Watching the 2016 Election Results Come In...

...was like watching the towers come down.  

Watching helplessly as madness and evil arrive out of a clear blue sky and destroy something you took to be permanent and safely defended.   

Burn The Lifeboats

Like a Virgin Redux

I wrote this back in 2009 on the occasion of the eight anniversary of 9/11.

It is now eight years after that, and it gives me nothing but nightmares that all the things I was writing about back then -- the berserk, blood-drunk madness of the GOP,  the utter cravenness of the Beltway media, the willful amnesia everywhere, the dreadful momentum all of it was acquiring -- have all gone from very bad to unspeakably awful.

Like A Virgin

“...they turned to prayer, beseeching
that the sin which had been committed
might be wholly blotted out.”

-- 2 Maccabees. 12:42

Once upon a time, there was a President named Bill Clinton, who was, by most historical standards, a typical Centrist Republican, although by a fluke of geography and circumstances he ran for public office with a "(D)" after his name.

Under his Administration, many Conservative ideas which had long gathered dust on the shelf -- ideas such as welfare reform, a balanced budget, debt reduction, a strict “Pay as You Go” fiscal regime, jobs-jobs-jobs, budget surpluses, NAFTA, GATT, official bans on gay marriage, etc. -- were finally realized.

And for all of his good work on behalf of their ideology, Conservatives spent eight, long years treating Bill Clinton -- a Southern, White, Christian man -- as if he were a case of flesh eating nuclear syphilis.

Because he did not run for office with an "(R)" after his name.

And because he did not run for office with an "(R)" after his name, according to the leading voices in the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement, Bill Clinton was, in no particular order, Hitler, a Socialist, a rapist, a warmonger, a serial murderer, and a drug dealer, whose Presidency was somehow vaguely illegitimate.

And counterpointing the 24/7 slime campaign, there were those endless, endless hearings. Whitewater. Travel office. Christmas Card lists. Lincoln bedroom. Etc ad nauseum.

Or don’t you remember?

He was “Not my President!” (Ollie North: War criminal, terrorist arms dealer, GOP Senate Candidate [1994] and FoxNews Contributor.)

He was warned “not to set foot in my state.” (Jesse Helms: Professional Bigot, Confederate Senator, 1820-2003)

His picture was used for target practice by G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate felon, would-be assassin, radio personality and Republican hero.

From "The American Prospect":

...it's worth remembering just how virulent the opposition to Clinton's presidency was. Republicans began plotting to impeach Clinton long before anyone had ever heard the name "Lewinsky," and many on the right simply refused to accept that he legitimately occupied the office he held. Then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey, when talking to Democrats, used to refer to Clinton as "your president."

It was a warped, hysterical campaign funded by wealthy Right Wing thugs like Richard Mellon Scaife

and propagated by wealthy Right Wing thugs like Rupert Murdoch who made sure the lies were jack-hammered into the headlines day after day, year after year.

And judging by its objectives, it was also a very successful campaign: it legitimized and metastasized Hate Radio; killed the credibility of the "objective" media once and for all; made the overt mass-slander of political opposition by the Right acceptable; moved radicals, militia nuts, bigots, Creationists and Limbaugh zombies to the center of the Republican Party; accelerated the exodus of reasonable moderates the hell out of the Republican Party; destroyed the possibility of public discourse; and kicked the door open to the use of Congressional hearings as instruments of political vendetta.

But as successful as it was, it was also an incredibly high-risk strategy, because of a thing called the "public record".

The public record meant that each and every time a Republican stood up to, say, slam the Democrat Commander-in-Chief during a time of war (from The Poor Man Institute:)

“You can support the troops but not the president”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

“President…is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy.”

-Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)

“American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy.”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

“If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy.”

-Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W. Bush

“I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning…I didn’t think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.”

-Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

“Well, I just think it’s a bad idea. What’s going to happen is they’re going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years”

-Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

“I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our overextended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

“Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?”

-Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”

-Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

“This is President Clinton’s war, and when he falls flat on his face, that’s his problem.”

-Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN)

“Bombing a sovereign nation for ill-defined reasons with vague objectives undermines the American stature in the world. The international respect and trust for America has diminished every time we casually let the bombs fly.”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

they left a documentary trail wide and bright enough to be visible from space.

Or from the next election cycle.

The public record meant that every frivolous Republican witch hunt and every syllable of hate and demagoguery gleefully poured out through public megaphones and megachurch pulpits to malign and demonize the Left could potentially represent a thick bar on the cage of any future Republican president's imperial ambitions.

