So, Arlen Specter is now a member of the Democratic party. Allow me to just say, officially and unequivocally, “Big fucking deal”. Joe Lieberman was a member of the Democratic party. So was Zell Miller. Hell, Bob Nelson still is a member. And it doesn’t mean dick-ola. It’d be one thing if Specter had an attack of conscience and realized that he was running under a flag that thinks Sarah Palin is qualified to be in a position to launch nuclear weapons. But it had nothing to do with belief or structure, and everything to do with his own political future. Specter admitted as much when he listed his reluctance to have his long career in the Senate decided by the fringe of his current party as one of his primary reasons for swapping.

On one hand, the Republican party is shrinking, and in at least two important ways. The first is their base, which just keeps getting smaller and more isolated. In Pennsylvania, where Specter was staring down the barrel of a primary fight for his Senate seat against resident batshit-crazy former House Rep Pat Toomey. And while the guy is cracklier than an AM radio in a fallout shelter, his particular brand of nonsense and noise is what passes for policy amongst that Republican shrinking base. And since Specter has always been one of the party’s more moderate members, he knew damn well he’d lose that primary.

But it’s more than just Toomey that spooked Specter. The man, I am quite sure, can count. And he saw that in Pensy, his own party’s self-identified membership was shrinking rapidly. More and more keystoners were referring to themselves as either Democrats or Independents. And as low as approval ratings for Democrats in congress generally are, they look sky high compared to those same approval ratings for congressional Republicans. His party is becoming marginalized, impotent and cranky. And Specter doesn’t like it.

To which I say fine. Run as an Independent. If you’re going to do a Lieberman impression, go whole hog, mate. Because make no mistake, he is doing a Lieberman impression. Because from what I can tell, he might have changed the little letter after his name, but he certainly hasn’t gotten on board with the party’s platform or with very much of Obama’s agenda. Now, you could say that’s just Specter staying true to his beliefs. And I’ll say fine. But that means that he isn’t a Democrat, since those core beliefs fly in the face of what the party has been building over the past few years. Hell, he can’t even find a decent word to say about Al Franken. Find me one other Democratic Senator or Congressman that is actively rooting for Norm Coleman. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

So what it boils down to is that Specter wanted that very in-vogue (D) after his name – which I’m pretty sure Fox News has already “accidentally” given him a few times – but he doesn’t actually want to take part in anything associated with his party. Personally, I agree with Markos Moulitsas on this one. I hope Specter keeps on pissing in his newfound pot. Because one of the reasons that the Democratic party has been able to drag itself out from under the crushing obscurity of its predicted “minor party status” is that lousy Democrats get primary challenges of their own. And if Specter thinks he’d have a hard time squaring off as a Republican against a rusty hinge like Toomey, he’s in for a shock going up against Joe Sestak in the Democratic primary.

Now, some people don’t think Specter should be primaried as a Democrat, because there’s a lot of talk that the fairly popular Tom Ridge might run against Toomey on the Republican ticket. Ridge polls well against everyone, and his vast name recognition (not to mention his association with the recovery after 9/11) gives him an edge. Personally, I think that’s some pretty terrible logic.

First of all, you don’t allow a self interested schmuck like Specter represent your party simply because you think he has a better chance of winning. But more importantly, Ridge will be much easier to take down than most people think. To be honest, I find it a bit inconceivable that a state that went for Obama by 10 points and rejected Rick Santorum two years before by 18 points is going to elect a former Bush Administration official to be their Senator. All Sestak has to do is bust out the footage of Ridge standing there like a square peg, waxing incoherent about color-coded threat warnings. It’s a route that Specter really can’t go because of his Senatorial record. But a guy like Sestak could (and in my opinion would) hammer the hell out of Ridge for being a good little Bush lackie.

So Specter can think that he swapped himself into another Senatorial term if he wants to. And the Democrats can delude themselves into thinking that they now hold 59 (and soon to be 60, Arlen) seats in the Senate. But they’re both dead wrong, and the sooner acceptance sinks in, the better.

