Fooling the People

If, as Lincoln once observed, you cannot fool all the people all the time, but you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, then the Republicans and those who travel with them should be doing pretty well right now.

Rush Limbaugh has picked up the Republican twitter phrase "Obama is sabotaging the economy"  and Newt Gingrich has picked up the idea speaking of the Obama Depression.

As if...

As if President Obama, who arrived in office with the economy hemorrhaging to death on his doorstep, the economy given him by the Republican party (both Republican President and the very same members of Congress, Boehner, McConnell and all those who sailed with them) as if President Obama created the huge economic mess.

Oh, how lovely and malleable memory is, especially for Republicans: They forget how they themselves howled about REGULATION killing the economy, REGULATION and it's evil twin, TAXES (on the rich.)   And so they repealed all those regulations (the G/S Act) which Democrats had put into place to keep banks from behaving irresponsibly , dating back to the Great Depression of the 1930's and so those Republican bankers ran wild and made terrible loans because the baby sitter had been thrown out of the house. And we got credit default swaps and mortgage backed securities and a banking sector gone wild and a crash, and it's all Obama's fault.

And Gingrich will tick off the sad shape of the economy, all gloom and doom, one in seven Americans now on food stamps--where does he get those numbers?--one of every four American homes now worth less than its mortgage. All Obama's fault.

And those tornadoes? Obama's fault.

But Newt knows just how to fix it:  Kill the "Death Tax," the Republican name for a tax on estates worth millions, which rich people hate because it means their kids will inherit only 5 million dollars and will start life only at second base instead of third base.   And reduce  the corporate tax rate, which is to say, increase corporate welfare for the rich.

And look at Obama determined to "Erect barriers that prevent us from taking advantage of our vast American natural resources. In the process, the price of a gallon of gas has gone up by nearly two dollars since he took office."

Oh, yes, that's right. America has vast oil resources. We are a veritable Saudi Arabia. If only Obama would just tap those oil fields.  Of course, President Obama, being an accommodating fellow, made the mistake of listening to those loud mouthed Republicans and just as always seems to happen when he listens to them, he frees up drilling in the Gulf of Mexico just days before the BP rig blows up and nearly destroys the Gulf Coast economy and ecosystem.

Fooled some of the people (President Obama and his mineral resource people) some of the time, the Republicans did.

But how about the rest of us fools?
 Are we ready to listen to the Radical Republicans. The voice of resentment and idiocy?