Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

What kind of milestone legislation were the Democrats able to craft with their thin majorities over the last two years?  How expensive has the Iraq War been?  Who led the effort to take America to war against a nation that had displayed no aggression toward us, violating international law, not to mention our own Constitution?  

The Democrats who voted to provide presidential authority did so with the understanding that going to war was a final resort, to be exercised only if the nation were subject to imminent attack, such as that "gigantic mushroom cloud" so dramatically described by Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

How much cumulative debt has the nation borne by an enterprise launched without legal cause?  Is this something that occurred in the two years that Democrats held a slim numerical majority?

As the nation marches on toward a $10 trillion debt, under whose watch did this occur?  Which party was in power when those disastrous tax cuts skewed toward rich Republican benefactors occurred?  

Many wise voices warned that to combine the huge cost of an ongoing war in Iraq along with military activities in and around Afghanistan, meaning Pakistan, would result in suffocating debt.  

That legislation was supported strongly by Bush and Cheney and a working majority of Republicans in the House and Senate.  Such a working majority also robustly supported the war and, waving a 9/11 fear banner while Bush exclaimed that "You are either with us or against us!"

Since that argument did not play well in Peoria or anywhere else in America, except with some of the nation's blindest partisans who watch Fox regularly and refuse to entertain even minimal reality, it was necessary to move on to Plan B.

So now we are on to Plan B and, to paraphrase that eighties film starring Michael Caine, "Blame it on Bush!"  

That line is apt to be rejected as well, if any semblance of reason is embraced by the majority of Americans.  

How we remember how Grover Norquist strutted and exclaimed that the Republicans would raise so much money from their corporate benefactors for the 2004 presidential race that the Democrats would be buried in a landslide reminiscent of Reagan's victory two decades earlier when it was declared that it was "morning in America."

Norquist explained that with superior money and organization that the Democrats could and would be driven out of existence, as it certainly should be.  Those Democrats who might protest Norquist's idea of "drowning government in the bathtub" save an ever expanding weapons industry and military forces, would not be around.  The idea was that nobody would be around to protest.

Late in the last campaign, when it appeared that a majority of Americans had strayed away from Norquist's rigid objective of destroying America's safety valves, destroying all meaningful social policy from Roosevelt's New Deal onward, Norquist responded like the rest of his badly stung species.

Norquist suggested that Obama be demonized, smeared over and over again.  That's right, Grover.  When you and your gang members are cornered the only thing you have left, in the manner of typically loud and desperate bullies, is to smear the opposition.