Take it away, Concern Troll:

Founded in 1946 by leading liberals such as J. K. Galbraith, Walter Reuther, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Americans for Democratic Action (“ADA”) is America’s oldest liberal organization. Each year, the ADA performs the useful service of rating the “liberal” quotient of each member of Congress’s voting record based on “key” votes. Such surveys can be questioned as a measure of a politician’s commitment or effectiveness but are a reasonable indicator of his or her ideological stance on most issues which actually come before Congress. For example, for 2009, Barney Frank got a 100 percent score for his House votes while Eric Cantor received a zero score, about what one would expect.

Can you smell the pseudo-science coming?  I knew you could.  Note that he says “key votes,” which in two little words contains two nifty dodges; their behavior that shaped the final legislation regardless of their vote, and also leaves out all the less “key” votes which would utterly disprove his flimsy argument.

It will also surprise no one to learn that Representative John Boozman (R-AR), this year’s Arkansas Republican Senate nominee, also received a zero grade from the ADA for his 2009 House votes. But, in light of recent events, it is disconcerting to learn that Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) got a 95 percent score for her 2009 Senate voting record, one short of perfect. She voted for the stimulus bill, and with the Administration on every key health care vote and on every other vote viewed as important by the ADA, except for the Durbin mortgage “cramdown” amendment, which deprived her of 100 percent.

Of course, only the threat of a primary challenger made her remember, briefly, which letter was after her name, and aberrantly vote accordingly here lately.  Her previous record had to be scrubbed from this faux-academic “study,” natch, and  she also will be beaten handily by Boozman, anyway, but that’s another story for another day.

However, given the facts that: (a) she represents a southern state carried by John McCain with 60 percent of the vote in 2008; and (b) she is up for reelection in 2010, one would have thought that her voting record would have been considered laudable by liberals across the country, and that they would have rallied to support her reelection campaign against a formidable challenge, in what is shaping up to be a very tough year for Democrats nationwide. It will be an especially difficult year in Arkansas, where two incumbent Democratic House members, Marion Berry and Vic Snyder, are retiring in the face of adverse polls. But if you thought that, you would be very wrong.

This is a center-right country, after all, so what you want are Republicans who call themselves Democrats to join hands with the real Republicans, and rule the small people the way Republicans want.  It’s what Jesus intended.

In fact, Senator Lincoln was on the receiving end of a serious 2010 primary challenge from the left by Arkansas Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter, who was backed by such key progressive players as the Service Employees International Union (“SEIU”), and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (“AFSCME”), and such luminaries of the left blogosphere as Markos Moulitsas (“Daily Kos”) and Jane Hamsher (“Firedog Lake”) as well as left libertarian columnist Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com. Halter’s effort fell short, 52-48 percent. But, speaking for that new coalition of labor activists and the netroots, known as “Accountability Now,” which had led the pro-Halter effort, Greenwald pronounced Lincoln’s Senate record to be “awful” and denounced her as a corrupt “corporatist.”

Those pesky Greenwaldian facts are always so insulting, as most of us here have seen, (to our considerable delight, especially when the target further digs his grave by responding…) that they all but demand a response, however lame.  So Connolly (any relation to Ceci?  It would be a match made in heaven…) launches into an incredibly boring and fatuous recitation of  ”history,” which in a nutshell says that because the Democrats stupidly started liking the darkies back in the 60′s,  afterward they had to do everything else the Republicans wanted for evermore, or be consigned to political oblivion by America, which as you know is supposed to be run by the rich and white.  Watch the scare quotes, which are as emblematic of such trolls as slime trails are to slugs:

In a June 10 column, he explained that his “purpose” had been to “remove her from the Senate, or failing that at least to impose a meaningful cost on her past behavior,” such as her failure to support a health care “public option” and union backed card check legislation. But why did Lincoln’s “behavior” warrant a challenge this year when neither she nor any other similarly situated southern Democrat would have been subject to one in the past? What may be happening is a break with a tacit understanding which has governed Democratic Party politics for the past forty years. This new departure is worthy of more discussion than it has received.

