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.