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!
"Trey Harlow" <tharlow@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:H7DJh.3015$Qw.2904@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From Salon.com:
>
>
> 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 wor****pped 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 leader****p 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
> sins, one singularly telling one has gone almost entirely unremarked:
> 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 im****tant 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, cor****ate-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 sup****t 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 tem****arily 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 ****tfolio -- 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 contem****ary 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
> psycho***ual 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, la****ng out robotically, never
> finding common ground or examining their own ideas, they are ****lls 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.
>
>
>
>
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