Oh, yeah, we never hear about how the hippies permanently discredited liberalism, at least those of us who are blind, deaf, and dumb.  Never mind that they were right, then as now.

That understanding, to be explained below, has its roots in the Democratic Party’s Great Trauma of the 1960′s. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won 44 states (all except AL, LA, GA, MS, SC and AZ) and 61% of the popular vote. It was the high water mark of 20th Century liberalism. In 1965, the Democrats held 68 Senate seats and 295 House seats and proceeded to enact a plethora of laws, including the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, federal aid to higher education, and immigration reform, which liberals regard as among the greatest modern achievements of the United States government. However, by 1966, things had begun to go sour for the Great Society, with Republicans gaining 47 House seats and 3 Senate seats in the election that fall. Despite the Democrats’ continuing majorities of 247-187 and 64-36 in the House and Senate, the Republican/Dixiecrat coalition was back in control by 1967 and the Johnson’s Administration’s domestic initiatives were essentially over. By 1968, a genuine political transition was underway. The presidential election of that year is usually remembered for its background of an escalating war in Vietnam, assassinations, cultural conflict on generational lines, and racial violence, as well as for the closeness of its outcome. But one striking aspect of it in retrospect is the clear shift in voter allegiances since 1964 which it reflected. The winner, Richard Nixon, received 43.4% of the vote, while the runner-up, Hubert Humphrey pulled 42.7%, which made the election seem very close at the time. However, George Wallace, running on an overtly racist third party ticket, won a staggering 13.5% of the vote, carrying five deep southern states, including Arkansas. Right wing candidates thus won 57% of the total vote.

Only a disnonest revisionist historian could call 13.5% of the vote “staggering,” and still have to leave out Humphrey’s last-minute turn against the war that nearly cost Nixon the election, despite his phony “secret plan” to end it that gave him his lead in the first place, and as a moderate, not a right-winger.  It could just as easily be said that peace candidates won by a similar margin.  Then there’s the question of “winning,” which if you’re Nixon or George W. Bush, means flatly lying about your intentions until November, and then abruptly veering right.  The number of people who would vote for an openly right-wing candidate has remained constant, around 30%, forever.

By 1972, the shift was complete. President Nixon managed to incorporate Wallace’s 1968 vote and add more besides, winning 60.7 percent of the total vote against George McGovern. Thus, in eight years, fully one-third of President Johnson’s 1964 majority had been sheared away, losses concentrated among socially conservative white voters in the upper south and in suburbs all over the country.

Never mind the infamous shenanigans that produced the 1972 landslide, as well as Nixon’s downfall.  All Republican “victories,” no matter how crooked, are sweeping mandates for right-wing governance.

This huge alteration in voting patterns created the context of modern American politics, making the once endangered Republican party the default preference in US presidential elections. Between 1968 and 2004, the Republicans won 7 out of 10 presidential elections, with their majorities always based on the same coalition which Nixon first assembled.

The filthy rich, scofflaw industries, racists, and religious nuts….  What a proud achievement.  And of course, between 1960 and 2008, Democrats won 6 out of 13 presidential elections, which kind of negates this dubious line of inquiry anyway.

The Democrats continued to do better in Congressional elections, in part owing to the ability of what Alan Ehrenhalt called Democratic “political entrepreneurs,” i.e. politicians skilled at survival in inhospitable electoral environments, such as Tom Daschle and Fritz Hollings. But here too the trend lines were clear, with the Republicans controlling the Senate from 1980 to 1986, 1994 to 2001, and from 2002 to 2006, and the House from 1994 to 2006.

Yes, dirty politics and corruption do work pretty well, but not always, as Connolly here glumly and sheepishly admits, behind a barrage of faux triumphalism.