Because, after all, should the tables ever turn -- should there ever be a Republican President whose election really was suspect, or who really did lie to the American public and flagrantly abuse his office, and did it in ways that cost the nation trillions of dollars and thousands of lives -- after spending eight years establishing a public record in such clear and unambiguous language what the Hell could the Right possibly say?

After conspiring to bring about two of the most destructive events in modern American history -- the impeachment of a US President over trivia, and the probable theft of the subsequent Presidential election -- to what God could Republicans possibly pray that their eight years of insanity, venom and violence "might be wholly blotted out?”

On 09/11/01, their dark miracle came winging its way out of a clear, blue sky.

Eight years ago, this is what we all saw.

All of us, all together across all political, cultural and religious spectra watched the worst thing many of us had ever seen.

Together.

But in what now seems like less time than it took to wipe away our tears, the same depraved thugs who sponsored eight years of "Clinton Murdered Vince Foster!" hysteria began hijacking of our pain and patriotism to serve their partisan interests right before our eyes.

The minute the Bush Administration began trying to stretch the war they got into an excuse for the war they wanted, 9/11 stopped being merely a national tragedy and started being the Bush Administration's bottomless political ATM machine.

The minute the Party of Personal Responsibility began using the mantra "9/11 changed everything" as the political equivalent of the Blood of Christ -- as a means to absolve themselves of their personal responsibility for eight years of malice and derangement -- for them September 11, 2001 stopped being a moment of shared, national anguish and started being a suit of cultural body-armor which magically deflected any criticism of their lies and their hypocrisy.

An impervious sniper's nest from which they could cynically escalate --

"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," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

-- their war on the Left.

Or don't you remember the day the Right robbed the graves of all those who perished on 9/11 to turn this


into their all-purpose

"Get Out of the 90s Free" card?

And the thing is, it worked.

By selling 9/11 for a mess of wingnut pottage, the Right bought itself an anti-Liberal free-fire zone and two Presidential terms-worth of blank checks. Two terms of an alternately supportive and supine media. Two terms of catastrophe, corruption and treason protected from scrutiny by an ablative shield made out of solid "Why do you hate America?", and a promise that they could go on bareback fucking diseased monsters in the alley all night long, every night, forever and wake up each morning miraculously clean, virginal and still beloved in the eyes of God.

But they forgot that tempus just keeps fugiting along. And as time passed, the Right got so accustomed to butt-scooting their depravity all over the public square and never being called on it they simply stopped noticing that they were amassing a whole new post-9/11 public record so despicable and overflowing with Conservative atrocities that it positively dwarfed their antics during the Clinton Years.

And that brutal, meth-addict level of dependence on never being brought to book for anything they say or do left the Right completely unprepared for the one thing their leaders promised would never happen again.

Losing.

And losing has driven them a special kind of crazy; that screaming-incoherently-and-lashing-out-in-every-direction kind of cold-turkey junkie withdrawal crazy.

In the few, short months since they lost, they have emptied out their entire store of raving invective and delusion.

Losing has left them insisting that that the legally elected President of the United States somehow isn't really the President. That he is a secret enemy. A Communist. A Hitler. A Muslim sleeper cell. A Chicago gangster.

Has left them swearing that "their country" has been stolen and that somewhere hidden in secret code in a 1,000 page health care bill is a plan to murder senior citizens.

To understand how deep and relentless their addiction goes, you need only consider the recent example of Mrs. Katy Abram, who leaped into microcelebrity and the wingnut pantheon a month ago with her Clown Hall rant of “I don’t want my county to become Russia!” speech.

Mrs. Katy Abram wants the world to believe that, like some pure, down-home, liberty-lovin' Sleeping Beauty, she somehow slept through 9/11.

Slept through two wars and the two trillion dollar bill they racked up.

Slept through tax cuts for the wealthy that added another few trillion to our debt.

Slept through Katrina.

Slept through Terri Schiavo.

Slept through the screams of the Constitution as the Bush Administration fed it an inch at a time through the wood chipper (the same Constitution she is now so deeply concerned about that she has somehow become, virtually overnight, an “original intent” quote-spewing expert) only to be awakened in a sudden, patriotic fury by the sound of a Black Democrat taking the oath of office.

I’m sure in Mrs. Abram’s mind – and in the tiny little minds of tens of millions of Americans just like her – she sees absolutely no contradiction between explaining that she never paid any attention to a single fucking thing prior to January of 2009....and saying that she started paying attention in 1991 "when we first went to the Gulf War" and that she has debated politics with friends at the opposite end of the political spectrum “a million times over”.

