The Deficit Under The Bed

by digby

For those of you who are worried about your kids being propagandized about Barack Hussein Obama, here’s an antidote for you:

Help! Mom! Radicals Are Ruining My Country!

features Speaker Pelosi as a Marie Antoinette-like elitist.

While Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s approval ratings may continue to sink, her favorability among children may plummet thanks to a new children’s book. Help! Mom! Radicals Are Ruining My Country! , written by author Katharine DeBrecht, slams the Speaker as an elitist, tiara-donning radical out of touch with everyday Americans.

The sequel to the bestselling Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! continues the story of two boys who open up a lemonade stand only to have the stand seized by the government. Determined to succeed, the boys open up a swingset business, but all hope is doomed when a sweaty and sputtering Congressman Fwank and a snarky Congressman Schmoozer demand that all kids should have a swingset whether they can afford them or not.

“Tell me about it, Darrrling,Speaker Queenosie primped her professionally styled hair. Little common people are entitled to a swingset just like the rest of you commoners, she jiggled a pair of jet keys through her perfectly manicured fingers,” the book describes the Pelosi-like character chastising the boys.

Queenosie and other radicals – such as a sweetheart dealmaker Senator Dudd and a cranky Senator Dontreid – run into trouble when the boys take them to task for outlandish spending on pork projectsand refusing to read the bills they pass. The radicals are forced to put on dunce-like thinking caps in order to remember what inane projects were snuck into the bills. “No, no, we cut military funding in the Popcorn Bill.” “Oh yeah! I remember! We put the Cheeseballs for Squirrels program in the Education Bill along with the funding for a study on how talk radio affects acne in fish!” “No no! We snuck that funding in the Energy Bill along with the funding for a study on how the number of holes in Swiss cheese affects whether girls aged 7-10 with curly hair use black or blue pens while doodling, remember?”

DeBrecht says the Pelosi character was essential to her book. “When Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House all we heard was how wonderful it was that a mother and grandmother rose through the ranks to such a position. In reality, that mother and grandmother has played an enormous role in ensuring that our children and grandchildren are shackled with debt for decades to come.”

Now, this is just silly wingnut welfare product of course. But it does give you insight in to the message that the right thinks will work among the neanderthals: deficit spending and pork.

People don’t know what’s causing their economic distress and the only ones who are explaining it to them in a way they can understand are the right wingers who are playing that old soothing song about government spending. It means nothing that the meltdown happened on a Republican’s watch because they have now convinced themselves that they always hated Bush’s spending as well. (I actually heard someone saying on television that Katrina was a boondoggle and that Bush should have held his ground and not “bailed them out,” which in the case of New Orleans was literally true. )

American right wing populism never goes too strongly at the malefactors of great wealth but rather points toward the “other” — and the government, which is accused of helping “the other” at the expense of Real Americans. They’ve reworked it using this deficit boogeyman because it’s familiar to Americans who recognize it as a negative economic term that everyone agrees is right up there with terrorism for sheer destructiveness. Tying it into political corruption and wrapping it in a nice sexist bow makes this little piece of wingnut offal a perfect stocking stuffer.

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