One of the authors is John Yoo, who famously wrote memos authorizing torture for the Bush administration. So, on one hand, Mr. Yoo thinks a president should not have authority to investigate if there’s even the appearance of a quid pro quo in federal contracting. On the other, in 2005, Mr. Yoo said the president should have the authority to crush a child’s testicles in front of the child’s father as a means of torturing the father to gain information.

I have a rule about never engaging in personal invective in this space. John Yoo has always been the toughest test of that rule. He does, however, illustrate the guiding principle of the Republican Party: We want what we want and we don’t care how we get it.

Consider the “deficit reduction” plan House Republicans recently passed. It would abolish Medicare over a ten-year period, give wealthiest Americans more tax cuts and increase the deficit. It doesn’t make sense, but sense is beside the point. It’s not designed to make sense; it’s designed to give the Republicans what they want – more power for the rich and corporate.

Look at the two parties’ positions on almost any issue. Democrats spend their time trying to find the right answer, a win-win or at least something fair, the greatest good for the greatest number. (Inasmuch as their own corporate masters let them. I mean, I haven’t started eating lotus blossoms.)

Trivial matters of logic or intellectual consistency do not bind Republicans. That’s why they scream about the deficit, but were silent in 2005 when Dick Cheney said, “Deficits don’t matter.” That’s why their “deficit reduction” is built on tax breaks for people who don’t need them cutting health care for old people. (Had I mentioned that already? It bears repeating.)

This is why Republicans run around calling themselves “fiscally responsible” while perpetrating scams on the public, why they say they’re “restoring honor to the Oval Office” while setting up secret prisons and torture chambers (not to mention sex-club fundraisers). They say whatever’s needed to get a short-term win. They believe if they string together enough short-term wins, it’s a long-term win. They may be right.

Karl Rove laid it out for journalist Ron Suskind in 2004: “The aide [Rove] said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”

This is why Fox News and the rest of the Murdoch media empire exist, to prop up and repeat these fantasies at great volume. They know well-informed, discerning citizen Thomas Jefferson imagined and Ralph Nader dreams of doesn’t exist anymore, if such a creature ever did.

They know people vote for the guy they’d rather have a beer with (George W. Bush) than the guy who’s more likely to have the right answer (Al Gore). Based on the collective seats of our pants, we decide beforehand whom we agree with and then never stop to listen to the facts.

It’s fun to watch Jon Stewart put up clips of politicians and Fox hosts contradicting themselves, sometimes with a span of mere seconds. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “Boy! If the New York Times and the Washington Post and the networks would just hold politicians as accountable as Jon Stewart does! Then we’d be getting someplace!”

Maybe we would. Even in the unlikely universe where an epidemic of truth telling seizes the American media, it would only be a start, a first step. Things are bad. They will not get better unless and until enough people decide to make them better. For the time being, can we at least stop pretending?

© Mark Floegel, 2011

Senator McCain pulled the mike away from her and said, “No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

We all shook our heads and clucked our tongues that things could have come to such a sorry pass. Mr. McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin, however, had crossed and recrossed the country, implying Mr. Obama was a friend of terrorists and extremists, so we weren’t shocked when the crazy old lady came to roost at the McCain rally.

Two years, later Sen. McCain, while he never found his way back to the straight talk that once endeared him to many, at least managed to knock off the campaign-style attacks, something Ms. Palin is incapable of doing or perhaps even understanding. Now, sane people are the ones having the microphones snatched away by crazies. What was the lunatic fringe two years ago is now dead center of the Republican Party platform and because that party brooks no dissent, everyone has to go along and say, “Yeah… sure, that stuff’s OK by me.” (This includes Karl Rove, who got smacked down by the thought police for calling Christine O’Donnell “nutty.”)

Last month, Forbes magazine printed a bizarre five-screen act of character assassination by Dinesh D’Souza which sought to explain Obama administration policies in light of the drinking habits of the father Mr. Obama never knew. Instead of the round scorning it deserved, fellow traveling wackos like Newt Gingrich expanded on the theme.

