All Lies and Jest

Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

The Most Ridiculous Sentence of the Week belongs to Andrew Sullivan:

 The attempt by the left and the neocon right to make [Ron] Paul out to be the real bigot in this race is gob-smacking.

First, for sheer entertainment value, nothing beats occasionally tuning into the long-running Telenovela of  Mr. Sullivan's serial, whirlwind affairs with one very bad idea after another.  In this soap-opera, Mr. Sullivan chases virtually any idiotic notion that suits his fancy waaay down virtually any rabbit hole own this it tumbles, alibiing himself all along the way that what he is really doing is exploring some as-yet-unheard-of crenelation in "real" conservatism: a form of conservatism which, as one wag once put it, seems to flicker in and out of existence like some form of exotic subatomic particle:

Like so many others of his kind, Sullivan maintains his career (and quite possibly his sanity) by hiding out in a meticulously-constructed fantasy-land. Bolted together out of leftovers from the Book of Genesis, it posits a righteous, sinless, pre-Fall "Real Conservatism" that apparently flickered in and out of existence like some exotic subatomic particle (two parts lepton to one part moron) sometime between 7:00 and 7:03 A.M. GMT on March 9, 1981. 

And so long as whatever-it-is-this-time bears the whiff of this imaginary "real" conservatism, Mr. Sullivan will wallow in it, lingering 

 In the rank sweat of [its] enseamed bed,
 Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
 Over the nasty sty 

until, of course, it inevitably blows up in his face.

At which point he hustles the hell away Frum from the scene of the crime, whistling loudly and talking about bigger pictures and broader perspectives.

This predictable, recurring FAIL seems to come directly from Mr. Sullivan's fundamental inability to understand the United States as it really exists.  As if he had come to our fair shores believing that the Civil War was some merry historical mixup from a bygone age, "General Lee" was just the name of the car on "The Dukes of Hazzard" and that everything of any importance in American history happened after the Ascension of St. Ronald Reagan.

So first, let me say that mere words cannot 'compass round my joy at having America's premier gay Tory Catholic Beltway blogger presume to tell me what "the left" thinks.

About anything.

And second, WTF are you talking about, "the real bigot"?

"The"?   Are you fucking kidding me?

It is true that after Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people in the name of striking a blow against the tyranny of Big Gummint

 

that particular strain of batshit Right-wing crazy slipped hastily into more pastel-colored Libertarian camouflage and became less conspicuous than Santorum's banal Dominionist leftovers.  But a quick costume-change doesn't mean that species of militant anti-government loco disappeared after Oklahoma City any more than slapping tri-corner hats onto the pointy heads of dog-loyal Republican Base after the debacle of the Bush Administration magically transformed them into a "Tea Party" which had apparently never even heard of George W. Bush.

The bigger picture here, Mr. Sullivan, in case you haden't yet pieced it together is that bigotry is the foundation on which your entire movement rests.

Bigotry is the indestructible Adamantine skeleton on which the flesh of 10,000 political campaigns, religious crusades, anti-science think tanks and "traditional morality" ballot measures have been hung.  And as everyone on the Left understands but apparently you do not, the reason Ron Paul is momentarily getting more attention for his brand of loco than Rick Santorum is for his is that Santorum's kind of hatred never went underground.

The bigger picture here, Mr. Sullivan, is that Racism is America's Original Sin.

And whether it comes swaddled in Scripture alongside misogyny and homophobia, or slithers in the back door with a little Small Gummint perfume dabbed behind its horns and tail, it will continue to be our democracy's terrible, wasting disease -- passed down from generation to generation -- until we are rid of it.

Until its adherents and exploiters are shamed or enlightened or marginalized into extinction.

And that will never happen as long as America's Original Sin continues to be wielded by the Right from the podium, from the pulpit, from behind the radio mic and in from of the teevee camera as it's political weapon of choice.  Which, as Mr. Charlie Pierce points out, they have been doing since around the same time Mr. Sullivan was taking his first steps and learning his first words:

You know who also thought that "appearing to be racist was a good political strategy in the 1990's"? The same people who thought it was a good political strategy in the 1960's, '70's, and '80's. The same people who hired Lee Atwater. The same people who looked at the white-supremacist backlash against the triumphs of the civil-rights movement and saw, not a outbreak of lawless racism, but a golden political opportunity, and who built a political movement out of the remnants of American apartheid, and who allowed that movement to take over an entire political party until all that's left is what you see now, parading through the streets of Iowa, or working in the state houses to deprive minority voters of the rights for which they paid so dear a price. 

It was more than Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul, boys. It was the entire Republican party, and the conservative "movement" that energized it. It's why Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign talking about "states rights" in Mississippi, not half-a-mile from the spot where murdered civil rights workers were buried in a dam. It was welfare mothers driving Cadillacs and young bucks buying steaks. It was the slandering of Lani Guinier as a "quota queen." It's all those ID laws in all those states, and the phony ACORN scandal, and virtually everything said by every GOP presidential candidate on the subject of immigration and, in case you haven't noticed, it's an awful lot of the problems your people have with Barack Obama. It's what the pathetic Willard Romney is talking about when he talks about "the entitlement society." It's too late to get out from under it now. Without "appearing to be racist" as a good political strategy, there would be no modern Republican party. Modern conservatism would have ceased to exist after the debacle of 1964. Don't be fobbing it all off on poor Ron Paul

But as one wag once noted:

Acknowledgment of Paternity which establishes Ronald Reagan as the political father of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin would completely fuck up Mr. Sullivan's lucrative scam. 

So, shhhhhh!