Conservatives Discover America

This ain't no party, this ain't no disco,
This ain't no fooling around

While it has been fascinating to watch the public antics of professional opinionators who have been driven out of the Party of God and into the Conservative Witness Protection Program after years of carrying wingnut water, this is not a game.

In case you didn't notice, Fox America declared war on Free America a long time ago, which is why I find the actions of certain Conservative exiles and part-time defectors so illuminating. Specifically, the fact that their livelihood as fence-straddling "public intellectuals" depends 100% on appropriating our Liberal critique of their former ideological fatherland right down to the fucking vocabulary...

...while assiduously avoiding any mention of the blindingly obvious conclusion that, damn, those fucking Liberals were right all along.

Lately, Andrew Sullivan has been rolling out his borrowed Liberal artillery almost daily:

The GOP is a religious and cultural force dominated by evangelicals, and fixated on total rejection of establishment or liberal ideas. Huntsman has acknowledged climate change, alone among the candidates.
...

When you realize this intelligent and capable two-term governor from the rock-ribbed Republican state of Utah, with deep domestic and foreign policy experience, has one tenth of the support of a pizza guy who emerged from motivational speaking and talk radio, and who admits he knows nothing about foreign policy and has never held elective office in his life ... well, you have the core reality of today's Ailes-led, resentment-fueled GOP.

David Frum has stockpiled enough Liberal groceries and peanut butter to last him indefinitely.

Were Our Enemies Right?
...

When people tell me that I’ve changed my mind too much about too many things over the past four years, I can only point to the devastation wrought by this crisis and wonder: How closed must your thinking be if it isn’t affected by a disaster of such magnitude? And in fact, almost all of our thinking has been somehow affected: hence the drift of so many conservatives away from what used to be the mainstream market-oriented Washington Consensus toward Austrian economics and Ron Paul style hard-money libertarianism. The ground they and I used to occupy stands increasingly empty.

If I can’t follow where most of my friends have gone, it is because I keep hearing Susan Sontag’s question in my ears.

And like a child darting out from cover to show his compatriots how brave he is by touching a dead turtle with a stick, about once a month David Brooks slips on his refined ratiocinator sneakers, dons a set of those once-despised jewels of nuance and slips out of his gated community to poke at some utterly safe Republican target -- a target which is now risk-free for him to write about only because Liberals were willing to do the lonely job of repeating the ugly truth over and over again back when nobody wanted to hear it; back when Mr. Brooks was busy spitting on us because, back then, we were the safe target.

But now:

...the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it.

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. A nation makes a sacred pledge to pay the money back when it borrows money. But the members of this movement talk blandly of default and are willing to stain their nation’s honor.

The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name.
...

That these apostates do this at all tastes a little like a victory, but that they do it while at the same time breaking their pens to avoid even accidentally mentioning that the Evil Liberals were, in fact, right all along means the battle is nowhere near over.

Because even as they position themselves as the High Priests of what they hope will be the New Conservative Orthodoxy, the exiles and o-again/off-again defectors still depend for their daily bread on selling cheap, 3rd-rate knockoffs of the political observations and opinions of their betters -- which makes Liberals the only people they reflexively hate and resent more than the "Ailes-led, resentment-fueled GOP".

Because they are so terribly dependent on us Liberals.

Because without the threads they scrounge from our closets they would be standing naked and mute before the world.

And that is as the core of their irreconcilable contradiction: that having arrogated to themselves the diametrically opposed roles of Truth Teller and Defender of the True Faith, they find themselves constantly faced with the same kind of awful dilemma that Zaius confronted in the person of Taylor in "The Planet of the Apes" -- How to deal with an indisputable fact that is also an unmentionable heresy?



However unlike Zaius, dynamiting a cave in a distant desert that holds the evidence of their fraud is not an option for the Conservative Apostate Community.

Instead the best they and their Mainstream Media collaborators can do is ignore us an hope we will go away.

But we are not going away.

Because we were here before you.

And we are better than you.