"Billary/2008" <F#%K_Liberals@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:ThDJh.1999$Bi2.436@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> This article pretty much covers all of the hate filled, wacko, extremist
> talking points of the left.
Coming from a hate-filled, wacko, extremist right winger like yourself, I
don't think anyone's going to spend too much time worrying about it.
>
>
> "Trey Harlow" <tharlow@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
> news:H7DJh.3015$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 p***** 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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