Spot the Error

In this time in this Daily Beast headline.

GOP’s Debt Kamikazes

In preferring default to a deal, the populist wing of the Republican party has demonstrated its new nihilistic streak. John Avlon on the politicians only too happy to take us off a cliff.
...

So, where's the FAIL?

It's the inclusion of the word "New" in the phrase "...the populist wing of the Republican party has demonstrated its new nihilistic streak." Because as every Liberal knows, these fuckers have been hollowing the soul out of the Party of Lincoln and stuffing the empty place full of undiluted, bigoted crazy since before Mr. Avlon was born.

Hell, Rod Serling was writing about them in the 1960s.

From Rod Serling writing in an editorial in the (then very right-wing) Los Angeles Times in 1964, in response to a series of articles by wingnut-apologist Morrie Ryskind:

…
What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.

We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct.
…

“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”

Back in April, 2005, in the hopes of making the problem so fucking simple that even someone as strategically obtuse as the Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual in America couldn't miss the fucking point, I abused a beloved children's book thus:

Little Red State Fundy sez...

Whatever will we tell the children?

One day we will have to explain to the children what happened when Thurston Howell III lost his right mind and decided that for the sake of some tax cuts to make him incrementally more comfortable, his very bestest buddies in the whole, wide world were the Ultra Right Wing Gorgons down in Jesusland.

May I suggest the following?

The Story of Little Red State Fundy

Little Red State Fundy found a grain of hate.

"Who will help me plant the hate?" she asked.

"Not I," said the Moderate Republicans.

"Not I," said the Undecideds.

"Not I," said the Libertarians.

"Then I will," said Little Red State Fundy.

So she buried the hate in the bloody ground of the Old Confederacy. After a while it grew up paranoid and ignorant and violent.

"The hate is ripe now," said Little Red State Fundy. "Who will do the mass mailings and preach bigotry from the Pulpit?"

"Not I," said the Moderate Republicans.

"Not I," said the Undecideds.

"Not I," said the Libertarians.

"Then I will," said Little Red State Fundy.

So she licked envelopes until her bill was cracked and dry and stood up into the House of God and crowed to her flocks in their millions that God Loved Them for hating and killing creatures who were not like them.

Then she asked, "Who will help me focus this hatred politically?"
...

Later, I tried putting it into engineering terms (from 2006):

Sometimes pictures tell a better story (plus I’m hording secret, weirding adjectives for the first week in November), so here is a simplified diagram I poached from a site discussing the principles of the “Very-High-Temperature Reactor” that I have repurposed to sum up the mechanical processes by which the Party of God maintains control.

Also I find when I look at it for what it is -- a machine, powered entirely by the energy from superheated lies -- the workings of it become easier to understand, deconstruct and defeat.


The Rove Rods (With Cheney sprinkles)

These are the wedge issues the GOP dredges up cycle after cycle to crank the Base of the Party up to Scared Shitless and White Hot Loco just in time for each election. It is why the GOP can fuck up whole countries and leave entire American cities to die without fear of being voted out of office 99-to-1 in every district everywhere. Because if you give mouthbreathers enough fags, burning flags and Terror Alerts around election time it’ll crowd the entire record of Republican perfidy, bloodshed and failure right out of their itty bitty heads.

The Propaganda Pumps

These babies can inject pressurized bullshit into the system at speeds varying from CNN to Fox to Limbaugh to Full Coulter. This is the Lie Delivery System, through which the air is kept thick with rightard trigger phrases like “feminazi” “activist judges” and “cutnrun” and squeegeed clean of anything resembling thoughtful discussion or honest debate.

The Radioactive Base.

This is a three-dimensional array of the ignorant, the hateful, the insane and the Christopath Right.

Individually, these samples of Enlightenment’s backwash make a persuasive argument that the good of our common humanity would be better served if the hatecults that fester in the wounds of our Democracy were gathered together for an All Ratfuckers Tribal Council at the Trinity Site and spontaneously Raptured into the stratosphere in a single, thermonuclear flash.

Collectively, they are the Modern GOP, and by putting every last species of botched American citizenship and knuckledragging bigot in harness together under one whip, the Republican Party has clawed its way to power.

The Liquid Bobo Koolant

The Koolant system that keeps it all from blowing apart at the seams and melting itself back into the masturbatory fever dreams of every wannabe Jefferson Davis circulate a viscous Koolaid-based composite goo made up of 43% David Brooks, 27% Tom Friedman, 23% Tim Russert, 12% Joe Klein and 10% David Broder.

You say that’s 115%? Well fuck you and your fancy, liberal, Jebus-hating elitist “arithmetic” anyway.

If you press your ear to the containment shell you can hear in murmuring through the pipes:

“There are no crazies here.”

“The Southern Strategy is a myth.”

“Ignore Falwell, Dobson, and Reed. They’re Men of Faith.”

“Ignore Schlafly, Limbaugh and Hannity. They’re just firm”

“Ignore Robertson, Perle and Nordquist. They’re just amusingly provocative.”

“Gingrich isn’t a fascist; he’s just ‘controversial’.”

“Coulter isn’t really serious, even though she is the keynote speaker and commands top dollar at national Republican events, Republican media outlets and sold-out Wingnut Christian rallies.”

“That carcinoma spreading across your face. It looks just the Jesus, so you know it can’t be bad for you!”

“The Moderates really run the party.”

“The Center is where all right thinking people should be, despite the fact that in the last 30 years the Right has dragged the Center a million miles into Crazyville.”

“No matter how completely the GOP rapes American values, without a sliver of evidence to support this assertion you should still somehow believe that Liberals are either just as bad or worse.”

“The GOP cares about idiots like you.”

“There is no core in this reactor.”

