Brilliant Politics

Al Gore has, more than any other single person, brought the need for a green economy to the forefront of the current political discourse. Bold vision is what we need. He lays out the challenge clearly here:

Media designer Jonathan Jarvis makes it easy to understand the current banking crisis (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan):

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Is Charlie Crist the only sane leader in the Republican Party? It could be so.

Frank Rich, in Sunday’s New York Times, nails the delusional Republicans on their confused heads:

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt….

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

More from Kos here, including real poll data, on how the D.C. blowhard pundit class is moving farther and farther away from reality. They were frequently wrong about the 2008 presidential election, as Frank Rich documented in great detail throughout the campaign, but that hasn’t stopped them from driving deeper into fantasy land in 2009.

-CDP

Barack Obama should model himself after Franklin Roosevelt, not Abraham Lincoln. Republicans are committed to obstructionism and an obsessive-compulsive fixation on ineffective tax cuts.

Here is the partial transcript of FDR’s speech in 1936 at Madison Square Garden (hat tip to Daily Kos):

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

Full transcript of the speech is here.

Garrison Keillor, as usual, uplifts us with the truth about America, while also making us laugh:

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back. He’ll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law. I just can’t imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference — the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis — you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.

And that reminds me of a photo essay we did here at Brilliant politics a while back:

How despicable have GOP congressmen become? They now shake in their boots at the prospect of making the bombastic blowhard, Rush Limbaugh, mad at them. As usual, Frank Rich proves to be the most trenchant and brilliant political observer in America:

Most pathetic of all was Phil Gingrey, a right-wing Republican congressman from Georgia, who mildly criticized both Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to Politico because they “stand back and throw bricks” while lawmakers labor in the trenches. So many called Gingrey’s office to complain that the poor congressman begged Limbaugh to bring him on air to publicly recant on Wednesday. As Gingrey abjectly apologized to talk radio’s commandant for his “stupid comments” and “foot-in-mouth disease,” he sounded like the inmate in a B-prison-movie cowering before the warden after a failed jailbreak.

“It’s up to me to hijack the Obama honeymoon,” Limbaugh soon gloated, “and I’ve done it.” In his dreams. He has hijacked what’s left of the Republican Party; the Obama honeymoon remains intact. The nightmare is that we have so irrelevant, clownish and childish an opposition party at a moment when America is in an all-hands-on-deck emergency that’s as trying as war. To paraphrase a dictum that has been variously attributed to two of our most storied leaders in times of great challenge, Thomas Paine and George Patton, the Republicans should either lead, follow or get out of the grown-ups’ way.