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The other day, Rep. Ed Markey made the following mundane but true observation:

For years, the Bush administration's oil strategy placed the granting of drilling leases ahead of safety review.

This irked Neil Cavuto no end:

Ipso-facto — Bush to blame for the big leak-o.

Just like he's apparently behind that big thousand-point swing-o.

Just like he's to blame for the unemployment rate that's higher than when he left office, and the deficits that are much higher than any year he was in office.

All problems, all Bush, all the time — probably until the end of time.

Cavuto wants a "statute of limitations" on blaming Bush. "Just give it a break," he pleaded.

Nuh-uh.

It's true that the miseries we're currently enduring are not merely the fault of the sole personage of George W. Bush, the man now widely viewed by conservatives as The Man Who Betrayed Conservative Values. He had lots and lots of help. In fact, he had millions of little helpers -- all those movement conservatives who now want to pretend that he wasn't a real conservative.

This is because, in reality, Bush is The Man Who Nearly Destroyed the American Economy. It wasn't Bush's "betrayal" of the "conservative values" they believe are so time-honored and proven that caused his abysmal failure -- it was those values themselves, and Bush's steady adherence to them throughout his tenure. Right-wingers like Cavuto and everyone else at Fox, however, simply cannot accept this cold reality; the resulting cognitive dissonance has now driven them pretty much insane.

The conservative approach to mis-governance comes up at every turn today for the liberals and centrists now dealing with repairing the damage, from managing the economy back onto its feet to fighting the two wars Bush got us into to coping with environmental disasters produced by his safety regulations. And it would be stupid to pretend that it's not what we're dealing with.

Because you see, if we don't constantly remind people of the disastrous consequences of conservative rule, they start listening to people like the talking heads at Fox News. They start forgetting just who got them into this big damned mess in the first place. Some of them even start blaming liberals for it (especially the hard-core insane conservative defenders).

We can't let that happen. Conservatives need to be slapped with the Bush legacy on a daily basis. Sure, they'll whine. But they have it coming.

Judd Gregg strode to the Senate floor yesterday and denounced the provision in the Dodd bill to remove derivatives from banks and put them on their own exchange in the sunlight for everyone to see. Remarkably, he centered his argument around the irrationality of populist anger, which he likened to Argentina in the 50s and the Peron years.

You know, I have really been trying to figure out what's behind this type of language [derivatives sunlight], because it's so destructive to our competitiveness as a nation, really.

I mean, this is the type of thing, as I said earlier, you would have seen in Argentina that -- Argentina in the 1950s -- bashing on entities simply because they're large and because obviously there's a populist feeling against them, which ends up, by the way, significantly affecting Main Street in a negative way.

Look at Argentina in 1945 - 1937, somewhere in that period. They were the seventh-best economy in the world. 7th most prosperous in the world. Now they're like 54th or something.

It is because of this populist movement which has driven basically their ability to be competitive offshore.

So now we have this huge populist movement here. I'm trying to think, what really is the rationale here other than just rampant pandering to populism?

He follows that with this:

Is there anything in this country that gets broken up because there is an attitude that big is bad, whether it contributes or not, unless you happen to be big and union, in which case you get saved, as the UAW was able to work out for GM and Chrysler.

Senator Gregg is either arguing for a corrupt extreme right regime or he has not studied Argentina's history lately. Here's a quick review. Argentina's economy followed other emerging countries in the early 1900s. In 1920, it was the 7th largest economy in the world, but the Wall Street crash took a deep toll.

Unfortunately, the 1930s witnessed a reversal in the legitimacy of the rule of law in Argentina. To stay in power in the 1930s, the Conservatives in the Pampas resorted to electoral fraud, which neither the legislative, executive, or judicial branches checked. The decade of unchecked electoral fraud lead to the support of citizens for the populism of President Juan Peron and the impeachment of the majority of the Supreme Court. The aftermath of Peron has been political and economic instability, which partially accounts for the fall of Argentina from the top ten of income per capita countries in the world. Read more...(PDF)

Did Senator Gregg really intend to self-indict conservatives in our time and country by comparing today's populist anger to Argentinian populist anger?

There are many, many parallels between Argentine conservatives of the 1930s and American conservatives of today. None of them are complimentary and all of them imply a severe indictment on the corruption, money and greed that seems to drive conservative legislators.

What really stands out, though, is the utter cynicism of a conservative senator criticizing populist anger while his party is spending millions upon millions to capitalize on that same populist anger.

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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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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.