Billary/2008
2007-03-13 19:52:19 UTC
This article pretty much covers all of the hate filled, wacko, extremist
talking points of the left. Everything from religion to economics. Joseph
Stalin himself could not have written a better manifesto. I applaud the
writer! His programmers would be proud of their protégé. He regurgitated
this crap flawlessly, on queue and without remorse. Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap!
talking points of the left. Everything from religion to economics. Joseph
Stalin himself could not have written a better manifesto. I applaud the
writer! His programmers would be proud of their protégé. He regurgitated
this crap flawlessly, on queue and without remorse. Clap! Clap! Clap! Clap!
The Coulterization of the American right
The "faggot" episode isn't about Ann Coulter. It's about the deal
conservatism made with the devil -- a deal that has cost it its soul.
By Gary Kamiya
March 13, 2007 | So Ann Coulter has done it again. She called John
Edwards a "faggot" at a major conservative conference and everyone is
outraged. But do we have to go through this ridiculous charade again?
Nothing's going to happen. This is old and profitable hat for the
shameless buffoon who once compared Hillary Clinton to a prostitute
(when Clinton was first lady, no less) and displayed her keen grasp of
geopolitical strategy after 9/11 by declaiming, "We should invade their
countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
(Following her sage advice, George W. Bush acted on the first two
recommendations, with splendid results, but the third, despite the best
efforts of some of his holy pals, is proving difficult.) We all know
that Coulter will emerge from this episode selling even more books,
appearing on even more right-wing talk shows and being even more
fanatically worshipped by her legions of fans. A few newspapers have
dropped her column, and some GOP presidential candidates condemned her
statement -- who cares? As should be amply clear by now, there is
virtually nothing that Ann Coulter can do that will cause her to be cast
out of the bosom of the American right. And even if she was to lose her
head and cross a line that even she can't cross -- calling Obama a
"nigger" is about the only thing that would do the trick -- a thousand
hissing Coulters would spring up to take her place.
For this isn't really about Coulter at all. This is about a pact the
American right made with the devil, a pact the devil is now coming to
collect on. American conservatism sold its soul to the Coulters and
Limbaughs of the world to gain power, and now that its ideology has been
exposed as empty and its leadership incompetent and corrupt,
free-floating hatred is the only thing it has to offer. The problem, for
the GOP, is that this isn't a winning political strategy anymore -- but
they're stuck with it. They're trapped. They need the bigoted and
reactionary base they helped create, but the very fanaticism that made
the True Believers such potent shock troops will prevent the Republicans
from achieving Karl Rove's dream of long-term GOP domination.
It is a truism that American politics is won in the middle. For a magic
moment, helped immeasurably by 9/11, the GOP was able to convince just
enough centrist Americans that extremists like Coulter and Limbaugh did
in fact share their values. But the spell has worn off, and they have
been exposed as the vacuous bottom-feeders that they are.
It will be objected that Coulter, Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael
Savage and their ilk are just the lunatic fringe of a respectable
movement. But in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe
is respectable. In the surreal parade of Bush administration follies and
Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared several times on Rush Limbaugh's
radio show. Think about this: The holder of the second-highest office in
the land has repeatedly chummed it up with a factually challenged
right-wing hack, a pathetic figure only marginally less creepy than
Coulter. Imagine the reaction if Al Gore, when he was vice president,
had routinely appeared on a radio show hosted by, say, Ward Churchill.
(The comparison is feeble: There really is no left-wing equivalent of
Limbaugh, just as there is no left-wing equivalent of Father Coughlin or
Joe McCarthy.) The entire American political system would melt down.
Beltway wise men would trip on their penny loafers in their haste to
demand Gore's head. Robert Bork would come out of retirement to call for
a coup to restore the caliphate, I mean the Judeo-Christian moral law in
America. Yet the grotesque Cheney-Limbaugh love-in doesn't raise an
eyebrow. We're so inured to the complete convergence of "respectable"
conservatism and reactionary talk-radio ravings that we don't even deem
it worthy of comment.
