Chutzpah

There was no way that Republicans would simply accept their defeat in the 2006 elections and be put out to pasture. We all knew that they were BETTER from the attack dog position that they were ever at governing. They thrive on being the persecuted minority; it's hard-wired into their worldview. And since they hate government, attacking those in power is a natural fit.

Still, I'm not sure any of us expected them to have the chutzpah* - there's really no other word for it - to attack the Democrats for the very sins they displayed throughout 12 years of rule in the Congress. Yet we should have. Because these are some of the most shameless people who've ever walked the Earth, and what's more they saw a winning formula in 2006, and they co-opted it. Plus, they rely on a low-information electorate who won't pay attention to the total hypocrisy coming out of their mouths when they blather and bluster.

This actually started very early in the Congressional session, when the GOP started whining about being locked out of the legislative process and the Rules Committee. But it's really reached a state of perfection in the past couple weeks. Once they saw Democratic weakness on Iraq they struck - and in the most logically challenged ways possible.

First they assailed the Democrats for - get this - earmarks.

Reps. John Boehner (R-OH), Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Jerry Lewis (R-CA) all actively participated in the extraordinarily irresponsible explosion of congressional earmarking that began shortly after the Republicans gained control of the Congress in 1995 and lasted until the voters tossed them out this past November. But according to their political rule book, making a huge mess doesn’t mean you can’t complain about how someone else is cleaning it up.

In an effort to sidestep those political mine fields they have instead decided that voters are dumb enough to forget who gave us “The Bridge to Nowhere,” who increased earmarking in the Labor, Health and Human Service Education bill from zero to more than a billion dollars a year, who tripled the number of earmarks in the defense bill, and who is currently the target of criminal investigations because of allegations that their earmarking practices were not only wasteful but also corrupt. Why, they ask, should anyone doubt their commitment to reform?

So indignant are they at the slow pace in reforming the abusive conduct they developed into an art form that they are now attempting to stop the movement of all appropriation bills and as a result funding for myriad critical federal programs.

And guess what, this actually worked, as the Democrats agreed to allow members to question individual earmarks dropped into bills in conference reports, and allow for what Roy Blunt - Roy frickin' Blunt! - called "the same rules of transparency passed by Republicans last Congress." That's right, Roy Blunt is taking the moral high ground on corruption. This guy.

Rep. Roy Blunt and the man he wants to succeed as House majority leader, Tom DeLay, shared similar connections to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and to corporate lobbyists.

Blunt, R-Mo., wrote at least three letters helpful to Abramoff clients while collecting money from them. He swapped donations between his and DeLay's political groups, ultimately enriching the Missouri political campaign of his son Matt.

And Blunt's wife and another son, Andrew, lobby for many of the same companies that donate to the lawmaker's political efforts.

The President is getting into this act as well, adamantly huffing that he'll contain runaway spending. The guy that's presided over the largest increase in government since LBJ.

President Bush warned Congress on Saturday that he will use his veto power to stop runaway government spending.

"The American people do not want to return to the days of tax-and-spend policies," Bush said in his radio address.

The House passed a $37 billion budget for the Homeland Security Department on Friday, but Republicans rallied enough votes to uphold a promised veto from Bush.

The measure — one of several annual spending bills that Congress began to consider this week — exceeds Bush's request for the department by $2.1 billion.

Democrats on Friday defended the extra money in the homeland security bill, noting it contains money to hire 3,000 additional border agents, improve explosive detection at airports and provides money to double the amount of cargo screened on passenger aircraft.

Nowhere in the article does it mention the bloated defense budget or the massive increase in spending under Bush and the Republican rubber-stamp Congress. The he said-she said media is just engaging in stenography, and the American people have to figure out on their own how audacious it is for these serial spenders who've been fattening the pockets of contributors for the past 12 years could suddenly be interested in fiscal restraint.

The GOP is even using the phrase do-nothing Congress, when in fact, they've obstructed this Congress from doing the people's business, and they did next to nothing beyond profit taking for the last 12 years.

Republicans also are tweaking Democrats on other fronts, such as stalled efforts to upgrade health care and reduce the cost of college and energy. (which THEY stalled! -ed.)

They are even adopting the same line Democrats once used against them, calling this "a do-nothing Congress."

"If Democrats fail to reverse course, the dynamics in the 2008 elections may shift significantly, allowing Republicans to run as the party of change ... only two years after Democrats successfully campaigned on that same theme," Senate Republican leaders told their ranks in a letter last week.

There's a certain pathology at work here, for Republicans to try and shed everything they've embodied for the past decade and to turn it around on the opposition. But it's devastatingly effective politically.

