by Damozel | I've enjoyed pointing and laughing at David Frum ever since that Vanity Fair piece where he explained that as a neocon speechwriter he had hoped to yank W's strings to make him dance the neocon jive -- only to find that the W puppet's strings were in a permanent state of hopeless snarl, and that if you tried to make him dance, he'd do back-flips instead, then just lie there tangled up in a heap.
Give Frum this: he is one of the few people who still claim to be Republican who still remembers what it is Republicans used to pretend to believe before Limbaugh hijacked the party platform and brought it crashing down to its fundament.
So anyway, there's this cover story at Newsweek where Frum laments on behalf of conservatives who also claim to remember a kinder, gentler party:
Frum begins:
In other words, for all his intentions to be the man pulling the strings, he's as credulous and manipulable as most of the GOP "base"...and yet and yet and yet and yet...
Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.
But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership? Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s. He plays an important role in our coalition, and of course he and his supporters have to be treated with respect. But he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise—and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important. (Newsweek)
Ha ha, he fell for it, hook, line, and sinker: because to be Republican is to be essentially credulous and lacking in basic reasoning skills (as one can see in this clip of Frum on the Rachel Maddow show).
nationally. No Republican official will say that; Limbaugh demands absolute deference from the conservative world, and he generally gets it. When offended, he can extract apologies from Republican members of Congress, even the chairman of the Republican National Committee. And Rush is very easily offended....
Every day, Rush Limbaugh reassures millions of core Republican voters that no change is needed: if people don't appreciate what we are saying, then say it louder. Isn't that what happened in 1994? Certainly this is a good approach for Rush himself. He claims 20 million listeners per week, and that suffices to make him a very wealthy man. And if another 100 million people cannot stand him, what does he care? What can they do to him other than … not listen? It's not as if they can vote against him.
And he says lots more as well, including hilarious stuff about how the Republicans still have something to offer, despite his acknowledgment that the views that most of them hold dear are seriously out of date and out of touch with current reality.
Wonkette ("David vs. Jabba") says:
Whereas Frum's non-mouth-breathing detractors will note that he is still officially a wingnut because though he points out the hand-writing on the wall, and even provides a fairly apt translation, he still hasn't worked out what it means about him and his fellow so-called "conservatives" who put Bush into office.
Anyway, as one of that sort of detractor, I say: Fight! Fight! Fight! Ha ha ha!
BTW, Wonkette's got the wrong analogy: it's not David versus Goliath, but Frankenstein versus his own monster. And not a nice monster, either. A big, scary, lumbering monster that will eat its own creator and everything else that gets in its way....
RECENT BUCK NAKED POLITICS POSTINGS
The Great Tax Debate: How Media Tries to Manipulate Ordinary Voters to Speak Against Their Own Interests
Embittered GOP (& Karl Rove) Bitterly Decry White House's Use of Rovian Political Tactics
Alan Grayson, the Most Awesome Guy in Congress, Apologizes to Limbaugh
"You Can Fool Some of the People All of the Time" Part 2: Rush Limbaugh, the Official Voice of the GOP
And the Heat Goes On: Responses to George Will's Climate Change Misstatements (& WaPo's Passive-Aggressive Response)
Rupert Murdoch -- Yes, Rupert Murdoch -- Apologizes for Accidentally Racist Cartoon at The New York Post
It would be a fitting end.
But remember that Republicans bounced back from being closely associated with the rise of Nazi Germany through, for example, their former presidential candidate Henry Ford.
In a broader sense, the conservative movement has been behind: slavery, the great trusts and the corruption that went with them, isolationism in both world wars, McCarthyism, Jim Crow, the Moral Majority, the great fraud of Reaganism, and W. Any one of those should have permanently destroyed the movement, but it bubbles merrily on, fed by all of the dark emotions of envy and cruelty and hatred of which we as a nation are capable.
Posted by: Charles | March 08, 2009 at 06:18 PM