blogger interrupted

I’m going to wade into the wingnut alternate reality for a second.  Republicans are making a lot of noise about 1994, claiming flawed parallels to Newt, historically illiterate references to Winston Churchill, god knows who else.  Point being they claim, and some Dems fear, that they are poised to ride a Rush Limbaugh induced backlash rage from the voters back into the majority in 2010, just like they did in 1994.

There are a lot of reasons this scenario is laughable, substantive and procedural.  But laughable it certainly is.

First, the substance.  Let’s just leave aside that Barack Obama is literally less than a month into his term (remember, we are entering wingnut reality – suspend all intelligence for a moment, please).    In 1993, Bill Clinton began his first term with the conservative catnip of “gays in the military”, the Hillary health care debacle, and raised taxes to balance the budget in an economic plan that received no Republican votes.  

The only part of that remotely resembling 2009 is the “no Republican votes” part.  In the less than one month of the Obama presidency, Barack has passed the most massive economic plan in the history of the country, which includes the largest tax cut in the history of the country.  Barack hasn’t even begun to approach the other tonnage of shitpile left behind by the Republicans – the banks, the housing market, energy policy, Afghanistan, education – i.e., his entire campaign platform.  

Second, the procedural.  In 1994, the Republican noise machine was basically unopposed, fired up, and on a roll, having been fed and regurgitated the catnip of culture war 1960’s era grudge match horseshit against Bill Clinton for a solid 3 years. Talk radio had the field to itself.  Rush Limbaugh and his progeny sat astride the discourse like giant movie screens in a bad 1950’s horror movie, were completely unassailable, and could lie 24/7 without ever fearing that any other media would question them.

Today, the internet, led by blogs, descends instantaneously on their cancerous bile like white blood cells.  Before a smear can even begin to make it into the mainstream, it is diagnosed, diagrammed, documented, and utterly debunked, sometimes in a matter of hours.  And that debunking spreads faster than the smear itself, again, thanks to the internet.

For example, does anyone think that the Vince Foster suicide smear of 1993 could ever survive today?  We just went through a campaign in which every single smear conceivable was hurled at Barack Obama, and every one of them got beat down like a rabid dog, to the point that John McCain himself had to strike “he’s an Arab” down in public at one of his own town hall events, even though his own campaign offices were spreading the smear. 

The white blood cell brigade in 2009 is already setting up nicely – an infrastructure is in place, well honed, and battle tested.  Keith Olbermann, perhaps one of the most important players in today’s anti-smear white blood cell brigade, took apart a health care debate skirmish-action smear last week with little effort, from a fraud who first germinated in the 1993 health care debate, and who is being rolled out for precisely the same fraudulent smearing against health care reform 16 years later.  

She’s got a surprise in store.  Because every coming policy debate will have waiting for it this arbiter of truth known as the internet, with an army of white blood cells waiting to seize upon falsehood in a cocaine heartbeat.  None of this means the smears will stop, or that the lunatics won’t believe them, or that some smears will still sneak out and affect the debate.  All it means is that most of the smears, probably the most virulent strains, will be dead before they can infect the electorate, or the reality in Congress as bills get debated.  

It ain’t 1994, folks.  You just have to look into your web browser, which didn’t exist in 1994, to figure that one out.