It's getting impossible to parody modern Republicanism. What do you do with a party whose leaders are just as devoted to conspiracy theories
as the dimmer parts of the base?
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accused the Obama administration of creating a “culture of intimidation” in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute Friday morning, charging that those in the administration and on the left have mounted a “coordinated effort to stifle free speech” spanning various agencies in the federal government.
Again I have to ask, just how flimsy do you have to be to be
intimidated by a plot that nobody else can even make out, much less make sense of? What's the threshold here for "intimidation," is it a flag pin worn an inch higher on the lapel than it really should have been?
How do you even get here?
“Our ability to freely engage in civic life and to organize in defense of our beliefs is still under coordinated assault from groups on the left that don’t like the idea of anyone criticizing their aims, and from a White House that appears determined to shut up anybody who challenges it,” McConnell said at the American Enterprise Institute, according to a transcript.
“As serious as the IRS scandal is, what we’re dealing with here is larger than the actions of one agency or any group of employees,” he said. “This administration has institutionalized the practice of pitting bureaucrats against the very people they’re supposed to be serving, and it needs to stop.”
Is there really nobody out there who remembers the time an administration hand-picked Justice Department "bureaucrats" for their political views? Nobody who remembers all the various members of an administration and a Congress who readily equated any deviation from their preferred war stances as being dangerously close to aiding the enemy? A time when our terror warnings were, even according to some of the people in charge of them, fiddled with as political tool, instead of public safety tool? Back in my day (we tied an iPod to our belts, as was the style at the time) you were pretty darn sure when you were being told to
shut up by the federal government. And if all McConnell is upset about is that there are "groups on the left" that don't like people "criticizing their aims," well Christ, man, I'm very, very sorry to have inflicted democracy on you. I didn't know that was all it took to cripple your movement.
These efforts of Republicans to keep their base panicked are getting more and more abstract. Now the whole government has been mobilized in an effort to get the nasty critics of this administration to shut their pie-holes already, and the sole evidence of this is that certain tea party-themed groups weren't allowed to make a mockery of our elections laws quite as speedily as our freedumz demands they should. This is the thing being pointed to as an evidence of a wider reign of terror being inflicted on conservatives. Every agency of government is arrayed against them, and every stool at the corner bar has an invisible Obama in it. Just sitting there. Plotting.