Wednesday, February 06, 2008

The Party on the Edge


of Forever.

This a fable. Not a truefact, but a bedtime story about long ago when a time traveler

accidentally stumbled into our era.

His mission was to unfuck a timestream that had gone terribly wrong, but rather than do the selfless, Star Trekkian thing – namely, set things right and go back home -- he found a soul mate, settled in, and decided to sacrifice his own, future timeline in order to star in the reformatting of a terrible past.

A walk-on part in the war exchanged for a lead-role in a cage, so to speak.

It was a conceited decision, this notion that he and she knew best how the Universe should unfold. But, at the time, his ego was balanced out by a legitimate confidence in his own prowess and a big heart, just as her ambition and harshness were leavened by a first-rate mind and a genuine concern for others.

And so together they set about rehabbing the world into something better.

But life is long, isn’t it?

And complicated, because as much as we think we can project-plan and deductively Sherlock our way through troubled waters, human nature will always finds a way to lure us into its uneasy bed and have its way with us.

So along the way to the Glorious Future, the idealistic young couple grew older,


more jaded, and confidence and intelligence sometimes lost out to mistakes of

arrogance and hubris, and as they amassed more genuine power, the consequences of those mistakes got larger.

But still, among the brainy and powerful, these are not exactly freshly-minted flaws, are they?

Because wasn’t it simply self-evident that they should govern?

That their idea-kung and ability-fu were superior? And after all, how could they allow the ark bearing a generation’s hopes to be entrusted to others who may not be as clever or watchful or tough or dance-a-riffic.

And didn’t they face actual, really, for-real enemies? Opponents that wanted to bury their now-somewhat-rusting ideals and our nation under a million tons of slander and fear and theocratic slag?

So they fought. And compromised. And failed. And triangulated. And fought. And traded some very dear things away that they should not have.

For years and years and year it went on.

He became a President who was much diminished if not undone by his own appetites and flaws, and the perfidy and pathologies of his enemies.

He had reckless affairs.

She grew a thicker, sharper carapace.

And the world became trench warfare as their enemies stopped opposing them for specific, explicable reasons, and started HATING them for merely existing.

And their sense of entitlement – of feeling justified in running their operations in ways that were often dodgy and smarmy because they were besieged by evil men – stoked that fire and kept their enemies warm and hungry.

In the NYT, Stanley Fish took a stab at explaining it this way…




All You Need Is Hate

[The] existence [of Hillary Clinton-hating] is hardly news — it is routinely referred to by commentators on the present campaign and it has been documented in essays and books — but the details of it can still startle when you encounter them up close. In the January issue of GQ, Jason Horowitz described the world of Hillary haters, many of whom he has interviewed. Horowitz finds that the hostile characterizations of Clinton do not add up to a coherent account of her hatefulness. She is vilified for being a feminist and for not being one, for being an extreme leftist and for being a “warmongering hawk,” for being godless and for being “frighteningly fundamentalist,” for being the victim of her husband’s peccadilloes and for enabling them. “She is,” Horowitz concludes, “an empty vessel into which [her detractors] can pour everything they detest.” (In this she is the counterpart of George W. Bush, who serves much the same function for many liberals.)

This is not to say that there are no rational, well-considered reasons for opposing Clinton’s candidacy.


But the people and groups Horowitz surveys have brought criticism of Clinton to what sportswriters call “the next level,” in this case to the level of personal vituperation unconnected to, and often unconcerned with, the facts. These people are obsessed with things like her hair styles, the “strangeness” of her eyes — “Analysis of Clinton’s eyes is a favorite motif among her most rabid adversaries” — and they retail and recycle items from what Horowitz calls “The Crazy Files”: she’s Osama bin Laden’s candidate; she kills cats; she’s a witch (this is not meant metaphorically).

But this list, however loony-tunes it may be, does not begin to touch the craziness of the hardcore members of this cult. Back in November, I wrote a column on Clinton’s response to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. My reward was to pick up an e-mail pal who has to date sent me 24 lengthy documents culled from what he calls his “Hillary File.” If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.

Compared to this, the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity.

