When the writers for the television series Beavis and Butthead created their peculiar malcontent characters, they built in some personality quirks that George Bush and Dick Cheney have borrowed these last W days. In almost every Beavis and Butthead episode, you could find that duo creating disaster of almost every kind imaginable. They always left a trail of ruin.
But that special quality that both those characters had was that they would never acknowledge that their insane misadventures actually caused any real injury. They were always creating an alternative reality about how and why bad things happened around them. The writers created a personality for Butthead that allowed him to ignore the obvious harm he caused or in the alternative, blame some imaginary third party for that harm.
Bush and Cheney for the last several months have been on what could best be described as an "alternative reality tour." All the Right wing radio hosts and lockstep bloggers are doing their best to help sell those alternative realities. One of my favorite spins is where the insanely devoted loyalist admits that, gee whiz, maybe that dynamic Bush and Cheney duo were not the best that the Republicans had to offer, but at least they kept America safe during their watch. It is almost as if those apologists never read about the story where 3,000 Americans were killed in the Twin Towers during those Bush/Cheney safe years. Or how about the new reality that Cheney is spinning where he tells the press that "no one saw an economic meltdown coming?"
To accept that reality we need to ignore all the news reports that recount the history of government regulators and economists telling the Bush/Cheney team at least as early as 2005 that the mortgage industry was on the verge of collapse even then and that the fallout of that collapse would be catastrophic.
W recently gave a speech at an American Enterprise Institute rally of conservatives where he told the crowd that when the true history of this financial crisis is written, the world would see that some unnamed entity other than Cheney and W would be held accountable for this train wreck that occurred on their watch.
I'm sure that crowd of loyalists cheered wildly because they too want to believe in an alternative reality for eight years of monumental failure.
Another interesting narrative coming from the Right is that some mystical day far off in the future, historians are going to uncover a collection of presidential and vice presidential memoirs that will finally expose the true genius of that duo. It's as if the new spin is suggesting that we suspend our disbelief the same way a child might as Easter rolls around each year. It is the equivalent of one of those Beavis and Butthead episodes where that team almost burns down Highland High School and then defends themselves by suggesting that the principal is too blind to appreciate the actions of two inspired visionaries.
TV critics reacted to Beavis and Butthead by usually pointing out that the show was painful to watch. This last Bush/Cheney episode will lead the entire world to a similar reaction.