That is the real similarity between the Obama team and the Nixon administration. In the 1970s, a paranoid president’s convinction that his enemies were out to get him and that their opposition was a threat to national security informed the decisions of his underlings. The ends justified the means. Now, a prickly president convinced of his own messianic quality and surrounded by sycophants decries his opponents as operating out of ill will. His underlings get the point.
It is not a coincidence that the few dead-enders in the lefty blogosphere and punditocracy still defending the president embody the same ethos as the president. Republicans are liars, entirely responsible for all that goes wrong, out to wreck the economy and racists, they would have us believe. Obama set the tone, but they amplified it, encouraged it and dutifully took down the White House talking points. Had they not been so passive and eager to enable the White House, some in the administration might have internalized a sense of limits. Instead, they got nothing but encouragement.
In the delusion that Rubin lives in, Obama is is mere yards from being thrown out of office by a groundswell of tens of millions (the same groundswell that failed to materialize and elect Mitt Romney, by the way) and that ironclad fact means anyone who disagrees with her is a "dead-ender", sure to be swept away in the tide of Revolution For Make Glorious Benefit Nation Of Teabagistan.
We all should be laughing at her, of course. But keep an eye on the "progressive left" who think she's right. She knows who her audience is.
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