However, despite or perhaps because of these losses, Democrats came to understand, that there was a formula for occasional victories at the presidential level, which was essentially the same as the formula for Democrats winning southern Senate races. To win, the Democrats had to nominate a moderate centrist candidate, liberal enough to hold their liberal/labor/African American base (which exhibited great forbearance and political maturity), but not so left wing that he could plausibly be labeled a Liberal, i.e. someone associated with the least popular legacies of the sixties. Such centrist candidates would be able to capture enough moderate and independent votes to win elections. Aided by other factors, this is the formula which worked for Jimmy Carter (1976 version), and Bill Clinton. It would have worked for Al Gore in 2000 as well, but for the Palm Beach County ballot, Ralph Nader’s third party candidacy, and a partisan Supreme Court. But when the Democrats ran more forthright liberals from north of the Mason-Dixon Line, e.g. McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis and Kerry, they always went down to defeat.

Here, he basically admits that a pretty significant Republican “victory” he’s heretofore been using to bolster his “argument,” Bush v. Gore in 2000, wasn’t a victory at all, nor does he explain how Kerry and Dukakis could were “forthright” liberals, or even liberals at all.

Of course, there was another election, in 2008, which appeared to shatter this political mold. Barack Obama, an unabashed liberal from Chicago by way of Hawaii and New York, and an African American besides, won an astonishing 52.7% of the vote, carrying such improbable states as Indiana and Virginia. It is this victory, in which young and minority voters played a newly prominent role, which has evidently created such high expectations in the world of left liberalism that a Blanche Lincoln has somehow become unacceptable.

Barack Obama, an “unabashed liberal?”  I bet this guy’s mother is a little embarrassed over that one, assuming she still can stand to read his work.

But did the election of 2008 actually mark a shift comparable to 1968? The 2009 Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial election results and the 2010 Massachusetts Senate election shocker would indicate that the answer is “no.” It is probable that the 2008 result had more to do with transient factors such as McCain’s age, Sarah Palin’s lack of qualifications, the financial crisis, and weariness with the Bush administration’s wars and perceived incompetence, than with any kind of permanent ideological shift, at least among the type of independent voters who swung for Obama, and then voted for Republicans Robert McDonnell, Chris Christie, and Scott Brown in 2009 and 2010.

More “probable” scenarios that sound like they came out of Sean Hannity’s ass.  No mention of the multiple kooky teabagger-backed challengers who have and will continue to fuck things up for the Republicans; you see, it’s only Democrats that have to agree (with Republicans) all the time.

If that is the case, then the kind of primary challenge aimed at Lincoln or the third party candidacy now allegedly being contemplated to challenge Representative Larry Kissell (D-NC), are a formula for certain Democratic defeat in general elections. Unless people are motivated by a kind of nihilistic desire to punish, such primary or third party campaigns have to be based on a reasonable belief that southern states and the United States will, in normal electoral circumstances, elect people to the left of Blanche Lincoln or for the matter, Barack Obama, also now a frequent target of “progressive” criticism. As was shown in his fierce and effective campaigning for Senator Lincoln, no less an expert on southern (and American) politics than Bill Clinton obviously considers such a belief to be profoundly mistaken. I agree with Clinton, but the Democratic Party’s future may depend in part on what netroot and other liberal activists believe regarding this suddenly important question. Either the Blanche Lincolns and Larry Kissells of the world will face tough primary and/or third party challenges or they will not. To paraphrase another Lincoln, Abraham, in his First Inaugural, in the hands of those activists now rests the momentous question of party civil war.

As any such contemptible nonsense always does, Connolly’s piece ends with a concern troll’s dire warnings, based on, as usual, nothing.  Ordinarily, I’m annoyed when such purportedly “liberal” sites such as Huffpo give voice to such right-wing claptrap, but in this case, I think it’s instructive, and I’m sure it will be taken as the sincerest form of flattery by its targets, particularly Greenwald and Hamsher, who have fought the good fight against this sort of preemptive capitulation by the Village Idiots much more forcefully than they’ve bothered to fight any individual unworthy like ol’ Blanche.