...

Horowitz warns that as the campaign heats up, this “type of discourse will likely not stay on the fringes for long,” and he predicts that some of it will be made use of by Republican operatives. But he is behind the curve, for the spirit informing it has already made its way into mainstream media. Respected political commentators devote precious network time to deep analyses of her laugh. Everyone blames her for what her husband does or for what he doesn’t do. (This is what the compound “Billary” is all about.) If she answers questions aggressively, she is shrill. If she moderates her tone, she’s just play-acting. If she cries, she’s faking. If she doesn’t, she’s too masculine. If she dresses conservatively, she’s dowdy. If she doesn’t, she’s inappropriately provocative.




This is simpler than Fish makes it.

The Wingnuts have been trained like circus seals to hate the Dirty Fucking Hippies.

Got it?

As is the case with anti-Semites (In his article, Fish gets that parallel exactly right. However he loses big points by trying to ham-handedly play “The Balance Game” by asserting that “Bush-hatred” is equally nutty. By which standard, I guess the American Revolution was just a bad case of “George III Derangement Syndrome” that got out of hand.) Wingnut’s are made pliant and usable by their mindless rage. They have been taught to loathe the (by now largely vanished and caricatured beyond anything recognizably human) DFHs and blame them and their political ancestors for everything that has gone wrong in the United States since the defeat of the Wingnut's Beloved Dixie.

The DHFs just ruined it all.

They completely undid the stifling, Miltowned, smile-or-we’ll-electroshock-your-ass, Lucite-perfect, happy Negro, obedient wimmin, buzzcut Daddy conformist illusion of an American Golden Age that Never Was that is the only environment the morally and emotionally stunted Authoritarian Right can bear.

Liberals harshed their sweet blackshirt buzz and replaced it with a scary vision of personal choice, personal autonomy, and a ferociously agnostic tolerance towards every interpersonal configuration that is “safe, sane and consensual” no matter how icky it might seem to Mrs. Gundy. And Worser!Still!, they coupled those ideals with a vision that held a compassionate, pragmatic communitarianism to be a central, non-negotiable value of a healthy cultural.

They offered a terrifying world in which Archie Bunker was no longer treated with deference tinged with fear, but was instead mocked every week on the teevvee!

The Right can only survive in a society that lives in the perpetually twilight of scared shitless, and so their entire history has been spent cycling through one deck of dime-store Hitlers after another in search of the perfect Enemy – some dark and terrible Lucifer to which they can point to justify their fetish for oppression and mindless conformity.

That enemy has variously been the Red Menace. The Yellow Horde. The VC. Muammar Quaddafi. Manuel Noriega. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Fidel Castro. Saddam Hussein. Yasser Arafat.

And these days a hodge-podge of various groups, subgroups and splinters that the Right lumps together and refers to ominously as “The Enemy”.

“The Enemy” attacked us.

“The Enemy” is in Iraq.

One any given day “The Enemy” is either beaten and on the run (when the Right needs to tout the success of the Previous Friedman Unit of Dubya’s disastrous foreign policy) or gathering strength and poised to strike (when the Right needs to justify the continuation of the extension of Dubya’s disastrous foreign policy for an infinitely large number of Future Friedman Units.)

And, finally, the Dirty Fucking Hippies – because they Hate America -- live only to surrender to “The Enemy” whoever he is, wherever he is, whether he exists or not.

And what Clinton Supporters do not or will not see is that, for reasons that are terribly unfair, to the Right, Hillary is a cardiac-needle-full of Pure, Triply-rectified Tincture of Dirty Fucking Hippy jammed straight in their eye.

It is not that the Right won’t run a sleazy, knee-capping, slanderfest against whomever the Democrats nominate. Of course they will. They must. Their's is a Movement now so bereft of ideas that they literally have nothing but their hate to keep them politically tumescent.

But even with that, Hillary is special. Hillary Clinton galvanizes the Right with a revivifying enmity the likes of which few Americans (with the exception of, say, Ted Kennedy or Michael Moore) can come close to inspiring.

