What do you do when your politics suck, your politicians have been repudiated and thrown out of office, all your ideas have proved disastrous, and the public hates you?

Well, if you had even the slightest shred of integrity, you'd apologize, fix your politics, and start all over again.

Of course, regressives in America don't quite meet that latter test. So maybe I better rephrase. What do you do when your politics suck, your politicians have been repudiated and thrown out of office, all your ideas have proved disastrous, the public hates you, AND you don't have even the slightest shred of integrity?

Ah, well that's easy. You just start fabricating reality.

And that is precisely what regressives are now doing.

Of course, this is not exactly a news flash. Remember how Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviets and won the Cold War? Remember how "the adults were back in charge" when George W. Bush came to Washington?

Without deceit, about seventy percent of the content of right-wing politics would immediately disappear. (The other thirty percent is just pure bullying.)

Just the same, it's remarkable the degree to which regressives have gone completely off the deep-end lately, and are now absolutely just making it up as they go.

As usual, Dick Cheney sets the gold standard. In this case, not only for telling tall tales, but also just for being such a completely tacky (alleged) human being. Cheney is even making George W. Bush look good by comparison, as the latter has had the decency (or is it fear?) not to attack the new administration in its first months. I guess Cheney, who went out of office with single-digit approval ratings, is seeking to determine just how utterly despised a politician can be (hint: Mussolini was shot, hung upside-down on meathooks, and then stoned by an angry public). Are negative numbers a possibility here? Can more people hate you than there are people? If anyone can do it, it would certainly be the Dick.

Nowadays the guy is running all over creation telling anyone who'll listen that Barack Obama's foreign and defense policies constitute a threat to American national security. The great irony here is that Obama is basically running the same set of ugly policies that the Bush administration employed, and sometimes even going them one better when it comes to shredding the Bill of Rights. True, Obama has said that he will close down Guantanamo - not that he is setting those prisoners free to go party in Vegas, mind you - but otherwise just about the only significant change I can see between the two administrations on security policy is that the current one seems to want to fight actual enemies of the United States, rather than fabricated ones sitting on top of oceans of oil.

Good grace dictates that Cheney should just shut up. More to the point for this discussion, however, when it comes to the substance of his assertions, he's just making it up as he goes.

So is the latest right wing media freak du jour, Glenn Beck, who has been on a tirade of late telling his audience that Obama has a secret plan to take away their guns. Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that we actually live in a country where it's legal to buy assault rifles. And let's leave aside for the moment the fact that even George W. Bush claimed he was opposed to that policy. All that aside, I am completely unaware of any actual evidence that the Obama administration has any plans to mess with gun control in America. Much to my chagrin, in fact, it seems pretty transparent that he has absolutely no interest in spending the enormous political capital that would be required to go after this issue, even if it was something that interested him, for which there is also absolutely no evidence that I'm aware of. This is even more embarrassingly stupid than the notion that Bill Clinton killed Vince Foster. There isn't even a dead body to explain.

But it actually gets a whole lot weirder from here. Ralph Peters is a columnist for the New York Post and is described as a "strategic analyst" for Fox "News". That's pretty much all you need to know about the guy's level of expertise. But his latest column provides an astonishing tour de force lesson in how to fabricate hysterically when the facts inconveniently don't fit your politics.

Did you know that Barack Obama's recent European and Middle Eastern tour was a complete disaster, and that he apologized for America everywhere he went? Did you know that Obama went to Turkey "on his knees" and "gave his seal of approval to a pungently anti American Islamist government"? You know, the same government of the same country that has been a key US NATO ally for decades, and is one of Israel's best friends? Did you know that Obama made "disdainful remarks" about George W. Bush? Did you know that "he told the Europeans that the global economic crisis is all our fault"? Did you know "He gave the Russians yet another blank check, too. (Meanwhile, in Moscow, Putin's thugs beat an aging pro democracy dissident to a pulp.)"?

Did you? Personally, I didn't know any of this stuff! Possibly because it is completely untrue. When Peters refers to the dissident-beating thugs of this "Putin" guy, does he mean the same Putin whose eyes George W. Bush looked into and saw a good-hearted soul? That Putin? Now that was some tough, skilled diplomacy right there, babe.

All in all, this is really remarkable stuff. If Peters argued that Obama had actually gone to the Gamma Quadrant, rather than Europe, and apologized to American-hating, socialist aliens, his tirade couldn't be any more hallucinatory than it is. It's really quite astonishing. These guys are clearly starting out with the conclusion that President Obama is badly failing, and then scrambling to fabricate 'facts' out of whole cloth in order to support that assertion, since reality is inconveniently spitting in their faces. And they're doing it on national television, no less.

Another wonderful example comes from some lunatic named William Murchison. He's real unhappy that gay marriage is on the march in America. So unhappy, in fact, that he's decided to simply fabricate it out of existence. He writes: "You really can't have 'gay marriage,' you know, irrespective of what a court or a legislature may say. ... The human race - sorry ladies, sorry gents - understands marriage as a compact reinforcing social survival and projection. It has always been so. It will always be so, even if every state Supreme Court pretended to declare that what isn't suddenly is. Life does not work in this manner."

Believe it or not, it actually gets more bizarre from there. Fundamentally, Murchison argues that gay marriage cannot exist because it doesn't serve the purpose of procreation, and he therefore even goes on to take shots at married heterosexuals who fail to reproduce, calling that "so odd a thing, to put the matter as generously as possible".

