The Angry Right.

Republicans are angry. This past Sunday you could flip around the bobble-heads and hear GOPers fuming about the stimulus bill and how the House Democrats wouldn't play with them and the Senate Democrats didn't pass a bill they liked, never asking themselves why anyone would listen to the economic advice from the party responsible for running up ten trillion dollars worth of debt.

That's like taking advice on marriage from Rush Limbaugh.

Come to think of it, that's like taking any advice on anything from Rush Limbaugh. As he's a darling of the right and, according to that giant Georgia pussy, Phil Gingrey, the voice of conservatism, let's look at Rush's record.

Back in '92, Rush swore that if Congress passed Bill Clinton's budget, including "the largest tax increases in history" (they weren't), that it would be an economic disaster. The budget passed, the economy boomed, and by the end of Clinton's second term we were in surplus.

When California was suffering their summer of brownouts and power failure, Rush blamed it all on the dirty hippies forcing their environmental extremism on the power industry. Then we learned how Enron caused the power shortages, gamed the system, extorted money from Grandma Millie and laughed about it all the way to bankruptcy.

Rush claimed that GIs who favored getting out of Iraq were "phony soldiers." This from a guy who dodged the draft with a cyst on his ass. "Phony soldiers." Wrong again.

Rush was all for a balanced budget amendment until he wasn't.

Rush swears that climate change is a myth. He's wrong. Again.

Rush always points out that the rabid segregationists of the past were Democrats, and while, technically, he's right, what he doesn't say is that those Democrats turned Republican after Johnson passed the Civil Rights act. You remember, heroes of the right like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond.

But enough about Rush.

Let's look at those angry Republicans in the heartland, those who listen to Rush and claim he's always right, even when he's wrong. Alexandra Pelosi, the speaker's daughter who came to fame by documenting W's cowboy charm in 2000, has a new film for HBO, following hard on the heels of her sympathetic doc about the deeply closeted crystal Methodist Ted Haggard. This new film is "Right America: Feeling Wronged."



I'll watch this, just as I've watched Pelosi's other docs, but I expect I'll come away just as mystified as I am now. Why are these people so angry? Why, after being in charge for the better part of the past 30 years, why do they feel that liberals like me are somehow cheating them? Even Pelosi echoes some of their bullshit.

"Well, more than 58 million people voted for John McCain, and I know that everyone on the coasts is on an Obama honeymoon right now, and they seem to forget that more than 58 million people did not want Barack Obama to be their president. And when I was traveling over the summer and I would go to rallies and 20,000 people would be there ... They had huge crowds, and I felt they were really underrepresented in the media. I didn’t feel like I saw these people on TV."

Is it just me or was that line about "people on the coasts" a tad dismissive? I live in North Carolina, home to Jesse Helms, and hardly a bastion of effete liberal thinking.

And she thinks these red state Americans were underrepresented in the media? Really? Can you say Joe the Fucking Plumber? Can you say hockey mom? Can you say Fox News? Underrepresented? Jesus, Alexandra, get your nose of the that elephant's ass for a moment and take a look at how many red states, with real people, turned blue this past November. Don't we count as real people, or are we just people who, as you describe your friends, "drank the Kool Aid."



It's this kind of attitude the feeds the Right's anger. They feel like we stole something from them. They don't look at their party and see how their leaders failed them. They play the victim. It's all about those people "on the coasts" who don't have any real values. It's all about men and women who serve in the military, unless you disagree with the GOP and then you're a "phony soldier." It's all about fear and lies like Obama's a socialist, and Obama's a muslim, and it's all fed to them daily by people like Rush.

I'll watch Pelosi's movie, but I doubt if it will get us any closer to the truth about why so many people have let themselves be manipulated and lied to for so long, just for the enrichment of a small number of people who think they're "sheep and should be treated as such."

That's a line from Richard Nixon, by the way. A Republican.