Monday, December 31, 2007

"Leave Dubya Alone!"


Paul Krugman wonders why the hell this is still the face of the GOP.

From the NYT.

The Great Divide
By Paul Krugman

Yesterday The Times published a highly informative chart laying out the positions of the presidential candidates on major issues. It was, I’d argue, a useful reality check for those who believe that the next president can somehow usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation.

For what the chart made clear was the extent to which Democrats and Republicans live in separate moral and intellectual universes.

On one side, the Democrats are all promising to get out of Iraq and offering strongly progressive policies on taxes, health care and the environment. That’s understandable: the public hates the war, and public opinion seems to be running in a progressive direction.

What seems harder to understand is what’s happening on the other side — the degree to which almost all the Republicans have chosen to align themselves closely with the unpopular policies of an unpopular president. And I’m not just talking about their continuing enthusiasm for the Iraq war. The G.O.P. candidates are equally supportive of Bush economic policies.

...

And things seem likely to get worse as the election approaches.

...however, except for Mike Huckabee — a peculiar case who’ll deserve more discussion if he stays in contention — the leading Republican contenders have gone out of their way to assure voters that they will not deviate an inch from the Bush path. Why?

Because the G.O.P. is still controlled by a conservative movement that does not tolerate deviations from tax-cutting, free-market, greed-is-good orthodoxy.

...


Krugman knows better than this.

I mean, he gives a pretty good, family-newspaper answer -- but since he asked the question…

There are two years that hold the answer as to why so many Republicans are supporting this lying failure of a President and his criminal and criminally incompetent policies: 1998 and 2004.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was every single thing Republicans claim they want in a “bipartisan” Democrat:
1. Smart
2. Capable
3. A superb communicator
4. Fiscally disciplined
5. A surplus-maker
6. Willing to compromise on just about anything and – to the horror of his party’s most loyal supporters -- give away to the GOP win after win on NAFTA, GATT, Welfare Reform and a slew of other items on the GOP Lifetime Wish List.
7. Respected on the world stage.


And for his troubles the GOP didn’t simply hard fight him on the fair-and-square every fucking inch of the way. Oh no. Instead, their political and media Parti apparats crawled up his ass and ripped into his guts like Furies on a mean whiskey drunk.

Morning, noon and night.

Wartime or peacetime.

24/7/365.

Under the banners of DeLay, Gingrich, Limbaugh and Falwell, they rededicated themselves to Total Political War on everyone Left of Pat Buchanan, and redoubled their efforts to destroy!destroy!destroy! the other side.

At any cost.

Now to be clear, in the matter of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton handed his enemies a sword and thought he could clever his way out from under the blade. But let’s also be clear that Ms. Lewinsky – like the endless Whitewater fishing expedition, or Congressional hearings to comb through fucking Christmas card lists -- was never more than the available means at-hand to serve Conservative political ends that had been in forged long before Clinton got into the Oval Office.

Because to have a (D) in the White House – any (D), any time, for any reason – stands in the way of the Republican One Party Theocracy.

Based solely on his accomplishments as President – and Republican rhetoric about what a President should be and do -- if Clinton had simply had an (R) after his name instead of a (D), the GOP would be clearing space on Mount Rushmore for him.

But he didn’t, and for that reason and that reason alone he had to be annihilated.

At any cost.

And then these same people “elected” and then “re-elected” an Administration fronted by a mush-mouthed halfwit and powered by looters, liars, traitors, imbeciles, degenerates and Dominionists.

Why? And why, as Krugman asks, do these same people still scuttle along in lockstep with leaders and policies who have marched them right off of the cliff over and over again?

Because in the space of a generation, Conservatism has devolved from dodgy-but-defensible political philosophy to a Hobbsean, Lord of the Flies cult whose tenets no longer intersect reality at any point.

Whose cultists no longer bother to consult the world of cause and effect for validation of their views of Right and Wrong.

Who instead cower in a terrifying darkness of their own making and, by the light of the AM Hate Radio dial, measure success by their own, creepy doctrinal checklist.

