Sadly, No! Atrios
Schaller argues that Bush has pretty much destroyed everything the Republicans have spent the last few decades building. I think it might take a little bit longer for the damage to be lasting, but it looks like that little bit longer will continue to happen. None of the Republican presidential candidates are really breaking from Bush. The Republicans in Congress aren’t either. It’s actually weird. There’s this sense that at any moment the damn will burst and they’ll all be fighting over who hates Bush the most, but it hasn’t happened yet.
I don’t think it’ll ever happen. Sure it would, if they were normal people. But they’re not; they’re wingnuts. And it’s not in the wingnut character to abandon Bush and the Iraq Crusade. They’re zealots and the Bush administration is their Masada.
I think history’s behind me on this point: think of the masses of dumbfucks who voted Republican in 1976. Of all times for a voting bloc to give up the ghost — what with Carter being a centrist Democrat on top of the Nixon/Ford disgrace — it was then. But it didn’t happen; they made what should have been an anti-Republican landslide a fairly close election.
Bush cannot be the Republican LBJ because of the nature of the Republican mindset. When we disapprove of our guys, we turn on them, as we did Johnson. When wingnuts disapprove of their guy, they try to reform him to the bitter end.
They’ll never give up and they’ll never stay home from the polls (whatever their threats to that effect). Two generations of them have been radicalized. Bushism — by which I especially mean jingoism in general and Middle East mayhem in particular, along with hardcore Jesus Freakery on the domestic front — is now a permanent part of their identity politics. They’re dead-enders.
The real reason it hasn’t happened is simple: all the current front runners for Republican Presidential candidate are suspect RINO’s to the wingnut base.
They simply CAN NOT oppose Bush in any meaningful way because the wingnut base will scorn these reformed RINO’s until they repent of their past sins by publicly kneeling and showing fealty to the standard party line.
Like it or not that line has been written by George W. Bush for the last several years.
The Pres. candidate on Republican side that has been more hostile to Bush’s blunders lately is Sam Brownback. He has the wingnut credentials to be allowed to go off track by the base. They trust that he is wingnutty enough for them even if he doesn’t toe the current party line.
Romney? A mormon who flip-flops like John Kerry over the wingnuts pet obsessions: gays and abortion. NO WAY is he allowed off the reservation by criticizing Bush until he has sufficiently placated the wingnut base.
Rudy? Abortion loving, gay loving ex-Mayor?? If he didn’t support the Pres. what on earth would he have to demonstrate that he is crazy enough for mentally challenged base?
McCain? They HATE this guy. The RINO of all RINO’s as far as the base is concerned. This is the guy who called out Falwell and compared to Jesse Jackson for chrissakes!! If he doesn’t give the wingnuts some blood lust, they’ll spit in his face.
We’re at WAR. We can’t criticize our LEADER. It UNDERMINES THE TROOPS and EMBOLDENS THE ENEMY (even if we’re talking about the budget, or Valerie Plame.)
De-programming takes awhile, and is not always successful, ya know?
I hope they don’t break from Bush and continue to behave as wingnutty advocates of the least popular Prez (at least for the next election). A time out (in jail, preferably) is long overdue for the Republican Party.
P.S. I pity the Democratic president who inherits the enormous debt Bush Co. has incurred. The Republicans should be forced to cough up the cash it has wasted (borrowed and stolen).
I’d add that the only reason Bush the Elder lost is that he couldn’t shake the wingnuts’ suspicion of him as unauthentic. Enough voted for Perot. That can’t happen to Dubya because he is an authentic wingnut, in which case greater Wingnuttia is like Tammy Wynette: they will stand by their man.
So, HTML, if we can keep most Americans tuned into the nuttiness of the wing, you’re saying the Thugs will never nominate someone who tacks toward the center? That their candidates will continue to drive Right off the cliff, like political lemmings?
Yes.
Well, they will continue to push the Republican party ever further right until the time comes that they get tired of just saying that they’re tired of how the eeevil Democommies are ruining this country and decide that they actually are tired of it – tired enough to actually do something about it.
At which point in time they will foment armed insurrection in this country.
But then again, I tend to see all of the eliminationist rhetoric that comes out of that group as the political equivalent of the sort of talk you hear from a group of drunk yahoos at a bar – the ones who spend twenty minutes bitching about how they “aren’t going to let some pussy-assed faggot get away with that shit” in order to work up the courage they need to go punch some guy who bugged them
Yeah, I know it’s alarmist. And if there weren’t historical precedent for this kind of stuff, I’d probably not find it as plausible as I do. I suppose we’ll see.
