The Sunshine Empire

Vice President Joe Biden, during a Democratic presidential debate said of the former mayor of New York City, “Rudy Giuliani… I mean, think about it! Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There’s nothing else! There’s nothing else!” But Mayor 9/11 himself seems to have forgotten the defining moment of his political career. Much has been said of Rudy Giuliani’s claim that there was no domestic terrorist attack against the United States during George W. Bush’s administration, and Jake Tapper of ABC News has a devastating take down of his comment and equivocation on it. Yet it’s telling of the overall operative ethic of the modern Republican party. Faced with staggering losses in the last two election cycles, and the country turning away from their ideals, they’ve just decided to say the opposite of reality and see if about 30% to 40% of the public buy it. With that I guess they feel they can build a coalition.

When it comes to the major issues of the day, the Republican party has decided to lock in talking points and go with them, facts be damned. Faced with polling that showed a majority of Americans were in favor of a public option if current insurance plans were unaffected, Republicans began with the mantra of “government takeover of health care.” The point is more nuanced than that, and the facts would show no nationalization of the health care industry was even close to purposed, yet Republicans kept repeating that the bill was a “government takeover of health care.” Even with the public option dead and Medicare expansion off the table they still repeat the same tired mantra.

Showing that there is no subject that Republicans will not try to exploit for political gain, suddenly the rules that applied to Bush are out the window with Obama. Former Bush administration officials come out and decry President Obama waiting three days to address the underwear bomber, when they themselves waited twice that amount of time to discuss the exact same type of attack from Richard Reid in 2001. By the way Rudy, that was after 9/11. Rudy Giuliani and Karl Rove are either grossly ignorant of basic facts or they are lying. The cognitive dissonance needed to live in such a convoluted mental construct is staggering. The radical right has no trouble imagining a world where George W. Bush’s presidency began on September 12th 2001 and Barack Obama’s began on September 12th 2008. Meanwhile Fox News watchers easily put the historical past into their mental memory holes.