An Inconvenient Decade

File Under: When the only alibi you have is a Dubya...

There was a big, ol’ slab of outright fraud at the center of Monday's post from Andrew Sullivan post on the devolution of the Right.

I'll give you a hint: it isn’t in Sullivan’s forensic analysis of the crimes of the Bush Regime, but elsewhere.

See if you can spot it.

The Brutal Truth
…

My sense is that it is a delayed reaction in some ways to Bush, and his betrayal of conservatism. For all sorts of reasons, most of the current tea-partiers backed the GOP under Bush and Cheney, although some, to be fair, did complain about some of it. The pent-up frustrations behind conservatism's collapse under Republicans were trumped, however, by the fruits of power, partisan hatred of "the left", defensiveness over the Iraq war and torture, and, above all religious devotion to the Leader. Now that Bush has been removed, the massive damage done, and a pragmatic liberal is trying to sort out the mess in a sane, orderly fashion, they've gone nuts.

Think of someone like Glenn Beck.

He sat back and watched Bush preside over the worst domestic attack in US history, explode the entitlement state, engage in unending projects of nation-building in two of the most dysfunctional countries on earth, rip up the Constitution, and bequeath as his legacy a trillion dollar deficit, unprecedented domestic discretionary spending, a banking collapse and the worst recession in many many years. The right will take some time to absorb this but Bush was Carter II - with two full terms. All that rage at what has actually happened - bottled up by rank partisanship for years - has come bounding out. Hence the bizarre spectacle of a president just two months on the job being treated on the right as if he's already Robert Mugabe. Throw in a little racial and cultural panic, add a world of genuine economic pain ... and you have the Malkin surge.

Did you find it?

You see, Andrew Sullivan -- like so many expat Conservatives -- lives in his own weird little hand-wrought doctrinal prison, which is made out of threads of clear-eyed honesty thatched loosely together with some horseshit about the nature of the Conservative Movement that is so jaw-droppingly dishonest it poisons everything else he writes.

So on the one hand, he is quite capable of writing about Bush and Cheney and their brain-dead acolytes with a righteous anger that borders on the Dirty Hippy. Hell yes, they’re a horde of zombie howler monkeys that can be twitched into and apoplectic, galvanic rage by the simple application of certain key words on AM radio! And fuck yeah, they’re ugly and their mama’s dress ‘em funny!

But on the other hand, in post after post after post, Sullivan also writes with a creepily fetishistic monomania about his hands-down favorite topic: the Glorious Conservatism That Never Was. His Imaginary Movement that was somehow pure and noble until it was murdered in an eight year Republican death march through the swamps of George Bush's bellicose halfwit frat-rat Oedipal Complex and Dick Cheney's depraved obsession with torture and tyranny.

Bush, for Sullivan, is always, always, always where the story begins and ends:

“Now that Bush has been removed, the massive damage done, and a pragmatic liberal is trying to sort out the mess in a sane, orderly fashion, they've gone nuts.”

Except, of course, in order to posit his self-serving piffle, Sullivan has to rather flagrantly ignore a period in time we here on the Left refer to as “The Fucking 1990s”.

Sullivan conveniently forgets that the slavering Limbaugh-led orcs on the Right who now treat Barack Obama "as if he's already Robert Mugabe" even though he has "just two months on the job" are the very same slavering, Limbaugh-led orcs who spent the eight years before Bush/Cheney treating another pragmatic, center-left Republican-lite President as History’s Greatest Monster.

The very same Limbaugh-led orcs who, long before George W. Bush ever took the oath of office, were tirelessly tearing around the United States in loud, hysterical circles ranting about the imaginary Liberals who were trying to destroy America, spending tens of millions of dollars hunting Bill Clinton like an animal and finally impeaching him over trivia.

In fact, the Right was arguably at their happiest and most politically fecund during that Inconvenient Decade that Andrew Sullivan’s Fantasy League Conservatism demands be disappeared into history’s cornfield.

In the 1990s, the Right had their goofball militia movements and “black helicopter” psychosis to get their little hearts started every morning. During the day they could lap up Rush Limbaugh’s every drooling, fascist lie and exhortation while it was still piping hot and fanatical, and not gone 15 years moldy and stale from rote, drug-addled repetition. At night they could mumble themselves to sleep with wingnut fairy tales about the “murder” of Vince Foster. And on the weekends, for some good, old-fashioned, anti-Gummint family entertainment, could blow up the occasional abortion clinic or federal building.

Good times!

But during Sullivan’s Omitted Decade, the real, toxic pathology of the Right’s absolute junkie-like addiction to hatred was never more vividly on display than when they were getting their amped-out-of-their-skulls ecstatic rage on about Bill Clinton.

Clinton, who went out of his way to sell out the ideals of the Left at every turn in order to give the people who loathed him more than anyone else on Earth virtually everything they wanted.

Clinton, who tried to appease the wingnuts with gifts like NAFTA, GATT, the Defense of Marriage Act, Welfare Reform, V-Chips, school uniforms, a balanced budget, surpluses, a booming economy...all wrapped up in a big, yellow bi-partisan bow.

Clinton, who actually caught and convicted the terrorists that attacked us, and actually won a war.

Clinton, who was rewarded for his pathetic willingness to trade away Liberal values for Conservative approval by seven years of relentless, ferocious and historically unprecedented partisan Conservative investigations, smears and attacks, which finally culminated in his impeachment. For fucking trivia.

Of course this all transpired between 1992 and 2000. Which means that, according to Andrew Sullivan’s ideological chronometer, none of it ever really happened.