Purity of Adolescence

14-year-old Teabagger Superman Marco Rubio explains how Social Security 'N stuff has been sapping America's precious bodily fluids!

Since 1935!

Jesus, no wonder I'm so tired!

From Talking Points Memo:

Rubio’s Reagan Speech: Entitlements “Weakened” Us
Thomas Lane | August 24, 2011, 5:30PM

Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) seems to be the "right" man for the "right" time. Indeed, there's now so much speculation that he'll take the VP slot of next year's GOP presidential ticket that one wag recently tweeted, "Is it time to rename GOP primaries 'the contest to become Marco Rubio's running mate'?"

The GOP heartthrob delivered a much-anticipated speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Wednesday. The address was packed with the red meat Tea Party audiences crave, and at its heart was the reddest meat of all: a "things-ain't-what-they-used-to-be" take-down of entitlement programs.

With a tone that suggested he spoke more in sorrow than in anger, Rubio said that though the creation of a welfare state "was well-intentioned, it was doomed to fail from the start."

"These programs actually weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another.
...

Like so many of his filthy breed, Senator Rubio's Conservatism draws its strength directly from his terrifyingly smug and apparent limitless ignorance of the basic history of this country and its people.

The halcyon past his kind hearkens back to is pure fiction that exists only in half-remembered episodes of "Little House on the Prairie" and "Father Knows Best": the pure and noble pre-Fall Conservatism his kind walk around every day politically-priapistic over, never fucking existed.

And as much as I a tempted to unfurl the Liberal Litany of Actual Facts about the history of Social Security and the horrorshow of poverty and neglect that it was created to mitigated -- a horrorshow that is the inevitable byproduct of unrestricted capitalism -- I figure, why bother?

These people long ago completely stopped listening to anyone who doesn't echo flatteringly back to them the shrieking voices in their head

much less a dirty Hippie like me. So we end up fighting the same skirmishes every few years or so, against more-or-less the same army of Wingnut Billionaire Funded Zombies who come lurching back out of thesewer with a slightly revised set of shiny new lies to publicly justify their single-minded Prime Directive: the complete repeal of the 20th century.

Because how does the Right keep getting the same idiots to swallow one more round of Conservative rat poison as grits and gravy, served up by the same liars who sold them the last 1,000 toxic Happy Meals?

By leaning hard on that most beloved of Conservative Big Lies -- the wholly fake past:

[Rubios's comments] probably don’t rule out Warren Harding, but even Calvin Coolidge as governor of Massachusetts signed a maximum-hours bill for women and children. For sure, Rubio’s words condemn Presidents Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Truth be told they condemn Ronald Reagan too, but shhh. They condemn almost every one of the party’s presidential nominees since Wendell Wilkie except Barry Goldwater: Tom Dewey, Bob Dole, and John McCain. And of course they condemn almost every important Republican governor, senator and member of Congress of the post-1945 period, Robert Taft very much included.

One of the effects of the Tea Party movement is to cut the Republican Party off – not only from the measured policy preferences of the American people – but from the Republican Party’s own history. It shrivels the GOP into a party without heroes, or rather a party with only one hero, Ronald Reagan, and otherwise a long succession of false and deluded leaders.

And it points Republicans to a doomed future of continuing failure and recrimination.
...

And until their movement is dismantled, their leaders dispossessed, their depraved ideology buried at the crossroad with a spike through its heart, and until their skeevy Centrist enablers start taking some hard, humiliating public defeats that land them in the same category as child-abusers and the scum who torture small animals, this war will drag on and on, and we will continue to lose the country we love one exhausting inch at a time.