Las Vegas Gleaner

Extraordinary teabagger delusions and the madness of crowds

About the infamous sign photographed (click the pic to big up) during the latest organized teabagger tantrum (via Think Progress)...

You can't argue with a sick mind, let alone the rampant sickness of thousands of minds feeding on each other's myths and delusions in a horrible circus of ignorance, fear and hate.

That is, there is no reasoning with these people. By now their inability to acknowledge, let alone consider, facts and stuff is, or should be, a given.

And yet I'll confess that I still experience just a vestige of surprise, or perhaps wonder, that the angry right is going full-on unhinged bonkers over what are essentially piecemeal, moderate proposals to change the nation's health care system. Even if reform was implemented in the most aggressive manner currently on the table in Washington, the impact of the legislation would go largely if not wholly unnoticed by many and probably most Americans, and the the United States would still have the most profit-driven health care system in the developed world.

Maybe the Democrats should just say to hell with it, quit screwing around and extend Medicare to the whole damned population. What's the right going to do? Accuse Obama and the Democrats of being socialists and Nazis hell-bent on a government takeover of health care?

There's a rule that says this video must be posted on every site on the internets

And it's a good rule.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The 11/3 Project
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

True fact: While with Public Citizen back in the day, your Gleaner used to hang and work in cahoots with Glenn Beck obsession Wade Rathke of the SEIU/ACORNS!!!! We deliberately went out of our way to stop a corporation merely because it wanted to charge low-income black people lots and lots of money for, you know, water.

Ha. Just goes to show the insidious radical conspiracy to ruin all your freedoms and turn everyone into gay Muslim atheist commies is so much more far-reaching and entrenched than even Beck suspects.

Looking for conventional wisdom that's overstated, simplistic and more trouble than it's worth?

   Relax. You're soaking in it.

This is going to be a big disappointment for Sarah Palin

Sue Lowden, who thinks she's senatorial material, went on the Nevada Newsmakers teevee program up yonder this week to deny that she laughed at the idea of Harry Reid's station wagon getting blown up. But that's not what this is about.

"Sue," began the amiable Ray Hagar of the Reno paper, amiably...

"you mentioned that you were the chair of the Nevada State Republican Party. But when you were the chair [Hagar's eyes roll here] I mean, the party almost had a civil war, it imploded. I mean, the Democrats, their registration in the state, they're --  they have a hundred thousand more registered voters, when you were at -- on your watch. So how does that help you get elected?"

The relatively high and frankly quite understandable sputter quotient of the delivery notwithstanding, good question!

And Lowden -- did I mention she thinks she's senatorial material? -- had her answer at the ready!

"Well, let's see what happens a year from now. Let's see what the registration numbers are. And let's face it, it was an Obama sweep, not just in Nevada but even in the very red state of Alaska. You know, we ended up with a, you know, an Obama win in Alaska. So from Florida to Alaska it was an Obama sweep."

Whoa, when you put it that way. After all, a whole year later, it's still shocking to hear that Obama carried Alaska.

But that's probably because McCain beat Obama in Alaska by 21 points, 59 to 38.

Hey, understandable mistake. It wasn't like the second biggest and first freakiest political story of 2008 had any Alaska connection or anything. And really, who would expect a former state party chairwoman and a self-described "frontrunner" for a U.S. Senate seat to know something that would only be known by someone who might have a passing interest in politics.

Virginia, New Jersey vote to attack Iran

The voters of Virginia and New Jersey have elected Republican governors, thereby nullifying the results of last year's presidential election. Health care reform is dead, because if it ain't broke, don't fix it! Ditto for climate change legislation, because let's face it, the science just isn't in on that yet. The key economic policy question now facing lawmakers in Washington is not whether businesses and rich people should get a big tax cut, but if they should get a bigger tax cut. And of course in foreign affairs, throughout the remainder of his one and only failed term, the president must do whatever Dick Cheney says.

Or maybe that's reading too much into the breathless media accounts about the thundering significance of two off-year low-turnout state-level elections.

