Waukesha, Wisconsin--If you didn't see it on Fox or C-Span today, John McCain was speaking at a rally when a very stupid old man started yelling, "The socialists are taking over," which makes no real sense while making a certain slanted sense, it being the GOP's lot to make no sense at all.
Of course, McCain being McCain, the dumbo demagogue he is, agreed with him, which is totally insane.
This line is being peddled by the GOP far-and-wide right now, and it's something to watch, counter, and to be wary of. "The Socialists are taking over."
We are? Can I tell you what to do now, asshole? Please? I kid. Others aren't, and they're rightly angry over the last 28 years of GOP meddling (they had DNC help) in our lives. "Kozmik" at Talking Points Memo wrote this eloquent and accurate assessment of where the GOP is right now regarding the Wall Street crash:
Of course bailing-out the banks is a kind of socialism, but it's nothing new to this country, it hasn't felled any civilizations recently (actually saving them in Sweden when their banks collapsed for similar reasons), and he's misreading history as most Americans who have had to suffer under our miseducational system that allows gym teachers to instruct in history, forget economics.The GOP is in shambles. The ideology which sustained the GOP through the cold war is now expiring in rough parity with the Chevrolet truck as commuter vehicle.
You just can't base a platform on greed, ignorance, and violence and expect to be prosperous. You can't run a party on nihilism while claiming to be the party of morality. You can't expect to be the world's leader while encouraging anti-intellectualism.
Both McCain and the Bush family show they've lost control of the base they cultivated and hoped to exploit for their ignorance. The essential flaw in Machiavellian logic.
Today's GOP is based on? What?
It's all garbage. From the virulent anti-intellectualism to the nonsense laissez-faire supply-side economics, to the moronically hyper aggressive FP and colonial mindset more appropriate to the era of telegrams and horseback than global markets/media and loose nukes. http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/mccain_supporter_rants_about_h.php
But you see, I have a plan that can bring about a kind of Gnostic-healing of the divide between the Free Market and Socialism, an admixture, and it's a novel one.
It's very simple and very American: give everyone a credit card with an absolutely insane credit limit. Then, tell them they can go out and spend-spend-spend. Go to Pier 1 (not really, this is hypothetical, don't do this at home), go to Red Lobster, take vacations in Europe (Italy, that should do the trick), hit-up all the remaining record stores and comic book shops and buy almost everything, buy new cars and trucks, start an expensive and trendy new drug-habit, eat out all the time, go to tanning salons, and all those expensive department stores you always wanted to go nuts at.
You know, just go crazy, girl, and spend as much as humanly possible.
After that, we know the rest: bailouts for the entire American public, everyone, even illegal aliens. That's right, drinks for everyone, and on the house. That free lunch we've all been dreaming of could be nigh, and since it's the nightmare of the Republican Party and bitter shopkeepers everywhere--delicious. Voila! Everyone in America is bailed-out by the government, all will be pure as light, and we'll live happily ever after in la-la land.
You might think I'm kidding, but that's OK. It's understandable.
The insanity of it all is that my plan would likely work, this being the worst--and utterly irrational--of all possible human worlds. While Michelle Malkin (who's losing it today more than usual), Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, and the rest of the GOP's apparatchiki go even crazier than they already are trying to explain away the bailout, we can all rest more soundly than they ever will. Yes, even with the worst economic crisis in our history facing us. Idiots like that old man in Waukesha are about to become a very isolated-cult of wackos, which is exactly what they were all along.
Now, things have been pushed so far by the conservatives that they've kicked their own hollow ideology from underneath themselves, they're done. Hemlock anyone? A drink for that man in the back row! I'd suggest that the old man from Waukesha drink hemlock, but he committed mental suicide a long time ago when he became a Republican.
And how is the right's "socialist" panic any different from the so-called online Left's with their hysteria over "an October 1 takeover"? It's not. They're all reactionaries who need to get-a-grip on themselves. That means you too Larisa Alexandrovna and all of the kooks at OpEd News. Reel it in, you're all beginning to sound like a bunch of hopped-up rednecks.
