Voice of Empire, Ctd

I was known for doing a certain thing that many of the other girls wouldn't do.
-- Michele Bachmann Laurie Bohner, "A Mighty Wind"

"The POTUS Driven Life" edition

So the meaningless Iowa Republican Party fund raising exercise in Ames (Motto: "Bring us deep fried bar-b-q Barabbas!") is behind us and to no one's surprise, the tiny, hurtling moons of the GOP -- Phobos and Deimos Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul -- won the day.

Which was enough to buy America's leading Self-Fulfilling Propheteer onto every program at the Mouse Circus.

The Iowa Straw Poll (Alternate Motto: "A political event so important that Party front-runners plan their entire calendar around ignoring it") is a tent revival for a Conservatism which long ago stopped being able to function without a Villain of Luciferian Proportions riding the Greatest Existential Crisis in History to keep its mad, evangelical furnaces stoked.

Even if they have to invent the Villain of Luciferian Proportions out of whole cloth.

Even if they have to precipitate the latest Greatest Existential Crisis in History themselves.

The Conservative Movement on display is not something new: it something old. Ancient.

It is the Mob, now finally being given a place at Democracy's table. A tribe of superstitious blood-drunk savages baffled and terrified and lost in a world of angels and demons. looking for a demagogue to give them succor, and a convenient devil on which then can heap the blame.

Bachmann is not simply a liar: she comes factory-equipped with that Conservative evangelical capacity to preach lies with eyes wide open and in the face of a firehose of facts that would upend mere reason. But reason just bounces off of Conservatism because is a cult -- a cult of enraged White Conservative victimhood jacketed in the language of the divine -- and its power is anchored a mile deep in the fanaticism of its saints and prophets.

Which is why their rage and incoherence always catches the corrupt humdrums of the Beltway by surprise -- why it appears so bizarrely out of proportion to whatever crisis their Brain Caste has them tweaked out of their skulls about this week.

Because they are not fighting on policy or economic grounds; they are fighting on holy ground. And Barack Obama is not just a President with whom they have disagreements (which, considering how much ground he pre-concedes to them before negotiations even begin, is objectively nuts): he (like Clinton...and anyone else with a [D] after their name) is a Satanic Usurper who has stolen the Mantle of Heaven from its Righteous Whiteous Conservative owners, and therefor against whom any measure whatsoever (up to and including impeachment or destroying the global economy) is permitted.

Normal, sane human beings do not think this way which is why normal, sane human beings don't see the batshits coming until their already ranging up and down the corridors of power.

Today, Bachmann was everywhere: the Full Ginsburg.

Some of her give-and-take, in spirit if not literally transcribed:

• Obamacare is the absolutely number one job killer. This company in Indianola laid off 100 people because of the Kenyan Usurper


• We can't afford extending unemployment benefits. We're too broke.


• Maybe people know better than those pointy-headed, atheist "experts".


• I'm for real!


• There are people in Dexter Iowa who canceled their internet because of the Kenyan Usurper.


• I care about senior citizens. I love them. The Kenyan Usurper threatened default because he hates senior citizens and wants to kill them all.


• This is real!


• I wouldn't take the 10-to-1 deal deficit deal because all deals are in D.C. phony and I'm about reality!


• (In response to her constant, malevolent gay bashing on which she built a political career) All these "gay" questions are not issues that people care about.


• I am no one's judge. /But did you just judge the fuck out of gays?/ Lalalala, I ascribe dignity and honor to all people. Except the Kenyan Usurper and the Evil Commie Libruls.


• The system in Washington is absolutely vile and corrupt.


• I cut my teeth on being a bi-partisan problem solver.


• We are the biggest debtor nation in history. Not long ago we were the biggest creditor. /driftglass: Yeah. Biggest creditor. And then Reagan took over...


• There are exactly 219 Communists in the State Department 1,690 people in the Department of Transportation who got raises since the start of the Republican Recession. Clearly the Kenyan Usurper is destroying America.


• I am real. I am authentic.


• I shall not rest until we repeal Obamacare.


• We can just "modernize" the shit out of Medicare and Social Security. /driftglass: Social Security has 2 moving parts. How exactly can you... You know. never mind. None of this is based on facts or reality: its based on tickling the pleasure centers of the Pig People.

Pretty much all of the above was repeated on each channel with a smiling robotic nonplussedness that was chilling to behold (Bachmann has also quite good at at overtalking David Gregory.)

Apparently one of the upsides of being a submissive Christian lady politician is that Bachmann actually heeds the council of her political advisers as if it was coming from a burning bush.

Her soulless political mechanic -- Ed Rollins

...
Because what Ed doesn’t mention [in the column I cite here] is that the 26%-ers who still fucking looooove the GOP -- who goose-stepped along with Bush right off the cliff and into infamy, and who spent the last three decades getting their Jebus from Jerry Falwell and their politics from Rush -- didn't just precipitate out of thin air.

Nope.

Instead, our friend Ed Rollins -- that nice, straight-talking fella from the previous few paragraphs -- built 'em.

From a kit.

He and his protégé Lee Atwater

(who eventually shivved him in the back.)

Their bastard child, Karl Rove, helped. Tom DeLay helped. Jesse Helms helped. Phyllis Schlafly helped. Ed's former boss, Richard Nixon, helped. Ed’s close personal friend, Newt Gingrich, helped. Ed’s political hero, Ronald Reagan, helped.

In fact virtually all of the Usual Suspects out in the GOP's New Confederacy Workshoppe spent years and years and worked real, real hard to make sure the pinhead dregs of the segregationist South found a warm and welcoming home in the Party of Lincoln.

Because it helped them win elections. Period. Full stop.
...

And so the GOP brain caste spent its entire political allowance recruiting the crazies. Pandered to them. Flattering them. Catering to their every whim. Giving them their own religion. Their own media. Their own think-tanks and their own cohort of men with college degrees, expensive suits and very sincere hair to reassure them that every one of their paranoid, imbecilic ideas was actually noble and patriotic.

That they and they alone speak for America.

That they and they alone are America.

Giving them, in other words, what they had always craved; political respectability and real power. In exchange for which they became the tent pole that propped up the entire Republican party.
...

-- is definitely earning his keep.

Jesus, on the other hand, was nowhere in sight.