"Tammy Bruce is in the same position as Ric Grenell. She is about as far right as you can get, and often plays the gay conservative role on Fox. That's fine, as far as I'm concerned, even though she has gone Breitbart on us. I've given up on the GOP for the foreseeable future, but I'm glad some gays haven't. We need to engage both sides."
What a terrific idea!
Yes, lets definitely keep holding to that "engage both sides" claptrap shall we?
Even after Mr. Sullivan discovered that Ms. Bruce's tweet was actually just the millionth unprompted, out-of-the-blue, non sequitur wingnut "joke" intended to poke fun at those damn humorless America-hating Libruls.
Even after it became perfectly clear that Ms. Bruce is doing quite nicely, thank you very much, as another one of American Conservatism's, self-loathing "self-administered prisoner".
Kapo: noun
A kapo or prisoner functionary (German: Funktionshäftling) was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks in the camp. Also called "prisoner self-administration", the prisoner functionary system minimized costs by allowing camps to function with fewer SS personnel. The system was also designed to turn victim against victim, as the prisoner functionaries were pitted against their fellow prisoners in order to maintain the favor of their SS guards. If they were derelict, they would be returned to the status of ordinary prisoners and be subject to other kapos.
And speaking of self-administered prisoners, it seems yet another proud member of the wingnut goon squad has suddenly discovered that -- OMFG! -- the wingnut goon squad is full of wingnut goons!
I mean, can you believe it!?
*So let's definitely give
this poor, tortured soul a column in "Salon".
Because that also seems like
such a fucking terrific idea.
My break with the extreme right
I worked for Reagan and wrote for National Review. But the new hysterical right cares nothing for truth or dignity
BY MICHAEL FUMENTO
Yet now I find myself linked not only with the Unabomber, but also Charles Manson and Fidel Castro. Or so says the Chicago-based think tank the Heartland Institute, for which I’ve done work. Heartland erected billboards depicting the above three declaring: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Climate scientists now, evidently, share something in common with dictators and mass murderers. Reportedly bin Laden was scheduled to make such an appearance, too.
You see, I’ve published articles saying I do “believe in global warming.” Yes, I’ve also questioned the extent to which man-made gases have contributed to that warming and concluded that expenditures to reduce those emissions would be as worthless as they’d be horrifically expensive. No matter; just call me “Ted.” Or “Charlie.” Or “Fidel.”
This is nuts! Literally. As in “mass hysteria.” That’s a phenomenon I wrote about for a quarter-century...
I was always way ahead of the curve. And my exposés primarily appeared in right-wing publications. Back when they were interested in serious research. I also founded a conservative college newspaper, held positions in the Reagan administration and at several conservative think tanks, and published five books that conservatives applauded. I’ve written for umpteen major conservative publications – National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among them.
But no longer. That was the old right. The last thing hysteria promoters want is calm, reasoned argument backed by facts. And I’m horrified that these people have co-opted the name “conservative” to scream their messages of hate and anger...
Hilarious, Michael. "Onion"-worthy. And as a writer may I say I
especially enjoyed your absolutely predictable, self-absolving bit about "the old right".
No, Michael, what bit you in the ass is none other than the same, old, raging, rotting, racist heart of American Conservative movement as it has existed in this country for my entire adult life.
And what you are now experiencing? This mindless, shrieking, all-out, berserk fury unleashed upon you for what you believe to be very reasonable, non-controversial positions?
This is what being a Liberal in America has been like for the last +40 years.
To be an American Liberal has means shouting your warnings into a maelstrom of well-financed Conservative lies and well-financed Centrist, "Both sides do it" complicity. And then watching, over and over again, as the threats about which you have been shouting yourself hoarse manifest themselves, over and over again, each time taking a bigger and bigger chunk of the country you love down in another burst of Conservative flame and failure.
And each time this happens you get to watch the incredibly well-financed Conservative multi-media fraud factory (which you, Michael, so faithfully served all these years) gather itself immediately back up and kick itself into high gear cranking out another set of designer lies "proving" that, in fact, the fires Conservatives had lit were somehow the fault of those Dirty Hippies.
Lies are then mass-distributed and
endlessly repeated at 24/7 at 150 decibels through a thousand well-worn wingnut media tributaries.
After which, as an American Liberal, you then get to watch the phenomenally well-financed Centrist, "Both sides do it" multi-media fraud factory eagerly seize upon this new set of Conservative lies like water in the desert; lies which then allow them to go back to doing they do best -- shaking their collective heads and launching another feculent hurricane of "No one could have predicted" and "He said/ She said" bullshit...
...into which American Liberals will once again impotently shout as the cycle repeats itself yet again.
However don't you worry your little head about this Sisyphusian horror, Michael: a life of pauperized pariah-hood spent
pouring words like these into the cold abyss --
The Big Lie
...
And for twenty years – while the mass purveyors of carefully calibrated hate and rage and xenophobia on the Right gathered more and more power and got more and more vulgar and vicious in their rhetoric – what did the Left try to do?
We tried to find common ground. To meet our opponents half-way.
To compromise…with people who sneered at the very idea of working together and said quite openly that compromise was “political date rape”.
While the Emperor of Weaponized Bile, Newt Gingrich, took over the House with a campaign explicitly based on calling Democrats “traitors” at every opportunity, and Limbaugh was being honored as the “Majority Maker” by those House Republicans, we on the Left were still trying to do and be all the nicey-nicey things that Alan Simpson is now all weepy and wistful for.
And it didn’t work. And while we played by Marquis of Queensbury, the orcs laughed in our faces, overran the joint, and bequeathed to us as its apotheosis the worst, most despicable, most incompetent, most Constitution-loathing Administration in American history.
Al Franken and Air America did not arise in a vacuum. The came into being as a desperate, eleventh-hour attempt to fight back against a twenty year multimedia blitz of unremitting, unrebutted Conservative lies and bigotry.
They arose because no one in the Mainstream Media had the guts to take on the GOP Propaganda Machine head-on. Instead, the MSM collaborated, because collaborating in the Big Lie was a much better, safer career move.
Progressive Radio arose because politicians like Alan Simpson were, for twenty years, perfectly content with looking the other way and harvesting the electoral fruits of the poison tree that their Conservative/Christopath/Racist Hate Radio, Hate TeeVee, Hate Satellite, Hate Cable and Hate Publishing so lavishly watered and fertilized.
Because the GOP was never concerned with the destruction of political comity…as long as it was working to their advantage.
As long as all of the screeching Orwellian hellfire was coming from the Right, they never said a fucking word.
But now, finally, after twenty years of unilateral disarmament, now that the Left has at last decided to fight back hard, suddenly old Republican loons like Simpson get all gooey for the glory days of cellulose collars, nickel candy bars, whale-bone corsets, heroic cavalry charges and a politics of gentle, ruffled fisticuffs followed by brandy, cigars and top-shelf hookers.
Suddenly it is “zealots on both sides” that have torn his beloved Temple down.
Well fuck you, Alan Simpson. Fuck you sideways for your bogus hand-wringing and crocodile tears.
And fuck you, George Mitchell, for sitting there with your thumb up your ass and allowing your good, Republican friend to spread this Big Lie unchallenged right under your nose.
-- is a fate reserved for
genuine Liberals. Those poor, dumb bastards who have had the inexcusably bad taste to be right about everything
since before you were born.
But an apostate Conservatives who has been
wrong about everything your entire life, I am sure that there is a cozy sinecure waiting just for you somewhere inside Tina Brown's vast, media empire.
Right between David Frum and Andrew Sullivan.
* (Thanks for pointing me over to Wonkette, textygirl.)
