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Joy Reid: JFK’s Liberal Heresies: Would Today’s Progressives Oppose Him?

Sarah Jones: Eric Cantor Runs from The American People with Real Time Facebook Censorship and Obama Throws His Campaign’s Weight Behind the Wisconsin Recalls

John Thorpe: Forget Anonymous: Evidence Suggests GOP Hacked, Stole 2004 Election

Jonathan Capehart: Debt-Ceiling Drama: Rep. Joe Walsh (Tea Party-Obstinate)

Paul Krugman: Profiles in Un-courage

Matthew Yglesias: If Only Milton Were Around…

National Center for Science Education: Victory for Evolution in Texas

Ali Gharib and Travis Waldron: Right-Wing Pundits Jumped To Blame Muslims And ‘Jihadists’ For Norway Attacks

Zandar, at ABLC: Teleporting To Conclusions On The Norway Attacks

The Rude Pundit: Nearing the Ends of DOMA and DADT

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Matt Yglesias: Paul Ryan’s Tax Plan Based On Discredited Heritage Foundation Analysis That Forecast Bush Boom

Mark Karlin: The Multi-Billion Dollar Brainwash of America's Middle Class

Suzy Khimm: Is GOP Medicare Ploy a Gift, or a Trap?

Steven D: GOP Wants to Kill Me (and You)

Alex Pareene: The Right Just Doesn't Get Journalism

David Frum: A Budget That Can't Budge

Jon Ward: Bill Kristol Attempt To Promote Paul Ryan 2012 Candidacy Falls Flat, But Coming Fight Over Spending Holds Wild Cards

Mark Follman: Juan Williams, Fox News Admit to Flagrant Error About Racial Prejudice

Angry Black Lady: 67% of Americans Support Obama’s GITMO Decision; Other 23% Cry Into their Wine Purses

Michael B. Keegan: The Terrible Twos: The Tea Party Throws a Tantrum

Joan Walsh: Mike Pence Backs More Abortions

Matt Taibbi: Tax Cuts for the Rich on the Backs of the Middle Class; or, Paul Ryan Has Balls

JHW22 recommends...

Mike and Anne Wilber: What is Becoming of Our New Hampshire?

Texas Tech (still) sux

posted by Armadillo Joe

And Matt Yglesias agrees with me.

Patterns

posted by Armadillo Joe

Following up on my post from Wednesday about the neo-Nazi violence at the Holocaust Museum (Selling Shit to the Shitheads) and dove-tailing nicely with my current reading material (Rick Pearlstein's "Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus"), I read today over at Yglesias' place about the so-called "China Lobby" that held sway in D.C. throughout the 1950's and into the 1960's and their adulation of General Chiang Kai-Shek (Yglesias quotes Robert Farley here):

the influence of the Lobby in the executive branch and in Congress helped prevent a Sino-American dialogue over Vietnam, the final status of Korea, the role of the PRC at the UN, and the potential for collaboration with the Soviet Union. When any President hinted at acknowledging the PRC, the Lobby could arm Congressional opponents with money and righteous rhetoric about the dangers of appeasing Beijing. Nixon was able to break the cycle, in part because the most vocal China advocates came from within his own party

That situation sounds to me like how our Middle East policy has been conducted for the last 30 years (since the Iranian Revolution of 1979), with deep-pocketed lobbyists and myriad influence-peddlers from foreign governments twisting our national dialogue, whether the issue be Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, et al.. The difference between then and now, it seems to me, is that the ultimate triumph of a certain group of people in gradually taking over the levers of power in this country who were considered to be fringe-group fruit-loops in the 1950's -- a march to power that ran from Nixon's crime syndicate posing as a legitimate presidential administration from 1968 to '74 through Saint Ronnie's glorious 1980's through the tragedy the Cheney regime ending on January 20th of this year -- meant that during the run-up to the Iraq War, no grown-ups were left in the room to talk down the ruling clique of perpetual adolescents who have spent their lives being protected from the consequences of being wrong about everything all the time and who wanted to blow some shit up and torture some brown-skinned people real good to finally, in mid- to late-life, establish their macho bona fides, making up for not joining others of their generation who had those bona fides forced upon them in the jungles of South East Asia.

Once again, I was reminded that it is all of a piece, from the racist Dixieland sheriffs of the Civil Rights-era Deep South to the Glorious Reign of our Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun to our current military-industrial complex's deep and frightful warping of our nation's spending and foreign-policy priorities. Mark Twain once said that history doesn't exactly repeat itself, but it does rhyme and the deeper I get into Pearlstein's book, the more I realize just how much today's neo-cons are just a pathetic copy of a copy of a 100th Xerox'd copy of their political and intellectual ancestors in the 1950's, who themselves proved wholly and completely wrong about every single political and historical development since World War 2, but at least had gravitas and panache while being cowards and liars (looking at you, William F. Buckley).