She doesn’t just drive them to vote; she catalyzes a species of sui generis psychotic rage that could make Jerry Falwell kick the hinges off of his crypt just so he can inveigh against her one, final time before the Dark One drags him into the flames forever.

For nearly two years, the GOP has been bombarded with the growing prospect of extinction. They have been humiliated. Their policies are in ashes. Their Congresscritters are resigning in wharf-rats-fleeing-a-burning-warehouse numbers. Their President and their support of him are becoming the punch-lines for a thousand long-overdue national jokes.

Sun Tsu diagnosed this 2,400 years ago in “The Art of War”:

Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped,
your strength exhausted and your treasure spent,
other chieftains will spring up to take advantage
of your extremity.

Then no man, however wise,
will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.


And

A whole army may be robbed of its spirit;
a commander-in-chief may be robbed of his presence of mind.


Everywhere except in the deepest bunkers of Hate Radio, the Right has been hearing clever people pronounce their movement doomed.

Everywhere around them lies the reeking carcasses of one proof after another that they had overplayed everything and lost everywhere.

They were getting ready to be beaten because they had been robbed of hope, vision, and anything cohesive around which to rally.

Sun Tsu said:

A clever general, therefore, avoids an army when
its spirit is keen, but attacks it when it is sluggish
and inclined to return. This is the art of studying moods.


Surely, then, he would scratch his head and ask why Democrats think it would be good idea to put in front of the sluggish and dispirited Wingnut Legions the one person on Earth most likely to rouse them one last time to Full Berserker Fury.

Because with any other candidate the Right would have an Opponent, but in Hillary they may find a Cause.

To be perfectly clear, if Hillary is the candidate, I’ll vote for her and drink a toast to her on election night, and I will do it with a smile if for no other reason than I don’t believe my Constitution can survive a Supreme Court which, under a Republican Administration, would undoubtedly become an unrepentant rubber stamp for Authoritarians and Christopaths for the next 20 years.

If Hillary is the candidate I will march into my polling place and cast my ballot for her and I will do it without wondering about her intelligence or grasp of policy or gender or even her Iraq Vote.

I will, however, be wondering every fucking step of the way why in the world my Party thought it was brilliant strategy to nominate the one person most likely spur the fractured and dejected Axis of Asshats to set their difference aside and put the band back together for one more show.

Why, of all the candidates we had at our disposal, did my Party pick the one who motivates the Right as no one else can to swing with all of their remaining fucktard fury for the fascist fences one last time.

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

This didn't seem to take the first time I typed it. So here it goes again:

The two dem frontrunners are not as different as you think.

Yes, Hillary is Hillary, with all that entails, but Obama is black.

res ipsa loquitur said...

Two thoughts:

I remember gritting my teeth when reading the Fish thing the other day because he just had to go for the "balance" BS. I don't know why an otherwise thoughtful guy feels that he needs to play that game. It makes me think that the editorial board at the NYT is mucking about under the hood of the car (something we know never happens, right?).

Hillary Clinton galvanizes the Right with a revivifying enmity the likes of which few Americans (with the exception of, say, Ted Kennedy...

Which begs the question why BO thought it was a good idea to send Teddy (or any of the Kennedys) out there to stump for him. Yes, I get that the BO campaign likes the comparison to JFK at a thematic level, but the truth is that half of America hates Teddy & Co. and the other half can fairly be described as ambivalent, owing to Teddy's only relatively recent vault into the legion of emotionally mature adults. Now if JFK Jr. had lived, he would have been the Kennedy to send out to the heartland on behalf of BO. That guy had all of the Kennedy glamour without any of the baggage.

It doesn't look like Teddy hurt BO, but when I saw Teddy out there in CA I wondered about it. I guess BO weighed the equities and decided they were in favor of putting Kennedy boots on the ground.

Anonymous said...

Eloquent piece, Drifty!

Nevertheless, I think you underestimate the extent to which the wackwackwackaloon syphilitic core of the hate-besotted right can transfer their hate smoothly and efficiently onto whomever their autoritarian masters serve up as the next Dirty Fucking Hippy Enemy.

