Republican sleight-of-hand & dirty tricks....

Digby, at Hullabaloo, discusses how, when most Americans support the Democratic agenda, the Republicans still manage to get away with governing from the Far Right.

Yet, they have successfully enacted a radical economic and social agenda of supply side tax cutting, begun a revolutionary overhaul of the legal system, initiated massive regulation rollbacks and dissolution of the traditional separation of church and state. And they have also, not incidentally, completely overturned half century of foreign policy doctrine in just 2 years.

What’s amazing is that they have done all of this not only without a mandate, but without even explicitly campaigning on those issues or being honest about their implications. They are secretive and uncooperative with both the congress and the press and have assumed an inappropriate level of power in the executive branch. They do this because they know that they cannot win with their real agenda.

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The fact is that they haven’t won anything without cheating since Bush ran as a moderate, seized office on a technicality and began to govern from the most radical edge of his party. The tax cut was passed with fuzzy math and outright falsehoods about the beneficiaries and the election of ‘02 was (barely) won because of smears against a disabled Vet and a coordinated talk radio campaign against a dead man’s grieving family. The invasion of Iraq was sold on lies about WMD and ties to terrorists.

The Bush administration, then, really is the political equivalent of Enron. Ken Lay and George W. Bush and Karl Rove and Andrew Fastow and Jeff Skilling and Dick Cheney are all cut from the same cloth....

The post is long, and well worth the read.