Gloating With Your Thinking Cap On By: Mark W Adams

Sara Robinson has written an extraordinary analysis of contemporary political history that explains how we got to where we are by examining the denial and fundamental crack-up of the GOP.

We understand now that Bush seized office on the essential proposition that America must control the world's oil taps at all costs; and that military means are the only effective way to accomplish this. Every other policy, every statement, every priority of the country is subservient to this belief. Global warming is not an issue. Terrorism is not an issue. Alternative energy is not an issue. The economy is not an issue. The health, aspirations, and well-being of the American people is not an issue. The opinions of the rest of the world never entered into it at all. The Bush cartel's entire reason for being is to maintain a status quo that most of us knew was cracking dangerously under our feet. They are managers, put in place by enormously powerful people making one last-ditch attempt to prop up an oil- and consumer-based system even they knew was headed toward failure.

And that, at the root of it, is why the Bushies lie. People in denial always lie -- first to themselves, and then to everyone else. To concede even one error is to open the door to the awareness that everything they know is wrong, and everything they've done has only made things worse.

However, it's obvious now that denial itself compounds the problem by several orders of magnitude. Companies, communities, and countries that make the effort to spot trouble while it's still on the far horizon usually find they have time to think through their options, and make well-reasoned preparations for the transition. (Most of what we're facing now isn't news; almost all of it was well understood the day Clinton took office 15 years ago.) Those whose leaders choose to hunker down in denial, using distraction and distortion and scapegoating and whatever else they can think of on the fly, are doomed to face the full fury of the storm without plans or preparations of any kind. The longer they live in denial, the more catastrophic the actual change process will be when it does come. When Bush stole the election, he also stole from us eight critical years of prep time. The price we will almost surely pay for that loss may ultimately be beyond reckoning.

There's more that's well worth taking a look at which points us to the exact reason the eventual Democratic nominee will face the likes of Huck, Mitt or Rudy. Read it in the context of Marcy Wheeler's look at the New Hampshire quest for independent voters between Obama and McCain as the very legs (as Digby might put it) of the the GOP are cut out from under them.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving crew of miscreants. It's a shame we all have to pay the price of cleaning up their mess.

Meanwhile, anyone not laughing their ass off at Mitt Romney reinventing himself as the "candidate of change" either hasn't been paying attention or has no appreciation for irony. He is without a doubt the most transparently opportunistic, chameleon-like lizard of a candidate I have ever witnessed.