JABbering Stooge

Or so the wingnuts who obsess over his every fart (or his every fart joke) would have you believe. But know ye this, wingnuts, Olbermann had every right to start last night’s edition of Countdown with a special comment. Because it was revealed today that Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman had sent a letter in response to a simple request from Sen. Hillary Clinton (er, excuse me, Hitlery XXXXXXXXXlintoooooooooooooooooooon, for you Freepers and Boortzites) that all but accuses the junior senator from New York of treason for the thoughtcrime of asking if there was going to be a sane approach to an Iraq endgame. For her efforts, she was rewarded with the “terrorist-lover” slur that has been the right-wing’s bread-and-butter for the last six years now. Anyone who dared question the received wisdom of The Most Holy George W. Christ, anyone who balked at worshipping the ground he trod upon, was instantly dismissed as part of the “Blame America First” crowd or “suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome™,” as if somehow resorting to the tactics of Soviet Russia would allow them to escape the Inconvenient Truths of this war.

But you can only cry “Wolf!” so many times before the rest of the country catches on, and either outright ignores your fallacious prognostications, or treats them with the bitter derision such blatant partisan hackery deserves. The 2006 midterms should’ve taught Karl Rove and his conservative allies in talk radio that lesson. Sadly, the only lesson they seem to have learned is that they lost not because they had overplayed their “fear and smear” card, but because they had not played it often enough.

We’ve tried things your way, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Boortz, Mr. Limbaugh. Tried them for six whole years. And what do you have to show for your efforts? Our soldiers, the best and the brightest, the guardians of our liberty, have been stretched to the breaking point in a desperate effort to referee a civil war. Those that aren’t lucky enough to make the ultimate sacrifice on the battlefield come home to deplorable conditions at the places where their wounds, both physical and psychological, are supposed to be patched up. They are betrayed because you think that supplying their most basic health care needs is a socialist handout that can be better supplied by your vice president’s cronies - even as those cronies poison and overcharge the those still fighting your war.

And the soldiers you hide behind aren’t the only ones being ill-served by your fetishistic obsession with concentrating all the world’s wealth in the hands of your buddies. From abstinence-only education to utter nonenforcement of environmental, financial and public health regulations, your policies have cut a wide swath of destruction that will take years, if not decades, to recover from. Your policies have been so utterly discredited that no sane person will ever look at them again with anything more than a jaundiced eye and a plaintive, “What the fuck was I smoking?!”

And so, with an empty ideological quiver, the only recourse conservatives have is to the old tried-and-true “fear and smear” campaign. And they couldn’t have picked a worse person to do the hit job. I mean Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman?! Talk about chutzpah! The man was Shooter’s national security advisor in the runup to Operation Iraqi Liberation - one of the chief neocons who helped lie us into war, whose appointment to be Undersecretary of Defense for Policy was held up by the Senate committee that Sen. Clinton is a part of. It smacks of a revenge fantasy for the parliamentary swirlie he endured.

If this is the best conservatives have got, then they are utterly pathetic, indeed.