Political Porn

If you're a member of the modern American Right, the past few days have been somewhat akin to a fever-dream. To put it in more blunt terminology, it's been like watching a Sarah Palin/Ronald Reagan sex tape.

And while you take time to reconcile that mental image, let's take a second to think about who both Reagan and Palin are.

I'll start off with some audio from Mike Stark and Rush Limbaugh, as that will provide some much needed context in a moment.



Two points before I get to Palin being touted as "She-Reagan":

First - Rush is clearly caught off guard. By claiming that Mike Stark wouldn't understand it if Rush were to explain the rationale behind the deification of Reagan, he's revealing his own ( and the entire modern American Right's ) inability to articulate specifics in favor of hyperbole.

Secondly - to claim that the Obama administration is aligning itself politically with Reagan is to twist the fabric of reality. What Rush is referencing is a poorly conceived narrative form a minority in the media who place Reagan and Obama side by side purely to draw a reaction from people like Limbaugh. It's less to do with actual policy comparisons or rationales than it is a catalyst to draw out a specific news cycle.

As for Palin - clearly "not letting a crisis go to waste" - she is less like Reagan than anyone within the modern American Right. Certainly, she has her crib notes memorized, but she - more than just about any aspiring Right Wing politico - lacks any and all ability to articulate in specifics what she would do/wants to do. After all, she is going to be running for President, let's not be naive about that.

What these two giants of Right Wing iconography have to offer is the ultimate in set-dressing for the upcoming 2012 election cycle. Reagan's clearly recorded legacy is being distorted ( more like completely ignored ) by the likes of Palin in order to attack the Obama administration purely because they have no alternative. Conversely, the Obama administration aren't exactly working from the positions they initially claimed they would. In that regard, I have to agree with Stark's statement to Limbaugh. If the Right in America would attempt to quell their continual hyperventilation, they would understand that Obama isn't the "tyrannical Socialist dictator" they claim he is.

The broader point of this is this - should the Right really be spending so much time molesting the corpse of Ronald Reagan, or should they be focused on what they told us they were focused on?

It all goes back to what it means to be a member of the modern American Right. In order to function and be recognized within their socio-political sphere, you have to live in a fantasy land and completely ignore the realities of your own country. If people like Palin, Limbaugh, and all of the other Regan worshipers would take time to see their country for what it is, then they would be more apt to formulate ideals that their opponents could at least consider.

I'm reminded of the claims that the Left in America were/are holding up Obama as some Solar Messiah, when the realities of his tenure has been marked with a majority within the American Left questioning his leadership decisions with marked intensity. From Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Healthcare Reform, Financial Regulation, on down to the unfounded claims of his Kenyan birth, Obama could have taken the approach that many of us expected him to. But, he insisted on trying to meet as close to the middle as possible. The modern American Right's projection in this matter is unmasked in full.

Some Thoughts For Your Morning

- Blogger and citizen journalist Mike Stark has been tracking down all of the Senators that voted "no" on Al Frankens "rape amendment". It seems that not everyone was keen answer Stark's very honest, very relavent questions. What were these men thinking? Not to delve too deeply into the "what if" realm that conservatives continually inhabit instead of what is transpiring in the real world, but what if someone like Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, or Michelle Bachman were raped by members of an organization they were assiting? Certainly they would claim that justice be swift and unflinching.

- Is Jake Tapper angling to get a job at Fox"News"? Each an every time Tapper goes off on some tangentical, abstract, pointlessness, conservative bloggers cheer his journalistic creds and hoist him upon their pedistal of diefication. The strange part of all this is that some conservatives think that anyone within the executive branch is not allowed to express their opinion on what is and what isn't a news organization. I guess no one told them about all the blathering that Dick Cheney did when he was VP. Oh, that's right, he wasn't part of the executive OR the legislative branch, was he.

- The Public Option certainly looks good in this ad.

- In an obvious attempt by the Senate majority leader from my state of Kentucky, Mitch "Beeker" McConnell, to boost moral within the Republican party, he completely distorts the facts on how Republicans are doing in polls related to the upcoming mid-term elections. The truth of the matter is that fewer and fewer people are aligning themselves with Republicans and the distance between them and their Democratic opponents has remained virtually unchanged in the last 2 years.

- With all the conspiratorial nonsense that Glenn Beck delivers to America each evening, Media Matters thought they would pay tribute to the man by using his own tactics against him. It turns out that the only difference between what Beck does and what MMFA has done is that the later actually fact-checks their research.

How Many?

Considering that the "birther" conspiracy is becoming a more acceptable meme within not only the conservative movement, but the Republican party as a whole, I wonder how many Republican mambers of Congress believe such nonsesnse.



From FireDogLake

Mike Stark has been up on the Hill all week whipping Democrats to hold fast on the public plan, and in his spare time, he decided to ask Republicans if Barack Obama was born in the United States. Not only do they not want to answer -- they run.

He asks Republicans Tom Price, Thaddeus McCotter, Jeff Fortenberry, Charles Boustany, Aaron Schock, Greg Harper, Mike Coffman and others what they think. Tim Murphy hides, looking at pens for 20 minutes to try and avoid him.

So, Thaddeus McCotter is busy with healthcare? Really?