The far right wealthy elite are having a lot of fun standing with one foot poised an a vanquished foe they’ve labeled "liberalism and socialism" and beating their chests. They base this upon the fact that they picked up three seats in the Senate and failed to lose the numerical advantage among the states governorships, attracting 19% of the popular vote as they did so. That they call such a performance a victory shows that they’ve pretty much lost contact with reality. That they believe it gives them a mandate to overthrow the constitution is flat-out hallucinatory.

Today’s Sacramento Bee had two articles that show just how far out of whack the right wing is, sandwiched around a third article that demonstrates the sickening complicity of the media.

The center article, with the amazing headline "Bush at war: Steady nerves, steely determination" was a piece written by a right wing hack, David Ignatius, praising a book produced by Bob Woodward called "Bush at War". As you can imagine, the article, and presumably the book as well, are propaganda pieces, of the "Our fearless leader is full of resolve as he guides his people through these perilous times" order of crapola. Bob Woodward used to be an investigative journalist. Now he writes flak pieces, no different from the stuff pumped out by a captive press in every other third-rate dictatorship in the world. Ignatius, going beyond Woodward in feverish efforts to make a silk purse out of a monkey’s ass, proceeds to compare Putsch with Lincoln.

When you’ve overthrown the government, and suborned the independent media, it’s easy to be cocky, and the accompanying two articles, written by journalists who haven’t sold out for "access" and a big payoff, show how self-destructively arrogant and stupid the far right has become.

The first, by Adam Cohen, deals with the meeting of the Federalist Society after the past election on the occasion of their twentieth anniversary.

Dealing with right wingers on the net, we’re accustomed to truculent and gleefully ignorant right wingers who are utterly incompetent to defend their own ideology and who are rapidly reduced to responding to criticism of the Putsch junta with sallies against Clinton that Rush Limbaugh was making back in 1992, and the usual bogus claims that people who disagree with them are traitors, racists, and/or communists. Anything to the left of the John Birch society must be described as "extreme leftist" in order not to appear marginalized.

Turns out that the talk isn’t limited to the bottom of the barrel. The movers and shakers, the guiding lights and moral and intellectual authorities of the Federalist Society talk and think (or is it not think?) in much the same manner. Cohen, probably with a certain amount of disbelief, listened to people at the convention rail on about Travelgate. Travelgate was a non-scandal in which no evidence was ever produced for the simple reason that no crime was ever committed. Clinton (and his wife) were accused of dismissing employees they didn’t like. Just as Andrew Johnson was, 135 years earlier.

Kenneth Starr invested it until the monkey choked, and gave up in disgust, admitting that there was no crime, or even the faintest hint of impropriety. That was back in 1998. Since then, Clinton has left office.

And yet, here are our guiding luminaries of the right, still railing about that little non-issue.

Starr himself was there, bleak, sullen, and trying his best to pretend that his role in the American legal system is not one which will remind people of used diapers for a long time to come. He wanted to wank about liberals, of course. Liberals, dem liberals. Oh, my, yes. Starr thought they were "result-oriented." Nobody really knows exactly what he meant by this, but it was a strange accusation from a man who prosecuted by finding a suspect and then looking about for a crime. Other whacks howled about how the liberal supreme court was showing its true colors by not striking down such commie stuff as antitrust laws and health and safety regulations, according to Cohen.

Cohen acidly noted that these people would be selecting the judges to fill the benches for the next two years, including the Supreme Court. The Federalist Society members were savage and vindictive in their gleeful triumph. Cohen finished up by writing, "And finally, a point of sportsmanship; the only thing less appealing than a sore loser is a sore winner."

But the most amazing thing the right has been up to comes in an editorial http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39211-2002Nov25.html by E. J. Dionne Jr., of the Washington Post.

Do you make less than $50,000 a year? If so, the far right doesn’t think you’re paying enough taxes, and wants to raise them.

No. Honest. It’s really true.

The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, an otherwise respectable newspaper, consists of a group of people who take their economic guidance from Ayn Rand, their political guidance from Newt Gingrich, and their moral guidance from John Fund. And they’ve decided that it’s just dreadful that someone making $500,000 a year pays about 28% in taxes, while someone making $12,000 a year pays only 4%. (Of course, if you factor in payroll taxes, the numbers converge dramatically. As Dionne points out, FICA alone makes it 29% and 10.2% respectively).

According to Dionne, the WSJ board, in their wisdom, feels that it’s terribly unfair that someone making $12,000 has $11,560 a year left over to play with, while the poor guy who is barely making $500,000 a year has to struggle to meet ends meet on just $360,000 after taxes. The horror, the horror!

The WSJ, of course, is aghast with class envy. What is their name for these people who are only paying 4% of their six dollar an hour wage in federal taxes?

"Lucky Duckies."

That’s the sobriquet they’ve laid on these slackers who scrub toilets and bust their butts in greasy spoons. Lucky duckies.

The Wall Street Journal has noticed that because George W. has cut taxes even as the economy tanks and we start a major war while increasing spending. Unlike Republicans, however, they realize that there is a link between all this and the exploding deficits. They have a solution.

Make the poor pay more.

Really. I’m amazed that all these guys making six and seven-digit incomes don’t all quit and go to work as janitors or flipping burgers in order to get into a lower tax bracket. I wonder if any of the WSJ editorial writers have gone to their boss and demanded that their pay be cut to $12,000 a year so they can make ends meet.

The Democrats need to be howling to the skies about this. You, the reader, need to be howling to the skies about this. Quite aside from the sheer ugly cynicism and greed of this notion, there’s the fact that by suggesting a tax raise for those least able to afford it, they not only spit on the working American, but they make a mockery of all their high-minded rhetoric about keeping government small and simple.

They don’t want a small, simple, unintrusive government. They just don’t want to pay for what they do want, is all.

It would be hard to find stronger evidence of what a greedy, vicious hypocritical sham the "small government" GOP really is. This is all going on as they intensify government intrusion into your lives in the name of security and piety, and start waging the endless war.

But if you get in their faces about this concerted effort to further rip off Americans as a part of their ongoing rape and pillage of the national wealth, they’ll probably just look at you and say, "But Clinton got a blow job in the oval office."

They aren’t as stupid and clueless as that sounds.

They just hope that you are that stupid and clueless.

Pay your taxes so the rich don’t have to.