Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

"That means that some are more prepared to cling to untruth than concede a thing to libruls or atheists or blue America, or whatever the "other" is at any given point in time. I simply do not know how you construct a civil discourse indispensable to a functioning democracy with this vast a gulf between citizens in their basic understanding of the world." 

-- Andrew Sullivan, 06/11/12

What in the wide world of sports do you mean, "construct a civil discourse"?

For the last 40 years, the American Conservative movement has made it painfully clear that they are not the slightest bit interested in preserving the basic comity and fidelity to factual reality necessary to maintaining a functioning democracy.

How have you failed to notice this, Mr. Sullivan?

These people you sided with all these years, Mr. Sullivan?  Your pals?  Your running buddies?  Your professional colleagues?

They are fascists,  Mr. Sullivan.

They are theocrats.  Homophobes.  Racists.

They are wired-in-the-brain authoritarians who only grow more deranged, paranoid and power mad with each passing year.

And you want to stop it?

Well good for you!

You can start by constructing a functioning time machine.

Then, travel back about 30 years and slap the living shit out of young Andrew Sullivan, young David Brooks, young David Frum and every other pseudo-intellectual Conservative drool bucket who was decanted straight out their Reagan Underoos and into lucrative think tank, political or media careers.

Go back and militate against those young, hollow, brown-nosing careerists who were in the process of getting it all so, so terribly wrong.  Who were so fucking willing to overlooked the terrifyingly inconvenient fact that the Party of Lincoln -- the Party of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Lee Atwater -- was busy assassinating the Great Emancipator all over again by reconstituting the rage-drunk, atavistic rump battalions of the Confederacy in order to win election. Who were so fucking eager to play hero and defeat the imaginary enemies on the Left that they overlooked the terrifyingly inconvenient fact that the Party Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed were busily and profitably perverting the teachings of the Prince of Peace into a bludgeon to beat the poor, the weak, the elderly and the outsider to a pulp.

Inveigh against the people who were helping to build Reagan's Monster, Mr. Sullivan...and then be prepared to spend the rest of the next 30 years marginalized, mocked, hated, and unemployed.

No "Atlantic" column for you Mr. Sullivan.  No "Daily Beast".  No "Newsweek" covers.  No teevee.

You will get none of those things, Mr. Sullivan.  What you will get instead is the opportunity to watch from your tiny hole in the skirting-board of history as the country you love is systematically destroyed by those hollow, brown-nosing careerists and their millions of Conservative fellow travelers.

You will get to watch as every dire prediction about the catastrophic arc of the American Conservative movement plays itself out in relentless, grinding, Greek tragedy fashion.

And as an added bonus, even as the wingnut conflagration against which you have stood consumes everything in its path in the name of Jebus, Liberty and Free Markets you will remain  marginalized, mocked, hated, and unemployed because those hollow, brown-nosing careerists and their neighbors inside the Washington Beltway now own the media and are all too deeply invested in the status quo and complicit in the Conservative conflagration to allowing some Dirty Fucking Hippie to start pointing out  at this late date the difference between the arsonists and enablers who set the fire and the firemen who are trying to stop it.

Instead, be prepared to be smothered under a tapioca tsumani of "Both Sides Do It"-ism from every single major media outlet ever single fucking time the subject of who was right and who was wrong comes up by assholes who never bothered to read "Frankenstein" or "The Sorcerer's Apprentice".

In other words, be prepared for life as a Liberal in post-Reagan America.

And if turns out that some variation of time traveler's paradox will not permit you to time jump within your own lifetime, then set the dial to 1864 and arm William Techumseh Sherman with enough firepower to visit a Carthaginian peace an every square inch of Earth south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Because as one long-forgotten wag once put it:

"[t]he entire focus of the modern American Conservative Movement has been to give goon like these enough political power to completely fuck up my country...[and the] last time these goons were given a free hand to fuck up my country, it took over two million Union soldiers and four years of bloody civil war to convince them it was a bad idea.

So now that the damage has been done, why the world would you assume it will take anything less than that this time around?