It's amazing how (1) Rush Limbaugh has degraded into personal self-parody and (2) how his own brand of spiteful irrationality is so ingrained into conservatism
as to pass for conservative wisdom.
Now, I happened to glom onto the Cruz-Lee defund effort, and whether it had a chance of succeeding or not ultimately was not a reason to avoid it, to me. The defund effort, to me, happened to be attractive because it was led finally by somebody who could articulate conservatism. Ted Cruz.
Ah, but that's the catch, now, isn't it? A conservatism defined by Ted Cruz is a conservatism that values the raw purity of something over concerns about whether that thing is actually grounded in any reality whatsoever. The premise was that the Republican-led House was going to shut down the government unless Obamacare was nullified, then Ted Cruz would do
something, then the president would say "Oh, all right" and do that thing. It wasn't that their plan was dodgy, it was that Ted Cruz literally
had no plan. "Conservatism" demanded hatred of health insurance reform; there was no step two, as you can see beneath the fold.
I think Obama's at 37 percent, the Democrats, I don't care what they think inside the Beltway. The Democrats are discombobulated. And I don't care about these polls that say that the Republicans are losing in the shutdown. That is a poll you could do any day of the year and you're gonna get that result.
So the effort can be considered a "success" if it hurts Democrats even slightly, regardless of whether or not it does more massive damage to Republicans. By gum, that does sound about right. As does the dismissal of poll results that say Americans disapprove of Republican actions—that's not even
news. Being loathed by America is to be
expected.
To people growing up today, conservatism... God, I shudder to think what it is. What is conservatism to somebody that's 18 today? Conservatism is a deranged, lunatic, stupid cowboy, George Bush who wanted to go into Iraq for no reason.
George Bush is no longer a proper conservative. The war they fought so very hard for is no longer a proper conservative war. There are in fact no
proper conservatives, and what would pass for
proper conservatism is impossible even to define.
One of the frustrating things is, the Republican Party has always been the modern day repository for conservatism, but you can't find anybody there who's willing to stand up and articulate it 'cause they're afraid to or they don't know what it is, or they don't believe in it, whatever.
Until Ted Cruz, apparently. Ted Cruz, who wandered into the senate thinking himself the second coming of Joe McCarthy and became the brains behind a House Republican rebellion based on nothing more than his assertion that putting a few hundred thousand people out of pay was a reasonable price for launching a futile, self-aggrandizing assertion of conservative bona-fides. No one is quite sure what conservatism is, these days, but it achieves its full articulation only with people willing to engage in wanton, radical acts of destruction.
But then—and this is the capper, and this is why Rush Limbaugh continues to be the touchstone of conservatism even as the rest of the nation has learned to cross to the other side of the street whenever they see him coming—this is current conservatism explained as clearly as it can be explained, an abstract movement of disapproval that cannot decouple itself or its anger from race, that is not racist but yet finds itself "stymied" by race, a movement that is supposedly about a thousand different things, or would be, if it were not for the unfair undercurrents pushing them from those fair conservative shores, but which cannot function efficiently so long as the other race has a say in things as well:
We got one factor here that nobody knows how to deal with, and that's race, the race of the president. That's what's got everybody stymied and shut down on our side. That's what's got 'em palpably afraid to say or do anything.
If this is
stymied or
shut down or
afraid to do anything, I shudder to think what their actions would be had they
not been stymied by the president's
race. Would they have lynched the president by now, if he was not black and there not such bad memories associated with
that? Are they holding back in merely shutting down the government over a new healthcare law—had they not been
stymied by race, would they have skipped that step and gone directly to signing declarations of secession? Is Rep. Darrell Issa finding himself walking on eggshells, not able to investigate nearly as many addled conspiracy theories or accuse the president of as many unconstitutional plots and schemes and vast, wide secret agendas as he would have if the president was a white man who Issa felt less restrained in attacking? The state legislatures pursuing nullification, a theory that goes hand in glove with states' rights demands to treat other races as subservient classes—would we be finding twice as many convinced that the government buying ammunition or providing healthcare or allowing the Muslim religion to exist is a plot to enslave the citizenry, if only those states weren't tiptoeing around the president's own race?
That seems difficult to believe. If conservatism is being held back by the diplomatic niceties of having to be polite to a non-white president, one can only imagine what the conservative agenda would be if it were not being so effectively blockaded by that politeness. Really, I can imagine nothing to say about that, other than to note that that very premise, not any muddled policy notions or contradictory position papers or baffling conspiracy theories, defines the modern conservative movement. It is a movement of rebellion, stymied by race relations and deeply resentful of it.