“The GOP has taken refuge in cruelty as politics. I’ve wondered for a while why so many conservatives have made a sport of being cruel to Cindy Sheehan. As if losing her son wasn’t enough cruelty.
“You now have the sad Chris ‘Kim Philby’ Hitchens, calling Sheehan a vile anti-semite based on a letter she didn’t write and ABC can’t find.
“If someone asks in future years, when the Conservative movement started to die, well, this would be the moment. When politics trumped human decency.” – Steve Gilliard, via Salon‘s Daou Report
We thought the Conservative movement would die in the 1970’s as well, when Nixon resigned in disgrace. In fact, Jimmy Carter, in his book, wrote that he wanted to run against Reagan because he thought he would be the easiest man to beat. Even if we win handily in the 2006 and 2008 elections, we must always guard against a revival of this kind of reactionary thought.
“Even if we win handily in the 2006 and 2008 elections, we must always guard against a revival of this kind of reactionary thought.”
Indeed. These guys are in it for the long haul. They know their hold on power will come and go. When they have power, they use it ruthlessly and relentlessly to further their cause. Bush is elevating judges that Nixon and Reagan put on the bench. With the accumulation of negatives that Bush has brought on his party, it is likely that we can take back at least some power in ’06 and ’08. We might win a majority in one or both Houses of Congress. We might even win the White House. But Bush has laid a few more bricks in the wall. And they will be back.
Going forward, I think the key thing to remember is that marginalizing conservatism is a prerequisite to advancing liberal ideals. The pendulum will swing our way again, to be sure, but if we want to keep it from swinging back, conservatism must be wiped out. I don’t, btw, mean that in the sense of rounding up conservatives and putting them in camps — that would be, well, conservative. What I do mean is that if we don’t want history to repeat itself every thirty years or so, we must so utterly defeat conservatism in the marketplace of ideas that it joins phlogiston and the flat earth on the rubbish-heap of outworn creeds. We need to push until it is no longer possible to hold conservative ideas without automatically being regarded as a kook by the overwhelming majority of the population.
The alternative is to let them do the same thing to us, and as it happens, they have already succeeded to a large extent. Reagan made “liberal” a term of such contempt that even liberals avoid the term. When was the last time a liberal congresscritter pushed a major program to do something unambiguously good, like ameliorate child poverty? Can’t happen in today’s climate; hatred of the poor is part of the common wisdom. There’s a through the looking glass quality to it for us, because we slept while they worked tirelessly to rehabilitate hatred, fear, and greed as the ultimate virtues in society.
We must work hard to get the pendulum swinging in our direction again, and when it does, we must nail it to the back of the clock. Let the battles of thirty years from now be between liberal liberals and not-quite-as-liberal liberals.
It’s fear. These guys are scared of losing their lives as they know it and they are taking it out on the rewst of us.
Peak oil, environmental pressures, China gaining on us as the economic powerhouse – these guys thought they were the cream of the crop of the “greatest country on earth.” Finding out that Americans are just one country out of many and that they, as the elite, will have to give back most of the wealth they’ve stolen just doesn’t sit well with them. So… denial, anger, and violence, are what we can expect from them.
That’s why we need to keep shaking them.. eventually they’ll have to wake up
Did Chris Hitchens suffer a brain injury. Really, I am serious – what happened to him?
I seriously DON”T KNOW!
He used to have one or two decent articles but lately he has totally gone off the deep end writing negative pieces abotu Cindy.. etc. I had thought he was a moderate but not any more.
alcohol…
Every time someone’s accused of it, the subject at hand vaporizes in the mist of the accused’s denials, which can rarely be skilled or verified enough to discredit the accusation.
Dean was really thrown off track by this for a time in his campaign.
The other nucular option, in defense matters, is anti-Americanism, which I heard on the Tom Hartman rebroadcast this A.M. being levelled at Cindy, again through fraudulent quotes. Tom alas allowed the accuser to read the quotation “just for context” after he’d pointed out that there is no valid source for it and the conservative guest agreed that she got it from a media friend whose own source couldn’t be validated.
That established, she read the quote and they debated the nonexistent issue for some minutes, forcing Tom to say he couldn’t support Cindy in certain elements of the thing she shouldn’t have said if she’d actually said them.
It’s not just our leaders, we need our media voices too to stop actively distributing Republican lies.
What’s really freaky is how much they enjoy being cruel. If you watch most of them, they get great pleasure out of it. I think that’s one reason why the right wing/Republicanism is so attractive to a certain type of person… the same type that would stand behind the big bully while they beat up on some kid, rooting him on and waiting for their chance to kick dirt into the kid’s face too.
That’s also why I don’t look for the movement to die anytime soon, although hopefully some of the less freaky members will leave the party (or turn it around… you never know).
of the Opinion Journal (find the link by yourselves, I don’t want to give him more traffic)
isn’t that called a ‘red herring’? isn’t that what the Repubs have been doing for years?
ooo welfare mothers in Cadillacs-yeah sure.
It’s the politics of resentment.
I used to think that once things began progressing toward justice in this country, slowly yes but at least inching forward that the battle was pretty much over. Okay, I was incredibly dumb but I plead optimism. I used to think most people were basically nice, not I have the feeling that most aren’t. The current crop of right wingers seem like the kids in school who liked to pull the wings off flies, cruelty is fun for them. Now if they can find a religion to hide behind and a political party that supports them, hey, they’re in clover. If we can win back the country I don’t know how to keep it for any length of time against the basic nastiness lurking underneath our culture and our skin. Hmm, sorry, bad day, bad week…