The right in America has always flirted with various forms of gutter
populism, but its latest incarnation may represent its lowest
limbo-dance yet. It's worth pausing for a moment to recall how this
happened. Newt Gingrich, the adulterous moralist and demagogic hit man
who led the vaunted Republican Revolution of 1994, is largely
responsible for the GOP's debased state, along with evangelical holy
warriors -- let's call them Christo-jihadists -- like Pat Robertson,
Ralph Reed and James Dobson. In a reprise of Nixon's "Southern
strategy," which used racist appeals to white Southerners to devastating
political effect, Gingrich and the Christo-jihadists fired up the
so-called values or social issues conservatives by ranting about guns,
God and gays.
Just as important as Newt and the holy men was what former right-wing
operative David Brock called "the Republican noise machine," the
well-funded media apparatus that ceaselessly broadcasts right-wing
propaganda. Figures like Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and, of
course, Ann Coulter, using the enormous power of the new Fox News
network and of talk radio, whipped their audience into a resentful,
self-righteous fury, raging against "godless secularists" and "liberal
elites" who they blamed for the moral collapse of America. This vicious
culture war played on the fear and confusion of traditional Americans
confronting massive societal and cultural changes -- a process
brilliantly described in Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?"
In fact, the right's culture war was -- and is -- mostly bogus. Most of
the deep societal changes it decried -- the decline of community, the
loss of religious faith, economic insecurity, selfishness, social
atomization, anomie -- cannot be blamed on liberalism: They are products
of modernity itself and of the modern world's triumphant economic
system, capitalism. (Daniel Bell pointed this out more than 30 years ago
in his 1976 classic "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.") And
those changes have been greatly exacerbated by the monopolistic,
heck-of-a-job-Brownie, corporate-crony version of capitalism -- one
loudly championed by, naturally, the GOP. Other aspects of the right's
culture war are simply reactionary and/or unconstitutional, like its
attack on science and its outrageous attempt to tear down the wall
between church and state. There are some culture-war issues, like the
fight over abortion, that are genuine moral cruxes and difficult to
resolve. But even these have been made far more toxic and destructive
than necessary by the right's hysterical use of them as a bludgeon to
attack its enemies.
But if the right's culture war is almost entirely a fraud, and is one
of the major factors behind the unraveling of the American polity, it
paid big political dividends. The right's embrace of "values" allowed it
to stave off what should have been its inexorable decline. If the price
is obeisance to an increasingly vulgar, bigoted, nativist, know-nothing
and theocratic ideology -- well, apparently it is better to survive as a
slimy Gollum hungering after the Ring of Power than not to survive at all.
By rights, American conservatism should be dead or on life support by
now. The ideology has always been incoherent, deeply divided between its
libertarian, free-market wing and its traditionalist, "values" wing. As
George H. Nash noted in his 1976 book "The Conservative Intellectual
Movement in America Since 1945," a shared anti-communism and political
convenience temporarily concealed these profound differences. Ronald
Reagan's anti-communism, and his sunny personality, allowed free-market
conservatives to overlook the fact that government actually grew
enormously on his watch. With a majority of Americans continuing to
believe in Democratic social policies and programs, and demographic
trends running in the Democrats' favor, the right was facing disaster
after Reagan's exit and the fall of communism. It desperately needed a
boogeyman to unify its unruly factions. Fortunately, conjuring up
boogeymen has been a right-wing specialty since the days of the
Know-Nothing movement.
First the right launched the culture war, a key part of which was
demonizing the Clintons. This and a disgraceful Supreme Court decision
sufficed to get a featherweight named George W. Bush named president.
But Bush lived down to his résumé, and after his first year his approval
ratings were tanking. The old culture-war tricks weren't working
anymore; the magic was wearing off. And then a miracle literally fell
from the skies: 9/11.
