Driftglass is Amazing I

None So Blind
3 Comments
Labels: Understanding The Right
Posted by driftglass
Wednesday, February 25, 2009

As those who get paid not to see.

Breaking: Andrew Sullivan discovers the Right is stinky with Crazy Bad People!

Again!

From his site:

“I've posted about [Alan] Keyes's remarks before but the full text of what he's saying is truly disturbing. He calls Obama an "abomination." He says that "we have to stop him" or the US will cease to exist. He says that the military should think about not obeying their commander-in-chief because he is not rightly the president of the United States. It seems important to me that responsible, leading members of the Republican party, if there are any left, need to disown these remarks. The consequences of letting them stand are quite disturbing."

Really?

Well while Alan Keyes is undoubtedly about one CD short of a David Lynch retrospective, he in also without office, platform or power. In fact as far as I can see, about all that's keeping "Alan Keyes: Conservative spokesman" from becoming "Alan Keyes: All-day-subway-rider-who-screams-at-strangers-about-fluoridation" are several nice suits and a stipend from whatever fascist "think tank" pays his room and board.

On the other hand, Tom DeLay spent years using very real power to inflict very real damage on the United States while Conservatives cheered him on, so how exactly are Keyes' ravings any worse than any of the million, sociopathic rants delivered by "The Hammer" over the last quarter century?

Or Newt Gingrich counseling Republicans everywhere to incant "Democrats are traitors" every time they got near a microphone?

Or endless headlines about Vince Foster's “murder”?

The drug-smuggling Clintons?

The mass-murdering Clintons?

Bill Clinton the depraved rapist?

The Right hunting a President like wild boar for seven years because he was "in the way"?

...
Richard Mellon Scaife is a billionaire contributor to the Republican Party and right-wing think tanks, one of the most influential men behind the right wing today. Scaife has helped establish their biggest institutions and supported some of their most radical ideas.

Scaife was a primary source of money used to fund attacks against Bill Clinton during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky eras of his presidency. He has also been known to purchase mass quantities of conservative books (especially those published by Regnery Press) to push them up the bestseller lists.

Among the right-wing organizations substantially funded by Scaife are the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Judicial Watch, Cato Institute and a working group within his American Spectator publication called the "Arkansas Project," whose specific aim was to locate and create dirt on the Clintons in order to smear them, in hopes of removing Clinton from office.

People for the American Way estimates that the Scaife Foundations have channeled in excess of $340 million to right-wing groups over the last thirty years, more than any other individual.
...


How is Keyes’ bloody rag-waving any different than a Conservative media that cheerfully fed its deranged base a steady diet of secret Liberal government plots and black helicopters ?

Any different than the leaders of the Conservative Movement who had no fucking qualms about playing footsie with neo-Nazis and militias scum right up until one of their Aryan heroes took literally the "irredeemably evil Liberal government" venom that was spewing out of the mouths of Hate Radio and House Republicans every single day...and decided to blow up a Federal building?

Conservatism in America was not somehow captured, cruelly tortured and then killed by that vile George Bush in 2003; Conservatism was born fucked up and in sin and has been an unholy alliance between plutocrats, fascists and fundies since it toddled out of the cradle and decided that George Wallace was a cultural hero to be emulated instead of a cultural cancer to be excised. And your so-called “responsible, leading members of the Republican party” have been dining lavishly out on scurrilous, Wallace-and-Keyes-style lynch-mob-goading language since I was in high school.

It is no longer productive to pretend a cavalry of responsible grownups from the Right is going to arrive and scold and shame people like Alan Keyes into shutting the fuck up. Keyes isn’t capable of shame and Keyes isn’t the problem: he is merely the latest high-profile ugly symptom of a disease that the Right -- your Right -- has always nurtured and cultivated.

On the other hand, responsible grownups on the Left have already wasted decades of time and energy and money and adjectives trying to warn people like you about people like Keyes and the calamitous arc your movement was following by embracing people like Keyes. Because, Mr. Sullivan, your movement has always been built around pandering to lunatics like Keyes.

So we warned you.

And warned you.

Holy Fucking Venus on a Vespa, did we ever warn you.

And now we’re all rather hoarse and worn out from trying to shout past Limbaugh and Falwell and Reed and Robertson and Weyrich and Bauer and Schlafly for the last two decades to get through to you.

