Open thread for night owls: Same nation, different worlds

This Slate piece published just before Sen. Dick Lugar lost his primary bid to the more froth-friendly Richard Mourdock is notable primarily for the number of looney statements freely proffered by the participants:

Taking out the Republicans who compromise with Democrats is a cold, logical decision, the easiest one they make. Jim Bopp, a lawyer who's worked on dozens of lawsuits to break up the campaign finance regime, was one of the first notable Indiana Republicans to dump Lugar. His USA Super PAC sent out around $100,000 of mail for Mourdock. It wasn't personal.

'Lugar is an honest and decent man, but he's voted wrong too many times,' says Bopp. 'His approach is just wrong now. When Reagan was president, we could afford someone who approaches these issues in a moderate, bipartisan way. But now we have an administration out to destroy us, and we need a fighter. Here's another way to say it. We're in a march to socialism. Obama's getting us there at 100 mph. If you endorse bipartisanship, you get us there at 50 mph.'

This seems to be the common refrain in certain Republican circles. Barack Obama has us, apparently, on a high-speed march to socialism. What the hell socialism is supposed to entail or how we might be getting there as a damn baffling thing, since it seems the most radical positions yet taken by the entire Democratic caucus don't amount to much more than what Reagan would have done on his more coherent days. There's that whole healthcare thing, which became socialist at the exact moment a Democrat proposed it, no matter how many damn years or damn think tanks conservatives spent proposing the same damn thing. There's supposed gun law changes that Did Not Fucking Happen. What's the rest of it?

It is a damn peculiar thing, how people on the left can lament the agonizing devotion to centrism that marks nearly everything the White House has done, and how the media can document over and over the Obama attempts to compromise on this, on that, and on the other thing, and how many stories can go by where the administration has gone out of their way to pre-compromise on legislation, only to have to compromise yet again, and likely even then find themselves predictably burned when whatever resulting "bargain" they negotiated for was batted away again six months later. Really, it's been in all the papers. You can't really miss it.

There's that version of reality. Then there's another one in which we're on a high-speed train to socialism (well, high-speed by U.S. standards, since that is yet another area in which the United States has patriotically decided to suck turnips, rather than to do anything Europe, Japan or China can do in their sleep at this point), and the train is being conducted by a non-compromising madman who will stop at nothing until the United States has marginally increased spending toward non-fossil-feul energy sources, or who rabidly demands we not cut critical assistance to poor folk by quite as much as Rand Paul, American Patriot, demands, or'you know what? I have no idea. If there's a plot there, it was lost long ago. There was the lightbulb law; that one was passed under George W. Bush, who was not known for his rampant forays into communism. There's now Teh Gays thing, in which Obama is a socialist for now expressing the same opinion as a very wide swath of America. It's not just a question of not knowing what the word "socialist" means. It's an entirely different plane of reality. You can only think Barack Obama is hurtling toward "socialism" if you think he's an extremist, and you can only think he's an "extremist" if you are so very, very fucking removed from reality that even Ronald Reagan himself now looks like a potential communist. Which, as it turns out, is exactly where we are:

'I've read New START, and it doesn't address North Korea or Iran,' says [Greg] Fettig. 'Why would we want to limit our arsenal and hope that Russia does when we're not even addressing other nations? I've been to Lugar's office in D.C. It's wallpapered with pictures of him climbing in nuclear silos in Russia. I guess that's the legacy he sees himself leaving, but it's an outdated legacy. He not only refuses to leave the beltway, he refuses to leave the 1980s.'

Well, that bastard. Here he cares about nuclear disarmament, and doth hast hanged some pictures up in his office of him doing that sort of thing, but the end of the Cold War is just so damn boring. Avoiding accidental nuclear annihilation is just so passe, so archaic; the modern conservative is obsessed instead with the existential crisis of nations who would be hard pressed to deliver so much as one nuclear bomb. Screw diplomacy with all the countries that already have them.

And so we have the spectacle of a supposed true conservative, a fellow of the clan that looks to Ronald Reagan as a god among men, complaining bitterly about someone being stuck in the 1980s. This would be funny if it did not involve at least some level of absolute batshit stupidity, and of the sort that normally people would be eager to hide from the outside world and not parade around publicly.

These Mourdock supporters, though, have nothing on the man himself. Here we have a man who on first impression seems to do his level best to be an arrogant, pompous ass with no particular redeeming qualities, a man for whom the only purpose of government is to do precisely what he says or to be destroyed. His post-primary victory statements were positively turgid:

RICHARD MOURDOCK: Well, what I've said is that I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view. [...]

To me, the highlight of politics, frankly, is to inflict my opinion on someone else with a microphone or in front of a camera. [...]

I feel I can defend the purpose of conservatism, and more Republicans should be doing it just as I want to.

That sounds less like a potential legislator than a bratty pre-teen telling the world off. Do what I say has never been less eloquently expressed. What a toad.

I do wonder at the delusional world "true conservatives" now find themselves in. It is a world in which they literally will tolerate no compromise, upon pain of being primaried and Super PACed out of existence'but it is the other side that is made up of radical extremists. The people willing to go to war over the mere suspicion of a bomb are patriots; those that want to address a thousand or so of them are living in the past. And leading the radical, radical charge toward socialism is ... Barack Obama. Or the Democrats. Or anyone who is merely not quite as conservative as the "true" conservative wishes.

I admit it; I would feel better if the Republican Party was merely under the thrall of business interests, or the wealthy, or Super PACs for either of them. That, at least, would be expected. I could at least wrap my brain around social conservatism if it still merely consisted of the tribal, despise-everyone-and-anything bigotries that they have been obsessed with for decades. But I think instead that the election of the first black president sent a good portion of them completely off their rockers, perhaps for reasons not even they themselves can parse out. When you look around you, after an economic collapse caused by greed and fraud and imaginary paperwork, and after all the bullying pseudo-patriotism of the Bush years, and after seeing all the simple, easy-to-understand charts that show how certain wealthy interests have made off better and better over the last years and decades, while everyone else, the whole of the rest of the country, has been doing worse, and when you read about how advertisers are no longer targeting the "middle class" so much because there is not really much of a "middle class" anymore'if you can look around at all that and see a march to socialism in all of it, than you are simply not a rational person. There is something wrong with you. You, dear conservative, are fucking nuts.

High Impact Posts. Top Comments.