Birthday Fundraiser: Day Two -- Simony

simony (/ˈsīmənē,ˈsimənē/). Noun: the buying or selling of ecclesiastical privileges, for example pardons or benefices.

Maybe as the sole proprietor of this little shot-and-a-beer joint out in the exurbs of respectability I should be working on mixing up some new prose to keep us refreshed as we slog along this hellroad we're on.  

And maybe later in the week I'll do just that.

But as I walk down the hellroad with you and try to see around the bends up ahead, I am freighted with a palpable sense of deja vu.  Like a member of the crew of the doomed spaceship E-59 landing on an alien planet only to discovering the wreckage of their own ship littered with their own corpses, then trying to leave and crashing, over and over again.

First, to set the mood,  this Sam Seder/Marc Maron video from 2009 (h/t Twitter user @emp4all) detailing the new, new, new "respectable" Republican rebranding scam:

Now let's head back to the cellar to retrieve a post from the Before Time.   From 2011, after the mainstream media had helped Republicans use their Bush-Off Machine to bulldoze their Fake Tea Party rebranding scam right over us crackpot Liberal alarmists and into a majority in the House of Representatives.

The most formidable weapon the despised Liberal has in his or her arsenal is Memory: the unwillingness to go quietly into that good night of Strategic Forgettery upon which the Right's dominance and the media's shallow cravenness completely depend. It is a theme that you may have noticed dancing around between the lines of this blog fairly often, and one of the small blessings of the blogosphere -- that when some mentally underclocking twat in a tri-corner hat rears up on his hind legs and start raving about, say, deficits, anyone with a decent memory (and a willingness to futilely engage with these political CHUDs one more time) can actually dig the past out the past in high-res detail, and ask, if [Insert any issue in the fucking Universe here] is so singularly fucking important, where the fuck were you during the eight, long years during which Bush was making [Insert any issue in the fucking Universe here] infinitely worse.

Of course that is the question the Right will never answer, and the press will never ask.

Which is why I do not have the slightest interest in what they say or think.

See, most every Liberal I know is quite willing to come to the public square and debate debt and deficits and budget cuts and taxes.

But that public square is currently ringed with sniper towers full of Republicans and other Fox News employees who are itching to open up on anyone who comes to that debate -- Republicans and other Fox News employees who open mock the very idea of compromise, and give each other merit badges every time they find some new way to sucker a Liberal into the open with talk of "compromise"...and then drop a "death panel" house on his head.

Whee! Stupid Libs!

So I am not interested in debating the deficit, or debt, or energy, or Social Security, or climate, or Medicare, or education, or Planned Parenthood, or election reform, or workplace safety or, really, anything with anyone on the Right anymore.

Because I already know what their stupid, lazy, toxic, paranoid, Toby-Keith-themed answer to every single one of those issues will be. Because they are wrong. Because they have been wrong about just about everything for as long as I can remember. And they will go right on being wrong -- loudly, whoopingly, murderously wrong -- because we are now living in a time of moral free-fall where there is no longer any penalty on the Right for being repeatedly and horribly wrong.

So I am not interested in them.

I am interested in those who make a living letting these CHUDs off the hook. The professional rehabilitators who get rich by recycling the same discredited fuck-ups and lunatics peddling the same deranged amalgam of Chick Tracts and remaindered copies of "Anthem" over and over again.

The people who are in the business selling indulgences to fascists.

At this point in the 2011 post I linked to something I had written all the way back in 2005 entitled "Republican Simony" because with the media and the GOP it's all shitty reruns all the time.

Then I finished up as follows:

The reason Liberals are so hated by, well, everyone, is not that we loathe America (we don't) or that we want to foist some radical agenda off on an innocent, unsuspecting nation (A. there is no secret agenda -- we're open about what we believe almost to a fault, B. on any given day the bulk of the public is less "innocent" than "zombied out on crap teevee and celebrity worship" and, C. to make room for our sinister agenda we'd first have to pry the entire Party of Limited Gummint out of America's bedrooms and vaginae, and we just don't have the manpower for that.)

No, the reason Liberals are despised is that we refuse to forget the past.

Refuse to forget about your past.

And we refuse to shut up about it.

I've got nothing to add to that.

No Half Measures