A fascinating act has been taking place before our very eyes and I think it deserves recognition. Perhaps a special Oscar category could be made. There is simply no more fitting way to describe what the conservatives in congress and in the media are doing. Take this for example, courtesy of Media Matters:

Now to the untrained eye, which is roughly 95% of the Fox & Friends viewership, it may look like Laura Ingram, Steve Doochey and Brian Kilmeade have an actual point. In short, Democrats are overstating the dangers of this economy so that any turn in the other direction can be sighted as progress. And apparently creating only 2 million jobs would be total and utter failure in Doochey’s assessment, hence his permanent name change on this site.

But to folks who’ve been watching both sides of their mouths for the last decade or so, something more interesting and truly funny is starting to show: They know this stimulus is going to work and they’re preemptively trying to call it a miserable failure even if it does succeed on some minor level. Watch that segment again and tell me it’s not fall-on-the-floor hilarious. They fear any measurable success in the stimulus package. Why? Because they disowned it. Any success is yet another disgrace to their failed economic vision. And any failure will be amplified by their right-wing echo chamber.

The funniest example of a right-winger totally owning up to the fact that this bill will have a measure of success is none other than Karl Rove himself (hat tip to Raw Story).

I also find it humorous that they call it using “fear tactics” and “doom and gloom” on the American people. They should be experts on this subject because it’s all they’ve resorted to when it came to terrorism and it’s how we ended up in Iraq in the first place. And since we’re drawing parallels to the Iraq War, I think there was a bit of spending involved in that one. The last I checked there was.

In fact, if I recall correctly, the previous administration managed to give out no-bid contracts to the companies they used to work for and, at the same time, manage to literally lose billions of those dollars into thin air. Boy I wish that billions of dollars could somehow go missing in our own country.

The fact is that Republicans have lost a considerable amount of face over the past years because of disastrous decisions and horrible management. The result is that the last two elections have seen Republicans being shown the door for being such awful stewards of our government. So now they’ve returned to the stone-throwing partisanship and hoping for another chance to fool the electorate into another “Contract With America” that they can screw us with.

Honestly, I don’t think Americans have too much difficulty in seeing these statements for what they really are: The last cries of a dying ideology that brought about the greatest economic disaster since The Great Depression. I expect they’d be bitter for owning that dubious reputation once more since their party was responsible for that one, too. But what they need to accept is their ideas have failed, the American people voted for change and that’s exactly what’s happening.

PS: Can someone tell Lindsey Graham to stop using a smarmy rendition of “that’s not a change we can believe in” as if the campaign is still on? Fuck, he’s an embarrassment.