The Democratic People's Republic of Conservatism

Last night as I was fighting off the last, clingy remnants of what appears to have been Rigellian Fever, and BG and I were otherwise rushing about trying to manage another midweek homework/ dinner/ shower/ bedtime-story traffic jam, my wife stopped dead in her tracks in front of the teevee just as Paul Ryan was stem-winding his bare-assed falsehood about the U.S. credit downgrade:

"Oh Jesus,"she said. "You mean they're really going to lie about that too?"

"Of course they are," I said. "After all, once you've trained your base to believe anything, why the Hell not just lie about everything? They're North Korea."

"They are," she said sadly. "They really are."

From inventing "welfare queens" and "young bucks" out of the raw material of their bigoted paranoia, to hiding their pig-ignorant, Limbaugh-loving Base in plain sight by strapping funny hats on their heads, calling them a "tea party" and claiming that they had never heard of George W. Bush, the strategy of bald-faced, Orwellian lying is one that the GOP been battle-testing and tweaking for 30 years.  

And with Paul Ryan's convention speech, the GOP has shown that it is determined to do what it always does in a crisis: double down and down and down on the lying.



Last night, on the biggest national stage he has yet occupied, Paul Ryan fully re-invested the Romney/Ryan ticket in Karl Rove's strategic vision of a Party that has thrown off the shackles of factual reality and now propels itself entirely by the internal combustion of its own fairy tales, medieval values and rapacious ideology:

Paul Ryan’s Convention Speech and His Web of Lies 

by Michael Tomasky Aug 30, 2012

Paul Ryan pushed American politics into new territory with his convention speech, effectively daring Democrats and the media to call him out on his string of blatant falsehoods.

It just boggles the mind to imagine how Paul Ryan can stand up there and lash Barack Obama for abandoning Bowles-Simpson when he did exactly that himself. Or for taking $716 billion out of Medicare that Ryan’s own budget also removes from Medicare. Or try to blame him for the closing of a GM plant that actually closed while George W. Bush was president. Those three lies are just the beginning of a cavalcade that followed. I can’t in clear conscience call such a speech “good” or “effective.” But I will acknowledge that Ryan can spin the goods like nobody’s business...

A strategy which, despite skyrocketing deficits, a suffocating middle class, a war birthed in lies and spiraling into catastrophe, and a barely literate debate performances by George W. Bush, worked like fucking Spanish Fly with magic leprechaun sprinkles in 2004.

It worked because while Democrats were busy being indignant and incredulous that anyone in their right mind could believe a word that the Swiftboat Liars and the architects of the Iraqi Debacle said, the Republicans were busy stealing a march from them among the dolts at the swampy end of the "Undecided" gene pool: a march from which the Kerry campaign never recovered.

Which is why this time around anyone who has lived through the depraved decades of the Reagan Revolution and the Age of Bush and who has watched the Party of Personal Responsibility get away with 100% pure, unstepped-on Orwellian crack like this --

 

-- and this --

-- and this --

The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, The New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush (later attributed to Karl Rove):

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

-- and this --

“Not intended to be a factual statement,” the comment made by a spokesperson for Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and transformed by comedian Stephen Colbert into a pop culture meme has come nearly full circle, as Democrats have begun to use the phrase on the Senate floor.    

-- has no business being taken by surprise by a Republican candidate for Vice President who gets up on the biggest stage of his life and --  in front of tens of millions of his fellow citizens -- lies as easily and unself-consciously as a dog licking its ass.

This is who they are now.  This is all they are now.  And the reason it might very well work this time even though we can see it coming right down Michigan Avenue is that the Republican system of bald-faced, pathological lying requires only two moving parts:  first, a Party that, top to bottom, has gone fully sociopathic and will lie about anything, any time without batting an eye, and second, a complicit, enabling Centrist media which categorically refuse to call them on their lying.

That first group -- the Party base -- is a cultural dead-loss: they've been stuck on stupid and bigoted for decades and, as I have said many times before, at this point they ain't gonna let nobody turn them 'round.

As to the second group...well the astute reader probably figured a long time ago why I devote so much of my meager firepower to Centrists:

...the Pig People would be nothing but a minor nuisance -- a boil on the ass of democracy -- without their  Centrists who keep the "Both Sides Do It" spider hole well-furnished and open for business.  Pound for pound, Centrism is the biggest and most debilitating lie in American politics bar none.  It is the Big Lie that makes all the little lies possible, which is why I focus so hard on those who traffic in it.  They are the ones most vulnerable to and terrified of being called out in public.  They are the ones we must run out of the media on a rail.

Think Progress has a fast rundown on the many exciting ways our Centrist, enabling media has invented to weasel out of performing its most basic public service of telling the truth and calling a liar a liar:

How The Media Soft-Plays Paul Ryan’s Lies: ‘Factual Shortcuts,’ ‘Perceived Inaccuracies,’ ‘Questionable Claims’

By Zack Beauchamp on Aug 30, 2012

Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) speech to the Republican National Convention last night was chock-full of bald-faced lies. For example, Ryan blamed the Obama for S&P’s downgrade of our credit rating (despite the fact that S&P blamed GOP policies) and blasted Obama for failing to heed the Bowles-Simpson debt commission (which Ryan torpedoed). Yet political reporters covering the speech have, in many cases, been curiously reticent to call Ryan’s lies what they are. Here’s a list, in no particular order, of the euphemisms used in place of “lie” to describe Ryan’s falsehoods...

Without their Centrist enablers by their side, the Pig People fail.  Miserably.

With their Centrist enablers by their side, they may well succeed.

And in the end the only way the enabling Centrist parasites can ever be pried away from their Pig People hosts is to visit such a relentless and unholy amount of professional pain on their heads that they are either forced to quit lying or are forced to lose their gigs in "respectable" media and have to fight with Greta Van Sustern for table scraps at Fox News.

This time around, it's really that simple.