I know we’re not your audience, but you should know that while I personally think its great that you’re finally mastering political A-B-C’s and fractions and all, we on the Left got tired of waiting for people you to stop circle-jerking with bigots and monsters wearing dime-store Maggie Thatcher masks a long time ago.

A very, very long time ago.

Long enough that we now find your eager and evergreen astonishment each time you re-discover that the Right is being run by madmen to be tantamount to a 45-year-old man bragging that he’s aaaaalmost figured out how to use the Big Boy potty without making boom-boom on the walls.

So quit waiting for whatever crusading watchdogs in the press or in positions of power on the Right to come thundering over the horizon in the final reel: any such creatures are either long since hollowed out, sold out, dead, or never existed in the first place.

Instead, if you really want to do a public service, stop yelping about why Keyes is still allowed to flap him gums, and start answering the really interesting question.

To wit:
“What exactly is so deeply broken in people like Andrew Sullivan that they can delude themselves so long, so passionately, so disastrously and so self-destructively about the real nature a movement which, in the end, was never more than a cult of angry, paranoid rubes, well-funded demagogues and rapacious plutocrats?

Driftglass is Amazing II

In which Andrew Sullivan is shocked to find that Republicans used their years running the country to wreck the country.

Sigh.

From his site (with emphasis added by me):


...
It is good to see the GOP pretending to be fiscally conservative again, but could any of them - just one or two apart from Ron Paul - concede that Bush and Cheney are the ones responsible for our current fiscal nightmare? They drove us so deep into the ditch that we have almost no fiscal lee-way to counter the kind of crisis they stumbled into at the end of their term. If we had retaied the fiscal health of the Clinton-Gingrich years into the new millennium, our range of possible actions right now would be far less dire.



Except since the beginning of time, the essence of politics has always been about deliberately depriving the opposition of as much choice and range of motion as possible. About deliberately forcing them down the path of your choosing by eliminating every other alternative.

How do you not know that?

For example, for the longest time Neoconservatives wanted to extend the American Empire into the heart of Middle East. So they used the crisis of 9/11 to gin up a pack of lies, roll 150,000 troops into Iraq, blow that country to atoms, fuel anti-American rage and terrorism where in never existed before, and then argued with a straight face that we could never leave Iraq….because of how fucked up everything was.

Or do you dirty terrorist-lovers want America to lose?!?

The whole object of the war was to strand us there; to arrange events so that no one could ever even whisper that maybe we should extricate ourselves from the Bush Clusterfuck without paying a fearful price. By mercilessly playing on the public's deepest fears and the Right's love of killing scary brown people, the Bush Administration would pitilessly cauterize every option except the never-ending occupation of Iraq and -- Bingo! -- the Neocons would have their Empire.

For decades, Conservative have also been equally open and clear about wanting to smash the federal government and replace it with an unfettered, unregulated corporate feudal state. Because Gummint is Evil, Evil, Evil! So Conservatives rolled the Bush Administration into D.C. with all its ruthless, calculated bumpkinism like a political IED and detonated it. And Conservatives cheered as their Decider smashed and bankrupted every bit of government he could lay his hands on…applauded as he hog-slaughtered the “fiscal health” of its predecessor without a backwards glance…and now fanatically oppose any action to address out economic crisis that does not begin and end with more tax cuts.

Because Conservatives HATE the government. Or don’t you remember?

Jesus, man, it was in all the papers. For years and years and years. C’mon and work with me here.

Unbridled loathing? “Booga-Booga; the Liberal Gummint is out to get you”? Hulk Smash? Starve the beast? Drown it in the tub?

On every radio and every teevee?

Ring any bells?

The text or subtext of a billion tons of Conservative direct mail campaigns?

The first paragraph of every Conservative phone-banking effort?

Ten seconds of every thirty-second Republican campaign ad?

The thesis statement of every wingnut begging letter and fundraiser?

The fucking Guanine and Adenine in your fucking political DNA?

And since hating government (in its Evil Liberal puppet masters) is THE central organizing principle of the Conservative Movement, how can it possibly surprise you that, as Iraq follows 9/11, Conservative policies and politicians have brought us to this moment.

That however many lies it may require and however much pain it may inflict on the public, Conservatives see economic collapse in America as a good thing. A righteous cleansing and path back to power. As their golden opportunity to finally, once-and-for-all curb-stomp the Evil Socialist Gummint into oblivion.

What comes after is a little unclear, but depending on which RSS feed you subscribe to, I believe we either get a 1,000 Year Randite Reich, or The Rapture.