Article first published as Michele Bachmann’s State of the Union Tea Party Commercial on Technorati.

TeaPartyHD, the television and Internet network responsible for the unseen camera and teleprompter that Michele Bachmann looked toward while delivering her rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address, finally posted their video of the congresswoman’s speech on Friday. And yes, she’s looking squarely at the camera.

So now, with a little luck, this will be the end of media coverage of the strange off-angle shot aired on CNN. In the big picture, who really cares what camera Michele Bachmann was looking at? The gaff made the speech a bit odd to watch, but it really could have happened to anyone. This aspect of the Bachmann story has been given far too much attention — so much that nobody’s talking about the insaniTea of her message.

First off, to call Bachmann’s speech a “response” or “rebuttal” to the State of the Union is to completely ignore everything she said. She didn’t deliver a response; it was nothing more than a rerun of the same fact-free Tea Party commercial we’ve all seen over and again, ad nauseam. It is on this inane content where criticism for the Bachmann slideshow should be focused.

Bachmann wants Americans to blame President Obama for unemployment, so she shows a nice red and blue chart depicting unemployment rates by year. According to Bachmann, the spike in 2009 is Obama’s fault. Of course, she failed to mention that we were hemorrhaging jobs at a rate of 600,000 per month when he took office, and that the economy was in a freefall stemming from the Bush orchestrated bank collapse, but what the heck . . . it’s all fair in politics.

The congresswoman then hit the tried-and-true “attack the Stimulus” chord. The “failed stimulus,” as she referred to it, gave America nothing more than “a bureaucracy that now tells us what light bulbs to buy.” This is a great tactic: just make up your own story, completely devoid of truth, throw in some exaggeration (the trillion dollar stimulus), play upon people’s emotions, ignore the facts, arrive at a hyperbolic conclusion, and BAM — the falsehood lives on. Keep repeating it, and you will gain believers.

This works well so long as the audience just buys the bullshit without checking any facts. But if people have even the slightest inclination to think for themselves, to actually understand the situation, the bald-faced nature of Bachmann’s nonsense shines through. It’s just too bad that so many people don’t care that the Stimulus actually staved off total collapse of the economy — that it added as much as 4.5% to the GDP, saved or created as many as 3.3 million jobs, kept unemployment from climbing to 11.5% or higher, and gave tax cuts to 94% of Americans. If they took the time to know the facts, they’d understand that the biggest problem with the Stimulus was that it was too small.

But the truth doesn’t always play well for the political goals of the speaker, so politicians and pundits are often forced to turn to propaganda — fact selection that results in lying by omission. According to Ms. Bachmann, while there had been “unacceptably high” deficits under the Bush administration, these “exploded” under Obama. She illustrates with a graph showing huge blue bars that tower above the short red Bush deficits, and she assigns all blame for the spending increases on President Obama.

Bachmann’s graph appears to be accurate, but like an iceberg, what’s seen on the surface doesn’t accurately reflect all that’s hiding below. And since the congresswoman doesn’t really want people to recall that her tallest blue bar, the one for 2009, actually reflects President Bush’s budget through October, or that it included much of the $700 billion “bailout” that was passed under Bush, she conveniently leaves these details out. And so what if she failed to mention that those little red bars didn’t include the spending for the two deficit-expanding wars that President Bush chose to keep off the budget. If President Obama didn’t want the billions in war expense reflected in his budget, he should have kept the costs hidden.

But as disingenuous as is Bachmann’s Tea Party spin on jobs and the deficit, there’s really nothing more egregious than the distorted fantasy of fear mongered hype she spewed regarding healthcare reform. In Bachmann’s words, “Unless we fully repeal Obamacare, a nation that currently enjoys the world’s finest healthcare might be forced to rely on government-run coverage that could have a devastating impact on our national debt for even generations to come.” What a crock!

Between Tea Party and more mainstream Republicans, there is no piece of legislation more illegitimately maligned than the Healthcare Reform. Their fallacy starts with erroneous claims about the quality of the American healthcare system, one that consistently produces outcomes inferior to other developed nations, and it always extends to outright lies about the nature of the legislation that was passed.

The truth of the matter is that “Obamacare” is not “government-run.” It’s actually an extension of the public/private system currently dominant in the U.S.. And as far as costs go, it’s designed to reduce them. In fact, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it will reduce the deficit by $230 billion. And although that doesn’t solve the problem, at least it’s a step in reducing the costs of a system that now outspends the average of the developed world by more than two to one.

