THE CORPSE OF OUR DEAD LEADER WILL SAVE US!

How pitiful are right-wingers on this day? Here's Jeffrey Lord of The American Spectator hoping to rally the troops by imagining an inaugural address delivered today by -- yes -- Ronald Reagan from beyond the grave:

... There is, it turns out, a heavenly White House. Roomier than the one at 1600 Pennsylvania, it is built to accommodate former presidents who have left the proverbial mortal coil behind....

To the irritation of some and the amusement of others, former President Reagan was concerned enough about the direction of current events to pen what some of his peers began referring to ... as "Reagan's Third Inaugural Address." ... Not surprisingly, someone got a hold of a copy and leaked it to the media down here.....

The "speech" itself is the same old rant against corrupt big-government appeasenik Democrats, put in the mouth of a corpse.

It compares the New Deal to slavery:

...2009 is not 1933. We must be candid that retreating to the provably failed big government answers of eight decades ago is no more of an advance than summoning forth the philosophy that once insisted slavery was both an American value as well as a constitutional right.

It blames the breaching of the levees in New Orleans on Democrats in the local government (Army Corps of Engineers? What Army Corps of Engineers?):

It is still remarkable to me that yet another governmental disaster that was Hurricane Katrina seems not to have caused any wonder at all about the situation the good citizens of New Orleans found themselves in before the hurricane -- a situation that involved a city run completely by liberal big government principles even as those principles shortchanged residents with everything from bad schools to bad housing to, tragically, abysmally bad levees that were supposed to protect the people.

It invokes the Smoot-Hawley tariffs -- twice. It describes the Dred Scott decision as "big intrusive government," as if slavery was somehow an add-on to the Constitution. And it declares that "the tide of history is -- yes, even to this day -- moving in the direction of conservatism."

This is how righties buck themselves up: one of them volunteers to don a turns and conduct a sad, pathetic seance, and the others weep at what they've lost. This is all they've got.