So how is it that when he was President Vice-President we heard from Dick Cheney about once every seven months, but now that he’s no longer in office the man’s got something new to say about how the government should be run every week or so? On one hand, I don’t really mind all that much. If the only guy in the Republican Party with a lower approval rating than George W. Bush wants to wedge his way back into politics, that’s good news for Obama and even better news for the Democrats in 2010. But on the other hand, it’s obnoxious. And the secret service costs of shuttling him back and forth between the Fox News studios and the partially constructed Death Star really aren’t helping out the budget crisis.

This week he surfaced to complain that the Obama administration released a variety of memos and reports about America’s faux legal justifications for torturing suspected and captured terrorists. And yes, I said torturing. Extended stress positions, extreme sleep deprivation, repeatedly slamming people into tables and floors, and of course the catch-all of the past decade, waterboarding, are all torture. And anyone who hasn’t been waterboarded needs to shut their armchair warrior cake holes until they get a taste of it first hand. We’ve executed people for waterboarding American soldiers, and that’s pretty much the end of the fucking argument.

Anyway, Cheney is all in a huff because there were other documents that Obama could have released that would show all of the incredibly important things we learned from waterboarding our prisoners. All of the foiled plots that we common folk never knew about and all of the super duper secret information we learned, without which America would have descended into terrorism and anarchy. And he requests – nay, demands – that Obama release these memos to the public so we can all see what a good job the previous administration did torturing people for freedom.

I call bullshit. I call one huge, honking pile of third rate bullshit. First of all, the Bush administration practically held a ticker tape parade any time they caught some fifth string terrorist intern. I started to wonder if radical Islam had some rule about only being able to count to 2 because every schmuck we caught was apparently “al-Queda’s second in command”. They were desperate to prove the validity of their efforts and policies to the American public. So if they really had foiled some crazy Tom Clancy shit, we’d have heard about it in the time it takes Sam Fisher to call for extraction.

Likewise, if there were any such memos, and they really were a cohesive argument for torturing prisoners, they’d have been either “leaked” or declassified years ago. At the very least, they’d have been made public before Cheney left office. So on one hand, we can believe that a man who would out a CIA agent in order to exact political revenge wouldn’t declassify documents justifying his entire administration’s world view. Or we can believe that Dick Cheney is full of shit.

What’s embarrassing is this isn’t even a new routine. You demand that your opponent release information that doesn’t exist. Then, when they tell you there’s no such information, you call that proof that the information does exist and the other guy is lying. And if that sort of logic sounds absolutely insane to you, I’d like to congratulate you on finally making it all the way to March of 2003.

You guys didn’t really think I was done with this whole teabagging thing, did you? Seriously? When the barely-literate right decides to stage a protest that, at best, sounds like they’re sitting around a table with petticoats and parasols and at worst sounds like something you have to pay an extra fifty bucks for, I simply lack the self control (and the desire) to leave things alone.

Now, the left would like to believe that absolutely no one showed up to teabag today, and that’s just not true. It was no million man march. . . hell, it wasn’t even a thousand man march, but most of the events turned up several hundred people. Those aren’t great numbers considering the fact that Fox News essentially turned into Teabag Central over the past week, but remember. This is the grass roots astroturf right we’re talking about. They’re pretty new to this whole “doing more than bitching about it at work” thing.

As I said yesterday, I remember 2002 and 2003. Everybody starts somewhere. Hell, I work with a few teabaggers. I didn’t even know it until lunch, in fact. They’re nice enough people, as long as you don’t ask them what country they think the President was born in. And I’ve long since made it a point not to talk politics with them because it just creates too much workplace tension when I grind their talking points into a fine, grey paste.