Just as it was before last year's elections, polls show most Americans believe the United States is headed in the wrong direction.

"The primary reason is war," said James Thurber of American University's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies.

But there are other reasons. "People have problems in their lives and they don't see the White House or Congress dealing with it," Thurber said.

A Quinnipiac University poll this month found Congress with an approval rating of just 23 percent. "People voted for change. But they don't think they got it," said Peter Brown, an assistant director of the poll.

A Gallup poll last month put Congress's approval rating at 29 percent. The number had fallen to 21 percent last December, just weeks before Republicans yielded control.

We have an instant-grafitication, short-term memorty culture, combined with a very slow ship of state. That means that the calls for change are almost continuous from one election to the next, and either side can simply borrow the other's clothing and use the same messages to their benefit. The Republicans are very, very good at this. We see it in the Iraq debate. The same people that used any scrap of evidence to claim that the surge was working a couple months ago are now saying that the surge hasn't even started yet and we need to give it more time. You simply cannot expect internal logic from these people. They are absolutely shameless, and it helps them immensely in the political arena, where the media has no use for the past either, and sees politics as professional wrestling, where a sense of shame is not a favorable attribute, but a relentless forward-moving attack is.

This is not only worrisome for the next election cycle, but far into the future, as Republicans clearly will keep using these kinds of logical leaps and get away with them, burying the past and attacking with a straight face. Indeed, those honest conservatives breaking with the President ARE setting up the Democrats for the future.

I think that when the "honest conservatives" reject Bush they're just setting up their assault on the Democratic president they expect to see elected next year. Their way of digging themselves out from under the Bush disaster (and obscuring their own massive role in that disaster) will be to swear that "Never again can an American President be allowed that kind of free hand!" This will justify their fighting the new Democratic President tooth and nail for every inch of ground.

For example, Bush's politicization of the career staff in Justice and elsewhere was a very bad thing, no? And certainly this kind of thing has to stop, no? So we will forbid the new Democratic President to interfere with career personnel, with the result that all of the political hacks Bush put in civil service positions will be untouchable. (When that happens, can we expect the media to understand what's going on? No, of course not. Can we expect the Democrats to understand? Not really, but this is one area where I'd trust Rahm Emmanuel. Send a hack to catch a hack.)

Digby expanded on this, and made the absolutely true point that Republicans have no problem co-opting any message and using it to their advantage, whether it's "stolen elections" (through voter fraud) or "culture of corruption" (the current earmark debate) or whatever.

The question is, how do you deal with it, because the Democrats almost invite this attack by going ballistic and trying to explain precisely how Republicans are being hypocritical here.

One way to deal with this infuriating, sophomoric (yet highly effective) political style is to simply ignore them, as we do trolls, who operate on the same principle. Instead of David Obey coming to the floor of the Senate with steam coming out of his ears, explaining that the Democrats are trying to clean up the carnage left behind by 12 years of Republican rule while John Boehner smugly buffs his fingernails and chants "earmarks, earmarks, earmarks" Obey should just refuse to acknowledge Boehner's ridiculous accusations and move forward with his own argument.

It's very unsatisfying, because you want more than anything to scream in frustration that these hypocritical asses have the unmitigated gall to accuse the Dems of exactly what they've been doing for 12 years! But it's what they want and the Dems shouldn't give it to them.

I think mockery is really the best way. The Republicans look ridiculous making these attacks - but only to those who pay enough attention to know the hypocrisy. To the low-information voter, it simply doesn't come across that way. Unless you present it as a given in the context of a joke. People soak in through osmosis what they are expected to know. It's exactly how Republicans operate.

Picture a video of a Republican standing on the House floor. He's going on and on with a long speech about how the Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for selling out to the lingerie industry. The whole time he's wearing a teddy and being outfitted with garters and boustiers and the like. You can see where this is going. It's hard to explain hypocrisy but easy to visualize it, and the public will very easily pick up on the message. Another example was my idea to literally debate a Republican Memory Loss Act calling for federal funding to help Republicans like Scooter Libby and Alberto Gonzales get their memories back.

In the meantime, it's something that these high-paid consultants might want to consider. When the Republicans are this full of chutzpah, you have to throw a little chutzpah right back at them. And understand that when they are whining, that means you're winning.

* - For the Yiddish-ly challenged, chutzpah simply means audacity, denoting behavior that is so fantastically dastardly that it's almost breathtaking to watch someone do it. It was also a book by Alan Dershoqitz I read back when Dershowitz wasn't calling for torture warrants.