Maybe it's disorientation after the longest and most incompetent, not to say reprehensible, presidential campaign in history, culminating in the election night massacre of their forces. Perhaps they're suffering a condition akin to battle fatigue. Whatever it is, something has happened to my favorite Republicans: as disingenuous, self-serving, and illogical as their ideas and arguments used to be, they've now become thoroughly infantilized. It's as though they've curled up in the fetal position preparatory to a return trip back up the birth canal, and sent their brains on ahead.
Consider the case of a blond of a certain age, a rangy female with firehouse red toenails and an Anne Coulter-like lean and hungry look. "Well, at least Bush has cleaned up the FBI and the CIA," she states categorically. Really? When the FBI still doesn't have a functioning computer system? When the CIA failed to notice a little thing like Russia massing troops on the Georgian border, only to learn of the subsequent invasion the way the rest of us did, from CNN?
"Well," she blustered, "I have friends, I just can't say where, and they tell me the FBI and the CIA have been cleaned up." So there! Her faith in her anonymous friends in high places would be touching if it weren't a tad silly. Not to say delusional.
Also hardly worthy of note, except that another rightist pal made exactly the same argument a few nights later. A bearded scientist, he began by observing that 9/11 was Clinton's fault, not Bush's. But wait: wasn't Clinton out of office for nine months when the attacks too place? Didn't Ron Suskind write of the CIA briefer sent to Bush in August '01 to apprise him of the imminent attack, whereupon Bush congratulated him for covering his ass and sent him on his way? Didn't former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, in his Against All Enemies, tell of repeatedly warning Rice, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz and others that Bin Ladin was poised to strike, only to be ignored by a Rice obsessed with Chinese missile attacks, an Ashcroft fixated on pornography, and a Wolfowitz dreaming of the oil fields of Iraq?
"Well," he blustered, "I don't read books. But I have friends who know exactly what happened. And they could tell you too, except they'd have to kill you afterwards." If they knew all that much nine months before 9/11, shouldn't they have done something to prevent it? Surely his friends are the ones who ought to be lined up against a wall and shot? The suggestion was not well received. Anyway, he continued, I know Bush, and he is a decent man. Decent men torture prisoners, spy on fellow citizens, kill and maims tens of thousand of their countrymen for no reason at all, all the while engineering a global economic collapse? I guess it all depends on what your definition of 'decent' is.
Another right wing acquaintance has been making categorical statements that make no sense, but at least he makes no claim to having highly-placed friends who feed him state secrets. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who commutes daily on the federal highway system, earns his living from the federal government invented internet, he is in this country thanks to the relatively enlightened immigration policies of the pre-Bush federal government.
"Obama is a socialist," he maintains, in a tone that brooks no argument. But wait. Whatever you want to call them, aren't Obama's policies different from Bush's? Of course. And has Bush done a good job? Terrible, terrible. So isn't a president who'll do the job differently a good thing? No, Obama is a socialist. To which the only possible response is to sing The Internationale.
I'd be seriously worried that my righty chums have lost it entirely, except for one thing. They never had it in the first place.