It is, in fact, a sign of the depth and effectiveness of their brainwashing that people like Mrs. Abram see no conflict between saying in one breath “I have never been interested in politics” and "I always seem to have faith in the government“ in the next.

Because during the Bush years, people like Mrs. Abram never saw their love of their Dear Leader and their fealty to his Administration as something "political". They saw it normal. As the Universe being at its proper, wingnut default setting: White, male, fundamentalist Christian, Conservative, flight-suit clad and killing scary brown people. And as long as that remained true, all was right with the world and people like Mrs. Abram were absolved by their "Don't Worry, Go Shopping" leaders of any responsibility for paying attention to anything their government was actually doing.

And once the Dear Leader's reign ended, as far as people like Mrs. Abram were concerned, the natural order of mindless obedience in exchange for a smug and blissful ignorance collapsed. "Their country" was suddenly broke and fucked up for reasons that they dared not think about too much. "Their country" was suddenly awash in dirty fucking hippies, who for some reason were no longer satisfied with being cultural punching bags. "Their country"suddenly had politicians and activists who said mean things about the Dear Leader and the Republican Party...and got away with it!

And worst of all, "their country" suddenly had a Scary Black Man living in their Dear Leader's pretty White House, probably having dirty, Muslim sex in the Dear Leader's sacred, Christian bed and putting his filthy, Kenyan hands all over "their county's" pure, white Constitution.

So, for example, when you hear the same people who fanatically supported President George W. Bush when he famously told Iraq war critics to fuck off --

"Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election."

-- now insisting, less that a year after the 2008 elections, that President Barack Obama needs to:

"...scrap the current grandiose plans and to start over."

or when you see the mobs on the Right being whipped by talk of secession or revolution or spilling the "blood of tyrants" into a nearly-pornographic frenzy, understand that what you are witnessing are the echoes of political decisions made in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Political decisions that trained the Right to believe, on a visceral level, that a sufficiently bloody and horrifying disruption to the life of the country can -- if properly exploited -- wash away their eight otherwise-unforgivable years of sin and restore "their country" to its proper, wingnut default setting.

That if the right sacrifices are made to the right Gods in just the right way, then they can be virgins again.

Come Out Of The Garden Baby

You'll catch your death in the fog.

In addition to a fine history lesson and some bracing prose, Brother Charles Pierce offers up a pretty shrewd guess as to what exactly President Barack Obama was trying to do last night:

Ultimately, I believe, that is what the president tried to do in his speech last night, a speech that was neither as bellicose as some people wanted, nor as isolationist as other people wanted. (Rand Paul, of course, feels strongly both ways.) He was talking directly to some of the people responsible for the derangement and asking them to take ownership of what they have done. He asked the nations of the region to take ownership of their own responsibility for creating the political and social environment from which ISIS can rise, and in which ISIS, or something like it, can thrive. And unless the countries of the region recognize that, there will be something like it again, no matter what happens to our current Hitlers du jour. The president also asked the Congress, and the political elite of this country, to take ownership of all that loose talk that has come out of our government since that day 13 years ago, the incoherent babble of our national derangement. This is now a Congress that is suing him for unilaterally delaying a portion of the Affordable Care Act, but that also is virtually begging him to make war on his own authority. For its own cheap domestic political purposes, the Congress wants it to be the president who is making war, and not the Congress, and by extension, all the rest of us. For their own cheap domestic political purposes, the satraps of the region want it to be the United States that makes the war, and that takes the inevitable blowback. There are substantial political constituencies, both here and abroad, for the national derangement that began in 2001 to continue. And I think that last night's speech was, in part, an attempt to challenge those constituencies to come out of the shadows and show themselves.

...

I tend to largely agree that this is the particular needle the President was reluctantly trying to thread, but implicit in his own speech and in Charlie's commentary --

"He was talking directly to some of the people responsible for the derangement and asking them to take ownership of what they have done."

-- you will find the reason why attempting to call the original architects of this disaster to account is doomed to fail.

It will fail, because it is impossible to bring people who refuse to acknowledge that history did not begin until  2009 to book for something they did in 2002.  Because as far as they are concerned, there is no "2002".

Or 2003.

There were no 2004 election.  Bush/Cheney did not win with 60 million votes and change.  The entire Conservative movement did not take to the streets in a giant, "Neener Neener!  We Won!  You Lost! So shut the fuck up!" parade that lasted until 2005, a year which also too never happened.

Just as 2006 did not happen.

And neither did 2007.

