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I do think that the wingnut glee in the IOC deciding to award Rio with the 2016 Olympics has really been a perfect example to show how reactionary the republicans and conservatives have become. Actively cheering something that would have helped an American city (and American jobs and the economy) just because they perceive it as hurting the president? Serious derangement.

On Meet the Press, Rachel Maddow just can't believe the level of Obama Derangement Syndrome necessary to cheer against an American victory:

The unseemly cheering on the right for America losing the Olympic bid I think is going to be the taste that lingers a long time after this failure. Certainly, the President tried to get something and he didn’t get it, and people who hate the President feel like that’s a cause for celebration, but to see, for example, the Weekly Standard, post “Chicago loses! Chicago loses! Cheers erupt at Weekly Standard headquarters” I think says a lot more about the Weekly Standard, says a lot more about the right right now than it does about this loss.

I know that facts are pesky and frequent ignorable and non-essential things for conservatives, but all four final candidate countries were represented by their respective head of state. If Obama hadn't gone, the right would have excoriated him for losing the bid because he didn't show. And it's the same hubris and American exceptionalism that dismisses that King Carlos of Spain and Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama were also snubbed. So there was no scenario in which Obama could have not gotten slammed by these wingnuts.

And it is in that Catch-22 that the wingnuts lose even more supporters, because these idiots are happy for failure for this country just to score some cheap political points, as Republican strategist Mike Murphy so aptly proves.

These are the people to guide America? I don't think so. They don't care about America. They don't care about Americans. It's the same mentality that fights against real health care reform, and helping struggling homeowners over insurance companies and financial institutions. And try as they might, Americans saw that "party over everything" attitude in 2008 and voted accordingly. And if the right keeps letting the wingnuts control the dialog like this, I have no fears over 2012 either.

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Republicans were out this weekend in force, holding town-hall meetings designed to "reconnect" with constituents -- and demonstrating in the process that they remain as clueless as ever.

As it happens, there was also an interesting Rasmussen poll showing that those constituents basically despise them:

Just 21% of GOP voters believe Republicans in Congress have done a good job representing their own party’s values, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) say congressional Republicans have lost touch with GOP voters throughout the nation. These findings are virtually unchanged from a survey just after Election Day.

Among all voters, 73% say Republicans in Congress have lost touch with the GOP base.

Seventy-two percent (72%) of Republicans say it is more important for the GOP to stand for what it believes in than for the party to work with President Obama. Twenty-two percent (22%) want their party to work with the President more.

In other words, the Republican base, by a large margin, is unhappy with their party's political leadership for not being right-wing enough. And that happens to comport with what their real leadership, aka the Right-Wing Punditocracy, has been saying.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the electorate at large has a distinctly different outlook. They strongly want Republicans to cooperate with President Obama, and strongly believe they are not making a good-faith effort to do so, either. Republicans want to fight, but this not a fight Republicans are winning:

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll shows that the president has a 63 percent favorability rating. But 31 percent of Americans approve of how congressional Republicans have conducted themselves, a dropoff of 13 percentage points from February when the same question was asked.

Here's the standard GOP analysis of the problem:

Shortly after the November elections, Republicans en masse began to acknowledge that the party had lost its way on the issue of fiscal discipline during the Bush administration. Their vote against the stimulus bill was the first real test for Republicans to exercise their frustration with what they describe as excessive federal spending. And they're shaping a message around this theme.

"We are united," said Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. "The debt of this country is a national crisis and a national security issue."

The problem with this is that Republicans seem to believe that it was simply George W. Bush's profligate ways with the budget that caused the economic disaster we currently are confronting. And that's part of the picture, to be sure. But only a small part.

The cold reality is that, as we explained after the election, the economic turmoil was created by a broad swath of Bush policies that, in every respect, were clear products of conservative fiscal and governmental philosophy:

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Ever notice how the wingnuts all clutch their pearls and collapse on the fainting couches whenever President Obama talks about the miserable failure that has been conservative rule?

Of course, they really don't want to own up to this failure, because otherwise their fading movement will collapse altogether. But the harsh fact is that we can't solve the problems, and prevent their repeat, without understanding the nature of the mistakes that caused them.

