In light of the recent election I’m really glad that there’s a movie out now about the Valerie Plame scandal. You remember her, Plame and her husband are the people who, from their mid-level intelligence positions, dared to report that there was no sign of WMD’s in Iraq and no indication that Saddam Hussein was making any great effort to obtain any. But higher-ups in the Bush regime had no great respect for reality, which had a way of contradicting their policies, based, not unlike those of contemporary Republicans, on faith based conservative dogma, gaining popular traction through sanctimonious appeals to emotion and prejudice rather than any sense of logic or pragmatism. The strong fundamentalist beliefs of conservatives evidently allow them to conflate their interests with god’s, believing that the almighty will somehow alter reality to conform with their self-serving world view.

The Bush regime’s reaction to anyone who asserted contradictory facts in the face of their fantasies was to employ the usual Rove/Atwater arsenal of spin, smear and big lie. This crap is often effective in the court of public opinion, which is not especially amenable to reality either. The only problem for them was that war is a rather stern reality check. There simply were no WMD’s in Iraq and the people of Iraq failed to be properly receptive to conservative think tank truisms about free enterprise and the wonderful benefits of the lack of an effective central government. Whatever the end result, it will be far darker and more costly than the rosy hued mirage summoned by Bush and company.

Although public perception is more in play when it comes to the economy, reality is a cold arbiter there, too. Bush’s magic mantra for economic success was cutting taxes and easing regulations, and we know how that turned out. Now the American public (or a majority of the small fraction that voted, anyway) dissatisfied with the pace of economic recovery (which would have been greater without Republican obstructionism), have, like consumers wanting to clean things up better and faster, switched back to brand GOP. The problem is that these new and improved Republicans (Now containing Tea Party!) are using the same failed formula of lower taxes/less regulation that caused the mess in the first place. It’s a product that, like the Iraq war, simply won’t work, now matter how energetically Fox News advertises and peddles it, and now that the Republicans will have to step up rather than foot drag, the cold hand of reality will eventually unmask them as the incompetent blowhards they are. You only have to wonder how many times the American people will allow this act to painfully bomb before they boo them off stage for longer than an election cycle.