Your Gleaner is genuinely saddened (sniffle), however, at the defeat of that full-on teabagging nutjob in New York's 23rd congressional district. For one thing, the last thing we need is one more Democrat in Congress fearfully looking over his shoulder at his conservative constituents and voting accordingly, i.e., with the Blue Dogs, which seems the likely result in this instance. But far more importantly, hopes were so high that the little foot soldier in Glenn Beck's army of enraged paranoid mouthbreathers would eke out a victory and even further embolden the kooks and the flakes and the nuts from coast to coast and especially right here in Nevada.

Oh well. The takeaway: Chins up, fruitcakes. I'm talking to you Jim Gibbons, Sueny Talklowdian and the rest of you birther-sympathizing glassy-eyed Republicans who have demonstrated you are willing to do or say anything to appeal to angry white people who hold a misspelled sign in one fist while angrily shaking their other at the sky. Pay no heed to fanciful accounts of alleged Nevada Republican moderation -- that sort of talk is so 2002. Your strategy is still sound, and the only way to seal the deal in Nevada is to run, run, run to the right as fast as your wingnutted feet will carry you. You know it in your heart, and in your gut, and in your head. OK, maybe not your head. But never mind. Soar, little wingnuts, soar, on to glorious victory.

In the primary, anyway.

Gibbons reaches out to the Republican base

For all his dishonesty, untrustworthiness, cruelty, narcissism, stunted emotional development and psychological disorders, mentally unbalanced Gov. Jim Gibbons still knows a thing or two about politics.

When he goes on TV and, citing the police report, insists that the 1981 attempt to blow up Harry Reid's car consisted of a phone book in a shoe box, even though the police report makes absolutely no mention of either phone books or shoe boxes, Gibbons isn't making "a mistake," as his spokesman claims.

The nation's creepiest governor is making a calculated and intentional appeal to the angry, paranoid base of conservative voters whose support will be crucial to winning the 2010 Republican gubernatorial nomination.

People who see socialism, death panels and a president with a Kenyan birth certificate under their beds are obviously impervious to sense, much less truth. By virtue of being Senate majority leader, Harry Reid allows Nevada's insecure, ignorant and frightened right-wing white people to localize their rage and paranoia and direct it at one concentrated source. And for all the innumerable matters of policy, or even decency, that Gibbons is too deranged or obtuse to comprehend, he totally gets the teabaggers.

Take a dedicated disregard for facts and mix it with the belief that Harry Reid is the boogeyman, and Gibbons sees a recipe for exploiting the people on whom the continuation of his political career -- at least through the Republican primary -- will hinge: the unhinged.

In his TV interview, Gibbons was not just wrong. He was strongly wrong:

"Wait a minute. Wait a minute, Ray. If you read the report, and I hope you read the police report. Did you read it? Did you read it? ... It didn't say car bomb. It said it was a shoe box with a phone book in it."

(For the record, again, the police report describes "a wire leading from the distributor to the fuel tank" and makes no mention whatsoever of a shoe box or a phone book).

Did Gibbons himself read the report? Almost certainly, just to see if by some bizarre coincidence there actually was some truth to the lone shoe box theory that he has propagated at least twice now. But let's be clear -- Gibbons has no more concern for what the report says than he does for the veracity of the words that come out of his mouth. Other matters are far more important, as his spokesman, Dan Burns, confirmed. "The larger question is, there was no bomb in the car? And who said the mob did it?" Burns told the Sun, demonstrating that he values accuracy and honesty every bit as much as his boss.

A sensible person, i.e., one not willingly associated with Gibbons, might think that the "larger question" has something to do with why Gibbons is lying so blatantly, willingly, deliberately, repeatedly and remorselessly.

The answer's simple. The teabaggers see him swiftboating Harry Reid. That makes them hot. And Gibbons knows it.

And really, is either Mike Montandon or Brian Sandoval, both of whom also hope to appeal to the radical right in the course of seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination, going to call Gibbons out for lying about Harry Reid? Not likely, especially so long as Gibbons is viewed as a dead man walking, politically. Why bother?

But as the Sandoval and Montandon campaigns may have noticed, for now, Gibbons isn't running against them. He's running against the man the New Republican Party loves to hate. And he isn't the Batshit Crazy Shoeboxer King as a result of his idiocy, incompetence, laziness, sloppiness or dementia. He deliberately sought the crown.

Tricky little sociopath, ain't he?