So like I said, this whole thing wasn’t a complete flop for the right. And the left is always going to paint it as a disaster no matter how it turns out. So I decided to try out something I’d ordinarily never punish myself with. My nerves steeled, I turned to Fox News to see how they were spinning all of this teabagging. And I have to tell you. . . anyone who is worried about these protests can rest assured that nothing significant was accomplished today. No groundwork was laid down. While the body count was significant, the brain count was effectively nil.

The right, it seems suffers from many of the same pains that the left used to (and sometimes still does) suffer from. The first is a lack of message discipline. Now, I’m not talking about the actual GOP. They’ve always run a tighter operation than the Democrats, and they have Reagan and later Gingrich to thank for that. But until public distaste for Bush was boiling up into over the 50% mark, most of the left-wing events that I attended felt like a pot luck of personal issues. The right has managed to take that to an entirely new level.

As far as I can tell, the teabaggers are upset that Barack Obama is a socialist, terrorist, fascist, muslim, abortion performing, immoral icon of the antichrist who is going to cause America to surrender by taxing the middle class  at a 150% rate, making everyone marry an illegal gay Mexican, and melting down all of our guns so he can use the metal to build concentration camps where our children will be sent to work in the ACORN mines. I might have missed some of the subtext there, but it’s kind of hard to read all of those signs when your eyes are watering up with laughter.

To be honest, I don’t think most of the teabaggers have any idea what they are protesting. It certainly isn’t taxation – I’ve yet to see a single person at any of those rallies that will be pulling in more than a quarter million a year. And it certainly isn’t socialism, since I don’t think most of them could define it without a trip to the publicly funded library to look it up. The truth is that all this teabagging is just one great big conservative hissy-fit about being out of power. I mean, really. Obama’s been the President for less than half a year. He hasn’t even had time to fuck anything up yet. Hell, it took his predecessor longer than that to really screw the country over, and that guy was a freakin’ expert.

Some of them claim they are protesting government spending, inflated deficits and unbalanced budgets. Others say they  are worried about the government having too much control over their lives or being too invasive of their privacy. And many of them are protesting under some catch-all banner about America being in crisis. Well, they’re all full of shit, cause I didn’t see any of them out there teabagging for the past eight years.

The only thing they have to be upset about is that their own party screwed the pooch so badly that they’re out of power now. And rather than turning to their former leaders and asking them what in the blue hell they were doing since the new millennium came around (which is what the left did with the Democrats when they were tired of getting their asses kicked), they are taking out their frustrations and their loathing on the man that stomped them so very, very hard last November. It’s Obama’s fault, you see, because he had the nerve to actually win an election.

And you know what? That’s fine. If they don’t like that they lost the election, they have the right to say so. They even have the right to protest the fact, technically. Although it’s a damn stupid thing to protest, since what they’re upset about is a matter of opinion. So let them go out there and march mill around aimlessly against their own disenfranchisement. Let them grumble and scream and caterwail like colicky infants on a twelve hour non-stop flight. The rest of the country will respond in turn.

You know, part of me almost feels bad for the politically disenfranchised right wing. Hell, I remember six or seven years ago when my world view was generally seen as crazy or irrelevant. I remember the opposition party chortling to themselves about their “permanent majority” (and I do hope the Democrats learn from their mistake). I remember when way more than 65% of the country firmly backed a President that I was sure would lead us into a downward spiral of ruin and disaster. Then I remember that no one is sending the thin-skinned right wingers any death threats or calling them unAmerican traitors, and I suddenly I don’t feel so bad for them anymore. Funny that.

But I do know where they’re coming from. I remember feeling ideologically abandoned by my countrymen, to the point where I hardly wanted anything to do with them. So I understand the whole “Going Galt” meme. For those of you that are unaware, “Going Galt” is a reference to the mysterious yet crucial character from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. John Galt is just about the richest, smartest, most industrious and ingenious man on the face of the Earth. He and his merry but generally disassociated band of do-it-yourself’ers decide that they are sick and tired of all the hangers-on and the crybabies demanding a slice of their hard earned pie. So one day, he just up and disappears, because he would rather vanish without a trace than work to support the lazy, worthless masses.