Making my entrance again with my usual flair, (Performance is everything. Tell the suckers what they want to hear.)
Sure of my lines (I read my Mantra book faithfully every morning.)
No one is there. (Thank God, those who make up their own minds don’t like it here.)
Don’t you love farce? (Fooling the fools is so much fun for me and my bank account.)
My fault, I fear. (What fault? There is always a lefty to blame.)
I thought that you’d want what I want– (If you don’t, you will by the time I’m finished.)
Sorry, my dear. (I’m only sorry there are so many other clowns to compete for the spotlight.)
But where are the clowns? (Are you blind? The audience is full of them.)
Quick, send in the clowns. (If you really need any more, call Michael Steele, Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. They have millions at their disposal.)
Don’t bother, they’re here. (How many fucking times do I have to tell you the same thing. Oh, oh, Frank Luntz isn’t going to like that.)

The organizers of this Circus Politicians Arouse the Crazies three day extravaganza chose as its last ringmaster Glenn “Big Emotem” Beck to titillate all factions of the empathy barren conservative right so they could somehow learn to love each other and live under one tent. He didn’t disappoint either the right or the left when he screamed, “All we’ve heard, the Fox News host complained, is “we need a big tent. We need a big tent. Can we get a bigger tent? How can we get a big tent? What is this the circus? America is not a clown show. America is not a circus. America is an idea. America is an idea that sets people free.”

Right Glenn. It gives shysters like you the freedom to CPACem, Conn the People to Anger the Country, so “conservative” War Hawks can make the people so afraid, they will cheer as the lions eat and torture the world on behalf of those poor billionaires who stop paying taxes after the first $109,000 they earn and receive Medicare because they have earned it. Once the circus owners believe those fighting for real freedom are consumed, the cheering fools including “Big Emotem” will be next.

I never thought until the Internet showed me the light in the last few years, so many Americans would be this foolish or that I would watch them act out their fantasies on my TV. All the theatrical techniques I learned as a theater major in college didn’t prepare me for Rush and Glenn’s P. T. Barnum acting skills nor did I ever dream that the French farces would be so overshadowed by the show put on daily by the Repothefacticans in Congress.

Below are a few highlights, or lowlights for the informed, from this spectacle of greed and ignorance uttered by the speaking clowns who were sent in by the circus owners to sing to the hypnotized fearsome.

Glenn Beck:

“Dick Cheney a couple days ago… says it is going to be a good year for conservative ideas, (wiping the sweat from his brow) it is going to be a very good year. But it is not enough just to not suck as much as the other side.” “What made us sit there at the john making us vomit for four hours? What are we suffering from?” “The real problem is progressivism (scrawling the word with chalk on his signature blackboard) This is the disease in America, we have a right to fail, but what we don’t have a right to is healthcare, housing or handouts.” “It’s like somebody sticking a screwdriver in your eye and somebody else pulls it out and puts a pin in your eye. I don’t want stuff in my eye.” “I’m a recovering alcoholic, and I screwed up my life six ways to Sunday. I believe in redemption, but the first step to getting redemption is you’ve got to admit that you’ve got a problem. I have not heard people in the Republican Party yet admit that they have a problem.”

Jason Mattera: (Young America’s Foundation spokesman)

“It’s always a delight to participate in CPAC. This is like our Woodstock. Except unlike the left’s gathering, our women are beautiful, we speak in complete sentences, and our notion of freedom doesn’t consist of snorting cocaine. Which is certainly one thing that separates us from Barack Obama. On the cocaine front, I do believe many young people in America viewed Barack in the same fashion as they do drugs. It was a substance to experiment with. But like most narcotics, the hangover afterward has them thinking, ‘what the hell did I just do?’”

