Bye Ernie.  Don’t let the diversity hit you on the way out.   And…good riddance…

Kentucky Governor Loses to Democrat

Dogged by political scandal in his first term, Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky, a Republican, lost his bid for re-election yesterday to Steve Beshear.

Looks like Teh Gay couldn’t drive the rubes to the poles this time.  Things are looking up in Virginia too, of all places.  I was reading an interesting view about how the current sub prime mortgage crisis may be a factor in the elections.  The McMansion suburbs have been a republican stomping ground for the past decade and now a lot of those people are loosing their houses or finding themselves suddenly under debt loads they cannot bear.  The problem for the republicans in all that is that those folks are educated enough to know that the republican greed reflex is largely responsible for the mortgage system collapse and they’re probably closely following its ripples through all their other investments too. It can’t be fun reading the financial news these days knowing that you voted for the idiots who are now running the economy like they’d been given a license to steal. 

And you thought republicans really meant all that stuff about small government and fiscal responsibility.  Never mind the price of oil…gold is now at an absolutely incredible eight-hundred and forty-one dollars an ounce as of last night.  When Bush took office it was selling for around two-hundred sixty.  The Canadian dollar is worth more then the U.S. dollar and the Australian dollar is inching close.  The national debt has skyrocketed.  So have foreclosure rates.  People in upscale neighborhoods in southern California are taking care of the lawns of homes that haven’t sold in months, so the neighborhood won’t look like a slum.  And now they’re finding squatters in some of those homes.  I’ll bet a lot of red neighborhoods in the McMansion suburbs turned blue this election.

"Greed is good", they said.  People should have paid more attention.  No, greed is not good.  Greed eats this year’s seed and doesn’t care if there’s any left to plant next year.  Greed squeezes what the market will bear out of it, and doesn’t care if what the market will bear keeps getting smaller and smaller every year.  Greed doesn’t favor the short term gain over the long run investment because it doesn’t admit there is any such thing as tomorrow.  There is only now.  Right now.  I want it Right Now.  "Greed is good", is the economic theology of seven year olds.

Paul Krugman had a good riff on the excuses we’re hearing now from the party faithful, that Bush and his cronies don’t so much perfectly represent modern movement conservative values in practice, as they are a betrayal of them.  Bullshit…

People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”

People claim to be shocked by the way the Bush administration outsourced key government functions to private contractors yet refused to exert effective oversight over these contractors, a process exemplified by the failed reconstruction of Iraq and the Blackwater affair.

But back in 1993, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The American Prospect, explained that “under Reagan and Bush, the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.”

People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”

Bush is not incompetent.  He’s been dead-on target every moment, every second he’s been in power, doing Exactly what the right has always promised America it would do once it got its hands on the levers of power.  Of course financial institutions all over the world are trembling now at the scale of the losses in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco.  They don’t matter.  Finance is predicated on a notion that both the secular and religious right categorically reject: that there’s such a thing as tomorrow.  Greed is good.  Or to put it succinctly:

SCHADENFREUDE ALERT….The New York Times reports today that a group of conservative authors, including Swift Boat nutball Jerome Corsi, is suing right-wing darling Regnery Publishing. The lead plaintiff is Richard Miniter, author of Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror, who apparently got his hands on a royalty statement he wasn’t supposed to see:

"It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance." He added: "Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?"

….The authors, who say in the lawsuit that [Regnery’s parent company] has been "unjustly enriched well in excess of one million dollars," are seeking unspecified damages. But Mr. Miniter said, "We’re not looking for a payoff; we’re looking for justice."

Well, we’re all looking for justice, aren’t we? But if a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a conservative who’s come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?

You got what you voted for.  The problem wasn’t that you didn’t read the fine print.  You didn’t read the bold print.