The Sunshine Empire

During the spring of last year leading into the summer, one of the more prevalent radical right talking points was to mock President Obama for his excessive news conferences and television interviews. Reading The Drudge Report for some bizarre reason today I found a headline that read, “Obama Hasn’t Held Press Conference Since July. . .” Seems the President just can’t find the even keel when it comes to pleasing wing-nuts. No matter what he does, Republicans reflexively move the opposite way, and seem to suffer political amnesia.

The political amnesia manifests itself in many ways. Take the issue of the Recovery Act or the stimulus as it’s often referred to as (my personal favorite wing-nut term was the porkulus). After initially characterizing the package that President Obama put forth as balanced due to it’s mix of middle class tax cuts and spending programs, Republicans considered the political calculus and then universally came out against it. Nearly every single Republican member of Congress voted against the Obama stimulus package and began to rail against it as it was implemented. Yet after some months a peculiar thing began to occur. Republican members of the House of Representatives began to distribute various grants and tout projects that were funded by the Recovery act as accomplishments of theirs. To turn a favorite Republican phrase from the 2004 presidential election, House Republicans were for the stimulus before they were against it before they were for it again. Even Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who had been a vocal critic of the plan, passed out giant golf tournament sized checks of stimulus funds at political events taking credit for the windfall.

The right also seems to be foggy on how much time you take to speak about an catastrophic event. After spending a week complaining that President Obama took too long at 3 days to speak about the same type of terror attack that Bush was fine waiting 6 days to talk about, Oxycontin addict Rush Limbaugh then turns around and calls it crass to take less than a day to discuss the tragedy in Haiti. Too long, too soon, you never seem to get it right with these people. Not to mention how the right now forgets Darth Cheney’s insistence that Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. They only seem to not matter for Republican administrations and not Democratic ones. The radical right has the intellectual consistency of warm Jello.

Much like their hero Ronald Reagan, the radical right seems not to recall what they were for just one year, or even six months ago. Willful political amnesia is the name of the game when you are out to take down the President no matter what the cost to the country. Because you are not to criticize the commander-in-chief during a time of war, well that is unless he’s a Democrat. Then it’s apparently cool.