Kind of Blue?

Anyone who saw Karl Rove raging around the Foxhole in the moments after Fox News and all the others called the election for Obama -- and anyone watching him waving a tablet with numbers on it and squeaking madly yesterday; explaining why Obama beat the Great White Dope, might not suspect that this is all over now or that the nation has decided or will decide that the United States has now gone kind of blue. 

They might look to the past and not expect the far right will settle down and go along with the tide of the future any more than they did after the humiliation of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon.  Ask Bill Clinton about the revenge of the Republicans or their patience while waiting for retaliation.  Hell no, the fight is still on, and while Fox News broadcasts and there are people who watch it; while Limbaugh roars and while Coulter hisses and snarls like a syphilitic witch, it's still on. While money talks, it's not over.

Hell no, you can be sure that for the coming years, Obama will have won only  by "suppressing the vote," by enlisting the help of the Black Panthers or the Neptunian Trotzkyite Front -- or by any other means apparent only to the collectively paranoid psychotic Tea Party base. Their number one priority will not now cease to be the removal from office by any means possible, the blocking of every initiative and the unrestrained and unfounded vilification of Barack H. Obama.  To them, they are still the majority and when they lose it can't be their own fault.

Democratic urges to make nice and play well with others, and Democratic expectations of a sudden comity and cooperation may be dangerously premature. We're not facing a chastened and contrite enemy, newly motivated to re-examine its outmoded assumptions and tired tenets, we're standing next to a wounded and very powerful beast, and what beast has a conscience?  The Republican machine is hardly moribund and is still as red, still as rich and even more motivated to lie, cheat, steal and filibuster than ever.

The GOP may be a party in grief and shock, it may be acting out the first two stages of that Kübler-Ross hypothesis: anger and denial, but any expectation that we'll see an attempt to bargain honestly, much less to get to any kind of acceptance in the near or near-distant future -- or perhaps ever, is terribly premature, in my opinion.  Yes, we may have dodged a bullet this week and the next four years may be a reprieve from the GOP success in their war against human rights, liberty and Democracy and perhaps  the war against real Capitalism, but we have to temper our great expectations. 2014, 2016 are the numbers of the beast and there never will be an end of their era.

Shock and Awe

"It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself. The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We're dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

Maybe you heard Paul Wolfowitz's words to Congress on the Daily Show 5 years ago when George Bush decided to pawn him off on the World Bank and everyone was laughing at the ridiculous bastard and e-mailing the clip to their friends.

Maybe the video of Karl Rove saying that what happened never happened will make the same rounds. Rove has always been able to rely on the gullibility of strangers -- and of course their defective and selective memories. Whether we write such things off to psychotic partisanship or bald stupidity or plain old evil is anyone's call but here's Karl on Meet The Press Yesterday saying the Bush Administration didn't say what the Bush administration said and even though you were an enthusiastic patriot for believing it then, you're a liar for believing it now.

"Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds."

wrote Frank Rich the day before. He hadn't yet had the joy of hearing this latest jewel of denial.

Of course you know I'm not an optimist. I've won many bets by gambling that the American public will make the most ridiculously inappropriate choices in public policy and my money is on the prediction that before long the Bush administration will never have said the war will be over in weeks, that we will be greeted as liberators, that there will be almost no casualties, that reconstruction will be swift and cheap, that there were al Qaeda training camps, mobile chemical weapons factories, nuclear facilities only weeks away from making deliverable bombs and that "freedom" will burst out all over the Middle East and the silly Liberal losers who doubt it are flirting with treason for doubting it.

Truth having caught up with the men who murdered America, they're forced to retreat into an imaginary world where they never said what they said, or did what they did and where a minimalist government presided over 8 prosperous years of freedom and peace - just like the theory says. Too bad we can't lock the door behind them.