…I mean, you can pride yourself as ‘Contrarian’ (or even ‘politically-incorrect‘)
…you never have to have any pesky doubts as to who’s ‘Right’ or not
…you have an enormous array of put-downs handily available, carefully formulated by likeminded, similarly funded old white-guy writers… (oh wait, Coulter’s not a guy
) for personally attacking anyone wrong-headed enough to take a position even slightly differing from yours
…& you get to hear exactly the same sentiments you espouse, over & over & over in the right-wing echo-chamber you’ve successfully framed as ‘The Liberal media’. “Fair & Balanced”, anyone?
So I’m just wondering– we know many of the most invincibly ignorant NeoCons actually are highly-funded, highly-educated Professor types, who hang-out in famous Ivy League schools with fully-funded Big Business Endowed Chairs. Great gig if you can get it, right? But they usually generate a continuous output of erudite publications known for their highly rigorous, highly-logical thinking…
But WHAMMO– all that comes to a screeching halt, when it comes time to toe the ‘Party-Line’.
How must it feel, what is the taste in their mouths, when they have to say things like “Creationism is science”, or “Global Warming doesn’t exist”(?!) For God’s sake [whichever 'one' or 'many' you choose], this is the 20th year in a row of steadily rising Earth temperatures, steadily shrinking icecaps, dramatically increased weather-related & otherwise natural disasters, & now even South Pole polar bears are dying in dramatic numbers b/c there aren’t enough icebergs for them to float on.
But no, “global warming doesn’t exist”… or still better, burning fossil fuels is the ‘best source of energy’, b/c:
“we can do more to help the poor by combating these problems now than we would by reducing carbon dioxide emissions…. Moreover, it is acknowledged by every responsible economist that drastic action to reduce fossil fuel use would increase energy costs, which would in turn reduce household income. Wealthier is healthier, and richer is cleaner.” National Review
Stop right there. That’s pure obfuscation, albeit elegantly framed. You see, rather than attacking head-on the concept of Global Warming (b/c there’s just too many Nobel Laureates saying it exists to undercut, discredit or successfully call ‘liberal loonies’, dagnabbit), why not just damn the concept of “Global Warming” with faint praise, & then ridicule any/all attempts made to actually address it. “Responsibility”, indeed. How does the party of ‘Moral Majority’ possibly justify bankrupting our future, exhausting our national resources, and rolling-back pollution controls (called the “Clean Air Act”, how Orwellian).
And here’s an even more brilliant straw dog– raise the idea of “helping the poor”, & then never actually do anything to help them… Heck, they should just ‘work harder’, to be a ‘have-more’ too, right? Where’s their ‘discipline‘?!
Or wait– I’ve got it: let’s do the reverse: not just ‘promising & then not paying’ (like say, New Orleans), or “spend but not tax”, or even calling any non-have-more’s “a nation of whiners“… Let’s actually roll-thru a whole new array of nation-wide social service cuts, this past Congress Session. Fantastic!
Anything is okay, I guess, to ensure continued massive consumption of fossil fuels… we wouldn’t want to ‘hurt the economy’, would we? And I suppose that same ‘economy’ will operate just fine, when the seas have risen enough to bury New York like Katrina did New Orleans? (Scientists estimate that will take approx. 60years at current rate of global icecap shrinkage… & correspondingly, very little time to reverse Global Warming’s acceleration.) Sorry kids… Heck, only liberals live in NY; good riddance.
So again, what must it be like, to be a fat, wealthy, old white man… surrounded by skads of same, convinced all “good” & “right” ppl go to your same (“One True”TM) church, worshiping the same (“One True”TM) God, & feeding at the troughs of the Born-Again/NeoCon deep-pocket backers. Never a pesky doubt, never a chance missed to wrap yourself in flag-pin patriotism, paying lip-service to “our boys” while cutting their VA benefits & awarding yourselves yet another huge tax cut.
Don’t worry– none of ‘their boys’ are ‘over there’; their boys are busily finishing Harvard MBA’s, JD’s, & assorted other ‘fast-track’ paths to inherit (or at least leverage) daddy’s billions. B/c here’s the dirty little secret of the “have-more’s”: the vast majority of them in America didn’t “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”; they inherited (ever wonder why they campaigned for so long & so vociferously against the ‘Death‘ Inheritance Tax, mmm?)
So just How do these guys do it? How could any thinking, caring person do something like this? Don’t they have kids, who’ll have to grow-up in an increasingly polluted, increasingly bankrupt, increasingly lower-class American world-standing???
Easy. Rent All the President’s Men. Hear the immortal words, “follow the money”. And then take another look at the entire NeoCon agenda… from war “Police Actions” in Iraq to South America; to attacking tort law (hey, eliminating big pay-outs for class-action lawsuits both protects large corporations, and simultaneously defunds tort lawyers, who are predominantly Democrat); to rolling-back Clean-Air Act & drilling in ANWR… it’s all about the $$.
Watch their actions, not their words. They’ll say ‘morals’, & ‘discipline’ (fiscal & otherwise), & then vote themselves another tax-cut, open another dozen off-shore tax-shelter loopholes, or even better: raise the debt ceiling to $9 Trillion (edit: $TEN TRILLION?!!!!). Can we just stop saying “deficit spending” & say “the Federal Gov’t is broke”?
Never forget, Bush once greeted a room of these guys thusly:
“This is an impressive crowd: the Have’s and the Have-More’s. Some people call you the elite, I call you my base” Al Smith Dinner Speech.
It must be fun, knowing that your are Right & there will never be a ‘Piper to Pay’.
God[sic] help us all.