"Those Who Cannot Remember the Past

are condemned to worship Ronald Reagan."

-- Joey Joe-Joe Junior Shabadoo Santayana

Andrew Sullivan gets indignant enough about some Conservative rube's comment on a teevee game show to throw the spotlight of his blog all over it.

An Insight Into The Right
09 Apr 2010 01:14 pm

It comes from Family Feud, and a contestant is asked to say things that apply to Ellen Degeneres. Gay? Yes. Funny? Yes. Married to Portia? Yes. Then the father says that "she doesn't like her country very well."

Ellen? Cheery, inoffensive, humorous. Idol-mainstream, all-American, beloved chat show icon, Ellen?

Translation: she's a lesbian and all homosexuals are anti-American.

Sometimes the real view comes seeping out into plain view. On national television. That guy voted for Palin. You know it.

I completely agree with Sully's assessment, but seeing as how we're playing the Idle Speculation Game, and seeing as how Big Daddy Mike Sutton is --

A) Old enough to have adult children, and
B) Reflective of millions of his fellow Texans' delightfully rustic views

-- let's see if we can't flesh out Sully's prose just a little bit in the interest of providing a more rounded and complete historical view of Sutton père's probable ideological pedigree.

...
Ellen? Cheery, inoffensive, humorous. Idol-mainstream, all-American, beloved chat show icon, Ellen?

Translation: she's a lesbian and all homosexuals are anti-American.
Sometimes the real view comes seeping out into plain view.

On national television. That guy voted for Palin. Reagan.

Twice.

And Dubya.

Twice.

Stood out in the rain the meet Rush Limbaugh.

Keeps a framed, autographed picture of Jerry Falwell on the counter at his small company.

Used an unchristian word to describe that awful Bill Clinton and his Absolutely True record of rape, murder, drug trafficking and Socialism. And that darn Liberal Media that refuses to tell the truth about him!

Twice.

Used an unchristian word to describe that awful Hillary Clinton and her Absolutely True record of being the lesbian criminal mastermind behind Slick Willy's Absolutely True record of rape, murder, drug trafficking and Socialism. And that darn Liberal Media that refuses to tell the truth about her too!

Twice.

You know it.

Of course, Sully's existential problem is the same as all of his "Thatcherite/Reaganite conservative" playmates: they cannot rationally explain the presence of million's of (allegedly) Palin-loving Mike Suttons occupying the beating heart of the America Conservative Movement without risking the complete destruction of their fetishistic hero-worship of their Imaginary Ronald Reagan.

The Real Ronald Reagan welcomed the Mike Suttons of this country into the GOP with open arms, effectively finishing the job of transforming the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Jefferson Davis begun by Richard Nixon. The Real Ronald Reagan surveyed the Road To Hell down which Palin and Limbaugh and Gingrich now travel in style; he graded it, poured its first hundred miles of concrete and cut the fucking ribbon on the thing.

But Reagan-worship is all Sully and his pals have left, and since the intrusion of the Real Reagan into their fairy tale of a Noble Camelot of Conservatism would render them all absurd, pathetic and unemployable, they have conjured a "Reagan of the Mind" out of the narcissism of their collectively arrested political adolescence. An Imaginary Reagan, who forever bestrides history like Republican Santa Claus, and on whose lap they still sit, getting older and drunker on vague memories of how Awesome the Gipper's ideological after-shaved smelled.

And how tingly it made them all feel down in their political pants back in the Good Old Days.

So while Sully and his posse want to despise Palin and Fox and Rush and all they represent, they dare not look too closely at Palin's ideological DNA for fear of being forced to acknowledge that they are all Reagan's bastard children.

But Sully, when your machine has a generation-long history of producing monsters, militia goons, moral zombies, fascist propagandists, several species of flag-swaddled imbeciles and bigots, several species of scripture-swaddled theocrats, and willfully blind apologists, at some point you run out of ways to run away from admitting that the production of monsters, militia goons, moral zombies, fascist propagandists, several species of flag-swaddled imbeciles and bigots, several species of scripture-swaddled theocrats, and willfully blind apologists was not a bug in the machine...

...but the purpose of the machine.

And you know it.