Ryan Sorba: (Representing California Young Americans for Freedom who took the stage to condemn the conference for it’s association with a group of gay Republicans)

“I’d like to condemn CPAC for bringing GOPride to this event. Guess what. Civil rights are grounded in natural rights. Natural rights are grounded in human nature.” (Sorba then addressed one member of the audience who stood up to shout him down) The lesbians of Smith College protest better than you do.”

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.):

“Obama (through economic policies she labeled ‘Bailout Nation’) — is leading the country toward an economic collapse on the scale of 1920s Germany and 1940s Argentina. People can indulge in Fantasy Football, but you can’t indulge in Fantasy Economics, it just doesn’t work.” “The joy of being an American is that we get to choose. We get to choose our destiny. Whether it’s decline or whether it’s greatness, it’s in our hands to make the choice. . . . It sounds to me like someone is choosing decline.”

Rick Santorum:

“Political correctness is reigning in the military right now. Some people say: [Do] whatever the generals say [on DADT]. I’m not too sure that we haven’t so indoctrinated the officer corps in this country that they can actually see straight to make the right decision.”

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC):

“The federal government is assaulting almost every sector of our free-market economy at a time when I fear America is teetering toward tyranny.” “(Mocking Obama’s charisma and oratory skills who delivers ‘ false hope and empty promises’) I hope Americans will expect more from their next president than a great speech. You can’t govern from a teleprompter. Just because you are good on TV doesn’t mean you can sell socialism to freedom-loving Americans.” “With our country drowning in debt, if we can’t give up pork for one year and won’t even try to balance the budget now, there’s no reason to think we’ll ever do it.” “Frankly, sometimes I feel like I’m trying to hold back the tide, and the constant fighting can be tiresome. If I couldn’t come here every year and plug into (your) renewable energy source, I wouldn’t have the strength to even show up at Waterloo, much less win the battle.”

Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio):

“I was in the White House for a meeting a few weeks back and we were talking about the economy and jobs and I was explaining that these Democrat policies, you know — cap and trade, national energy tax, government takeover of our health care system, card check, higher tax rates — all of this was paralyzing business owners because they had all of this uncertainty. And you know no small business owners can plan, invest or hire new workers in this kind of environment. But the president didn’t like it. He looked at me and he slapped the table and said, ‘Boehner, it’s not my policies that are paralyzing these employers. It’s you Republicans who are scaring them.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, the American people aren’t scared about what we have to say. They’re scared by the policies that are being promoted by your administration and your colleagues up on the Hill.’ I told him, ‘well here is the thing, the American people want leaders who will listen they don’t need any more lecturers coming to Washington.”

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.):

“Now’s the time for all of us to do all we can to preserve what makes this country great. If you can give, give. If you can speak, speak. If you can write, write. And if you can run, run.” “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a depression is when you lose your job, and a recovery is when Nancy Pelosi loses her job.”

Newt Gingrich:

“I’m not frightened by bipartisanship. It will be tough. It will be hard. But if we are going to have three years in which the president loses energy, Pelosi and Reid become isolated, the left cracks, we can’t just sit back and hope that the world will let us wait… We should be brave enough to stand up and say let’s work together until we finish defeating the left and then we won’t have to work with them as much.” “Candidly, we should adopt rules that say even when they are in a small minority, down to the last 15-20 left wingers in the Senate, the last 100 or so in the House, we should still have rules to allow them to bring their ideas to the table because we should not be afraid.”

Tim Pawlenty:

“The implication is, we’re kind of bumpkins. Well, history is on our side. The Constitution is on our side. We’re on the side of freedom. We’re on the side of individual responsibility. We’re on the side of free markets. We’re on the side of rule of law. We’re on the side of limited government. And, like Grant, we fight. When you listen to the elites and the pundits talk about the tea party movement, when they talk about us conservatives, they may not always say it explicitly, but implicit in their comments is, ‘Maybe they’re not as sophisticated.’ They don’t hang out at chablis drinking, brie eating parties in San Francisco. As eagle-eyed cultural savants and Wal-Mart aficionados point out, brie and chablis aren’t exactly haute cuisine. And both are, in fact, available for purchase at Wal-Mart.” “I think we should take a page out of her (Tiger Woods’s wife) playbook and take a nine iron and smash a window out of big government in this country.”

