Another Dose of Digby

She is - perhaps by far - the smartest political analyst in the liberal blogosphere for my money. In the last several years, I've basically never seen her make a mistake. Hell, at this point I don't know if she even has critics, and all the big names in the liberal blogosphere have critics. Anyway, this struck my eye:

Hey, you can't really blame people overseas for thinking this way. I doubt that anyone overseas has been any more impressed with their commitment to democracy than I have since they launched it directly after stealing an election at home and telling everyone who raised the slightest protest to go cheney themselves. There may be people in the world less credible on the issue of democracy, but I can't think of any who have made such a fetish of insisting that other countries do as they say but not as they do.

Furthermore, the Bush administration has such a reputation for lying and incompetence, the smart bet is to do exactly the opposite of what they prescribe in any situation. You can't go wrong assuming that if they want something it's for self-serving reasons and that if they get what they want, they will screw it up so badly that even if it were well-intentioned it would come out badly anyway.

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This is going to be a big problem for the US for a long time to come. People may recognize that Bush and Cheney are somewhat unique cases, but they also know that the bipartisan political establishment pretty much backed everything he did. It makes it very hard to argue that anyone else will be substantially different.

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No matter what a new administration does, the single most important rhetorical tool they must employ is Bush bashing. And I mean that seriously. Our credibility around the world is moribund until the US government repudiates George W. Cheney.

There's a radicalness to her critique of the U.S. political system in there, and that radical critique - which is of the structural (as opposed to people-based) nature of the problems in Washington, D.C. - didn't really exist in the mainstream before the liberal blogosphere came along.

The big liberal bloggers and their hordes of commenters, co-bloggers and readers want to love America so bad, but the more they've learned, the more they - as an overly broad generalization - realize how deep and nasty the structural problems are.

It's enough to make my cynical black heart laugh.