Is Janet Daley ugly?

I only ask this question because the Telegraph's partly-housetrained attack dog has penned an article today under the headline "Is Gordon Brown insane?". She assures us the question is "not just vulgar abuse". Well, heaven forbid you should do anything vulgar, Janet. But if it's not abuse, then my question isn't either. (For what it's worth, the answers to the two questions are "no" and "yes", but not necessarily in that order).

Janet's outburst is fairly typical of the way that right wingers, both politicians and pundits, are reacting to the current economic malaise. Here in the UK, I have a hard time making sense of the Tories' economic policies. I find it hard to believe that they would really like to rerun all the policy mistakes of the 1930s. Mostly, though, I assume they're really just pushing a standard political counterfactual: "this would never have happened if we'd been in power". I have my doubts about that, but it's a legitimate argument.

If the Tories are mildly incoherent, over in the US the Republicans have gone clean through the foaming-at-the-mouth stage and are ready to be fitted with a straitjacket. Unlike the Tories, of course, they can't remotely claim that none of this is their fault. Given that even Alan ("don't blame me") Greenspan warned of looming problems as early as March 2007, Dubya and his pals had almost half of their second term to try to set things right.

In fairness, Bush himself, and some of his senior people, have explicitly stated that they owe Obama their silence while he tries to sort out the mess. However, most Republicans are unwilling to abide by any such self-denying ordinance, even before the end of the customary "first hundred days" honeymoon. It's impossible to tell what these morons would do if they were back in power, because they're not saying. Let AIG fail? Put GM and Chrysler into Ch 11? Cut welfare spending? Raise tariffs? Who knows.

The pundits of the right are leading the charge. Mark Steyn, for example, has gone completely over the edge, in the process even losing his customary wit. This week he declared that the Obama economy will be a "disaster for the entire world" -- this in response to the forced resignation of GM CEO Rick Wagoner. Well, I for one am prepared to admit that I don't know whether Barack Obama can run GM. But I'm absolutely certain that Rick Wagoner couldn't.