While perusing the day’s stories, I noted the usual defensiveness from the expected sources; but this quote from Herr Limbaugh caught my eye because it perfectly encapsulates the problem:
They’ve had a plan filed away in a drawer to take away as many of our political freedoms as they can.
“They” being the left, liberals, progressives, of course. The paranoid universe is a closed system: inside it, all new facts become evidence of hypothesis. THEY are out to get us; THEY are all-knowing and powerful; THEY are all in it together. This is why reactionaries strive so hard to “prove” shooters and bombers are not from their ideological side. It is always a conspiracy against THEM. The vast radio- and TV-driven culture of paranoid politics is never, ever responsible for the massacres carried out by its addled audience — these incidents are simply reduced to new conspiracy fodder.
Rationalization is even more rampant inside the Beltway. House Republicans were quick to step back from their plans this week, village media immediately called on “both sides” to change their tone as if both sides are the same, and soon enough everyone will attempt to “move on.” But they will fail — because the Frankenstein monster they created is not going away. When Delaware Republican Mike Castle faced his first birther at a town hall in 2009, it should have been a warning to the GOP that something had been unleashed.
Indeed, the astroturf engineers of K-Street made a great deal of the uncontrollable nature of their stolen Ron Paul meme. Dick Armey in September 2010:
In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” over the weekend, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey issued a warning that Republicans risk being targeted by the Tea Party if they don’t get with the program when it comes to signing onto fiscally conservative policy. (Emphasis mine)
The tea party project was a response to the Democratic victories of 2008. The moribund movement had to be reinvigorated, indeed had to yank the Overton Window as far to the right as possible, or else see Republicans move to the center. No leftward swing, even from the far right to the middle, could be contemplated.
But tea parties brought more than ideological purity. From the very beginning, fringe elements dominated the new conservatism. Out of control and out of its head, the tea party has become exactly what I said it would be: a teabag terror.
I spent most of the day playing with the rabbit in a foot of snow. Sorry about the lack of posts, but it’s been a long time since there was snow like this around here.
