A history lesson from my man
drifty:".... Seriously, watching these Gap-clad Yahoos trying to paper over the moral bankruptcy and cowardice of their party and positions with nothing but empty decibels and hysterically spasmodic knee-jerkery is like unto watching a Busby Berkley epic recast with Third Stage syphilitics, water-head drunks and St. Vitus’ Dancers: There’s a sense of horror that no Grown-ups are putting a stop to it... a certain, shameful, geek-show fascination...and a degree of wonder that, given the headless-Chickenhawk flailing that passes for forensic skills on the Right, they all haven’t just kicked each other’s million-dollar orthodontia down each other’s throats.
I mean, Jesus, how is it possible that
everything they touch turns to ****? Hell, twenty-years from now, you show someone your fancy-schmancy Medal of Freedom, and the question is going to be, “Good Lord, what did
you get caught doing? ****ing dogs?”
I wanted to take a moment and talk a little about a subject which is the
single most verboten topic within the Republican Party: The Past.
Specifically, how did we get here?
How did it ever get to be OK to be just plain Bug**** Zell Miller Ranting Nuts and still claim a place at the Adult's Table of public discourse? For example, how did a bilious Mad Cow like Ann Coulter ever get her name publicized anywhere but scrawled on the walls of your lower-rent Glory Hole stalls? Why isn’t Rush – who uses the phrase “feminazi” as freely and often as Chicagoans say “Over by d’ere” – ever given the Dick Durbin treatment for conflating the women’s movement with the Third Reich?
We’re about to have a helluva Summer and Fall, and all over D.C. and the MSM, any number of ass-licking “Moderate” Republicans and misguided Dems will be wringing their damp little paws and decrying the lack of civility and comity in our public discourse.
Which might be fair enough...if the breakdown of mutual respect was a natural phenomenon, but its not. The strategy of dumping ton after metric ton of raw sewage into the public discourse in order to slime to death anyone within a mile of honest debate is a strictly man-made Republican phenomenon.
For twenty years, the GOP Poison Factory has made unilateral war on the Democratic Party, and for twenty years the Dems have been stupid enough to keep kicking at the football that Lucy kept yanking away at the last minute (and then Lucy would pee in their faces for good measure.)
There is a
reason why a sweetheartbag like James Dobson isn’t off fleecing widows out of their pensions but instead wholly owns the testicles of the Heir Presumptive to the GOP Throne. There is a
reason why Creationists and Petro-potatos dictate Science Policy, and why the GOP Krazy Kampus Kuttlefish have no concept of how to construct a decent argument
It’s because for twenty years they have been carefully taught that lying, cheating and calling anyone a traitor who disputes their infinite wisdom in the slightest is their God Given Right. They have been taught that Thuggery and Mendacity are Good and Holy, and when you get caught with your pants down and your wang buried to the short-and-curlies in the family pet...that the solution is to shriek a little louder, and call everyone who sees you a terrorist.
The good news is, this makes them incredibly weak. At long last, like dying drunks, all the GOP has left to prop itself up are the very dregs of the bottle: hatemongering traitors like Rove, warmongering loons like Rummy and Dominionist chuds like Dobson. And like the Potemkin Puppet People that seat-filled Bush's disasterous Social Security Loot-a-palooza Tour, they have grown so used to hearing nothing but retard adulation for every idiot lie they puke out that one, clean shot to the body freaks them completely out.
"Play-nice" time is over.
Long over. I say **** these people, and anyone that look’s like ‘em.
And now, for your viewing pleasure, a re-cut version of comments from elsewhere and elsewhen. Call it recycling ;-) Or, if you prefer, a Special Encore Performance of the actually history of the GOP’s Long March into the Moral Sewer...
1986: Federal court rules that overturning the “Fairness Doctrine” was the purview or the Executive Branch, and Congress has no say in the matter. The Fairness Doctrine was a 1949 FCC reg that said, in part, that if you wanted to use the
public airwave you had to, at a minimum, "afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of public importance."
