They Say It There

And in come out here.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the "short bus" side of the blogosphere, you have probably noticed that a couple of new words have come lumbering into the Christopath vocabulary.

“Socialist” and “Communist”.

Well, technically they're not “new” words, but ones that have been passed through the bowels of Wingnuttia, mutated and molested to serve new and ugly masters, and have now made it in their new infernal incarnations into the New York Fucking Times.

Because more than universal health care, job security or a habitable planet...what the wingtards need more than anything else is a New Bad Word.

See, “queer” got stolen long ago by Teh Gay. Along with “gay”.

Lesbians put “dyke” up on blocks one night and stripped it of its power.

“Moonbat” was fun for awhile in a crazy-old-chain-smoking-batshit-nuts-lady-screaming-out- her-screen-door-at-imaginary-Negroes kind of way, but it had no staying power once the Dirty Fucking Hippes starting putting it on tee-shirts.

(And let’s face it. like some marketer’s idiotic made-up fast food name for a fish sandwich -- “Lord Fishington’s Seagoing Spice Island Heaven-Meat” – people felt enough like a pinheaded nine-year-old just saying “moonbat” to ruin the product.)

And, worst of all, Liberals finally figured out that, no matter how many times degenerates like Limbaugh, or perverts like O’Reilly or racist scum like Falwell spat it out, “Liberal” isn’t actually a bad word after all.

As laughable as calling someone a “Fucking patriot!”, “liberal” is, in fact, something to be damn proud of. Whereas after seeing it running full bore amok for 30 years now, “conservative” clearly belongs in the social designation lexicon right between “well-poisoner” and “puppy-fucker”.

But while the fascist legions of the Right had billionaire underwriters, think tanks, a million AM radio outlets, their own Brand Name Jebus, satellites, churches, and a news network all their own, for a long time all we we had was “Mother Jones”, the “Utne Reader”, 16% of NPR, 9% of PBS, seven tin cans, 4,000 yards of string and a router.

And in the face of such a hurricane of bullshit it was sometimes easy to forget simple truths.

And so almost exactly five years ago – just as the Best Fucking War Evah was beginning its plummet into the abyss – a semi-prominent wingnut writer named Gary Schneider penned a an odious slab of Red-baiting trash entitled (sorry but no links to authoritarian enablers here):

“Neo-Socialism: A Decomposition of the Liberal Mind”

Which comes with this yummy goodness as the salad course:

… an understanding can be developed that begins to decode their seeming day to day defiance of logic, history and common sense … thereby mitigating, albeit just a little, the extreme and frustrating befuddlement most mainstream Americans inherently feel when confronted with the illogical output of a Liberal mind. You see, to the Left, history, fact and logic are secondary to the defense and promotion of its philosophy…

Ruh Roh!

Cue ominous, Hitchcock-Psycho-Shower-Music...

A philosophy that is rooted in

Music. Getting. Louder. This is gonna be bad; I just know it!

Socialism

Oh noooooes!!

And then Our Mister Schneider serves up – hot and stinky – one steaming slice of ratshit loaf after another that all boil down to this:

1. Socialism was evil!evil!evil! And a failure. And has been definitively proven thus and so has gone where all bad things go; into the Great Woodchipper of History. So shut up!

2. Liberals are Socialists. Because, uh, I say so.

And I quote, directly from Our Mister Schneider:

” Socialism (and its younger cousin Liberalism)…”

“Now, many suggest that Liberalism is not Socialism; However, I submit that Liberalism is Socialism by other means. So, in order to understand the Liberal mindset, you must understand Socialism.”

“Nearly all contemporary liberal causes and policy can now be traced back to any one or more of these…basic tenets of Socialism, or “Neo-Socialism”.

3. Therefore Liberals are evil!evil!evil!

This laughable piping bag full of hysterical Randite cranky was, of course, greeted breathlessly as a Great Freep Forward in Wingtard Scholasticism by such stalwarts of the basement patriot bedwetter set as Frei Republic and “Stop the ACLU”.

(Some even dared whisper that Our Mister Schneider’s little tantrum might perhaps one day even rival in wonderfulness that greatest breakthrough for The Cause ever: the discovery of the Cap+Lock/Bold Key Combo by “RIGHTEOUSCHRISTIANPATRIOTEAGLEOFLIBERTY1776” on January 21st 1998!)

And what was the first comment Our Mister Schneider got right out of the box (emphasis mine)?

‘We might make some progress by calling them "socialists" rather than "liberals."’

Because in April of 2003 you had this odd mix of strutting "Boo-Ya! We Got Our Fucking War You Pussies!" wingnut triumphalism combined with the growing yet-still-almost-subliminal sense (shouted down louder and louder, year after year) that history and reality were about to start coming inexorably down on their soft, little heads.

An urgent, feverish feeling that they’d better fucking well celebrate Loud and Right Now because everything they believed in – everything they had fought and lied and screamed and impeached for – was just starting to curl up at the corners.

Just beginning to turn to radioactive shit right before their eyes.

