Well, happy election

Journal Concern's Journal: Well, happy election 5

Journal by Concern on Wednesday November 08, 2006 @08:57AM

Well, like after every election these days, I'm disgusted - the same way I would have been disgusted if Al Gore or John Kerry took the Whitehouse with a 51-49 split.

It's foreboding - even today Republicans can send so many candidates back to Washington that it's close.

Something is deeply broken in this country's social machinery, and a few years of the world's most tepid opposition party is not going to fix it. The architecture of the new conservative movement took generations to build, and it will take generations to tear down.

At this point, I almost wish conservatives didn't have this small abberation to contend with. Why let some of the slightly more responsible theives (Democrats) back in the game? What can they possibly do to clean up such a collossal, epic-making mess?

Iraq can be abandoned but it cannot be "solved" - it's a no-win situation, thank you neocon hawks.

The government's finances can only be saved with the dramatic readjustment that must come whenever the party ends and your loans come due - service cuts and tax hikes.

Our economy is deeply endangered, and the world knows it, and quietly buys Euro-denominated assets... and gold ($600-$700 per ounce anyone?).

You have to envision individuals rather than numbers. Elections hide that, which leads to a dangerous complacency.

What would it take for someone to shake this manufactured faith? An American who voted twice for Bush, who is pro-forced-birth, who believes that opposition to the war supports the terrorists, will certainly not understand the subtleties of how you futilely try to fix this mess. I see many of these people still patiently trolling liberals on slashdot even in some hypothetically ruined America, where the economy and the government have collapsed and such activity can only be a brief respite from dealing with another Great Depression. I think if a Nuke went off in Washington, or gas hit $10 a gallon, they could look you in the eye and blame the liberals.

What's so dangerous about the conservative movement is that it is built with not only the same self-satisfied superiority to truth that Hitler and Lenin enjoyed, but even some of the same extremeties of belief.

If you doubt messianic Christians and athiest oligarchs have the same capacity for self-deception, lawbreaking and violence that messianic Muslims do, turn on your television. Sometimes I wonder - is this a movement that could go quietly, when its successor arrives? Parents homeschooling their children to hate religious rivals and liberals sounds exactly the way it sounded to me to hear Palestinian parents (not violent extremists, just ordinary people) teaching their little children about Jews. When you take it that far, when does it ever end?

To be clear, American conservatives are not suddenly winning after a long American past full of respect for Enlightenment principles and the Bill of Rights. They're turning around a brief, 50 year losing streak. In many ways they are conceding defeat - by trying to accept other races, if not other religions, and trying to accept women (though read the fine print). The Catholic Church is even rumored to be considering liberalizing its ban on condoms.

It's time now to look at what's changed over the last 50 years, and think carefully about how we made the progress we have. My first hint is, you have to fight hard - much harder than this new generation ever has. That was perhaps easier when there was a draft and people could see politics as a life or death struggle. But it always is.

Second hint: fight smarter. Conservatives didn't just run on the treadmill faster. They build their own high schools. Train young recruits in the competitive and twisted debate team culture they've fostered. Created bent law schools and launched bent newspapers (and television news networks). They coordinate their PR campaigns with viciously effective, neurolinguistically vetted talking points authored by scientists.

Well, back to today. I am disgusted. But the day is not without its satisfactions.

The conservatives' inner circle is forced to live quite a bit more in reality than most members. It's the only way they can shape it. It's been fascinating to watch their anguish. I imagine most "true believers" are fairly insulated from these sad moments, and will wake up in the morning fully tuned up to exploit a returning scapegoat for a little while.

So with that, I leave you with some quotes by famous neocon hawks. You know, the people who said Iraq would be a cakewalk, and that they'd throw flowers at our troops' feet. Courtesy of Barista.

Richard Perle: 'The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.... At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.... I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."

Kenneth Adelman: "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."

Richard Perle again: "I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

To me, the strangest line comes from David Frum, who wrote the 'Axis of Evil' speech:

"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

If you spurn the reality based community, and live in a world of will, you have to believe the spell as you cast it.

Otherwise, you may accidentally call forth the Golem, and it will punish you, and not your enemies.

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