Good demagoguery gone bad

There was an encouraging sign yesterday that John McCain's creeping senility can in fact bob and weave, as demonstrated in his shockingly lucid criticism of his House counterparts' refusal to extend the payroll tax cut:

It is harming the view, if it’s possible anymore, of the American people about Congress.

Sadly, however, John's sudden improvement seems to have come at the cost of Eric Cantor's acute slippage:

[T]he people of this country are beginning to wonder about the body on the other side of this Capitol and are wondering what the leader over there has against the middle class of this country.

Now, now, Eric, you know better. You know that populist, insurrectionist rumblings are rarely if ever ignited over what half of one-third of a government is doing at the tyrannical behest of its bourgeoisie-despising majority leader; assuming, even, that you, Eric, could make such a preposterous rap stick.  

American demagoguery is a delicate thing. It is not, as many republican adepts believe, always cruelly unrighteous, for it can be adorably wicked, as it was, say, in the playful hands of Boston's James Michael Curley; and it is not always ill advised, as Huey Long's material improvements of his swampland of a state proved; nor is it always rhetorically smooth, as the often drunken incoherence of Joe McCarthy revealed. But it does require at least some subatomic smidgeon of truth, reality, and above all believability -- and here, on all three indictable counts, Eric Cantor has pitiably transgressed. Harry Reid has it in for the American middle class?

One could conjure more threaded evidence for the old lunatic bugaboos that Gen. George C. Marshall was a Stalinist sympathizer and President Eisenhower a fellow traveller, as the John Birchers raved, than for Cantor's peculiar desperation that Harry Reid is plotting against our vast and sainted Babbittry.

In short, Mr. Cantor has heaved the envelope of sniveling, rabble-rousing Crazy to unacceptably unbelievable extremes. He has left even the abstract and post-expressionist artists of American demagoguery behind, thereby endangering its immediate future. And woe to him who knows not his limits, or the limits of his craft.

Comments

[Robert Lipscomb]

Some Christmas cheer.

http://www.paddypower.com/bet/novelty-betting/other-politics/us-politics

I dare say that five percentage points of Obama's disapproval is based on the erroneous assumption by much of the electorate that a US President has the constitutional (magical?) authority to somehow "make congress act right". In other words, I think that they think he has "failed" to save us from these yahoos.

[Peter G]

As puerile and mediocre as Cantor is, the nonsense he spouts is not intended to persuade his choir to sing a tune but in chorus with it. They actually believe that crap.

[majii]

Quite the reaction from Lil' Eric Cantor. Methinks it's because Senator Reid was able to do what he and Boehner couldn't do: craft a bill to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits and pass it with bipartisan support.

[SueMe]

What a prick!! Does even he believe this shit? Well, the 30 percenters do. They, the great uniformed will believe whatever...at 72 years of age, I think I've lived too long

[web design london]

Disapproval is based on the erroneous assumption by much of the electorate that a US President has the constitutional authority to somehow.