“Didn’t the government do anything?”

“What government?  The central principles of neo-conservatism, on the Cheney-Rumsfeld continuum from Ford through W, seemed to be that free markets can absorb and correct for everything, including the worst aspects of human behavior—ignorance, hubris, and naked greed, thousands of years of human experience to the contrary.  Government’s role is restricted to protect them from interference.  Unlike their Republican forebears, the latter-day Bushies seemed to be so hypnotized by their own beliefs that they didn’t know how to govern, so they had nothing when Ayn Rand shrugged.”

“Who’s Ayn Rand?  Was she in the cabinet?”

Noam stared at David.  “I’ll ignore that.  At the time, there were enough gray heads around to realize that there are worse things than losing an election.  The consequences of market behavior not seen since 1929 left no room for argument.  The wagons got circled and an infusion of $1.3 trillion occurred before Obama was sworn in.  That amount just about equaled the debt Bush II had run up in eight years.”

“After that, Obama just blew it, then?”

“Hardly,” Simon said.  “Wasn’t given much of a chance.  Oh, he pulled the best and brightest together; set about to restore credibility in the world community; worked his new Congressional majority; leveled with the American people.  All the furniture was in place pretty quickly, but the criticism began almost before he took the oath.”

“Criticism?  From whom?”

“Unlike post-Clinton, after the bailouts finance and industry could absorb only so many pink-slipped neo-cons, especially with the feds overseeing them.  Public service was out and academia never paid well for them outside of development, so the best remaining option for them was media.  A half dozen multinational corporations owned every means of public expression.  Alliances with liked-minded owners and managers were already strong, after all, so it was a short step to the largest disinformation campaign ever undertaken.  Everything President Obama did or attempted to do was subtly distorted and filtered through lenses of race, or inexperience, or ineptitude.  Simultaneously, Governor Palin—“

“She ran against Obama with McCain, right?”

Antoinette snorted.  “Two dozen years after Geraldine Ferraro was nominated they threw up an inexperienced, ill-prepared woman against an intelligent Black man.  Most cynical stunt in American political history, in my opinion.”

“Well—why?”

Antoinette’s eyes were lasers.  “For them to assume female voters were that transparent and that she was an acceptable substitute if McCain bought it.”  She shook her head.  “Cheney and that bunch clearly didn’t spend any time talking to their daughters.”

“No argument,” Noam said.  “Though she quit her governorship mid-term, right after the election, Palin was resuscitated, re-groomed, and installed as a celebrity.  From then on, her every move was magnified; by inference and innuendo she was everything he wasn’t.  They didn’t make the same mistakes.  She was cocooned, rehearsed, and schooled.  Times remained tough enough that the Democrats lost over 60 seats at the next mid-term election, and another two-year campaign was on.”

“’T’was a thing of beauty,” Simon said.  “Once again, Rove & Company used fear and ignorance to manufacture a ‘political movement’ they christened the ‘Tea Party,’ a faction consisting mostly of angry, older White males, and installed her at the head of it.  It bordered on mass hypnosis.”

“Irony, anyone?” Antoinette interjected.

“See,” Noam said, “early in 2010, the Supreme Court decided the First Amendment right to make political contributions extended to corporations, so the neo-cons had hundreds of millions at their disposal to smear Obama and the Democrats, virtually at will.  Campaign reform died on November 2.”

Simon chortled.  “And—from the ridiculous to the sublime.  Guess who profited—literally—from all those toxic TV ads?”

David scratched.  “Uh…the media?”

Sean clapped David on the back.  “Correct—the Fourth Estate, Guardians of our Precious Freedoms!”

“Oh, there were glimmers of hope before the endgame,” Antoinette said.  “Obama opened multilateral diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East early—revived the Arab-Israeli ‘roadmap,’ for real.  Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton pieced together a political solution in Iraq, with back-channel help from Syria and Iran’s Shi’ite clerics.  They were making progress toward pacifying the Afghan frontier, to divide the Taliban and force Pakistan to disgorge bin Laden, at last.  Palin and Grover Norquist, self-styled ‘tax patriot,’ won another close, contested election and things went downhill quickly, once the old orthodoxy was back in place.”