The Bipartisanship Scam/Reality and the Right

Digby, as usual, calls it like it is. I'm going to add a thought or two of my own to her comments, particularly in the light of that ridiculous statement by Richard Viguerie above.

Conservatives in this country, particularly in the last generation, have had distinct problems with reality,* which, believe it or not, they've managed to turn to their advantage. I call it Reaganspeak: if you repeat it often enough and loudly enough, it's true. Witness Bush's last state of the union address. It was, simply put, more of the same, and bore the same relationship to what you can see going on in the world around you -- which is to say, none whatsoever. It's justly conceded that the Republicans are totally in synch on their message, as fanciful as it is, and their enablers -- the right-wing flacks on the radio, TV, and in the newsrooms of the major dailies -- dutifully repeat it without challenge. (Once again, class: the corporate press is corporate first, journalists somewhere down the list -- maybe. They know which side has the butter.) The problem here -- and it's a severe one -- is that their reality has become the reality of public discourse, even though it has little relationship to actual events. The right wing, including its pundits, talking heads, and corporate outlets, like its president, simply refuses to acknowledge any event that doesn't adhere to the tropes they have delineated.

(This strikes me as being systemic: the right wing tends to be composed of those with authoritarian leanings who depend on received wisdom -- call it "marching orders" -- for direction, so it's fairly easy for them to have that kind of message discipline. The left is a big, sloppy, diverse-to-the-point-of-anarchy mess, which is something the right can't really manage very effectively: look how badly their tripartite marriage of convenience is fracturing after one generation.)

But I digress. "Bipartisanship" is the right-wing's way of getting off the hook for its screw ups. Just look at who is behind "Unity '08" and similar travesties: a few billionaires who see themselves losing their places at the government trough. (Oh, and you'd better believe Big Corpo would support a Bloomberg campaign.) It's really very simple: when it looks like the brown stinky is about to hit the air system, call for "bipartisan cooperation" so we can "move ahead" and stop "raking over dead issues."

As a tangent to this (although not really all that tangential, when you think about it for a while), see this essay by Sara Robinson at CAF.

* This is not, by the way, limited to the arch-reactionary, "special rights for heterosexuals" wing of the Republican party. See this excellent summary by Andy Towle of the McCain anti-gay robocall flap; McCain was, of course, defended by the Log Cain Republicans with the usual array of lame arguments, including the old stand-by:

"Of course, those facts won’t satisfy the left-wing who pounces on these kinds of things. But where were these same left-wingers when Democrat Barack Obama, who has never introduced a single piece of pro-gay legislation in his Senate career, paraded around on stage with an anti-gay religious leader who believes in so-called “conversion therapy”? Where were they when Democrat Sen. Hillary Clinton couldn’t bring herself to denounce Gen. Peter Pace’s anti-gay remarks last year? Where were they when Obama proposed meetings and negotiations with the gay-murdering president of Iran?"

WTF? I seem to remember a huge outcry over the McClurkin incident (in fact, I remember contributing to it, as well as doing some follow-ups), and a lot of flack directed at Clinton and Obama for their reluctance to call Peter Pace on his anti-gay comments. Iran, not so much, but then, the context was not centered on gay rights on that one -- I seem to remember that Obama proposed that as a way of avoiding yet another war in the Middle East. Of course, if you're a McCain Republican, eternal war is one of your guiding principles.

And my question for the LCR is simply, how gay-friendy is a candidate who has an atmosphere in his campaign that makes something like that possible? (And let's not forget that conservatives are all about principles, shall we not?)

But then, we can't let facts get in the way of our pouting now, can we?