At A Small Meeting the other night, we discussed, facetiously I think, the possibility of infiltrating our local Republican Party. First, their business meetings might be a little shorter than our Bigger Meetings have been. We could sit in the back and grumble about the second amendment, that might be fun. I could see some of my neighbors. We could take photos with our camera phones and make people paranoid. And we might find some good place to insert a monkey wrench or two.
After listening to a few versions of "Love Me, I'm a Liberal", I'm wondering if there is truly any place for progressives in American politics as currently practiced. Like Theodore Roosevelt said, the two national parties are husks.
I've taken up describing the GOP and the DLC as the two wings of the Money Party.
Anyway, in the Great American Tradition of focusing on the other guy's shortcomings, I thought I'd cut n paste the following piece that says it far better than I ever could.
(A note: Scott Horton just posted a couple weeks worth of shows in his archives. Looking forward to listening.
A second note: the April 20 Democracy Now show on Blackwater was dynamite. Amy Goodman rocks.)
Ellis Weiner
04.19.2006
A Public Presentation of My New Theory
...
This brings me to my New Theory, which in truth is a slight variation of Charles Darwin's Old Theory, the world-famous principle of natural selection. Every specific kind of environment will "select for" some kinds of life forms, and cause them to thrive, while it "selects against" others and causes them to die off. God, who loves us, has been doing this for six thousand years, so don't even bother trying to not believe it.
And, as with primates, zinnias, and all 360,000 species of beetles, so with Republicans, thus:
The Bush administration, as any schoolchild knows, is a complete disaster for everyone except corporations and the very wealthy. (And they'll get theirs, once Antarctica melts.) Having squandered its four-and-a-half years of special dispensation since 9-11, it now rightly finds itself under attack and criticism for a mind-numbing record of ineptitude, corruption, mendacity, and arrogance.
In response, it defends itself with lies, smears, and intimidation. It will say anything, about anything or anyone, for the tiniest short-term advantage, and then supplant those lies with more lies. It will lie to the media and it will lie to the public. It will lie about what it has done in the past, what it is doing now, and what it will do in the future. It will lie from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, from Earth to the Moon, and from here to eternity. It will lie to me, to you, and to our dog named Boo. It will lie to its enemies, to its friends, to its constituents, to its allies, and--this is how cynical I've become--even to that adorable Katie Couric. Its presentation of itself to the world consists of not so much a tissue of lies as an entire box of Kleenex of lies. It's just a big fat liar.
As such, therefore (here's where the science part comes in), it has become an environment hostile to intelligent, honest support. Evolutionary pressures have "selected against" anyone on the right capable of making a persuasive case for the administration's policies and a decent defense against its Democratic opponents. Only the self-interested, the ignorant, the credulous, and the pathological survive.
Which leaves who, exactly? Why, the career propagandists (Kristol, Krauthammer, Brooks, Podhoretz, Hume, etc.), the rodeo clowns (O'Reilly, Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc.), the side-show geeks (Boortz, Savage, etc.), the hobbyist ranters and sniggering gigglers and bloviating gasbags on their ten thousand blogs--and, finally, the foot-soldiers, the pawns, the simpleminded halflings from the Shire caught up in this titanic struggle between Good and E-vil, who cannot be blamed for their small, limited grasp of the powers that are at play, the issues that are at stake, and the monstrous corruption and mendaciousness of their leaders, yes, the trolls.
Isn't this hilarious? No, it's a catastrophe, and brings us face to face with a plaintive query:
Where are the Good Republicans?
Where are the fiscal grownups who think that an 8.38 trillion-dollar national debt is maybe several trillion too much?
Where are the sincere Christians for whom torture and internment camps and tax cuts for the rich are emphatically not WJWD?
Where are the sensible businesspeople who think that the Katrina debacle, the Iraq debacle, and the Medicare debacle give evidence of an administration whose heart isn't in it and whose brain is out to lunch?
Where are the rational, traditionalist adults for whom the manipulation of science should be anathema?
Where are the vaunted "patriots" of the right who suspect that a president who thinks he can do whatever he wants isn't a president any more, but something else?
Where, on the right, are the actually compassionate and the actually conservative?
Obviously, we're not talking here of the so-called moderates in Congress. The "centrists" from the U.S. Senile and the House of Reprehensibles, the Richard Lugars and Christopher Shayses and Olympia Snowes of the world, have long ago been absorbed into the Nut Borg and, in their (deserved) chronic sleeplessness, have their hands full with Ambien-dependency problems, with the night-driving and the night-cooking and so on. For whatever reason--careerism; cowardice; dumb loyalty; outrage fatigue--they're lost.
Along with Macbeth they can say, I am in blood/Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more/Returning were as tedious as go o'er. Politically they're straitjacketed and morally they're toast.
But what about the people who voted for them? What about the people who are registered Republicans and yet know full well, as much as anything can be known by mortal men, that Fred Barnes (Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush) is a horse's ass? Let's say Bush's base consists of ten thousand millionaires and fifteen million religious fundamentalists (i.e., the fifty million who voted for him '04 times the lingering 30% who still "strongly don't think the President is a total nightmare"). If I'm the Republican Party, I'm wondering, as someone who was the Republican Party once said, "Where's the rest of me?"
Have they become extinct? No. My New Theory here departs from Darwin by positing an alternative to extinction. These missing Republicans are not extinct. They're in hiding.
They're cowering in abject terror, or going to work and playing with the kids and sitting around reading the paper and watching TV, in their Park Avenue duplexes and Miami Beach condos and gated Sunbelt communities and all the other perfectly nice, or at least adequate, houses and apartments all over these now still somewhat United States.
They're out there, they know better, and they're silent.
In which case, shame on them--not only for their passive complicity with the lies, criminality, and corruption of the first Bush term, but for electing him to do it all again for a second. Because he has done it all again, and now it looks like he wants to do it all again again in Iran. The invisibility, inaudibility, and tacit go-along-ability of responsible, moderate Republicans have become almost as contemptible as the high crimes and low misdemeanors of our megalomaniacal Boy King and his sneering vizier.
That's why my New Theory concludes--daringly, refreshingly--by "breaking the fourth wall" and addressing its own subject directly: Come on, Joe Six-Pack and Mrs. Six-Pack! Come on, Joseph Blanc and Mrs. Sauvignon-Blanc! Pull your damn weight! If six senior military men can publicly call for Rumsfeld's removal, then ten or twenty million non-insane Republicans can call for George Bush to take advantage of an early, deeply humiliated retirement, and for Dick Cheney to be hauled before the Hague or, if you prefer, vice-versa.
Granted (per my New Theory), the atmosphere on the right has been polluted beyond description by the neo-con empire fantasists, the corporate-lobbyist cabal, and the Krackpot Kristians. But that's everyone's problem--especially yours--and not anyone's excuse. I call on you to do what firemen and bomb squads do: throw on a gas mask, jump into a HAZMAT suit, and wade on back in here and help clean up this mess.
If you don't, we'll quietly quit the Democratic Party and join yours. You won't see us, you won't hear us. We'll paint our faces (either our own, or each other's; it's still being debated) and travel by night. By the time you know we're there, the Republican Party will be in a body bag labeled TOXIC: MILLIONAIRES AND THEOCRATS.
And that's my New Theory. Discuss.
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