All of the other brilliant and talented industrialists follow suit, and their absence throws the entire world into disarray. Because without their inexplicable awesomeness, always present to tell the other 99% how to live their lives, the rest of us poor suckers are lost in a hazy doldrum of pointless existence. Without Galt and his caste of upper-echelon makers and doers, the rest of the world lacks a teat to suck on. Low and behold, we all learn the error of our ways and come to respect those who propped us up. Only at the end of the novel does John Galt re-emerge to end the suffering of the tiny-brained working class by re-structuring all of society into a calculated applause machine whose affections are permanently affixed on Galt’s sheer genius.

You want to talk about a self-aggrandizing masturbation fantasy? You just can’t beat Atlas Shrugged. Never before (and hopefully never again) will the rights of the privileged and the pompous be so thoroughly defended in their privilege and pomposity through such tedious and repetitive prose. I’ve spared you the fake mysticism and the badly arranged pseudo-science, and more or less spoiled the book at this point. But that’s only true in as much as one can actively spoil something that is already fetid with willful exaggeration and childish, intentional stupidity.

So beloved is Atlas Shrugged on the economic right (Alan Greenspan worshiped at the altar for most of his adult life) that, for a tiny, hilarious blip on the social radar, people started actually talking about “Going Galt”. Notice that I said they were talking about it, as opposed to actually doing it. In the end, no one went Galt because not a single Objectivist was willing to put his money where his mouth was. Because the entire philosophy is just one big rationalization for “poor, successful me”. Because even the true believers know, deep down, that they love money far more than they love their ideals. Either that or they know they’re full of shit. I’m open to either possibility.

Even those who actively, publicly called for people to Go Galt were full of shit. John Galt didn’t make his great big (fifty-six page long) speech before he disappeared. He just up and vanished. And the gap that he left in the workings of the world was evidence in his absence. Yet Michelle Malkin and her ilk didn’t just up and disappear (though I pine for the day, I really do). No, Malkin stuck around, cheerleading for everyone else to take a stand. Possibly because deep down she knows she doesn’t produce anything useful to society in the first place. But more likely because that’s where the easy money was.

And in a lot of ways, that’s the real trouble with Atlas Shrugged. It fails to realize that while there are a few prodigies and genuine geniuses out there shaping the world, there are ten times as many capable, intelligent people waiting in the wings. In its own absurd way, it fellates unfettered capitalism without acknowledging one of its core tenants. In a truly free and open market, if one person cannot or will not produce, another will gladly fill their spot and collect the wealth that could have been theirs.

So, back to our emotionally battered right wing. I said earlier that I understand their rejection of the countrymen that seem to be rejecting them. I remember that phase. For me, it lasted a few days after the election. For others, I guess it lingers a bit. But I also understand another need. The need for relevance. The need to roll up your sleeves and change the direction of the nation itself. When you realize that you cannot or will not abandon something you’re invested in, and you decide to take hold of it and make it your own again.

And as those sorts of movements go, the left did an amazing job. The resurgence of individually-powered politics and, dare I say it, populism in this country between Bush’s first term and the present day still leaves me a bit staggered and breathless. I watched as the left grew out of their anger (but not out of their outrage). I watched them organize, mobilize, and hold their party’s feet to the fire.

Yes, there were protests and marches and grand, media-grasping gestures. But there was also a lot of political footwork. There was time donated to causes and leaders we could genuinely respect. There was also money donated – so much that it rivaled the standard wholesale purchasing of politicians that is so repugnantly present in both political parties. It wasn’t just idle foot stomping and tantrum throwing. It was measured, decisive action. And hey, some of it worked, some of it didn’t. But today our President is Barack Obama instead of John McCain or Willard M. Romney or even Hillary Clinton. And anyone who was paying attention knows that it was the individual wills of many rather than the presumed logic of the failure-proned Democratic leadership that helped him get there.

