On Becoming One With the Darkness

After decades of following the twisty course of Conservative arguments and debating  friends and colleagues, I know one thing to be true: the futilely of trying to get Republicans to talk honestly in the 1990s about, say, Bill Clinton amounted to little more than a dress-rehearsal for futilely trying to get Republicans to talk honestly about Bush, Cheney, DeLay, Iraq, 9/11, deficit-exploding tax cuts, climate change, radical banking deregulation, radical environmental deregulation, the assassination of abortion providers, contraception, labor unions, mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds, and couple of dozen other topics I could reel off.

In other words, it doesn't work: to protect their egos (and, often, their incomes) instead of doing what we teach every child to do -- apologize when you are wrong -- the Right has collectively jumped past a spiritual event horizon and into a soul-darkness from which there is no return: a darkness in which imps and devils are always patiently waiting to take your hat and coat and make you extremely comfortable on the gentle, downward-sloping road to Hell.

This darkness comes with a promise and a catch: the promise is, that the Right will never, ever be called to account for the endless lies they have told and endless betrayals they have committed; the catch is that they can never leave, and no matter how repellent their neighbors become and no matter how humiliating and horrifying the lies become, they are obliged to shut up and go along with the program. With this promise comes the terrible, goosestepping power of a mob under harness, but with it also comes a grotesque fragility because to keep the darkness alive the Right has become a confederacy of Mrs. Havishams, rotting away in the gloom.

And to make matters much, much worse, their decaying mansion sits on top of such a massive, leaky stockpile of lie upon lie, betrayal upon betrayal, hypocrisy upon hypocrisy and treason upon treason that the danger of one, stray non-Fox Approved fact accidentally glancing off another non-Fox and sparking off a conflagration is omnipresent.

The entire Conservative enterprise is built on delusion and old dynamite, which is why every clock much forever remain stopped at one minute after Reagan's inauguration, every fact must be smothered under the stasis field of Rush Limbaugh roaring, rage-drunk bluster.  It is the sarcophagus of a dead ideology where the walls are now so densely postered and palimpsested with the detritus of Conservatism's lurid, lying history that its denizens cannot find the exit anymore, and its floors are so sticky and pitted with the grue of its savage, tribal, beat-in rituals that no one bothers to even look for the door.

Which is why  no deviation can be permitted, no error can be admitted and no apologies can be allowed.

As I wrote last year, this catastrophe all began as a headlong dive into the best fucking high the Right would ever have --

Shattered Like a Glass Reagan

...
Reagan was the opening coda of a long, wretched orgy of pure, barbaric, fuck-it-all that has roared along on adrenaline and borrowed money for more than 30 years now. Reagan was the first mountain of coke the Right piled onto the national coffee table; the first, chilly bottles of champagne bought with stolen credit cards being popped. Reagan was the promise that the peak moment of frenzied, stomping, tribal, rage-drunk Wingnut Worldfuck -- the moment when everything was beautiful, and everyone was gonna get laid -- could be made to last forever and ever if they all just clap-clap-clapped loud enough, hated hard enough, and all agreed to never under any circumstances look back at the ruin they were leaving in their wake. As I wrote three years ago: ...in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull. Listen to any aging wingnut sighing and jerking sadly off to a tattered photo of Saint Ronnie -- despite the fact that the catastrophes we are now reaping were sown by his ruinous ideology -- and you can hear every addict who ever lived pining for that first Perfect High. The one they spend the rest of their days chasing, regardless of the size of the debts they run up or the ruined lives they leave in their wake.

Clinton? Objectively, Clinton qualifies as the greatest Center/Right President in history, and with balanced budgets, GATT, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, record surpluses, foreign and domestic terrorists brought to book, and an actual military victory, he arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else.

And they hated him for it.

Why?

Because Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.

And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison. ...

Reagan -- that perfect, luminous Cartoon Reagan of their Limbaugh-addled minds -- is the greatest high the Right ever had: the one they have been chasing down the rathole of Conservatism ever since. He represents a genuine, revolutionary moment in American history: the moment when the Base came to believe --really, viscerally believe -- that they were now the Masters of All Things. When their eyes began to sparkle with a special, crazy light of certainty that they had finally found the Christian Warrior who would sweep aside the whiny, nagging, shabby carpenter-God of caution and consequence and compassion for the least of these...and place on that righteous throne a New, Muscular, Almighty Yahweh of unlimited consumption, White American Privilege, and kicking the motherfucking shit of anyone who said otherwise.

Fuck solar power.

Fuck turning the fucking thermometer down.

Fuck fuel efficiency.

Fuck sweaters.

And while we're at it, fuck pushy women and uppity Negroes too!

Those things and all the others were for fags and tree-huggers and the French, and we were Americans God Damn It. And as Americans, Reagan told us that we had a divine right to an unlimited supply of everything we ever wanted.

Supersized.

Forever.

Reagan promised the Right that those scary rules about of cause and effect and action and consequences they always been taught were primal and immutable were really just fictions invented by smarty-pants Nanny-state Liberals. That their souls were troubled and lives were being slowly pulverized not because they were being slow-roasted by Ronnie's corporate friends and backers, but because Imaginary Lefty Elites had been holding them back all these years.

And salvation was at hand! All they had to do was stop fearing Hunter Thompson's assay of the dark side of the American character --

...a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

-- and instead wallow in it. Fling themselves into its arms like the embrace of the wildest, kinkiest lover they had ever dreamed of.

Forever.

Reagan was the first, few vivid hours of the binge that is now shuddering to its squalid ending like something that crawled off the last page of Harlan Ellison's "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" 

...

Now the bender is over.

