Gee, Why Doesn't This Surprise Me: or I FVCKING WARNED YOU IDIOTS!!!

Speaking for all of us who railed against the institution of the ridiculous executive power expansion under the Bush Circus, Glenn Greenwald points out the, erm, slight inconsistency of the right's objections to the DHS comments on growing right-wing fanaticism. Money quote:

Indeed, thanks to the very people who are today petulantly complaining about politically-motivated federal police actions (now that they imagine it's directed at them rather than at people they dislike), the Federal Government today has the power to eavesdrop on telephone calls and read the emails of American citizens without warrants; monitor bank records without court approval; obtain all sorts of invasive personal records, medical and financial, without Subpoenas; and obtain and store a whole host of other personal information about American citizens who have not been accused, let alone convicted, of having done anything wrong. Also thanks to them (and things like the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments Act, etc. etc), most of this is carried out without any real oversight or safeguards, left entirely to the judgment and good faith of federal officials to wield these powers carefully and for proper ends. And, better still, federal officials can hide behind sweeping claims of secrecy and National Security to prevent courts from scrutinizing what they did and determine if it was illegal (we call that "the state secrets privilege").

So what's the problem? As the National Review/Bush-following-Right has been telling us for years now, there's nothing to worry about if you've done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide. The first duty of the Government is to protect us all -- keep us safe and warm from all the scary things out there, like a Good Daddy does -- and if they need to trample on some lofty privacy ideals and so-called civil liberties concerns and supposed Constitutional safeguards, well: that's just how it is. It takes a real paranoid hysteric to think that federal government officials have nothing better to do than target domestic political opponents. And besides, what good is the Constitution if we're all dead at the hands of domestic McVeigh-like Terrorists? After all, the Constitution isn't a suicide pact. Remember all of that? I certainly do.

A. Fucking. Men.

Seven years of warning against this. And the stupid, drooling GOP automatons ignored us, or said we were 'supporting terrorism'. Goddamn idiots!

Now the fruit is ripe. But it is ever so bitter.

Mark Lilla on the decline of Intellectual Conservatism

Honestly, I'm going to have to start paying Ed Brayton a finder's fee for hunting down good articles for me to read.

Over at the WSJ, Mr' Lilla has an excellent article on the fall of intellectual conservatism and the GOP. Worth a read. He describes the fall, as many have in recent months, as culminating with the selection of Sarah Palin as the VP nominee. His argument is that a re-emergent populism and the demonizing of intellectual prowess resulted in the low-brow conservative echo chamber which now controls the right's campaign machine:

So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provincialism and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with "ordinary Americans" whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that "populist paranoia" was "subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government." But by the mid-'80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the "common sense" of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by "our disoriented elites," which is why "so many people -- and I include myself among them -- who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism."

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

This basically encompasses all of the grave missteps of the right over the last 2+ decades. The withdrawal from open fora and retreat to the rhetorical cocoon of talk radio and conservative think-tanks/web sites, the glorification of intellectual mediocrity and the offhanded dismissal of educated classes, the proffering of academia as inherently antithetical to conservative causes.

This sort of thing is now being openly said all over the media. Amazing how things can change in just a few weeks. Question is, will conservatives do anything to correct it?

If this woman is a source of their ideas, I'm thinking no.

Llosa on the Conservative Revolt Against the GOP

Alvaro Vargas Llosa has written a brilliant summation over at The New Republic on the growing chasm between the old intellectual right and the Neo-con Religious Right alliance which currently controls the GOP. He runs through the laundry list of right-wing minds who have come out recently against McCain-Palin and the direction the GOP is heading, and the GOP faithful's reaction to these supposed betrayals. He explains the rift as a result of the deviation of the GOP from the principals of intellectual conservatism, and describes thusly:

This deviation expresses itself in different ways. First, in the confusion between Jeffersonian populism -- a salutary mistrust of economic power allied to political power--and class-based populism, which is what Republican leaders promote when they scorn America's coastal and big-city culture. Second, in the contradiction between a low-tax, low-spend policy and an interventionist foreign policy that, by definition, is costly--as every empire in the history of mankind eventually and painfully found out. Last, in modern-day Puritanism, which started, perhaps understandably, as a reaction against the cultural excesses of the 1960s but ended up turning into what H.L. Mencken described decades earlier as "grounded upon the inferior man's hatred of the man who is having a better time."

