Little Red State Fundy Turns 14

“There was once a dream that was blogging.  You could only whisper it.  Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish.” 

Tomorrow will mark the 14th anniversary of "Little Red State Fundy" -- one of the first pieces I ever wrote after the late Steve Gilliard kicked me out of his comment section and told me to go stake my own claim out on the wild, blogosphere frontier, and one of my favorites.

It begins like this...

Little Red State Fundy sez...

Whatever will we tell the children?

One day we will have to explain to the children what happened when Thurston Howell III lost his right mind and decided that for the sake of some tax cuts to make him incrementally more comfortable, his very bestest buddies in the whole, wide world were the Ultra Right Wing Gorgons down in Jesusland.

May I suggest the following?

The Story of Little Red State Fundy...

Those were heady days, my friends, even though blogging died shortly after that.
Or so I have been told.
Many, many times.

But of course, blogging didn't really "die" so much as it was co-opted and consumed by media corporations and investors with business plans, so today I speak to you as a gobbet of chicken gristle that briefly stuck in the throat of the all-consuming forces of media consolidation before being spit into the Napkin of Irrelevance and dropped onto the Tablecloth of Immateriality.

You see, back in the olden days, the dream of Liberal political/media blogging was that writers from everywhere could defeat the surly bonds of geography, bypass the insider, coastal media clubbiness that had all but choked the life out of the free press, and ply their trade from anywhere that had an internet connection.  We of the netroots were gonna crash the gate of the Beltway media and our talent and persistence would do the rest.

Well I'm talented.  And after 14 years of doing this every day, I can fairly claim to be persistent.  And that OG vision of blogging is still practiced, but only out at the margins, where blogging (or, really, writing anything for the The Internet that runs longer than 240 characters) has become an artisanal craft, like Elvish calligraphy or hand-churning butter.  You can still find bloggers like me at the local farmer's markets between the okra and the homemade chili, selling mason jars of clever graphics and acerbic adjectives.  But the notion that we Liberal bloggers were going to reshape the public dialogue in any meaningful way was always a fantasy.  Like bringing back Firefly for a second season, or raising the Pentagon through prayer.

Then as now, it is the men and women who run established media corporations who shape the public dialogue:  men and women who care only about money and ratings, and for whom politics is just another commodity.  Just another sit-com or pro-wrestling event competing for viewer's attention.  And since they own cameras and microphones, these men and women use that crass, gladiatorial metric to decide who should be handed a megawatt megaphone and a massive public platform, and who should be kept the hell away from the grown up's table and restricted to standing on orange crates and shouting from the sidelines.

And if you paying attention, you can actually watch this happen over the course of time.

For example, in a healthy society where the news media served the public interest, the blood-drunk Republican war pimps who lied unto the Iraq War would never be able to get within a parsec of a camera or microphone again.  And the depraved, racist Republican party that elected, re-elected and ecstatically supported the Worst President In American History (until that time) would have to spend the next 40 years wandering the political wilderness until until all the generation that had inflicted such wounds on our democracy was consumed.

But of course, none of that happened, and unless something changes drastically, it won't happen this time either.  Because those blood-drunk Republican Iraq War pimps were also paid-in-full members of the Beltway insider club, and thus were shriven and rehabilitated as Trusted Members of the Fourth Estate almost immediately.  Their crimes not just forgotten, but off-limits to questions from anyone.  This monumental, tragic, and ongoing chapter in American history -- and every ghoul and demagogue who profited from it -- were quietly declared off-limits to further inconvenient inquiry by the very institution that should have been shouting it from the rooftops for the next.

Creepy as fuck, right?

But you and I saw it happen, just as we saw the base of the Republican party disappear overnight.  Because where you and I saw a depraved, racist Republican base,  corporate media advertisers saw rubes with disposable income.  They saw eyeballs and clicks.  They saw potential customers, and you do not convince potential customers to buy your dick pills and reverse mortgages by making them feel stupid or ashamed for being bigots and imbeciles.  Thus the Fake Tea Party was invented and, in a trice, the "Fuck You Libtard!" Bush-loving base --

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." Karl Rove, June, 2005

-- was magically transformed by the corporate media into "Fuck You Libtard!" independents which had never even heard of George Bush.

