How Perry Mason Ruined America

And no, not just because Raymond Burr crapped up the original "Godzilla", or because "Perry Mason" became a fetish with the Neocon Grand Vizier Leo Strauss, whose unholy spawn eventually went on to capture the Conservative Movement and destroy America.

But rather because it suckered too many people -- myself included -- into the civic fantasy that the factual and/or logical irrefutability of a proposition has anything whatsoever to do with whether people -- especially people who belong to the Confederate rump battalion that the American Conservative movement has degenerated into -- believe it or not.

Quite the opposite.

As the Conservative Movement has rocketed along its trajectory towards full-on, crazyfuck, Heaven's Gate cult-status at geometrically accelerating speed, more and more of Teh Internets (and my mailbox) has filled up with infuriated, "J'accuse!"-type questions challenging one aspect of the Right's overall psychosis or another, with varying degrees of mental and verbal dexterity.

"How can they say...?"

"How can they believe...?"

"Have you heard the latest...?"

"How can someone who say this and then turn right around and say that?"

These days I just shrug. Shrug at the mutants who think that simply screaming EVER LOUDER will get us to notice that they these are the same useful wingnut idiots who never gave a shit about any of their suddenly-dearly held beliefs as the Bush Administration serially and brutally savaged them.

And then a Negro put his hand on the Bible.

Deep inside the dark and seemingly bottomless nightmare of the Age of Bush when the chips were down -- when it fucking well mattered -- when these fair weather patriots weren't slagging the Left for being traitors, they were nowhere to be found.

And then a Negro put his hand on the Bible.

Now, of course, these broken, brainwashed clowns want the world to believe that they were all righteously outraged...in secret! As millions of Liberals were marching past their front door, they were apparently in the basement bellowing bravely into their pillows. As millions of Liberals demanded accountability from a provably reckless and depraved Conservative Republican Administration, these heroes were too busy handing out stern and learned lectures on macroeconomics to whoever was passed out on the bar stool next to them.

For eight long and catastrophic years they somehow never found their Outside Voices.

Until that Negro put his hand on the Bible.

And then, as predictable as the sunrise...

3...2...1...

I Want My Country Back!!!

The same well-financed masterminds who trained these sock puppets to sit up on their hind legs and howl over the imaginary horrors of Bill Clinton's Democratic Administration...and who taught them to roll over and play dead during the actual, daily horrors of George Bush's Republican Administration...have simply returned the outrage chip in their little heads to its factory default pre-Bush Administration setting.

Of course, their conditioning is such that the Right never notices their own enormous and flagrant hypocrisies, because they are no longer capable of noticing such things. Which is why I don't doubt their sincerity, any more than I doubt the sincerity of a waterhead drunk begging for a bottle.

Any more than I doubt the sincerity of the mob in "1984" howling out its carefully-programmed hatred at imaginary enemies.

Lunatics are very sincere people, and this knowledge -- that on the Right, any connection between passion and logic has been irrevocably severed -- is what permits their leaders and politician to look the camera in the eye and just lie, lie, lie about things that are plain and self-evident

and get away with it.

The obvious fact that they are lying -- that shameless and continually lying about big, important stuff has now become nothing more than an everyday tactic among Conservatives -- is certainly a fact, but also completely misses the point.

The Teabaggers are the loyal Outer Party members of the Right, who had always, always, always, been at war with with Eastasia.

Then a Negro put his hand on the Bible...