The Biggest Loser

It's nice that more moderate Republicans such as Frum recognize the clown college forming in their midst, and the concomitant danger in tying their collective fortunes to that of Limbaugh, who might as well have given his CPAC manifesto in a Nacho Libre costume, rather than that vory v zakone Leningrad mafiya knock-off (thanks for that imagery, Marius).

Barring some black-swan Katrina-type event that tests Obama's will or skills (unlikely, since Obama seems to prefer seasoned tax cheats over horsie-show doofuses for his appointments), it's probably too little too late already for this round of oppo-party ambitions. And while the corporate party does need opposing wings, the far-right wing (as opposed to the center-right wing helmed by the current crew) really needs to figure out what it stands for anymore.

Frum takes a skillful tack in approaching Flush's credibility by way of his well-known proclivities. This allows Frum to avoid admitting the failures of the previous crew of geniuses. Limbaugh is not driving the stupidity of the hangers-on so much as capitalizing on it. Everyone else simply gave up on their happy horseshit. It has to rankle milquetoast "moderates" of the Frum/Bobo stripe to no end, that their bloodless epistles of more traditional conservative sentiments, of fiscal prudence and moral sobriety, are ignored in favor of a man of Limbaugh's prodigious, consumptive appetites.

It does not seem to occur to Frum/Bobo that the remaining revanchists have no interest in prudence and moderation and all that shit; in fact, these are people who are well-conditioned to embrace a preening vulgarian like Limbaugh. He understands his audience perfectly well, the imaginary grievances and rampaging id defining their perceptions of the world.

And he caters to their conviction that everyone else aspires to their pellucid understanding of the universe, that only librul perfidy thwarts flawed humanity's divine purpose of achieving Nietzschean superman status, found in the persona of the aforementioned Nacho Limpballs. It is not the effete exurban utilitarianism Bobo and Frum are preaching, it is seething consumerist authoritarianism, the righteous conviction that muscle and gall trump ideas and intellectual honesty, that happiness is accumulation and jonesmanship. I am fascinated by what the psychology of a man who lives with a cat and a car collection in a 12,000+ square foot mansion might be, and the various argumentative tactics deployed by him and his fans are a pretty good indication.

As entertaining as their flailing and foaming has been (and it is pretty fuckin' hilarious), there's a nasty undercurrent to it all that will only be exacerbated by the economic free-fall and the eventual realization that a lot of the toys are never coming back, and that expectations are going to have to be permanently dialed down for a lot of people. And the lack of cohesion and consistency in terms of generating new ideas is impossible for them to work around anymore. They shot their wad with Fredo, hitched their wagon to him and are lamely trying to walk all that back.

They've given up the notion of trying to finesse any principled distinctions between the Obama administration's enormously flawed efforts thus far to fix the economy and their own policy proposals, in that they haven't bothered proposing anything. They take turns pretending that they don't really want Obama (and in turn, the entire economic system, fatally debauched as it is) to fail, even though their strategy dictates otherwise. The only way tactics of prophylactic obstructionism work is if Obama's policies achieve fail sufficiently epic that they can plausibly say, "Hey, we tried to tell you," even though they haven't really told anyone much of anything.

And now they've stepped on their dicks, letting Rahm Emanuel play them hard on this Nacho Limpballs thing. All they had left was the dead-enders in the base, and now they have to finesse them, lest Sarah Palin and Sam the Plunger jump off and form a Know-Nothing splinter and drag all the village idiots. It's a very deft political maneuver, and it'd be more fun to watch if there wasn't so much at stake, and if all those cool superpowers Cheney granted himself weren't still being continued.