For All Of His Fine Posts About

Pot and gay marriage, there really is no writer more fiercely and pathologically dishonest about the history, nature and trajectory of Modern Conservatism than Andrew Sullivan. (although David Fucking Brooks runs a close second.)

"...
From the green shoots of Hayek and Oakeshott and Friedman to the final blooming of Thatcher and Reagan, this regenerated conservatism really did restore the balance between state and society toward Oakeshottcover society and away from the state.

It harnessed traditional impulses - nationalism in Britain, evangelicalism in America - but it never fully gave into them..."

Also if you fuck a dog but don't kiss it on the mouth, it doesn't count.

Seriously, everything that now horrifies Mr. Sullivan about his Movement was there at the creation, baked right into its DNA.

Me, five years ago:

Fuck Everyone But Me.

That’s what being a Republican comes down to in the end.

Those four, little words that mean so much.

The pillars of the Republican Party.

The basic “forward”, “forward”, “side”, “close” that make the formal steps of the Neocon Foxtrot identical to the Christopath Waltz.

Decade after decade, the GOP has burrowed away like the clever, eyeless rodents that they are, weakening the very bulwark that makes our nation possible. Gnawing away with their blood-stained razor-teeth at the very concept of the commonweal – the common good – itself. They have worked carefully, deliberately, patiently to rip the belly out of our Republic and breach the levee of our civilization...and now the filthy, mutagenic sludge roils through the streets, staining an polluting everything it touches.

We have lived to see “Fuck Everyone But Me” enshrined as a virtuous sentiment. And not just any virtue, but the Primum Mobile. The First Cause behind all other virtues -- by men who claim the mantle of God’s Favored -- while “Love Thy Neighbor” floats face-down in the noxious hellbrew they have worked so hard to unleash.

Fuck Everyone But Me.

The Guanine, Adanine, Cytosine, and Thamine that make up the base-pairs of the Modern GOP, interlacing themselves into ever more complex patterns and Rovian huckster patter, spiraling outwards into policy shops and pulpits, fractalling into think-tank White Papers and PNAC lucid dreams.

But unspool the complex helix of Republican thinking, map the GOP Genome backwards from any direction – theological, philosophical, economic, “scientific” – and it always comes down to the same, straightforward building blocks: Fuck Everyone But Me.

And see, this is where every Republican I know trips right over their own dicks every single fucking time.

Because there is no getting around the fact that Fuck Everyone But Me is a depraved and morally bankrupt philosophy.
...

Don’t get me wrong; it is at least an honest philosophy, and if Republicans were ever honest for five consecutive minutes they’d just own up to the fact that the loathe their fellow man and women on a sliding scale that reaches its zenith when the people on the business end of the shotgun are Poor and/or Black.

Republicans don’t give a shit if “those people” live or die as long as they don’t live or die near them.

As long as their taxes don’t go to them in any way shape or form. As long as they stay in their place, and pump prices stay low. But if brown people have to be killed in their millions to keep Republican’s tanks full of cheap gas, fuck ‘em. If Republican’s have to choose between their poorer, browner fellow citizens living in abject poverty and despair, and a $600 tax cut, fuck ‘em.
...

I have no idea how many of the Nine Billion Names of God are Sacred and True, but I do know this for God Damned Sure: if your –ism demands that you do make yourself occasionally uncomfortable in the service of your fellow man, it’s on the right track. If it demands that you love more and hate less, act with empathy and fucking well feel bad when you act like a shit...you’re on the right bus.

If your faith says you damned well are your brother’s keeper and slaps you cold and wet across the face when you try to shirk your duty, sign me up.

Nature, Kate Hepburn reminds us in The African Queen, is “what we are put on this Earth to overcome."

Not the oceans or the they skies, but ourselves. Our own killer ape instinct to fuck everything that moves, and kill everything that doesn’t smell like us.

And as true as it is that when your faith demands that you work hard to be better than your most rapacious instincts call you to be, you know you’re headed in the right direction, so it is equally true that if your faith tells you to indulge your worst impulses – to positively revel in them -- then you know you are serving a very dark master indeed.
...

And now they have their own political party, and all the pig-lipstick in the Universe will never cover up the fact that the Dixiecrats fled to the Republican Party in their millions precisely because the Party of Lincoln was willing and eager to whore itself for the scum of the Earth. Because for no other reason that raw political gain – for EXACTLY the same political reason that George Wallace said “no one will ever out-nigger me again” after he lost in his first run for Governor -- the GOP hung out a shingle that said, “Klansmen Welcome: We Hate Coons Too!.”
...

The Republican Party is the ugly consequence of Democracy itself. The unembraceable shadow. It is the moral rot that is left behind when we believe that we are Exceptional by virtue of genetics or economics or God. When we stop requiring an informed electorate, and begin breeding idiots who take their sustenance at the diseased teats of Hate Radio and Old Time Gospel Hour.

It is the sharp, bright line that separates an often foolish and weak fixer-upper Democratic Party from an unambiguously depraved Republican Party.

Democrats believe that racism, hateful hillbilly superstition fobbing itself of as theology and simple, down-home pig-ignorance are, y’know, BAD things that should be educated into extinction.

Republicans, on the other hand, cultivate that barbaric sewage as if it were prize-winning teacup roses. They coddle and cuddle and actively encourage it because without a steady stream of bigoted morons and self-righteous inbreds, lets face it, there would be no Republican Party.

When Moderates react with horror at what they saw in NOLA, and then whiplash themselves catatonic looking suddenly around in every direction at the bile that comes fountaining from the mouths of talk radio hosts, teevee commentators and former-First-Ladies-and-Mother-of-the-current-President, they are looking for safe harbor. Some bit of dry land from which they can express their outrage, and yet still pretend that despite decades of warning that their Party is run by these very monsters, they can somehow remain Republican and keep their souls.

That the thugs who run their Party aren’t really there, or maybe they’ll just magically dry up and blow away.

Sorry, that ship has long since sailed, and you fucking well know it and the roaring sound you hear are flocks of chickens darkening the sky as the come home to roost.

Moderates thought worshipping at the church of Fuck Everyone But Me was a pretty sweet deal: they got tax cuts, but more importantly they got soothing men in pastoral garb and $1,000 suits telling them that it was absolutely OK to behave like a selfish prick. That letting people rot was a far lesser sin that the Evil Government confiscating their hard-earned ducats to use for reason that do not benefit them directly.

After all, since they were little shits they’ve been taught that they know how to spend their money better than some Washington Bee-Euro-Crat.

The problem being, this is the attitude of a cranky stupid child and not a grown up who lives in the real world, and the election of 2004 can now be seen in retrospect for what it really was: a tantrum thrown by idiots.

It was the screaming of 59 million 5-year-old spoiled brats bellowing, “You can’t make me clean up after myself. You can’t make me pay for the war I ordered. You can’t make me look at the truth.”

And the answer is, tragically, we don’t have to. We never did.

Being warned to stop putting a loaded gun in you mouth isn’t a way for us to score debating points. It was a way for your fellow citizens to say, “Hey, dumbass; if that thing ever goes off you’re gonna be in a world of shit.”

And then it went Bang!
...

Mr. Sullivan knows all of this perfectly well, but as Upton Sinclair observed, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Mr. Sullivan also reserves some of his deepest contempt for people like Sarah Palin, -- who lie their asses off about the history, nature and trajectory of Conservatism because their salaries depend on it -- and for the whole "cocooned, conservative, religio-political subculture, complete with a massively lucrative publishing/broadcasting/blogging service industry" on whose "cultural sledge-hammer" these very profitable lies depend.

The irony of this could not be denser if you built it out of neutronium.