This is a small example of how a Modern Conservative “thinks”:

Government destroyed? Check.
Everyone armed to the teeth? Check.
Neocon-approved hack put in charge? Check.
Every critical public service “privatized” to friendly contractors? Check.
Every vital national resource handed over to corporate overlords? Check.
Corporation-friendly tax structure installed? Check.


All of the above being true, Iraq must therefore be Wildly Successful.

QED.

And since Iraq is Wildly Successful, there cannot have been any looting.

There was no insurgency.

It was a cake walk.

A slam dunk.

Iraqis do not hate us.

There were no ethic tensions.

Everything will be great in six more months.

We’re turning the corner.

9/11…9/11…9/11.

And since Iraq is Wildly Successful, all who say otherwise must either hate ‘Murrica or be the stooges of those who hate ‘Murrica.

In the 1990s, these people reacted to four years of exactly the kind of cooperation and concession-granting they said they wanted by shrieking “Impeach the Mothefucker!” ever louder and louder and louder, because these people will never get past the atavistic hate and stupidity that decades of relentless wingnut propaganda with a Christopath chaser has burned into their skulls.

In the 2000s the same people looked at four years of hard evidence of incompetence and ruin and incipient fascism – of an Administration that had systematically eviscerated every canon of genuine Conservatism – and bellowed “More Please!” ever louder and louder and louder, because these people will never, ever, ever give up their dream of a tidy, White, Male, totalitarian Jesusland where the clock has been run back to a perfect, conformist 1951 that never was.

They are the mooching, lying Party Malfunctionaries that launch wars they have no intention of fighting in or paying for, and set standards for others that they themselves have no intention of meeting, and couldn’t if they spent the next thousand years trying to evolve opposable thumbs, respect for the Constitution and some detectable trace of a fucking conscience.

The endless "Get Out of Accountability Free" cards that Conservatives deal out to cover every one of the Bush Administration's atrocities is the final and irrefutable proof that they did never meant a single fucking syllable of all of those millions of fiery words of self-righteous rhetoric the expended during the Clinton Era.

That it was all lies. All theater for their fuckwad masses.

And through it all – all 15 years of it – these grotesque failures have coped with this overwhelming evidence of their own perfidy, hypocrisy and complicity in the ruin of this nation by smirking, lying and called the rest of the world deranged.

Whose idea of an action plan is to burn the world down to the stumps because…because… because…well...that’ll Show Those Damned Libruls!

And so, in the words of Steve Gilliard -- our immortal bard of Fighting Liberalism --

“It is time to stop looking for an accommodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?”

25 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oopsy!

Happy New Year!!!

Congrats on the Golden Monkeyfist Au Peer award. Gilly would be proud.

Mr. Natural said...

Thanks for the Steve Gilliard quote. Sometimes I run flat out of inspiration.

Anonymous said...

Happy fucking New Year's, Drifty. I knew I'd rather be here than anywhere else.

May 2008 be better than 2007. Though I doubt it.

But that's no reason not to try, eh?

-Marek

Phil said...

As you so subtly beat around the Bush explaining the sociopathic genetic mutation that hides behind Dobson's fur lined truss and bares its fangs in defiance of all that is good and decent, I am reminded that unfortunately, there are common laws against beating their brains out with a tire iron.

Clintons first mistake was believing for one fucking second they weren't going to do exactly what they did.
His second and subsequent mistakes were simply repetition of the first.
Now that we have had twenty plus years of the never ending loop of textbook criminal insanity, the Dems still have not learned from these mistakes.
It's like watching a slasher flick and screaming at the screen for the stupid blonde chick not to go in the basement .Yet every damn time she heads off into cinematic sausage making history.

Someone please change the fucking channel to a hockey game where I can at least HOPE a bench clearing brawl will break out and SOMEONE from the other team is going to get their nose broken.

Anonymous said...

Don't go in the basement!

Ivory Bill Woodpecker said...

Busted, the faction of the Dems who can't or won't learn aren't really Dems.

40, 30, even 20 years ago, those people would have been moderate Republicans in fact as well as at heart. The Democratic Party is their only home now because their natural party was taken over by Teh Cult that Drifty mentioned.

Anonymous said...

Thanks drifty.
Perfect capper on the year.
Have a good one.
(You too Steve, wherever you are)

Distributorcap said...

thanks for that post drift
may you and ALL of us have a better '08

except Chimpy, may he be a miserable wretch his whole life

Anonymous said...

