Hot breath of doom

America is choosing to slurp up plutocratic bullshit:

[H]ow do you revise the historical narrative when the evidence of what led to economic catastrophe is so overwhelming and the events at issue so recent? You and your political allies just do it. And you bet on the old axiom that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.

If you are Rep. Paul Ryan, you ignore the fact that our federal budget deficit has ballooned more than $1 trillion annually since the financial collapse. ... Instead of focusing on the real cause of the deficit, you conflate today’s budgetary disaster with the long-term challenges of Medicare so you can shred the social safety net.

If you are Alan Greenspan, you retreat from your 2008 epiphany in which you acknowledged your “state of shocked disbelief” that “the whole intellectual edifice” of your deregulatory ideology had collapsed. ... [A]fter driving the economy over the cliff, you offer to give driving lessons.

If you are JP Morgan’s chief investment officer, you refute the statement that your chairman and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, made to the FCIC in 2010 blaming the failures of major financial institutions on “the management teams 100 percent and . . . no one else.” ...

If you are most congressional Republicans, you turn a blind eye to the sad history of widespread lending abuses... You refuse to acknowledge what went wrong and then try to stop efforts to make it right.

Societies that fail to learn true and hard lessons from events, fail. Failure is the path that our richers and betters have chosen for us. They have propagandized vast portions of the population into believing that liberals are blame, when we are the exact people who have been most right about how to structure an economy to nurture the middle class and grow the fastest. Instead, like the Russians before us, we are destined for oligarchy, authoritarianism, and the end of the American dream.

I think we're past the tipping point. After the Bushists fucked up everything, and Democrats swept into office in droves, Karl Rove's thousand-year permanent majority for government by wealth is tantalizingly within reach for the forces of reaction. And all Democrats can do is dither and cave.

Republicans will buy the 2012 election, the Supreme Court has put it on the block. They will own all three branches of government. They will kill the filibuster, as we should have, and consolidate their already firm grip on the federal judiciary. They will sweep away the twentieth century to restore the Gilded Age, despite the repeated clear and dismal failures of their economic policies. But this century's Vanderbilts and Rockefellers will be ecstatic. That's what they're buying.