Fundraiser Day Six: Dixiecrat Avengers Assemble!

"For in those care-free days, I and my so-called droogies wore our maskies, which were like real horror-show disguises."

-- Alex, "A Clockwork Orange"

To begin, a bit of history that will not matter in the slightest to anyone outside of irrelevant fringe dorks like me, but which future students of American history might amusing.

Yesterday, tea party darlin' Chris McDann'l got his nuclear-bright future as the Very Most Reagany-Pure Senator from Jesusland slapped out of his Neoconfederate paws.  Slapped to the ground and stomped on by a bunch of uppity black people armed with (horrors!) voter registration cards, which is why today Teh Internets were positively wormy with the lashing and the barking and the generally incoherent fury of our nation's most politically active inbred swamp folk.

The same inbred swamp folk (it is important to add) who have spent the last six years rage! rage! raging! against deficits and Evil Gummit overreach and the horrors of compromise.

Of course (here comes the history bit) a scant ten years ago, the very same inbred swamp folk who now rage!, rage! against deficits and Evil Gummit overreach and the horrors of compromise...

...went to the polls in record numbers to re-elect the lyingest, most criminal, most criminally incompetent, torturingest, most treasonous, most deficit-spawning, Evil Gummit overreaching and "How dare you not support the Commander-in-Chief you traitor!" touting Administration in American history.

And after they did it, they turned around and -- along with the rest of the 60 million Americans who put the Dubya Regime back in power -- told the rest of us to SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK IT Hippies!

Bwahahahaha!

We Won.  You Lost.  Fuck You!

You know how I know this?

Because I was there.

So were you.

And we remember.  

And so long as it is within our meager power, we will never let them forget which side they were on when it counted.  Never, ever let them forget how wildly they cheered Dubya, or how unrestrained and deafening their contempt was for anyone who dared to stand athwart the serial catastrophes the Bush Administration were unleashing on America and shout "Stop!"

United States presidential election in Mississippi, 2004

2000 ← November 2, 2004 → 2008

Nominee George W. Bush John Kerry Party Republican Democratic Home state Texas Massachusetts Running mate Dick Cheney John Edwards Electoral vote 6 0 Popular vote 684,981 458,094 Percentage 59.4% 39.8%

And now?

Now all we hear about is the teddible, teddible schism between the Tea Party and the Republican Party.

Except, of course, (sing it with me -- you know the words):

There. 

Is. 

No. 

Tea. 

Party.™

There never has been -- a fact which Liberals like your's truly nailed while Tea Party fairy tale was still being beta tested (The "Independent" Granfalloon), and which even some outliers in Conservative Brain Caste are now quietly willing to admit.

The Tea Party Never Existed

MAY 21, 2014 4:34 PM EDT

By Ramesh Ponnuru

...

And so, because There. Is. No. Tea. Party.™  there obviously cannot be a schism between it and the Republican Party.  There is merely a difference of opinion between those who deploy the selective, self-lobotomizing tool of Strategic Forgettery™ as a tactical matter, and those slabs of Orwellian slunkmeat who have so thoroughly internalized the habit of doublethinking away the incriminating past...and science...and math...and causality and, well,  everything else about the world that is disquieting or inconvenient that they are no longer sane:

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

As I and other Liberals have written since the dawn of blogging (and about which we railed at our crystal radio sets before it became possible to write down whatever we wished and publish it to the wider world with the clink of a button), this is nothing more or less that the Golem which the Party of Jefferson David built in order to win elections and raze those parts of The Evil Gummint which it's oligarch owners want to see destroyed.  And there are a lot of words that are appropriate to describe the Conservative monster that has turned on its maker, but "schism" is not one of them.

Predictable?  Sure.

Predicted?  Definitely.

Dangerous?  Absolutely.

Entertaining?  Damn betcha.

And very, very dangerous?  Absolutely.

Because are in middle of a long, ugly knife fight for the future of this country, and to win that future, we must reclaim our past.

As I wrote back in 2010:

To win elections, crush the New Deal and sell the United States into perpetual corporate serfdom, it was Ronald Reagan and the rest of the Conservative Elites who spent years and years and literally billions of dollars to create the infinitely reprogrammable army of imbeciles from which many of those same Conservative Elites now flee in horror.

And however hard they try, it remains our solemn duty to never let them forget it.

PS.  Proper "Thanks Yous" to everyone who has hit the tip jar will be forthcoming once things get a little less nutty here at Castle Driftglass