Congrats on the Au Peer award!!
Great rant about the Clinton years. It seems to have been lost down the memory hole just how hypocritical and dangerously obnoxious these Rethug creeps are yet they are treated with oh so much respect and seriousness by the MSM.

You captured the essence of it perfectly.

Anonymous said...

Congrat's on getting 'Fisted Bruddah!!! Uhhh... that didn't come out right - oh well, you get my "drift". (*smile*)

Anonymous said...

Great one, Drifty! So many great sentences in there, but this is my favorite:

"They are the mooching, lying Party Malfunctionaries that launch wars they have no intention of fighting in or paying for, and set standards for others that they themselves have no intention of meeting, and couldn’t if they spent the next thousand years trying to evolve opposable thumbs, respect for the Constitution and some detectable trace of a fucking conscience."

Every time someone says that Obama is a great choice for the Democratic nomination because he will "build bridges" or "reach across the aisle", they should be forced to sit in the fucking corner by themselves and read this piece five times.

Anonymous said...

Driftglass and Prof - I agree. I'm sick of hearing Broderite pleas for bipartisanship.
If our Dems board that ship, they'll sink.

Anonymous said...

Congrats!! Well deserved Au Peer award!!! Thanks to monkeyfister for shining the light around.

This has been a "total war" for 30 years but, unlike Steve, so many on the left have been blind to it far too long. Excuses such as naivety and functioning under the false belief that civility combined with the truth will win the day are no longer valid.

Here is an early 1990s quote from the former top operative of the true father of today's conservatism. You can see him say it at this link:

"But is a total war. Basically war of ideas. War of mind, the battlefield is the human mind. This is where the battle is fought. So in this war the entire thing will be mobilized, political means, social means, economical means and propagandistic means, and basically trying to take over the other person's mind. That is what the third world war is all about — the war of ideology."

Again, you can see the former top operative of the true father of today's conservatism saying the above at this link

...and some people also still wonder why today's conservatism is "cult-like"....

asha said...

Thanks, Drifty. Great way to cap off the old year. I agree with every thing you wrote and, as usual, love the way you string words together.

While I also don't believe that lockstep Republicans are capable of facing (much less "compromising") with reality, having made many mistakes in my own life, I have come to believe that consequences cannot be bought off forever so something has got to give with this nonsense, be it global warming and environmental collapse, a depression, the rise of China or simply internal betrayals, back stabbing and total panic as moron Repukelickers finely get it, that they have been sodomized en masse by the GOP which is unraveling our democracy and long ago sold America into unwitting slavery or all of the above plus handfuls of other karmic delights long ready and waiting to go in the pot. But then there's always the possibility that mass hysteria will finally and throughly engulf 'merika and undo this country from the inside out, as the fundamentalists already hold a sizable portion of the dark age patriarchy and their women folk in hypnotic sway.

As for even a thorny, long range, hard won political solution? It's a new year and I chose to begin it with faith, confidence and resolve, to throw my shoulder to the wheel and do my infinitesimal part, break the silence, speak the truth as I see it, and support and vote for whoever manages to buy, bribe and crawl to the top of the steaming heap in order that, in my wild dreaming, collectively we will create an articulate, successful global resistance to the subversive cancerous fascist corporatocracy even now carving up the world for its own lewd consumption although I suspect that, in our heart of hearts, many of us hope out that we won't have to actually do anything because, like in the movies, the comeback kid and others will magically, at the last minute, appear and do it all for us.

So here's to new beginnings and better times. Cheers.

Blue Girl, Red State said...

Excellent post. We nodded reverently Steve's direction, too. His "Fighting Liberal" post is still the single best blogpost ever written in the ten year history of the weblog.

Anonymous said...

The GOP is a cult whose tenets no longer intersect reality at any point.

Whose cultists no longer bother to consult the world of cause and effect for validation of their views of Right and Wrong.


WORD.

