Last word on the DAR debate goes to Charlie Pierce, who is old like me, and remembers these monsters from their earlier crimes against humanity and the American system of government:
… [W]e must pause right here at the top to commend the Wingnut Undead for their lively presentations last night at the 9,875th of 10,623 scheduled Republican debates. Given the sponsorship of the vampire clans at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, it’s true that the only way you could have kept them out of Constitution Hall would have been to garland the joint with garlic. But, mother of mercy…
__
Edwin Fking Meese?
__
The man who was breaking the heads of the civilly disobedient in Berkeley forty-one years before the Cal-Davis cops discovered what fun chemical weapons are? Ronald Reagan’s devoted porn sleuth? (Elsewhere on The Meese Commission was Father Bruce Ritter, the famous priest who ministered to the runaways in Times Square, and the angry prophet against neon-lit sleaze, who later was discovered to have been sharing his penis, as well as the Lord’s grace, with his charges.) The attorney-general who gave the Iran-Contra crooks just enough time to do the shredding? The man who once said that Miranda protects only the guilty, that the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence was a”pro-lesbian” group, and that employers should be able to discriminate against employees with AIDS if the employer decides he’s protecting the public health? I’d even forgotten how very much I disliked this guy, and now here he comes, suddenly appearing in the present, with Fred Kagan, and the chin-impaired sadist Marc Thiessen, and Paul (My War, Your Kids) Wolfowitz, and Meese gets the first question of the night? It was like seeing Bela Lugosi turn up in the newest Twilight film.
__
Unsurprisingly, Meese, who never met a civil liberty he wouldn’t feed to his fish, asked the assembled candidates to stand up and cheer for the Patriot Act, which Ron Paul declined to do, and about which Jon Huntsman waxed thoughtful before rising about halfway and giving a rhetorical golf-clap… Everybody else reminded us that there are bad people who want to kill us. Meese returned to the coffin full of his native earth and we were off for the rest of the proceedings…
To repeat myself: No matter what your totebagger “thoughtful centrist” aunt may have been told by dishonest hacks like David Frum, David Brooks, and the other spineless contenders for Dean Broder’s Commode of Centrist Thoughtfulness, the Republican Party has not recently been stolen by a batch of half-witted bigots, xenophobes, authoritarians, and garden-variety grifters. They’ve had control of the GOP wheel for more than 40 years, at least since Nixon’s triumphant accession to the Oval Office with the help of many of these same fine Heritage Institute ‘statesmen’. They were bad people when they were interning during Watergate, they were bad people when they used Reagan as a figurehead to start the full-scale authoritarian takeover and banana-republic-style looting of our national treasury, and they remain Bad People in Charge even unto this very day.
Anybody who votes for a modern Republican is voting for a Bad Person (h/t Driftglass).
AA+ Bonds
The next time anyone feels moved to say anything nice about Victor Davis Hanson, remember that his office at the Hoover Institution is right next to Ed Meese’s and they’re best friends and have the same views about history
me
According to Wikipedia, Meese has been feeding at the wingnut welfare trough for 23 years now. He’s even a fellow at the Discovery Institute.
Davis X. Machina
Just wanted to step in and say that both parties are the same, and the Republicans are just Democrats with enough balls to do what they’re all thinking. Ed Meese and Eric Holder just differ in degree.
(I don’t believe it for a minute, but I’m sufficiently public-spirited to get that one out of the way right up front, and keep the comments under 150 or so, freeing up the collected energies of the Juicers for creative approaches to turkey leftovers…)
S. cerevisiae
Ed Meese and James Watt should be enough to remind anyone how bad the Reagan years were. I have tried to forget.
Redshift
On a related note, I was just reading the New Yorker article about Planned Parenthood, and I recommend it highly. I hadn’t realized that abortion was turned into a partisan issue by Nixon, as a complement to the Southern Strategy, solely for the purpose of splitting Catholics from the Democrats. (And later taken up by Jerry Falwell to do the same for evangelicals.) It’s hard to imagine the amount of harm they have done in pursuit of power.
Bad people, indeed.
very reverend crimson fire of compassion
These are, objectively, the forces of evil. It sounds bizarre and melodramatic to state it out loud, but it remains the simple fact. These are evil people, whose lives are given to the service of evil. Dress it in any ideology you care to, call it by any name that pleases you, it still comes down to the willingness to harm others in the pursuit of power, then using that power to further harm others in the pursuit of yet more power. Evil.
The Ancient Randonneur
Ed Meese: The guy who makes John Ashcroft look like a piker.
cathyx
It finally dawned on me why they are having so many debates. It’s the best way to force the crazycream to rise to the top of the milk jug.
MikeJ
@The Ancient Randonneur: Ashcroft actually refused to approve warrentless wiretapping. He was still evil in plenty of ways, but he had at least one moment of less than evilness.
