Let’s make it 3-0.
Sorry Mr. Goldwater, You’re Not On The List
In my experience one of the great pleasures of modern life is to scan rightwing comment threads after a post about Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh. At least since Palinmania! the same scene replays itself almost every time. For a while the commenters mostly agree that liberals are worse than cancer. Sadly, the happy reverie breaks as soon as some well-meaning board regular gently suggests that lining up behind such obvious idiots may prove less than useful, even taking into account that they piss off liberals. Inevitably commenter X (let’s call him ‘David Frum’) supported Republicans all his life and voted for Bush twice, for all the good that does him. Without fail the thread devolves into a prolonged search for why X can be dismissed.
Almost invariably the true believers bring up a wingnut litimus test that I call The List. D.F. must simultaneously oppose abortion (always), support torture, wiretapping and aggressive war, question evolution and doubt global warming, fear muslims, hate taxes and really hate government healthcare. If D.F. fails a single point on the list then he’s clearly a bogus conservative, anathema and unwelcome to taint the pristine boards with his heterodoxy. The question of the day (e.g., did Sarah Palin harm the ticket) usually makes a guest appearance on The List, conveniently anathematizing anyone who disagrees with the putative topic of the thread.
The List has a life outside of the internet. Christopher Buckley, Colin Powell and, of course, David Frum faced more or less the same thing IRL. Heterodoxy is schism. That the DFs are perfectly right, and that true believers torment them for trying to save their own party* is what makes it so funny to watch.
In a deeper sense the funniest part of all is how little of The List is recognizably Republican. Other than the bit about taxes not one of those bedrock Republican principles stretches farther back than the Reagan administration. Not only are most of these points younger than most Republican voters (judging by recent polls, also younger than most of their kids) but more than half, for example the unprovoked wars and government surveillance stuff, would make William F. Buckley or Barry Goldwater spin so fast that their graves could change the rotation of the Earth.
What’s going on is kind of simple, and kind of terrible if you’re a Republican. Almost every bullet point on The List doesn’t come from the party’s core purpose. That would be protecting the money class from the danger of social mobility via Social Security, healthcare and progressive taxation. At this point almost all of The List comes from tactical decisions that Republicans made over the years to pad their vote share.
The muslim hate stuff would puzzle Republican leaders from Reagan to Norquist, and government surveillance and extralegal torture would probably kill Goldwater again. The story of the religious right is especially chuckleworthy. It dates from the Reagan era, when Republicans freaked out over Carter and MLK Jr. and made a cynical deal with some fringe religious leaders like Pat Robertson, whom they considered chumps to be milked for votes. Eventually ‘chumps’ claimed enough of the party to start demanding, and getting, more than insincere lip service, though that era is fairly recent. Naturally one of the first things that they demanded and got was Terri Schiavo. Brava.
The terrorism parts on the list are particularly comical, maybe because they’re so new. Scan the 2000 Republican party platform for relevant words. Bin Laden? Al Qaeda? Nada. Terroris* returns three hits**. Compare that with twenty hits for Iraq. It is even interestinger that al Qaeda blew up our buildings while Condoleeza Rice was in the middle of a speaking tour arguing that, contra Richard Clarke, Iraq was the looming imminent threat that Americans should pee their pants about. The torture and muslim hate stuff is just the usual ass-covering overreaction when a diminished person gets caught by surprise with his pants around his ankles.
Lunatics running the asylum has become cliche, but that is exactly what happened here. Republicans made a series of short-term grabs for this constituency or that for the votes to repeal the estate tax, kill Social Security and increase taxes on the poor/middle class, but somehow the chump constituencies got hold of the keys and took over the main office. Now the money class doesn’t trust Republicans and a drooling hodgepodge of xenophobes, nativists, torture fans, religious fanatics, racists and militiamen camped out in the cafeteria kicked Christopher Buckley to the curb.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
No, f*ck that. It is hilarious. I wish the GOP could keep dying forever.
(*) The Bush admin made a closet industry out of persecuting heretics out of their job and sometimes siccing the famously objective Ashcroft/Gonzales DoJ.
(**) If you want to find plans to deal with the actual people who attacked us, look here.
Sorry Mr. Goldwater, You’re Not On The ListPost + Comments (98)
Saturday Night Open Thread
Rented National Treasure 2 and Taken, and between those two and The Deadliest Catch marathon on Discovery, it should be a wild one here tonight. Got the garden tilled, picked up all my plants, and I’m going to go plant everything tomorrow morning when the soil is cool:
I have the following going in:
zucchini
squash
cucumbers
cantaloupe
multiple colors of bell peppers
a wide variety of hot peppers I am too lazy to list
a wider variety of tomatoes, including heirlooms, big boy, beefsteak, better boys and on an on.
broccoli
As far as herbs I am putting in some mint, cilantro, basil and some other spices I can not remember. The herb garden already has several things growing in it, so I will just chuck those in there. I can already taste fresh tomatoes. Also, I don’t know how the overall economy is doing the past week or so, but the Lowe’s around here was JAMPACKED with people. I was waiting in line to check out for near 15 minutes, it was so crowded. That, for a change, is a good thing.