1987: The Reagan Administration immediately invites the “Fairness Doctrine” to the West Wing basement to “check out some cool **** I got” and shoots it in the head. Twice. See, when you’re Anointed By God Almighty, all “conflicting views” are axiomatically equal to Satan’s Own Lying Helljizz, and we can’t be having helljizz spattering all over the place, can we? What About The Children!?
So no more Fairness Doctrine, and suddenly any bottom-dweller with a talent for spoonfeeding young, dumb Fascists whatever lies they want to hear could become Rich! Rich as Pirates! But from what far shore would this new lion arise?
This from World Of Celebrities “In 1988, Limbaugh returned to radio as a talk show host in Sacramento, California.”
My, but that was fast.
Again, why do you have to be “Fair and Balanced” if you are 100% right all the time, and everyone else is a freedom-hating traitor? And would you want to give Valuable Bandwidth/Frequency to those Enemies of Democracy anyway?
And out of his fetid, little whelping box comes his imitators – the Hannitys, O’Reillys, Coulters, Fox News itself, etc.
In 1992, President George I goes on Limbaugh's show as part of his re-election campaign.
In 1994, when the Republicans captured the Congress, they held a ceremony naming him “an honorary member of Congress” and “the Majority Maker.” Today he is heard bleating his Goebbespeak from 600 stations and 20 million people listen to him every week.
Meanwhile, inside the Party of Lincoln (although the differentiation between party “insiders” and “the media” had, by this time, all but disappeared) Newt Gingrich --
GOP’s #1 Fountain of Bile -- had produced GOPAC’s own Little Red Book: a primer on teaching GOP Newspeak to the young ‘uns. It divided the rhetorical world into Positive, Optimistic Words to be used to describe all things Republican, and
another list of words to be worked into every conversation about Democrats. Newt Gingrich’s instructions to his congressional Hitler Youth:
“This list is prepared so that you might have a directory of words to use in writing literature and mail, in preparing speeches, and in producing electronic media. The words and phrases are powerful. Read them. Memorize as many as possible. And remember that like any tool, these words will not help if they are not used.”
The words he listed to be jackhammered mindlessly into the skulls of anyone anytime you spoke of Democrats were: decay, failure (fail) collapse(ing) deeper, crisis, urgent(cy), destructive, destroy, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, they/them, unionized bureaucracy, "compassion" is not enough, betray, consequences, limit(s), shallow, traitors, sensationalists, endanger, coercion, hypocrisy, radical, threaten, devour, waste, corruption, incompetent, permissive attitude, destructive, impose, self-serving, greed, ideological, insecure, anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs; pessimistic, excuses, intolerant, stagnation, welfare, corrupt, selfish, insensitive, status quo, mandate(s) taxes, spend (ing) shame, disgrace, punish (poor...) bizarre, cynicism, cheat, steal, abuse of power, machine, bosses, obsolete, criminal rights, red tape, patronage.
And guess what: it worked. Without anything like a “free” press, or regulatory requirements to report news fairly, or an opposition party that had yet caught on to the sea-change that was happening all around them, the GOP Lie Machine steamrolled on unimpeded.
This was and is straight-up GOP Party
POLICY, and now they actually have the nerve to pule about “civility” and “decorum.”
**** them. **** anybody that looks like them. **** anybody that voted for them and doesn’t want to begin the conversation with, “I am soooo sorry”.
The point of this is simple and I’ve said it this way before: without Gingrich declaring a deliberate, Orwellian War on Language itself, and without Limbaugh and his ilk acting as the Republicans’ own trillion watt Bull**** Metraton, the GOP are nothing but a minority part, squatting in their squalid Slave States, musing angrily about Negroes.
Professor Plum-**** ‘em in the Conservatory with a candlestick.
**** ‘em sideways.