And while all this was happening, we Libtard pariah's on out tiny orange crates at far beyond the edge of respectability were shouting a warning to anyone who would listen.  That this would all end very badly.  That if the Republican party was once again collectively let off the hook for all the massive, suppurating wounds they had inflicted on our democracy, the only lesson they would learn is that they were invincible.  That they could get away with any atrocity no matter how horrifying.  That the next time they came to power it would be even worse than the Worst President in History.

Which brings me back around to "Little Red State Fundy": a warning, which, along with the other +8800 posts I have written over the years, I honed as sharp as time and vocabulary would permit and which I shouted as loudly as I could from my little orange crate.   A warning that the base of the Republican party -- the base that the leaders and thinkers and professional opinion-havers of the Republican party had spent decades flattering and cultivating -- was , in fact, a dangerous, cult-think, mob of pig-ignorant lunatics who were seizing direct control of the GOP by demanding candidates and banner-carriers who were just as fucked-in-the-head as they were.

Decades ago and with no special instruments or insider contacts, Liberals saw this doom coming -- the doom that now squats in the White House, its fangs sunk into the throat of our democracy while the Party of Lincoln screams its ecstatic support.   And since we all know that Memory is the Liberal Superpower, here's a fun though experiment!  What exactly was the cream of American Conservative intelligentsia doing?  You know, the blood-drunk Iraq War pimps?  The paid-in-full Republican members of the Beltway media club.  The elite Conservative brain wizards with reserved seating the the media table, who now are all singing from the same "Holy shit!  The Republican party is full of Republicans!" hymnal?

What were those con men and hobgoblins up to back in 2005?

In 2005, Washington Post op-ed columnist and reliable Beltway activities Michael Gerson was still being paid to advise George W. Bush and put word in his lying mouth.  In February 7, 2005 of Time Magazine, the Gerson was named in "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America"  article as the ninth most influential evangelical.  And yet today, Mr. Gerson claims to be completely stunned that Conservative evangelicals turned out to be Donald Trump's most fervent and stalwart supporters.

Because Mr. Gerson is a willfully blind fool.

In 2005, New York Times' Never Trumper best-seller, columnist and frequent cable-news guest, Rick Wilson, was midway between two milestones of his career as a paid Republican rat-fucker.  In 2002, Wilson had been responsible for creating the despicable attack ad against Max Cleland, and in 2008 Wilson had led the way in trying to slander Barack Obama by hanging Jeremiah Wright around his neck.

In 2005, Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard was running covers celebrating the genius of Mr. Kristol's fellow neocons...

...how well everything was going with Dubya's Excellent Iraqi Adventure...

...and "How Liberalism Failed Terri Schiavo"

And while the archives of America's other bastion of white Conservative grievance peters out in 2009, it's Obama-era covers...

...tell the tale.

Yes, while all of those very important people and very respected publications were busy making a handsome profit and locking in permanent positions within the Beltway media establishment doing all of that, Liberals like me were busy permanently alienating ourselves from the Beltway media establishment by writing things like this:

...And Little Red State Fundy delivered the margin of victory and was featured in many, many magazines: without Little Red State Fundy, the Republican Party could never, ever, ever win anything.

And now everybody knew it.

Then she said, "Now who shall help me Rule the Earth."

"We will!" said Moderate Republicans, Undecideds, and Libertarians.

"I am quite sure you would," said Little Red State Fundy, "but see, now you are all my bitches."

Then she called Randall Terry and Tom DeLay and Ann Coulter and Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh and James Dobson, and they and the rest of the Shining Path Republicans used what was left of the Constitution as ass-floss.
And judges were terrorized into silence.
And those deemed ungodly were beaten in the streets.
And they invaded whoever the fuck they felt like, for whatever fucking reason they chose.
And the very idea of a Free and Fair press died.

And to people who had been very clear all along that they genuinely believed in a Theocratic Nanny State and thought that precipitating Armageddon and triggering the Second Coming should be the highest calling of any worldly government, were handed over the police, courts, government, treasury and nuclear weapons stockpiles of the United States of America.

And in the end -- just as they had been warned for the past twenty years -- there was nothing whatsoever left at all for Moderate Republicans, Undecideds, and Libertarians.

-- every god damn day.

No surprise that 14 years later, the same Beltway media that led us so far astray and devoted so much time and energy to shielding the worst people in the country from the consequences of their perfidy ...

... now devotes the same amount of time and energy fanatically avoiding the question of who is to blame for the terrible situation we are in, and who was right about the Right all along?

Behold, a Tip Jar!