Tuesday, October 04, 2005
"We've defended you for five years for This Moment"
by thereisnospoon
Tue Oct 4th, 2005 at 14:17:23 PDT
Even with all the hullabaloo about the conservative reaction to the Miers appointment, I think people fail to understand just how colossal a mistake Bush just made in nominating his crony Miers to the Supreme Court. Bush simply doesn't realize what he has done.
If anyone has been asking themselves why a panoply of conservative columnists--columnists who refused to attack Bush on his anti-conservative moves on Iraq, the deficit, federal spending, states' rights, etc.--are now crying out in outrage, I think the answer is pretty simple.
Allow me to provide one quote that essentially sums it up for a vast portion of Bush's base: "We've been defending you these five years because of this moment."
- thereisnospoon's diary :: ::
That quote comes from a RedState.org diary on Miers' donations to Al Gore in 1988.
So far, we Kossacks have been appalled: Bush has completely excised the word "Conservative" from the Republican party, and they just didn't seem to care. We wrote long diaries about getting the Libertarian voter back, and winning the true conservatives to our side. But we just haven't been seeming to get much traction. After all, look at his record:
Taken at his word, he has used massive military force for a perverse sense of global idealism and nation building.
He has spent more money than any administration since Lyndon Johnson.
He has used the power of executive privilege and federal power more than any other government, and even more so in the face of Katrina.
He has delved in people's private lives more than any other administration.
And still they defended him.
Not only did they defend him, they used any argument they could--even pulled straight out of thin air. Their defenses have been at times shameless, at times ludicrous, and at times downright stupid on a basic 3rd-grader's level.
And when the sheer incompetence and utter betrayal--even of conservatives--by this adminstration grew to a reeking stench over the last few months and STILL little progress made, we have been left asking ourselves whether these people were simply deluded by a propaganda machine, or just downright evil. After all, how else could 40%-45% of the nation still defend this guy at this point???
The answer is actually pretty simple. They just didn't care.
You see, as Thomas Frank so clearly and potently argued in What's The Matter with Kansas?, the entire conservative movement has been built around a sheer dissatisfaction with a large number of people about the "rotting and corrupt culture of America."
To Bush's base, everything wrong with America was the result of the multiple social revolutions of the 60's and early 70's.
They see raunchy MTV videos and they wish the sexual revolution had never taken place.
They see people of different races as their neighbors and children's classmates, and they wish desegregation had never taken place.
They see poor civic behavior, and they blame it on the "removal of God from the public square."
In fact, every progressive thing we cherish as a result of that era is something they hate.
And, most importantly, in order to reconcile themselves to how those changes could possibly have taken place in "their" America, they cannot allow themselves to believe it was the popular will. In fact, they believe, EVERYTHING "bad" that happened in those "terrible days" of the 60's and early 70's was the fault of JUDGES.
You can see this view here. Or here. And nothing could sum it up better than Pat Buchanan, in a piece called Judgment Day:
Answer: stark fear. If the Left loses the Supreme Court, the Left loses the Culture War. The Left loses the country. For 50 years, the high court has been its indispensable ally in the campaign to remake America into a secular and egalitarian society. The court has served as the battering ram of a social revolution that has to be imposed upon America--because it is hated by most Americans.
They truly believe that all of liberalism--that everything progressives have ever achieved--was not the result of a people-powered revolution spanning a decade and a half, but rather the imposition of a few totalitarian judges.
He goes on:
But the court's subsequent decisions that ordered intercity busing to force integration tore the Democratic Party apart, North and South, and created a backlash that propelled the Wallace and Goldwater movements. I yet recall being invited onto a TV show in St. Louis in the early '60s where the hostess asked me, to the laughter of her audience, if the Right thought Warren should be impeached. "No," I replied, "we believe he should be hanged".
And finally:
You see, EVERYTHING--Iraq, Katrina, global warming, cronyism, outing CIA agents, money troubles, deficits--EVERYTHING is irrelevant to these people.
When we bring up these issues and get baffling replies that "Bush is a good man" or "you liberals just hate Bush", we must realize that they don't really like his policies either. You checked out the poll numbers on Iraq or Social Security lately?
They only care about one thing: undoing the 60's.
And they are foolhardy and vicious enough to believe that the entire revolution happened because of a few totalitarian judges who deserve to be hanged for putting their sons and daughters into schools with black people and then giving them libertine ideas about being able to miscegenate with them--and abort the Rosemary's baby that ensued after that. Oh horror of horrors!
And THAT is why they've been supporting Bush this entire time: because they were certain he would appoint judges who would overturn all that.
But they picked the wrong man. They should have tried to elect Buchanan, because Bush is about corporate money, not culture wars.
"We've been defending you these five years because of this moment." And once his real base figures out that he really didn't give a damn about that moment, those defenses will end.
Look out, Mr. President. Because you just made a very grave mistake.
