The Twilight of the Rhetorical Question

In polite, Progressive society, rhetorical variations of "They can't really believe that, can they?" is how nice Liberals keep from screaming, "Yes! Yes! They are that fucking stupid! You cannot look at the flaming slime trail these atavistic meatbags have left behind them for the past +30 years and come to any conclusion other than (as one wag once put it) they will never, ever grow opposable thumbs and climb down out of the stupid tree." at the teevee every day.

It's how we have traditionally kept the party polite, but over the last several years the chasm that separates "Conservative" and "Sane" has gotten so stark this polite rhetorical convention sounds increasingly quaint and ridiculous: a bygone linguistic relic from an older, more shirt-ruffle, Marquis of Queensbury age.

Jill at "Brilliant at Breakfast" shows how silly such figleaf upspeaking sounds when you walk it around the softly collapsing ruins of the World's Only Remaining Superpower.

I think you already know the answer to that question, Mr. Krugman

Posted by Jill | 6:24 AM

Paul Krugman, NYT, today:

Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are? If you’ve been following his campaign from the beginning, that’s a question you have probably asked many times. But the question was raised with particular force last week, when Mr. Romney tried to make a closed drywall factory in Ohio a symbol of the Obama administration’s economic failure. It was a symbol, all right — but not in the way he intended. First of all, many reporters quickly noted a point that Mr. Romney somehow failed to mention: George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, was president when the factory in question was closed. Does the Romney campaign expect Americans to blame President Obama for his predecessor’s policy failure?

Yes, it does, and yes, it's going to work. All I have to do is walk around my own neighborhood in my little Republican-leaning town to know that it's going to work. In previous springs, you'd see contractor signs on every street, the skeletons of add-a-levels rising from what used to be the roofs of 1950's ranch and cape cod houses. This year, we see the green stains of moss on the sides of the vinyl siding that was put on the add-a-levels of years past. Down the street is a foreclosure with some kind of paper sign in the window. It used to be a cute, well-maintained cape, but finally went into foreclosure after two years in the process. I'm told that the basement was flooded during Hurricane Irene last year and the bank didn't do anything about it.
...

Americans got used to instant gratification during the Bush years, as they bought McMansions and turned postwar tract housing into ersatz ones. They took leases on SUVs so they could drive more vehicle than they could afford to buy and fancied themselves to be adventurers. They pulled their kids out of school in mid-year to take them on Caribbean vacations. People in towns like mine saw Louis Vuitton and the newly-plastic Coach handbags as their due. Then it all came crashing down, and someone must be blamed. And if the person to blame feeds into the sub-surface racism of this town that is still, even in this decade, 96% white, even better.
...

In 2012, millions of Americans who treated the plunder of the future as if it were a Constitutional right will be offered the chance to stick the Dirty Hippies and their Kenyan Commie President with the huge bill they ran up during their long, mad Bonfire of the Conservative Vanities.

Never doubt for a minute that they will grab that chance with both hands, even if comes to them in person of a soulless, lying vulture capitalist robot with shitty human-interaction software and a religion that many of them regard as something just short of Raelism with better hair.

After all there are good reasons why humanity's legends and fables are full of people falling all over themselves to strike infernal bargains


 

 with various unsavory and sulfurous characters (video might have an ad embedded.)

Go read the whole thing here.