Dead Center

Political Cowardice Now Has Its Own "Movement"!

Yay!

In case you ever idled away an afternoon screwing around with your old political chemistry set/fantasy football league lineups and wondering what would happen if you took a bunch of Republican primary losers (Charlie Christ)...added in a goonbag of out-of-work and out-of-favor former Republican speechwriters and campaign button-men (David Frum/John Avlon/Mark McKinnon)...the last of the politically arteriosclerotic insider DLC goofs who aren't already drawing paychecks under the Obama Administration's "Former Clinton White House Full Employment Project" (Nancy Jacobson aka. Mrs. Mark Penn)...Republican minor teevee celebrities (Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough)...

...and David Fucking Brooks?

And then sprinkled the resulting crime against nature with an assload of money (because there are always, always endless assloads of money available for any horrible idea that reinforces Villager sensibilities)?

What you get crawling out of the Petri dish are things like the autotuned, content-free, sugar-coma-inducing horror that is

the "No Labels Anthem"

But nothing we did not expect, right?

I mean, ever since the Republican Base ducked out on paying the tab for a generation of being loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything by putting on funny hats, screaming about liberty and calling themselves "The Tea Party", their sleazy Centrist enablers have been seething with jealously. Quite suddenly the monster they built didn't need them anymore and the skeevy hustlers who had helped create the Racist/Corporatist/Dominionist Confederacy on the bones of the New Deal and the grave of the American Dream found themselves cast out and looking for their next meal ticket.

Preferably a meal ticket under a banner that -- like "Tea Party -- wouldn't keep bringing up their horribly inconvenient past as the sleazy, enabling hustlers.

Hey, kids! I have an idea! Lets peel those the icky, damning labels off of everything and -- presto! -- there is magically no longer any difference between rat poison and apple sauce!

Can I haz my million dollars now?

Well, how about another, better idea? One for which there is never a million-dollar payday for Beltway insiders because it does not offer to chop-shop your miserably failed past out of existence, and let you roll right back out the door cleansed and shriven thanks to a cheap "Tea Party" or "No Labels" spray job.

How about, to fix our big, national problems, we start by calling our problems by their real names

so that we can deal with them as they really are?

Of course, the problem is, if you take your political nutrients by re-breathing Rush Limbaugh's racist beer farts, you can't join.

If your worldview is informed by mainlining Glenn Beck conspiracy theories with ever-larger gauge needles, you can't join.

If you believe that the Earth is 9,000 years old, that global climate change is a George Soros put-up job, that science is bad...and insist that your head-up-ass fantasies be legislated into reality, you can't join.

If you are Newt Gingrich or his space-age polymer wife, you can't join.

If you are Sarah Palin, you really, really can't join.

If you want the government to keep its hand off of your Medicare, you can't join.

If you're a Birther or a Death Panel monger, don't even fucking bother.

If you lied us into a war (and then botched that war), you can't join.

If you listen to Fox News and Hate Radio to "get both sides", you can't join.

If your bookshelf is shot through with crap that has been pooped out of the Regnery Press Mendacity Factory, you can't join.

If you think President Obama and anyone else slightly to the Left Sean Hannity is a radical, committed Marxist, you can't join.

If you still think ACORN was a threat, Andrew Breitbart is a journalist and James O'Keefe is a hero, you can't join.

So...tallying up the results here...looks like the entire Conservative Movement is wingnuto non grata at the "No Liars" movement.

How sad.

Worse yet, if your are a purveyor of the Biggest Lie of All, you are also obviously out of the club.

And what is the Biggest Lie of All?

That "both side do it".

Ruh roh...(from me, back in 2007):

The Big Lie

...
And for twenty years – while the mass purveyors of carefully calibrated hate and rage and xenophobia on the Right gathered more and more power and got more and more vulgar and vicious in their rhetoric – what did the Left try to do?

We tried to find common ground. To meet our opponents half-way.

To compromise…with people who sneered at the very idea of working together and said quite openly that compromise was “political date rape”.

While the Emperor of Weaponized Bile, Newt Gingrich, took over the House with a campaign explicitly based on calling Democrats “traitors” at every opportunity, and Limbaugh was being honored as the “Majority Maker” by those House Republicans, we on the Left were still trying to do and be all the nicey-nicey things that Alan Simpson is now all weepy and wistful for.

And it didn’t work. And while we played by Marquis of Queensbury, the orcs laughed in our faces, overran the joint, and bequeathed to us as its apotheosis the worst, most despicable, most incompetent, most Constitution-loathing Administration in American history.

Al Franken and Air America did not arise in a vacuum. The came into being as a desperate, eleventh-hour attempt to fight back against a twenty year multimedia blitz of unremitting, unrebutted Conservative lies and bigotry.

They arose because no one in the Mainstream Media had the guts to take on the GOP Propaganda Machine head-on. Instead, the MSM collaborated, because collaborating in the Big Lie was a much better, safer career move.

Progressive Radio arose because politicians like Alan Simpson were, for twenty years, perfectly content with looking the other way and harvesting the electoral fruits of the poison tree that their Conservative/Christopath/Racist Hate Radio, Hate TeeVee, Hate Satellite, Hate Cable and Hate Publishing so lavishly watered and fertilized.

Because the GOP was never concerned with the destruction of political comity…as long as it was working to their advantage.

As long as all of the screeching Orwellian hellfire was coming from the Right, they never said a fucking word.

But now, finally, after twenty years of unilateral disarmament, now that the Left has at last decided to fight back hard, suddenly old Republican loons like Simpson get all gooey for the glory days of cellulose collars, nickel candy bars, whale-bone corsets, heroic cavalry charges and a politics of gentle, ruffled fisticuffs followed by brandy, cigars and top-shelf hookers.

Suddenly it is “zealots on both sides” that have torn his beloved Temple down.

Well fuck you, Alan Simpson. Fuck you sideways for your bogus hand-wringing and crocodile tears.

And fuck you, George Mitchell, for sitting there with your thumb up your ass and allowing your good, Republican friend to spread this Big Lie unchallenged right under your nose.

So -- moar sad! -- looks like our Centrists friends are out too.

Leaving one group which, whatever their faults and frailties,

by and large doesn't fucking lie to you all day, every day on order to scare you so stupid that you will not only gladly drink poison...

...but you'll demand a second helping if the first dose doesn't kill you.


UPDATE: Tengrain attempts an ancient and all-but-forgotten journalistic rite known as "Following The Money" here.