What Would Bush Have Done?

Carpetbagger has a post called Still Taking BP's Side which highlights Nevada weirdo Sharron Angle's suggestion that the $20 billion trust fund BP set up is a "slush fund."  And Carpetbagger uses that to suggest that, as the title says, Republicans are still taking BP's side.

But I don't think that's the case regarding those who label it a slush fund.  Maybe that's the case for BP's congressmen, like Rep. Barton (R-BP), but Angle strikes me as one of the true believers: Someone who gets her news from talk radio and imagines Fox News to be a little too fair and balanced, in that they don't repeat enough of the conspiracy theories they get from radio and emails.  So in her case, I think this has more to do with her general distrust of Obama.

Obama as Bush

Now, imagine how you'd have felt if this had happened while Bush was in office and Bush met with the heads of BP and proudly announced that BP had agreed to aside $20 billion to handle claims.  You'd naturally have been suspicious. 

Because, most likely, this really WOULD be a political slush fund.  Bush would no doubt have put a political hack in charge of the fund, and while little guys would surely have gotten some dough; most of it would have gone to Bush cronies and to pump money into congressional districts they wanted to win.  And no matter how bad we thought this would be handled, we'd eventually find out that it was even more corrupt than we had imagined.  For example, the political hack would be getting kickbacks of every dollar he doled out, and taxpayers would ultimately have been the ones funding the whole thing, while BP expensed it on their tax return. 

Well, that's what they think about us.  That's what they're assuming Obama is doing.  They're not calling this a slush fund because they don't think BP should pay up.  They're calling it a slush fund because they think Obama is a political goon who only has his corrupt interests in mind, and that he's a smooth liar who's extremely good at hiding his true intentions.  And they "know" his true intentions, because of what they've picked up from talk radio and the emails they keep receiving from their crazy uncles.

Meet the Crazies

And that's what's going on here.  For crackpots like Angle, Obama is a Chicago-style thug who's doing all the stuff we saw Bush do.  And they think we're as blind as we thought they were when they didn't see what sort of guy Bush really was.  They see the same reality we see, but the context is different. 

And just as Obama's critics on the left bash him because they see everything in the context of him selling them out, just as they always "knew" he would; the crackpots on the right already "know" he's a corrupt thug, so that's how everything looks to them.  For both sides, it's just a matter of time before their suspicious are finally proven.  Until then, they'll consider all speculation to be stronger than fact.

And I now see that Angle has retracted her "slush fund" comment, realizing that it put her on the side of defending BP.  So now she's giving the bizarro postion that she supports the trust fund, but that we should have waited to determine everyone who was to blame for the spill; including the federal government for not stopping BP from breaking the rules.  And while that sounds a bit more like something a political consultant would write, it completely contradicts her "slush fund" remark and still doesn't sound very good.  It's like forbidding a murderer from pleading guilty because the cops failed to stop the murder in the first place.

And overall, this just demonstrates how dangerous the Tea Party movement is for Republicans, because these people are simply wacko.  And with Angle's recent comment suggesting that we make "lemonade" by forcing women to give birth to incest and rape babies, I think the GOP is going to increasingly regret ever hyping these fools in the first place.