Obama gets this, of course. So today in his speech on the economy, he tackled it head on:

It is simply not sustainable to have a 21st-century financial system that is governed by 20th-century rules and regulations that allowed the recklessness of a few to threaten the entire economy. It is not sustainable to have an economy where in one year, 40 percent of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices, maxed-out credit cards, over-leveraged banks and overvalued assets. It's not sustainable to have an economy where the incomes of the top 1 percent has skyrocketed while the typical working household has seen their incomes decline by nearly $2,000. That's just not a sustainable model for long-term prosperity.

For even as too many were out there chasing ever-bigger bonuses and short-term profits over the last decade, we continued to neglect the long-term threats to our prosperity: the crushing burden that the rising cost of health care is placing on families and businesses; the failure of our education system to prepare our workers for a new age; the progress that other nations are making on clean energy industries and technologies while we -- we remain addicted to foreign oil; the growing debt that we're passing on to our children. Even after we emerge from the current recession, these challenges will still represent major obstacles that stand in the way of our success in the 21st century. So we've got a lot of work to do.

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Evidently, Andrew Klavan thinks the problem liberals have with Rush Limbaugh is that they don't actually listen to his shows. But then, as Media Matters observes, Klavan doesn't seem to have listened much to Limbaugh himself.

Still, such stroking is the liquid naphtha that fuels Limbaugh's ego, so sure enough, he was touting the piece yesterday on his radio show, as Simon Maloy at the Limbaugh Wire recounts. Not only that, it rocketed him to new heights of rhetorical excess:

Based on what we've seen with General Motors and the banks, if he fails, America is saved. Barack Obama's policies and their failure is the only hope we've got to maintain the America of our founding.

That, of course, was just the start. Greta Van Susteren played some clips on her Fox News show last night:

It's not what Obama knows. It's what you think he knows. It's what he makes you think he knows. He doesn't know anything about the automobile business. He doesn't know how to change a tire.

The automobile business needs car guys -- people who love grease, get in there, manufacture these engines and cars, create designs, lines, make people want to go out and buy these cars. Car companies have to be run by financial people today, because they're basically health care and retirement funds. The side business is making cars, hoping they pay for some of it.

And he wrapped it all up with a classic piece of projection:

This is a radical guy. This is a very arrogant, radical guy, who is angry -- no one will convince me otherwise. Yeah, I mean, he doesn't show it. Sometimes I think I notice -- I think it flares at some times. Not the anger, the -- he reveals that he has a bunch of chips on his shoulder. And we know his wife does, and we know Reverend Wright does. And we're getting, you know, a lot of this stuff that's happening right out of Reverend Wright's sermons. Yeah, but it really is. And a lot of what's gonna happen in education right out of Bill Ayers' curriculum. His extremist terrorist buddy.

So I think we've got a guy -- I think the best way to understand Obama -- and I can't say this enough -- he really believes it his job to return the nation's wealth to its rightful -- quote unquote, rightful owners. And that means he believes the people who have wealth have stolen it, from those who have no wealth. It's been unfair achieved and accrued. And it's his job to take it and redistribute it. And that's what he means by sacrifice. When he talks about sacrifice, he's talking about raising your taxes, taking your assets, and giving them to other people who he thinks you stole them from, who are thus more deserving.

Sorry, Andrew, but you're sadly mistaken. We hear Rush Limbaugh all too much.

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Jonah Goldberg was part of a panel discussion broadcast on CSPAN this weekend put together by Commentary magazine titled "The Future of Conservatism."

Goldberg, as is his wont, tried to explain the need to humanize conservatives by whining about how tough it's been to get people not to see them as humorless, out-of-touch whiners:

There's a lot to be said for sort of -- David Brooks came up with a great anthology of conservative writing. And a huge chunk of it was just trying to remind people that conservatives are in fact people. You know, that we're nice people, that we are -- with human ambitions and human desires, and compassion and all of the rest. Because we already had the arguments about economics and all of that, and foreign policy pretty well nailed down when this book came out, it was to convince people that you were not a bad person to be a conservative.