Nor most of 2008.

In fact, the entire predicate for the Teabagger Uprising  (ed note: There. Is. No. Tea. Party.) is that the Bush Administration never happened or, if it did, they certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

In fact, they all seem to remember Very Clearly

that The Great Recession started when Barry Obama and Bill Ayers conspired with Fanny and Freddie and ACORN and the New Black Panther Party to destroy the US economy as part of their Master Commie Plan to create an army of welfare-dependent moochers. Period.  (See "Abram, Katie")



(See also "Bush-Off Machine")

And in one of the great ironies of modern history,  Republican's would have had a considerably harder time passing off their "crazy make-'em-up" (h/t Christopher Walken) version of modern history had they not found a-more-than-willing ally in our newly-elected president, Barack Obama.

It was President Obama, after all, who was so desperate not to get his freshly-minted mandate all icky with partisan spoo that he rejected out-of-hand any notion of putting members of the previous Administration on trial for their crimes, or even just convening a non-judicial Truth and Reconciliation Committee so that we as a people could set the record of the previous  eight years straight once and for all.

For the benefit of those of you who are either Republican or under the age of seven,  remember that Bush Administration left this country impaled on a shit-covered Conservative punji stick. And rather than carefully extracting it, cleaning out the wound and letting us heal properly, President-elect Obama -- anxious to get on with tackling many other very real and incredibly damaging problems the Bush Administration had scattered in its wake -- was content with perfuming this festering wound with a lot of happy talk about looking forward not backward and meeting with the likes of Charles Kraphammer, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, Bill Kristol and the rest of what passes for Conservative intelligentsia for a nosh and some cheery "Both Sider" banter.

The Age of Bush left us broke, broken and deranged, but the side effects of that illness and derangement were so profitable to so many powerful interests that instead that receiving proper treated for our political PTSD, political PTSD has become our new national status quo.

Instead of listening to the god damn Dirty Hippies who were positively screaming from their pathetic little blogs and 50 watt radio stations that we desperately needed to clean out our deep national wounds (me, from May, 2005) --

Is this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burned the topless towers of Ilium?

Since 9/11, that famous line by Christopher Marlowe has meant something radically different and sad to me.

This was the monster that came screaming out of our collective unconscious to pull down the sky and murder three thousand of our mothers and fathers. Our brothers and sisters. Our children.

So why the fuck is he walking free and easy somewhere along the Pakistani frontier, while this guy is the one washing out his underpants in an Iraqi prison sink?

The answer is very simple, but the consequences of accepting the answer is the pivot on which the future of the nation turns.

The President of the United States lied to the People of the United States.

He lied about War and Peace, played on our raw nerves and post 9/11 damage and pain to cynically ram though an Ultra Right Wing agenda in exactly the same way an infectious disease takes advantage of a sucking chest wound...and it is absolutely okey-dokey with Republicans.

It's perfectly OK with Iowa farmers and with retired WWII vets in Florida. With laid-off steel-workers in Gary. With soccer-moms in Phoenix and hardware store owners in Springfield, Illinois. It is perfectly OK with these people that we are being bled out one pint at a time in the deserts of Iraq because of a lie.

Or, put it a different way:

There was a moment that followed expenditure of the last Right Wing bitter breathe that shouted that all Liberals are Traitors for ever doubting that Iraq was thick with WMD’s and nearly-completed nukes. Festooned with AQ training camps and mobile weapons labs. Positively choking with direct complicity for 9/11 and imminent, drawn-dagger threat to our Nation.

And then came that hovering moment of silence as it all fell apart.

No weapons.

No complicity.

No involvement of any kind whatsoever.

No “greeted as liberators”.

No “cake walk”.

No self-funded war.

No “slam dunk.”

No, not just one piece of it. Not a blowjob. Not a stained dress. Not 49 or 51 percent of it shown to be wrong.

All of it.

All of it wrong.

All of it a lie.

Every last fetid bit of it shown to be utterly, criminally false.

Gasping on the last wisp of oxygen of the WMD Justification as it turned to cyanotic poison in their lungs...the Republicans drew another breath. And these same Republicans who were willing the burn the country to the ground to impeach a Democratic President over consensual sex between adults because any President must be held to the highest possible standards, began screaming at 1,000 decibels that WMD’s were now irrelevant.

Nuke-talk was now inoperative.

Al Qaeda links were now off-the-table...and how dare anyone suggest that anything had ever been otherwise...and whatsamatta you; you luv Saddam Hussein of somethin’?!

Never blinked once.