The terror attacks were just what the right needed. It allowed it to
fold "national security" into its culture war portfolio -- a potent
mixture, especially with Congress and the mainstream media drugged by
patriotic fervor. Islamic terrorism was hastily dressed up as the new
Red Menace, liberals were painted as Chamberlain-like appeasers, and all
was well for a while. In 2004, Bush's strategy of appealing to his base
proved successful, despite his disastrous war on Iraq, and inspired GOP
hopes that Rove's dream of a decades-long realignment might prove true.
But the "Islamofascist" solution to the right's woes proved to be
short-lived. Bush's bungled war on Iraq angered not just the old-style
traditionalists, who tended to be isolationist, but the free-marketers
and libertarians, who seethed as Bush busted the budget and squandered
trillions of dollars on his war of choice. As for the neoconservatives,
who dominated Bush's administration, they never established themselves
as a dominant political force to begin with, and they lost all
credibility after the Iraq debacle.
That left only the base -- the culture warriors for whom the battle over
"values" trumps everything else, the zealots who brook no compromise.
The problem is, no political movement led by its most extreme elements
can win. The right's culture warriors are too manifestly unhinged; their
obsessive mean-spiritedness, more than their actual positions, leaves
them out of the American mainstream, even out of the mainstream of the
Republican Party. A movement figuratively led by the likes of Ann
Coulter (or literally by Newt Gingrich, who is lurking on the sidelines,
ready to run) cannot win a general election in this country. A red,
white and blue banner inscribed with "Faggot!" may rally the hardcore,
but most Americans will reject a politics based on hate and fear.
And they will do so in large part because they've been there and done
that. The disastrous Bush presidency, which is certain to be recorded as
one of the worst in American history, managed to stay politically afloat
by making primal appeals to fear, revenge and patriotism. But like the
boy who cried "wolf" -- or, in this case, "terrorism!" -- once too
often, it has used up its fearmongering capital.
Episodes like the Coulter debacle make it all too clear, especially to
the swing and independent voters and pragmatic Republicans who will
decide the election, that the GOP's base (which, by the way, is what
"al-Qaida" means in Arabic) is a rather scary group. The GOP is reaping
what it has sown. It preached hatred, fear and resentment for years, it
whipped up the troops with apocalyptic rhetoric, and now it has created
a core constituency that only too obviously reflects that negativity.
Indeed, the Republican base increasingly defines itself not by positive
values, which a true conservatism would affirm and which could hold
broad appeal, but only by its partisan hatreds.
The sorry state of contemporary conservatism shows that there is an
innate danger to civil society in letting loose the dogs of "values" --
especially right-wing values. Because conservatives tend to believe more
than liberals in good and evil, in a clear-cut, transcendental morality,
a values-based politics for them quickly acquires not just an
authoritarian cast, but an almost religious one. As we learned on 9/11,
and observe every day in Iraq, religious zealotry is not conducive to
reasoned discussions. When you have God, right and patriarchal authority
on your side, anything goes. The result, among other things, is ugly
psychosexual mudslinging like Coulter's. As my Salon colleague Glenn
Greenwald has pointed out, the right's strategy is "to feminize ... all
male Democratic or liberal political leaders. For multiple reasons,
nobody does that more effectively or audaciously than Coulter, which is
why they need her so desperately and will never jettison her."
Yet despite their supposed beliefs, a kind of nihilism, an intellectual
sterility, emanates from the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world. This
is in part due to the fact that they are, at bottom, entertainers,
stand-up comedians of resentment. Their riffs are so facile and endless
that they devour whatever actual beliefs supposedly stand behind them.
Incapable of compromise or nuance, lashing out robotically, never
finding common ground or examining their own ideas, they are shills of
negativity, forever battling cartoonish monsters in a lurid,
increasingly unrecognizable world. And most Americans, even conservative
ones who may share some of their putative positions, are tired of their
glib, empty paranoia. If these are the messengers, there must be
something wrong with the message.
