Clueless Narcissists Should Be Careful About Hitting "Publish"

I see that in his rush to pat himself on the back for being The Only Human Being On Earth With Guts Enough to Tell The Truth About Sarah Palin! Mr. Sullivan has once again tripped over his own dick (emphasis added):

"Liberals are restrained from really laying out the truth for fear of further attacks from the Palinite right. Establishment conservatives cannot bring themselves to understand what they did - although Steve Schmidt has admirably copped to intense and abiding remorse for his part in the process. The far right, which Palin helped bring to further heights of lunacy, has continued to debase any prospect of a sane two-party system in the US. Palin's legacy lives on to damage the country."

-- Andrew Sullivan.

Even for a shamelessly self-aggrandizing revisionist like Mr. Sullivan, this is a remarkably stupid thing to say.

If you want a juicy, bone-in review of "Game Change" that honestly limns the various motives of the constellation of tools and con men who were in orbit around the 2008 GOP Presidential Campaign, skip anything Mr. Sullivan has to say and go read Charlie Pierce --

Well, the 2008 presidential campaign is still over and there's nothing left (still) but the bitter recriminations. When John Heilemann, and the utterly inexcusable Mark Halperin, published Game Change, their gossipy account of the campaign four years ago, almost every page fairly dripped with flop sweat. Not from the authors, but from the dozens of professional political types, anonymous and not, who saw in the book a chance to rehabilitate their own reputations from the fools, thieves, and mountebanks for whom they'd worked. (And who, it should never be forgotten, they spent two years trying to foist on the rest of us as national leaders.) There was backstabbing befitting the court of a Borgia pope. There was resumé-polishing and brown-nosing that would have embarrassed the Haskell family down four generations. (The most distasteful was the unpardonable slandering of Elizabeth Edwards, something that the authors won't live down for a while, either.) Generally, you'd have to wait until the Ides of March to watch a group of people sell out their boss that badly. To barber a phrase from the great Dan Jenkins, the book was further proof, as if we needed any, that, if you put 100 political consultants in a barrel and rolled it down a hill, there'd always be a son of a bitch on top.

-- because Mr. Sullivan's riff is not about the story qua story, but about vindicating his own, well-documented public floggings of La Palin.

Which was all well and right and good on ya, mate...

....until Mr. Sullivan decided to clear the path to his self-aggrandizement by taking another, gratuitous, mendacious shot at those awful Liberals by hauling out the Biggest God Damn Lie in the American political media hymnal:  the "Both Sides Are Equally Wrong" lie:

"Liberals are restrained from really laying out the truth for fear of further attacks from the Palinite right."

Bullshit, Andrew.

Bull-shit.

During Palin's tenure as Wingnut Hive Queen, I defy anyone to find a single Liberal who felt in any way constrained by fear of attacks by the Right's flying moneys from publishing what I am sure amounted to thousands of brutally honest columns and hundreds of sharply


pointed



pieces



of visual art



all of which


made the same case,

over and over and over again.

Hell, it had been perfectly clear for years and years that being carpet-bombed by Conservative poo-flingers was the price anyone who chose to tell a little truth about the Right was going to have to pay, which is part of the reason why so many of those millions of words and pixels were spilled with a shrug.

Because every Liberal knows that in the American media universe, Liberals are not restrained --  we are simply ignored.

And we are ignored because we insist on speaking aloud the heresy that sun-blotting failures like Palin are not the aberrations of Conservatism, but its apotheosis.

Here are the leading lights of Conservatism, talking about the Scintilla from Wasilla from a post I wrote back in 2008 

"She's the first journalist ever to be nominated, I think, for the president or vice president, and she was a sportscaster in commercials on local television," Gingrich said on the "Today" show. "So she has a lot of interesting background. And she has a lot of experience. Remember that, when people worry about how inexperienced she is, for two years she's been in charge of the Alaska National Guard."

-- Newt Gingrich

"It's a pretty amazing story of personal success, being at once a traditional woman who broke all of these traditional barriers, kind of the best of both worlds, if you believe in traditional values."

-- William Kristol

"Many people are conditioned by their life experiences to see this choice of a running mate through the prism of identity politics, but that’s the wrong frame. Sarah Barracuda was picked because she lit up every pattern in McCain’s brain, because she seems so much like himself.

“Palin pick allows McCain to run the way he wants to — not as the old goat running against the fresh upstart, but as the crusader for virtue against the forces of selfishness. It allows him to make cleaning out the Augean stables of Washington the major issue of his campaign.

"So my worries about Palin are not (primarily) about her lack of experience. She seems like a marvelous person. She is a dazzling political performer."

