Perestroika, Hold The Glasnost

A new, occasional feature examining the deathly hallows in which America's soft-handed, soft-headed, life-long, keyboard-warriors of Ivory Tower "Conservatism" have trapped themselves, and the various verbal gymnastics they are performing to avoid the horribly inconvenient fact that Conservatism -- their Conservatism -- has been killing this country for a long, long time.

Things have gotten so bad for them, in fact, that a few of them are willing to entertain the concept of political Perestroika:

Perestroika (literally: Restructuring) was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Its literal meaning is "restructuring", referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system.

As long as the don't have to put up with any God Damned Glasnost!

Glasnost (Openness) was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s.

In other words, lets not get all crazy about allocating blame and penalties for how fucked up everything is, or ; lets just all agree that I get to keep my well-paid media gig...and I'll stop calling you a traitor so often...and we'll both agree that Michele Bachmann is nuts.

Ok?

Uh, no. Not Ok.

See, to fix the country, we have to identify what is broken and how it got that way.

So lets start with something simple.

One sentence.

After twitching incredulously on about how Professional Conservative TeeVee Liar George Will had sure goofed up on a lot of, um, facts, Mr. Sullivan concluded thus:

So Will is simply empirically wrong.

No, Mr. Sullivan, George Will is simply lying.

In fact, George Will lies a lot.

In fact, as I am sure you could not failed to notice, a lot of Conservative pundits, journalists and public intellectuals lie a lot.

And more interestingly, our "liberal media" exacts no personal or professional
price whatsoever for this epidemic Conservative lying do they?

I mean, creatures as irredeemably corrupt and incompetent as Mark Halerpin and Newt Gingrich can spew the most outrageous, dishonest ridiculous and they have irrevocable Golden Tickets that grant them eternal access to the major American media.

Why is that?

Perhaps one day someone with access to the media decision-making process will name names and explain how it came to be that Conservative pundits, journalists and public intellectuals who lie were granted blanket and permanent absolution. And why other voices who aren't irredeemably corrupt and incompetent -- who have, in fact, been right about most things right along -- have never and will never be allowed within a 1,000 feet of a live Mainstream Media network camera?

To the extent this lying gets called out at all by anyone other that we crazy Liberal bloggers, it is invariably done in the most mumbling and passive way possible, and always weakened even further by the Ubiquitous Whiny Question Mark ("What could so-and-so be thinking?" or "Why would my-old-running-buddy-who-clearly-went-Full-Metal-Brownshirt-years-ago-but-to-whom-I-continue-to-drive-traffic say such a thing?")

Your-old-running-buddy-who-clearly-went-Full-Metal-Brownshirt-years-ago-but-to-whom-you-continue-to-drive-traffic says such things because he is a congenital Conservative liar.

And so-and-so is thinking "How can slither out of the very scary place my Conservatism has trapped me without admitting the horribly inconvenient fact that it is my Conservatism that ran me up on these rocks in the first place? Hey! Maybe I'll just lie my way out!"

As I have written before, this nation can no longer exist Half-Fox and Half-Fre

I am sure I will write about it again.