Happy "aught eight" drifty! I dare say this one will provide you a wealth of source material. :-/

Anonymous said...

dammitt USBluez - you snipped the quote right out from under my mouse.. :-))

"Conservatism has devolved from dodgy-but-defensible political philosophy to a Hobbsean, Lord of the Flies cult whose tenets no longer intersect reality at any point"

Perhaps it is then true, that republicans exist in some single dimension parallel universe, akin to 'Flatland', just minus the scenery.

Happy New Cheers, only 384 more days left to go!

Anonymous said...

Dead bang wordsmithing, Driftglass, in your genre -- peeling the biomechanical zoot suits off of already-naked, filthy Repubs.

Comments from bustedknuckles (Clinton's first mistake was believing for one fucking second they weren't going to do exactly what they did.

His second and subsequent mistakes were simply repetition of the first.)

and from PhysioProf (Every time someone says that Obama is a great choice for the Democratic nomination because he will "build bridges" or "reach across the aisle", they should be forced to sit in the fucking corner by themselves and read this piece five times.)

HIT THE HAMMERS ON THE NAILS.

The Clintons still have not figured out the compromise and bendover trap (See Bill's book about how the Repubs are really good, decent people who simply have a different POV. ? And Hillary's status as poster girl for corporate American $$$.)

Obama is attacking both Clinton and Edwards FROM THE RIGHT. And Paul Krugman already indicated that Obama is talking about compromising on universal health care -- throwing in the mealy mouth towel -- before he's won a single primary.

Iterations include: Nancy Takes-Impeachment-Wolf-Off-the-Table Pelosi and Harry Bend-Over Reid.

QUESTION:
So, are we the lonely Poe smart ones? Are we the only ones who see this core DNA of shit-paired detritus molecules? Why don't the "smart" Clintons and the "good guy" Obama see it too?

WereBear said...

Dear Driftglass, I hope I recover from the hernia I got from laughing at that graphic, because we all know the dismal state of healthcare in Amurrica today...

Another post full of truth and beauty. Gosh yes, they are drowning in the mayhem of their own making; I just hope that they don't drag the rest of us down with them.

Evil always sows the seeds of its own destruction.

Happy New Year to all!

Anonymous said...

Absobloodylutly spot on DG. Power to your arm. Love & Cubic Droppings.

Unknown said...

Great great one, Drifty, but I should have known you'd save the best for last! And terrific comments kevin, prof, Asha,and someone anonymous who coined the prize phrase "core DNA of shit-paired detritus molecules."

You are the cherry on top of whiz-bang blogtopia, DG!

Sad to say that I can't think of any comments to add to your brilliance. You and your readers have just about covered the whole minefield. I could differ (okay, I will) with your commenter (anon 8:24P) who thinks the Clintons haven't figured out that compromise/accommodation won't work. I don't think they are misinformed or ignorant about that. They are exactly smart enough to think that they can beat the thugs at their game, thusly why we should avoid her/their candidacy like the world-ending plague it is shaping up to be.

And more praise from my corner to the memory of that Fighting Liberal, Steve Gilliard! I hope you're watching over us, Steve.

And one more DG favorite from a Southerner who hears these sentiments daily (with silent gagging accompaniment):

And since Iraq is Wildly Successful, all who say otherwise must either hate ‘Murrica or be the stooges of those who hate ‘Murrica.

In the 1990s, these people reacted to four years of exactly the kind of cooperation and concession-granting they said they wanted by shrieking “Impeach the Mothefucker!” ever louder and louder and louder, because these people will never get past the atavistic hate and stupidity that decades of relentless wingnut propaganda with a Christopath chaser has burned into their skulls.



HNY! (Yeah, just trying to be upbeat for once.)

Suzan

Welcome to Pottersville

Anonymous said...

Happy New Year Drifty. I found you by way of Steve years ago, thank you for keeping his words alive.

And thank you for your words. You are the best, even if I don't always recognize who you've turned them into.

pwapvt

dguzman said...

Holy shit, that was a great post. Thanks for jumpstarting my tired but still fighting liberal ass.

Anonymous said...

Bartkid sez,
Word. I concur with every word of this masterful post.
[insert sound of standing ovation]

Anonymous said...

Well, don't forget that the Villagers had a heavy hand in the impeachment drama, and still believe that they know best what's good for America (and it ain't Obama or Huckabee). Just ask their good pals in the traditional media...