Commander-in-Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia

When the boss is a massive tool.

After over 500 posts, many of which have been spent stirring the bilious gruel that washes around inside the sharply tapered skulls of Christopath Republicans and making merry mock of the lumpy bits of idiocy that float to the surface like so many mob hit victims that have rotted out of their Sakrete wingtips, it may come as a petit shock that I in no way believe it was inevitable that I would be a partisan.

Or, rather, it was never pre-ordained that I would dig my toes in so deep on the Liberal side of the aisle, or that I would have such unreserved contempt for any of the GOP Stalinists who have stood so ferociously and mindlessly by the Dear Leader these last five year, or have bayed in approval like rabid hounds at twenty-years of Newt-and-Rush calling anyone that disagreed with them America-hating cowards and traitors.

Because there is an honorable way for sincere conservatives and sincere liberals to have a spirited debate.

Really, really I tell you true, there is, because there is honor to be found in the best sentiments of both schools of thought.

There is integrity is trying to keep a downward pressure on government where possible, and where important programs are not gutted, because as terrific as those programs are, they do drain some measure of capital and creativity away from the marketplace in which the wealth…that generates the revenue…that funds those programs is created.

And there is integrity is trying to keep an upward pressure on government, because we do not live in a dictatorship, under occupation by an alien power. This is the poisonous shaping-delusion that neocons and Fundy’s have flogging as the Pure Quill for the last three decades. Government in a Democracy is no more than all of us acting together for our common good. The “commonweal”, which will evolve as times and circumstance change, but whose core First Principles will always sound something like this:

“…establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”

Sound familiar?

You want to know what Democrats are “for”?

That’s what we are for, and in the middle of an honest debate over the conflicting impulses to over what the exact the scope and scale of our democratically-elected government should be, men and women of good faith give and take and swallow some shit they hate and get some things that are near and dear to them.

It’s called political compromise: It is exactly what the Founders had in mind as the mechanism for governing a far-flung and diverse nation, and it is exactly what the Fake Originalists of the Right have worked for thirty years to cripple and destroy.

The reason I loathe the modern Republican Party is not that idea of smaller government, or transparent government or accountable government are bad. They’re not; there is merit in those positions.

The reason I loathe them is that, in order to win, they have crawled into a filthy, Procrustean Bed with the scum of the Earth, and are now deep in the belly of that beast.

At this point in our history, Segregationist and the Christopath should be marginal, freak-cults confined to living history museums and Davidian-style compounds deep in the high desert. Instead they openly call the shots in every branch of our government, while Party “Moderates” cower in the cloak room with their thumbs in their ears, glue over their eyes, hysterically repeating, “We gave the our party to Fat Falwell, and insist we do not mind the smell.”

Oh, and bite the arm of any Democrat, Liberal, Progressive or whatnot that tries to make them face the truth.

The reason I loathe them because in order to win they have allowed themselves to degenerate into a Party of monsters and slaves; Degenerati that gleefully betray in fact every ideal they claim to hold in principle.

The reason I loathe them is because while the Democratic Party may be, on some things, of many voices, the Republican Party is firmly ensconced in Hell and demands that the rest of us join them there.

The reason I loathe them is because the Modern Republican Party has murdered everything that was noble about genuine Conservativism, and those that should be the most enraged and horrified by the seeing their values butchered – Conservatives of Conscience – still mindlessly buy into the hateful propaganda about Liberals that their Party’s assassins manufactured in order commit the fucking crime in the first place.

And who should be on the top of every genuine conservative’s Enemies List?

This from the the Paul Krugman may give you a hint (From a March 3rd column, “George the Unready”, meticulously Silly Putty-ed off a dead tree version of the NYT, ‘cause the e-version lies beyond the Hot Gates of NYT Select. Emphasis added by me):

Iraqi insurgents, hurricanes and low-income Medicare recipients have three things in common. Each has been at the center of a policy disaster. In each case experts warned about the impending disaster. And in each case — well, let's look at what happened.
…

Intelligence analysts who refused to go along with that line [that insurgents were dead-enders and furriners] were attacked for not being team players. According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush's reaction to a pessimistic report from the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief was to remark, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?"

Many people have now seen the video of the briefing Mr. Bush received before Hurricane Katrina struck. Much has been made of the revelation that Mr. Bush was dishonest when he claimed, a few days later, that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees.

