A thing to remember about Right Wingers when they start smearing Democrats, Liberals, feminists, environmentalists, journalists, and, oh, widows and orphans, the sick, the poor, and the helpless, anybody and everybody they hate, is that whatever they accuse their enemies of doing they’re doing it themselves.
A J’accuse! from the Right is synonymous with an “I confess!”
I noticed this during the Impeachment Crisis when, one after another, Republicans who were trying to run Bill Clinton out of office for having fooled around on his wife were revealed to be serial adulterers, orgy guys, fetishists of the kinkiest tastes, and, in one case, essentially a high-priced call girl.
Before these “youthful indiscretions” of men and women well into middle-age came to light, I had thought that Republicans were obsessed with the sex lives of Democrats like Bill Clinton and the Kennedys because they had no sex lives of their own.
Shows what I knew.
Events then and events since have proved that Republicans get a lot of sex. A lot of sex.
Doesn’t seem to make them happy. Which is probably why they get so mad when they find out other people are having a good time in bed. Republicans can’t seem to do it without making it dirty in some way. Someone once asked Woody Allen, “Is sex dirty?” and Allen said, “It is if you do it right.” But Republicans don’t have dirty sex that’s dirty the way Allen meant. They dirty it up with money, with guilt, with weirdnesses, and with stunningly arrogant hypocrisy.
And by setting out to ruin the fun for the rest of us.
I’m not saying Democrats and liberals are saints. (Cough John Edwards cough.) But we don’t make a fetish out of pretending that we are, nor we do put people like Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich out there to lecture on morality and virtue, nor do we set out to vilify and punish people whose sex lives seem happier and healthier than our own.
So, since 1998 I’ve lost count of the number of Family Value promoting Republicans who’ve turned out to be adulterers, sexual deviants, inverts, perverts, harassers, molesters, wide-stancers, Appalachian Trail hikers, diaper babies, and cads and creeps of all kinds.
My rule has been if they’re railing about the supposed sexual sins of others, then they’ve just paid the driver to take their mistress home---or in the case of John Ensign paid off her husband to keep his mouth shut.
If they’re railing against gay sex, they’ve just paid off the rent boy.
But it’s not just sex.
If they rail about corruption, they have both arms in the till up to the elbows.
If they rail about liberals being anti-military, they’re about to propose a cut in veteran’s benefits or soldiers’ pay.
If they rail about earmarks, you’ll need both hands and one foot to tally up their friends and relatives whose businesses depend on government contracts.
If they rail about welfare cheats, they’ve spent their lives on the Conservative dole or---in the case of Tea Party types---they’re collecting unemployment, disability, or Social Security. Nothing wrong with that, it’s the selfishness and the hypocrisy and the push to deny others the help they take for granted for themselves that are evils.
If when pushing for war and more war they call opponents and dissenters cowards and traitors, they not only have never served in the military themselves, they will tell you that they better serve the country from behind a desk or at a keyboard safe at home.
And if they accuse Democrats and Liberals of wanting to see America fail…
Michael Brown, George Bush’s criminally incompetent head of FEMA during Katrina, the guy who went out to dinner and enjoyed a nice bottle of wine while New Orleans went under, went on TV the other day and said this about President Obama’s response to the oil rig disaster in the Gulf:
"This is exactly what they want, because now [Obama] can pander to the environmentalists and say, 'I'm gonna shut it down because it's too dangerous.'"
As if that isn’t clear, what he said was that President Obama wants the beaches from Louisiana to Florida and around and on up to Georgia and the Carolinas coated with oil and all the fishermen working those waters put out of business and the marine life and wildlife dead so he can push his anti-business, pro-socialist, hippy dippy environmentalist agenda.
Brown accused the President of wanting to poison a large chunk of the United States to get cap and trade.
Of course he should have immediately been asked, “Is that why you let New Orleans drown, to prove Big Government can’t solve problems?”
Or “Do you think that’s why an qualified screw-up like you was put in charge of FEMA in the first place, so that there was no way your agency could solve any problems?”
Or, possibly more to the point, “Still feeling guilty about all those people you let die, Mike? Figure if you can get people to think President Obama is doing a poor job in the Gulf they might forget what a historically and horrifically miserable job you did in the Big Easy?”
But he was on Fox News, so he wasn’t asked.
And, at any rate, because he was on Fox News, he wasn’t there to talk about himself or for himself. He was there to help the Republican Party---for which Fox News has become Campaign Central---push its favorite theme: President Obama is out to ruin the country.
In other words, Obama and the Democrats want America to fail.
And only the Republicans can save us!
This would be laughable if it weren’t such a threat not only to the nation’s well-being but to democratic government.