Now, I think in some ways that fight has kind of been won, or at least we've made a lot of progress in that fight. The problem is that in the process, we are now going back to New Deal economics and all of the rest, and all of the other issues, on foreign policy we're sending out lovely videos to Iran and that's about it. And so the job for conservatism is again to go back to these arguments that we thought we had won a long time ago, and that's a worthy fight to have.

These sorts of ruminations tell us a great deal about how conservatives see themselves, which (as is usually the case with conservative self-mythology) has the cognitive-dissonance-producing problem of not being particularly well grounded in reality. Indeed, as in Goldberg's peroration here, it's practically an alternative-reality fantasy, a distinctly backward-looking one that refuses to acknowledge current realities on the ground.

Conservatives indeed had economic arguments won for much of the past thirty years -- Reagan's "small government" ethos was present in Bill Clinton's administration as well, embodied by his willing signature on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act back in 1998.

What Goldberg and his fellow conservatives are loath to admit is that this approach to economics and fiduciary responsibility has been proven irrevocably to be an unmitigated disaster, and a return to FDR-era regulation is not only warranted but necessary for our economic survival.

This reality on the ground changes the arguments for conservatives in fundamentally profound ways -- which they, in their ongoing state of denial, stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. One of these is that the old, stale argument about whether conservatives are nice people or not is rendered utterly useless.

It is, in fact, quite possible for perfectly nice people to believe things that produce perfectly bad outcomes for the rest of society. That's as true of liberals as it is of conservatives. And what's become clear is that movement conservatism produces all kinds of bad outcomes. Those nice people make for really bad governance.

Indeed, those nice people can even politely applaud while real evil proceeds. Torture, anyone? Katrina? The list of actual evils produced by conservative governance is quite long.

Sure, we can acknowledge that most conservatives are in fact nice people. But they're nice people who have nearly ruined the country. That's an argument conservatives can't really engage, though, without losing -- because they've already lost it.

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Interviewed by John King on CNN's State of the Union this weekend, former vice president Henry F. Potter Dick Cheney wasn't really able to tell us why Republicans like himself should have any credibility whatsoever when it comes criticizing the Obama economic plan, considering how well theirs worked out.

Here's how theirs worked out:

Here's how Cheney explained it:

Well, there are all kinds of arguments to be made on that point. But there's something that is more important than the specific numbers you're talking about, and that had to be priority for our administration.

Eight months after we arrived, we had 9/11. We had 3,000 Americans killed one morning by al Qaeda terrorists here in the United States. We immediately had to go into the wartime mode. We ended up with two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of that is still very active. We had major problems with respect to things like Katrina, for example. All of these things required us to spend money that we had not originally planned to spend, or weren't originally part of the budget.

Stuff happens. And the administration has to be able to respond to that, and we did.

... We always said -- I always said that wartime scenario is cause for an exception in terms of spending. It was appropriate in World War II, certainly, and I think it's appropriate now.

So his excuse for the sour economy was 9/11 -- which happened six years before the economy started heading south -- and the Iraq invasion -- which turned out not to have been quite as necessary as advertised.

But earlier in the same interview, Cheney had claimed that it was actually all Democrats' fault:

Well, I don't follow the news quite as closely as I once did. But there's no question that what the economic circumstances that he inherited are difficult ones. You know, we said that before we left. I don't think you can blame the Bush administration for the creation of those circumstances. It's a global financial problem. We had, in fact, tried to deal with the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac problem some years before with major reforms and were blocked by Democrats on the Hill, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.

Well, there's no doubt that the Fannie/Freddie debacle was part of the latter stages of the economic debacle. But an honest and thorough look at the causes of the economic meltdown -- such as that offered by Wall Street Watch earlier this week -- has plenty of blame to pass around, and no small portion of it falls on the shoulders of the Bush administration.

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Franklin Schaeffer was interviewed yesterday by MSNBC's Tamron Hall, talking about his HuffPo piece describing what's wrong with today's GOP, and why so many onetime Republicans like himself have fled the party for good.

It feels like a consummate summation of the situation, and a clarion call not just for liberals but for everyone who's had enough of movement conservatism.

The above chart, taken from the straw poll of attendees at last weekend's zany Conservative Political Action Conference, really tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the kind of people who attend these things.

