Incredulity Watch

To repeat that which I have quoted before:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"

Andrew Sullivan had this up at his Conservative Expatriate Tree Fort today:

Epistemic Closure Watch
15 Nov 2010 03:40 pm

David Frum's piece in the NYT magazine is well worth your time - about as elegant and as devastating a critique of current Republicanism as you can find in one place. This is where he challenges the most:

Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it.

This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon.

...

OK, two things wrong here.

First, rather than "...spending a billion years scrubbing out toilets in the Malebolge of the Flatterers with naught but Andrew Sullivan's beard for a scouring pad" (as your humble correspondent has previously suggested would be his job description over in the Better Universe) David Frum instead gets to use the New York Times magazine -- apparently at will -- as an outlet for his views.

Second, having read Frum's piece, I have one question for Andrew Sullivan:

To whom do you think any of this comes as a revelation?

Seriously, why not just title it "Breaking: Vader is Luke's Daddy!!" because however "elegant" it might be, who one Earth do you think you are addressing that has not already figured this out?

Frum is describes a phenomenon that the Left has warned was coming for decades.

Warned about, even as even as George H. W. Bush was throwing himself into the arms of bigots, fundamentalists and the very lowest of Common Conservatives Denominators to win the highest office in the land.

Warned about, even as Rush Limbaugh was being credited -- 16 years ago, by leading Republicans -- with making the 1994 GOP congressional takeover possible,

Warned about, even as even as Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich was pioneering and mass-producing on a previously undreamed-of scale an explicitly toxic, Orwellian brand of slander and lying, that the Right was sopping up with a biscuit.

And in response to our warnings we were told to shut up.

Told by Conservatives -- in public and with a smirk -- that we didn't understand how your politics was played. Reassured quietly and in private that the Right's stable of bigots, xenophobes, paranoids, militia freaks, fascists and Christianists were just a means to an end: that you Brain Caste Conservatives had the nutjobs under control.

So now the Hour of this very Rough Beast which your Conservative brethren so carefully cultivated has come 'round at last.

And as it slouches its inexorable way to Jerusalem to be born, I have one more question:

From what Stygian depths of Conservative hypocrisy does David Frum now summon up the nerve to feign concern and surprise?