I didn't think I could still be outraged anymore by anything from the right. I was wrong.
Today there was this, from Steve Bannon.
He apparently has a talk show, funded by renegade Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.
As part of the news on Bannon's arrest on federal charges, I saw an episode of it posted on Josh Marshall's site, and listened to some of it.
My jaw literally dropped when he started talking about the previous evening's Democratic convention.
This is what he said [my rough transcript, starting ~4:00; I’m not going to post the video — go to Josh’s site and scroll down that article if you want to watch it]:
How are they [Democrats] trying to sell, with a straight face, the American people on the neoliberal policies that did nothing but destroy jobs, concentrate wealth, have income inequality, ship all our factories overseas while unlimited amount of competing labor against blacks and African Americans in the working class, and neocon policies that spent seven trillion dollars in the middle east on these failed wars... I don't get what the Democrats are trying to do here, I don't get what they're trying to sell...
Another person on the show added more about "the neoliberalism that shipped jobs overseas, that impoverished much of America...crises that we are seeing manifest all around the world..."
And they had the gall to argue that Trump is bravely fighting to reverse all that, instead of obsessively self-dealing and flailing around like a clown.
Is it just my imagination that the people who pushed tirelessly for the "creative destruction" of globalization the past 20-30 years have been all on the right?
George H.W. Bush, and Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney negotiated the most damaging free trade deal for American labor, NAFTA, although Bush couldn't finish before he left office and left it to Clinton to sign the completed agreement.
How many hundreds of articles did right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation produce pushing for more globalization and more free trade and excoriating anyone who stood in the way as enemies of freedom liberty and prosperity?
Who were those people who violently opposed further rounds of globalization agreements that expanded offshoring at the so-called Battle in Seattle in 1999? They were lefties and progressives, of course — labor unions, students, anti-capitalists and environmentalists.
That propagandists like Bannon are now trying to imply that the Iraq debacle is somehow the fault of Democrats is beyond obscene.
It was Republican George Bush's war, and they bullied and demonized anyone who dared to try to tell them at the time that it was a bad idea.
So this is the level of Big Lie that the sheeple of the right are hearing and lapping up.
Are Americans’ memories really so short?
Are people stupid enough to swallow lies like these whole?
It's a seamless worldview, a system of airtight epistemic closure.
Have they told themselves the lies long enough that they actually believe them?
It's hard to imagine how anyone could be shameless enough to say any of it, but I guess that's what the game has become for right-wing Americans and their Trumpian Republican Party.