That’s how it works.
...

Tried drawing charts and graphs.

...in November of 2004, the Left forever lost whatever was left of its political virginity and began to think about how to function in a country ruled by a mob of angry imbeciles.

But I still think that a piece from 2004 by a writer known only as mg_65 who wrote the following and emailed it to the late Steve Gilliard, who reprinted it in toto, stands a full head above almost everything that has been written since.

Here is a tiny snip of that much longer piece, which I tidied up just a little and reprinted here:

...
Right-wingers are cowards. They want a monarchy, a theocracy. They hate Liberalism. They worship hierarchical power. The only thing they respect is a boot in the face. That gets them rolling over and peeing in exciting submission. Fuck them. Let's give them some of that Shock and Awe they love so much. Let's withdraw. They will not change. They are just plain bad. Spend your time and money on yourself, your family, your community, your values. Let them drown in their own filth.

Let them have what they want. Let them have the totalitarian theocratic feudal system they want so much. See how long they last. No FDA: good luck with that aspirin. Enjoy your hamburger! No CDC, no OSHA, no EPA. No labor laws, no minimum wage, no right to sue the corporation that put the mercury in their medicine and arsenic in their water and whose machinery ripped their arm off. No right to declare bankruptcy. Let them wallow in their hatred of us and when they need us and all our works, they can just go pray to Jesus.

As Joe Conason writes ,

"Liberal policies made America the freest, wealthiest, most successful and most powerful nation in human history. Conservatism in power always threatens to undo that national progress, and is almost always frustrated by the innate decency and democratic instincts of the American people...

"If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights -- you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable -- you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family -- you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn't black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green -- you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same public facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society -- you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of those advances…"

It's ours--we fought and died for it. They don't want it; they never did. So fuck them. Walk away.

Listen: in Tao, absence is as strong as presence. I am not advocating hatred. I am not saying to fight them, or be mean to them. I am saying, stop trying to give them something they don't want. It isn't working. When you fight, your energy feeds what you're fighting against. When you resist, your resistance props it up. When you hate, you become what you hate.

And when you keep reaching out your hand in loving kindness to someone who hates your fucking guts and wants you dead, you're an idiot.

So stop it.

Stop enabling them. Stop fighting for them. Stop trying to give them something they don't want. Just stop. Stop not telling the truth because it'll hurt their feelings and cause unpleasantness. They're bigots. They are going to change the Constitution to make you a second-class citizen.

They are going to keep carpet-bombing cities full of civilians. They are going to continue to disappear American citizens, keep putting innocent people in our concentration camp in Cuba, keep on encouraging and allowing terrorist acts on blue state cities, continue to rape and torture and murder and complain about how immoral liberals are.

And there's not a damn thing we can do about it, except starve them out.

Start now.

Because this is what they voted for.

And in 2010 they voted for it again, which is why we once again stand tippy-toe-and-tilting-forward at the edge of yet another wingnut-manufactured catastrophe.

Furthermore, as you many have noticed over the years, nothing the Dirty Effing Hippies have ever tried -- no Photoshop tricks or verbal fireworks or tracking-their-madness websites or letters to the editors or solid, academic papers or polling data or the patient documenting of Conservative lie and lie and Conservative tragedy after tragedy -- has ever budged the Villager Gasbag Media needle so much as a millimeter, because frankly Team Evil just pays too damn well.

Because, as Upton Sinclair famously put it, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."

So now that the Right's latest treasons have become OMFG! headlines in major newspapers and websites all over the world, ask yourself , "What changed?"

And if you're honest, what answer comes?

Nothing.

Nothing at all has changed, and that is the tragedy.

Nothing especially shocking or new is visible that had been somehow impenetrably cloaked for the last 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 years. Nothing whatsoever has changed about the basic nature and direction of the Right...

...except now the tidal wave of wingnut Crazy that has been destroying this country for a generation has finally started to flood the rec rooms of our Beltway Gasbag Overlords.

I mean, it's not like the nutjobs are just blowing up federal buildings or murdering abortion doctors waaaaay out in flyover country anymore: they're coming for the Villagers' investment portfolios now, so for God's Sake won't someone please stop them!

They're inside the walls, man! Inside our wallets! Which means what was once a violent reality teevee show playing itself out in the provinces of the Empire now suddenly out Herods Herod!

Meanwhile, former George W. Bush speechwriter, and inexplicably-still-employed political fabulist David Frum thinks former George H. W. Bush Speechwriter, Singapore Sling aficionado, lying twat and inexplicably-still-employed idiot Peggy Noonan makes "an excellent point" as she once again jams the Vibrating Supply Side Reagan Egg of Glory up her abandoned mine shaft to help get her "Both Sides Do It" freak on:

This Is No Time for Games
Ronald Reagan wouldn't be playing 'Targeted Catastrophe.'

BY PEGGY NOONAN

Looked at one way, it shouldn't be hard. Both parties in Washington have every reason to want to prove they possess the baseline political competence to meet the government's central and pending crisis, which is the spending crisis. Both parties should be eager to reach a debt ceiling agreement, if only to prove the system isn't broken. Because really, they are the system. If it's broken, they're broken, and if they're broken, who needs them?
...

Yes, because when some twitching junkie on a hair-trigger sticks a hand-cannon in the face of a convenience store clerk and starts ranting out an incoherent stream of irrational demands, clearly the blame for that tense and dangerous situation is equally shared by both junkie and clerk.

In America, we don't have a jobs crisis or a debit crisis or a deficit crisis or an environmental crisis.

We have a Conservative crisis, and a Centrist crisis.

And until their collusive and lavishly well-funded stranglehold on our politics, media and economy is destroyed, we are well and truly fucked.