Thursday, March 1, 2012

What It's Really About


Here, unpolluted by made-up facts, by distraction over public rules for private parts, is what the election is -- or ought to be -- about. (The entire speech is here.) Two very different ideas of what's important, where the priorities are, if we're willing to pay for the requirements of a future, whether there remains any sense at all of community. Which is exactly why the Rs are trying to pretend it's about anything and everything else; because, were they ever to fail to keep teabaggR eyes off the ball, they'd lose.

Given current R proclivities and the propaganda organs that concert and conspire to keep them aboil, and given the R desire for magic solutions to the right problems and preference for focusing on the wrong problems, I'm not so naive as to think Obama's message (ie, the truth) will prevail. Rs, after all, are nothing if not small-c constitutionally imbued with antibodies to reality-based information.

In actuality, they're way worse than that, and the few remaining thoughtful conservatives seem all but done with them. Asks David Brooks, who, unlike Rick Santorum, generally doesn't find fault with the fact (reminds us continually, in fact) that he's well educated:
[W]here have these party leaders been over the past five years, when all the forces that distort the G.O.P. were metastasizing? Where were they during the rise of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck? Where were they when Arizona passed its beyond-the-fringe immigration law? Where were they in the summer of 2011 when the House Republicans rejected even the possibility of budget compromise? [Cutting through the crap: Brooks hasn't been exactly consistent himself.]
Answers conservative commentator P.M. Carpenter:

I can answer that, Mr. Brooks. They were lounging in their cloakrooms' soft-leather, wingback chairs, breezing their eyes across conservative columns that dwelled, for example, on socioeconomic functions of "happiness," rather than conservative columns that relentlessly smashed the emergency glass and frantically rang the alarm bell: Has this party gone fucking nuts -- or what? Granted there have been a few conservatives, such as Andrew Sullivan, doing just that; but on the whole authentic conservatives have tended to sigh and tsk-tsk instead of unambiguously condemn.

And now, it may be too late. The Republican Party may be irredeemable as a conservative party. It, and the radical philosophy it has embraced in a smothering death-hold, no longer, as law professor Carl Bogus poignantly writes in his latest work, Buckley, embraces a conservative "philosophy of caution and prudence," or is aware of "the dangers of unintended consequences," or fosters "community -- a hallmark of Burkeanism," or rejects "military adventurism," or ponders the merits of "pragma[tism]."


More times than I care to recount I've written here lamenting the loss of a thoughtful conservative party. Reading such commentary as the above, I'd be heartened, at least a little, were it not for the aforementioned machine that's been working for decades to create a carefully ill-informed electorate; and the emergence of such heroically hateful and unrepentantly uninformed icons as Sarah and Michele and Rick and Jan, such disgraceful panderers as Mitt and Newt... and their lionization by the hordes of those of teabagger mentality. On what basis might we expect the edification of people who've been so carefully and effectively taught to laugh at expertise, to reject facts that run counter to their preferred beliefs, to see thoughtfulness as a failing? By what means might it occur, when they've been pre-programmed to reject everything said by anyone but a RWS™ or excreted by Fox "news"?

1 comment:

  1. first you use "Gism" in a post and now Propaganda "Organ", jeez your almost getting as Risque' as my Daughter's "17" magazine.
    And have you seen "17" lately?
    I hope not, since unless you have teen daughters its sorta creepy, and even if you do, people give you dirty looks if you read it while waiting for your Rx at CVS.
    now maybe Anatomy in Ali-Bama is different than in Bah-Ston, but I don't remember studying the "Propaganda Organ".
    OK, and I missed Parathyroid Day, and those little ear bone thingies drove me crazy.
    and in 20+ years of Medicine noones every asked me to check there Stapes or the other 2.
    And as someone who's voted for Reagan x 2, Bush, Perot, didn't vote, W, W(Sharpton in the Primary) and didn't vote last time, am I a "Conservative"?
    And I've never taken a Government Handout, except for my Med School Scholarship, and OK, a few Student Loans(someones gotta support the Motorcycle industry)and I've happily taken all the Bush-Obama tax cuts, just like you.
    But I love me a little of the Chronic(medicinal of course) now & then, support affirmative action(in Birth Control) and I even chuckle a bit at the antics of that clown Joe Biden.
    And I Admire JFK, thats right, any President who can do nothing(except getting shot), Screw a 17 year old, and get on the 50 Cent piece is a hero in my book.
    OK, I did contribute a fin to that Chick who ran in Delaware, but only cause she's sorta hot, and Mrs Drackman made me.
    So take off those Stero-Type Glasses Sid, Nothing's Black&White(except the President) its shades of Gray, and trippy-groovy-Psychadelic-Colors-Man...

    Frank man

    ReplyDelete

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