-- David Brooks

"Congratulations to John McCain for hearing and responding to conservatives. Conservatives, the base of the party, have been listless. But, now, nearly all will work enthusiastically for the McCain-Palin ticket. In fact, this is the most enthusiastic conservatives have been since the era for Ronald Reagan… This is a grand-slam home run. Conservatives' feet haven't touched the ground since this announcement."

-- Richard Viguerie

“I see this woman...holding a sockeye salmon, and I think, ‘I love you,’ ” Carlson, sans bow tie Monday, told the crowd during a breakfast panel discussion in downtown St. Paul.

-- Tucker Carlson

As a 44-year-old woman, Mrs. Palin adds desperately needed diversity to the Republican ticket. But that's not her his main strength. It's her his conservatism that matters more. Like Mr. McCain, she's an anti-establishment reformer who's taken on the corrupt Republican hierarchy in Alaska. She's more conservative than Mr. McCain, balancing his maverick tendencies.

... And should the McCain-Palin ticket win the election, it will produce a huge change in the party itself. Mrs. Palin would become first in the line of succession to become the next Republican presidential nominee and would usher in a new generation of leaders. ...

Mrs. Palin is no feminist. Instead, she appeals to almost every conceivable grouping of conservatives. She's pro-life on abortion, pro-gun (she hunts), pro-drilling for oil (including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), and is as hawkish about cutting government spending as Mr. McCain himself. She's also an evangelical Christian.

-- Fred Barnes

With the Palin pick, McCain stole from Obama the mantle of being the only history-making candidate this year.

… I really do have tingles up my spine.

... Kudos to John McCain for thinking so far out of the box.

-- Mary Matalin

This is my sixth RNC, and I've never seen anything remotely like the excitement Palin has unleashed. Some compare it to the enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan in 1976 or 1980. Even among the GOP's cynics, there's a kind of giddiness over John McCain's tactical daring in selecting the little-known Alaskan governor.

... Readers of National Review Online -- a reliable bellwether of conservative sentiment -- flooded the site with e-mails throughout the long weekend. The messages ran roughly 20-1 in almost orgiastic excitement about the pick. On Friday, one reader expressed Christmas-morning delight over the gift of Palin, proclaiming that McCain had just "given us our Red Ryder BB gun."

-- Jonah Goldberg

Listening to Fred Thompson tonight, I wondered, after thirty years of being ass-fucked onto the poorhouse and eight years of giant, flaming extinction level Republican catastrophes pounding their lives and dreams to atoms, who in their right fucking mind could possibly still fall for this D-Grade, grits-n-gravy “weez heah ‘r all just a’squirtin’ with smalltownvalues [all one word] pitted agin’ that buncha Establishment, Insider, Powerbroker crowd” horseshit being toweled out by this Party of Fuckup Plutocrats. 

Man, he does luuurve hookin’ his thumbs into his gaiters and wheezing on about “the Washington crowd” 

And then the camera swept across an oinking sea of brain-dead, over-fed Botoxed marshmallows in red white and blue uglypants and I am yet again reminded, oh, yeah, that’s who.

The Liberal critique of Palin was never merely that Palin was a ferociously ignorant, vindictive goon, but that -- pay attention now, because this is important -- she was also not some freak of nature but was instead another entirely predictable plunge off of one more entirely predictable cliff on that long road to Hell down which Conservatism has been rocketing for the last 40 years.

Needless to say, as accurate as this critique is, it makes those who have been the Useful Idiots and Centrist enablers of Conservatism for most of the last 40 years hideously uncomfortable. And since the  Useful Idiots   and Centrist enablers of Conservatism now thoroughly dominate our political media, it will never get a public hearing.

Once again, Mr. Sullivan cannot acknowledge that Liberals have been right all along about the ugly realities of Conservatism because (from 2009)...

"Here is a Revised List..."

... In fact there is virtually nothing in the whole, Lutheranesque list of grievances digitally spiked into the front door of the Party of God (May it forever be Holy, Reagan and Apostolic, amen!) that Liberals haven't been warning people like Mr. Sullivan about -- in ever-more urgent tones -- for the last 30 years.

Perhaps a small illustration would make things clearer (some of Mr. Sullivan’s comments on the Right; my helpful interlineal notes on the Left.)

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe
in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic
and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal,
extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced
by the system to return to the rule of law.

Are you referring to Nixon’s Watergate?
Or Reagan/Bush’s Iran/Contra?

I cannot support a movement that exploded
spending and borrowing and blames its
successor for the debt.

You forgot to add
“…unless Reagan does it.”

I cannot support a movement that so abandoned
government's minimal and vital role to police
markets and address natural disasters that
it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.

The radical, mass-deregulation
of everything regardless of consequences
was built right into the DNA of the
Conservative movement from the
moment of its birth.

And you damn well know it.