And for some perspective on how completely out of synch with the rest of the American public they are, remember this:

And just how narrow a slice of the right-wing pie are we talking about? Well, 52 percent of the voters were students.

Of course, most of the news surrounding the straw poll was that Mitt Romney again won their presidential endorsement:

Not that this necessarily means a lot; Mittens won last year's straw poll too. And Bobby Jindal, whose GOP star appeal seems to be fading, was a distant second.

But more noteworthy, perhaps, are the two candidates who came in tied for third at 13 percent: Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Paul's showing suggests his pseudo-libertarian followers are not going to fade away into the woodwork; while Palin's weak showing suggests her 15 minutes of right-wing fame are just about up.

However, both candidates represent the right-wing populist bloc of the GOP -- and their combined support would have been 26%, or the largest single bloc at the convention.

These are the folks who have been the most vocal about calling Obama's economics "socialism," as they were at CPAC:

This gloomy hour for the right is probably most akin to 1965: Routed at the polls, the bedrock conservatives see their worst dreams of big government becoming a legislative reality. One word that has surfaced repeatedly here in speeches and interviews has been "socialism."

"Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff," Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told a packed ballroom on Thursday.

"We now have moved a major step in the direction of socialism," Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) said Friday, adding: "We are close to a fascist system where the government has control of our lives and our economy."

Which inspired the following observation over at Fox Forum:

From the likely nationalization of Citigroup to centering power in the White House by politicizing the Census to using American taxes to promote abortion around the world, Obama’s policies are more like Mussolini than Lenin.

Sure, just like we liberals had trouble discerning whether George Bush's policies were more like Ted Bundy's or Hannibal Lecter's.

But which kind of totalitarian state is it that Obama is bringing about? A fascist state, a communist state, or a socialist state? Because ne'er the three shall meet ... unless one wanders into the fetid swamps of Jonah Goldberg.

Which I think is where indeed we're heading, judging by their favorite media figures:

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Laura Ingraham didn't like President Obama's speech to Congress the other night. What apparently got her goat the most, judging by her carping on Bill O'Reilly's show last night, was what she calls "the immature and rather unbecoming Bush-bashing" -- even though she acknowledges that Bush was never mentioned by name.

There's a reason for that: Obama wasn't blaming Bush specifically for the problems he inherited but conservative Republicans and their misbegotten recipes for certain failure.

And if Laura Ingraham doesn't think this is so, well, the present mess stands as a mountain of testimony to the affirmative. Of course, what they really hate is being reminded of this. They want everyone to forget that it wasn't just Bush but a whole army of conservative ideologues like Ingraham and O'Reilly who got us here.

The same is true, as O'Reilly briefly reminds us, of how Bush's bad governance opened the door for yet another great national disaster -- namely, 9/11:

O'Reilly: You know what was interesting: After 9/11, when we were attacked, President Bush did not blame President Clinton. I did, partially. I said Clinton wasn't aggressive enough. Other pundits pointed out that under the Clinton administration, there were a series of attacks by Al Qaeda. And there was a response but it wasn't --

Ingraham: Yeah, I pointed it out too.

O'Reilly: But Bush never did that.

Ingraham: Extremely gracious.

O'Reilly: Bush never said, you know: 'My predecessor didn't take aggressive enough action, and now I'm left with this huge mess.'

Well, Bush never had to say this, since the entire right-wing Wurlitzer picked up this storyline and ran with it at full volume. There were countless Fox programs dedicated to this thesis, plus radio talk shows, articles, Regnery Books -- and even a made-for-TV movie.

But there were certainly other reasons Bush himself remained mum about Clinton's anti-terror efforts -- because the reality was that he himself was asleep at the wheel on terrorism when the attacks struck on 9/11. That was because he, like every conservative on the planet, had deemphasized terrorism as a serious concern because that was "a Clinton thing."

