Shamelessly unaccountable drollness

No shame. No accountability. But one helluva sense of humor.

How else to describe Sen. John Cornyn's remark that for Democrats to remind voters that high unemployment and suffocating debt came courtesy of the George W. Bush administration shows only that "they are desperately trying to change the subject. People should scoff at it for the joke that it really is."

Or, there's Dana Perino, former press secretary for 43, who topped Sen. Cornyn in shamelessly unaccountable drollness with these lines: "I don't think a lot of people are sitting around thinking, 'Gee, what would George Bush be doing?' They don't care. They have a house they can't sell. They have a job they are worried about losing. All they hear is this whining and complaining and blaming."

Yes, their properties have tanked and their jobs are precarious -- have been since, oh, roughly the fall of 2008. Ring any bells, Dana? And yes, there's been whining and complaining and blaming; also attempts to reverse the damage done, although the folks who sponsored the destruction seem to believe that ruling majorities and the corrective mandates that come with them are but political playthings.

But above all, we have indeed heard blame. Ms. Perino is right about that. To my mind, however, we've heard not nearly enough.

Adjusting for that insufficiency is now the official Democratic strategy, as the Washington Post reported Friday afternoon. Republicans -- see for example Cornyn, Perino & Co. -- have and will continue to respond with cutesy spin, infantile ridicule, and absolutely no mention of their party's responsibility for all the destruction wrought.

It's what they do. They've become the party of the Limbaugh putdown, the Beck sneer, the Palin sarcasm -- and within that faux populist mix there's not a dram of fresh or serious thinking; and it is that insufficiency which has re-earned them the 1950's Hofstadterian epithet of "pseudoconservatives."

Genuine conservatives would have restrained, as best they could, Democratic proposals to cure what ails us, for genuine conservatives are of course genuinely wary of too much change, too fast. But they would not have made a political game of uniform obstructionism; they would not have toyed with, of all things, unemployment benefits; and they most decidedly would not be advocating trillions in extended tax cuts while in the grips of such looming debt.

Out there, somewhere, are millions of rank-and-file, and genuine, conservatives. Democrats, while reminding all voters of the lingering curse of Bushism, might also want to remind those conservatives, specifically and emphatically, that the GOP, tragically disfigured in all but name, has replaced conservative principles with pseudoconservative infantilism.

Comments

[David Thompson]

"hey've become the party of the Limbaugh putdown, the Beck sneer, the Palin sarcasm -- and within that faux populist mix there's not a dram of fresh or serious thinking"

You forgot science hating and Young Earth Creationist supporting.