The past decade and the delusion of how conservatives skewed reality all summarized in one paragraph.

Here’s the central aspect of the Rmoney Presidential Campaign: he and his rich cronies need the American people, engaging our vaunted short-term memory, to forget all about the global depredation and financial collapse of the Bush Years. Mitt’s rebranded the GOP to be all about a Businessman President, who’s Compassionate Yet Principled, who will deregulate America to get bureaucrats out of the way of entrepreneurs and Big Bidness. Also: taxcuts!

Wait, how is this different from W?

It’s July 1, 2012. We’re rapidly approaching the fourth anniversary of the murder of the American middle class, the Dark Times when our corporate-controlled government, draped in the disguise of democracy, announced in (allegedly) Willie Sutton fashion, that the only way to save the country from financial ruin was to transfer all of our life savings into the offshore bank accounts of the 1%-ers like Jamie “Diamonds” Dimon, Lloyd “Blank Check” Blankfein, Vikram “the Bandit” Pandit, and Ken “Platinum Parachute” Lewis. Distracted by the presidential election circus of 2008, the American citizenry sat passively by as BushCo, having already looted the U.S. Treasury to pay for the administration’s Iraq Follies, decided now that they had gotten theirs, it was the banksters’ turn. The country was forced to watch, locked out of their bank-foreclosed homes as the government rehabilitated these murderers, this time by robbing from the private sector.

Two months later, Barack Obama, the one-term Senator from Illinois whose rhetoric soared (but whose resume was a bit thin on the ground), won the Presidency, beating out the cranky old man who shook his fist at the clouds. Hope and change were in the air.

By any objective measure, Republican dominance in either state or local government ends in failure. Deficits, cronyism, declining services and economic malaise are always the result, conveniently leaving in their wake increased public cynicism about the value of government at all. But that leaves out the curious paradox that it precisely when government is so thoroughly trashed, rich people are more eager than ever to buy it. Why? For the same reason they love to buy “troubled” companies and fixer-uppers; somewhere, someone has left money on the table, and they’ve got to get their paws on it.

Just what the world has been demanding.

I guess there’s a difference between being nervous and being stunned like a trout

Another stirring non-victory by the anti-heroes of the Bush foreign policy team.

Things were going along pretty well for the Bush Administration Apologists Alumni Association. Sure, they were out of their old offices, but things were good. Obama adopted their wars as his own, the economy has sputtered along long enough to have become (in the public’s mind) at least as much Obama’s fault as theirs (thus the cries of “deficits! deficits! deficits!” from those who launched us into two wars), and most of the BAAAA have landed in cushy lucrative new digs.

Then Obama had to ruin it by getting bin Laden. Suddenly, all the old discussions are back — at least as far as torture goes — and this has at least some of them very worried, like Michael Mukasey.

He should worry. A lot.

It was only a matter of time before people who weren’t paying attention figured out that the Teabaggers were just repackaged Bush/Cheney Republicans, and that time has come.

Seems like only yesterday when Condi was playing footsie with Moammar in Tripoli, while Faux News covered her visit triumphantly.