If Bush had dared to say anything, they know that the first thing to come out would be that Aug. 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing warning of an impending Al Qaeda attack. As well as the testimony of Richard Clarke, who prepared a comprehensive anti-terror strategy for the incoming administration in January 2001, only to have it ignored. And the countless other pieces of evidence (the budget cuts, the security-team shuffling, etc.) that make one thing abundantly clear: If Clinton's effort "wasn't aggressive enough," then the effort of George W. Bush -- who took not a single concrete step against terrorists prior to 9/11 -- was an outright case of gross, impeachable malfeasance.

It might also be worth recalling that Bill O'Reilly was one of the media talking heads who derided Bill Clinton's attacks on Al Qaeda in 1998-99 as simply "wagging the dog" -- when in retrospect it's clear the strikes were fully warranted. It was media figures like O'Reilly, in fact, whose irresponsibility in the 1990s helped lull the public into complacency about the serious threat that terrorism posed.

Finally, O'Reilly ought perhaps keep in mind that Obama never mentioned Bush or indulged in the kind of bashing of his predecessor that O'Reilly envisions. Obama has been implicitly indicting all conservatives, and not just Bush.

Of course, Bill O'Reilly and Laura Ingraham don't get that because they can't.

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The media have already been called out on their ridiculous stacking of the news talk shows regarding the Obama stimulus plan with Republicans. It doesn't seem to be getting much better; the Sunday talk shows were reasonably balanced this week, but most of the panels and "expert appearances" discussing the plan have been laden with rabid right-wing ideologues.

And it hasn't been just on Fox, though the problem is acute there. Yesterday on CNN, for instance, who should John King have on to discuss the stimulus on the "State of the Union" program but our old friend Grover Norquist.

Norquist pontificated at length about how a Republican alternative should look. It was just more of the same crap conservatives have been feeding us the past decade: tax cuts, deregulation, shrink government, blah blah blah.

Now, I can think of a lot of people the public could be getting sound advice about the economy from. Some of them could even fall in the "conservative" category. Grover Norquist is not one of them.

After all, this is the man whose philosophy of government is summed up in one quip:

"I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

In other words, this was one of the geniuses who not only brought us Katrina and food poisonings but the economic calamity now confronting us.

Thanks, but no thanks. And until John King and his producers can demonstrate they know how to bring on people who can actually provide useful insights and not ideological propaganda, I won't be tuning in.

Memo to Conservatives: You failed and are now irrelevant.

OK, I expect you'll ignore this memo like our previous ones. Nate Silver is right: Republicans are caught in a death spiral, and it's going to be awhile yet before they hit bottom.

Nowhere is it more self-evident than in the broad acknowledgment this week that the GOP is being led by a bilious radio talk-show host, and the ongoing fact that its most popular politician is a wingnutty, malinformed Alaska governor.

The unanimous refusal of House Republicans to vote in favor of Obama's stimulus plan may have given the Malkinites a stiffy, but all it really demonstrated was the utter impotence of Conservatives to have any say in how we proceed with fixing the economy.

And there's one real reason for that: They broke it. Their philosophy of governance, especially their feverish laissez-faire demolition of regulatory oversight, and their obscene enrich-the-rich approach to taxation, were the two overarching reasons for our current economic debacle. Of course they still want to blame minority lending for the plunge, but no one with serious money is bothering to listen any longer, because they know what the story is. And so do most Americans.

So Rush Limbaugh can pen all the worthless split-the-baby-in-two proposals for economic stimulus he likes, and House Republicans can toss out all the tax-cut-heavy alternatives they like. And no one will take them seriously, because we've heard these proposals before -- for the past eight years, in fact. They've been nothing but a recipe for failure and disaster. Why would anyone want to take that course now?

What's worse for Republicans is that not only have they not yet figured out how irrelevant they've become, they are even further from understanding the reasons for their irrelevance. They're in deep denial about the direct relationship between their philosophy and the current economic debacle, and even more so the extent to which the public is finding their pugnacious, vicious, attacking style of politics increasingly repellent.

So Neil Cavuto is right when he defends Limbaugh by saying that of course, ideologically speaking, conservatives will naturally as a matter of principle oppose Obama's policies. We understand that Limbaugh and other conservatives believes that Obama's policies will fail and will vote and speak accordingly.

But he completely overlooks the problem with Limbaugh when he openly hopes Obama will fail: It's one thing to believe a policy will fail and oppose it accordingly. It's quite another to openly hope for it.

