We're here.
We're Liberal.
Get used to it.
This is indeed a party more extreme than any other right-of-center party in the West, a party whose social policy is dictated by the Bible, whose foreign policy is directed by the furthest-right faction in a foreign country (Israel), and whose economic policy is based on the notion that if you cut taxes massively and boost defense spending and only cut entitlements in twenty years, we can best tackle the debt.
But its candidate - who has ensured there is no daylight between him and the more rabid parts of his party - is neck and neck with a president still in the world of reality. The GOP's degeneration is its own fault;...
...but that such a degenerate, irresponsible, ideologically extreme party is now, I believe, the favorite to win this election is a reflection not on them, but on us.
What the fuck is this "us" business, Andrew?
"We" did not create this monster and set it loose. You did.
You and David Frum And David Brooks. You and Ann Coulter. You and Hugh Hewitt. You and Ronald Wilson Reagan. You and Jerry Falwell. You and Karl Rove. You and Lee Atwater. You and Rich Lowry. You and Thomas Sowell. You and Phyllis Schlafly. You and Newton Leroy Gingrich.
You and tens of thousands of others, all pulling on your little oars, each contributing your time and energy to setting this horror in motion.
You. Fucking. People.
And then there were those other people, Andrew. The Liberals. The ones who have been putting their backs and hearts and wallets into reversing the course the Party of Reagan has been on for 40 years; to stopping this long, grotesque and premeditated slide into an emiserating Conservative Dark Ages of ignorance, superstition and fear.
The ones you used to call "fifth columnists" until the wind shifted and started blowing your shit back back down your throat.
And you know. in a way the social issues of 2012 bears some eerie similarities to the Iraq War circa 2004-2005. Once again, the GOP has painted itself into an ideological corner that is violently at odds with reality. Once again, to get out of the noose, the Party of Personal Responsibility resorts to and all-out campaign of slander and lies. Once again the spineless press simply transcribes and transmits the slander and lies verbatim. Once again, the roof they have thatched together out of pure fraud and bullshit works for awhile...and then starts to collapse right on top of their victory parade.
And then comes the Holy Shit moments as the scam falls apart.
Holy shit, there really were no WMD!
Holy shit, there really were no nukes, no mobile bio-labs, no secret bunkers, no anthrax-spraying drones!
Holy shit, they really are torturing people!
Holy shit, these incompetent fuckers really are did let an American city drown!
Holy shit, Terri Schiavo!
And a few people noticed -- far too few noticed -- that, holy shit, the Liberals were right all along.
Of course that particular revelation would fry every circuit in the Conservative skull so, unsurprisingly, after it all went sideways on you -- after it all blew up -- Conservatives like you simply wrote us out of the picture, didn't you? Because we were a constant and horribly irritating reminder that we were right and had been right all along, and people like you were wrong and had been wrong all along.
And so we jump into the big, Hope and Change bobsled and sail in the Year of Our Lord, 2012, where we find ourselves waist deep in the sour backwash of three solid years of Republican slander, lies and sabotage. And as the media swings the Big National Spotlight down Tampa-way, people here and there are once again briefly popping out of their political comas to discover...
Holy shit, they really are bigots!
Holy shit, they really do think the Earth is 6,000 years old!
Holy shit, they really still listen to Rush Fucking Limbaugh!
Holy shit, they really do hate science!
Holy shit, they really do think woman are chattel and vaginae are full of scary sorcery!
And again, a few people are noticing -- far too few -- that, holy shit, the Liberals were right all along.
This is a big deal for us Liberals because the default status of being a Liberal in Andrew Sullivan's America is a little like being gay in Pat Buchanan's America: absolutely invisible most of the time, mocked and ridiculed the rest of the time.
As a Liberal in Andrew Sullivan's America, I am not permitted to exist except as a straw man projection of the fears and ignorance of others. I am hauled out and punched around whenever some wingnut halfwit needs to prove his bona fides, or some douchbag Centrist needs to prop up the forever-collapsing walls of their Both Sides Are Equally Wrong cloister. To be a Liberal in Andrew Sullivan's America means that I constantly have motives imputed to me that are simply lies. It means that I am told -- emphatically told, every single day by every wingnut goon with a microphone -- that I believe all kinds of things that I do not believe and that no Liberal I have ever met believes.
The converse of all of this is that, as Liberals in Andrew Sullivan's America, neither you nor I will ever be given a chance to rebut any of this on a large scale, because to be a Liberal in Andrew Sullivan's America means that you are never allowed anywhere near that Big National Spotlight.
Because once in that Big National Spotlight -- even for a moment -- there is always the risk that you might rudely point out that "we" are not the problem.
Because,
as I explained to the well-meaning Bob Herbert back in 2008, there is no "we" anymore: there are the people who have gotten everything fucking wrong, there are the people who have opposed the people who have gotten everything fucking wrong, and there are the people who are too lazy or foolish or cowardly to perceive the difference:
Dear Bob Herbert,
...I could not help but note that the technical term for people who
tried to suggest any of [his very reasonable ideas about fixing our national problems] at any point over the last couple of
decades was "Dirty America-hating Liberal".
A group roundly hated, ignored and demonized by the Real Murricans on the Right, and their enablers in the press.
And
in November, while nearly 69 million of us surveyed eight years of
debt, theft, blood and failure and ran screaming in the opposite
direction, over 58 million of those Real Murricans looked at exactly the
same shattered landscape and voted for “More Please, and with Extra
Palin Sprinkles!”
Truth is, Bob, there is no “we”
anymore; there are those of us who look at your laundry list as a
reasonable assay of our challenges and changes…and there are the Pig
People, their panderers, exploiters and ringleaders.
A
major reason we are still at great peril, Bob, is not that nobody knows
what the problems are, or even how to tackle them, but that
Conservatism’s meaty thumb still rests heavily on the cultural scales.
Here
is a belief system that has proven beyond any doubt to be a oligarch’s
scam -- whose adherents are botched, cartoonish failures as citizens –
and yet inexplicably continues to be treated with respect. Even
deference. As if bleeding with leeches were still considered to be a
legitimate substitute for heart surgery, or casting out demons was still
discussed as a valid, competitive alternative to psychotherapy.
Failure
by failure, lie by lie, after 30 years Conservatism deserves nothing
but publicly mockery as a noxious witchbag of bad religion and bigotry
it has always been, and yet when I flick past C-Span this evening, who
do I see but George “Macaca” Allen…
...being fĂŞted by the Heritage foundation…
...urping up one Conservative talking point after another
- Just lock criminals up longer instead of letting them out like Liberals wanna do.
- Burn more coal.
- Don’t listen to “pompous elites”.
- Global warming is a lie.
- Americans are not addicted to oil; Americans are addicted to freedom.
- Etc. ad nauseum
...and smiling that big, fatuous, shit-eatin’ good-ol’-boy grin that is ceremonially Dremeled onto the front of every wingnut politician and preacher’s skull they day their balls drop.
...
Once the wingnuts are electorally neutered and driven into the political sewer, and once the Centrists who prop them up are collecting unemployment, then we can start discussing how "we" are going to get ourselves out of the troubles they got us into.
Once an accounting is made "we" can talk, but not a moment before.
Postscript: This is also unintentionally revealing --
"It's Orwellian propaganda. Chris Matthews was righteously indignant yesterday about the revival of Atwaterism - but the real scandal is that a major campaign is running a race-baiting ad based on nothing."
re·viv·al (r-vvl)
n.
...
2. A restoration to use, acceptance, activity, or vigor after a period of obscurity or quiescence.
Andrew, as a point of simple fact, you cannot "revive" something which has never gone away.