The Feeling's Mutual

Digby has the right take on this asshole's raving nonsense, in which he tells us how much he hates us. Hey, right back atcha, dickhead.

WHEN I WAS speechwriting at the White House, one rule was enforced without exception. The president would not be given drafts that lowered him or The Office by responding to the articulations of hatred that drove so many of his critics.

This rule was especially relevant to remarks that concerned the central topic of our times, Iraq. Having left the White House more than a year ago, I conclude that the immunizing effect of that rule must have expired, because I now find that I am infected with a hatred for the very quarter that inspired the rule--the deranged, lying left.

These people literally have no shame, they are so completely and utterly disingenuous in their protracted garment-rending. It's as if offical speechifying was the be-all/end-all of the power of the bully pulpit. One would read Burgess' foaming idiocy and think that all this happened in a vacuum, as if the entire administration posse hadn't ridden out consistently over the past few years and deliberately engendered this polarization.

This moron thinks we're all just going to sit back and let him and his punk pals call us traitors and pussies and not say anything? Eat shit and die, Fucko. My only hope is that when the Democrats finally do take over, they have the balls to step up and squash them once and for all, like the corrupt, thieving, mendacious, scuttling cockroaches they are.

Goddamn I'm sick of this bullshit, these people who have sat back and chuckled at every cheap rhetorical scud their friends have launched at the people who voiced principled disagreement -- people, it scarcely needs to be said, have been proven thus far to be correct in their disagreements, and correct in their assumptions regarding this administrations competence and principles. Burgess whines about Howard Dean's realistic assessment of the war, but has nothing to say about, for starters, what serious Republicans like Chuck Hagel and John Warner have said, that essentially jibe with what Dean has actually said.

I don't agree with the things that the extremists Burgess names has said either. I have little use for the destructive sophistry of the Ward Churchills of the world, though I note that if Churchill were a Republican, he'd either have a gig on Fox News, or a Regnery book contract. The wingers do take care of their own over there.

But conflating a few radical academics with a preponderance of regular citizens who have not launched inflammatory rhetoric, but have consistently recognized the administration players for exactly what they are, is deliberately dishonest and obfuscatory. It's by design, as Digby points out, and hypocritically so. The timing is anything but coincidental, but is rather optimized to stir up the haters in their own base, the people who time and again have shown that they vote out of no thought for policy or love of country, but out of pure spite, malice, and ignorance. They let pedigreed fools like Burgess whip them up and point them in the desired direction. They are nothing but automatons, and they deserve to fail miserably.

And make no mistake -- they are already preparing for that eventuality. They are already frantically trying to get their stories straight, to revise their conventional wisdom, and justify their continued employment.

One thing that you can say about Bush is that, by and large, he doesn't change. Any basis for criticizing him has been glaringly apparent for quite some time. All that has changed is the fact that he is now wildly unpopular and that his failures are too glaring for most to deny. Because of that dramatic change -- and for no other reason -- these Bush-worshipping pundits are desperate to shed their Bush-following skin and pretend that they have been open-eyed realists and critics all along.

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging one's errors and changing one's mind. When it is genuine, that is a commendable attribute which ought to be encouraged. But that isn't what is happening with the Peggy Noonans of the world (including the serious, moderate Beltway pundits who spent the last five years lecturing all of us on the importance of Supporting the President). They aren't admitting anything. To the contrary, they are pretending to be something that they are not -- namely, wise, objective, insightful analysts who all along have long seen the flaws in the President that have caused his presidency to collapse.

They are not analysts who have changed their minds or bravely recognized their errors. They are just self-serving, deceitful rats jumping a sinking ship that they long helped to keep afloat. Worse, they are doing so while pretending that they were never really on board (Noonan: "it's clear now to everyone in the Republican Party that Mr. Bush has changed the modern governing definition of 'conservative.' He did this without asking. He did it even without explaining"). If Bush's popularity skyrocketed tomorrow, their gushing praise would instantaneously return.

Right on the money, and Digby has been on top of this particular issue for many a moon as well. Nooners herself is not a neocon, but she is an old-school movementarianism, which dovetails neatly with the current Serious Thinkers' angle of epistemological retreat. Because most of the neocons are disaffected liberals, or out-and-out converted Trotskyites, permanent revolution is the backbone of the game plan. It's also wrapped up in their puling, projected daddy issues, which manifest themselves in the utilization of the Great Man theory, in which Bush is supposed to be the rhetorical heir to Churchill or Lincoln.

But when the Great Man's sand castle gets washed away, then they reflexively decide that it was he who failed the movement, not the inherent flaws in the movement itself, nor their own ridiculous clatter. It's as if Nooners, like her one-time hero (I recall one post-SOTU mash note where Nooners actually offered the nauseating riff that she practically felt like Her Hero could suddenly rip open his suit and shirt and reveal the Superman costume underneath. Seriously.), doesn't know that we all have resources where we can capture the record of their contradictions and shameless turnabouts and throw them back.

Either that or, again, when a huge part of your electoral strategy is not only to harness but encourage spite and ignorance, there's not really a downside to making shit up as you go along. It's not like their followers ever hold it against them.