I once defined Palinism as Bushism stripped of all its redeeming features. I think that’s still true, but now it’s the entire Republican Party that is Bushism stripped of its redeeming features. It’s interesting to look back at how this unfolded. As I wrote back in 2010, President Bush weaponized the stupid, but it took McCain to deploy it.
What happened, I believe, is that something broke on the right when they were forced to spend September and October of 2008 pretending that it would be okay if Sarah Palin were elected vice-president. The only way to maintain that stance was to jettison all the normal standards we have for holding such a high office. But it also entailed simply insisting that the truth doesn’t matter.
And so, now, seven years down the road, it’s gotten to the point that Republicans have realized that they can say anything they want and just blame media bias if anyone calls them on their lies.
Palin basically invented this is a survival strategy after she fell on her face in her first big interview with Katie Couric. It’s now more than a survival strategy. It’s the Republican Party’s modus operandi.
Does the GOP have nowhere to go but up? Or is extinction a possibility? I would like to hear from our resident political analysts. I see similarities to 1856 & 1860, but I’m the first to admit that I’m a novice at this.
The demise of most institutions after they begin cracking and fraying and losing their original purpose for existing takes longer than predicted or projected. During that process they can also have periods when they seem to be rejuvenated, but the substructure remains rotten and all the pretty new window dressings won’t stop it from crashing down; sometimes suddenly and other times a slow crumbling.
Ah! Classic mathematical catastrophe theory! The precise point is probabilistic but the danger zones can be located analytically. You can’t tell when the inverted cone is going to topple, but you know it will.
I’m going with extinction. The breaking of the Faustian bargain between self-interested elites and reactionary working class whites can only go one way if you start actually counting voters.
http://www.boomantribune.com/comments/2015/10/10/1826/2544/6#6
Digging into the links, there’s an alleged quote where Bush supposedly said he wouldn’t vote for the McCain/Palin ticket because it was so irresponsible to put someone like that so close to the presidency. Might be plausible if great-daddy Bush hadn’t done essentially the same thing.
There have been a few other VP nominees that were also dangerously irresponsible choices. Shudder to think what a President Lieberman would have done in the ME.
Or here!
But at least he spoke in natural sentences.
It’s as if they believe that lipstick and skirts were the only impediments to a President Palin. Or that the quotient of suckers in America can’t possibly be less than 50%.
If often seems depressingly higher.
It’s not, but we do rarely get a glimpse of the baseline for the sucker population as it gets contaminated by so many, most propagandistic, variables such as religion, political party ID, and striving to be “cool.”
I remember the “lipstick on a pig” controversy. But no one pointed out the dangers of a President with the brains of a Chihuahua. (My apologies to dog lovers.)
One sucker a minute times 525,600 minutes in a year… Since 1869… Carry the nincompoops… I only get about 76 million not counting attrition.
I’m guessing there must be a sucker born at most every 15 seconds and probably much less.
Maybe you could remind me of some of the redeeming features of W.
Well, he did make a point more than once of specifically defending Islam and reminding people that it was only a small minority of Muslims who were militant radicals. I mean, it seems like that sort of thing should be a basic standard of behavior for a US president, but in comparison to this mob …
That’s all I can come up with, though.
aid to Africa for AIDS and Medicare Part D – although that was poorly executed it was a good idea
NCLB was another well-meaning idea that was horribly executed.
Er, no. That was the camel’s nose.
The reprehensible violence against Iraq was also poorly executed.
so you’re saying that it was a good idea to invade Iraq? that’s a hell of a statement
Obviously you don’t get it. Tongue in check: got it now? They couldn’t even plan their most obvious crimes well.
He was horrible beyond description but at least he actually lived and worked within the real political world. He could have dinner with foreign nationals, wear a suit, shake hands, speak reasonably coherently behind closed doors; he understood that there’s a Senate and a House and bills that become laws and executive orders and a Justice Department and a Foreign Relations Committee. He spent his life within the Eastern establishment; he went to Yale (he was a C-student but at least he was there; he knows what it is).
Trump, Carson, Palin etc. pass none of these tests. They’re rubes, vulgarians; as ignorant as somebody you pull randomly from a rural Walmart parking lot. It’s scary.
Yes, he kept up the illusion. Or maybe more correctly: the media and elite conspired to give the impression that he was working within sane parameters. Of course he wasn’t. He does have a patina of posh respectability, though, a huge back account and a famous daddy.