So here we are, three months into the Obama Presidency, and the right is absolutely sure that the sky is falling, ACORN is wire-tapping their call phones, and that the government is going to give their guns to terrorists and their paychecks to welfare queens. Socialism is descending on their lives like some throwback McCarthy boogeyman, and they’re not going to take this shit sitting down!

They’re going to throw a Tea Party.

No, for reals. Actually, they’re going to throw a lot of Tea Parties. All over the country, in fact. Yes, in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, and I’m using the word “spirit” loosely here, the wingiest and the nuttiest of the wingnuts are organizing protests and marches on April 15th – tax day – and rallying against the forces of Evil Obama Socialism. Of course, instead of engaging in acts of genuine protest they’re going to march down the streets waving tea bags  in their hands. Just like our founding fathers, I tells ya! And I’m sure once they take about ten minutes per person to explain to every onlooker what their gesture is intended to represent, the general public will be very impressed. You know. Once they get done making “teabagging” jokes.

Aww, who am I kidding? I’m never going to be done making “teabagging” jokes.

So, is Rush Limbaugh the defacto leader of the Republican Party? Personally, I don’t know if I care or not. Since their choices seem reduced to either completely sack-less leadership or batshit-crazy leadership, either way it’s a win for me. I am enjoying the sight of the party in a desperate scramble for meaning and significance. It’s almost as if they don’t know they’re completely and utterly in the minority now. A crippling election has come and gone, and they still seem to think that the majority of Americans trust them to fix the financial crisis. They still believe that “bipartisan” means the Democrats caving in to their every demand. They still trot out that tired, never-ran cliche of socialism as if the American public hasn’t failed to be terrified by it the last few thousand times. And they still blame the Democratic party for all that is wrong in the world, from the failing economy to the cost of health care – the GOP even seems to think the Democrats are responsible for the clusterfuck their own party has become.

The right can push these absurd meme that it’s some kind of Obama / Reid / Pelosi/ Carville conspiracy that elevated Rush to his faux leadership role within the GOP, but it’s just not true. There were a few factors that allowed Rush to gain so much clout within the party’s base. The biggest one is that the party doesn’t really have any leadership. They ran a weak Presidential candidate, chosen from an entire field of bullshit-weak candidates. Their supposed diamond in the rough is back up in Alaska, blissfully being forgotten by the majority of America. The minority leaders in Congress are both laughably unable to deliver leadership, and are selling a bill of goods that the country just isn’t buying.

Oh, and there’s the fact that Rush appeals to the absolute wing-nuttiest of the wingnuts. He’s certainly got that going for him.

But this idea that it’s an orchestrated effort between the Democrats and the media to cause tension between Rush and the supposed Republican leadership is absurd. It wasn’t the Democrats that put him on the air, or cowtowed to his lunatic rantings. Barack Obama didn’t enlist Rush to be a key speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference this past week (where he received an award, I believe, for  outstanding achievement in the field of excellence). And unless I missed some very creating video editing, James Carville wasn’t responsible for Michael Steele’s on-air fellating of Limbaugh after he dared to assert that Rush is an entertainer, and a crude one at that.

No no, boys. The Republicans own this one. They have only themselves to blame both for their inability to inspire their constituents and for their willingness to use Limbaugh as such a useful tool. A reliable attack dog who could say the sorts of hideous things that elected politicians never could. No one on the right minded when Rush defended eight years of the Worst President Ever, because it was convenient to let someone else do that dirty job. Hell, even Rush admitted afterwards that he was “carrying water” for Bush. Live on his show, no less. They invited a selfish, beligerent junkie into their homes, and now they’re surprised that he’s shitting all over the living room carpet.

Must be more of that “politics of personal responsibility” we’ve seen so much of over the past decade.