Condemned to Repeat the Past

Here's a bit from Maureen Dowd's latest NY Times op-ed. She is on the warpath over the inability of Americans to remember their recent past:

As Barack Obama struggles to rekindle the magic, one of the most pathetic headlines was the one on a CNN poll last week: “Was Bush Better President Than Obama?”

“Americans are divided over whether President Barack Obama or his predecessor has performed better in the White House,” the CNN article said.

So now the Republican president who bungled wars and the economy and the Democratic president trying to dig us out are in a dead heat?

America’s long-term economic woe has led to short-term memory loss. Republicans are still popular, and the candidates are crazier than ever. And crazy is paying dividends: Sharron Angle, the extreme Republican candidate for the Senate in Nevada, vacuumed up $14 million in the last quarter in her crusade to knock out Harry Reid — the kind of money that presidential candidates dream of collecting.

Karl Rove has put together a potent operation to use anonymous donors to flood the airwaves with attack ads against Democrats. And a gaunt-looking Dick Cheney is out of the hospital and back to raking in money defending torture and pre-emptive war. He, Lynne Cheney, Rove, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Laura Bush drew more than 10,000 people at $495 a pop to a conference in Bakersfield, Calif., last weekend.

Republicans are also gearing up to start re-sliming Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson when “Fair Game,” the movie based on their memoirs, opens next month. Robert Luskin, a lawyer for Rove who considered Plame collateral damage and labeled her “fair game,” dismissively told Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The Times that the Wilsons are “a little past their ‘sell-by’ date.”

The rest of this article focuses on the soon-to-be-released movie Fair Game that covers the sleazy illegal "outing" of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, as petty vindictiveness by Bush, Cheney, and the other criminals in the White House. And, remember, only a low level underling, Scooter Libby ever paid any price for this crime of treason in high places by thugs -- big shot "Republicans" -- who thump their chest about patriotism and duty to God and country. Scooter Libby went through the charade of a trial and then "pardon" by the real criminals, Bush and Cheney.

You want to talk about criminals and treason and rot inside the system, then look at the Republican party that has fostered these sleazeballs year after year, decade after decade:

• Joe "slime everybody as a commie" McCarthy


• Richard "I am not a criminal" Nixon


• Ronald "sell arms to your enemy so you can illegally field death squads in Central America" Reagan


• George "wars of choice, spend to create deficits, and deregulate, deregulate until you create a Great Recession" Bush