From the BBC (of course — this topic is beyond the scope of the U.S. media), here, finally, is an explanation of the underlying cause of the rise of the tea bagger movement and the concomitant decline of Americans’ standard of living — it’s stories, not facts, that influence voters:

If people vote against their own interests, it is not because they do not understand what is in their interest or have not yet had it properly explained to them.

They do it because they resent having their interests decided for them by politicians who think they know best.

There is nothing voters hate more than having things explained to them as though they were idiots.

As the saying goes, in politics, when you are explaining, you are losing. And that makes anything as complex or as messy as healthcare reform a very hard sell…

In his book “The Political Brain,” psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side.

He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:

Gore: “Under the governor’s plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he’s modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries.”

Bush: “Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers.

“I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It’s fuzzy math. It’s trying to scare people in the voting booth.”

Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense – but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: “One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.

“Obama’s administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans’ Depression, caused by the Bush administration’s ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him.”

So:

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channeling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America’s poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Or, as Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” put it, “It’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.”

The effects of this puppet mastery by the Republican elite are plain to see. Simply ignore their anti-intellectual, psuedo-patriotic jingoism and instead look at the record of what they did during the Bush years when they controlled the White House, the Congress and the Judiciary:

• From Bloomberg News, exactly one year ago, Rich got richer as their tax rates fell in Bush years, data show:
  

  The average tax rate paid by the richest 400 Americans fell by a third to 17.2 percent through the first six years of the Bush administration, and their average income doubled to $263.3 million, new data show. The 17.2 percent in 2006 was the lowest since the Internal Revenue Service began tracking the 400 largest taxpayers in 1992, although they paid more tax on an inflation-adjusted basis than for any year since 2000.

• Not surprisingly, this led to the shrinking of the American middle class.
• And a deterioration in the standard of living for the lower middle-class and the poor:
  

  On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush’s two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country’s condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton’s two terms, often substantially.

• They dismantled or defanged government agencies charged with regulated industries and corporations:
  

  Virtually every week since he took office, the Bush administration has made or proposed changes in our laws designed to help the rich and powerful while harming the most vulnerable people in society and putting the middle class at greater economic risk. The list of horrors can be so numbing that one can lose sight of the cumulative impact of these actions. Taken together, they add up to the most direct assault on working people, the environment and the poor that the country has seen since the presidency of William McKinley over a century ago.

• Government operations were outsourced to private corporations like never before, creating a fourth branch of government that is accountable to no one:
  

  Without a public debate or formal policy decision, contractors have become a virtual fourth branch of government. On the rise for decades, spending on federal contracts has soared during the Bush administration, to about $400 billion last year from $207 billion in 2000, fueled by the war in Iraq, domestic security and Hurricane Katrina, but also by a philosophy that encourages outsourcing almost everything government does.

The takeaway from this is that the true central organizing objective of the Republican Party is not governing, it is simply a quest for power. Their objective in gaining power — again, based on their record, not their rhetoric — is to hand the control of America’s blood and treasure over to their corporate masters.

Left to their own devices, Republicans would reconfigure the United States from the republic it is today, with its meager (and dwindling) form of representative government, into a Mexican style oligarchy, with a tiny, extremely wealthy over class; a minimal middle class — just as many lawyers, doctors and managers as are required to service the elite — and a sprawling, uneducated underclass — hundreds of millions of people — left to fend for themselves in garbage dumps.

The sublime paradox is that the only way the Republicans can achieve this end game is to convince the turkeys to vote for their own Thanksgiving Day slaughter — and on that score, they are winning.

Smoking Gun: John Edwards’s ex-mistress is seeking to suppress what appears to be a sex tape featuring her and the disgraced politician.

TNR: TSA officer to passenger: “Someone ought to do something about those machines–it’s like we don’t have any privacy in this country anymore!”

Chattahbox: Dale “Niggar” Robertson “photoshopped Obama with a pencil-thin mustache, wearing an oversized zebra-striped fedora trimmed with white fur, a garish purple band and a black feather.”

TNR: And would he be the only plausible Democrat to win the U.S. Senate seat?