"...The armies of those I love engirth me, and I engirth them;
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the Soul."
-- Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass.”
File under: Sled in, drone on, cash out.
To figure out just where the Palinites might believe their political clown car is headed as it cartwheels down the interstate, belching smoke and shredding itself against the guardrail at at 110 mph, we have to begin with this simple fact: There is nothing vital or alive left inside the Conservative movement. Nothing at all. Rampaging along on the two, moldering stumps of bygone glory – tax cuts forever and Liberals are Devils -- Conservatism has become a raving, headless, dead thing.
Facing this fact, some former Bush water-bearers like David Fucking Brooks and Andy Sullivan have ripped out the copper wiring, sold the appliances and respectively sidled and sprinted away from their upside-down mortgages on what was once prime, wingnut ideological property.
But for others, there is no way to walk themselves back out of the shithole they’ve dug for themselves. Their livelihood depends on it. Or their power base. Or, most terrifying of all, their identity.
They went all-in on the bugfuck, and because the cannot cope with the fact that their idols were all frauds -- that everyone they trusted turned out to be a swindler and everything they believed in now bloats and rots in the midday sun -- they are left to squat in political mass-grave they have spent the last 30 years painstakingly excavating for themselves, decorating its walls with fading pictures of Ronald Reagan and calling it a temple.
To do what Jefferson Davis did in the waning days of the Confederacy: take the overwhelming evidence of their movement’s disintegration that is now closing in from all sides and try to pretend that catastrophic failure is a good thing:
To the People of the Confederate States of America.
Danville, Va., April 4, 1865.
…
Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free; and who, in the light of the past, dare doubt your purpose in the future?
...
Now when you begin with a movement that was already stocked to the rafters with goofs and bigots 30 years ago, and then plot the trend lines of their radical yahoo/anarchic Branch Perfidian cult to its logical conclusion, you cannot help but notice that they all seem to intersect at point in the near future occupied by something that looks a lot like Sarah Palin; a perky, Fox-teevee-camera-friendly Brown-shirt in bright, red “Fuck Me” pumps who didn’t so much resign from the governor’s office, as she contemptuously resigned from the very concept of government itself.
From Dave Johnson at HuffPo:
"People need to understand that in Republican circles, resigning as Governor does not harm Sarah Palin's career. Being a Governor is just ... governing ... and Republicans don't do that.
"In fact, there is a contempt for the idea, and Palin has just reinforced her brand as one with contempt for government. The very word, "Governor," is suspect to them. The only use of the job is to affect redistricting so Republicans can have more power, and to keep a state from "spending" (also known as providing services to the citizens) and especially from asking the rich or corporations to pay any taxes for their use of the infrastructure the rest of us built."
And so, liberated from the need to meet even the most minimal requirements of democratic government – from the mundane need to "propose policy", "solve real problems" or "know what the fuck she is talking about" – Palin is now free to finish the project begun by Rush Limbaugh over 20 years ago: to reduce the existential distance between Hate Radio of the Republican Party to zero.
To mutate into a Being of Pure Media.
A sylph dispensing Delphic fortune cookies pasted together from flag pins, bumper stickers and scriptural confetti.
A wingnut elemental.
A granter of plutocrat wishes and fulfiller of imbecile dreams.
10 comments:
It's getting so bad they can't even successfully lie to themselves any more, much less other people.
And there's a good piece on HuffPo titled "Palin in for a crude awakening", which posits that the reason for her resigning now is that the golden days of high prices for oil are gone, at least for the time being, and that means that Alaska is going to be taking it in the shorts in the foreseeable future, with some huge deficits, and guess who would have been at the helm while that's happening?
You hate to count too many chickens; plus, Obama aint exactly the ball of fire for progressive causes that we hoped he would be, but if the GOP keeps laying turds in their own chiffon congeal, we may get progress almost by default. :o)
It's dead, but it is still walking. Case in point: more domestic terrorism incidents happen when the nutters are feeling most out of power. The FBI needs to be taking a closer look at the winger threat; it doesn't take a genius to see that we're headed into much more dangerous times with these people.
And, not incidentally, those few paragraphs of yours describing the conservative situation these days, are as succinct and to-the-point as anything you've ever penned.
And that, my friend, takes in a territory as big as Alaska. :o)
Drifty--more pure poetry!
Branch Perfidians.
How gloriously, perfectly, uniformly applicable to the cultists of the Reagan religion.
Yep, pure, succinct, ball-busting truth.
The blue-gowned Bedesmen of Reagan's Punic faith ignoring reality while doubling down on the error of their ways.
Even the slinkers like Bobo insist on dragging their Stars and Bars battle flags with them into their new philosophical digs. Hoping to unfurl on yet another Morning In America.
Reminds me of a certain chicken.
I'm with Rehctaw - I LOVED "Branch Perfidians"
Yeah, "Branch Perfidians" cracked me the hell up when it fell straight out of the sky :-)
Ironic, but funny, few if any of Palin's supporters would recognize your spoof of Walt Witman's "Body Electric" title.
I expect 25% of any given population (country, county, city, blog) to be crazy, so it doesn't surprise me that approx. 25% of country is the republican base.
loretta, now ignorance is correctable, it may take time and money but it can be corrected.
Stupid goes all the way to the bone and is uncorrectable, so there will always be Republicans.
Am I the only one who would not trust Sarah Palin to correctly skin a moose?
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