The Bush fanboys are back, led by Breitbart's Dana Loesch, the Queen of double-talk nonsense. She wrote a post glorifying Bush, who is out on his image-makeover/revisionist-history tour.
I love how his face seemingly peeks out from the black-and-white news columns of the day to defiantly whisper: “PSSST. HEY. Still heeeeere.” His existence may have been obscured by the hubris surrounding the current administration, an increase in terrorist attacks, a movement born partly because of several Bush policies, and an election; the sudden appearance of Bush across all the networks and on the front and cover pages reminds us that even though he isn’t the sort of GOPer grassroots adore, he was infinitely better than the man currently in the White House, a man who bows to anything with a pulse.
The excerpts from his book give insight into the process leading up to the decisions what the rest of the world would see and whether you agreed with him or not (I’ve long been on record abhorring NCLB; also the prescription drug act was neither “compassionate” or “conservative,” and neither was TARP) the man would make a decision and stick with it. Mainly though, I love how fist-in-the-air defiant he is in the book.
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Defiance on steroids. Balls!
(h/t Digby)
Have you noticed all these conservatives who now say that Bush wasn't a beloved figure? Where were they when Bush was attacking countries that didn't attack us, and torturing terrorism suspects, for starters? Of course, he increased the debt as much as he could while giving all our surpluses to the richest of the rich. Now that he's back and trying to spin his way out of being the worst President in the history of America, the wingnuts are making it up as they go along.
What this illustrates is the fact that these so-called Tea Partiers are just typical bloodthirsty wingnuts. When Bush passed NCLB, there was no grassroots outcry. When he passed the prescription drug benefit, there was no grassroots outcry. TARP produced some push back, but remember that by that time Bush was a popular as e coli and it was hardly fashionable to be one of his slavering fangirls.
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They do love a codpiece, don't they?
I can't prove it, but I would bet money that the very people who now decry deficits and spending and say they were horrified by Bush's domestic policies are the same 30% who stuck with him to the end. What they loved about him was his crudeness and cruelty and --- more than anything --- that he inspired such loathing from liberals. It's the in-your-face defiance that they admire, the eagerness to be politically incorrect, the exclusion from the process of those whom they see as not fully "American." It's a defining characteristic of the right. Domination, exclusion, and eliminationism are what animates their thinking, not deficits, taxes or the constitution.
The bottom line is that the Tea Partiers just hate Liberals. Breitbart admitted to me that he doesn't care about policy or legislation, so what does he stand for? Smears. Matt Taibbi exposed the Kentucky Tea Partiers for what they are: Complete phonies about almost everything they believe in..
"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."
"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"
"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."
I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"
"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."
"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"
"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.
Glenn Beck, their most trusted news source, calls us parasites and viruses and tries to undermine FDR all day, every day. That's all they care about. So now Bush is back and the fanboys are alright! And Loesch is the latest girl to hop on the bus and swoon over Bush. Read Rick Perlstein's column in The Daily Beast:
We live in a mendocracy.
As in: rule by liars.
When will the media wake up?