Never even an itty, bitty apology for the deaths, for the lies, for the duplicity, or even for their grotesque hypocrisy: just all of their calculatedly hatemongering demagoguery – the same fucking 20-year-old, Newt Gingrich “Anyone who ain’t with us is a Traitor” script – brazenly turned on its head and “repurposed” in front of the whole world.

In that moment they chose to call treason “strength”, and treachery “staying the course”.

In that moment the Republicans chose to sell out their principles, their party and their souls to the Great Lie. Decided to use their thin majority to ram it though at any price, and demonize anyone that pointed out the blindingly obvious fact that that Emperor is most definitely Naked.

A naked liar.

Decided to rape the Truth in broad daylight and then bitch-slap it around the block and back again, and then dare it to raise its voice in protest.

In that tiny interval, in that moment all alone in the voting booths, in that long, dark night of the Conservative Soul, people with whom I might have often disagreed but before now almost always respected chose to kneel to the Lie. To offer up the heart of a free nation on the altar of the Great Liar.

Everything else follows from this primal fall from grace.

...

-- and honestly litigating what had really happened to us during those terrible years, instead we let Conservative gangrene set in.

And then, before anyone (except the aforementioned Dirty Hippies) realized it, that gangrene started wearing tri-corner hats and waving Gadsden flags and calling itself a movement.

And because our Elite Media has permitted the GOP to become a permanently self-lobotomizing monster capable of ouchlessly forgetting tomorrow all the bullshit it slung today, elected Republican officials like Representative Jack Kingston can now openly muse about his party's repulsive strategies --

"Representative Jack Kingston, the Georgia Republican, offered a surprisingly honest, if amazingly cynical, assessment of the politics of the moment, saying that Republicans 'like the path we’re on now.'

“'We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long,' Kingston told The New York Times."

-- in the sure and certain knowledge that by the time the sun rises again over the Potomac, all evidence that he ever said it will be safely hidden away in the one place our Elite media never thinks to look.

Yesterday.

Fusion

Dead on my feet and using the free internet at one of the fast-food-with-WiFi joints just off the I55/Exit 220 is no place to hold forth at great length on anything, except maybe this. 

With stable fusion power in the hands of an artist, you theoretically have a Philosopher's Stone at your command, capable of using the terrible power of nuclear fusion to transform one element into another.  

In other words, lead into gold.

In the hands of a monster like, say, Karl Rove, 9/11 was used in a remarkably similar way: using the terrible power of the events of that day, the GOP brain caste took the degenerate elements of the Party of God and transmuted them into an army that truly believed that they were immune to history and causality.  That no matter how many times their crackpot ideas blew up in their face, no matter many of their hypocrisies were hung out in the public square, no how many times they lied -- lied big, about really important shit -- and got caught...it didn't matter.  They were special.  They were chosen.  They had their hands on an infinite "Do Over" credit card that would never, ever bottom out.

What you are seeing in the Romney campaign is the dead-ending of that mentality. The lying-with-giddy-"Fuck You"-abandon at the top of the ticket, and the genuine rage and bewilderment on the part of the Base that their "Do Over" credit card doesn't work so good anymore.

The GOP used 9/11 to mutate their already-depraved Base into something new and awful.  Come November we'll see if they win or we do. 

Getting back on the road now.  

Until my next internet oasis, I'll leave you with this from me on 09/11/2009.

Sadly, it still holds up far too well:

Like A Virgin

“...they turned to prayer, beseeching
that the sin which had been committed
might be wholly blotted out.”

-- 2 Maccabees. 12:42 

Once upon a time, there was a President named Bill Clinton, who was, by most historical standards, a typical Centrist Republican, although by a fluke of geography and circumstances he ran for public office with a "(D)" after his name.

Under his Administration, many Conservative ideas which had long gathered dust on the shelf -- ideas such as welfare reform, a balanced budget, debt reduction, a strict “Pay as You Go” fiscal regime, jobs-jobs-jobs, budget surpluses, NAFTA, GATT, official bans on gay marriage, etc. -- were finally realized.

And for all of his good work on behalf of their ideology, Conservatives spent eight, long years treating Bill Clinton -- a Southern, White, Christian man -- as if he were a case of flesh eating nuclear syphilis.

Because he did not run for office with an "(R)" after his name.

And because he did not run for office with an "(R)" after his name, according to the leading voices in the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement, Bill Clinton was, in no particular order, Hitler, a Socialist, a rapist, a warmonger, a serial murderer, and a drug dealer, whose Presidency was somehow vaguely illegitimate.