And as things got progressively worse, the Pig People coped with the encroaching horror of the damning, final, bloody, catastrophic proof of their own epic stupidity, gullibility, incompetence and failures the same cowardly way they always have and always will: by blaming the Dirty Fucking Hippies, and by inventing a new/old Bad Word to yell at them.

So, did it work?

Well, you be the judge.

Let’s watch 59 pages fly off the calendar from the moment Our Mister Schneider first put crayon to paper and land our time machine on this lovely post by Devilstower over at Barsoom:

I'm Trying to Scare You to Death!
by Devilstower
Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 08:11:07 AM PDT

Not me, actually. But Virginia Foxx, Republican Congresswoman from the 5th Congressional District of North Carolina, doesn't believe you're scared enough.

Rep. Virginia Foxx says she believes God will judge people for sins of omission as well as commission, so the Banner Elk Republican had a message she couldn't keep to herself.

"You should fear for your country," Foxx told a gathering of members of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce.

The Democratic majority in Congress has become "bolder and bolder" with tax dollars and the rules of the House, she told the business leaders at their annual Washington meeting.

"I am trying to scare you to death," she said.

God will judge our country for its sins, and we should fear for our country? Wait a second, the Congresswoman can't really think that God should damn America. Otherwise, the story would be running 24/7 on her namesake network, right?

As for the two Democratic presidential candidates, Foxx pulled out her reserve can of fear.

"I believe they are socialists, and if you look at their platforms you will see their plan is to take money from part of the population and give it to other people in the population," she said later, referring to their universal health care plans.

"I don't know the dictionary definition of socialism, but most people would see that as socialism."
…

And just last night as I was plowing through the NYT early-bird special, I caught a whiff of Bill Kristol's latest pile of pissy old cat litter entitled “The Mask Slips"

Which, believe it or not, actually begins thusly --

“I haven’t read much Karl Marx since the early 1980…”

and caused me to wonder not for the first time why on Earth this smirking, talent-free, elitist warpimp is sopping up gravy at the Times?

Because like congressional embarrassment Virginia Foxx, Kristol has decided to embrace the new Bad Word for Liberals and dump a big ol’ bucket of Dirty Commie on Barack Obama’s head.

If you want you can read all about it here and here.

Honestly, I read it and I yawned.

It’s not that Kristol is a bad writer, but that he is a painfully bad writer. A painfully bad writer with his own little cabin “of clay and wattles made” smack in the middle of the NYT.

A painfully bad writer because, at the end of the day, Kristol fails in the first and most important job of a writer of opinions; to filter parts of the world through the complex glass of his or her own persona in a way that tells us -- whether we ultimately agree with it or not -- something new or real or revealing.

With a real writer, mixed in with the ink you should find a pipette of blood. At least a few sentences taken out of the arena where the writer goes to slug it out with his demons and his beliefs.

The problem with Kristol is that what he genuinely believes is both execrable and ossified to the point that he has becomes a self-parody: a bile dispenser with a permanent, death’s-head-rictus grin lacquered to the front of his skull.

He’s a fascist -- out-and-out -- in a country that fought a World War to eradicate the diseased, degenerate ideology that is at the dead, dark heart of NeoConservatism. Kristol is a True Believer in something truly evil, and so outside of the damp fastness of the Fox News locker room or the safety of whatever Mad Hatter NeoCon Tea Parties get thrown up at the House of Kristol, Bloody Billy cannot – dare not – take to the massive NYT pulpit and speak from the heart about what he genuinely, deeply believes or values.

Because like Virginia Foxx or the bedwetters at Frie Republic, what Kristol genuinely values is horrifying.

And so like the entire Right Wing Noise Machine, outside of some cold, lumpy, boiler-plate pabulum about “Luvin Murrica!” the bulk of Kristol’s words are always devoted to lashing acidly out.

With him – as with the rest of the the Noise Machine – it is all-attacking-all-the-time. And in that world, a piece of oratory or page of writing is judged not by how well it advances an argument or cogently and persuasively is debates policy, but instead is measured almost exclusively by how much it offends, irritates and mocks the Dirty Fucking Hippies.

It is hatespeech-as-genre; a genre in which Kristol is so saturated that he cannot go more than a paragraph or two without reflexively trying to shiv a Liberal somewhichway. Kristol and his ilk remind me of nothing so much as a German National Socialist from, say, 1931; so steeped in hateful ideology that they literally cannot resist slipping “…and because of the Dirty Jews” into every argument.

Kristol’s writing fails in its first duty because he shows us nothing.

He risks nothing.

He illuminates nothing.

Instead he has built himself a toasty little sniper's nest on the roof of the New York Times and merrily pot-shots anything to the left of Mussolini.

Except now that his Conservative Movement has been shown to be the blood-drunk fascist whorehouse that the Dirty Fucking Hippies have been warning us all about, the word “Liberal” has lost its pejorative currency.

So, late to the party as usual, Kristol now does what the rest of the Pig People Peerage have been doing for five years: switching from screaming “Liberal!” at 100 decibels to screaming “Commie!” at 150.