For all their other faults, Republicans’ worst mistake often tends to be their timing. Bushes pere et fil started their wars too early for their electoral purposes, but since the winner lost and the loser won, the wrong lessons were learned. Who can forget Bush crowing about the “capital” he had earned by stealing Ohio in his second shady “election” that he would “spend” by handing Social Security over to Wall Street, and how that lamebrained righty pipe dream helped drive the Republicans to crushing defeats in 2006 and 2008? As it turns out, luckily, almost everybody.
After the massive bust of 2008-2009, would you imagine that this bunch is back to the idea of handing retirement security for millions of FOX watchers over to the stock market, still? Of course not. But almost unbelievably, a shabby and discredited fraud crafted a dozen years ago when the stock market and financial system were conveniently booming is being dragged out of the righty attic today as though the last two years never happened. They think people are so stupid that they won’t notice Wall Street’s recent unpleasantness, and would prefer “free market” discipline to a regular check in the mail in their old age. What’s the average age of the typical FOX viewer, again?
But the best example of bad timing is how the controlling minority of Republicans have dredged up ten year old whines about nasty (and not incidentally, Democrat-supporting) “trial lawyers,” historically ordinary Americans’ only club to battle overbearing corporations that maim, poison, fleece, and kill them just when corporations have been doing so so regularly and ostentatiously. A power plant in Connecticut just exploded, killing several and maiming many more, a major international automobile company just recalled the vast majority of its vehicles for gross safety flaws that have killed motorists, and a longtime US House representative was sent to the grave by sloppy surgeons who severed his intestine while working on his gall bladder, and the Republicans want to REDUCE the damages these murderous scofflaws pay. Do these guy read even less newspapers than Sarah Palin? You have to wonder.
Further, Republicans are openly basking in the glory of their carefully crafted Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Citizens (!) United, that helped cement in law the crony capitalism that has left so many people unemployed and disenfranchised, as a good thing, even as the health care companies they so unfailingly support proudly and publicly raise rates almost 40% in California. Couldn’t they have gotten them to wait? The pure delusion and squandering of political opportunity almost rivals something the Democrats might try, and that’s the Republicans’ eternal ace in the hole.
Today President Obama went on TV and defended Chase Bank CEO Jamie Dimond’s 17 million bonus, which was apparently set as a percentage of what he was able to finagle out of the taxpayers to save his (no longer) dying company. Talent, and all that. Rich Lowry proclaimed that the teabaggers had set aside their populistic communism in favor of good old Republican “ideas” of 2002, read so beautifully off Sarah Palin’s hand, and naturally the WaPoo and the NYT ran around “debunking” global warming and Republican (loser) intransigence as unfortunate but temporary products of liberal excess. Maybe Republican’s timing isn’t so off after all. For them, losing is the next best thing to winning.
