I've made a similar comment to another article today, so pardon the repetition.

After the damage he did to the American economy and people, I always thought that Ronald Reagan had one defense: he was too stupid to be held morally culpable. I think that at least some of the people who raise the "offing Granny" nonsense could claim the same defense. They are just too dumb to tell fact from opinion or think critically. Remember, half the people in America have an IQ under 100.

The other ones are evil. I suspect they know full well what they are saying is all lies, but they are bought and paid for by corporate interests or appealing to a political base of mean, angry, stupid people to stay in office (or to keep an audience). These people have always played a major role in American politics and have been dominant since at least 1968. Democrats have never developed the stomach for fighting back or going after these people politically and personally as they deserve.

For what it is worth, I think Sarah Palin is probably entitled to the Reagan defense. She's a lot like Reagan: background in sports and entertainment, minimal education, hysterical personality, and pretty dumb. I just wish she would shut up.

About nine months before the invasion of Iraq, a friend of mine with military connections accurately predicted the day of the invasion (he admits hitting the day was lucky) and stated categorically that there were no WMDs or programs to develop them. Nuclear programs are big and produce radioactivity and funny gases. You can't hide them. Chemical or biological weapons programs in countries with third world technology produce circles of unexplained deaths around the sites. No strange pattern of deaths; no programs. If my friend knew this, everybody in the military and intelligence communities knew it (and so did the gutless Democrats in Congress who voted to support the war).

What Lyons reminds us is that our so called independent media went along when most of those reporting must have known it was a hoax. I wonder how this relates to mainstream media coverage of the health care debate?

Moses led the children of Israel for forty years through the wilderness, but he was not allowed to enter the promised land. Senator Kennedy worked for universal health care for forty years, and he also was not permitted to cross the river.

I wonder if the promised land of universal health care will ever be achieved. I am more inclined to think that the rich and powerful have scared the weak and poor enough to block real reform yet again.

I hope Teddy died feeling, right or wrong, that he had seen the promised land.

Conservatism or neoconservatism in this country has always been an ideological defense of the wealthy. I agree with Lind that the neoconservative ideas of the '70s won, but the result has been the enormous build up in wealth and income for a rich minority at the expense of everyone else.

Since Republicans--the party that embodies conservative ideology and represents the rich--represent less than one percent of Americans, they have to scam 50 percent to win an election. If you look at the "issues" that Republicans have used to win elections since 1968, they have little to do with conservative principles. Rather, they are scams that appeal to the simple minded: communism, racism, abortion, gun control, immigrant bashing, gay marriage, and presently, death panels.

That is the underlying reason for the seeming intellectual collapse of the right: there are no real ideas there, just the scams. The only loyal spear carriers Republicans have left are a bunch of loony, racist, Yahoos who will believe any crap the right wing think tanks and Fox News comes up with.

It is important to remember that there are a lot more people in this country who have no chance of understanding the health care system or the tax system than can.

I had the advantage of taking intro economics before the Friedman, free market, revolution took over academic economics. We learned a lot about sectors of economic activity in which market mechanisms seemed to work well (grocery stores), and areas in which they did not (public utilities). My professor, whose name I am forgetting, had been on Eisenhower's council of economic advisers, so he was no flaming liberal.

Later through the work of Alfred D.(for DuPont)Chandler, I came to believe that there had not been a free market economy in America since the railroads started consolidating in the pre Civil War era. The railroads proved that you could not run capital intensive businesses with real competition.

These are the facts that the free market ideologues forgot--or suppressed in service of their corporate masters. The rediscovery of Keynes is, I think, primarily a return to common sense. Free market economics as an ideology is a great rationale for promoting the interests of the rich--I think some guy named Adam Smith said something like that some time back.(and look how well it has worked since 1980!)

The real problem is that our conservatives aren't. The people who call themselves conservatives are not ideologically consistent. They just come up with rationales for the interests of the rich. Most of their votes come from dumb people who are the victims of scams. The Yahoos who supply most of the votes are worried about communists (not so much lately, except for Obama), race, abortion, gun control, gay marriage, etc. Our conservatives look dumb because they really are, or they are pitching crap to people who really are.