I Think They Remember This As Real

When you build an entire campaign on the twin pillars of -- 

• Appeasing a lobotomized mob of dolts whose fragile hold on reality depends entirely on refusing to remember anything that happened before January 20, 2009 (and precious little that's happened since). And,


• A political press whose livelihood depends on never, ever mentioning that your Base is a mob of lobotomized dolts

-- you end up with ads like this:

Unfortunately, when the guy whose reputation you are using to mule your bullshit into the mainstream press is not some long dead political boss over whose dodgy reputation history has planted lovely vines, but someone who is alive and well and not real happy at being used to shiv his own guy, you end up picking blowback like this out of your teeth:

Statement by President Bill Clinton on Governor Mitt Romney’s New Television Advertisement

New York, NY-Governor Romney released an ad today alleging that the Obama administration had weakened the work requirements of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. That is not true.

The act emerged after years of experiments at the state level, including my work as Governor of Arkansas beginning in 1980. When I became President, I granted waivers from the old law to 44 states to implement welfare to work strategies before welfare reform passed.

After the law was enacted, every state was required to design a plan to move people into the workforce, along with more funds to help pay for training, childcare and transportation. As a result, millions of people moved from welfare to work.

The recently announced waiver policy was originally requested by the Republican governors of Utah and Nevada to achieve more flexibility in designing programs more likely to work in this challenging environment. The Administration has taken important steps to ensure that the work requirement is retained and that waivers will be granted only if a state can demonstrate that more people will be moved into work under its new approach. The welfare time limits, another important feature of the 1996 act, will not be waived.

The Romney ad is especially disappointing because, as governor of Massachusetts, he requested changes in the welfare reform laws that could have eliminated time limits altogether. We need a bipartisan consensus to continue to help people move from welfare to work even during these hard times, not more misleading campaign ads.

There is nothing particularly new about this gambit, per se: if you measure such things by their ability to touch every one of the ooey-gooey bigoted wingnut pleasure centers, then Willard Romney certainly got what he paid for.

The side-effects, however, are getting kind of interesting.

Deprived of a 9/11-Iraq War cudgel with which to club the press completely into line and marginalize all opposition, over and over again the Right finds itself showing its ass in public, and each time they try to run the old plays from the old playbook they end up exposing to the rest of the country the extent to which they are entombed inside the sarcophagus of delusions and spin that Reagan, Atwater, Gingrich and Rove made for them.  Brick by brick they built a system where the past is instantly annihilated and replaced by rewritable Etch-A-Sketch dust.  Stone by stone  they built a system where the idea of just fucking lying all the time about everything is still considered innovative and Swift Boat-y because, hey, they'll never see that one coming!

Lying has become so automatic to them -- such a reflexive and universal response to every situation -- that they can no longer function without it because, as any recovering alcoholic knows, eventually, the bottle drinks you.  I've written a lot about this phenomena before --

By selling 9/11 for a mess of wingnut pottage, the Right bought itself an anti-Liberal free-fire zone and two Presidential terms-worth of blank checks. Two terms of an alternately supportive and supine media. Two terms of catastrophe, corruption and treason protected from scrutiny by an ablative shield made out of solid "Why do you hate America?", and a promise that they could go on bareback fucking diseased monsters in the alley all night long, every night, forever and wake up each morning miraculously clean, virginal and still beloved in the eyes of God.  

But they forgot that tempus just keeps fugiting along. And as time passed, the Right got so accustomed to butt-scooting their depravity all over the public square and never being called on it they simply stopped noticing that they were amassing a whole new post-9/11 public record so despicable and overflowing with Conservative atrocities that it positively dwarfed their antics during the Clinton Years. 

-- but the absolutely dog-licking-its-own-ass lack of inhibition with which the Right now routinely lies about really big, important and easily verifiable events in recent history is still remarkable (from Salon):

In Jennifer Rubin’s world, a world where everything is Good News For Mitt Romney, this is a “debacle” for Obama. It may shock you to learn how much Jennifer Rubin admires Bill Clinton, or at least the conservative anti-Obama Bill Clinton that she has invented for the purposes of this post. “One wonders how Clinton feels as Obama repudiates the centrist vision that made Clinton the most successful Democratic president since Harry Truman,” she writes. (He feels OK enough about it to stump for Obama?) 

This is my favorite part of the post, where Rubin somehow turns Clinton releasing a statement calling Romney dishonest into a confirmation that Clinton totally agrees with Romney’s attack.

The party that screamed itself stupid for eight long years over the imaginary crimes of Bill Clinton, that made continuous war on Bill Clinton, that tried every trick it could dream up of to grind the normal processes of government to a halt under Bill Clinton and who eventually  impeached Bill Clinton over trivia has -- without batting an eye -- gone back into the business of freely lying about Bill Clinton while at the same time rewriting history to make themselves seem all cuddly with Bill Clinton...all while Bill Clinton is still alive and well and standing right...behind...them.