As we begin a near-seven month nightmare — the 2012 elections — the US of A has become one vast holding pen of pure bullshit, creating an ironic, near-mockery of American democracy.

Not only is the political discourse so freakin’ stupid, sometimes just a pain to watch, but the distortion of so much data is beyond mind bending — and the nasty, self-centered lying coming from the right side of the political mind-set is so staggering, one couldn’t have imagined it even a decade ago.

If fact, events are so saturated with shit, last week the Republican dominated US House passed the Mark Twain Commemorative Coin Act, a move that would surely make Twain scream once again, this time from the grave: “There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.”

Maybe with all that irony in his diet, John ‘The Boner‘ Boehner will have the energy to pitch another hysterical, and completely phony, temper tantrum.

(Illustration found here).

Flying clods of bullshit can be deadly, especially if one ain’t payin’ attention, and even when struck squarely in the face with a big wad of dookie (not to be anywhere-near confused with Dookie), a lot of people are either shocked out of their minds, or really didn’t feel the impact.
Ignorance without humility is most-terrifying, but arrogance born of ignorance is pant-shitting horror.

And even worse are the assholes.
Just yesterday, a well-known total quack, blubbered that Mitt Romney, who’s always called for the US auto industry to go bankrupt and has stood on that point for years, now reveals President Obama’s car-builders’ bailout was actually a Romney idea.
Via Crooks and Liars:

“[Romney’s] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed.
I know it infuriates them to hear that,” Eric Fehrnstrom, senior adviser to the Romney campaign, said.
“The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice.”

Lying because assholes just don’t care, though, some call it being cynical — Karoli at C&L is more-then right on: ‘This is the cynical Romney campaign at it’s lying-est best.’

And a most-glaring example of the ‘don’t-give-a-shit‘ dysfunction at the heart of this country — nearly all of the disinformation, distorted-delusional data and bullshit has originated from the Republican party, the GOP, postulating the verbiage onto the nowadays: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
Of course, Democrats are assholes, too, but absolutely nowhere-near the asshole level of Republicans.
And for reasons I can’t fathom, Democrats can also act like spineless, little turds — and although Obama is hovering near a failed presidency, he’s also nowhere-near an asshole like George Jr.
Obama’s heritage/legacy is that he’s by far the most-disappointing president in US history.

On the posture of the ugliness of the GOP, the MSM appears to have at least allowed some discourse on the subject.
A piece Friday in the Washington Post by Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and titled ‘Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are The Problem,’ narrates the plot point, but in ho-hum, MSM fashion — they never come out say these guys are really just a bunch of f*cking assholes, they try to be nice about it.
The commentary should have been written by a Matt Taibbi or a Hunter Thompson — way-more interesting and readable.

Nevertheless, Mann and Ornstein do paint the picture — a few snips:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional.
In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted.
Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics.
It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
…
In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.
On financial stabilization and economic recovery, on deficits and debt, on climate change and health-care reform, Republicans have been the force behind the widening ideological gaps and the strategic use of partisanship.
In the presidential campaign and in Congress, GOP leaders have embraced fanciful policies on taxes and spending, kowtowing to their party’s most strident voices.

And in the slosh of last night’s ‘Nerd Prom,’ Mann and Ornstein also slapped at the MSM:

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views.
Which politician is telling the truth?
Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?

Of course, a lot of the shit belched out by the GOP is tolerated by the MSM, or The Villagers, as they’re sometimes called in DC and let a lot of bad stuff slide.
The authors surmise the reason behind this GOP ‘problem‘ as a building factor, starting maybe way back with Roe v. Wade, Prop 13 in 1978 California, and more recently, the rise of hard-right news organizations, yep, Fox News.
Even the actions/policies of just two small turds — Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist — were also cited as reasons behind the bat-shit crazy antics spun into the current GOP ‘problem.’

However, all this ugly didn’t really see the light of day until the 2008 presidential campaign and the arrival of Sarah Palin — all the shit finally had a conduit.
All the ignorant dumb-asses finally had a spokesperson, and even appearing from the get-go as obviously uninformed, but also carrying a simmering mean streak, Palin seemed to reflect that underbelly of US peoples who live off delusion.
And in one of those terrible quirks of historical coincidence, the Tea Party movement appeared to suck Palin’s ignorance right down to the bottom of the glass, and then continued to suck even harder.
Couple that shit with Fox News, and, presto!
Instant bullshit, and tons and tons of it — and the rest is bad-stomach history.

All with startling ferocious array in October 2008: “This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.”
Apparently, Palin didn’t even pay attention or even care for her source material for that statement — it was lunacy at best, and just an out-right, manipulated lie at worse.
Either, it’s a bitch.

And then the obvious biggie — “death panels” for President Obama’s health care plan, coined via her Facebook page in August 2009 — and called by fact-checkers at Polififact as the “Lie of the Year.”
Ms Palin’s response: “The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally.”

