So Proudly They Hail the Flag of Flapdoodle

Yes, Mitt Romney actually said that. If you can imagine.

By Dan Hagen

The Republicans need to find someone fluent in flapdoodle. You know, mosques. Flag pins. Freedom fries.

Flapdoodle.

The right keeps the country stirred up about things that are symbolic but meaningless in real-world terms — flags, gay marriage, public religious displays, “support the troops” magnets, etc. They are all matters of semantics, useful for keeping the American public distracted from the police-state erosions of its liberty and the corporate picking of its pockets.

Flapdoodle like “drug-test all the parasite welfare recipients!” Florida Gov. Rick Scott spent $178 million of the taxpayers’ money in order to prove that 98 percent of welfare recipients DON’T use drugs. He intended to prove the opposite, but — being a Tea Partier — he is, of course, always wrong.

Republicans worship only money and actively loathe people who do not possess it — including, ironically, themselves. The Republicans fear a society in which money might not trump and crush all legal rights and social privileges.

Flapdoodle like “austerity.” When George W. Bush was president, the GOP leaders voted seven times to increase the national debt ceiling. At the beginning of Bush's term, the U.S. debt limit was $5.95 trillion. Bush promised he would pay off the debt in 10 years, but, by spending and borrowing like a proverbial drunken sailor while massively cutting revenue, he increased the debt to $9.815 trillion. John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell all cheerfully helped him do it.

Remember, there wasn't a “national debt crisis” at all a few months ago, when all Republicans and many complicit Democrats decided to throw away vast amounts of revenue in perpetuity by extending Bush's obscene income tax cuts for billionaires.

Flapdoodle that feeds the Tea Partiers’ foolish fantasies that they're all about to be reborn as those billionaires, their Second Amendment fever dreams about how shooting lots of people would banish their fears of weakness, and their panic at the idea that they might someday learn something that their grandmother didn't know, with their anxiety disguised as anger at anyone who would DARE to be unlike them.

Flapdoodle like promising to fix the economy by firing teachers and police officers, invading more countries and diverting yet more billions to the Cayman Islands accounts of Wall Street bankers. I ask you, what could possibly go wrong with a plan like that?

Flapdoodle like pretending to believe that Wall Street billionaires who got rich through derivative fraud are entitled to every penny they stole, but ordinary Americans who paid into Social Security their whole working lives are entitled to little or nothing. Yes, Republicans are strange birds indeed. Apparently some variety of vulture.

Flapdoodle like pretending to believe in the “free market.” Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs do not really regard themselves as “free market” risk takers. All that’s just PR BS to feed the fools.

They regard themselves, accurately, as the ruling class. They crashed the world economy with derivative fraud, got the politicians they puppeteer to bail them out, and were doubly rewarded instead of imprisoned for their crimes.

All those billions in bailouts, bonuses and boondoggle legal monopolies are the tribute paid to them by American citizens, whom they regard, accurately, as their bootlicking serfs, to be fired, fleeced, forced into poverty and forgotten however they see fit.

Those plain facts unpalatable to the public? Then fire up the flapdoodle, folks.

Flapdoodle like charges of “elitism.” Of course I'm an elitist. I've worked and studied throughout my life for my academic degree, for my career, for my awards, for my library, for my philosophy and for such understanding of human nature as I have.

What I DON’T require is to be told by some lazy, loudmouth ignoramus who was frightened in childhood by a book that his whim-driven, knee-jerk “common sense” is superior to the vast, painfully acquired sum total of human cultural knowledge and science.

“Common sense” informed people that the world was flat. “Common sense.” That's the American euphemism for “thundering ignorance.” When you have surgery, make sure it's not performed by some physician with all that fancy book-larnin'. Just grab a beer buddy, give him a knife and tell him to use his common sense.

Flapdoodle like “The mess in Washington!,” “More bang for the buck!” Those are among the empty slogans screenwriter Budd Schulberg suggested could be used to easily fool ignorant Americans into voting for people who intended to harm them.

In 1957.

You see, self-destructive, willful ignorance is a venerable American tradition. In America, fact-free, flag-waving, cross-swinging, education-hating, xenophobic fatuousness is always the first refuge of a scoundrel, and of the fools who follow him — or, in Palin's and Bachmann's case, her.