Because it’s Right Wing Republicans who want America to fail.
This isn’t even another routine case of projection.
They flat out admit it.
Called on it, they’ll lie, of course. “We never said any such thing.” Showed that they have said such things and worse, they’ll dodge. “We want Obama to fail because we believe his success will be the ruin of our country.”
And they mean “our” as in their country.
Rooting for the President to fail means rooting for the economy to continue to stink and stink worse. It means rooting for more people to lose their jobs and go broke and lose their homes and for their families to break up and for their kids not to be able to go to the doctor when they’re sick and for their schools to shut and their future prospects to vanish like breath.
Rooting for the President means rooting for us to lose the war in Afghanistan and re-lose the war in Iraq.
Rooting for the President to fail means wishing that car bomb had gone off in Times Square, wishing the underpants bomber had set fire to more on that plane than just his shorts, wishing that some Islamofascist succeeds in putting another crater in New York or Washington or Chicago or any other blue city where they don’t plan to be when it happens.
Oh, and rooting for the President to fail means rooting for every pelican and crawfish and maybe a few people living in the Gulf sicken and die. Ok, maybe only rooting for the people to get sick. But it definitely means rooting that what happens in the Gulf turns out to be worse than what they did to New Orleans and nearly 2000 people died there.
Rooting for the President to fail means rooting for America to fail.
I don’t know about you but I wanted George Bush to win the war on terra. I wanted him to save New Orleans. I wanted him to get his immigration reform bill passed. I believed his policies wouldn’t work, but I desperately hoped they would and I didn’t care if that meant another twenty years of Republicans in the White House.
But that wasn’t going to happen, because the Republicans wanted their own President to fail. They want their own supposed policies to fail.
The awful, terrible, terrifying, loathsome thing is that don’t want President Obama and the Democrats to fail, and with them the nation, so that they can get back into power to do what they think is better for the country.
They want them to fail so that they can get back into power in order to be back in power.
They don’t want to do anything for the country except to make it more their country. They want power only to protect and expand their wealth and their status. They want power for power’s sake to use it against anyone they believe is threatening their wealth and their status and their control of the country and their sense that it is their country.
This is what they’re up to as they actively work to cause the President to fail.
Over at Open Left, Paul Rosenberg asks:
In what universe does it make sense for a party to seek political power on the open and avowed basis of preventing others from fixing dire problems? Not just refusing to help solve problems, mind you. That would be irresponsible enough. But actively working to block any solutions whatsoever? In what universe does that make sense?
And then he answers himself:
That is not a rhetorical question. Because the answer, obviously, is "ours."
He follows that up with another question:
But why is our universe the way it is?
His post is an attempt to explain why and it has to do with conservatives never having had in the United States what conservatives everywhere and in all eras have always wanted and which they enjoy in plenty of other countries---one hundred per cent control of everything.
“Conservatives,” he says, “believe they should rule the world.” American conservatives believe they should rule the United States. Rule not govern, not run, not manage. Rule. And because our democracy, flawed as it is, hasn’t let them rule the country, not, says Rosenberg, “in the virtually uncontested way they have ruled other countries,” they have always hated our democracy and looked for ways to undermine and destroy it.
American conservatism has always been fundamentally seditious in a way that no other brand of conservatism in the world has been.
Read the whole post, America’s delusional politics.
Meanwhile, given the way our universe has been operating, given what the American Right wants, and given their habits of projection and of accusing the Left of wanting to do what they themselves are in fact doing while making the accusation, Michael Brown should have been asked and made to answer:
Was that what was going on in New Orleans? Was that why you were in charge? To discredit the Federal Government? To make people believe that their own government couldn’t help them in times of trouble and crisis? To convince them never to trust any even mildly Progressive politician promising to make government work for them so that they will vote for the Party that will put an end to government doing anything except protect the wealth and status and power of conservatives?
Was that your job, Michael? Was that what your bosses wanted you to do? Fail? Were you hired to be the screw-up you proved to be? Were you expected to let a city drown? Were you expected to let whole neighborhoods sink so that thousands and thousands of poor people would be left permanently homeless to punish them for voting Democratic and teach them not to do it again? Were you expected to let people die?
Heckuva job, Brownie.
Another tip of the hat to Avedon Carol and one to Garry Trudeau too.
I turned off the television last night gagging in disgust as I heard Brown say -- concern etched on his face -- "It's *almost* as if they don't care!" We really do live in bizarr-o world.
Posted by: DeborahT | Wednesday, May 05, 2010 at 12:41 PM
Preach it, Brother Mannion. You speak the truth.
Posted by: GregM | Monday, May 10, 2010 at 12:14 AM