On Democrats seeking the "Middle"

Read Driftglass because he writes stuff like this:

Somewhere out near the chill orbit of Saturn, the Goddess of Irony was minding her own business.

Then She heard this...

From tonight’s Sixty Minutes:

PELLEY: What would you say right now in this interview to the Iranian president about the meddling in Iraq?

BUSH: I'd say, first of all, to him, "You've made terrible choices for your people. You've isolated your nation. You've taken a nation of proud and honorable people, and you've made your country the pariah of the world. You've threatened countries with nuclear weapons. You've said you want a nuclear weapon. You've defied international accord. And you're slowly but surely isolating yourself." ...

And there, in the vacuum of space, the Goddess of Irony screamed silently for three hours as if She were being torn apart by wild dogs.

And then She died.

And like this:

Funny, Bobo is usually a little more deft in hiding the razor in the apple.

But then again, when attempting to spackle over such an enormous mound of shit with such a weak and watery thimble of third-rate prose, one has to deal with the fact that entire limbs of feces are going to stick out all over.

And now, standing at a safe distance from the clatter and claptrap, we can see all the GOPixels resolve themselves into the Real NeoCon Way Forward.

1. Iraq is fucked and they all know it. “Victory” is not possible, however,

2. The loss of this war will mean the end of the GOP for a generation.

3. Therefore any plan that doesn’t claim to lead to “Victory” is to be rejected out-of-hand.

4. Furthermore, any plan that does not loudly call for impossible “Victory” it is to be dogmatically assaulted as unserious and terrorist-friendly.

5. And since all things in Heaven and Earth, no matter how vital or tragic or insane, are simply political variables in the Neocon Power Calculus, the Rove Playbook is still very much alive and well. So,

6. From the Mouse Circus to the NYT to 60 Minutes, the game of Pin the Blame on the Dirty Hippies now begins in deadly earnest.

And especially this:

To quote the estimable Steve Gilliard: “Fuck bipartisanship.”

Why?

Because the Left is now the “Center” and the Right is now a dark forest populated only by trolls, bigots, halftards, Christopaths, little lost Small Gummint children and a groping menagerie of ignorant, single-issue armies who clash by night and have let their own fright-propaganda so ensorcelled them they can’t even see what a noxious sewer their has Party become.

And because the only people outside of the GOP Circle Jerk who refuse to acknowledge this huge, glaring fact are the Media.

You know; the people who are actually paid to Report On Huge, Glaring Facts.

[...]

Imagine a stance like that taken today in favor of secularity and tolerance.

A government that believed that not only is freedom our greatest asset, it is also our export and our greatest weapon. And the more the most powerful nation on Earth confidently “walks the talk” of democracy -- the more we fearlessly call into the world's shadows and challenge all medieval, barbaric and fear-mongering perverters of noble faiths to come out and debate us in the clear light of tolerance and liberty for all -- the freer the world will become and the safer we will be.

But of course this government cannot do that because it is itself run by a cabal of medieval, barbaric, fear-mongering perverts.

And since today's GOP will always put Party ahead of Nation, and will never risk it’s long-term project oblivion by eradicating the Wingnuts who win it’s elections, staff its phone banks, stuff its envelopes and define it’s dogmatic parameters, they will keep this country stuck in a religious-hypocrisy-stasis in the exactly the same way we were was stuck in a civil-rights-stasis when we castigated the USSR for human rights abuses abroad while tolerating segregation and lynching here at home.

I mean, who in their right mind is going to believe that we stand for Enlightenment and Democracy as long as preening demagogues and raging fascists like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity continue to be the faces and voices of one of our two main political Parties?

And who in their right mind is going to believe that the lords of this moral slum don’t make pre-emptive war for oil as long as virtually the entire Executive branch is run by oil men?

So now that you’ve used up half of your paper you’ve made your list of where the Republicans were thirty years ago and where they are today one thing should be crystal clear.

One thing that you all already know.

That for the last thirty years The GOP has been on a dead-run due Right so fast that they have disappeared entirely over the horizon into an ultraviolet haze of theocracy and stoopid.

Which means that for the Center to have remained an intellectual constant for three decades -- as every fucking reporter in the Mainstream Universe just keeps insisting is the case -- then the Left must have become....Communists.

Every last fucking one of us (that isn’t Shining Path or Green, that is.)

A Party of Maoists who spend our days militating for the annihilation of Wall Street, and our nights conspiring to Collectivize and Nationalize every industry.

Except even a half-bright eight-year-old can see that we’re not.

Not even in the same ballpark. Not even on the same planet.

No, if you actually bother to check, big swaths of the 1976 GOP platform look distinctly...Clintonian.

Does this make me happy? No. But there it is. And to continue to hawk the ridiculous Broder/Friedman/Sullivan/Klein/Lieberman line of bullshit about everything on the Left being equiposedly extreme to everything on the Right is so obviously insane that the REAL story must become: "What are the real reasons why the Pundit Class continues to deliberately lie to the Amercan public?"

[...]

From who gets slashed up in the Fox-tainted media, to who gets taken seriously, or who gets carted off the “No Lefty Left Behind” re-education camps next year, the old maxim that “A Jew is whoever Hitler says is a Jew” applies.

The ubiquitous and otherwise-amusing “dirty hippy” image of the Left in the media is almost entirely a construct of the Right which parallels exactly the “dirty Jew”, “savage Injun” or “lust-crazed Negro” stereotypes of famous fascist/eliminationist movements of the past. Marketing campaigns to hawk a simple message to the Great Wad:

That those people are responsible for your pain.

Of course this completely unravels when you actually talk to people in those groups and find out that they’re about 90% like you, except they get shit on or shot at more than you do. Which is why it is terribly important to keep the Great Wad scared stupid all the time; their lynch-or-flee reflexes kept on a hair trigger by horror stories of what’ll happen when you start “mixin’” groups that Caucasian Jebus wants kept apart.

So here’s the truth.

The Left has moved so far Right in the last few decades that the Left is the New Center.

The Right is now run by and for evil lunatics who conceal their evil lunacy in the shadows thrown by their Dirty Straw Hippies.

And anyone who tries to pretend any different is either an idiot or liar who will fuck over your children’s future, kosh you on the head, razor out your pockets and leave you for dead the minute you turn your back on ‘em.

Now fold your list into a little paper bucket.

Puke in it from nausea induced by the fact that although deconstructing these little spun-shit Fox-spawned “stories” is as easy as Dick Cheney pulling the wings off the Constitution, there is apparently no one – NO one – left in the Mainstream Media outside of MSNBC and Comedy Fucking Central who has the nads to even bother anymore.

And then dispose of your sick bag safely.

Hell, who knows?

If it’s viscous enough and comes with a good head of hair, you can maybe get it its own talk show on Fox.