Conservatives Discover America, Ctd.

One Of Dubya's former footstools is suddenly worried about income inequality.

Oh boy!

From David Frum:

[T]he distribution of power tends to follow the distribution of wealth. If only a comparative few own, then only a comparative few will rule. If it’s indeed inevitable as Kling hypothesizes [in the article Frum is citing] that wealth must concentrate in the information age, then it’s equally inescapable that democracy must yield to a new political system that better protects the interests of those who possess it. Understand that implication–and brood on it.

Which reminds me in a very specific way of Tom Friedman's odious column from June, 2005 in which he complains that nobody was talking about Iraq!

...
Tom Friedman has well and truly surpassed himself.
...

Friedman has already been righteously and rightfully beaten down as the leading-edge of the execrable Apologist Wedge by Atrios, Gilliard, and god knows who all else, so I will keep this short. Ok, short-ish.

Here’s a tiny sip of the rancid stew:

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 15, 2005

Ever since Iraq's remarkable election, the country has been descending deeper and deeper into violence. But no one in Washington wants to talk about it. Conservatives don't want to talk about it because, with a few exceptions, they think their job is just to applaud whatever the Bush team does. Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed. As a result, Iraq is drifting sideways and the whole burden is being carried by our military. The rest of the country has gone shopping, which seems to suit Karl Rove just fine.

First, Captain Obvious has again renewed his wretched subscription to the despicable and now, really, outright treasonable world-view that

A) No one is talking about Iraq. Which is such an nakedly demented lie that one must wonder if Tommy-boy has, at last, just lost his mind. As I sat at Wrigley field last week, in a park packed to capacity with highly-focused and well-informed Cubs and BoSox fans, at no point did I ever feel compelled to lean over to my fiends and remark -- shouting over the noise – that it was sure a pity the no one wanted to talk about baseball.

Had I done so, my friends (being my friends) would have, have cut off my beer, gotten me out of the hot sun and into an ER immediately. We’ll immediate…after the ninth inning, but they would have been very concerned.

What they wouldn’t have done is give me a column in the New York Fucking Times.
B) The Universe is carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.

It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.

It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.

It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.

However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happened to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong.

And then stamp his chubby little feet and whine that No One Is Listening to Him!

What a lazy pint of watery poo he is, and if that were all he is, that would be bad enough, but with his second absurd “indictment -- "Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed.” – he definitively crosses the line into outright treachery.

So you want to know how this Liberal views Iraq?

Take a look at the sickening image that came roaring out of our collective unconscious and onto our televisions on 9/11: a human being confronted with two choices too terrible to contemplate -- leap into oblivion or be roasted alive.

And once in the air, whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs this poor bastard might have had became irrelevant. Flapping their arms didn’t matter. Prayer didn’t matter.

Once in the air, the Cold Equations were all that mattered. Once in the air, my fellow human being became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much.

That, you despicable little stooge, is EXACTLY how Iraq looks to me.

On the heels of our greatest modern national trauma, the President and his minions shrieked and bellowed, roared and raged that there was a conflagration at our backs. That we were all in immediate, lethal danger from a massive, murderous attack by Saddam Hussein and that if we didn't act right now we were fucked.

Mushroom-cloud fucked.

And that the ONLY alternative was to jump. He was advised by wise men of the costs of jumping, of the dangers, of the number of troops necessary, of the extremely complex situation into which he would be dropping. He was warned that beating Iraq militarily would be easy…but that securing the Peace would be hard.

He told us that the fall would be simple. That we would alight in a land where we would be greeted as Liberators. The costs would be negligible. The gains would be high. Virtually painless.

But MOST of all, that the fire was nipping at our heels. It was so urgent, so imperative. that if we didn’t want to see our children perish, we had to jump right now.

So we did.

Convinced by Bush that it was the only option left to us -–and that he had planned carefully for the consequences -- we leaped out of window and into the sky.

We jumped, because we were told we had to.

And in jumping, we committed our troops, our nation and our good name to the brutal calculus of war; to factors beyond our control, and now we are plunging down and down and down into tragedy.

And as we fall we find that the building was not on fire at all.

That the people that pushed us into space had lied to us.

That the parachute of carefully planning that they were supposed to have prepared to save us from ruin had been packed with nothing but empty slogans and ideology-drunk fantasies.

Now we are falling, out of control.

And pointing out that we are falling because of the lies and delusions of the Administration has nothing to do with whether or not I "want the Bush team to succeed” you contemptible little weed. We are watching the country we passionately love plummet into darkness along the exact trajectory we warned you about, and you think that there is any joy in being right? Any pleasure in seeing your beloved wasted and playing in traffic?

Sorry, Friedman, but no.

Now whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs we might have had have become irrelevant. Flapping our arms doesn’t matter. Prayer doesn’t matter.

Once in the air, the Cold Equations are all that matter.

Once in the air, my nation became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much.
...

I an reminded of that 2005 Friedman travesty because of what Mr. Frum rather spectacularly fails to mention: that none of the elements of his sudden concern about oligarchy are new. What he is describing is the apotheosis of Davos Capitalism and the supply-side, union-free, cheap-labor-driven economic vision of his beloved St. Ronald Reagan...about which a whole lot of people have been brooding.

For decades.

Brooding. Warning. Jeremiading. Shouting. Blogging. Speechifying. Debating. Cooperating. Speculating. Positing. Agitating. Back-sassing. Lipping off. Being shrill. Being logical. Pleading. Reasoning. Thrusting our fists against the posts and still insisting we see the ghosts, and generally Cassandra-ing ourselves hoarse.

And the people who have been "brooding" about the future which now agitates Mr. Frum so are called "Liberals"...

...although in the Conservative social circles in which Mr. Frum used to run, I believe they are more commonly referred to as "America-hating, cheese-eating cut-and-run surrender monkeys."

Via my post the World Economic Forum ("Privilege has its Memberships") here is what sociologist Richard Sennett was writing "about life on Capitalism's Olympus in 1998, Richard Sennett had this to say about how the New Ruling Class views us little, shire-folk":

The dizzy life of Davos man

Yet I had an epiphany of sorts in Davos, listening to the rulers of the flexible realm. "We" is also a dangerous pronoun to them. They dwell comfortably in entrepreneurial disorder, but fear organised confrontation. They of course fear the resurgence of unions, but become acutely and personally uncomfortable, fidgeting or breaking eye contact or retreating into taking notes, if forced to discuss the people who, in their jargon, are "left behind." They know that the great majority of those who toil in the flexible regime are left behind, and of course they regret it. But the flexibility they celebrate does not give, it cannot give, any guidance for the conduct of an ordinary life. The new masters have rejected careers in the old English sense of the word, as pathways along which people can travel; durable and sustained paths of action are foreign territories.

In other words, we are back to the Two Commandments:

1. There is a Club.
2. You are not in it.

And the social contract firehoses we could have used to put out this conflagration have been defunded, clear-cut, deregulated and finally sliced up into paper-thin O-rings, which were then shipped to the Marianas Islands where they were woven into designer microfiber hand towers by slave labor, which were then shipped back to the United States where Paris Hilton's valet uses them to pick up her teacup poodle's droppings.

Everybody made a fucking fortune on the deal!

Except of course for the poor suckers who are still waiting around for their social contract to be honored.

And their honest labor to be treated with dignity.

But as long as enough of the suckers remain brainwashed by Mr. Frum's former employers into believing that their problems are really the result of sinister conspiracies of unions, uppity women, welfare queens and dirty hippies, they will continue to obediently march this country into an assisted national suicide, listening happily to Sean Hannity until the very end.

And that will be the story of us.