The GOP brain trust presumably knows this -- but it doesn't have any
other cards to play. And as the feebleness of the right's agenda becomes
more and more apparent, we can expect the noise from figures like
Coulter and Limbaugh to get louder and louder. But the tactic will not
work -- in fact, it is likely to backfire. And if the Republicans go
down big in 2008, conservatives will finally be forced to confront the
Frankenstein monster they created -- and decide whether they dare get
rid of it before it consigns their movement to oblivion. Based on their
recent history, I don't think they have the common sense to take out the
garbage.
The "faggot" episode isn't about Ann Coulter. It's about the deal
conservatism made with the devil -- a deal that has cost it its soul.
By Gary Kamiya
March 13, 2007 | So Ann Coulter has done it again. She called John
Edwards a "faggot" at a major conservative conference and everyone is
outraged. But do we have to go through this ridiculous charade again?
Nothing's going to happen. This is old and profitable hat for the
shameless buffoon who once compared Hillary Clinton to a prostitute
(when Clinton was first lady, no less) and displayed her keen grasp of
geopolitical strategy after 9/11 by declaiming, "We should invade their
countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
(Following her sage advice, George W. Bush acted on the first two
recommendations, with splendid results, but the third, despite the best
efforts of some of his holy pals, is proving difficult.) We all know
that Coulter will emerge from this episode selling even more books,
appearing on even more right-wing talk shows and being even more
fanatically worshipped by her legions of fans. A few newspapers have
dropped her column, and some GOP presidential candidates condemned her
statement -- who cares? As should be amply clear by now, there is
virtually nothing that Ann Coulter can do that will cause her to be cast
out of the bosom of the American right. And even if she was to lose her
head and cross a line that even she can't cross -- calling Obama a
"nigger" is about the only thing that would do the trick -- a thousand
hissing Coulters would spring up to take her place.
For this isn't really about Coulter at all. This is about a pact the
American right made with the devil, a pact the devil is now coming to
collect on. American conservatism sold its soul to the Coulters and
Limbaughs of the world to gain power, and now that its ideology has been
exposed as empty and its leadership incompetent and corrupt,
free-floating hatred is the only thing it has to offer. The problem, for
the GOP, is that this isn't a winning political strategy anymore -- but
they're stuck with it. They're trapped. They need the bigoted and
reactionary base they helped create, but the very fanaticism that made
the True Believers such potent shock troops will prevent the Republicans
from achieving Karl Rove's dream of long-term GOP domination.
It is a truism that American politics is won in the middle. For a magic
moment, helped immeasurably by 9/11, the GOP was able to convince just
enough centrist Americans that extremists like Coulter and Limbaugh did
in fact share their values. But the spell has worn off, and they have
been exposed as the vacuous bottom-feeders that they are.
It will be objected that Coulter, Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael
Savage and their ilk are just the lunatic fringe of a respectable
movement. But in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe
is respectable. In the surreal parade of Bush administration follies and
Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared several times on Rush Limbaugh's
radio show. Think about this: The holder of the second-highest office in
the land has repeatedly chummed it up with a factually challenged
right-wing hack, a pathetic figure only marginally less creepy than
Coulter. Imagine the reaction if Al Gore, when he was vice president,
had routinely appeared on a radio show hosted by, say, Ward Churchill.
(The comparison is feeble: There really is no left-wing equivalent of
Limbaugh, just as there is no left-wing equivalent of Father Coughlin or
Joe McCarthy.) The entire American political system would melt down.
Beltway wise men would trip on their penny loafers in their haste to
demand Gore's head. Robert Bork would come out of retirement to call for
a coup to restore the caliphate, I mean the Judeo-Christian moral law in
America. Yet the grotesque Cheney-Limbaugh love-in doesn't raise an
eyebrow. We're so inured to the complete convergence of "respectable"
conservatism and reactionary talk-radio ravings that we don't even deem
it worthy of comment.
