The local AM radio's internet storefront, Dubya-Deebie-Yo, has a post up today hyperventilating in it's typical faux-objective-journalistic style about some comment of Alan Grayson's to the effect that the pathological gummint-haters of the GOP have no business being in...you know...elective gummint. That this makes roughly as much sense as hiring jihadis to pilot commercial airliners.
True, the man is not a subtle rhetorician, but I'd insist that criticism belongs frimly in the 'don't hate the player, hate the game' category. Oddly, my fellow commenters on the WDBO piece don't concur.
But really now.
Conservatives act as if there weren't something bizarre about a fully-functioning political party--in a two party system, mind-- that for 30+ years has made a populist fetish out of the slogan that 'Gummint is The Problem'.
Is it 'the problem'? Really?
Then what's with all the GOP incumbents running for office all the time? Forget that they are so often fudged on...why in hell would leaders of such an anti-politics party require any such thing as a 'term limit pledge'? Unless the whole thing is a bullshit story, these guys and gals would be jumping out of their skin to hand the heavy burden of Demon Gummint service off to whichever selfless Red Robin Hood is willing to take one for the 'liberty-loving' team.
Unless the whole thing is a bullshit story.
And what in the Fookin' 'ell could possibly be the problem with an anti-gerrymandering reform like Fair Districts? Unless...
The best one can conclude is that the High Holy Archangel Reagan indeed worketh in mysterious ways. And the other myriad teeth-grinding failures of the otherwise ever-so-superior private sector, from the 'Deepwater Horizon' to 'toxic' securitized mortgage debt to Enron's conning the world with it's shell-game accounting tricks, to the inconvenient truth that charter schools perform no better, all told, than unionized public schools...chalk that all up to those funny 'mysterious ways'.
Because no other explanation makes any sense, where 'gummint is the problem' and is good for absolutely nothing but leaching dry, butchering into salable chunks, and spinning off to the corporate sharktank.
I've never heard of anyone, anywhere on the conservative side repudiate either the influential anti-gummint "Club for Growth" itself, or the famous mission statement of CfG's founder Grover Norquist, that the long term aim of his Reagan Cult termite-ism is to 'shrink gummint to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub'. Has any figure of any stature on the right ever taken issue with that framing of this core goal of the conservative movement?
If not, what's all the outrage about? Why not man up, like machismo-damaged authoritarians really should, and own this fundie 'demolitionist' label? What's Grayson's comment but a sharply-worded pointing out that it's weird to have a political party in this country so dedicated to the idea that government (outside of cops and gummint-issue soldiering to some degree)--as a concept, as an institution of social organization and resiliency, is a failure and a mistake. And one that looms above all other priorities, as a thing to be constantly diminished, demonized, marginalized, and effectively destroyed?
And yet you nevertheless get these kind of pearl-clutching reactions from the AM radio right, where it's portrayed as shocking--SHOCKING!--that anyone would dare suggest that Republicans are carriers of political sledgehammers rather than good-faith stewards of the our democratic welfare state.
It doesn't hold up to scrutiny, fellas. Which is why Reaganoid conservatism deserves to be called out as a kind of fundamentalism.
0 comments:
Post a Comment