Today In Revisionist News...

Andrews Sullivan explains to the Daily Beast's millions of readers how Dat 'Ol Debil Right uses !Dishonesty! (Can! You! Believe! it?!) to pretend Dubya never happened.

He concludes as follows:

I guess they'll persuade some. But others have memories.

No, Andrew, they do not.

As far as I can see, virtually all Conservatives -- both the current, card-carrying goof variety like Palin and the recent expatriates such as yourself -- simply have an "Off" switch buried somewhere along the time-line of recent American history.

For those on the Right still sealed inside their airless, lightless wingnut ragebox like Ariel in her his* "cloven pine" --

By help of her more potent ministers
And in her most unmitigable rage,
Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprison'd thou didst painfully remain

-- history's "Off" switch is located on January 20, 2009, at around noon Eastern Standard Time.

When asked about any event before that, here is what you get...


Strategic Forgettery.

...absolutely nothing left sifting around inside their mushy, angry skulls except that sparkly aluminum sand that good people at Ohio Arts use to make the Etch-a-Sketch.

Shake-shake-shake...and Ronald Reagan never sold weapons to terrorists, funded an illegal war, raised taxes four times, or left behind the largest deficit in American history up until that time.

Shake-shake-shake...and Bush the Elder never hired Lee Atwater.

Shake-shake-shake...and what Southern Strategy?

Shake-shake-shake...and George W. Bush is the Greatest President Ever, you filthy, Liberal traitors!

Shake-shake-shake...and where did you ever get the idea that anyone in the Conservative Movement supported that "Progressive" George W. Bush?

Shake-shake-shake...George Bush who?

Shake-shake-shake...Sarah Palin never supported the bailout!

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits don't matter.

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits are worse than six Hitlers!

Shake-shake-shake...the Kenyan Usurper's deficits are destroying America.

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Republican"? I'm a Conservative!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Conservative"? I'm an Independent!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Independent"? I'm a Independent/Conservo/Libertarian!
...

Now while the Conservative Expat's position may be slightly more nuanced, it is also immensely more dishonest. This is because the Expat almost invariably locates their own "Off" switch right around the time their gag reflex finally kicked in and they lost the ability to uncritically choke down the sheer metric tonnage of bullshit required to continue to pretend that Conservatism is not the barbaric, authoritarian farce that Liberal always told them it was.

Before that moment, Conservatism was all Reagan and Maggie Thatcher riding a red-white-and-blue Push-Me-Pull-You that farted pure Free Market Fairy Dust in perfect, Laffer-Curve arcs down the Yellow Brick Road; after that moment, all was darkness and Palin and and roving packs of inbred yahoos scaling the walls of their Nice, Conservative gated-communities and pigfucking them in their own beds!

Gads!

And so Expats continue to lie to themselves and their readers in ways that differ only in degree but not in kind from the ways the Teabagger and Palinites leaders lie to themselves and their acolytes --

1. They both "still cling fiercely to the abstract, rapturous purity of [their] core dogma and will probably never be able to wrap [their] heads around the fact that Ayn Rand's little wingnut terrarium is not a heroic creed, but a moral spider hole for misanthropes, rich degenerates and rich degenerate-wannabes."

2. They would both come to instant financial and professional ruin without the myth that the Pure and Perfect Conservatism over which they stand guard is being threatened by villains and heretics who must be stopped.

3. They both would rather french kiss a supernova than ever admit that Liberals were right all along. That we warned you. And warned you. Holy Fucking Venus on a Vespa, did we ever warn you:

And now we’re all rather hoarse and worn out from trying to shout past Limbaugh and Falwell and Reed and Robertson and Weyrich and Bauer and Schlafly for the last two decades to get through to you.

I know we’re not your audience, but you should know that while I personally think it's great that you’re finally mastering political A-B-C’s and fractions and all, we on the Left got tired of waiting for people you to stop circle-jerking with bigots and monsters wearing dime-store Maggie Thatcher masks a long time ago.

A very, very long time ago.

Long enough that we now find your eager and evergreen astonishment each time you re-discover that the Right is being run by madmen to be tantamount to a 45-year-old man bragging that he’s aaaaalmost figured out how to use the Big Boy potty without making boom-boom on the walls.

So quit waiting for whatever crusading watchdogs in the press or in positions of power on the Right to come thundering over the horizon in the final reel: any such creatures are either long since hollowed out, sold out, dead, or never existed in the first place.

Instead, if you really want to do a public service, stop yelping about why Keyes is still allowed to flap his gums, and start answering the really interesting question.

To wit:

“What exactly is so deeply broken in people like Andrew Sullivan that they can delude themselves so long, so passionately, so disastrously and so self-destructively about the real nature a movement which, in the end, was never more than a cult of angry, paranoid rubes, well-funded demagogues and rapacious plutocrats?”

* (Thanks for the catch, billyblog)