Today’s news reports the second assault in a week on a 23-year-old woman who opposed a GOP candidate (not the same woman or candidate). In Walla Walla, Washington, Victor Phillips struck Christie Stordeur outside a Republican Party office. Ms. Stordeur opposes the Senate candidacy of Dino Rossi.

Monday, Lauren Valle suffered a concussion when she was pinned to the ground and kicked in the head by Rand Paul county coordinator Tim Profitt in Lexington, Kentucky. (Disclosure: Ms. Valle is an activist who has worked with Greenpeace, although I don’t think I’ve met her. All these kids look alike anymore.)

The people who run around in costumes (Hang on, folks, the weekend you’ve been waiting for is nearly here!), screaming about the Constitution are taking to the airwaves to defend the beatings of women who attempt to exercise their First Amendment right to speech.

Let me get back to the lunatic fringe for a second. The phrase was coined by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt to describe anarchists who believed in “propaganda by deed” – or symbolic acts of violence designed to provoke a revolution against the sitting government. Sound familiar?

Last week, the New York Times pointed out that not only have 95 percent of Americans gotten a tax cut since Mr. Obama’s been in office, a similar number – fewer than one in ten – didn’t realize their taxes had gone down.

Are Americans really that stupid (or crazy)? Of course not. The problem is that they have been lied to, both by the national Republican Party and its corollary 24-hour news channel, Fox. If you lie and repeat the lie and amplify the lie (and the hapless Democrats can’t do anything to counter it), then it’s inevitable that voters will head to the mid-term polls under a cloud of utter fabrication.

All of which is bad enough, but where will we be by the last week in October 2012?

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Maybe it’s just the time of year when the fruit ripens. The primaries in Kentucky, Nevada, Alaska, New York and Delaware (and a near miss in New Hampshire) are the fruit of the seeds planted by Ronald Reagan 30 years ago… 45, if you want to count his asinine shenanigans as California governor.

Sure, it was fun to watch Karl Rove scolding Sean Hannity Tuesday night and then see Rush Limbaugh lose control of his bodily functions at Mr. Rove the next day. (The day after, Karl had to take to the airwaves and kiss several of Rush’s bodily functions to atone for his apostasy.)

For years now, the cynical manipulators of the Republican Party and Fox News have spouted insidious invective at Democrats, independents, anyone who does not fall down and worship at their chosen set of idols. They’ve laughed up their sleeves as the “useful idiots” of the religious right and the racist and homophobic elements of the voting population did their bidding. The rich got richer as the rubes voted against their economic interests and undermined American democracy.

The gay issue was useful for a long time. I remember the Florida 2004 ballot with homophobic initiatives tacked onto it to drive Bush base to the polls. Mr. Bush’s campaign manager that time around was Ken Mehlman, later chair of the National Republican Committee. Last month, Mr. Mehlman, after years of rumors, admitted he is gay. Guess it was just politically convenient to hide it and use gay-bashing as a cudgel. Now Christine O’Donnell grabs the GOP senatorial nomination in Delaware away from favored Republican Mike Castle, in part by insinuating that Mr. Castle is gay, leaving Mr. Rove to wring his hands at the unfairness of it all.

The Cantors and McConnells, like Victor Frankenstein, thought they could control the monster they sewed together with pieces from the graveyard of unwanted ideas. “Drive out the RINOs!” (Republicans In Name Only) they cried through the early years of this decade and the Chafees and Jeffordses of the GOP either switched allegiance or retired. If you drive out of the party everyone more moderate than yourself, guess where that leaves you?

Others are still surfing. Dick Armey, once a Texas congressman and Newt Gingrich’s lieutenant in the 1990s is now fronting Freedom Works, passing along some of Charles and David Koch’s oil billions to the tea partiers devouring the establishment Mr. Armey once called his own. I don’t think he gives a crap, as long as he gets paid.

Now the shouters at Fox and the GOP operatives have to decide if they can – or want – get this mad dog back in the yard. Homophobia having run the course of its effectiveness, they’re now playing with the gasoline and matches of religious hatred and racism, calling Barack Obama names and inciting violence against Muslims.

