Back some sixty years ago, H.L. Mencken, the brilliant curmudgeonish iconoclast, said in an interview, "It is one of my firmest and most sacred beliefs... that the government of the United States, in both its legislative and its executive arm, is ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and disgusting... that the administration of justice in the Republic is stupid, dishonest, and against all reason and equity... that the foreign policy of the United States __ its habitual manner of dealing with other nations, whether friend or foe __ is hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable... that the American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose_steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages... "

OK, I ‘ve got a higher opinion of the American people than Mencken does. They aren’t all serfs and goose-steppers.

That said, Mencken was right. For evidence, one need only look at Tom DeLay’s House of Republisentatives and the Putsch junta in the White House. "Ignorant, incompetent, corrupt and disgusting."

Ayup. Works for me.

As far as American dealing with other nations in a "hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish and dishonorable" manner, one need only look at Iraq. Or Bosnia. Or Vietnam. Or. Or. Or. It’s quite a long list, the list of countries America has robbed and cheated and destroyed over the years.

There IS currently the slight matter of the 30,000 illegal munitions, 500 tons of nerve gas, 38,000 liters of Botulinum toxin and 12,000 liters of anthrax that Powell swore up and down Iraq had. The latest spin from Putsch is that Saddam quickly destroyed it just before we invaded. Fed it to his dog or something. Somehow Saddam found a way to safely dispose of all that in such a way that no trace remains.

So let’s add "idiotic" to Mencken’s list of American foreign policy motifs.

Of course, that just means America’s no better than any other nation. After all, 20^th Century Russia couldn’t be trusted to keep her word on ANY treaty signed, and 19^th Century England was justifiably known as "perfidious Albion." America is no better than communist Russia or imperial England. That might be true, but it’s disappointing to anyone who thought America might be something a bit better.

The other spin (Republicans like to counterattack on two fronts at once when they can) is that while the weapons may not have actually, (ahem) actually EXISTED, so to speak, there is the fact that we got rid of a really vicious thug, and the numbers of people supposedly murdered by this thug are escalating faster among the right than the annual deficit is in Washington. What makes this particularly sickening is that in order to arrive at such big numbers (we’re up to a million, and it’s still only June), the right had to include the Iranis Saddam killed, frequently with our weapons, and the Kurdish villages he destroyed using American toxic gases. Our government didn’t say boo at the time, even though the rest of the world reacted in outrage, because we WANTED Saddam to kill lots of people, partly because we were annoyed at some of them (the Iranis) and partly because we wanted to see how our toys worked, and to make sure the USSR, with whom we were in battle for moral supremacy, also knew that they were cheap and effective and turned Kurds into Whey.

Mencken would have looked at the poltroonish President, and the "hypocritical, disingenuous, knavish, and dishonorable" collection of political and military neo-fascist retreads with which he has populated his administration, snorted, and declared, "See? I told you so!"

But enough about our wonderful foreign policy. Let’s go back to that amphitheater of the American people, that well of "the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose_steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages... " the House of Representatives.

Tom DeLay is defending the last minute switcheroo which removed the tax credit for working families making less than $26,000 by sneering that they "don’t pay taxes anyway" and pointing out that many of the people calling for the tax cut to be reattached didn’t vote for the total package anyway. He forgot to mention that by removing that package, he cheated a lot of his own fellow Republicans, moderates who would not have voted for the tax bill had there not been something substantial for the working poor.

The rest of the VRWC spin machine is, of course, questioning the patriotism of people who are outraged by the tax cheat. "Don’t you know the tax plan will HELP AMERICA?" they chant, "Are you against HELPING AMERICA?" I think the Mencken phrase that fits here is "stupid, dishonest, and against all reason and equity."

The tax break will hurt America rather than help it, just as similar idiotic tax cuts did in 1982 and 2001. It’s a huge windfall for the undeserving rich, but it has dramatically bad effects on the rest of us.

For example, the average income for a typical American family has dropped steadily since 1978, recovering only slightly during the Clinton boom, and we have an extra quarter trillion a year going to finance the debt. That means less services for more taxes, with that money going to banks and the wealthy. AMERICA survived, but the people IN America took a pretty good hit because of it.

And the Putsch regime's tax cuts, which are aimed at eliminating all government services save those that keep the rich secure, dwarf Reagan's vaudevillian economic policies. You need to pretend that a vast concentration of wealth – the government reassigning of wealth that you so hate when it's in the other direction – is somehow in the best interests of the average American. That's a lie, and I suspect this admin knows it's a lie. Giving our national wealth to a thin scum of ultra wealthy in hope that they will be grateful and take good care of us doesn't work. Never has.

The other half of the spin attack is that we have to "undo the damage Clinton did to the economy." That’s Republican economics at work: the benefits of Reagan’s policies were immediate, as evidenced by the fact that the upper quintile of the population had a boom in the eighties. But anything good that shows up in a Democratic administration, such as the stock market boom under Clinton, must be attributed to actions taken by Reagan eight years or more prior. We all know that people buy stock based on things that happened a decade ago, and not on what they hope the stock will do next quarter, right?

They don't. The economy reacts to what has occurred in the previous quarter, and the market reacts to what it thinks might happen in the next quarter. The role of taxes on economic growth is variable, and often indiscernible. Only a fool thinks higher taxes always slow economic growth (the 30s, 50s, and 90s would disabuse anyone of that notion) and it's utterly moronic to say "The economy is growing now because people were paying less taxes ten years ago". That doesn't work. That doesn't even pass the snicker test.

Maybe, looking at Iraq and our economy, we should arrange a trade. We could send Tom DeLay to Iraq to explain the benefits of taxing the poor to subsidize the rich, and we could locate Saddam and invite him here to explain how well his program of using the poor to subsidize the rich caused a boom in palace building in Iraq in the 1990s.

All to the background noise of mordant, bitter laughter from H.L. Mencken’s grave...