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa):

“I don’t want to meet with the president of the United States (on Feb. 25) to see what other kind of toxic stew he is going to serve to us. And it is a toxic stew. We don’t want a pot full [of toxic stew], we don’t want a spoon full. We don’t want a bowl full or a cup full… We want it dead.”

These hucksters fed a lot of pablum to the suckers and they ate it up. The over confidence whether real or pretend exuded over the entire show under the tent. The more over confidence the better to me because an over confident opponent is very vulnerable to real attacks with the truth. Come November, a long time in political time, I believe that conning the American people will collapse the tent and the foolish hopes to take back the congress followed in 2012 by the presidency.

First up among the suspiciously numerous teabaggers of the day was a gentleman with a thick outer-borough NY accent; let’s just call him Archie from Queens.  He was against taxes, all right, and everything from the tolls of the Port Authority to Social Security taxes for his employees were already nefariously conspiring, to his mind, to take 60% of his earnings.  Referring to the imagined cost of a public option on health care, he said, “What do dey want now,  80 puhcent?”  The sad thing, which must bring a smile to any Economic Royalist still capable of fogging a mirror, is that Archie had a point, albeit not the one he intended: the huge increase in payroll taxes pushed through under Reagan, coupled with the relatively higher tax rates everyone pays so that the rich aren’t “punished,” small business owners, particularly in places like New York, have taken an ever larger share of the load, and see no benefit from it, since the money is hurriedly pissed away on wars, more tax cuts for the rich, and crony capitalism for the largest corporations.  Archie sees government as the problem, which it now effectively is, unless you’re Halliburton.  Paul Krugman once referred to the strategy set forth by the Wall Street Journal a few years back; tax the little guys they disingenuously called the “Lucky Duckies,” more heavily, and they would soon be as virulently anti-tax as Steve Forbes and Rush Limbaugh, put together.  Mission Accomplished.

More disturbingly, but admittedly more comically, along came Karen from Michigan.  In a breathless, twangy diatribe that was equal parts Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, only preachier if such a thing were possible, she said “I don’t want my tax dollars going to pay for the murder of innocent babies….  Planned Parenthood makes millions of dollars off abortion…” and every other teabaggy thing a girl could free associate until the ordinarily quite civil Norm, who had clearly spotted her a mile away, finally interrupted to ask if she had supported the Iraq War, since she was so obviously against the slaughter of innocents.  Speaking more rapidly, angrily, and confidently than ever, she expectorated, “Yes I did because they attacked us first.”  So, she believes that a non-profit outfit like Planned Parenthood was “getting rich,” from government money, something Blackwater would never, ever do, natch, and Iraq had it coming because, well, just because.  Norm immediately pointed out that no one involved in the decision to invade Iraq, with the possible exception of Dick Cheney, still believed that, and basically tore her to shreds, pointing out that the government did a lot of things of which he did not approve, but paying taxes was not like ordering things from a Chinese menu, and finally in frustration saying, “Please, Karen.  Read a newspaper.”  But Karen no doubt hung up triumphant; being debunked by the liberal media is to her, like being awarded a Bush Medal of Freedom.  The more you’re told you’re wrong, the more right you must be.

Back when off-duty prostitute and White House correspondent Jeff Gannon (sic) was pumping up Bush for his imminent “triumph” to be paid for with the political capital (sic) from his 2004 landslide (sic), that is, handing Social Security over to the banksters, he plaintively asked Bush how he could deal with recalcitrant Democrats, who were so hopelessly “divorced from reality.”

How, indeed.

