That’s what Bush and the Republicans seem to be testing these days. A good deal of the equation lies with how good your publicity is. If you have a really good hard sell, if the opposition party fails to make a big deal about opposing you and showing up your faults, if the media is on your side or is otherwise disinterested, and if you carry out most of your screw-the-people legislation just after elections so a few years pass before people can vote their anger, then the answer seems to be that you can screw the people pretty damned royally and still get away with it. It also helps to be able to have a terrorist attack or foreign war going on while you wave the flag and say that any criticism against you is actually a vicious, seditious attack against the troops, America, and apple pie faux-morality.

But even now, Congressional Republicans must be in the early stages of looking really closely at the grape Kool-aid that Bush is serving them, and wondering what exactly is it laced with. Even the Bush Administration, at full steam and volume, is not winning over the people on the Social Security plan. Too many people have heard of the trillions we’ll go into debt, about the inevitability of cutting benefits, and (gasp) of the fact that SS could be saved by simply eliminating the tax cap that keeps wealthy people from paying into the system.

But we can’t have that. I mean, really–tax the rich? Get real! Certainly the government hasn’t been doing anything close to that for the past four years–quite the opposite, in fact. Taxes have shifted increasingly on the poor and the middle class, and far, far less on the wealthy. Almost every other way outside of taxes which can balance the nation’s wealth has also shifted for the rich and against everyone else, from slashed local budgets for services that the poor and middle class depend on, to financial law which allows wealthy people to shift money out of the country to avoid tax liability altogether.

And then there’s the bankruptcy bill that seems destined to pass, a bill that will utterly crush middle-American families whose savings are wiped out by medical emergencies or by divorce, forcing them to become virtual peons to credit card companies. The administration claims that there are provisions to shield against such cases, but like so many other “feel good” programs that Bush & Co. claim mitigate their draconian anti-non-rich policy, it is without any funding at all, and people who are bankrupt will of course be unable to pay for it. (The only saving grace for the right wing on this is that corruption in general is lending a strong hand in getting it done–enough Democrats have been bought off in addition to all the Republicans to get the votes, and Clinton is no longer on hand to veto the mess like he did before.)

Meanwhile, the same bankruptcy bill, while forcing the poor and middle class into lifelong servitude to credit institutions, at the same time–almost incomprehensibly–allows rich people to avoid paying off debts even more than they are repulsively able to do at present, via shelters and other high-end loopholes. While Republicans are claiming that “This bill is about fairness and accountability,” they are at the same time failing to include any provision in the bill that would hold rich people accountable–in fact, the bill makes it easier to shelter personal wealth from bankruptcy, such as by investing in real estate.

This bill has been called “a law without a constituency,” meaning that it works against the majority of the people–but then again, what’s new? I’m almost to the point of becoming cold-hearted and saying to myself, if the people are so stupid as to elect these people to office, then they deserve to get screwed. But the fact is, these politicians win by 51% of the vote, often by cheating, always by lying; too many Americans are smart and honest but are screwed by that foolish slim majority.

But even that slim majority of fools is starting to sit up and take notice: faced with a government which is stealing its money, burning its future and running off with the bank, maybe enough will begin to miss the days when there was a party that gave a good goddamn about them. Or maybe they’re more foolish than I give them credit for; after all, we practically have legalized loan-sharking as it is, and I wonder how far off debtor’s prisons are, and whether or not that would start changing minds.

And by the way, it wouldn’t hurt for the Democrats in office to actually give them something to vote for.