The right in America has always flirted with various forms of gutter
populism, but its latest incarnation may represent its lowest
limbo-dance yet. It's worth pausing for a moment to recall how this
happened. Newt Gingrich, the adulterous moralist and demagogic hit man
who led the vaunted Republican Revolution of 1994, is largely
responsible for the GOP's debased state, along with evangelical holy
warriors -- let's call them Christo-jihadists -- like Pat Robertson,
Ralph Reed and James Dobson. In a reprise of Nixon's "Southern
strategy," which used racist appeals to white Southerners to devastating
political effect, Gingrich and the Christo-jihadists fired up the
so-called values or social issues conservatives by ranting about guns,
God and gays.
Just as important as Newt and the holy men was what former right-wing
operative David Brock called "the Republican noise machine," the
well-funded media apparatus that ceaselessly broadcasts right-wing
propaganda. Figures like Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and, of
course, Ann Coulter, using the enormous power of the new Fox News
network and of talk radio, whipped their audience into a resentful,
self-righteous fury, raging against "godless secularists" and "liberal
elites" who they blamed for the moral collapse of America. This vicious
culture war played on the fear and confusion of traditional Americans
confronting massive societal and cultural changes -- a process
brilliantly described in Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?"
In fact, the right's culture war was -- and is -- mostly bogus. Most of
the deep societal changes it decried -- the decline of community, the
loss of religious faith, economic insecurity, selfishness, social
atomization, anomie -- cannot be blamed on liberalism: They are products
of modernity itself and of the modern world's triumphant economic
system, capitalism. (Daniel Bell pointed this out more than 30 years ago
in his 1976 classic "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.") And
those changes have been greatly exacerbated by the monopolistic,
heck-of-a-job-Brownie, corporate-crony version of capitalism -- one
loudly championed by, naturally, the GOP. Other aspects of the right's
culture war are simply reactionary and/or unconstitutional, like its
attack on science and its outrageous attempt to tear down the wall
between church and state. There are some culture-war issues, like the
fight over abortion, that are genuine moral cruxes and difficult to
resolve. But even these have been made far more toxic and destructive
than necessary by the right's hysterical use of them as a bludgeon to
attack its enemies.
But if the right's culture war is almost entirely a fraud, and is one
of the major factors behind the unraveling of the American polity, it
paid big political dividends. The right's embrace of "values" allowed it
to stave off what should have been its inexorable decline. If the price
is obeisance to an increasingly vulgar, bigoted, nativist, know-nothing
and theocratic ideology -- well, apparently it is better to survive as a
slimy Gollum hungering after the Ring of Power than not to survive at all.
By rights, American conservatism should be dead or on life support by
now. The ideology has always been incoherent, deeply divided between its
libertarian, free-market wing and its traditionalist, "values" wing. As
George H. Nash noted in his 1976 book "The Conservative Intellectual
Movement in America Since 1945," a shared anti-communism and political
convenience temporarily concealed these profound differences. Ronald
Reagan's anti-communism, and his sunny personality, allowed free-market
conservatives to overlook the fact that government actually grew
enormously on his watch. With a majority of Americans continuing to
believe in Democratic social policies and programs, and demographic
trends running in the Democrats' favor, the right was facing disaster
after Reagan's exit and the fall of communism. It desperately needed a
boogeyman to unify its unruly factions. Fortunately, conjuring up
boogeymen has been a right-wing specialty since the days of the
Know-Nothing movement.
First the right launched the culture war, a key part of which was
demonizing the Clintons. This and a disgraceful Supreme Court decision
sufficed to get a featherweight named George W. Bush named president.
But Bush lived down to his résumé, and after his first year his approval
ratings were tanking. The old culture-war tricks weren't working
anymore; the magic was wearing off. And then a miracle literally fell
from the skies: 9/11.
The terror attacks were just what the right needed. It allowed it to
fold "national security" into its culture war portfolio -- a potent
mixture, especially with Congress and the mainstream media drugged by
patriotic fervor. Islamic terrorism was hastily dressed up as the new
Red Menace, liberals were painted as Chamberlain-like appeasers, and all
was well for a while. In 2004, Bush's strategy of appealing to his base
proved successful, despite his disastrous war on Iraq, and inspired GOP
hopes that Rove's dream of a decades-long realignment might prove true.