Bachmann is right about one thing regarding healthcare, it will bankrupt the country if allowed to continue on its present course. But the issues driving that dynamic are actually made better under “Obamacare,” although not to the extent needed — that would have required the “public option,” but the Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats made sure that didn’t happen. There was no way they were going to do anything to cut into the record profits of the medical insurers and Big Pharma.

Our nation faces serious problems, and President Obama’s State of the Union was light on specifics regarding how he will address them. But unless the American people want more poverty, more debt, more concentration of wealth, fewer jobs, lower wages, and a healthcare system that puts the insurers above the patients, they will do with Michele Bachmann’s “response” what they do with all fecal matter — flush it and forget about it.

Article first published as A.D.D. America on Technorati.

How short is the memory of the American People? How ephemeral is their focus and attention?

Do you remember where you were when Kennedy was shot? How about when the Iran hostage crisis occurred? The opening of the Berlin Wall? If you’re of voting age, there’s no doubt you remember the events of September 11, 2001.

It’s equally certain that you remember the bank collapse of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. Americans seem to have vault-safe memory of those events that are etched into our collective consciousness, but somehow when it comes to remembering the facts leading up to those events, that steel vault is all too often turned into a plastic sieve.

The 2010 midterm election will happen tomorrow, and virtually all polls indicate that the American people will return control of at least one chamber of the Congress to the Republican Party. Much of this is anti-incumbent hostility stemming from a bad economy, but that’s certainly not the whole story. The most recent Gallup poll on the question of whether voters believe the country would be better off with Democratic or Republican control of the Congress shows a clear plurality, 45% compared to 23%, backing the Republicans.

Those people who dig beneath the hyperbole and spin, those who actually check facts are likely to shake their heads in bewildered disbelief at the writing now on the wall. They may still be in denial, as so many in Washington still appear to be, or they may have resigned themselves to the expected outcome of the election. But regardless of their reaction, knowledgeable voters must all be stupefied at the amazing capacity of the American people to be manipulated and used by those willing to play on their fears and ignorance.

President Obama is fond of using the “drove the economy into a ditch” metaphor to describe the Republican-created mess that he inherited. He asserts that they “can’t have the keys back, because [they] don’t know how to drive.” The Republicans naturally respond that the President needs to stand on his record and stop trying to blame his predecessor.

Well, there is a problem with President Obama’s metaphor, and there’s also a practical sensibility to the Republican response. The President is patently wrong about the Republicans driving us into a ditch — it was a freaking canyon — it was the economic Mariana Trench. And it makes perfect sense that those responsible for the collapse, the feed-the-rich Republicans would be vehemently opposed to assigning any blame where it was due.

The truth of the matter is that the American public has been ripped off by the nation’s corporate elite and had their return to prosperity held hostage by the corporate lackeys commonly known as the Republican Party. And now, in order to punish the innocent and avoid holding accountable the thieves who helped pillage the wealth of the American middle-class, the electorate is going to put the greed-drunk drivers back behind the wheel.

Hurray for the American way!

If only the American people would recall the events that brought us to this point. If only they remembered that George Bush inherited a $236 billion budget surplus that he turned into the $1.2 trillion deficit he passed to President Obama. If only the sting of the 3 million jobs that were lost in President Bush’s last year in office was still clear in their minds, or if they were still mindful that the economy was hemorrhaging nearly 600 thousand jobs per month when Obama took office.

Would we be in the same situation for election 2010 if American voters would call to mind the fact that 65% of the Bush tax cuts went to the top quintile and 50% if his 2001 cuts went to the top 1%. What if they remembered that the price tag for the cuts to the top 1% in 2008 alone was $79.5 billion? How about if the average American even understood that 37% of the much maligned Stimulus, $288 billion, was in the form of tax cuts that went to 94% of the working families in America?

Would it make any difference if the people were aware that, as bleak as things have been, more private sector jobs have been created in 2010 than under the entire 8-year term of George Bush? How about if they grasped the fact that the Republican policies that wrote the economic book for the past decade and tested the effectiveness of growing the economy and creating jobs by cutting taxes, has been proven to be an abysmal failure? If they knew that the first decade of this century produced ZERO net job growth, while no other decade going back to the 1940s produced less than 20%

Americans should be casting their votes with full awareness that Bush and his Republican colleagues had the worst job creation record since 1945, established the policies that gave America its first decline of median household income since 1967, while simultaneously giving the top 1% it’s highest share of after-tax income since 1979, and concentrating more wealth in the top 1% than in the bottom 90% combined.