Most liberals, by way of contrast, believed George W. Bush would fail, and many predicted it; but it's hard to find any of them, particularly leading Democrats, who were out there saying that they hoped he -- and by extension, the nation -- would fail after 9/11 because his policies were "fascist." They opposed these policies in principle. Anyone who openly hoped for our military failure in Iraq, for instance, was in a tiny minority; but there were millions of us who opposed the war because we believed it was not only wrongheaded but doomed to fail. And we were proved right.

In fact, all this shouting is just cover for Republicans' greatest and deepest fear: That Obama in fact will succeed. That progressive "socialism" (as they call it) actually will make people's lives better, heal the economy, and get the nation back on its feet. That the nation's working people will finally get a clear view of which side is on their side. That the public will finally see that not only is Conservatism an abject failure, it's a fraud.

In the end, they are such deeply invested ideologues that they would rather see the nation fail than see that reality reach fruition.

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Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are clearly among the breed of Republicans who refuse to believe that Conservatism failed -- rather, that the GOP failed Conservatism. And so their solution for party renewal is to just go back to embracing the policies and ideas that brought the nation to the brink of economic and diplomatic ruin.

They don't seem to realize yet that the country has turned the page and moved on. And so they rage, rage against the fall of right-wing night. Last night's second part of Hannity's interview with Limbaugh really was more a pathetic display of hapless and unhappy impotence.

It has all the usual Limbaugh flourishes.

White Identity Politics:

Limbaugh: The Republican Party is making a big -- the Conservative movement, too, making a big, big mistake in planning for the future. You hear things like, well, the Republican Party needs to identify the middle class, the Wal-Mart voters, and come up with policies for them. And then we've got to come up with policies for Hispanics, because they hate us because of illegal immigration. That's the way the Democrats do it. You put people into groups and then you victimize them. And give the victims power over the majority. Because they then have grievances that are nonexistent, and the majority gets cowed into fear, because they don't want to be complained at, they don't want to be blamed, so 'OK, OK, you want health care, fine, we'll go get it."

[Did you know that minorities' grievances were actually nonexistent? Neither did I! Did you know that liberals -- and not racists and gay bashers -- actually victimize the minorities they champion? Me neither! Boy, ya learn something new from Rush each time out, dontcha?]

Malarkey Mythos:

Limbaugh: Self interest is different than selfishness. People working in their own self-interest benefits the family, the neighborhood, the community, the state, the city, the whole bit. And this is what I think the Republican Party and Conservatism has lost. The blueprint for landslide electoral victories right there, and the Republican Party and the Conservative movement has just -- they've washed it away.

Planet Bizarro-Style Projection:

Limbaugh: And the reason they [the GOP] lost huge is because in a contest of group politics, the experts are gonna always get group votes before the pretenders will. And we were pretenders trying to get the groups. We gotta get the Hispanics, we gotta be moderate, we gotta prove we can walk across the aisle, the era of Reagan is over.

I never hear Democrats talk about walking across the aisle, never see any of them praise each other or brag about the fact that they do it. They brag about the Republicans that they destroy. They brag about the Republican bills, legislation that they defeat.

Hatred of Youth/Pop Culture:

Limbaugh: The culture -- we've lost the culture, Sean. We have lost pop culture. It is unrealistic to expect the people watching MTV, going to see the rot Hollywood's putting out, listening to the rot music is today, every four years to go into a voting booth and vote Republican or conservative. And this isn't even something we have addressed in an electoral way, or a strategic way, but that's gonna have to be done as well.

Historical Revisionism:

Limbaugh: I get into arguments with people about this. To this day, FDR is a hero. And Hoover is the idiot -- Hoover is the guy that broke the country. If the media wants to prop somebody up, they will do so. Liberalism in the media -- a series of myths. ... Liberalism cannot deal with the light of truth.

Crass Hypocrisy:

Limbaugh: 'Everybody does it.' That's the constant excuse. 'Everybody has sex with their intern. Everybody leaves a stain on a blue dress. Everybody -- '

Hannity: If Rush Limbaugh did it, it would be a different story.