But the "Islamofascist" solution to the right's woes proved to be
short-lived. Bush's bungled war on Iraq angered not just the old-style
traditionalists, who tended to be isolationist, but the free-marketers
and libertarians, who seethed as Bush busted the budget and squandered
trillions of dollars on his war of choice. As for the neoconservatives,
who dominated Bush's administration, they never established themselves
as a dominant political force to begin with, and they lost all
credibility after the Iraq debacle.
That left only the base -- the culture warriors for whom the battle over
"values" trumps everything else, the zealots who brook no compromise.
The problem is, no political movement led by its most extreme elements
can win. The right's culture warriors are too manifestly unhinged; their
obsessive mean-spiritedness, more than their actual positions, leaves
them out of the American mainstream, even out of the mainstream of the
Republican Party. A movement figuratively led by the likes of Ann
Coulter (or literally by Newt Gingrich, who is lurking on the sidelines,
ready to run) cannot win a general election in this country. A red,
white and blue banner inscribed with "Faggot!" may rally the hardcore,
but most Americans will reject a politics based on hate and fear.
And they will do so in large part because they've been there and done
that. The disastrous Bush presidency, which is certain to be recorded as
one of the worst in American history, managed to stay politically afloat
by making primal appeals to fear, revenge and patriotism. But like the
boy who cried "wolf" -- or, in this case, "terrorism!" -- once too
often, it has used up its fearmongering capital.
Episodes like the Coulter debacle make it all too clear, especially to
the swing and independent voters and pragmatic Republicans who will
decide the election, that the GOP's base (which, by the way, is what
"al-Qaida" means in Arabic) is a rather scary group. The GOP is reaping
what it has sown. It preached hatred, fear and resentment for years, it
whipped up the troops with apocalyptic rhetoric, and now it has created
a core constituency that only too obviously reflects that negativity.
Indeed, the Republican base increasingly defines itself not by positive
values, which a true conservatism would affirm and which could hold
broad appeal, but only by its partisan hatreds.
The sorry state of contemporary conservatism shows that there is an
innate danger to civil society in letting loose the dogs of "values" --
especially right-wing values. Because conservatives tend to believe more
than liberals in good and evil, in a clear-cut, transcendental morality,
a values-based politics for them quickly acquires not just an
authoritarian cast, but an almost religious one. As we learned on 9/11,
and observe every day in Iraq, religious zealotry is not conducive to
reasoned discussions. When you have God, right and patriarchal authority
on your side, anything goes. The result, among other things, is ugly
psychosexual mudslinging like Coulter's. As my Salon colleague Glenn
Greenwald has pointed out, the right's strategy is "to feminize ... all
male Democratic or liberal political leaders. For multiple reasons,
nobody does that more effectively or audaciously than Coulter, which is
why they need her so desperately and will never jettison her."
Yet despite their supposed beliefs, a kind of nihilism, an intellectual
sterility, emanates from the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world. This
is in part due to the fact that they are, at bottom, entertainers,
stand-up comedians of resentment. Their riffs are so facile and endless
that they devour whatever actual beliefs supposedly stand behind them.
Incapable of compromise or nuance, lashing out robotically, never
finding common ground or examining their own ideas, they are shills of
negativity, forever battling cartoonish monsters in a lurid,
increasingly unrecognizable world. And most Americans, even conservative
ones who may share some of their putative positions, are tired of their
glib, empty paranoia. If these are the messengers, there must be
something wrong with the message.
The GOP brain trust presumably knows this -- but it doesn't have any
other cards to play. And as the feebleness of the right's agenda becomes
more and more apparent, we can expect the noise from figures like
Coulter and Limbaugh to get louder and louder. But the tactic will not
work -- in fact, it is likely to backfire. And if the Republicans go
down big in 2008, conservatives will finally be forced to confront the
Frankenstein monster they created -- and decide whether they dare get
rid of it before it consigns their movement to oblivion. Based on their
recent history, I don't think they have the common sense to take out the
garbage.