These fundamental deviations from conservatism crystallized in the Bush administration. The result was the biggest growth in government since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, a loss of international prestige and, in purely political terms, the alienation of millions of people who could have been attracted to the Republican Party had its libertarian roots been preserved in dealing with social issues.

Hear, hear. And the Palin pick was the clearest illustration the Party could have given of the anti-intellectualism which has become so pervasive among the religious right and movement conservatives.

Read the whole article. Good stuff.

McCain/Palin Rally in Waukesha

McCain Palin held a unbridled orgy campaign rally in Waukesha, WI yesterday (I was wondering why those black clouds suddenly rolled in from the southeast and blotted out the sun). We 'Sconnies had our own, local look at the insanity that the GOP crowd has become.

The candidates whipped the drooling masses into a frenzy warmed the crowd up with charges of demon-worship and witchcraft harangues against the moldy old Ayers issue and some blather about ACORN, then proceeded to "take questions from the angry mob audience". That didn't quite work out. The crowd was not so much interested in asking questions as they were in giving advice and making demands. They want McCain/Palin to hit Obama harder with negative ads and attacks.

My first thought was "Harder? These people seem to be completely out of touch with what's been going on for the last month. What's harder than going 100% negative? What's harder than accusing him of being a terrorist and a traitor, and giving your followers your tacit approval when they scream out things like 'Kill Him!' during rallies?"

The only way he could get nastier with Obama would be to start taking these accusations up in his media interviews and the last debate. And I'm sure Obama would like nothing more than for McCain to do that. It would be the last nail in the coffin of the GOP campaign.

John McCain cannot win a war of guilt-by-association in any arena where people who read the newspaper and know anything about his history are to be found. He brings up Bill Ayers, an old, irrelevant, forgotten and failed 60's revolutionary who Obama only knows in passing, and Obama comes back with Charles Keating, who McCain actively abetted in the former's attempts to subvert thrift regulation. McCain brings up Jeremiah Wright, Obama counters with John Hagee. McCain brings up ACORN, and Obama can again counter with the Keating Five.

I'm not particularly surprised that people who would attend a McCain/Palin rally would think that this strategy would work. Between the media isolationism the right has been indulging in in the last 2 decades, and their more recent war on intellectualism, the GOP has been working very hard to produce an electoral base of mindless robots. They got what they wished for, bless their little hearts. And I do mean little.

Taking this tack would be suicide for McCain. And while McCain has had a notable talent for blunders recently, I don't think even he is clueless enough to commit this one. But he could yet prove me wrong.

A GOP Bailout Copout?

Via Andrew Sullivan, some republican voices are of the opinion that Republican legislators should oppose the bailout plan being put together by the Bush administration and Democratic congressional leaders. Their reasoning is so profoundly cynical, I scarcely believe it's sincere. They don't oppose a bailout because it's unwise (which could be argued, if one is a hardcore free-market capitalist), or that the proposal as it stands is unwise (which could definitely be argued regardless of your views). They think GOPhers should oppose it simply to have their opposition on record: so they can come back and claim that they were championing fiscal conservatism.

Now, being of a generally libertarian/free market bent, I'm ambivalent about the proposal: I don't think that it has been considered carefully by people who can understand it and either support or oppose it on an informed basis (I certainly wouldn't trust much of our Congress to understand its potential impact). I don't know that a bailout is necessary, period: long term economic health may be better if we just let this house of cards fall (disclosure: I have worked in the mortgage servicing industry for 15 years, and as such would see my employment prospects damaged as a result of allowing the mortgage industry to founder).

And I simply don't like the idea of passing legislation that has this much impact on us in an environment of panic. That's how we wound up with the USA PATRIOT Act. So I'm not exactly enthusiastic about the plan.

But to simply oppose it as campaign fodder is petty and irresponsible. The bailout, if one must occur, should be carefully considered by all legislators. If one sees an area of weakness that can be improved, it is the responsibility of every legislator to get involved and create the best possible outcome. These people are proposing that sitting legislators with obligations to this nation absent themselves from the process of governing in order to create a talking point.

So much for putting the nation first.