But the truth of the matter is that, while Republican policies have nearly destroyed America for all but the very rich, a manipulated electorate has allowed itself to fall prey to the incessant Republican barrage of distorted facts and fear mongering. The American people are suffering from severe Attention Deficit Disorder and have sadly forgotten who was driving when our economy went off the cliff.

President Obama has certainly made some mistakes since he took office. In retrospect, the biggest amongst them was probably to underestimate the gullibility of the American people — perhaps he should have played the Republican game of politics over people — he could have omitted the Stimulus and allowed the Great Recession to take its full toll.

But that’s not what real leaders do. No, they set about the hard work of recovery, and when you’re in an 8 million job hole, that takes some time. It’s too bad the American people can’t stay focused long enough to ensure it happens.

Article first published as I Think I’ll Vote Republican — NOT! on Technorati.

On this, the eve of Glen Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, I think it a good time to reflect on what it means to be a conservative in 21^st Century America. Beck has scheduled his rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “March on Washington.” According to Beck, the purpose of the rally is to celebrate “upstanding citizens who embody our nation’s founding principles of integrity, truth and honor.” Such patriotism, such vision, a staunch supporter of the Republican Party, Beck is at the core of contemporary conservatism.

So, what is it that defines today’s conservative? What is the Republican plan for the future of America?

John Boehner shared the Republican vision for America earlier this week. And fortunately for conservative voters, the Republican platform is far more simple than that of their Democratic counterparts. Republicans don’t spend all that wasted time worrying about equity and ethics and all that stupid liberal stuff. Heck, when your objective is limited to maximizing the profits of big-business and minimizing the tax burden of the top 2%, all that fairness stuff just gets in the way.

Oddly enough, the new Republican Party looks an awful lot like the party of George Bush. So drastic is the likeness, that topping their list of priorities is the extension of the Bush tax cuts — for even the very rich, permanently. They even espouse the same disproven Bush tenet that tax cuts pay for themselves. So, although economists contend that the $678 billion price tag to extend the cuts for the top 2% will directly impact the deficit for which the Republicans feign concern — not to worry — we just need to cut spending.

Ah, but where to cut? Not defense! Oh no, the Military Industrial Complex is the heart and soul of conservative America — not to disparage the fossil fuel industry or the gun lobby. But, with defense costing over $1 trillion and representing more than 25% of the budget, where better to slice? Wait a minute . . . what would George Bush do? That’s it — Social Security can be privatized! Never mind that it’s solvent through 2037 and that with minor tweaking it can provide a vital safety net well into the next century; it’s a huge pool of money just begging to be exploited.

But, what about jobs? The problem is that Americans still expect far too much in compensation for their labor. But is it government’s responsibility to get people back to work? Unemployment is actually a good thing, for business, so long as you don’t have to pay benefits. There are really few things better for corporate profits than an abundant supply of labor so desperate for work that pay-scale and fringes no longer matter. So, the solution is self-evident: oppose any government funding of benefits, rail against government investment in infrastructure or energy or anything else that might tip the balance of economic power, and for God’s sake make sure nothing stops the flow of jobs overseas.

So, less taxes, fewer entitlements, an eager workforce, it’s music to the ears of contemporary conservatism. And the final ingredient to restore the Bush recipe for a prosperous upper crust — more deregulation. Just keep those oil wells pumping, those insiders trading, that gas flowing, and blessed will be the fruit of the offshoring multinational. The heck with the environment. What’s a little oil spill here and a little flaming water there? Businesses have to compete on a global scale, and worrying about the environment just isn’t good for profits. Besides, if you’re already exploiting the people, who gives a care about the planet?

Does any of this sound at all familiar? It should, because it’s Bushonomics 101. Today’s Republican Party promises a full return to the very practices that produced the most meager job growth since the 1940s, resulted in the first decline in median household income of any cycle since 1967, set modern records for the concentration of wealth at the very top, crashed the economy, brought us the Massey mine disaster, filled the Gulf with oil, and divided our nation.

The only real difference between the Bush Republicans and the Boehner, McConnell, Palin, Beck contingent is that where the Bushies confined their fear mongering to terrorists and certain foreign enemies, the 2010 Republicans have turned their sites inward. American citizen or not, if you’re Islamic or Mexican, Black, gay or liberal — you are an “Other,” and that makes you the problem . . . or rather the solution, because wealthy or not, the Republicans still need votes, and with a platform that only benefits 2% of the population, distraction is everything.