Yutsano
@MikeJ: Ashcroft was a tool in many ways (covering up the statue of Justice? REALLY?) but his refusal to go with Gonzo’s evil scheme while incapacitated in the hospital says a lot about the man.
parsimon
This is roughly what I said to my “I’ll vote against all the incumbents” brother the other day, though I went a bit farther, and said that he himself would be
a bad personmaking a very big mistake if he voted for a Republican.It seemed to give him pause.
shan
You forgot to mention Wolfowitz’s girl friend Riza. Riza was born in Libya, a British citizen, allowed to roam about the pentagon with Cheney’s spawn without any formal security clearance. Wolfowitz also arranged a job for Riza at the world bank that ultimately caused his resignation. Wolfowitz is pure wingnut rot.
moonbat
Ahhh, James Watt the Interior Secretary under St. Ronald who said in front of a Senate committee that Jesus would return as soon as the last tree was cut down. Consider him the father of the dominionist, climate denier, apocalyptic freaks we have all around us today.
Blech! I need another shower….
Kyle
Yes, and they’re called ‘Republicans’. You have much more chance of being killed by an unsafe product or workplace, tainted factory food, corporate pollution, lack of health care or a trigger-happy thug cop than by Al Quaeda.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kyle:
Just this.
Meese needs to be dealt with the way the Italians dealt with Mussolini, and the Romanians dealt with Ceausescu.
Rihilism
@Redshift: Most people I’ve talked to about abortion issues aren’t familiar with this information. Abortion was considered a Catholic thing and wasn’t part of evangelical orthodoxy until Falwell decided to make it part of the Christian Coalition as a means to motivate the religious zealot base for Raygun.
It’s disheartening to know how few people truly remember, or bother to educate themselves regarding the sordid histories behind some the right’s more nefarious players.
No list could be complete without Cheney. He was right in the middle of the scumbags. Here was a “man” who voted in favor of Apartheid and the South African government and considered the ANC and Mandela terrorists (go figure). At the time of his nomination, on a blog I asked how our future Vice President would be able to look Mandela in the eye as one of those who supported keeping Mandela in prison (I believe my post was deleted as too inflammatory). Nelson Fucking Mandela! And yet here was Cheney being touted as some mature statesman-like figure by the MSM, rather than the lying, petty, little coward that anyone with any knowledge of his history knew him to be.
So, yeah, Ed Fucking Meese? I’m not in the least bit surprised…
Rihilism
@moonbat: With Watt, I’d recommend a Silkwood shower…
pluege
Anybody who votes for a modern Republican is voting for a Bad Person.
doesn’t take voting republican to be a bad person. Identifying in any way makes one a bad person. The quintessential defining characteristic of the republican personality is being an indecent person. Or said more precisely:
bad people identify with being republican.
WereBear
Oh, that Charles Pierce!
Chris
Even before that, they were still in the party and they were still exerting influence. The hardcore unrepentant Gilded Ager/antidemocratic fringe was always part and parcel of the GOP. You’d probably have to go back to Reconstruction to find a time when they weren’t.
That’s a huge difference between Republicans and Democrats: even in their most liberal/moderate incarnation, in the Eisenhower/Rockefeller years, they never cut themselves off from their crazy/evil ones, the Bircher/McCarthyist/right wing nutjob fringe. They didn’t let them govern, and occasionally they turned against individual leaders (McCarthy, Nixon) – after those leaders had become irrevocably tainted, mind you.
But they never tried to purge that fringe the way we did to the far left in the early 1950s, and they never led the charge against them on an issue that really mattered to them the way we did to the Dixiecrats in the 1960s. They crazy/evil ones were too reliable a source of partisan support for them to go without.
BruinKid
[insert Ron Paul fanboy comment here]
The people I know who’ve become Ron Paul fans just cannot be reasoned with. They keep pointing to his sane views on foreign policy and terrorism, fine, but then try to justify his insane views on the economy and how ending the Fed is the solution to all our problems. This is the latest stuff they’re passing around online.
I’ve tried explaining how leaving it up to the corporation to police themselves is NOT a good idea, but they just don’t seem to get it, and then start ranting about Obama being bought and paid for by Wall Street. :-/
celiadexter
A benefit of being of a certain age is that, if one was paying attention, one understands the history of these people and how little “we” seem to have learned. The cynical, amoral, evil Republican Party goes back to before Nixon and probably before McCarthy. The only difference is that through the 1960s and even early ’70s there were a few Republicans who were still decent. But after Nixon, no more.
driftglass
Bo-Ya!
Anne Laurie
@driftglass: Fix’t?
Did not mean to steal thunder, seriously.
How’d “Blanket the Earth” go, in your precincts?
Ruckus
@celiadexter:
None of the party rethuglicans were decent by human standards but only by comparison to the insane branch. Conservatives have always been evil. They are always trying to turn back time, to when they had more control(and maybe didn’t look like such raging assholes). Time may be a fungible substance but not that fungible.
Rihilism
A bit OT, but has anyone ever tried to comment at Pierce’s place. Thought about doing it but it looks like you need a Facebook account? Personally, I refuse to do this. That sucks…
William Hurley
Truer words are rarely spoken.
driftglass
@Anne Laurie: No worries & I was being perfectly sincere. I liked what you & Charlie wrote and wanted to give it a cheer :-)
I am in downstate IL right now and have no direct intel about how BtE is going in Chicago.
xian
@AA+ Bonds: god, when would anyone be moved to say something nice about Victor Davis Hanson?
xian
@Ruckus: that seems to be the premise of “The Reactionary Mind,” a book I just received for my birthday (thanks @jac!) and look forward to reading. It may cure me of my “there is a decent side to conservatism” delusion (I’m starting to think that decent side is the side called “liberalism”). maybe Obama should read it too.