We are in the midst of an Alice in Wonderland electoral cycle filled with right wing nuts are GOP candidates spewing their proto-fascist, hate filled bigotry, while many of the Democrats are DINOs without even a hint of traditional Democratic Party populist, common good values.

Roger Bybee at Working In These Times captures the scene in his piece: "American 'Plutonomy' Drives Warped Electoral Season."

"The stakes of the November 2 mid-term elections are coming more sharply into focus.

"The plutocrats have unlimited money, they have a media machine devoted to their viewpoints, and they have a grassroots movement to camouflage their ultimate agenda of domination of the economy. Stopping a Republican takeover of either or both houses is crucial to lifting our economy out of recession and preventing the further distortion of our economy through the expansion of the parasitic financial sector.  

"It's a surreal and disturbing tableau: While Tea Party activists wave banners about "smaller government," America's CEOs have not lost interest in the privileges and profits that can be extracted from the Big Government that they supposedly hate so much.

"Major corporations recognize that the federal government remains an indispensable source of both critical legal protections and vast treasure chests of plunder.

"For Corporate Amercia, "Big Government" means huge federal contracts (no-bid in the case of favored outfits like Halliburton and Blackwater), massive subsidies, tax breaks, investment guarantees, low-cost oil and mineral leases, and of course, the "too big to fail" doctrine....

"Essentially, we are seeing a variation of the Right's strategy so memorably described in Thomas Frank's What’s the Matter With Kansas? In the 1990s, the Right used "election-season" issues--in the 1990's, social issues like guns, gays, and God to solicit votes that were translated into a mandate for expanded corporate power.

"Currently, the pitch is more economic than moral: "smaller government" and "lower taxes" promote a concealed agenda of not shrinking government, but instead full exploiting it to enrich corporations and the top 1%.

"This strategy remains effective because the leading Democrats won't tackle the fundamental problem of corporate power, which raises the moral and emotional dimensions necessary to ignite a real progressive movement.

"The Democrats' reticence about challenging corporate power has meant neglecting the urgent needs of its long-suffering base, and we can no longer play along."

And in that vein, Scott Horton at Harper's asks Roger D. Hodge, author of a new definitive critique of the Obama presidency from the left, The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism, six questions about his book such as the following:

1. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs recently derided liberal critics of the Obama Administration as the “professional left.” Was he talking about you? What do you make of this line of attack?

"I’m not sure Gibbs has a coherent idea of what he means by the “left,” but if opposition to permanent war, extrajudicial assassination of American citizens, boundless state secrecy, and unlimited corporate bailouts constitutes “leftism,” then so be it. True to their Clintonian principles, President Obama and his advisors have spurned the Democratic Party’s liberal base and have sought to govern by appropriating the policies of the Republican right. Just as Bill Clinton enacted NAFTA and destroyed welfare, Barack Obama has pushed through a health-care program that was inspired by the Heritage Foundation and largely written by the insurance lobby—and he shows every sign of being willing to vandalize Social Security in the name of deficit reduction even though the program has nothing to do with the federal budget deficit. Obama has embraced the Bushite war on terror and has refused to roll back the unconstitutional executive usurpations that so outraged his supporters. And yet Democrats expect liberals to toe the line and shut the hell up lest the Republicans take advantage of their dissent. In fact, for the most part, the “professional left” of policy intellectuals, public interest advocates, and opinion journalists have done just that.

"What’s fascinating about the Democrats is how consistently they have squandered enormous political advantages. The party’s leaders have apparently internalized Republican propaganda to the point that they feel they do not deserve to rule; consequently, when Democrats come to power, they always negotiate with themselves prior to meeting their opponents, make the tough-minded decision to betray their most loyal supporters, and profess shock and anger when the GOP—which never makes the mistake of publicly spurning its base—refuses to accept the purported bipartisan compromise. What results, of course, is that the Democratic Party, over and over again, enacts some version of the Republican agenda."