Totally nailed it. And if you want to see the moment we left orbit just watch the expression on poor Katie Couric’s face. Priceless.
Trump watched the whole thing and said to himself, “OK, so why not me?” So he comes along and erects his own flashy condominium in the middle of the site zoned ‘fact-free’ by consent of the media. Next door to Ben Carson’s nutritional supplement marketing agency.
Bad luck for the GOP, eh? Why don’t these numskulls ever think a thing through to its inevitable conclusion?
B/C thinking is hard work. Too many potential variables to consider.
I recall the morning shortly after the invasion of Iraq that I said to a co-worker, “You know that Bush doesn’t have an exit strategy, don’t you?” He said, “Then what’s going to happen?” I shrugged, “Feel free to guess.” The blood drained a bit out of his face, and he said, “Does it mean were screwed?” “Pretty much.”
WaPo:
Billmon:
Every brand of fascism is different.
Trump’s enforcers will be camoshirts with AR15’s.
Quintessentially American fascism.
I still believe that Trump entered this race as way to clear out the radicals on the right for Hillary, but he’s staying in the race because a majority of primary voters actually buy his schtick (and his books!). In the end, I think having Trump as an opponent favors the Democrats; although there will be 47% of the electorate that votes for democrats or the GOP regardless, it is that 6% in the middle that will side with sanity. Additionally, I think a candidate like Trump will move the ratings dials, I’m not sure that it will move GOP voters as strongly as it will Democratic voters who actually enjoy keeping a democracy in place.
I guess the republicans have been reading too much Neitsche.
Only the back of cereal box or Reader’s Digest version.
If that. I think it’s funny that these crazies, in their own way, have the similar view of truth as some of my English and philosophy dept. colleagues, who are about as far from right wing “thought” as one could possibly get.
Yes, the “Nietzsche for Dummies” edition would be far too advanced…
Of course, The Big N has famously been appropriated by some other big league authoritarian nationalists as well…Sieg Heil!
Well, if one hasn’t read a serious Josef Goebbels biography by now, it’s well past time to do so. Mass authoritarian movements long ago understood that “facts” and “truth” were malleable, and certainly needed to be dispensed with as standards of thought and behavior.
We are watching our own rightwing nationalist authoritarian movement piece by piece dispense with truth and factual accuracy; instead “conservatives” have deployed the Big Lie on a variety of fronts—global warming is a hoax, tax cuts raise revenue, guns make us safer, Saddam’s nukes, etc, etc. And smaller lies are deployed by Repubs on a daily level as well—such as “Planned Parenthood sold babies organs for profit!” To work, the Big Lie must be a total falsehood and it must be continually repeated.
What Goebbels would have given for the twitter machine and facebook! Daily lies fed instantaneously to citizens for immediate consumption. Goebbels controlled the state media monopoly, of course, but it’s hard to see that today’s Repub Big Lie strategy is somehow failing as a result of courageous reporting by our useless corporate media. The hapless journalists are flummoxed to deal with the torrent of lies, if they even wanted to confront them, which I doubt. And our conservatives do have their own Noise Machine, which operates in some way as a conservative media monopoly, especially in radio, the mass media technology of Goebbels’ day.
Of course, we could all see this coming with the massive campaign of lies that Rmoney ran, and got away with. Whatever was the basis of Obama’s victory, it didn’t have anything to do with citizens understanding any facts, since the water had been so polluted by Repub lying that very few could possibly know the “facts”. And “conservative” voters are long past caring.
Thus, the ignominious end of the “marketplace of ideas” theory of the First Amendment—that lies will be exposed by debate and discussion and the truth will out. Who in God’s name thinks that is now occurring? Or that there is any mechanism for it to occur?
If one thing is clear, it is that the “conservative” movement has no shame. Like Goebbels, they will literally say anything if it will mislead rubes and propel them to power. From absurd nonsense about “Syrian baby terrorists!” to “88% of white murders are committed by blacks!”, we live in our own Goebbelsian Era. Lie piled on lie, ad infinitum.
is excellent, and this analysis in it of how the worse-than-useless (i.e., doing actual harm) corporate media got to be that way, abdicating their 4th-Estate duty (which, uniquely among secular institutions, merited their very own clause in the 1st Amendment) along the way [my emphasis added]:
Very nicely done by Taibbi. Excerpts don’t do justice to the whole article. The conclusion is sobering and frightening.
this is should be more reliable 🙂
cnc turning parts