You'd like to think that people get what they deserve. The entire American political system — in theory, anyway — is dedicated to that proposition, among some others. In a monarchy, for example, you luck into a good king, or else you have the misfortune of living under the reign of a bucktoothed, inbred hemophiliac until such time as that person accidentally falls under the wheels of his own touring car. It's not your fault when His Royal Highness appoints his pet rabbit to be Chancellor of the Exchequer or ambassador to Finland. However, the American system is constructed such that if, like the people of the great state of Florida so did last month, you elect to be your governor the greatest Medicare swindler in the nation's history, you bear all the blame down the line if and when he starts handing over your public institutions like door prizes to his corporate cronies, or sees the public treasury as something of an ATM machine, some of which apparently is happening already, despite the guy not actually being in office yet.

But we would almost guarantee that this will not happen, that no burden shall be shouldered henceforth. We have insulated ourselves from the responsibility of what we are doing to our country and its politics and, therefore, its government, all of which belong to us — in theory, anyway. And that is what triumphed in 2010.

The national Id was the Creature of the Year, and any fair balloting wouldn't even have been close. Its first great earthquake — the election of Scott Brown to fill the Senate seat of Ted Kennedy — looks positively innocent in comparison to what came afterward. Because this fall the American people, faced with the undeniable accomplishments of a conciliatory, centrist Democratic president — including a national health-care bill by which people will be forced to buy insurance from the same lycanthropic industry that almost everyone once claimed to detest — decided to demonstrate our inchoate anger by voting into office the radical fringe of a major political party that has thoroughly lost its mind.

Leave aside the inevitable re-election of people like Michelle Bachmann, whose constituents seem perfectly happy to be represented in Congress by a nutball who believes, among the other bats rattling around her crowded belfry, that the U.S. Census is a government plot and that AmericaCorps is one goose-step shy of an Obamajugend. Bachmann's an incumbent, and they usually get re-elected because nobody's really paying attention. And, besides, the inexcusable Citizens United decision produced by the U.S. Supreme Court LLC this January pretty much rigs the playing field for any incumbents who behave like good little wholly owned subsidiaries.

No, the Id really came out and danced among the rookies who succeeded in November. Remaining for the moment in Florida, we have new congressman Allen West, who may or may not be a war criminal, but who claimed to have a higher security clearance than the president and whose prospective chief-of-staff was a local talk-show host. Rand Paul ran against the Civil Rights movement in Kentucky and won. In Utah, stalwart Republican Bob Bennett wasn't conservative enough and got primaried into oblivion. He will be replaced by Mike Lee, who is proud to be called "the Rand Paul of the West," and would like to re-fight the battle over the Fourteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, and believes that the states have the power to nullify federal law, which means he'd like to re-fight the Battle of Gettysburg. In Wisconsin and Ohio, they elected governors whose first acts, during a period of record unemployment, were to cancel high-speed rail projects that would have supercharged the economies of their impoverished states. And Governor Chris Christie cancelled a tunnel project, a move that should guarantee him the opposition of anyone who gets stuck in the Lincoln any time between now and when Christie stands for re-election.

But it likely won't, because Christie's a big, blustering bully who likes to make women teachers cry. That trumps money and jobs any day — these days, anyway, when an extension of unemployment benefits with the jobless rate pushing 10 percent is impossible to pass unless linked to preposterous tax cuts for the upper third of the wealthiest Americans. Blame that teacher. She probably has a pension. And you probably don't, because some twenty-five-year-old Wall Street suit pissed yours away on a derivatives swap that made him more money than you'd ever have seen, even if he hadn't stolen yours. So, obviously, the logical course of action is to vote for people deeply committed to making sure the whole thing can happen again.

Let us assume for the moment that Barack Obama has neither the will nor the political savvy to resist completely the relentless tide of oligarchical bullshit that's going to be coming his way from the House of Representatives. (Already, he's taking people like Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin — one of those pathetic souls who believes that Ayn Rand wrote erotica, and whose vaunted deficit "road map" would cut taxes on the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of Americans an average of $1.7 million a year on top of the Bush tax cuts that Obama agreed to extend — far too seriously.) We're hearing too much talk about finding common ground with people who want to rescind the 20th century, and far too much concern about things like "entitlement reform" in a climate where political vandalism succeeds far too well and too often. If the president has noticed this, he's been awfully quiet about it. Meanwhile, too many of us are out of work, and more than a few of the think-tank sharpies are floating the idea that the 10 percent number we've been hovering around is "structural" — as in permanent, or as close to permanency as can be determined.

And what do we do, in response to the looting of the national economy and the far-too-simple mainstreaming of destructive lunacy? We cheer. And then, one day, when the country and our lives have become unrecognizable, we look for someone to blame.

It'll probably be a teacher, though.

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