Explaining Using Little Words

So Conservatives will u-n-d-e-r-s-t-a-n-d.

Over on the Island of Misfit Conservatives, the holiday intern they left in charge is filling up column inches by excitedly speculating on how many whiny Right-wing twats can dance on the head of a pin.

The Right's Sledgehammers

20 Dec 2010 08:30 pm

Conor Friedersdorf

When Internet radio host D.R. Tucker alerted me to an interview he recorded with Jonah Goldberg a couple weeks back, I had no idea it would contain one of the more revealing accounts of what the National Review Editor-At-Large really thinks about the conservative movement's bomb thrower talk radio types. (Transcript of relevant segment here.) I'd always imagined that he and I would be utterly at odds on that subject. As it turns out our assessments overlap.

The initial example discussed in the segment is Mark Levin. To my surprise, Goldberg noted that the nationally syndicated talk radio host has said "awful things" at his expense, pointed out that he's "constantly ripping into" Stephen Hayes at The Weekly Standard, and expressed bafflement at his "minor war on National Review." It's rare and gratifying for a prominent voice in movement conservatism to acknowledge that Levin's rhetoric is baffling and that he serially launches unfair attacks.

Does he therefore hurt conservatism? Goldberg doesn't think so...

Isn't Goldberg's answer interesting? His mind immediately goes to the David Frum critique of talk radio: that the overheated rhetoric of its blowhard hosts turn off independents. Its arguably true about Rush Limbaugh, whose high profile makes him unique. But whatever you think of the Frum thesis, there are two distinct arguments about how talk radio hurts conservatism that Goldberg never seems to consider.

For those of you keeping score at home...

...Jonah Goldberg is the wingnut whose Clinton-hunting mommy launched his career, and whose most notable contributions to Western civilization are a series of bad ideas and Simpson's jokes called "National Review Online", and a book called "Liberal Fascism". For his labors, Mr. Goldberg is paid obscene sums of money.

...Mark Levin is a cackling lunatic with a voice like a rabid, tuneless-bagpipe-playing weasel being sucked into jet engine who nonetheless plies his very lucrative trade sitting in front of a microphone and telling lies on hundreds of Conservative talk radio stations across America. He also co-wrote "Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America" with his good friend Rush Limbaugh.

...David Frum is a former George Bush speechwriter who hung onto Neoconservatism's ass like a limpet until the increasingly violent oscillations of the Party of God flicked him off like a wee turd, shortly after which he found a nice hammock and steady work doing exactly what he had been doing before, but with "Centrist" sprinkles.

..."The Weekly Standard" is a Neocon Safe House run by a blood-drunk sociopath named William Kristol. Mr. Kristol's crimes against democracy have grown too numerous to mention (as are the inexplicably large number of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th chances to contribute to America's most famous newspapers and journals this staggeringly awful writer keeps being handed. Y'know, it's almost like there is some sort of Club...) "The Weekly Standard" has most recently disgraced itself with its glowing, revisionist, Disneyfication of "Yazoo City, MI" in order to advance the predicedntial fortunes of Mr. Haley Barbour.

In other words the interplay among these giants of the Right that so fascinates Mr. Friedersdorf amounts to absolutely nothing more than a screaming match in a DT ward over whether getting piss drunk on fortified wine or piss drunk on drug-store vodka is more respectable.

So let me explain this very, very simply:

All Modern Conservative theory springs from the corrupt fountainhead of St. Ronald Reagan's pronouncement that "Government is the problem".

All Modern Conservative tactics spring from the corrupt fountainhead of Richard Nixon's win-at-any-cost Southern Strategy.

Everything that has happened on the Right in the last 30 years comes down to nothing more than the destructive antics of the ever-more degenerate and horrific political mutations caused by the factory-farm inbreeding of these two corrupt ideas over and over and over again.

And the idea that these clowns on the Right are now fighting in the rubble of the ruin they made over which of them is the bigger dick would actually be hilarious if they hadn't fucked up my country so badly in the process.

You're welcome.