[Hey, everybody gets hooked on Oxycontin and uses their housekeeper as their dealer. Everybody takes 'boys' trips to the Caribbean with valises full of illegal Viagra. Everybody gets divorced three times. And it was indeed a different story when Rush Limbaugh did it.]

Outright Delusion:

Limbaugh: He [Bush] is a decent man. He had a reverence for the office. That's why he didn't get partisan. He thought it was irreverent to turn the Oval Office, or the office of the Presidency, into a partisan strategic battleplace. He just didn't want to do it, he was content to let history be the judge. I think -- I heard Rove say, I think on your network, that they miscalculated in not firing back on some of these things often enough.

It's vintage Limbaugh: such an immense avalanche of b-----t that you need a bulldozer to deal with it.

But if you listen carefully, what you hear is the desperate grasping at straws, for which Limbaugh's customary strawmen are indispensable. And you hear the rage of powerlessness -- the impotence of the obsolete.

If Conservatives indeed keep following his lead, he'll lead them all right -- into even further irrelevance. Which, when you think about it, is where they richly belong.

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George W. Bush held his last press conference this morning, and he was asked, once again, if he thought he'd made any mistakes:

Q Four years ago, you were asked if you had made any mistakes. [Ed. note: You may recall, he was unable to give an answer.]

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q And I'm not trying to play "gotcha," but I wonder, when you look back over the long arc of your presidency, do you think, in retrospect, that you have made any mistakes? And if so, what is the single biggest mistake that you may have made?

THE PRESIDENT: Gotcha. I have often said that history will look back and determine that which could have been done better, or, you know, mistakes I made. Clearly putting a "Mission Accomplished" on a aircraft carrier was a mistake. It sent the wrong message. We were trying to say something differently, but nevertheless, it conveyed a different message. Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake.

I've thought long and hard about Katrina -- you know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge. The problem with that and -- is that law enforcement would have been pulled away from the mission. And then your questions, I suspect, would have been, how could you possibly have flown Air Force One into Baton Rouge, and police officers that were needed to expedite traffic out of New Orleans were taken off the task to look after you?

I believe that running the Social Security idea right after the '04 elections was a mistake. I should have argued for immigration reform. And the reason why is, is that -- you know, one of the lessons I learned as governor of Texas, by the way, is legislative branches tend to be risk-adverse. In other words, sometimes legislatures have the tendency to ask, why should I take on a hard task when a crisis is not imminent? And the crisis was not imminent for Social Security as far as many members of Congress was concerned.

As an aside, one thing I proved is that you can actually campaign on the issue and get elected. In other words, I don't believe talking about Social Security is the third rail of American politics. I, matter of fact, think that in the future, not talking about how you intend to fix Social Security is going to be the third rail of American politics.

One thing about the presidency is that you can make -- only make decisions, you know, on the information at hand. You don't get to have information after you've made the decision. That's not the way it works. And you stand by your decisions, and you do your best to explain why you made the decisions you made.

There have been disappointments. Abu Ghraib obviously was a huge disappointment during the presidency. Not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment. I don't know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but they were -- things didn't go according to plan, let's put it that way.

Anyway, I think historians will look back and they'll be able to have a better look at mistakes after some time has passed. Along Jake's question, there is no such thing as short-term history. I don't think you can possibly get the full breadth of an administration until time has passed: Where does a President's -- did a President's decisions have the impact that he thought they would, or he thought they would, over time? Or how did this President compare to future Presidents, given a set of circumstances that may be similar or not similar? I mean, there's -- it's just impossible to do. And I'm comfortable with that.

A quick rundown of these "mistakes" reveals that he mostly regrets poorly executed symbolic gestures. Otherwise, he's perfectly comfortable with the policies he's enacted and doesn't think he made any mistakes in that regard. Evidently, the economic and foreign-policy wastelands he has created were only the result of bad symbolism.

Take his explanation of Katrina, for example: What could he have done differently? Well, Bush can only think of how maybe he should've landed his plane in Baton Rouge but then realized it might be its own set of bad optics, so he stayed away and went to cut a birthday cake with John McCain instead.