Outside, Reality's beating sun is stationed in the treetops, so bright and close to the Earth that it vaporizes shadows inside of pockets and purses, and through the sodden walls of their fragile fastness Conservatives they can feel its slippery photons circling their ideological clubhouse, sniffing the hinges and lintels like wolves, looking for a way in.

This time, there is no trick-or-treat scamper to safety for them in the kindly, Tea Party gloaming: no way to scuttle off to the next wingnut spider hole in a tri-corner hat and tights pretending they'd never even heard of George W. Bush. No, the rotting hulk of the Party of Lincoln has become their crypt, and inside of it there is nothing left for them but to sink forever deeper into the shadows until they become one with the darkness.

And from deep inside their narrow house, you can hear the terrified squeals of Conservtism's pasty, self-righteous, rigidly ignorant, sexually-terrified wingnut child-men trying frantically to spackle up the little holes through which modernity, complexity and reality continue to leak:

From one of Andrew Breitbart's media whelplings: 

 Sluts Without Shame! 

-By Don Boys, Ph.D.

Since the Fall of man, the earth has been cursed with women (and men) who used their bodies in illicit ways. They have been called loose women, prostitutes, whores, fallen women, and sluts; however, in earlier days, there was a sense of shame and disgrace in their activities. Even Hollywood lowlifes tried to be discrete. While “slut” is considered offensive, so is the lifestyle.

When I was young, if an unmarried woman got pregnant, she was sent to “visit her grandmother” for a few months. The family still loved her, wanted the best for her, forgave her, but there was a lasting sense of shame. But those days are long gone. Society calls it “reproductive freedom” but God calls it whoredom; and status, beauty, money, and education don’t change anything.
... 

Sex outside of marriage is always wrong.

It is not illegal to be promiscuous, male or female; but a recent graduate law student has shocked the nation by her advocacy for slutism. Her audacity and lack of shame are appalling. While she did not admit to casual sex, she did plead the cause of sluts everywhere. Loose women and men who sleep together take the risk of walking away with more than they expected! With all the STDs out there I am amazed that prostitutes can stay in business. It shows that many men think below, not above the belt.

In congressional testimony to Congress and the world she appeared to have no shame, decency, self-respect, or morals as she advocated for casual sex. Some people will do anything for 15 minutes of fame. Or infamy. She wants me to pay for a girl’s roll in the hay! That is insanity. When you play, you pay. Not me.
... 

Or maybe have parents finance their fornication. ... I wonder if her parents are hiding in a dark cave somewhere! Maybe, just maybe their permissive child-training contributed to and encouraged her sexual lunacy!

Moreover, if recreational sex for a female is a health issue that citizens should fund then how about paying me for recreational golf since that too is a health issue. ...

Feminists are trying to make this a birth control issue but no one is trying to limit birth control availability. Normal people simply insist that the promiscuous should provide their own. No birth control method is 100% accurate but female sluts could solve their problems by using the old American standby, the aspirin between the knees. That is a 100% sure way to prevent pregnancy and STDs. 

...

(Dr. Don's bio says that he "...is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives, author of 14 books, frequent guest on television and radio talk shows, and wrote columns for USA Today for 8 years. His most recent book is ISLAM: America’s Trojan Horse! His new eBook, The God Haters is available for $9.99 from www.thegodhaters.com. These columns go to over 11,000 newspapers, television, and radio stations. His other web sites are www.cstnews.com and www.Muslimfact.com.")

Here is another angle from another one of Mr. Brietbart's special little people: 

For those unaware, a long-time liberal activist named Sandra Fluke was brought to a faux committee hearing in D.C. by former Speaker of the House Nancy “Sanfran” Pelosi to disgorge the left-wing, big government, liberal ideology about spending federal tax dollars to give free sex supplies to rich Georgetown coeds so that they can sleep around all they want without all those messy consequences.  

 After her White House planned “testimony” Rush Limbaugh, as is his wont, called this woman a slut. It’s hard to defeat his blustery logic with that. After all, what DO you call a woman that thinks everyone else should pay for both her education and her sex supplies? Anyway, Rush made such a splash with the comment that the inevitable, left-wing faux outrage was ginned up.
...

And another:

She’s No Fluke: Is the Word ‘Slut’ Still Relevant?

-By Selwyn Duke

A woman close to me once characterized the sea change in our society well. “Years ago you knew who the bad girls were,” said she. “Now you know who the good girls are.”

And the good boys get condemned for not pretending the bad girls are good.

I am, of course, speaking about the dust up involving law student Sandra Fluke and talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. Fluke had said in front of Congress that financing rolls in the hay can be so expensive that it can be a burden on women in law school. So she wants you, dear taxpayer, to foot the bill for her contraception. In response to this, Limbaugh called her a “slut” during his commentary on the matter. And now he’s being labeled a “sexist” and misogynistic for it (he has since apologized).

Of course, in Fluke’s testimony, she didn’t literally say that she was having $1000-worth of sex a year. What she said was, “Without insurance coverage, contraception can cost a woman over $3000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary.” Now, I’ll leave it to you to determine her implication, but I’ll say that if a female law student is engaging in so much sexual congress that she’s spending a mint on birth-control, I wouldn’t reflexively assume she’s a slut. Because I’d wonder how she was working her way through law school.
...

(Selwyn Duke's bio says that he "...is a former tennis professional, entrepreneur and writer whose works appear widely on the Internet. He is a columnist at TheNewAmerican.com, NewsWithViews.com, Renewamerica.us (Alan Keyes' site), as well as at many others, and a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. Selwyn has traveled extensively in his life, visiting exotic locales such as India, Morocco, Algeria and Taiwan, as well as quite a number of other countries.")

What remains wriggling around inside the Conservative Movement no decent person would touch without a barge pole and a HazNat suit.

The sounds they make are the howls of the damned.