A Candy Colored Clown They Call The Tanned Man

(Very, very NSFW)

I could write the post below seven years ago, because for decades the true nature of American Conservatism has been blindingly obvious to anyone what wasn't a complete imbecile or a paid Beltway hack.

Sadly, it requires no updating whatsoever, save for the fact that where Reagan was the Right's last perfect high, and Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser...

...Trump is whatever-the-Hell Frank Booth was huffing in "Blue Velvet" combined with Booth's pure, psycho, "Fuck Everything!" ebullience.  And the freak-show of sadists, nihilists, gun-fetishists, and bug-eyed black-shirt ciphers just begging to led by an American Pinochet to the pure, white Promised Land that once smirked and howled just behind the curtain is now fully onstage.*

Visible for all to see.

Even the complete imbeciles and the paid Beltway hacks.

Understanding the Right #1

Junkie logic.

The last lie a junkie tells himself isn't "I’m not an addict."

The last lie a junkie tells himself is "My being a addict doesn't matter."

And in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull.

Listen to any aging wingnut sighing and jerking sadly off to a tattered photo of Saint Ronnie -- despite the fact that the catastrophes we are now reaping were sown by his ruinous ideology -- and you can hear every addict who ever lived pining for that first Perfect High. The one they spend the rest of their days chasing, regardless of the size of the debts they run up or the ruined lives they leave in their wake.

Clinton? Objectively, Clinton qualifies as the greatest Center/Right President in history, and with balanced budgets, GATT, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, record surpluses, foreign and domestic terrorists brought to book, and an actual military victory, he arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else.

And they hated him for it.

Why?

Because Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.

And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.

So what is the last lie a Conservative tells himself? The last lie that the junkies and their suppliers both fight like hell to keep alive and twitching?

That, whether or not their ideology is depraved or deluded, it doesn’t matter because:

“Both side are always equally wrong about everything all the time.”

Doesn’t matter the who or what. The when or how. Doesn’t matter who was driving the bus towards the cliff and who was waving the red flags, throwing their bodies in front of it, trying to make it stop. Doesn’t matter who was trying to douse the conflagration with hoses shredded by 20 year of Reaganism, and who was lobbing milk cartons full of jellied gasoline onto the bonfire.

It is the lie the hagged-out Cokie Roberts pushes week after week after week on “This Week…”

It is the lie that David Fucking Brooks pushes in the pages of the New York Times.

It is the lie that made David Broder the “Dean” of the Villagers; the lie on which the quarterly profits of the entire Murdoch media empire now rests.

Because these people and thousands more like them are not journalists or “pundits” or expert who offer facts or interpretation or a philosophical framework for illuminating and contextualizing the events of the world.

They are pushers, selling that last, nihilistic lie to the junkies on the Right who will pay any price and cut any throat to escape the fact that they are personally and specifically responsible for the destruction of the country they claimed to love in the name of a God they claim to believe in...

Seven years later and Dubya has ceased to exist entirely and it is now an article of faith on the Right that we had won in Iraq until the Kenyan Usurper stabbed us in the back!

Also I deeply appreciate all the "you must read this" emails I get, and definitely keep them coming. What I do find both maddening and darkly amusing is that they usually point me to articles which are saying now exactly what I was writing six or eight or +10 years ago.

*(Thanks for the catch)