But what's really striking [about the Bush WH response to Katrina], given the gravity of the warnings, is the lack of urgency Mr. Bush and his administration displayed in responding to the storm. A horrified nation watched the scenes of misery at the Superdome and wondered why help hadn't arrived. But as Newsweek reports, for several days nobody was willing to tell Mr. Bush, who "equates disagreement with disloyalty," how badly things were going. "For most of those first few days," Newsweek says, "Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing."
…

How did this happen? The same way the other disasters happened: experts who warned of trouble ahead were told to shut up.

We can get a sense of what went on by looking at a 2005 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office on potential problems with the drug program. Included with the report is a letter from Mark McClellan, the Medicare administrator. Rather than taking the concerns of the G.A.O. seriously, he tried to bully it into changing its conclusions. He demanded that the report say that the administration had "established effective contingency plans" — which it hadn't — and that it drop the assertion that some people would encounter difficulties obtaining necessary drugs, which is exactly what happened.

Experts within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must have faced similar bullying. And unlike experts at the independent G.A.O., they were not in a position to stand up for what they knew to be true.

In short, our country is being run by people who assume that things will turn out the way they want. And if someone warns of problems, they shoot the messenger.

…

Bingo.

Michael Brown is now sticking like a bone in the throat of the Bush White House because while Brownie obviously got the memo about the ablative function of underlings in the corporate feudal state, he has loudly failed to heed it.

And for people who are especially frantic to make sure that government is run "like a business" the Bush/Brown example should be of particular interest.

Because the oligarchs tout a business mind-set as a panacea for all the ills of the public sector without ever acknowledging how businesses -- all kinds of businesses -- are really run.

Businesses are a dictatorship, not a democracy.

They are a One Party State in which the guys at the top are, quite often, morons.

Now startups, for example, are different, and there are thousands of company owners who run their shops extremely well because they learned how every machine on the factory floor operates, and they work 16-hour days sweating blood to squeeze another nickel out of the production cycle.

But there is another kind of business that is not run on merit or competence, but is ruled by petty, spoiled, dimwitted martinets who keep their power and can make you dance solely because they can destroy your economic life on a whim. And in such cesspits, there is another breed CEO that is all too common – the buzzword-spewing, inbred Loafetarians with contacts to burn and hollow resumes burnished everywhere Daddy's money and friends could make an entree.

In my life and in the lives of many people I have known, we have had occasion to be in the presence of more than one highly-placed individual who was exactly like Dubya; a non-too-bright sack of lumpen, trustfund meat who has had the privilege of being girded on all sides since swaddling days by sycophants and ass-buffers.

Clowns who really will kill 50 minutes of a one-hour meeting expounding lavishing and emphatically in that special kind of “tardthusiasm” stupid people have when they think they've just hit on some New Verity (or as Jon Stewart says, saying the most obvious shit in the world that everyone but dumbass has know for years as if he'd just discovered it...and as if you disagree)..and then holding forth for nine of the remaining ten minutes on whatever breathless, stale, decade-old wisdom that chapter seven of Tom Friedman's latest Corporate Harlequin Romance has vouchesafed to him that morning.

Spoiled baby-men who do amazingly stupid, risky shit with other people’s money and livelihoods based on hunches and the Emperor’s New Clothing Haberdashers with which they encase themselves.

Who will tout themselves as the second coming of Edward Deming the one time in a hundred they stumble into being right…and keep the boardroom shelves stocked with underlings to toss on the grenades that come with the other 99 times that thier stupidity outstrips their dumb luck and shit blows up in their faces.

Who will treat those who conscientiously warn of troubled water ahead as mutineers.

Who will never, ever take responsibility for any of the disasters they trail behind them like Linus’ Blanket.

Who will casually shoot anyone that comes bearing bad tidings…and then turn right around and lecture everyone else on their failure to take responsibility for not warning him more vigorously.

Think of the most high-density, low-wattage, craven nitwit you have every work for.
Now knock 10% off of his IQ, give him access to nuclear weapons and the United States Treasury, and puppet-masters that are bent on the destruction of the America we know and love.

The reason I loathe the modern Republican Party is that they -- and they alone -- have eviscerated honor, comity, compromise, respectful debate and every other essential virtue handed down to us by our Founders and replaced them with the anti-tolerance of Rush Limbaugh, the anti-Americanism of Ann Coulter, the anti-Christianity of James Dobson, the anti-Journalism of Fox News, and the anti-Presidency of George Bush.

They have carefully and calculatedly terminated the Age of Enlightenment and replaced it with the nightmare of the Age of Dubya.

I loathe the modern Republican Party because in the Age of Dubya, you can either be a Good American, or a Good Republican, but you can no longer be both.