Everything seems to be happening earlier today--an hour earlier--including my Con Games show. So that means it feels like I'm in the studio an hour earlier than usual, though paradoxically I also slept in this morning.
Go figure. It's just like politics these days: it seems upside down, like the world has turned faster than you can say Tea Bagger. But that's an illusion. On the left, disorganized as can be, things are remarkably like they've always been. We haven't changed. We haven't need a Tea Party how to behave because our values are eternal and they go far beyond taxes and spending.
Did somebody just try to change what a "liberal arts" education means because of the Great Recession? I don't think so.
Panic on the left is, of course, perfectly normal, given the "shellacking" Obama and his forces on the hill suffered in the midterm election. Why did the worm seem to turn so completely, with the House turned upside faster than you can hire Meg Whitman's Latino housekeeper?
Two reasons: (1) it's the economy, stupid; and (2) the Republican Party became the Tea Party in 2010, driven by a cable news network and talk radio that considers repetition next to (Christian) godliness. And by buckets and buckets of unaccounted for money.
Employment is creeping up, with over 150,000 new jobs, far more than analysts anticipated, added in October. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is about to monkey with the money supply, and that's bound to help as well. More to the point: the economy goes in cycles, and this cycle is already starting to look up, albeit slowly. I'm no economist, but economists seem to be wrong more than right. And I did predict the precise month the recession would end. So maybe dumb luck trumps Nobel brain soup.
Second, the Republican Party and the conservative movement--both on the verge of extinction--are managing to morph into the co-opted Grand Old Tea Party. After 20 years of blaming Democrats and liberals for everything, the Right finally 'fessed up long enough to admit Republicans were also to blame. But this blanket admission of hypocrisy didn't make them skip a beat.
As the last of the liberal talk show hosts--sorry Ed Schultz but you're a yeccccch "progressive"--it has fallen to me to point to the best reason why this is all going to shake out to our benefit: my home state of Colorado.
Sure: Colorado lost two Democratic Congresspeople in the slaughterHouse, but Michael Bennet won his appointed Senate seat against a Bagger and John Hickenlooper trounced both a Bagger and a Tancredo. Not only that, Colorado turned down a noxious "personhood" amendment and others that would have kneecapped governments in the state large and small.
If Colorado is indeed a bellwether, then the state was good enough to just say no to the Tea Bagger nonsense and come down on the right (left) side of all of the above. In Nevada, Delaware, and Colorado, the Tea Baggers actually helped kill the Republican Party's ambitions to control of the Senate.
No need for liberals to fall apart faster than the CU Buffs in quarter four against Kansas. Stay the course. End times have come and gone.