This opened the door to similar Republican bullshit-tossing, becoming a forerunner of sorts — we all remember about this time last year when slip-knot, jerk-ass Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) slobbered out that abortions were “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”
Kyle’s office then tried to trot it back, claiming Kyle’s crap was not spoken to be taken literally: “his remark was not intended to be a factual statement…” and no matter.
And Rick Santorum in February just shit on the Dutch and their euthanasia laws — inflating, exaggerating, creating an impression of a nightmare land where a fairly-good sized portion of Netherlands people are ‘involuntarily‘ euthanized every year.
Despite evidence to the contrary and creating a small shit-storm in the Netherlands, facts or anything else literally doesn’t matter, Rick was just being himself.
Santorum press secretary Alice Stewart when confronted by Dutch TV: “It’s a matter of what’s in his heart. He’s a strong pro-life person.”
Just say anything you want to, just don’t take it as literal reality — the truth is they’re lying.

These people can’t stand up under any kind of scrutiny — Sarah Palin has had only one real press conference, shortly after the 2008 election and: It was a mess.
The interview with Katie Couric a disaster — revealed too much silly, easily-spouted bullshit.
The face of Palin is Facebook.
(An aside: What about social media? Played a major part four years ago — and how about a Facebook election? People voting online — PCMag reveals possible possibilities).

Palin as a runner-up in Time‘s Person of the Year 2008 — although the rag figured it was an achievement, but way-not the way they intended.
Indeed, if Palin was anywhere near Person of the Year, the ensuing time has ironically posed this as reality:

Hardly anyone saw Palin coming.
The newspapers had to tell readers how to pronounce her name.
The culture war had gone quiet but had not gone away: conservatives had been searching for a soul mate for ages, and it sure wasn’t John McCain; the left was primed for a fight that Barack Obama seemed unwilling to wage.
Women, meanwhile, were wondering what comes next: if Hillary Clinton, the wonky workaholic with her legions of fans, could not capture the White House flag, who was next in line?
Palin broke it all open, even before she headed out to conquer what she termed the “pro-America parts” of America.
She arrived at the bonfire with the tinder stacked high, and somehow it fell to her to be the match.

Among a select cast of runners-up to the 2008 Person of the Year (Barack Obama) — Hank Paulson, Nicolas Sarkozy, Zhang Yimou — Palin has remained about the same — an ignorant loud mouth.
From The Dish in September 2008 and a record already public on Palin lying:

I know the MSM demands that we move on from the fact that someone who could be president next January has a list of public lies so extensive and indisputable that the McCain campaign has still not been able to rebut or even address any one of them, while fencing her off from the press and refusing to hold a press conference to clear the air on so many murky questions of fact that get to the core of whether this person is fit to be vice-president or president.

Read the post which has links to all the lying bullshit.

Despite the obvious, Palin can still wring shit out of nothing.
Last week, she once again took to Facebook and literally distorted a proposed Department of Labor regulation on child labor laws on farms, typing ferociously “if you think the government’s new regs will stop at family farms, think again.”
Another factoid lie: The plan specifically excluded children who work on farms owned or operated by their parents.
Despite reality, the Labor Department nixed the plan late last Thursday after a campaign by a shitload of GOP-influenced assholes (not just Palin) caused a minor political stir in an ugly election year, thus the Obama administration caved.
Not a pretty result, however.
Via HuffPost quoting Norma Flores Lopez, a child farm workers’ advocate at the nonprofit Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs:

“We felt that these were commonsense protections that maintained the traditions of family farms and would have saved many kids’ lives.
We’re sad about it,” said Lopez, who herself was a migrant worker as a child.
“All the misinformation being put out there was really misrepresenting what these rules were.
The benefits were overshadowed.
The ones who will be paying for that is kids.”

Politics is politics, however.
Last night, Obama in his sometimes funny remarks at the Nerd Prom also chided Ms Palin and the distorted gossip-news she winks about and proclaims as truth: “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” Obama asked. “A pit bull is delicious.”

No wonder trust in the so-called ‘press’ has plummeted.

Georgetown political scientist Jonathan Ladd at The Monkey Cage (h/t The Dish):

Party polarization has raised the stakes in elections.
And polarization combined with the growth of partisan media options has created an incentive for party leaders and activists to discredit the mainstream media among their supporters.
Party leaders convince their partisans in the mass public to resist informative messages from the mainstream media and ideologically hostile outlets, and instead rely more on ideologically friendly new outlets.
In doing this, they can help to inoculate their supporters against voting for the other side. Polarization created the incentive for political media criticism, but the changing media industry created the opportunity for it to be effective because there were so many non-mainstream media outlets providing alternative messages.

The GOP has gotten good at that shit, and a consequence is delusion, an attribute Republicans seek: A variety of evidence suggests that those who distrust the media are more resistant to new messages about the state of the country, instead relying on their prior beliefs and partisanship to form their current perceptions.

Boy, are we in a fix.