The problem we encounter now is that so much of what has come to be defined as "conservative" over the last four or five decades subsumes a wide range of opinions, from monied business interests and wealthy cultural elites who resent the expulsion of monarchy from the realm of legitimate authority, southern race-warriors still bitter about losing the Civil War, a jingoistic military class who consider their political proclivities indistinguishable from the nation's security interests and a random assortment of slack-jawed, Bible-thumping hillbillies and other nattering, theocratic busy-bodies resentful of the tolerance expected in polite, civil society when living in a pluralistic, multi-ethnic country. Granted, many or even most of these groups overlap to some degree, but the outliers on the far edges of each group make for an uneasy alliance between them and, as I've said before, the only thing that truly unites all of them is a hatred for the Dirty Fucking Hippie.

Hatred is not a governing philosophy, which is why conservatives can't govern. They only know how to oppose and destroy things, which is why the porcine, drug-addled sex-tourist who leads their party will never step out from behind the microphone to actually take a run at public office. Inciting the screeching, poo-flinging monkeys of the Reich-wing to riot (and feigning surprise when they do) is a much more fun pastime for an opportunistic blow-hard with a black hole for a soul than the delicate job of compromise and problem-solving required by the idealism of a life in government service.

James von Brunn is a natural product of that putrid, seething cesspool and he won't be the last one to find his voice now that the poo-flingers have finally, for the first time since the 1970's (and probably not even then), been mostly driven from national office.

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Rachel Maddow: Swing and a Miss

Richard Thompson Ford: Bad Test - Sonia Sotomayor rejected the New Haven firefighters' claim because it threatened to burn down civil rights law.

Charles M. Blow: Rogues, Robes and Racists

The Good Fight

by Armadillo Joe

Matt Yglesias gamely tries to spelunk into the frightening recesses of the wingnut mind, attempting to describe their vision of how the world works, especially now that an unwhite-skinned islamofascistic pointy-headed Big City Lib'ruhl who speaks in complete sentences (and has a mooz-luhm name!) runs the show:

The people on the outs are “normal” and the people running the show are “abnormal.” And while I wouldn’t use that language to describe the difference in the coalition, the basic description is right—most Americans are white and most Americans are Christian, and the Republican Party is overwhelmingly the party of white Christian America while the Democratic Party draws its support from a diverse array of non-white and non-Christian ethnic and sectarian groups. But the authentic America is seen as the white & Christian American, an entity in whose defense one can claim to rebel against the actual United States of America.

Doug J at Balloon Juice quotes Yglesias and then follows-up with his own assessment of the wingnut militia movement:

in the minds of many wingnuts, a right-wing insurrection would be a restoration. This probably explains why the right is generally more interested in the idea of armed insurrection than the left

But, driftglass, with the usual aplomb, is having none of it. He gleefully goes for the jugular and gets to the heart of the problem with Reich-Wing politics faster and more thoroughly than ten Andrew Sullivan apologies for the recent political stumbles of otherwise transcendent and timeless conservative values. He attacks with a ferocity that washes over and clouds the vision like a mainline hit of unadulterated TRUTH straight into an artery:

Republicans don't give a shit about this country. They give a shit about their country: the The Caucasian Free State Of Jesusland. And to whatever extent the actual America and its actual constitution and history and pluralty and complexity frustrates and impedes the implementation of the New Confederacy of their dreams, that is the extent to which they will always despise the real America.

And then he uses that momentum to carry us forward into action, ACTION NOW! complete with pitchforks and torches because somebody has to stand and fight against these people before they bring down the rickety facade of the last, best hope on earth:

From Congress to our local PTAs, we have to stop playing nice. We have to stop pretending they'll go away, or sober up, or that they're kidding, or that someday all of that being bugfuck nuts 24/7 will get wearying and they'll take up another hobby.

Sorry, but these are the people who watched Worst President in History magically turn everything he touched to shit and decided "Four More Years!" These are the people who look into Michele Bachmann's helter skelter eyes and asked for seconds.

They have spent decades, vast sums of money and considerable effort going out of their way to earn our loud, rude, sustained and public contempt.

And I urge every Liberal in America to take it upon himself or herself sure Conservatives are paid what they've earned -- in full and with interest -- no matter how long it takes.