(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
.
Doghouse Riley points out that the Village courtier media is scrambling to provide a figleaf, now that the GOP emperor’s new clothes have been exposed, not to mention some huge pasty-white arses:
… I don’t wanna hear about “how rapidly public opinion has changed.” Public opinion is an ass, kept around to do mule work when you people need it. Ten or fifteen or forty or fifty years of denying civil rights has gone on with your help. Hell, Ralph Fucking Reed is still on the Sundays, and if there’s a stronger argument against the existence of a benevolent God at the moment I can’t think of it. If th’ teevee news had had the balls to call this–or much else–as it is, it’s a good bet those Americans whose opinions are changing fast enough to make their heads spin, assuming their heads are involved in their decisions, would have been forced to make the choice years ago.
But we couldn’t treat gay rights as an ethical slash legal problem with a pretty straightforward answer in The Land of Freedom because the Republican party wanted to use it as an issue. Now that much of the party’s “intellectual” platoon wants out from under the clear Public Good of marriage equality has suddenly become inevitable, somehow, “no matter what the Court decides.”
Fuck that. This is getting on the right side of history before it rips a hole in your pocket. (Fuck the Clintons, while we’re at it.) Go on insisting that politicians aren’t supposed to show courage, or independent thought, if you want. Just don’t hand ’em a Bush Presidential Medal of Approval after the fact.
The Republican party cannot live without its Backwoods Bronze Age wing. At least not on election day. It’s in desperate need of cover. Unlike forty years ago, it doesn’t have a race card to play. It wants to do nothing and be applauded for its progressiveness. Talking about how public opinion has transformed itself, or how cool and happenin’ all the Youngs are, ignores who made all this necessary….
And Jon Chait, at NYMag, explains the “Next Stage for Gay Rights: Conservative Amnesia“:
It took decades for the civil-rights movement to prevail legally, and decades more for it to embed itself within the political fabric in order to occupy its current position as so obviously correct and noncontroversial that nobody is willing to admit that their side actually opposed it. The gay-rights cause is advancing much more rapidly (in part, perhaps, because the historical precedent of the civil-rights movement looms so large). A welcome, albeit hilarious, side effect is that the cycle is also proceeding at a breakneck pace. Half a century had to pass between the era when National Review’s editor endorsed segregation and its publisher wrote a cover story calling for Republicans to bring southern whites into their fold by attacking civil rights, and the present day, when National Review can pretend none of these things happened…
Open Thread: That GOP Hobbyhorse Is Dead, But Our Collective Memories Aren’tPost + Comments (49)