But the Katrina disaster was directly related to the failures of conservative governance, as Kevin Drum enumerated in detail at the time, summing up:

So. A crony with no relevant experience was installed as head of FEMA. Mitigation budgets for New Orleans were slashed even though it was known to be one of the top three risks in the country. FEMA was deliberately downsized as part of the Bush administration's conservative agenda to reduce the role of government. After DHS was created, FEMA's preparation and planning functions were taken away.

Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It's the Bush administration in a nutshell.

Or, as Paul Krugman put it the other day, "what happened with Katrina wasn’t that the administration started to fail; what happened was that for the first time its failures were visible to all."

Even more revealing, perhaps, is Bush's explanation for the misleading rationalizations under which we invaded Iraq: "Not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment." Bush, we know now, was determined to invade Iraq and "take out Saddam" no matter what. His disappointment, as he tells it now, clearly was not that he relied on deliberately skewed intelligence that told him what he wanted to hear, but rather simply that Saddam didn't have the damned things. It's all that darned Saddam's fault we invaded Iraq under false pretenses.

I think Ben Sargent's retrospective on the Bush Legacy says it all, really:

Paul Krugman devotes a column to the localized levels of the economic meltdown:

But even as Washington tries to rescue the economy, the nation will be reeling from the actions of 50 Herbert Hoovers — state governors who are slashing spending in a time of recession, often at the expense both of their most vulnerable constituents and of the nation’s economic future.

These state-level cutbacks range from small acts of cruelty to giant acts of panic — from cuts in South Carolina’s juvenile justice program, which will force young offenders out of group homes and into prison, to the decision by a committee that manages California state spending to halt all construction outlays for six months.

Now, state governors aren’t stupid (not all of them, anyway). They’re cutting back because they have to — because they’re caught in a fiscal trap. But let’s step back for a moment and contemplate just how crazy it is, from a national point of view, to be cutting public services and public investment right now.

Krugman is right, but there is a dimension of this that goes unmentioned: Many of these states and their governors are in fact constrained by right-wing ideology and its effects as well.

All across America, anti-tax ideologues have, over the past generation or so, managed to pass -- often through state-level initiatives -- laws that not only require states to meet balanced budgets, but hamstrung their ability to gather revenues.

Here in Washington state, we've been plagued by the efforts of a character named Tim Eyman, who successfully championed measures that capped property taxes and motor-vehicle licensing fees, and unsuccessfully attempted a number of other measures. In Oregon, it's a similar character named Bill Sizemore. Indeed, ever since the days of California's Howard Jarvis, there have been anti-tax initiatives similarly hamstringing state governance all across the country.

The conservative ideologues running these campaigns loved to appeal to people's cheapness and the Reaganesque belief that government is the problem. And now, we're seeing the results of that short-sighted worldview.

As we start digging ourselves out of this economic mess, we're not only going to have to undo the toxic effects of conservative ideology on the federal level, but at the state level too. And the next time some demagogue starts promising that he can make things better by slashing taxes and revenues and government, we'll all know better than to listen.

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As he heads into the political sunset none too soon, Bush and his minions are busily trying to repair his image so that he can move into that new house in Texas with a nice little legacy as a "misunderestimated" preznit.

Lotsa luck with that.

Apparently the meme that will resurrect his legacy will be the notion that somehow he kept us safe. First it was the Magic Dolphin lady; then the other day on MSNBC with David Shuster, Cheri Jacobus (identified by the universal "Republican strategist" moniker) did her game best:

I think history is going to look upon the George W. Bush presidency quite favorably. He has kept this country safe -- ah, since 9/11, we have not been attacked on our own soil. That is first and foremost the most important thing that Barack Obama can do as president, and I hope and pray that the Obama presidency is at least as successful as the Bush presidency in that regard.

If that sounds like a classic Republican setup, it is: First change the actual record, and then hold the incoming Democrat to a wholly higher standard that you've done your damnedest to ensure won't be reachable. After all, Bush did not keep us safe on 9/11 very well, did he? And moreover, he definitively made us more vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Brad Woodhouse responded just right:

Rewriting President Bush's legacy is going to be one heck of a task. I mean, just look at the state that America is in today. Like I say, the cupboard is bare. There's no product here to sell.