The left-wing, including, gleefully, yours truly, has been having a lot of fun with the way right-wing whackos have blindly, ignorantly jammed together mutually exclusive concepts without realizing that they were, you know, mutully exclusive. For instance.But while they are slowly moving closer and closer to the truth about the Republicans and wingo mouthpieces like Glenn Beck, even the best of them seem to be having trouble accepting the obvious: that they're pure political propagandists. They keep looking for a consistent throughline of some kind as if what's left of the GOP and RWNM are still locked in the ideological framework of the Bush years. Here's Glenn Greenwald:
Like the establishment leadership of both political parties, [Glenn Beck] has no core political principles or fixed, identifiable ideology. His description of himself as a "rodeo clown" might be the most perceptive thing he's ever said. Attempts to classify him on the conventional political spectrum are destined to fail, and attempts to demonize him as some sort of standard Republican bogeyman will inevitably be so over-simplified as to be false. Such efforts assume far more coherence than he possesses.
Good. He clearly "gets" Beck now. But on the political party front, he still can't understand how they can say one thing one day and it's opposite the next with equal fervor.
Add to all of that the fact that this anti-Obama sentiment is being exploited by run-of-the-mill GOP operatives who have no objective other than to undermine Democrats and return the Republicans to power -- manifestly not the goal of many of the protesters -- and it's impossible to define what this movement is or what is driving it. In many ways, its leadership (both organizationally and in the media) is fundamentally at odds with the participants. How can people who cheered on the Bush/Cheney administration and who want to re-install GOP leaders in power (i.e., Fox News, Limbaugh, the right-wing blogosphere, GOP House members) possibly make common cause in any coherent way with those who are in favor of limited federal government power, reduced debt, privacy, and Constitutional protections -- all the things on which the GOP relentlessly waged war for years? In one important sense, the "tea party" movement is similar to the Obama campaign for "change": it stays sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they're part of the same movement.
In fact, they are. Bush's takedown of the country in the name of neoconservative ideology has actually freed the rabid Right from any necessity for clinging to old-fashioned, out-moded intellectual consistency. They are free to believe anything they want to believe, and it can change from day-to-day. Their attempted leadership of the small but noisy right-wing populist revolt that is represented by the Town Howlers and the Birthers and Beck's 9/12ers and all the rest of the right-wing hodge-podge of the ignorant, the racist, and the stupid is perfectly legitimate. These are the people they - the Joe Wilsons and John Cornyns et al - now represent. They are the modern, post-Bush GOP. And they make DFH's look like the clean and sober relics of an earlier, safer, saner time.
They may think that they're exploiting a group of lame, halt, easily manipulated retards but in fact it is (or soon will be) the crazies who are manipulating them. And they're just as pleased as punch. They have been freed from the slavery of coherence and the shackles of intellectual consistency. They can chase all the bogeymen of their nightmares, worship the brightest bauble of the right-wing day, and give full and final vent to every mean, vicious impulse they used to have to control. And get rewarded for it. They don't have to make sense, they only have to echo the nonsensical brain farts of the whackos they follow.
Think about it. The freedom. the fun. They're kids playing in a well-stocked sandbox where all the adult supervision has disappeared and they can say all the dirty words they want because there's no one there to report them to the principal. They can throw sand in the face of the Teacher's Pet, gang up on the wimps, and bully all the girls. It's like...a holiday. You know?
Because as even the most marginally intelligent GOoPers are starting to figure out (even Douchehat gets this much), adults, even crypto-adults, are no longer welcome in the playground GOP. It's Lord of the Flies over there. The mildest and least intellectually challenging political tenets around, the elementary biplaned world of the neocons, are still too structured for the Inhofes and the Coburns. Newt Gingrich is a mealy-mouthed crypto-liberal to them, and John McCain is a math teacher.
The world of the remains of the Old GOP is a D&D world, a world of wizards and warlocks and wars between Men and the Dreadful Things of the Dark Lord. (You know, Libruls and Mooselimbs.) Trying to make sense of this or find a coherent intellectual throughline is an exercise in futility because they won't allow a DM and the rules change with every turn.
The Good News is that this particular snake always ends up swallowing itself. It's so inbred, never aligning itself with anything that isn't pure whack-blooded, that it eventually dies of self-ingestion. That spiral has begun and it won't be long now before we see the Last of the Breed vanishing down its own gullet.
Self-immolation. It's not just for Buddhists any more.
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