Ghosts Of The Before Time: April 11, 2005

Over the decades I have written predictive polemics about the media and the Republican party that have been depressingly accurate, fictions and other flights of fancy that featured real people and were, let's say, directionally correct, and stuff that's somewhere in-between as seen through a glass, darkly.

To-date, 12,000 of them, all told.  +11,300 published, and +600 abandoned in draft for one reason or another.

So, from time to time, for the next little while, in addition to new stuff written for our dark age, I'm going avail myself of my own archives, and revisit the days when I was was sporting a pony-tail, wearing a suit and tie to my job  every day, getting back to my Chicago condo from that job late at night and cranking out blog posts at 1:00 in the morning.  Back when there was an army of Liberal bloggers like me, all in conversation with each other.  

The pony-tale is long-gone, as is the Chicago condo, and the job, and that army of Liberal bloggers has been whittled down and down and down, but the writing remains.  So, the plan is to repost on-this-date-20-years-ago material intermittently, and see how things go.  

So, typos and all, from April 11, 2005...

This is not a large number

In the comment section, SWR poses the question: “The real issue is how we win the knuckledraggers in the south without becoming like the knuckledraggers in the south.”

Good question from a very long-range strategic perspective, but I think it’s the wrong one for the here-and-now.

Right now, this dogfight is about 100,000 votes.
This is not D-Day. This is not the Apollo program. Hell, this is not even the Pope’s funeral. This is about 100,000 votes.

Yes, the South is the problem. No, the South is THE problem. If I had a “Wayback Machine” and could take one trip back, I’d haul ass to 1865 loaded for bear (sort of the opposite of the plot of the very good “Guns of the South”) and demand that the de-Nazification of the Confederacy be thorough and final. Southern racism and the perverse White Privilege Ideology and theology they invented to rationalize their racism is (and always has been) the biggest single source of misery for this country.

It is the headwaters of a hundred other sins. Every time some Right Wing Mole Rat pops out of the ground to denounce, well, Reality, he always wraps his bile up in the yummy yummy bacon of Almighty God. Consider what a typical Son of the South -- the trial judge said in the case of Loving v. Virgina (1958) – write when he ruled against the right of consenting adults of different races to marry:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

Subtitute the “gay” for “race” and I dare you to tell me that these squamous tubs of righteous stupidity have changed one iota in the last 50 years. Or in the last 100. Or 200. Their spoor is always the same and always easy to smell:
1. Some group to hate and blame for their fucked up lives.
2. Scripture that lets the believe that they have a Divine Right to be ignorant fucktards.
3. Some means of enforcing their will (Nooses, guns, burning crosses, fellow travelers in the courts and government.)
4. A propaganda machine to Say It Loud (pulpit, floor of the House, Fox News, Hate Radio.)

But we have three major political parties in this country: Democratic, Republican and Dixiecrat...and the NeoConfederates only survive by hopping from party to party like the opportunistic disease that they are. If we were having this discussion a century ago, I would have been a staunch Republican – a Lincoln Man and proud of it (and burned as a witch for blogging during the administration of Teddy Roosevelt.) But the perverse truth is that the Party of Lincoln is now the Party of Jeff Davis, and the Stars-and-Bars now fly over the grave of the Great Emancipator.

There are a lot of reasons why my politics are the way they are, and case-by-case I may side with a variety of surprisingly different groups, but in this case it’s easy. I look to see where the cross-burners, Fundies, militia goons, clinic bombers and racists have made their nests. Then I run like Hell in the opposite direction...and these days that’s more than enough for me to vote (D) almost every time.

But for now, fuck the South. Thinking about how to deal with them -- writ large -- is too vast. First, we have to win, and winning means 100,000 votes, and they key to that is around the edges.

The “moderate” Republicans I know are horrified by DeLay and Santorum and Terry and the rest. They thought they were voting for tax cuts. And Law and Order. And getting to keep the Glock they like fondling. Even though they had been warned (pedantically, by me among others) they really, truly never believed that the Right Wing was dangerous, and never noticed that the Fundies are about as fundamentally opposed to the original principles of the GOP as you can get.

So what’s the plan?

These people need to stay home in disgust next time around, or be so terrified of the fact that Randall Terry is now the Madam of the GOP Whorehouse that they’ll vote Democrat or Independent even though they believe that they might go to hell for it. And our job is to keep pounding away at them, personally, face-to-face. They voted for this shit and we need to hang it in all its stinking glory around their necks at every opportunity. And thanks to the towering arrogancy and rabidity of the Ultras, making this case gets easier and easier every day.

Never again let them get away with saying, “But I didn’t KNOW?”

Of course you knew. How could you possibly not know? And if you are that fucking ignorant of the A-B-C’s of your own party, what in the Hell are you doing within a country mile of a voting booth?

And more importantly, now that you DO know about it, what are you going to do about the mess you made? Or don’t you believe in “Personal Responsibility?” Man, they hate that :-)

100,000 votes is nothing. It’s a margin or error. It’s two Chicago wards.

So let’s go get ‘em!

Next up: Can this blogger stitch together dildos, killdeers and recess nominations? Stay tuned...

Well that was fairly unnerving and infuriating to revisit after all this time.  

And a reminder that while writing that stuff as warning in 2005 made Liberal bloggers into media pariahs, writing exactly this same sort of stuff in the Age of Trump once it became far too late to stop the worst from happening has made the same recently-former Republican who slandered us as alarmist, America-hating cranks back then, into wealthy Liberal media darlings, sought-after speakers, and best-selling authors.  

Burn The Lifeboats