A love note from writer Charles Pierce to Mr. Cheney and the current Republican party. What's sad is that his P..S includes some gazing into the future, and unfortunately I believe he has the gifts of a seer;
To every camel's back, there is a final straw. Sooner or later, we've taken all we can stand and we can't stands no more, and we pass over the Popeye Line. For me, it came sometime last weekend when I heard Richard Cheney, the pre-eminent moral and physical coward of the era, explain once again the Mulligan theory of national defense by which every president gets one free mass casualty attack that doesn't count toward "keeping us safe." (Note to Dick: by this standard, every two-term president kept us safer than you guys did. You were the worst at it. Scoreboard!) And I realized that, by all the standards of objectivity I was taught in journalism school--the most basic of which was that, if you saw a man walking down the street with a bird on his head, you could report it without finding someone else to tell you that, no, what you actually saw was a bird walking down the street with a guy on his ass--there is no longer any reason to take the Republican party seriously. It has become a festival for fruitcakes. The political movement that powered its ascension has become publicly demented. Sam Tanenhaus can plug his book all he wants, but the fact remains that it was American conservatism that spent three decades throwing open the doors to the monkeyhouse--starting with the Goldwater campaign in 1964, moving along through the Reagan campaigns of 1976 and 1980, the NCPAC campaigns of that same era, the marriage of convenience with theocratic crackpottery, the Buchanan campaign against the first President Bush, the various exercises in lunacy aimed at Bill Clinton, the half-mad banality of Newt Gingrich, and the cult of personality that sprang up around the second President Bush. It's a little late for delicate conservative intellectuals to ponder how it was that all that monkey poo ended up on the walls.
The serious people don't lead in that party any more, and the leaders of it -- Hello, Michael Steele -- are not serious people. It is a major political party run now as an elaborate radio talk-show and completely in thrall to the maniacs who run actual radio talk-shows. Goddammit, the Spartacists are more intellectually honest and the Hemp Party folks are a helluva lot more fun. Why do serious political journalists take this careering clown car seriously, ignoring the evidence plainly in front of their own eyes? Why does a Democratic president, and an overwhelmingly Democratic congress, both elected at least in part because the country had determined that the Republicans had gone completely mad, care what these people think about anything? Why does a party led by people who think the president is going to hypnotize schoolchildren with his magic Kenyan-Socialist spinning eyeballs scare the living protoplasm out of putative tough guys like Rahm Emanuel?
The perfect should not be the enemy of the good? Maybe not, but the good has many actual enemies. Evil is the enemy of the good. Greed is the enemy of the good. Ignorance is the enemy of the good. Cowardice is the enemy of the good. How's about, just once, somebody worries about those enemies of the good, all of which are amply in evidence in the campaign to make sure we never reform the criminally negligent and morally indefensible way we deliver healthcare in this country?
Instead, we get this. One thing we learned this week--Stephanopoulos is Greek for "Stockholm Syndrome". Jesus wept.
P.S. Oh, hell. They've even started selling their alibis already. Watch this unfold. The D's will sign off on some nutless POS and then have to run in 2010 on their support for a massive giveaway to the insurance companies, a group of institutions whom everyone I know hates. The elite press then will ponder earnestly whthe administration couldn't work with "serious conservative voices" on a "bipartisan" plan, as though any of the former even exist. The Beckite "Socialism! Fascism! Soup!" crazoids will go zipping down the memory hole.
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