Crimestop, Centrism and You

crimestop:  "The faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. In short....protective stupidity." 

 -- George Orwell 

Originally I was going to file this under the heading of my ongoing "Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says" series, but what Mr. Sullivan is saying this time around is less "stupid" and more, well, "remarkable".

In the literal sense of being something worth remarking upon.

Regular readers know that I take Mr. Sullivan to the shed on a regular basis for "repeating as epiphany stuff thoughtful liberals have been saying for the last 30 years" without ever acknowledging that Liberals have been right all along.  To date, this simple act of honesty and modest atonement has proven to be beyond him because...

...in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee. 

And yet as the world burns around him, Mr, Sullivan has been forced almost against his will to notice that his former running buddies -- the American Conservative movement and the GOP -- are the ones dancing around the flames howling with the Devil's own delight and brandishing piping bags of napalm and Jerry cans of gasoline.

And so keep Orwell's definition of "crimestop" firmly in mind as we consider two, remarkable quotes by Andrew Sullivan.

"We are reaching a democratic crisis of some sorts.

One major political party refuses to accept empirical truths. It has become a hall of ideological mirrors."

-- Andrew Sullivan, 06/20/12

"We are reaching..."?

Oh Andy, Andy, Andy.

You might have been too busy being part of the problem to notice this, but we reached that crisis long ago. What you see all around you now is nothing but the same old American Conservative cancer that has been hag-riding this country for centuries once again bubbling up from its rotting heart and bursting through its thin skin of respectability.

"A party this irrational - a party hysterical about debt whose members do not actually want to cut spending or raise any taxes, a party a majority of whose members have somehow persuaded themselves that there were indeed WMDs in Iraq in 2003 - should not be a mainstream party in a Western democracy.

"It should be in therapy"

-- Andrew Sullivan, 06/21/12

Really?  "Therapy" is the best you can come up with?

I tell you, sometimes these fifth coumnists and their hatred of America really roast my Puerco Pibil.

No, Andrew, the Right should not be in therapy.

The Right should be treated as one with the rabid dog and the downer cow.

The Right should be culturally quarantined like the plague bearers that they are.

The operators of the Right's teevee and radio networks that pump their unfiltered filth into the public airwaves should be tried as well-poisoners.

But disease vectors don't have unlimited financial and social resources at their command, and terrorist saboteurs don't own Senators and congressmen, do they?  

So none of that is ever going to happen, is it?   

So go on and rage and shake your fist in this 11th hour all you want, but you know damn well that the Fox/Hate Radio Behemoth will continue to roll merrily along destroying everything in its path until it is knocked on its ass, vivisected and tossed on the ash-heap of history right next to Nazi Germany's "Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda" and the Soviet Union's "General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press":

The accompanying falsifications took place, and on a barely credible scale, in every sphere. Real facts, real statistics, disappeared into the realm of fantasy. History, including the History of the Communist Party, or rather especially the history of the Communist Party, was rewritten. Unpersons disappeared from the official record. A new past, as well as new present, was imposed on the captive minds of the Soviet population, as was, of course, admitted when truth emerged in the late 1980s.

However, now that you have finally, grudgingly arrived at the same conclusion that Liberals came to decades ago -- that our problems are not primarily caused by both sides being equally awful, but by one side going intractably insane --  you have left yourself a very interesting problem.

How will you, Mr. Sullivan,  deal with the Big Lie of Centrism?  

More specifically, how will you deal with your colleagues and friends who make their living relentlessly purveying of the Big Lie of Centrism?  Colleagues and friends of no small influence and esteem who have built entire careers on the Big Lie of Centrism?  Who dine handsomely out every God damned week in the New York Times or on NPR or on network television on the Big Lie of Centrism?  

As a man with a very large megaphone, Mr. Sullivan, what are your moral obligations when it comes to confronting your colleagues who continue to use the Big Lie of Centrism to help prop up the very system which you know must be brought down if our democracy is to have any hope of surviving?

What of them, Mr. Sullivan?

What of people like your friend David Brooks?

After all, if you really believe this -- really believe that our most serious problems are being caused or exacerbated almost exclusively by the Right --  then aren't you obligated by the ineluctability of your own reasoning to accept the corollary proposition?  That people who keep insisting that Both Sides Are Equally Wrong in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary must either be reality-denying liars of a genuinely Palinite order...

... or they must exist in a perpetual state of such reckless, pathological, fact-proof denial that they are morally comatose and have no business peddling their crazy in public?

Are your Centrist friends liars or lunatics, Mr. Sullivan?  Because if you genuinely believe your own premise, no third alternative exists.

And whether they are liars or lunatics, the inescapable logic of your position obligates you to recognize at long last that those who relentlessly dismiss or discount or alibi every Conservative atrocity by reflexively allocating 50% of the blame to imaginary Liberals are monsters in their own right -- frauds and abettors of every Conservative atrocity.  

That every time the Fake Centrist crowd invokes the magic, conjure words of "Both Sides Do It" they act as the Right's willing co-conspirators.

I repeat:  as a man with a very large megaphone, Mr. Sullivan, what are your moral obligations when it comes to confronting colleagues who continue to promulgate the Big Lie of Centrism?

Because mocking NRO every time they "discover" and excommunicate another bigot from their midst is nothing...or looking-with-alarm at Bill Kristol's latest exercise in priapistic Neocon empire porn is nothing...or taking the dudgeon-mobile out for a spin every time Rush Limbaugh coughs up another bolus of racists twaddle is nothing compared with taking on the likes of David Brooks or David Gregory or Mark Halperin.  

Going after people like Limbaugh is the definition of a low-risk proposition.  People like him (or Hannity or Malkin) operate within an entirely different professional domain than you,: they cannot really lay a finger on you or tangle up your career in any way (Hell, MSNBC and liberal radio have practically made cottage industries out of fisking Limbaugh, Hannity,  O'Reilly, Palin and all the rest of the gargoyles on the Right on a daily basis, and rightly so: they are awful people who deserve to be staked out under a blazing, scrutinizing sun as often as possible.)

But what about their mainstream media co-conspirators?  What about their Beltway wheel-men?   Who devotes the same time and effort depriving the Right of its reliable, "Both Sides Do It" alibi and spider-hole by taking down the Fake Center?

And the short answer is...almost no one, because it is one thing to slam Jonah Goldberg every time he pinches off another steaming log of flailing idiocy, but to use you megaphone to lay out some blunt, home truths about people who might actually be able to inflict some damage, well that's a dragons of an entirely different order.

Say, for example, your friend David Brooks: a colleague of yours whose lies are far more pernicious and destructive than Limbaugh's because they reach so far beyond the wingnut media ghetto, and whose professional standing gives him the power to  actually reach out and fuck you up should he choose to do so.

If it is indeed true that "One major political party refuses to accept empirical truths", what are we to make of Mr. Brooks using his incredibly privileged position at the pinnacle of the American media establishment writing his 500th New York Times column once again denouncing "partisanship" and tediously allocating blame for our terrible plight to "those on both sides".

What are you morally obliged to do then?

What about when he writes his 1,000th such column?

What actions do your own words demand of you to do when his friend David Gregory invites him on "Meet the Press" for the 100th time to once again repeat that lie in front of 15 million viewers?

Its easy to inveigh against villains when they carry pitchforks and reek of sulfur.

How much harder it is when they're three levels above you on the respectable media's informal  organization chart.