And counterpointing the 24/7 slime campaign, there were those endless, endless hearings. Whitewater. Travel office. Christmas Card lists. Lincoln bedroom. Etc ad nauseum.

Or don’t you remember? 

...

The rest is here.

09.11.11

"I lie here not knowing … how long I've been alone.
So how … how can I heal?
How am I supposed to heal if I can't … feel time?"

-- Leonard Shelby, "Memento"

This year, the youngest explained

what she learned in school.

Last year, Atrios reminded us of the breathtaking, predatory speed with which Conservatives hijacked the events of 9/11 to demonize the Left and advance their depraved agenda.

And this from 09.11.06 still holds up far too well.

We are still mad from fever and terrible ideas.
We have not healed.
We have not yet really begun to heal.

"Like a Virgin" Video Redux

"Because he had a 'D' after his name..."

Just when I despaired of having something cool to post today, I find that reader Ben Riddle has taken it upon himself to turn the text of my 09/11/08 "Like a Virgin" post into a narrated, two-part, pre-election special video.

Above was Part I: The Public Record

Here is Part II: Like a Virgin


Take a bow, Ben; nicely done.

Oh, and Conservatives, if you every wondered why the Left finds you loathsome beyond redemption and thinks your ridiculous Teabagger Movement is at once hilarious, tragic and obscene, this is why.

9.11.10

Another thing we remember?

The single-minded, breathtaking, predatory speed with which Conservatives moved to make sure we all knew who America's real enemies were (From FAIR with a h/t to Atrios for ringing the memory bell):

"Domestic political dissent is immoral without a prior statement of national solidarity, a choosing of sides." -- New Republic editor Peter Beinart, 9/24/01

"The middle part of the country--the great red zone that voted for Bush--is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead--and may well mount a fifth column." -- Andrew Sullivan, London Sunday Times, 9/16/01

"Why are we sending aircraft carriers halfway around the world to look for enemies, when our nation's worst enemies--communists proclaiming an anti-American jihad--will be right there in front of the Washington Monument on Saturday?" -- Washington Times columnist Robert Stacy McCain, 9/27/01

"The blood of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans is on the hands of the antiwar activists who prolonged the struggle and gave victory to the communists...this country was too tolerant toward the treason of its enemies within." -- David Horowitz, L.A. Times, 9/28/01

"...the anti-globalist rioters seek to intimidate world capitalism into shutting down altogether, and the distance between breaking the windows of McDonald's to achieve that end and blowing up the World Trade Center is pretty damned narrow." -- Columnist Steven Schwartz, New York Post, 9/12/01

It is worth noting that, nine years later, as far as I can tell no Conservative anywhere has ever lost a job by spewing mob-inciting, demagogic lies.

In fact, quite the opposite.

Like A Virgin

“...they turned to prayer, beseeching
that the sin which had been committed
might be wholly blotted out.”

-- 2 Maccabees. 12:42

Once upon a time, there was a President named Bill Clinton, who was, by most historical standards, a typical Centrist Republican, although by a fluke of geography and circumstances he ran for public office with a "(D)" after his name.

Under his Administration, many Conservative ideas which had long gathered dust on the shelf -- ideas such as welfare reform, a balanced budget, debt reduction, a strict “Pay as You Go” fiscal regime, jobs-jobs-jobs, budget surpluses, NAFTA, GATT, official bans on gay marriage, etc. -- were finally realized.

And for all of his good work on behalf of their ideology, Conservatives spent eight, long years treating Bill Clinton -- a Southern, White, Christian man -- as if he were a case of flesh eating nuclear syphilis.

Because he did not run for office with an "(R)" after his name.

And because he did not run for office with an "(R)" after his name, according to the leading voices in the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement, Bill Clinton was, in no particular order, Hitler, a Socialist, a rapist, a warmonger, a serial murderer, and a drug dealer, whose Presidency was somehow vaguely illegitimate.

And counterpointing the 24/7 slime campaign, there were those endless, endless hearings. Whitewater. Travel office. Christmas Card lists. Lincoln bedroom. Etc ad nauseum.

Or don’t you remember?

He was “Not my President!” (Ollie North: War criminal, terrorist arms dealer, GOP Senate Candidate [1994] and FoxNews Contributor.)

He was warned “not to set foot in my state.” (Jesse Helms: Professional Bigot, Confederate Senator, 1820-2003)

His picture was used for target practice by G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate felon, would-be assassin, radio personality and Republican hero.