It is a tough line to straddle. Crazy enough to make Dobson n’ Donohue cream their crucifixes, yet avoid the spinnning eyeballs, twitchy neck and clammy fish-grip that makes the normals decide that you’re not quite good enough to kiss MY baby….
If it works that way, it will certainly keep Sadly, No! in business, watching the continuous line of vacuous, soulless tweakers walking down the continual shredder that will be come the Rethug nomination process. “First, mr. Giuliani, you will need to defeat Dobson and his flamethrower while armed with…. a herrring! And after that, comes the Grover Norquist Baby drowning marathon! Followed by the Dick Cheney Memorila Puppy eating Banquet. Afterward, while you try to hold down your bile and wip the blood and phlegm off your chin, you’ll be forced to kiss the corpse of Babs Bush while taalking tax cuts with Peggy Noonan. Then, and only then, after you’ve demonstrated that no act is too insane, too degrading, for you to perform, you can try to wash the stain off your soul long enough to pass for human with the real voters!”
Nothin but GOOD Times ahead.
Xanthippas: I think you mean criticizing the trrops “Embiggens” the enemy.
I prefer the term Embiggens, meself. Its use properly frames the wingnuttiens who employ it.
Yeah, I know it’s alarmist. And if there weren’t historical precedent for this kind of stuff, I’d probably not find it as plausible as I do. I suppose we’ll see.
A good read.
If by “good”, you mean “harrowing, nauseating, causing sleepless nights”.
Jillian,
the ones who spend twenty minutes bitching about how they “aren’t going to let some pussy-assed faggot get away with that shit� in order to work up the courage they need to go punch some guy who bugged them
you mean like these guys? (link to FirstDraft)
Christ, that’s creepy, my dear doctor.
Nothing like beating up on a bunch of queers for contaminating the National Anthem by letting it pass between their homosexual lips.
You know, when you consider what a small percentage of the American populace is gay or lesbian, you find that community endures the disproportionately largest percentage of hate crimes each year. Yet another reason to not, under any circumstances, ever vote Republican – their official stance on homosexuality serves to legitimate these sorts of crimes.
I saw Chris Hedges, the author of “American Fascists” on Book TV the other day, and I really have to go buy that now. He was clear eyed, non alarmist, and yet straight to the point. Hedges talked about how he’d been living mostly overseas for the last twenty years, and from that sort of perspective, the changes that have taken place in that time in America are (in his words) “shocking”. I really liked hearing him making some of the same points I’ve made before – like when he talked about the “Weimarization” of the middle and working classes in America (great turn of phrase), and then went on to lay the blame for a lot of that at the feet of the Clinton administration.
If the book is half as compelling as his talk was, it will be a one-sitting read, I’m sure.
No. Not going to happen. Authoritarians are savage when operating from a position of power, but when the odds even out they turn into total pussies. Studies have borne this out. In fact, while these types of people have no problem with harsh penalties being imposed on their ideological enemies if those people are accused of any sort of crime on the flimsiest of evidence, they are also very likely to lash out at their own kind if they stand accused of similar crimes.
At their core, these people are conformists. They won’t tolerate people who work to upset the status quo. For example, in occupied Germany, the millions of Germans who had fully supported the Nazis horrific policies immediately turned against their old leaders once the country was under Allied Occupation and the Nazis went from being the primary authority and providers of stability to being social pariahs. There was no insurgency in Germany.
Bush won’t lose the crazy center of the wingnut base unless he withdraws from Iraq. As long as we’re still in Iraq when Bush leaves office, then the Wurlitzer can blame defeat on the next guy (and Democrats and the media), and make up a plausible dolchstoss legende to reform Bush.
If Bush leaves Iraq, then he’s the loser and even the base would condemn him. So we can’t leave. And Americans keep dying…
If Bush leaves Iraq, then he’s the loser and even the base would condemn him.
I dunno, Sean – now that there’s a Democratic Congress it’s easy enough to blame them. No matter how or when the withdrawal takes place, the libruls are going to be blamed, the Wurlitzer will lionize Dubya, and so on.
Our job is to keep it all from going unchallenged.
When wingnuts disapprove of their guy, they try to reform his media image to the bitter end.
Fixed your typo.