Missed most of the lacrosse today, but Syracuse destroyed Duke and Cornell smashed UVA. I watched the first half of Cornell/UVA and UVA never looked like they were even in he game.
Anything going on your way tonight?
The Truth Is Out There!
This is pretty awesome. Wingnut WorldNet Daily is running a fundraising drive to “raise awareness” about Obama’s birth certificate:
Would you like to see more awareness of the serious questions about Barack Obama’s eligibility to serve as president of the United States? Are you frustrated by the lack of media coverage of this constitutional issue? How would you like to join in a campaign to generate public debate and discussion?
WND, the only news agency in the world that has relentlessly pounded the eligibility questions, is ready to up the ante — with your help.
Donations are being accepted to defray the costs of a national billboard campaign with the simple message: “Where’s the birth certificate?”
The idea is to make sure Obama cannot avoid this question any longer. He must be asked to produce it at every turn. Billboard space is currently being negotiated in Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Sacramento, San Francisco, New York-New Jersey, Des Moines, Seattle and other metro areas.
Putting aside the idiocy of the movement’s basis, but even their approach is wingnutty. If the idea is to pressure Obama and not give him a moment’s notice, why put up billboards in Des Moines and Seattle, when the man lives in Washington, DC? If you want him to see billboards, that would be the place to put them. Do the citizens of Des Moines have a special in with Obama? They can call him up and pressure him?
They’ve apparently raised 25,000 dollars, which sort of upset me, because I was hoping it would be more than that since every dollar spent on this is a dollar not spent doing something harmful, like funding Republicans in races.
*** Update ***
As DougJ notes in the comments, 99% of the country is going to have no clue what birth certificate they are even talking about.
(Via)
Made tiny by the hand of God
I’ve often been struck by the fact that, although being tall is considered an advantage in most American sports, the greatest (or second greatest, depending on who you ask) player of all time in the most popular sport on earth — Maradona — was well below average in height (he’s 5’5″, while the average Argentinian male is about 5’8″). And that’s always made me wonder about what advantages shorter people might have in various arenas. So this caught my attention:
If a person touches your toe and your nose at the same time, he says, “you will feel those touches as simultaneous. This is surprising because the signal from your nose reaches your brain before the signal from your toe. Why didn’t you feel the nose touch when it first arrived?”
It may be that our sensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest piece of information to arrive, Eagleman says.
[….]Because for the taller person it takes a tenth of a second longer for the toe-touch to travel up the foot, the ankle, the calf, the thigh, the backbone to the brain, the brain waits that extra beat to announce a “NOW!” That tall person will live his sensory life on a teeny delay (at least as regards toe-touching). This, of course, could apply to all kinds of lower-extremity experiences — cold or heat against the skin, tickles, rubs, hitting a soccer ball — the list goes on and on.
Someone has a book to sell
Steve Benen posits the theory that Cheney is on tv, driving down the fortunes of his own party, because he has a book to sell:
Reports indicate Cheney may end up with a deal with Simon & Schuster, because it’s home to an imprint run by Mary Matalin, who is also publishing Karl Rove’s book.
This might offer at least some hints about Cheney’s recent motivations. A book written by a failed former vice president may not compel publishers to pay the big bucks, but a book written by one of the leaders of the modern Republican Party, and the GOP’s leading attack dog of the nation’s elected leadership, might generate a more sizable advance.
I’ve always found Carville/Matalin fascinating. It’s pretty clear neither believes in anything beyond the next pay check, no matter how much they bray about morals and principles and what not.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Matalin is helping Cheney sell the Republican party down the river for a seven figure book advance.
For the past six years, every Bush insider who wrote a book critical of the administration — Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neil, Scott McClellan — has been accused of just trying to make a buck by trashing an unpopular administration. There’s a delicious irony in seeing the ultimate Bush insider do even more political damage by trying to make a buck defending an unpopular administration.
There once was a man from Little Rock
Speaking of kooky wingnut attacks on Nancy Pelosi, Mike Huckabee has written a poem of sorts:
Here’s a story about a lady named Nancy
A ruthless politician, but dressed very fancy
Very ambitious, she got herself elected Speaker
But as for keeping secrets, she proved quite a “leaker.”