Racism has now emerged as basically all the Republicans have left at this point, and to a disturbing degree, it’s working for them. From wars to taxes to astonishing breaches of centuries-old civil liberties, it’s the (hormone and antibiotic-laced) whipped cream and the (maraschino) cherry that covers up, if a bit barely, the shit sundae they’re serving.  The Ricci case, of course, is ready made for the right, because it conjures up  its favorite chimera of white people being constant, beleaguered targets of “reverse-racism,” as they quaintly used to call it, but now they’ve officially turned racism itself into something exclusively practiced by its historic victims against the white, whose idea it inconveniently was in the first place.  Even Archie Bunker would have gasped such audacity, but there it is.  What made the Greenwald thread so compelling and revealing to me were two things; commenters previously identified with white racist views had a lot to say, as you’d expect, but more frightening was the fact that a whole new crop of defenders of the white also showed up in what was clearly a new place for them, to offer similar, and of course similarly worded, attacks on the very idea that affirmative action, and the landmark civil rights laws from which it sprang, is anything but a vengeful war on white people.  We’ve come a long way, Baby.

When I was in college in the early 80′s, this rhetorical trick, which is nothing more than the projection that is always psychologically appealing to authoritarians, was first repackaged as a “free speech” rebellion against the stifling “political correctness” that supposedly was responsible for the intolerable smothering of racist and homophobic thought in public discourse, and once that disingenuous but admittedly clever idea took hold, they were off to the races, no pun intended.  You see, conservative policies, which can pretty much be summarized as the relentless and socially destructive upward transfer of wealth and power that they love, are extremely difficult to sell honestly, so conservatives have really honed their skills at figuring a way around that.  On some level, you have to hand it to them.

Racist talk, whether about Blacks, Muslims, or “Illegals,” (meaning all hispanics), now has gained such a broad audience through talk radio and FOX that people are simply no longer embarrassed to say things that I would have, and did, cringe in horror to hear my grandmother, Etta, say publicly in the 1970′s.  And even more alarmingly, because there is another layer of more rational sounding arguments in the layers above the sewers of Limbaugh and Savage that appeal to the same tribalist hate on a more tasteful level, there are a lot of people who are not the least embarrassed to give voice to such flat bigotry even at a a blog like Greenwald’s,and do so in complete, correctly spelled sentences and everything. No clumsy Archie Bunkerisms like “Capital Punishment is a well-known detergent to crime” here.  Like good cartoons as well as  good propaganda, the meaning is designed to be on two levels.  One for the dumb, one for the merely cynical; one for the kids, one for the grownups.

All they reveal though, despite their efforts, is that the best thing about not being a racist is that it makes you smarter; a person so suspicious of those outside his own tribe (it’s almost always a “he”) is necessarily dumber than those less sheltered, but he’s also dumb enough to vote Republican, which really was the basis of the Southern Strategy all along.  I may be a failure, and perhaps more significantly, an insufferable , lying asshole, but dang it, at least I’m white.   That ought to count for something.

That’s what makes it fun, though, because bad behavior is interesting, and often brings out both mental nimbleness and biting humor that never fails to delight.  Better yet, if you’re in the right company, someone will say something like, “And if you don’t like my language usage, well, stick it up your ass*,” obviating the need to reply to a particularly repellent troll for the moment, and freeing up valuable time to mix drinks.  Comic relief is plentiful, as there’s always a lampshade wearer with spelling issues, a host of topic-specific Johnny one notes who seem to have walked into the wrong house, and hilarity always ensues when the least likely, most antagonistic pair in the entire room ends up making out in a corner. 

Of course, I can only speak to the one thread I follow with any regularity, Glenn Greenwald’s Unclaimed Territory; dipping into anything more MSM-ish can be a harrowing Fun House of scary illiterates, and the lack of back-and-forth makes the trip as boring as it is alienating, and surely contrary to the point of comment threads as a concept.  Many times I’ve felt like crawling out a window, or claiming to have left something in the car, or whatever, but I always come back.

I know who throws good parties.  And when I get my first troll incident here, I’ll know I’ve arrived.

* Jebbie today at UT to the very deserving Vacca.