I think about it this way. These people are addicted to hate like an inveterate sell-your-own-child-into-slavery-for-a-bump addict is addicted to cocaine. 1992 is a week ago, and Bill and Hillary Clinton are an eight-ball.

Suppose that eight-ball runs out today, and all it can be replaced with is a bag of crystal meth. Within just a few days, our addict is going to be a happily raging tweaking teeth-rotting-down-to-the-fucking-pulp screaming-in-the-streets-at-total-strangers apotheosis of a crystal meth head.

Cocaine, what's that? I luuuurve me some crystal meth!!!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

Spot on, DG. But I wonder if the generally uninvolved masses can take any of this into account, while the 27% slaver like mad dogs, ready to hate anybody who does not have an (R) after their name.

Anonymous said...

All you say is true, but it's not a valid reason for avoiding nominating Ms. Clinton. If Dems avoid the people they think are best because it will cause Rethugs to rise up, we may as well hand the world over to the frothing at the mouth idiots. I have issues with Ms. Clinton's policies and though I would love to support a woman or an African American for president, I found myself hoping for a white male -- John Edwards -- because his ideals and ideas were more in line with mine. I'm now supporting Obama. I will support Hillary if nominated. I pray to God this nation is smart enough and that Diebold is inept enough that we can actually elect a Democrat to try and clean up the mess 8 years of Republican rule has wrought. I'm glad I'm old and probably won't be around long eonough to see what happens in the long run. But I know the past 8 years are not going to disappear easily and if we elect another Republican -- any Republican -- God help us.

Anonymous said...

When you see a rock rolling downhill...

Give it a little kick to help it get to the bottom faster.

It looks like the half-way sensible folks still left in the Republican Party have managed to get their one candidate with any sort of appeal to swing voters, McCain, the nomination. It's not a done deal, and yes, most of the appeal is fraudulent (the people who vote for him in primaries think he's their peace candidate!) in ways that can be exposed. But what the exposure of his real extremism can't do fully would be completed by Hillary Derangement Syndrome if she is our nominee. Their foamers and their HDS will undo all that appeal to swing voters that their realists achieved by getting McCain the nomination.

No, this is not an argument that Hillary should be our nominee. As jody points out, Barack is black. They'll foam over at that, too, and not in subtle ways useful as a dog whistle. Either candidate of ours, any candidate of theirs, and their foamers win us the election.

Walt said...

I'll confess, for the benefit of the Court (which is duly instructed to take judicial notice of it at trial), that I voted for McCain.

Not because I like the jowly bastard (in my blog I repeatedly call him The Political Bisexual), but because he was less disgusting than the others. Sort the "hold-your-nose" candidate.

And do I think he stands a chance in Hell of getting his worthless ass elected? No. I plan on voting for whoever the Democrats nominate.

The Minstrel Boy said...

another wise axiom from the often misunderstood and misquoted sun tsu is when he warns that a prudent commander will always leave the enemy a route of safe egress, because,

men fight the hardest for an indefensible position.

by choosing the route they escape you are choosing the ground for the next confrontation.

Stephen A said...

Two quotes from SF and the military:

"Why not? Only one Human captain has ever survived battle with a Minbari fleet. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, be somewhere else!" -Delenn,B5

"I'd rather have a fighting division than an untried army"
-Douglas MacArthur

Regardless of the Democratic candidate, the right will get uglier than they have ever gotten before in November. We've got a choice between a relative newcomer, or somebody who has been in daily mortal combat with the wingnuts for the past several decades. Remember the fundamental reason the wingnuts hate the Clintons is that they win.

I'm sick to death of the "Oh, noes!! This is a gunfight? I just brought a penknife! And that got confiscated by the TSA!" candidates.

Say what you like about Bill and Hillary but they not only expect an ugly fight to the finish but relish it. They expect to be hated attacked and slandered by the Republicans, Media and a good portion They have collected the most vicious SOBs and Mofos on our side and are ready to fight.

For once I want to hear: "Oh, noes!! This is a gunfight? I just brought a Nuclear Submarine with a full complement of MIRVed Trident missiles with Enhanced Yield 20 Megaton Cobalt Warheads!"

