[...]For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.
[...]
Now, up until this point, the mighty right-wing wurlitzer has been silent on these very points. The tribal group-think of conservatism and Reagan's eleventh commandment, "thou shall not speak ill of another conservative," not only prevented them from pointing out the destruction of America, but directed them to label anyone who did so as far-left Michael Moore Bush-haters.
Let us continue to peek in at Ms. Noonan clutching her pearls and desperately fanning her face.
[...]But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."
The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."
[...]
Well, gee golly gosh. The poor dear is a victim of Conservative S.O.P. which is demonization of your opponents so you can get your way. Peggy dear, to maintain your lifestyle you simply must be supplied with an endless supply of virtually powerless servants. Please do as you're told and do not question your betters, especially out loud. Remember the eleventh commandment.
[...]
Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.
[...]
Oh fer cryin' out loud. Peggy sprays this ink all over the Wall Street Journal as if she just now parachuted into the middle of the latest maladministration fecal fest. It's like Patrick Duffy just stepped out of the mutherfukkin shower on "Dallas" or sumthin.
It is open warfare within the Republican party, Wall Street who enjoys cheap labor and purchases the fuel for the Republican campaign machine, and the right-wing wurlitzer that generates profits from ad revenues based on low information, knuckle-dragging rascists, aka Republican voters.
Poilitics requires money and votes. This is the essence of the failure of conservatism. The interests of the corporatists are in direct conflict with the interest of the voters, violently, in the Republican party. In effect, they are hoist by their own petard as a result of their "southern strategy."
The biggest mouth-from-the-south, Bill O'Reilly hosts pro-comprehensive immigration plan Senator John McCain (R-AZ). via Atrios:
Bill O'Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you've got to cap with a number.
John McCain: In America today we've got a very strong economy and low unemployment, so we need addition farm workers, including by the way agriculture, but there may come a time where we have an economic downturn, and we don't need so many.
[crosstalk]
O'Reilly: But in this bill, you guys have got to cap it. Because estimation is 12 million, there may be 20 [million]. You don't know, I don't know. We've got to cap it.
McCain: We do, we do. I agree with you.
Completely aside from the fact that we have two guys whose names begin with O' and Mc, feel their "white cultural dominance" is threatened, indeed an existential threat as real as al qaeda, requiring some serious brown ass-kicking even closer to home, one wonders why O'Real McCoy doesn't have any Apaches or Navajo's involved in this little powow.
For a cherry on top of this little discussion I am including a brilliant collection of essays gleened from the comments of Firedoglake by a dear friend I have never met, Valley Girl. Hugh, very much tongue-in-cheek defends English as Our National Language. I begin here, with part three: Be careful, it may be a French invasion.
OT in Defense of English as a national language Part III
This may seem like déjà vu for some of you since I have already written twice vis-à-vis the importance of English as our national language. But one of my bêtes noires is the laissez faire attitude and dégagé manner of our current President who makes one gaffe and faux pas after another in what is supposed to be his native tongue. Not everyone, I know, can write or speak with élan or panache but at least Bush should be able to find the mot juste from time to time (’suicider’ being only the most recent atrocity). To be frank, it offends my amour propre to see this daily sabotage of English camouflaged as Texan bonhomie and good old boy naïveté. Nor do you have to be a member of a soi-disant élite to feel this way but just a true blue linguistic patriot like me. The raison d’être of English as a national language movement, as I see it, is to use the force majeure of the federal government in the promotion of the proper use of English. This legislation would drag Bush from his semi literate cul-de-sac and require him to speak English for the first time in his life, comme il faut and sans détours. Gone would be the days of our acceptance of his manque of rhetorical savoir faire and toleration of his many linguistic défauts. The débâcle that is his language skills would have at last received its coup de grâce or, at the least, be rendered hors de combat. I say without a soupçon of malice and with a complete sang froid that that is a day I would dearly like to see.
Or perhaps, Latin is a better defense.
In defense of English as a national language Part V
We are one nation from the Rio Grande to Montana, from Florida to Los Angeles and San Francisco. As one who is an aficionado of English, I say it is this language that binds us and our nation together. English is too important to become a political piñata. It has helped make us Número Uno in the world. We should keep it and although there is little chance of us losing it, if we did lose it, we could lose the whole enchilada and that would be plain loco. However unlikely, we could be left pronto with zero, zip, nada and that would be muy malo for us all.
Understand those who support English as the national language are not waging a guerilla war on some but are making a sincere effort to create a unifying and unitary ambiente simpático for us all. Nor is it an act of machismo by the current jefe and his junta. Indeed Bush’s pregnant pauses are the very opposite of this. They bespeak a man embarazado and that is an embarrassing state of affairs indeed. No, amigos, compañeros, English as a national language is an act of faith, an auto de fe, as it were, of our rights. Let us not say hasta la vista, baby to an idea whose time has come. Let us embrace our inner pendejo and have the cojones to bid adiós to our doubts. To those who ask in the plaza of public opinion, ¿Qué pasa? here, let our answer and our language be clear: ¡Que será será!
I am not sure, but I think this is in English:
OT Something for Friday: in defense of English as a national language Part VII and last
Our language like our borders is in crisis. Its autochthonic ethos is threatened by the paradox of a heterodox dogma of inclusion. This embrace of linguistic schizophrenia must be anathema to all those who love the orthogonal logic of our native idiom. We must shed our dystopic entropic psychology of cataleptic catatonia with its apathetic anergy of cultural polymorphism. Polyglot iconoclasts under the aegis of heterogeneity and with a nostalgia for the exotic are making a hecatomb of our language. They accuse us of seeking our therapeutic in a sophistic xenophobia. Alas, this is not some paranoid phantasm. We stand at the edge of the abyss on the horns of a dilemma surrounded on all sides by catastrophe, cataclysm, holocaust, and a full tetrahippal apocalypse. In such a toxic atmosphere, we, the hoi polloi, must be the catalyst of a cathartic apologia leading to the agathic agape of a pragmatic paradigm of an English only hegemony.
Hugh offers no version for Native Americans. Their language was not suitable to be integrated into American. And now, those who claim to hold a monopoly on the definition of American are fighting amongst themselves.
It is ironic that many in the Republican Party who do not believe in evolution are now throwing poo at each other.
Peggy Noonan wrote, "that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks."
Unfortunately, we did not hear such language coming from such learned and worthy scribes as Ms. Noonan until recently. One wonders at what point does such behavior cross the line from defensible to unacceptable.
I would presume to venture the O'Rielly defense (insufficiently racist) or the porch light defense (June bugs seek out the brightest porch lights) or both.
Conservatism cannot fail, people merely fail conservatism. A conservative can spend all the money s/he wants, quadruple the size of the federal government, but if they fall in the polls (porch light dims) by not being sufficiently racist they are failed conservatives.