From "The American Prospect":

...it's worth remembering just how virulent the opposition to Clinton's presidency was. Republicans began plotting to impeach Clinton long before anyone had ever heard the name "Lewinsky," and many on the right simply refused to accept that he legitimately occupied the office he held. Then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey, when talking to Democrats, used to refer to Clinton as "your president."

It was a warped, hysterical campaign funded by wealthy Right Wing thugs like Richard Mellon Scaife

and propagated by wealthy Right Wing thugs like Rupert Murdoch who made sure the lies were jack-hammered into the headlines day after day, year after year.

And judging by its objectives, it was also a very successful campaign: it legitimized and metastasized Hate Radio; killed the credibility of the "objective" media once and for all; made the overt mass-slander of political opposition by the Right acceptable; moved radicals, militia nuts, bigots, Creationists and Limbaugh zombies to the center of the Republican Party; accelerated the exodus of reasonable moderates the hell out of the Republican Party; destroyed the possibility of public discourse; and kicked the door open to the use of Congressional hearings as instruments of political vendetta.

But as successful as it was, it was also an incredibly high-risk strategy, because of a thing called the "public record".

The public record meant that each and every time a Republican stood up to, say, slam the Democrat Commander-in-Chief during a time of war (from The Poor Man Institute:)

“You can support the troops but not the president”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

“President…is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy.”

-Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)

“American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy.”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

“If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy.”

-Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W. Bush

“I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning…I didn’t think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.”

-Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

“Well, I just think it’s a bad idea. What’s going to happen is they’re going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years”

-Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

“I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our overextended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

“Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?”

-Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

“Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”

-Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

“This is President Clinton’s war, and when he falls flat on his face, that’s his problem.”

-Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN)

“Bombing a sovereign nation for ill-defined reasons with vague objectives undermines the American stature in the world. The international respect and trust for America has diminished every time we casually let the bombs fly.”

-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)

they left a documentary trail wide and bright enough to be visible from space.

Or from the next election cycle.

The public record meant that every frivolous Republican witch hunt and every syllable of hate and demagoguery gleefully poured out through public megaphones and megachurch pulpits to malign and demonize the Left could potentially represent a thick bar on the cage of any future Republican president's imperial ambitions.

Because, after all, should the tables ever turn -- should there ever be a Republican President whose election really was suspect, or who really did lie to the American public and flagrantly abuse his office, and did it in ways that cost the nation trillions of dollars and thousands of lives -- after spending eight years establishing a public record in such clear and unambiguous language what the Hell could the Right possibly say?

After conspiring to bring about two of the most destructive events in modern American history -- the impeachment of a US President over trivia, and the probable theft of the subsequent Presidential election -- to what God could Republicans possibly pray that their eight years of insanity, venom and violence "might be wholly blotted out?”

On 09/11/01, their dark miracle came winging its way out of a clear, blue sky.

Eight years ago, this is what we all saw.

All of us, all together across all political, cultural and religious spectra watched the worst thing many of us had ever seen.

Together.

But in what now seems like less time than it took to wipe away our tears, the same depraved thugs who sponsored eight years of "Clinton Murdered Vince Foster!" hysteria began hijacking of our pain and patriotism to serve their partisan interests right before our eyes.

The minute the Bush Administration began trying to stretch the war they got into an excuse for the war they wanted, 9/11 stopped being merely a national tragedy and started being the Bush Administration's bottomless political ATM machine.

The minute the Party of Personal Responsibility began using the mantra "9/11 changed everything" as the political equivalent of the Blood of Christ -- as a means to absolve themselves of their personal responsibility for eight years of malice and derangement -- for them September 11, 2001 stopped being a moment of shared, national anguish and started being a suit of cultural body-armor which magically deflected any criticism of their lies and their hypocrisy.

An impervious sniper's nest from which they could cynically escalate --

"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," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

-- their war on the Left.

Or don't you remember the day the Right robbed the graves of all those who perished on 9/11 to turn this


into their all-purpose

"Get Out of the 90s Free" card?

And the thing is, it worked.

By selling 9/11 for a mess of wingnut pottage, the Right bought itself an anti-Liberal free-fire zone and two Presidential terms-worth of blank checks. Two terms of an alternately supportive and supine media. Two terms of catastrophe, corruption and treason protected from scrutiny by an ablative shield made out of solid "Why do you hate America?", and a promise that they could go on bareback fucking diseased monsters in the alley all night long, every night, forever and wake up each morning miraculously clean, virginal and still beloved in the eyes of God.