I cannot support a movement that holds
that purely religious doctrine should govern
civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness
of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

Perhaps you should take it up
with Jerry Falwell’s ghost.
Or Pat Robertson?
Or Phyllis Schafly?
Or Ralph Reed?
Do I need to go on?

I cannot support a movement that is deeply
homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals
to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that
its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

You forgot to add,
“…unless Reagan does it.”
Again.

I cannot support a movement which has
no real respect for the institutions of government
and is prepared to use any tactic and any means
to fight political warfare rather than conduct
a political conversation.

Like, say,
impeaching Bill Clinton?

...

I cannot support a movement that
criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.

Does the name “Reagan” ring a bell?

I cannot support a movement that would back
a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified
and duplicitous because of identity politics
and electoral cynicism.

Andrew Sullivan,
meet
Mr. J. Danforth Quayle.

I cannot support a movement that regards
gay people as threats to their own families.

“Reagan”?

I cannot support a movement
that does not accept evolution as a fact.

“Reagan”?
Any bell at all?

I cannot support a movement that sees
climate change as a hoax and offers
domestic oil exploration as the core plank
of an energy policy.

And…right…here
is where I got fucking fed up
with repeating myself.

I cannot support a movement that refuses
ever to raise taxes, while proposing no
meaningful reductions in government spending.

Read. My. Lips.

I cannot support a movement that refuses
to distance itself from a demagogue like
Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

The 1994 Republican Congress
gave Limbaugh
credit for their victory.
Gave him a fucking plaque.
That's 15 years ago.
Not 15 minutes.

So it turns out that virtually all of Mr. Sullivan's hard-won epiphanies amount to little more than the well-thumbed history and plainsong lore of our Fucked Up Modern Age as it has been long understood and passed down among those awful Liberals. And so when I see statements like this -- "Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not." -- what I see is a man who might want to distance himself from the appalling actions and despicable outcomes of his former allies, but still wants to continue honoring their idiotic parameters and debased vocabulary.

Yes, Mr. Sullivan, your objections emphatically do make you a "radical leftist", because in the hands of the shitkicker demagogues of the Right like Malkin, phrases like "radical leftist" have long since lost any meaning. They are just the pejorative-du-jour, pulled from a random grab-bag of Limbaugh-words -- socialist, elitist, feminist, Marxist, anti-American, compassionate, cut-and-run, surrender, Liberal, extremist, collectivist, queer, Communist, fascist, atheist, humanist, "New York", "San Francisco", “Chicago”, French, European -- that each used to have discrete and very different meanings, but are now bleated interchangeably by the Pig People and their overlords at anyone with a softer heart than Curtis LeMay and less imperial ambitions than Genghis Khan.

But then again, if Mr. Sullivan simply outed himself as a Liberal, he would instantly lose his place in the food-chain, wouldn’t he? Because like that microscopic number of self-loathing black Conservatives who make their daily bread by serving the interests of the Southern Bigot Party, more than any other single factor, it was always the sheer gawking, oddballness of the brazen self-delusion inherent in being the gay champion of the Christopath Homophobe Party that put Mr. Sullivan in the spotlight.

That was what gave him his unique and lucrative cache.

After all, Liberal gay political writers are a dime a dozen, and so in a strange way we find Andrew Sullivan locked in the same kind of mortal combat over labels -- and for exactly the same reasons -- as Roy Cohn's character in "Angels In America" as he adamantly insisted -- even as he was dying of AIDS -- that he was not a "ho-mo-sex-shall".


(Not Safe For Work)

Because, Cohn reasoned, homosexuals were nobodies; losers who had zero clout and “in 15 years cannot pass a pissant anti-discrimination bill from City Council.” And since Roy Cohn could get the President of the United States (or his wife) on the phone -- could take the man he was fucking to the White House and make Ronald Reagan smile at him and shakes his hand -- it therefore followed that Roy Cohn could not possibly be a homosexual.

That unlike every other person in his position on Earth, Roy Cohn was a heterosexual man, who fucked around with guys.

Likewise, even though Mr. Sullivan now, belatedly comes to believe much of what Liberals believe and finally deigns to notice a horde of grotesque truths about his Conservative Movement about which Liberals have been sounding the alarm for 30 years, Andrew Sullivan nonetheless looks us all straight in that eye and argues that he could not possibly be some mere Liberal.

Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.

Mr. Sullivan regularly receives such largess, therefore he must not be a Liberal.

He instead must be the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur.

Because if he is not something spontaneously-generated and utterly sui generis, then he is just another Lefty-Come-Very-Lately, showing up at our door at 3:00 A.M., 20 years late and trailing toxic baggage behind him like a Halley Comet.

And who in the world would pay him to do his little dance then?

In other words, bite me Andrew.