Anonymous said...

yes, indeedy I love that last graf,stephen a

Pablo

Anonymous said...

Like anonymous said...

Are we supposed to refuse to nominate a candidate just because the Wingnut Army will be driven to ever greater heights of spittle-flecked outrageousness? I'm as pragmatic as the next Liberal - many of my more Liberal friends think I'm TOO pragmatic, especially when the name of Ralph Nader comes up. But the side-effect of the Dems abandoning Clinton in the face of the wingnut backlash is to imbue them with more power. They will KNOW (whether it's true or not) that the only reason Clinton got abandoned by the Dems is out of fear of their power. "Excellent", they will say, rubbing their bony fingers together like Monty Burns, "the Dems fear us and our Billary hating machine. As well they should!" As every school kid knows, if you flee out of fear of the bully, before the bully even takes a swing at you, the bully has already won. You have given them an even greater victory. No, the only way to deal with a bully is to face the bully down with a large helping of Chimpy McJockstrap "bring it on, mo-fo!" And then beat the living crap out of the bully, even if it means taking some lumps in the process, in full view of the rest of the school. This is the only way to END the bully's reign of terror.

Anonymous said...

yep for whatever reason hillary clinton is who they have to vote against because they can't vote against jane fonda.

Anonymous said...

"Tincture of Dirty Fucking Hippy"

Bottled in pure driftglass no doubt. ;)

As to why Hillary? As SG used to say "people forget to vote for the black man on election day". She's "minority" (even though there are more women than men), she's got WH experience (even if it's vicarious).
IMO 'thugs on the fence can overlook a vagina more easily than melanin. Those types consider her nearly a man anyway.


I'd even go so far as to say the Democrats want to try and rub in that the republicans have abused the system to the point of alienating party members who care more about the future than ideology

Anonymous said...

What Drift said.

Hell, bandwidth costs money! :o)

Woody (Tokin Librul/Rogue Scholar/ Helluvafella!) said...

Polls over last weekend--i fergit which--had McStain/Anybody ahead of HRC by better than the moe, and tied with BHO... BEFORE he locked up the nomination, and even without the roar of the mighty Right-Wing Media Echo Chamber, which will come around as soon as HRC gets the nod.

the ability of the Dems to confound success is just about legendary, but this year just about takes the cake. In a climate wherein the sitting incumbent is the leat popular president in history, and has tarnished the reputation of his (nominal) party beyond apparent redemption, the Dems narrow the contest on their side to the two candidates in the whole field who could be relied upon to both unite the opposition and divide the base...
fuukin amazing

Anonymous said...

Why, of all the candidates we had at our disposal,
did my Party pick the one who motivates the Right
as no one else can to swing with all of their remaining
fucktard fury for the fascist fences one last time.


Why??

Two words:

Uneducated electorate.

But the truth is, and has been stated in this very comment section,
the fucktards are brim full of self-loathing and hate, much more than
enough venom to fuel their irrationality against "the enemy" of
America, the librul/socialist/Satanic/porno/DFH/hoards of. . .
fellow countrymen.

Tho I had to clean the vomit off me, Mitts was right, today;
this is a culture war; the last two elections, so
polarized they were close enough to hack and steal, were costly
red victories in the culture war, and blue cannot afford to blow
another one. Picture it: McCain and Huckleberry, lobbing slimeball
after slimeball at Billary Bushinadress and _________, the excess
flowing like a shit river all over this land and waste-deep.
But the Skeksi can, and will, die.

Malacandra said...

I'm with drifty on this one. Yes, the right will demonize whoever we nominate. No, we shouldn't abandon a good candidate just because the righties hate them.

OTOH, we've got another good candidate who has that much less baggage and is pulling a rabbit out of his hat by getting young people energized and disenchanted folks voting again. That could - if it's not completely shallow - trigger a whole new generation of activism and leadership.

Frankly, all the people who talk about how battle-hardened the Clintons are leave me slack-jawed, because to my mind the Clintons got played like a violin by the right and set the tone for the whole freakin' Democratic Party's "let's be civil, meet 'em halfway, and ignore their knives and chains" mentality that was endemic until Howard Dean came along with a stiff shot of atropine to the heart of the party.

