Arizona Debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost

[Lakhota]

By Matt Taibbi

How about that race for the Republican nomination? Was last night's debate crazy, or what?

Throughout this entire process, the spectacle of these clowns thrashing each other and continually seizing and then fumbling frontrunner status has left me with an oddly reassuring feeling, one that I haven't quite been able to put my finger on. In my younger days I would have just assumed it was regular old Schadenfreude at the sight of people like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich suffering, but this isn’t like that – it's something different than the pleasure of watching A-Rod strike out in the playoffs.

No, it was while watching the debates last night that it finally hit me: This is justice. What we have here are chickens coming home to roost. It's as if all of the American public's bad habits and perverse obsessions are all coming back to haunt Republican voters in this race: The lack of attention span, the constant demand for instant gratification, the abject hunger for negativity, the utter lack of backbone or constancy (we change our loyalties at the drop of a hat, all it takes is a clever TV ad): these things are all major factors in the spiraling Republican disaster.

Most importantly, though, the conservative passion for divisive, partisan, bomb-tossing politics is threatening to permanently cripple the Republican party. They long ago became more about pointing fingers than about ideology, and it's finally ruining them.

Oh, sure, your average conservative will insist his belief system is based upon a passion for the free market and limited government, but that's mostly a cover story. Instead, the vast team-building exercise that has driven the broadcasts of people like Rush and Hannity and the talking heads on Fox for decades now has really been a kind of ongoing Quest for Orthodoxy, in which the team members congregate in front of the TV and the radio and share in the warm feeling of pointing the finger at people who aren't as American as they are, who lack their family values, who don’t share their All-American work ethic.

The finger-pointing game is a fun one to play, but it’s a little like drugs – you have to keep taking bigger and bigger doses in order to get the same high.

These people have run out of others to blame, run out of bystanders to suspect, run out of decent family people to dismiss as Godless, sex-crazed perverts. They’re turning the gun on themselves now. It might be justice, or it might just be sad. Whatever it is, it’s remarkable to watch.

Much More: Arizona Debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

It's as if all of the American public's bad habits and perverse obsessions are all coming back to haunt Republican voters in this race: The lack of attention span, the constant demand for instant gratification, the abject hunger for negativity, the utter lack of backbone or constancy (we change our loyalties at the drop of a hat, all it takes is a clever TV ad): these things are all major factors in the spiraling Republican disaster.

…the vast team-building exercise that has driven the broadcasts of people like Rush and Hannity and the talking heads on Fox for decades now has really been a kind of ongoing Quest for Orthodoxy, in which the team members congregate in front of the TV and the radio and share in the warm feeling of pointing the finger at people who aren't as American as they are, who lack their family values, who don’t share their All-American work ethic.

True.

It’s a perfect portrait of rightwing posters on USMB, particularly the bolded.

 

[GuyPinestra]

By Matt Taibbi

...the warm feeling of pointing the finger at people who aren't as American as they are, who lack their family values, who don’t share their All-American work ethic.

]

So now patriotism, morals and hard work are a BAD thing?

You gotta be CRAZY to buy this SHIT!

 

[Lakhota]

By Matt Taibbi

...the warm feeling of pointing the finger at people who aren't as American as they are, who lack their family values, who don’t share their All-American work ethic.

]

So now patriotism, morals and hard work are a BAD thing?

You gotta be CRAZY to buy this SHIT!

Is reading comprehension difficult for you? You're simply validating what Matt is saying. The right doesn't have a lock on patriotism, morals, or hard work - even though they may think they do.

 

[zonly1]

So now patriotism, morals and hard work are a BAD thing?

You gotta be CRAZY to buy this SHIT!

Is reading comprehension difficult for you? You're simply validating what Matt is saying. The right doesn't have a lock on patriotism, morals, or hard work - even though they may think they do.

bad night for lahota, this is the most incoherent drivelage fomentation from the left in quit some time but nevertheless news is never about objective reporting. right pinche' hota.

why all of sudden is soetoro given a free pass...fast and furious, green job bankruptcies.
greenie jobs the pipe dream to utopia......

 

[JustSomeGuy]

Most importantly, though, the conservative passion for divisive, partisan, bomb-tossing politics is threatening to permanently cripple the Republican party. They long ago became more about pointing fingers than about ideology, and it's finally ruining them.

Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence. There's a little something here called 'confirmation bias'. Apparently someone hasn't been paying much attention to the last four years or so, as if he had he would have noticed that Obama has spent the last four years essentially blaming Bush/Republicans for everything wrong with the U.S., while the Democratic party in general has been busy calling those who don't agree with them everything from obstructionists to terrorists.

 

[Lakhota]

Most importantly, though, the conservative passion for divisive, partisan, bomb-tossing politics is threatening to permanently cripple the Republican party. They long ago became more about pointing fingers than about ideology, and it's finally ruining them.

Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence. There's a little something here called 'confirmation bias'. Apparently someone hasn't been paying much attention to the last four years or so, as if he had he would have noticed that Obama has spent the last four years essentially blaming Bush/Republicans for everything wrong with the U.S., while the Democratic party in general has been busy calling those who don't agree with them everything from obstructionists to terrorists.

Well, thanks for your "unbiased" opinion. Goodnight...

 

[GuyPinestra]

So now patriotism, morals and hard work are a BAD thing?

You gotta be CRAZY to buy this SHIT!

Is reading comprehension difficult for you? You're simply validating what Matt is saying. The right doesn't have a lock on patriotism, morals, or hard work - even though they may think they do.

Nobody said the right has a 'lock' on those things, but when the Left dismisses those same things in the name of whatever, the right has the responsibility to bring it up.

 

[Truthmatters]

By Matt Taibbi

...the warm feeling of pointing the finger at people who aren't as American as they are, who lack their family values, who don’t share their All-American work ethic.

]

So now patriotism, morals and hard work are a BAD thing?

You gotta be CRAZY to buy this SHIT!

No they are great things.

try showing them some time

 

[GuyPinestra]

So now patriotism, morals and hard work are a BAD thing?

You gotta be CRAZY to buy this SHIT!

No they are great things.

try showing them some time

I do, but blinded partisans like you are unable to see it...

 

[occupied]

Is Matt wrong on the following statement?

============
This is where the Republican Party is now. They’ve run out of foreign enemies to point fingers at. They’ve already maxed out the rhetoric against us orgiastic, anarchy-loving pansexual liberal terrorists. The only possible remaining explanation for their troubles is that their own leaders have failed them. There is a stranger in the house!

This current race for the presidential nomination has therefore devolved into a kind of Freudian Agatha Christie story, in which the disturbed and highly paranoid voter base by turns tests the orthodoxy of each candidate, trying to figure out which one is the spy, which one is really Barack Obama bin Laden-Marx under the candidate mask!

We expected this when Mitt Romney, a man who foolishly once created a functioning health care program in Massachusetts, was the front-runner. We knew he was going to have to defend his bona fides against the priesthood ("I’m not convinced," sneered the sideline-sitting conservative Mme. Defarge, Sarah Palin), that he would have a rough go of it at the CPAC conference, and so on.

But it’s gotten so ridiculous that even Santorum, as paranoid and hysterical a finger-pointing politician as this country has ever seen, a man who once insisted with a straight face that there is no such thing as a liberal Christian – he’s now being put through the Electric Conservative Paranoia Acid Test, and failing!

============

Of course he's right. We've talked of the conservative purity test here and the impossibility of anyone passing it. With this about to get uglier than anyone can possibly imagine just remember that the republicans did it to themselves by trying to turn their party into an exclusive cultish group and driving out the moderates.