Stand still

And let me hit you.


There is this joke about a linebacker that I’m sure dates all the way back to the days of Alex Karras and Rosie Grier, and it’s not really a great joke, which I now realize is not something one says before telling a joke, so just pretend I didn’t just say that.

Anyway.

There’s this linebacker. Big as a Panzer, but very linear and not so good with the abstraction and improvisation, so after trying to teach him various complicated plays, the coach gave up and told him, “Look, let’s keep this simple. Hit whatever’s in front of you.”
And it worked brilliantly for 4-5 games, until one day at practice an assistant came tearing into the coach’s office and told him that his star linebacker had busted his shoulder and was en route to the hospital. Probably out for the season.
“What the fuck happened?” the coach demanded.
“It was the clean-up crew’s fault,” the assistant said. “They were replacing the sod and they moved the tackling dummies a little to the left.”
“So?”
“So the dummies weren’t where he expected them to be, so he just kept a’runnin and a’runnin until he hit a parked car.”

This from Matthew Yglesias brings that joke to mind.

April 26, 2005
REALLY AND TRULY NO EXIT.

If you're looking for reasons to believe that the Bush political machine is losing its deft touch then look no further than Bloomberg News' report that the President will be extending his Social Security privatization world tour beyond the initial 60-day timeframe. This is an absolutely baffling thing to do. By all objective standards, the tour has been a catastrophic failure. He's induced zero new legislators to back his agenda. Privatization's numbers have sunk further in the polls. Indeed, the best polling evidence available suggests that the more people focus on the issue, the less they like the president's ideas. Even worse, we're now seeing clear signs that pushing privatization is driving down the GOP's overall level of support with key constituency groups like senior citizens and rural people, both groups that backed Bush in '04 on cultural grounds and are now being driven back into the Democrats' arms.
Frankly, Bush has won enough battles over the years that I have trouble believing his team would do anything as dumb as a tour extension clearly seems to be. Maybe they've got some trick up their sleeve so brilliant that I can't grasp it. …

I commend the whole article to your attention, but here’s where I respectfully disagree with part of what the estimable Mr. Yglesias wrote: the Rove strategy was and is statistically sophisticated. Relying on knowing the voter registration and preference stats to a degree of granularity almost fine enough that one can count the number of Fundies live on a particular street in a particular district. But the method or activating the base and the margins was actually simplicity itself.

Hate. Lie. Hate. Hate. Fear. Hate. Lie. Little bit more Fear. Tax cuts. Fag bashing. Smear. Hate. And wrap it all up purdy in the Bible and a Confederate Flag. All shrieked at 1000 Decibels by their pet Pravda Media and their Fuhrer-Pundits.

Which is a lot of things, but not deft. Not subtle.

It is a set-piece battle that relies on Democrats never moving around and just letting the Shining Path Republicans bomb the shit out of them, while the SCLM and the Moderate Republicans are allowed to cower in the shadows and then pick the corpse clean after the hyenas have brought it down. And it relies on that ever-reliable backbone of all Biblical Literalists – that you can never, ever, ever admit even the possibility that you might be wrong.

The “strategy” is simply that you bet the pot and go all in every time, on every issue, and never admit that you might have stepped in it even when you are covered head to toe with a three foot layer of the foulest elephant dung that any diseased pachyderm ever pooped out.

Deny, deny, deny: always the featured item on the menu of Fundies, con men and alcoholics everywhere. Just keep charging blindly ahead, heedless of the horrific damage you’re inflicting: Keep calling it “confident” and “decisive” and focus on saying anything and doing anything that keeps you one bounced-check ahead of the carnage.

Or put another way: being infallable means never having to say you're sorry.

Except that somebody went and moved the damned tackling dummy...so wave to the funny Republicans as they sprint right out of the stadium and into traffic.