Fired up Drum
by digby
If you’re looking for some good reading, treat yourself to a series of fired-up, fed-up posts by Kevin Drum over the past few days. There are a number of good observations but I like this one in particular, in which he responds to Marco Rubio rending his garments over Barack Obama’s failure:
““When does it start to get better?” Rubio asks. “When does the magic of this president start to happen?”
Gag…
Here’s Drum:
Today is one of those days where I hardly know how to react to things anymore. Part of me shrugs at this stuff: politics is politics. Of course Republicans are going to call a Democratic president a failure. What else would they do?
But then, for about the thousandth time, my mind wanders over the past ten years. Republicans got the tax cuts they wanted. They got the financial deregulation they wanted. They got the wars they wanted. They got the unfunded spending increases they wanted. And the results were completely, unrelentingly disastrous. A decade of sluggish growth and near-zero wage increases. A massive housing bubble. Trillions of dollars in war spending and thousands of American lives lost. A financial collapse. A soaring long-term deficit. Sky-high unemployment. All on their watch and all due to policies they eagerly supported. And worse: ever since the predictable results of their recklessness came crashing down, they’ve rabidly and nearly unanimously opposed every single attempt to dig ourselves out of the hole they created for us.
But despite the fact that this is all recent history, it’s treated like some kind of dreamscape. No one talks about it. Republicans pretend it never happened. Fox News insists that what we need is an even bigger dose of the medicine we got in the aughts, and this is, inexplicably, treated seriously by the rest of the press corps instead of being laughed at. As a result, guys like Marco Rubio have a free hand to insist that Obama — Obama! The guy who rescued the banking system, bailed out GM, and whose worst crime against the rich is a desire to increase their income tax rate 4.6 percentage points! — is a “left-wing strong man” engaged in brutal class warfare against the wealthy. And Rubio does it without blinking. Hell, he probably even believes it.
We are well and truly down the rabbit hole. The party of class warfare for the past 30 years is fighting a war against an empty field and the result has been a rout. I wonder what would happen if the rest of us ever actually started fighting back?
As long as the war is just a game — the field, the teams, the referees — owned by big money I have a sneaking suspicion that it will continue to be rigged, unfortunately. The biggest danger I see in all this is that the people just stop caring about the game at all.
But I do take Kevin’s point that as depressed as I am by the Democrats’ and administration’s abdication, listening to Rubio lugubriously whine about “waiting for the magic” is enough to make me want to put my foot through the computer screen. The chutzpah of these assholes is truly epic.
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