Month: March 2012

"After decades of following the twisty course of Conservative arguments and debating friends and colleagues, I know one thing to be true: futilely trying to get Republicans to talk honestly in the 1990s about, say, Bill Clinton amounted to little more than a dress-rehearsal for futilely trying to get Republicans to talk honestly about Bush, Cheney, DeLay, Iraq, 9/11, deficit-exploding tax cuts, climate change, radical banking deregulation, radical environmental deregulation, the assassination of abortion providers, contraception, labor unions, mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds, and couple of dozen other topics I would reel off.

"In other words, it doesn't work: to protect their egos (and, often, their incomes) instead of doing what we teach every child to do—apologize when you are wrong—the Right has collectively jumped past a spiritual event horizon and into a soul-darkness from which there is no return: a darkness in which imps and devils are always patiently waiting to take your hat and coat and make you extremely comfortable on the gentle, downward-sloping road to Hell.

"This darkness comes with a promise and a catch: the promise is, that the Right will never, ever be called to account for the endless lies they have told and endless betrayals they have committed; the catch is that they can never leave, and no matter how repellent their neighbors become and no matter how humiliating and horrifying the lies become, they are obliged to shut up and go along with the program. With this promise comes the terrible, goosestepping power of a mob under harness, but with it also comes a grotesque fragility because to keep the darkness alive the Right has become s confederacy of Mrs. Havishams, rotting away in the gloom.

And to make matters much, much worse, their decaying mansion sits on top of such a massive, leaky stockpile of lie upon lie, betrayal upon betrayal, hypocrisy upon hypocrisy and treason upon treason that the danger of one, stray non-Fox Approved fact accidentally glancing off another non-Fox and sparking off a conflagration is omnipresent.

The entire Conservative enterprise is built on delusion and old dynamite, which is why every clock much forever remain stopped at one minute after Reagan's inauguration, every fact must be smothered under the stasis field of Rush Limbaugh roaring, rage-drunk bluster.  It is the sarcophagus of a dead ideology where the walls are now so densely postered and palimpsested with the detritus of Conservatism's lurid, lying history that its denizens cannot find the exit anymore, and its floors are so sticky and pitted with the grue of its savage, tribal, beat-in rituals that no one bothers to even look for the door.

Which is why  no deviation can be permitted, no error can be admitted and no apologies can be allowed.

Read the rest here.