I don't remember a lot of Bill and Hill laying solid blows to the ribs of the right. I remember them acting like the Perfect Model of A Modern Moderate Democrat, and still being vilified as if they had been peeing on Ronald Reagan's White House portrait twice daily (and three times on Sunday). I remember "the end of big government as we know it", with welfare moms (and their kids) being kicked to the curb. Don't Ask, Don't Tell. DMCA. NAFTA. Media Consolidation. The Clintons did everything possible to be liked by the righties... and the more they tried, the more they were reviled.

Forgive me if I don't regard that as being tested in the flames and rising like a phoenix.

Nominating Hillary is a little bit like rolling around in raw hamburger before entering the dogfight pit.

Sure, the pit's a mean, nasty place at the best of times... but why go cruising for extra pain?

And, yeah, if she's our nominee, I'll work for Hillary and vote for her because she's light years superior to a GOP candidate. For the Supreme Court alone I'll fight like a wolverine for our nominee in the general election.

But in 2004 I wondered if we nominated the right person, even as I was working for him. If we nominate Hillary, I'll have the same reservations.

Anonymous said...

Quote of the week:

"If the democrats are stupid enough to nominate Hillary, the republicans will rally around a ham sandwich."

Only, they left out:

"Independents and a shitload of conservative democrats will do the same thing."

And that little factoid is not true of Obama. With the Sword of Bush, at $3 bil a week, hanging over their heads in Iraq, and with the economy bouncing around like a blowfly on a hot turd, Obama won't have any problem peeling a lot of those people away from the GOP.

Plenty enough for a democratic tsunami. :o)

I think we might get this bonus with him, too:

If we nominate Hillary, it will be
like mainlining Viagra to an 85 year old man. Collectively, the goopers will get a hard-on that a cat couldn't scratch. Which will mean that they will defend Bush and his bloody petro-posse 'til
death.

With Obama, I think by mid-summer the polls will have the republicans in congress shitting their pants, and George Bush and Dick Cheyney will become a lot more valuable to the GOP as sacrificial pigs for a "Y'all come" barbecue for the voters, on the white house lawn, than they will as retiring republican "statesmen".

Dick Lugar has positively dropped off the face of the map, politically speaking. I mean we see and hear NOTHING of him. I think that's good news, in a way, because I think it means that he's the "Gerald Ford" in waiting.

Of course, if this scenario plays out, it will mean that Obama won't be able to campaign and point to goatboy sitting in the oval office and say to the voters:

"There he is, folks! The pride of the republican party." :o)

And don't forget, Gerald Ford came within a couple of bonehead gaffes,
especially, the pardon,
of keeping the white house for the goopers, nemmind that Nixon had just left in disgrace.

Hard to cackle too much about a forced resignation, with THAT history to think about.

Anonymous said...

Excellent points, Malacandra!

And let's not forget her support of Kyle-Lieberman, the new-and- improved shitmire #2 Koolaid.

Nor, the fact that, in the fall of 2006 when some of the dems were working hard to amend the pentagon apprpriations bill to include language banning the use of clusterbombs in civilian areas, she voted AGAINST the ban.

Senator Obama voted in favor of the ban.

If there were not these little lesion-chancres showing on Clinton's resume', and if she had risked one quark of her political ass for OUR side, then it might; MIGHT, I say, be worth risking her huge negatives with republicans and conservatives across the board, as well as a lot of independents, to nominate her.

But when she comes to us with chronic tennis elbow from giving glute-rubs to the warpimps, such as her enthusiastic applause for bush's slathering on the "surge accomplished" bullshit a few nights ago, while Obama had the common decency to sit as mute and stonefaced as the Sphinx, then, to pretend that she and Obama are "two fine candidates for us", as her supporters attempt to attach themselves to Obama like leeches, is utter, complete, bullshit.

Anonymous said...

BTW; we're democrats. "Unity" not required, until we pick a candidate.

The "unity!" shreik is a dog-whistle for "Lay off Clinton!".