It’s amusing to see the right-wingers’ shotgun go off in their faces, leaving them with the blasted eyebrows of Elmer Fudd, but the greatest damage is done to our nation and we all suffer for it.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

In the last month of the ’92 campaign, with a sluggish economy controlling the debate, the Republican candidate was falling behind in the polls. George H.W. Bush, aghast at the prospect of being forever branded “one-term president,” began leaking bile. Behind in the polls, Mr. Bush was advised to “go negative” and try to tear down his rivals. To his misfortune, Mr. Bush’s master of negative campaigning, Lee Atwater, had died of a brain tumor the year before, after apologizing to the many people he’d smeared in his career.

Absent the coaching of a professional mudslinger, Mr. Bush was reduced to referring to Bill Clinton and Al Gore as “bozo and the ozone man.” He sounded weak and hapless and Clinton/Gore won with 100 electoral votes to spare.

Now it’s John McCain’s turn to sound like an angry, impotent old man as he watches Mr. Obama and Joe Biden widen a lead in the polls. Americans today wish we could describe our economy as “sluggish,” rather than “catastrophic.” Senior citizens, who should be part of Mr. McCain’s base, are watching their IRA/401k nest eggs disappear overnight. So much for getting Florida in the GOP column.

I’ll say this for the elder Mr. Bush: at his worst, his bilious name-calling never fell to the despicable level we’ve heard at McCain/Palin rallies in the past week. Accusations of treason, terrorism, veiled race baiting and now the veil has begun to slip as Mr. McCain’s supporters begin to call for lynching.

This is ugly stuff, unworthy of any American, much less a senator and a governor. While we can’t hold the candidates accountable for everything that gets shouted from the crowd at their rallies, the silence from the campaign in response to those shouts has been terrible to behold.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. Last year, when it was expected Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee, a stupid old lady asked John McCain to his face, “How do we beat the bitch?” His response was a snicker rather than a remonstrance for what was clearly and out of line comment. He then called it an “excellent question” and addressed his chances of beating Sen. Clinton.

In his autobiography, Mr. McCain portrays himself as a selfish and shallow youth who learned the meaning of duty an honor during five and a half years in a prisoner-of-war camp.

In the 1980s, now a U.S. senator, Mr. McCain abused the power of his office to aid a corrupt savings-and-loan operator who showered the McCain family with gifts, contributions and get-rich(er)-quick investment deals. Reprimanded by the Senate, Mr. McCain professed to have learned his lesson and had become a better man.

In the 2000 Republican primary, Mr. McCain was subjected to Lee Atwater-style gutter politics, at the hands of George W. Bush and Karl Rove. Trying to stay alive in South Carolina, he endorsed the flying of the Confederate flag on the statehouse grounds. Later, he said he regretted that position. He said he’d learned a lesson and was now a better man.

That was then, this is now. Mr. McCain hired one of Karl Rove’s acolytes – Steve Schmidt – to run his campaign. Immediately after Mr. Schmidt came aboard, things began to get nasty and have gotten nastier with each passing week. Mr. McCain, to what little credit can be accorded him, at least seems to wince as he delivers his venom. Sarah Palin, the self-described “pit bull,” winks when she does it.

Barack Obama, for his part, is doing his best to ignore this. The general campaign seems not only like the ’92 contest, but eerily like this year’s Democratic primary, when he slowly pulled away from Ms. Clinton, as she (and the former president) sank to depths unworthy of them.

Soon this will be over and two of the three senators (Ms. Clinton and one other) will have to walk back into their chamber and begin their post-campaign careers. I hope the losing senators will have learned something from the experience. I hope they will become better people. I wish I could believe it.

© Mark Floegel, 2008

Mr. Marshall has provided copious evidence to prove Mr. Rove’s lie, but I was thinking, “Hey, I’ve been writing this thing for 11 years, what did I have to say about it?”

Sure enough, there it was in my commemoration of the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks.