Krugman Goes Full Driftglass

I must say, it was Almighty de-lightful to read this in the New York Times today (and h/t to Anonymous for pointing it out to me):

Getting to Crazy
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 14, 2011


There aren’t many positive aspects to the looming possibility of a U.S. debt default. But there has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief — of the black-humor variety — in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy.

A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. “Has the G.O.P. gone insane?” they ask.

Why, yes, it has. But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.

And may I say to those suddenly agonizing over the mental health of one of our two major parties: People like you bear some responsibility for that party’s current state

...
First of all, the modern G.O.P. fundamentally does not accept the legitimacy of a Democratic presidency — any Democratic presidency. We saw that under Bill Clinton, and we saw it again as soon as Mr. Obama took office.

...
But there has been no such price. Mr. Bush squandered the surplus of the late Clinton years, yet prominent pundits pretend that the two parties share equal blame for our debt problems.

So there has been no pressure on the G.O.P. to show any kind of responsibility, or even rationality — and sure enough, it has gone off the deep end. If you’re surprised, that means that you were part of the problem.

Bwahaha!

Of the +3300 posts I have written since I began blogging in 2005 (and the +83 podcasts Blue Gal and I have done since we began podcasting over a year ago), arguably a very strong plurality of all of it has been devoted to examining this very phenomenon: Not "Damn, aren't those wingnuts crazy.", but "Damn, why are you Mr. Centrist, Mr. Reasonable GOP Leader and Mr. TeeVee Gasbag continuing to get away with pretending that the wingnuts aren't crazy...or that the Left is just as crazy?"

Like virtually the entire Liberal blogosphere, this has been The Big Question for me since forever.

From one of my very first posts in April 2005 when I moved out of Steve Gilliard's place and struck out on my own:

...
But short run…Tom DeLay is now a Household Name. Been waiting 10 years for that to happen and always amazed that Republicans had no fucking clue who he was, even though you’d tell them five or a hundred times. Sheesh. All RAM and no Hard Drive with some people.

Every GOP Leader knows the Gingrich Lesson: No matter how much the membership owes you, they’ll go absolutely Lord of The Flies on your Piggy-ass the minute you becomes a measurable liability. Newt was so completely “I Am The Reich” that he would have been perfectly happy to go into the bunker and fight it out until the GOP was razed to rubble had he not been stopped by his own House Republicans.

And since the Suddenly Huge Liability named Tom DeLay is now just “Tell Tale Heart”--thundering away under the GOP floorboards, threatening to drown out everything else, the question is, will that same dynamic play twice?

Well DeLay ain’t Gingrich. He learned from that episode, and they don’t call him The Hammer for his shipwright skills. He spent a decade forcibly collecting GOP testicles and caching them in his private Crown Royal bag. At the slightest provocation he will to politically and personally destroy anyone who doesn’t bend a deep knee to His Gorgon Awfulness.

And both the Texas and National Republican parties have shown absolutely craven willingness to rewrite the Rules on the fly any time the Beast’s wet-bar needed to be restocked with virgin’s blood, or whenever a law or policy might make threaten to cinch-in the bottomless lust he and his stooges have for Power, Money, Trinkets and Perks, even a trifle.

So (hahah!) they’ve kinda disarmed themselves to accommodate him, and now they’re stuck very much up on that very windy gibbet with him.
...

To this obit for David Broder in March, 2011:

Death of the Anti-Gonzo

...
While there were many, many things David Broder loved -- centrism, politics, bi-partisanship, equidistanthood, divarication, bisect-uality, decussation -- one thing he really hated was hippies.

Those those damn, dirty, disrespectful fucking hippies.

He especially hate those fucking imaginary hippies: they were the sawdust and breadcrumb filler he kept heaping into his increasingly inedible journalistic meatloaf; the thumb he pressed down ever harder on the scales of his funny little rambles about America during his declining years (which encompassed all of the 21st Century and a big chunk of the end of the 20th) to artificially "balance out" the clear and horrifying fact that Party of Lincoln and Eisenhower that he had known as a barefoot lad growing up in the swampland of Chicago Heights was devolving into a billionaire-industrialist-funded mob of fundies, racists, imbeciles and sociopaths.

In fact, this fetish became so obsessive that, in the end, it became the great, tragic irony of David Broder's professional life. Because at last he simply could not bear to part with his fantasies about what he wished America to be and face the brutal realities of what America was actually becoming, David Broder -- this "Dean of the Washington press corps" -- totally missed out on covering the greatest story of his time; the utter collapse of the American news media and the mutation of the GOP from a political party into a dangerously fascistic cesspit of oligarchs, lunatics and rubes.

It was a story which his background and years of hard work had almost uniquely prepared him to cover, and one that was literally staring him in the face for much of the last 20 years.

And he completely fucking blew it.
...

To this other random sample grabbed from 2010:

"Then A Miracle Occurs..."

Like all Modern Conservatives, Bobo simply unremembers inconvenient facts that stand in the way of his pet theories. In this case, it is the grossly inconvenient fact that, since even before those heady days of the media obsession with Conservative lies about Clinton the Depraved Monster, Clinton the Secret Commie, Clinton the Rapist and Clinton the Murderer, it has been Bobo's Conservative Movement which has been gleefully driving this country off cliff after cliff after cliff. And plowing right through the "Catcher in the Rye" mobs of Liberals who -- at each junction -- were trying to block their serial, headlong plunges into one disaster after another all along the way.

So rather than facing the horribly painful reality of our nation's recent past, Bobo instead takes another loooooong hit off that Reagan crack-pipe, squints into a imaginary bright future and invents an entire movement of imaginary Patriot Centrists...

And from 2009:

"Here is a Revised List..."

...
So it turns out that virtually all of Mr. Sullivan's hard-won epiphanies amount to little more than the well-thumbed history and plainsong lore of our Fucked Up Modern Age as it has been long understood and passed down among those awful Liberals. And so when I see statements like this -- "Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not." -- what I see is a man who might want to distance himself from the appalling actions and despicable outcomes of his former allies, but still wants to continue honoring their idiotic parameters and debased vocabulary.

Yes, Mr. Sullivan, your objections emphatically do make you a "radical leftist", because in the hands of the shitkicker demagogues of the Right like Malkin, phrases like "radical leftist" have long since lost any meaning. They are just the pejorative-du-jour, pulled from a random grab-bag of Limbaugh-words -- socialist, elitist, feminist, Marxist, anti-American, compassionate, cut-and-run, surrender, Liberal, extremist, collectivist, queer, Communist, fascist, atheist, humanist, "New York", "San Francisco", “Chicago”, French, European -- that each used to have discrete and very different meanings, but are now bleated interchangeably by the Pig People and their overlords at anyone with a softer heart than Curtis LeMay and less imperial ambitions than Genghis Khan.

But then again, if Mr. Sullivan simply outed himself as a Liberal, he would instantly lose his place in the food-chain, wouldn’t he? Because like that microscopic number of self-loathing black Conservatives who make their daily bread by serving the interests of the Southern Bigot Party, more than any other single factor, it was always the sheer gawking, oddballness of the brazen self-delusion inherent in being the gay champion of the Christopath Homophobe Party that put Mr. Sullivan in the spotlight.

That was what gave him his unique and lucrative cache.
...

Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.

Mr. Sullivan regularly receives such largess, therefore he must not be a Liberal.

He instead must be the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur.

Because if he is not something spontaneously-generated and utterly sui generis, then he is just another Lefty-Come-Very-Lately, showing up at our door at 3:00 A.M., 20 years late and trailing toxic baggage behind him like a Halley Comet.

And who in the world would pay him to do his little dance then?

From 2007:

"The 27% Problem"

...
Understand that a world in flames, their every enemy – imaginary, real, here, abroad – writhing in agony, dying in as uncountable vast numbers as grains of sand on a beach is not a nightmare to them.

It is their dearest dream.

Hunkering over a bleeding globe, armed, insane, invulnerable, leering, dictating terms at the point of an ICBM and making the rest of humanity DANCE is their dream. The Bill of Rights a tattered memory. The bequest of our Founders mounted on pikes and paraded around in torch-lit processionals on Saint Reagan Day.

The do not fear fascism. They do not have the slightest problem with a New Inquisition.

They have no problem making this America’s New Face...the face of a raving nuclear-tipped sociopath, indiscriminately killing anyone who looks at them funny based on imagined slights and the voices in their head.

They only fear a holocaust where they are not the ones wielding the axe.

As I have said before, it’s a helluva story.

The most important story of our generation.

Too bad we no longer have a free and fearless press interested in reporting it.

From...well, you get the point :-)

So thank you Mr. Krugman.

You have absolutely made this dirty fucking hippie's day.