….the hubris of some people is breathtaking.

Take, for instance, Mark Levin, wingnut columnist for the crackpot neo-fascist National Review Online, attempting to praise those House Republicans who voted to kill the bailout bill (quoted by Glenn Greenwald at Salon):

[...] The liberal uses crises, real or manufactured, to expand the power of government at the expense of the individual and private property. He has spent, in earnest, 70 years evading the Constitution’s limits on governmental power. If conservatives don’t stand up to this, who will? If they don’t offer serious alternatives that address the current circumstances AND defend the founding principles, who will?

Oh, really???  Would that also include that great liberal George Walker Bush, who personally contributed to “small government conservative” values through his opposition to the PATRIOT Act, his gutting of FISA to allow telecoms immunity from prosecution for tapping Americans’ phones, or his strong fiscal conservatism that actually increased both the size of government and the debt simultaneously??? Oh, wait…Levin was a booster of Bush and his wars from the very beginning??

And what about those 95 Democrats who voted against the bailout, Mr. Levin??  I guess that they don’t count because they aren’t your kind of principled “conservatives”…right??

And…70 years???  Wouldn’t that include, like, the Cold War years, the Nixon years, the Reagan years??  The wars in Vietnam, Central America, Grenada, Iraq, Iran?? Which conservatives would that be, Mr. Levin….Joe McCarthy??  Theodore Bilbo?  George Wallace?? Ike Eisenhower?? (Wait, he was no conservative…he integrated the South and pulled troops out of Korea….not very “conservative” of him.)

BTW…his alternative to the “bailout” would basically be to eliminate the corporate income and capital gains taxes and make the Bush tax cuts permanent…and to allow the “free market” to work it’s healing magic in weeding out the crooks.  Never mind that it was such “free market” magic that allowed the likes of Phil Gramm to create the sub-prime mess to begin with….or that he would have basically the same crooks who manipulated the government to get rich off such Ponzi schemes to rule over and get mightily rich on the healing process….while average Americans are left to fend for themselves.  But, hey, it’s all the Black Caucus and ACORN’s  and “the liberal’s” fault, anyway, since they forced the bankers against their own will to make tons of money off these junk loans.  Really, we’re just innocent folk….Saddam made us do it!!!

And apparently, the lunacy vine is spreading rapidly across Wingnutteria: here’s Jabba the Fat-Ass Oxycontin Addict (aka Rush Limbaugh) attempting to run the same meme today at his website (also quoted from Greenwald):

Left Creates a Crisis Mentality, Uses It to Abrogate Constitution

Let me read to you the preamble of the United States Constitution. . . . Some Hugo Chavez or some Brazilian president attacked the US over the weekend, saying that the US Constitution is out of whack. Somebody needs to tell him the US Constitution is not in play anymore. The US Constitution has been abrogated and is being tossed overboard section by section by the Democrat Party and the American left.

Funny..but I’d think that a 775-point dtop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the liquidation of two major banks and the consolidation of a third, and the not-so-leftist Republican Treasury Secretary and really-not-so-leftist Federal Reserve Board Chairman, flanked by the current President of the United States (which, unless my hearing has failed me, is probably not a leftist or even a Democrat) would seriously count as a crisis, not merely a “crisis mentality”. But, if Rush wants to keep on ignoring the divisions in his own party and his own movement just to lob spitballs at the Dems and the liberals from his Excrement in Thincasting bunkers….well, that’s fine by me. Just wondering how much of his latest $380 million deal was lost in the panic last week??

Oh…and memo to Rusbo: before you pull up the “But the Democrats were in charge of Congress the past 2 years” smack, you might notice that the Congress has been mostly giving your once favored President mostly blank checks to do whatever the hell he wanted on issue after issue….so where’s the “obstruction’ charge coming from???  Probably pulled right out of your colon, more than likely.

Expect more of the meltdowns as the election gets closer and reality finally begins to set in that the free-for-all party that the Right has been having is finally ending.

…or, probably more accurately, how John McCain tanked it away.

Remember about two weeks ago, when it was for certain that McGrumpy had all the momentum on his side??  That his pick of Sarah Palin (aka the FauxMILF) as his Veep was energizing the Christianist Right base and causing simultaneous orgasms amongst the Right-Wing Noise Machine that is talk radio?? That all the talkamongst the media was whether Obama was going to dump that albatross that was Joe Biden and put Hillary Clinton in her supposedly well-deserved slot as the Dem VP….or, even, whether she would replace Obama as the Presidential masthead for the Dems??

Seems like a decade ago these days, doesn’t it??

Amazing what a couple of bank failures, a couple of huge dumps on Wall Street, a failed strategy of “suspending” one’s campaign, followed by getting stoned by his own party on the ‘bailout” deal, and having his VP candidate consistently suffer from Tunnel-Carpal syndrome (as in constantly getting muscle pulls from extracting her foot from her mouth) will do for a guy’s momentum…’ya think, Senator McCain???

And my, my, my….how cooler than a cucumber does Obama look these days?? He must have been borrowing some of Reagan’s Teflon, because these days, nothing seems to be sticking to him…except the throng of crowds listening to his message.

And you think that there were actually liberals and Dems raking him for not attacking McCain harder.  Apparently, considering that McBush and the FauxMILF and the Repubs are doing such a splendid job of melting down all by themselves, perhaps BHO should save the money and invest in his vaunted get-out-the-vote ground game…or start preparing his inaugural address.

Obviously, it’s not all over yet, and there could still be a few surprises left in store….and there is this thing about wounded porcupines trapped in a corner; but it’s beginning to look a lot like we will have to get used to saying “President Obama” soon.

And no, I don’t think that even having Governor FauxMILF rise from the dead and give the knockout performance of her life at tomorrow’s VP debate will help that much…and it’s far more likely that she will, under the white-hot lights of pressure, simply blow off another zinger that will make the public say, “WTF?!?!?”

Of course, the Repubs can always rely on their skillz in the art of voter suppression…but with early voting already happening in some of the most crucial battleground states (and oh, guess who’s taking full advantage of that), I’d hardly think that there would be enough votes to fix by the time November 4th arrived.

Oh, well, Repubs…it’s been a nice run with ‘ya…..not.