Addressing the Iowa Supreme Court justices who disagree with him, he writes: "These learned folk tell us earnestly that the right to 'equal protection of the law' necessitates a makeover of marriage. And so, by golly, get with it, you cretins! Be it ordered that. One can say without too much fear of contradiction that people who set themselves up as the sovereign arbiters of reality are - would 'nutty' be the word?"

Get it? Because Murchison sees marriage solely for the purpose of procreation, not only does he get to decide who can marry, he even gets to pretend that there's no such thing as other forms of marriage outside of his narrow, bigoted and historically inaccurate definition of the term. If the guy is willing to say there's no such thing as gay marriage, why doesn't he just get it over with and say there's no such thing as gays? Or Democrats? Or presidents named Obama? I mean, if you're going to do denial, why not do it right?

There is a whole lot more of this stuff, everywhere you turn. But I guess my favorite example is given to us by a guy you may have heard of before - a certain Karl Rove. Rove is really upset - and understandably so if you're familiar with his gentle biography - at the notion that the Obama administration might actually use leverage, or remember who its friends are, when it comes to playing legislative politics in America. So upset, in fact, that he devoted his entire last column in the Wall Street Journal (natch) to a single heinously egregious incident of this. According to Rove, Representative Peter DeFazio got a taste of the presidential backhand when he voted against the stimulus bill. According to Rove, at a subsequent closed-door meeting Obama told fellow Democrat DeFazio, "Don't think we're not keeping score, brother". Oooooohh! Ouch! Now that's some rough stuff, eh?

Of course, we don't know if Obama actually said that. And we don't know if he said it in jest, either. But, just for the sake of argument, let's assume that it all went down in the way Karl Rove reports it. Does that seem like a case of particularly tough politics to you? Does that seem like a president who is really playing some serious hardball? Does that seem like something that doesn't happen every five minutes in Washington, and arguably should happen?

More importantly, does that seem like something that the Karl Rove that we've all come to know and love this last decade would really have a problem with? Does it seem like a tawdry, pugilistic, or despotic behavior, far below anything Rove himself could imagine employing? One answer to those questions comes from Ron Suskind, who wrote a piece about Rove in 2003. It's worth quoting at some length:

"Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes early, just in time to witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ's famous browbeating style, is becoming legend but is seldom reported. Rove's assistant, Susan Ralston, said he'd be just a minute. She's very nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where a few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open door to Rove's modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.

"Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get around - curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events - but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence the Angel smile. 'Come on in.' And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour."

Of course, we could go on and on in describing the sort of hardball politics that Karl Rove used over and over again in order to win at all costs. Stuff that Barack Obama would never dream of touching. Stuff like creating rumors that Ann Richards was a lesbian. Stuff like spreading lies that John McCain had fathered a black baby out of wedlock. Stuff like scheduling the Iraq vote right before the midterm elections. Stuff like running ads against triple-amputee Vietnam vet Max Cleland, morphing his face into Osama bin Laden's.

Stuff like that. When a guy who's capable of this and so much more worries out loud that Barack Obama is a tyrant because maybe he made a mental note of a member of his party letting him down on a key vote, you really have to ask yourself what's going on here. Clearly what isn't going on here is that Rove and the regressive right have any sort of genuine concern about fair play and benighted sweetness and light in the practice of politics. Just as clearly, what is going on is that a political ideology that has exhausted its viability has now turned to wholesale fabrication in a desperate attempt to make the old voodoo work again.

Yep, it's ugly out there, people. But there is good news in the land, nevertheless. First, what seemed false and idiotic and pernicious only to progressives five years ago now thankfully seems false and idiotic and pernicious to most Americans today. And it is therefore well that the practitioners of these gutter politics continue their practice. Indeed, the more their desperation compels them in frequency and in absurdity, the better our hopes of transcending the threat of regressive politics forever. Clearly, and finally, as Bush and Rove themselves demonstrate, they are their own worst enemies.

Second, like any good regressive should be expected to do, they have now pulled out their forks and knives and are busy eating their young. The regressive movement and its chief political agent, the Republican Party, have never been busier attacking each other and slashing each other to bits. Just last weekend the Virginia GOP had a civil war over what to do with their state chairman, truly a junior version of Michael Steele, and every bit as buffoonish. He's now gone, and it probably won't be long before Steele is gone as well, as Republicans seek to join the Know Nothings in the ash bin of history. Yes, as a matter of fact, it is Rush's party now. I, for one, couldn't be happier.

Finally, the public increasingly just has no use for these sick puppies. Go figure, eh? A lunatic in Pittsburgh killed three cops with his AK-47 the other day, because he believed that President Obama was going to take away his guns. Hard to figure why some folks might decide not to watch Glenn Beck henceforth.

A New York Times poll released this week shows that only 27 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party. Fifty-six percent have a favorable opinion of the Democrats, and, hey, those guys are weenies! When asked which party is more concerned with the needs of people like themselves, Americans picked the Democrats over the Republicans, fifty-seven percent to twenty-two percent. They trust Obama to make the right decisions about the economy, sixty-three percent to twenty percent for the Republicans. And, remarkably, they trust Obama over the Republicans even on national security issues, sixty-one to twenty-seven percent. Can you say "finished"? When the GOP is getting clobbered more than two-to-one even on their stock-in-trade scary-movie security issues, the show's over, folks.

That doesn't mean we won't continue to see outrageous fabrications of the sort chronicled above, as the regressive movement writhes through its painful and self-inflicted death throes.

It just means that such a display will lean rather more towards the comical than - as in recent years - the catastrophic.

_______



About author David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles ( David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles ( dmg@regressiveantidote.net ), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net