"You just can't close the door on this crowd. The party that brought us the worst economy since the Great Depression, that led us into Iraq and the worst foreign policy disaster in American history, that would like to take a hammer to Social Security and a chisel to Medicare, is back in control of the House of Representatives with the expressed mission of undermining all things Obama.

Once we had Dick Cheney telling us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and belligerently asserting that deficits don't matter. We had Phil Gramm, Enron's favorite senator and John McCain's economic guru, blithely assuring us in 2008 that we were suffering from a "mental recession."

(Mr. Gramm was some piece of work. A champion of deregulation, he was disdainful of ordinary people. "We're the only nation in the world," he once said, "where all of our poor people are fat.")

Maybe the voters missed the entertainment value of the hard-hearted, compulsively destructive G.O.P. headliners. Maybe they viewed them the way audiences saw the larger-than-life villains in old-time melodramas. It must be something like that because it's awfully hard to miss the actual policies of a gang that almost wrecked the country.

" Full articlehere in the NYT.