Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Centrist hogs swarm the both-sides-do-it trough" edition.

On "Meet the Press" today, Teabagger/Republican Congressman Labrador from the Free White People's Republic of Idaho noted that during Bush Administration a bunch of Liberals said "Fuck" a lot and and many other naughty things about The Dear Leader. This, he averred, was precisely the same as the wingnuts showing up en mass at public events waving guns, screaming about crackpot conspiracy theories and stating quite openly that if they don't get what they want they will start shooting.

This gave host David Gregory an instant case of raging Centrist priapism.

Gregory: Remember that Liberal Alan Grayson said naughty things!

Congressman Labradoodle: Exactly. There is no difference between the two sides whatsoever.

Gregory: My enormous Centrist erection agrees with you! If only both sides would quit showing up to mass rallies and town halls armed, screaming for blood, and waving birth certificates around.

Congressman Labradoodle: Your enormous Centrist erection is indeed Fair and Balanced!

Gregory: Thank you. I can also fit Newt Gingrich's entire fist in my mouth.

Congressman Labradoodle: You must be great fun at parties.

Gregory: So I am told. Say, about those guns, what about maybe some kind of "law" that would prevent "crazy" people from having them?

Congressman Labradoodle: Hey, hey, let's not go all LiberalIslamoStalinist here. You were doing so well.

Gregory: I iz sorry.

Congressman Labradoodle: Individuals just need to be personally responsible for using their assault weapons and grenade launchers correctly.

Gregory: I iz very sorry.

Congressman Labradoodle: Also I blame the cops.

Now multiply that by 1,000 and you have today's Mouse Circus.

In other words, no mention of the fact that Right's interlocking political/media/religious keiretsu has been a massive paint-shaker for Crazy for as long as anyone can remember: when they need a few more votes or a few more dollars, they notch it up; when someone takes them up on their elimination rhetoric and blows up a federal building or flies a plane into an IRS office or murders a doctor, they dial it back a little and pretend they have no idea where anyone could have gotten such ideas.

Which is, of course, done with the enthusiastic cooperation of Establishmentarian testicle cozies like Gregory, whose defense of his patently absurd equivalencing (which is a word starting now) has rarely been on more feculent display.

Andrew Sullivan gets some of it right here (credit where it is due):

...
Yes, I used those words to delineate the corrosively caustic and eliminationist rhetoric that can fuel disturbed individuals like Jared Loughner. I did so because it is stupid to deny the vitriol that swamped George W. Bush during and after the recount and then the Iraq war. And there is a defense of heated rhetoric here: what language are you going to use when a president institutes torture or goes to war on empirically false pretenses?

But - and here I return to my recent blog-debate with Pejman - I do believe that the delegitimization and demonization of Barack Obama are in a different league and define the right in ways in which Bush hatred never fully defined the left.
...

And some of it predictably wrong here:

...
The Palin forces, who have fomented this dynamic more viciously and recklessly than any other group, are reacting today with incandescent rage that they could even be mentioned in the same breath as this act of political terrorism. That's called denial. When you put a politician in literal cross-hairs, when you call her a target, when you celebrate how many targets you have hit, when you go on national television and shoot guns, when you use the language of "lock and load" to describe disagreements over healthcare provision ... you are part of the problem.
...

What Mr. Sullivan and his expatriate tribe have never come to terms with is that this problem didn't just precipitate out of the pellucid ether two years ago with the arrival of "The Palin forces". It was right there, in plain sight, during all the many, many years he was cheer-leading for the Right because Palinism is nothing more or less than the latest, mutant manifestation of the violent, paranoid and often-racist rot that has always been at the very heart of Mr. Sullivan's beloved Movement.

There was no Palin when McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma to stop the Evil Government whose imaginary treachery had been dinned into his ears for years, or when militias armed themselves against the coming of the Black Helicopters and the U.N. New World Order, or when the Clintons were being gutted in the press every day as a murderers, assassins, depraved monsters and drug dealers...

...but there was Grover Norquist and Dick Armey. There was Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.

When the World Trade Center came down, there was no Palin immediately blaming it on Liberals and gays and the ACLU...

...but there was Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberston.

It wasn't Palin who sanctioned the Republican Southern Strategy. It wasn't Palin who stood practically on the spot where Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were murdered, dog-whistled to the bigots about "state's rights", and was rewarded with electoral success for doing so. It wasn't Palin who turned Lee Atwater loose to sink his fangs into the American jugular. It wasn't Palin who set up the revival tent freakshows like "Justice Sunday" to threaten "activist judges". It wasn't Palin who used the mortal remains of Teri Schiavo to score political points.

And it wasn't Palin who was working busily away the entire time in Conservative think-tanks, journals and in the halls of Congress cooking up alibis and justifications for every filthy bit of it

Palin is merely an emergent property of all that preceded her: just the latest inheritor of Conservatism's long and obscene legacy who is using that inheritance exactly as she was taught to use it by her Conservative forebears.

And other than the 3,000 posts and 51 podcasts I have already done about this same sad subject over the last six years, right now I have nothing more to add other than my sincerest sympathy and most earnest prayers for every single person who was damaged or destroyed by this tragedy.