Through the looking glass, darkly (again)

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about how certain conservatives had a point of view so bizarre and out of accord with reality that it was baffling to me. Of course, I had no idea at the time that the right-wing chatter, which I compared to the Mad Hatter's tea party, would soon coalesce into a bone fide movement that actually calls itself the Tea Party. In the words of someone in a silly movie (I believe it was William Shatner in 'Airplane 2'): "I guess Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes."

And so, the inanity abides. And crazy has come to feel, more or less, normal.

On Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday (October 15th) somebody said something wrong and dumb and it flew by more or less unnoticed. This was hardly unprecedented or surprising, but it grabbed me by the throat anyway, because it so vividly demonstrates the degree to which right-wing politics and political opinion in this country are so alienated from reality these days.

One of Maher's guests was the conservative commentator and St. Louis Tea Party co-founder Dana Loesch. Her major example of why Obama is a horribly fiscally irresponsible president was that the federal budget deficit tripled from 2008 to 2009. She adduced this as conclusive evidence of his profligacy - this was her rhetorical trump card.

For charity's sake, I will assume that this person simply doesn't know what she's talking about, rather than that she is deliberately lying on national television. But in either case, she's wrong and her criticism is misplaced, to say the least.

The budget deficit did indeed triple from 2008 to 2009, but the 2009 budget is Bush's, not Obama's - a new president inherits his predecessor's last budget. It was George W. Bush who increased the deficit from $460 billion in 2008 to $1,410 billion in 2009, not Barack Obama. This is simply an inarguable fact.

The biggest reasons for this increase were reduced tax revenues owing to the financial crisis and the TARP (signed into law by president Bush in October 2008).

Another major reason the 2009 deficit was so enormous compared to previous years? Obama decided to make the government's accounting practices more accurate and more transparent, thus including in the announced budget expenditures that had been there all along, but which the Bush administration had concealed from public view - such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the full cost of Medicare reimbursements. In other words, Obama decided to act according to the principle that in a democratic republic, the government should be open and accountable to the people.

Of course, Karl Rove could have told him that he'd get no credit for this - people just aren't interested in the arcana of the budget process. And they don't know when the fiscal year begins and ends. And context doesn't matter. And the facts don't matter. And reality doesn't matter. Anyone who thinks otherwise is probably fooling themselves, while the savvy pols and pundits get away with fooling everybody else.

But what troubles me is not the cynicism of Rove and his ilk, who know exactly what they're doing, but the apparently sincere delusion of people like Ms. Loesch, who seem to have no idea that some of their most cherished views are based on entirely - entirely! - false premises and drastic misreadings of the facts.

The villainy of Rove is fathomable - it is deliberate, rational, strategic. There is method in the mendacity. Like that of Professor Moriarty or Hannibal Lecter, it's not so terrifying because, despite the wickedness and evil intents, it at least makes some kind of sense.

But what is behind the Tea Party? What do the Tea Partiers think they're doing? Many of them are apparently sincere, but they make no sense - no sense at all. That's what really scares me.