Can't More Billionaire Tax Cuts Save Us?

Because, y'know, electrolytes!

Like a seemingly-infinite set of nested Matryoshka Dolls origami-ed out of moldering back issues of The National Review, it seems that every week another Conservative Apostate -- for one reason or another -- dares to boldly quit huffing the Burma Shave out of Reagan's Underpants for five seconds, slowly rubs their widdle eyes and for once in their worthless god-damned lives focus on something other than Bill Buckley' hairy ass-crack and a faded, sepia-toned photograph of a glorious Conservative Golden Age that never fucking existed.

Then these sad little Parlor Punks of the Revolution That Never Was stagger around the ideological alleys all kinda teary-eyed and dispossessed for a new nanoseconds before stumbling their way into the 24/7 pity party of the the League of Extraordinary Conservative Gentlemen, where they find a whole mole-rat's warren full of like-minded, suddenly-single, political frottage buddies with whom the can cross-link and dry-hump all day long about their Shock!Shock! that...

...at some point, while they were all busy quoting Burke at each other, and laughing at Stupid Liberals who were desperately trying to warn them that their Glorious Movement was in fact nothing but a massive, oligarchic sham being rammed through by an army of rabid, mangy, bigoted hellbeasts, and giving themselves yet another awesome, club-tie, trans-Atlantic daisy-chain reacharound...

...some person or persons unknown very carelessly left the Ayn Rand Memorial Objectivist Doggie Door unlatched and in swarmed several million rabid, mangy, bigoted hellbeasts who chewed up all the "Firing Line" souvenir throw pillows, ripped the throats out of all the pretty little Noonington Songbirds and generally shit all over the entire Glorious Cause (which is why we can't have nice things!) and chased everyone up a single, slender sapling...

...where they have built themselves a little, "Shipwreck Kelly" perch

that shudders and wobbles precariously whenever the wind blows in from the direction of Reality...

...and from which they all now frown fiercely down at the nearly limitless army of Palinite killbots and Beck myrmidons -- each with "Made in the U.S.A. by Ronald Wilson Reagan, The Moral Majority and The Southern Strategy" clearly stamped on the soles of their feet --

It is Sullivan...

Stockman's Diagnosis: Still True
02 Aug 2010 10:47 am

It's the kind of op-ed that has one sitting up straight with the sting of fresh memory. Back in the 1980s, I was a Thatcherite. I believed in low taxes but I also believed in - you know - balanced budgets as a core principle of, you remember, conservatism. It was odd coming to America to be told that here, for the first time in human history, you could cut taxes and raise revenue at the same time! It was triply odd, coming from green eye-shade Thatcher-land, to hear that "deficits don't matter." In his first term, of course, even Reagan felt it necessary to adjust from this madness - a madness that, far from "starving the beast", simply made Americans believe that the beast never needed full funding

...
But the central point Stockman makes is that all of this was not conservatism as it should be, but the degenerate mockery of conservatism that has come to dominate the GOP: a blend of fiscal abandon, politicized religion, lawless foreign policy and utter electoral cynicism. Until this is confronted, owned and refudiated, we may have a Republican future ahead, but not a conservative one.

Who hands off to former Reagan Budget Guy, David Stockman.

...
The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing — as suggested by last week’s news that the national economy grew at an anemic annual rate of 2.4 percent in the second quarter. Under these circumstances, it’s a pity that the modern Republican Party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach — balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline — is needed more than ever.

And later, Sullivan again:

The Embarrassment Of Being A Sane Conservative
02 Aug 2010 11:31 am
Let us count the ways we wince.
...

Who tosses to Professor Bainbridge (dot com):

It's getting to be embarrassing to be a conservative.

These days it's getting increasingly embarrassing to publicly identify oneself as a conservative. It was bad enough when George Bush 43, the K Street Gang, and the neo-cons were running up spending, fighting an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq, incurring massive deficits, expanding entitlements, and all the rest of the nonsense I cataloged over the years in posts like Bush 43 has been a disaster for conservatives.

These days, however, the most prominent so-called conservatives are increasingly fit only to be cast for the next Dumb and Dumber sequel. They're dumb and crazy.
...

Who, in turn, links to David Klinghoffer:

...
Once, the iconic figures on the political right were urbane visionaries and builders of institutions — like William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol and Father Richard John Neuhaus, all dead now. Today, far more representative is potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, whose news and opinion website, Breitbart.com, is read by millions. In his most recent triumph, Breitbart got a U.S. Department of Agriculture official pushed out of her job after he released a deceptively edited video clip of her supposedly endorsing racism against white people.

What has become of conservatism? ... With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism. Once the talk was of "neocons" versus "paleocons." Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons.
...

And of course, every few days, recently-exiled troll David Frum needs to be thrown a bouquet of flowers:

What's a Libertarian to Do?

by David Frum

I am not a libertarian, and I remain committed to the right and the Republican party, but I feel Brink's pain. Here's the consolation however: the party system as we have seen it these past few years is not the party system of tomorrow. The Republican party cannot survive as a coalition of the rural and the elderly - and Republicans are very determined to survive. Democrats have in recent months made a fateful choice to depart from the centrist economics of the Clinton years in favor of bold new exercises in very unlibertarian state control.

-- and solemnly promise each other that they're all gonna form an even cooler club, with even more awesome songbirds and throw pillows.

Meanwhile not one of them -- not a single fucking one of them -- has the guts to answer this simple question:

Doesn't the fact that you have spent nearly your entire adult life suspended in a state of willful, toxic, profitable and genuinely spectacular ignorance about the true nature and purpose of your Glorious Movement mean that, by any objective measure, your career as a public intellectual has been a failure and a fraud, and that your opinions about politics should treated as suspect to the point of worthlessness?