But they forgot that tempus just keeps fugiting along. And as time passed, the Right got so accustomed to butt-scooting their depravity all over the public square and never being called on it they simply stopped noticing that they were amassing a whole new post-9/11 public record so despicable and overflowing with Conservative atrocities that it positively dwarfed their antics during the Clinton Years.

And that brutal, meth-addict level of dependence on never being brought to book for anything they say or do left the Right completely unprepared for the one thing their leaders promised would never happen again.

Losing.

And losing has driven them a special kind of crazy; that screaming-incoherently-and-lashing-out-in-every-direction kind of cold-turkey junkie withdrawal crazy.

In the few, short months since they lost, they have emptied out their entire store of raving invective and delusion.

Losing has left them insisting that that the legally elected President of the United States somehow isn't really the President. That he is a secret enemy. A Communist. A Hitler. A Muslim sleeper cell. A Chicago gangster.

Has left them swearing that "their country" has been stolen and that somewhere hidden in secret code in a 1,000 page health care bill is a plan to murder senior citizens.

To understand how deep and relentless their addiction goes, you need only consider the recent example of Mrs. Katy Abram, who leaped into microcelebrity and the wingnut pantheon a month ago with her Clown Hall rant of “I don’t want my county to become Russia!” speech.

Mrs. Katy Abram wants the world to believe that, like some pure, down-home, liberty-lovin' Sleeping Beauty, she somehow slept through 9/11.

Slept through two wars and the two trillion dollar bill they racked up.

Slept through tax cuts for the wealthy that added another few trillion to our debt.

Slept through Katrina.

Slept through Terri Schiavo.

Slept through the screams of the Constitution as the Bush Administration fed it an inch at a time through the wood chipper (the same Constitution she is now so deeply concerned about that she has somehow become, virtually overnight, an “original intent” quote-spewing expert) only to be awakened in a sudden, patriotic fury by the sound of a Black Democrat taking the oath of office.

I’m sure in Mrs. Abram’s mind – and in the tiny little minds of tens of millions of Americans just like her – she sees absolutely no contradiction between explaining that she never paid any attention to a single fucking thing prior to January of 2009....and saying that she started paying attention in 1991 "when we first went to the Gulf War" and that she has debated politics with friends at the opposite end of the political spectrum “a million times over”.

It is, in fact, a sign of the depth and effectiveness of their brainwashing that people like Mrs. Abram see no conflict between saying in one breath “I have never been interested in politics” and "I always seem to have faith in the government“ in the next.

Because during the Bush years, people like Mrs. Abram never saw their love of their Dear Leader and their fealty to his Administration as something "political". They saw it normal. As the Universe being at its proper, wingnut default setting: White, male, fundamentalist Christian, Conservative, flight-suit clad and killing scary brown people. And as long as that remained true, all was right with the world and people like Mrs. Abram were absolved by their "Don't Worry, Go Shopping" leaders of any responsibility for paying attention to anything their government was actually doing.

And once the Dear Leader's reign ended, as far as people like Mrs. Abram were concerned, the natural order of mindless obedience in exchange for a smug and blissful ignorance collapsed. "Their country" was suddenly broke and fucked up for reasons that they dared not think about too much. "Their country" was suddenly awash in dirty fucking hippies, who for some reason were no longer satisfied with being cultural punching bags. "Their country"suddenly had politicians and activists who said mean things about the Dear Leader and the Republican Party...and got away with it!

And worst of all, "their country" suddenly had a Scary Black Man living in their Dear Leader's pretty White House, probably having dirty, Muslim sex in the Dear Leader's sacred, Christian bed and putting his filthy, Kenyan hands all over "their county's" pure, white Constitution.

So, for example, when you hear the same people who fanatically supported President George W. Bush when he famously told Iraq war critics to fuck off --

"Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election."

-- now insisting, less that a year after the 2008 elections, that President Barack Obama needs to:

"...scrap the current grandiose plans and to start over."

or when you see the mobs on the Right being whipped by talk of secession or revolution or spilling the "blood of tyrants" into a nearly-pornographic frenzy, understand that what you are witnessing are the echoes of political decisions made in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Political decisions that trained the Right to believe, on a visceral level, that a sufficiently bloody and horrifying disruption to the life of the country can -- if properly exploited -- wash away their eight otherwise-unforgivable years of sin and restore "their country" to its proper, wingnut default setting.

That if the right sacrifices are made to the right Gods in just the right way, then they can be virgins again.

NOTE: Yes, I know the comment section looks squirrelly in Firefox. It's the effing template. I tried paying the HTML drywall guys in California State IOU scrip

and they walked off the job.