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rove may be a thug but he is not a fool--he knows that the writing is on the wall for the type of politics he has been an important part of shaping...so he is doing the only thing he seems capable of doing, which is to retreat back into the variant of racist discourse that has been the stock in trade of conservative politics for years now.
so it is not surprising to find folk who actually believe this nonsense tracking its basic logic. moosenose is in a sense only a particularly inept performer--he is not responsible for the ridiculous, limited way of seeing the world he talks through--the problem is that contemporary conservative discourse make positions like his appear almost legitimate.
i tend to see in moosenose and others who argue more or less the same line near-perfect expressions of everything degenerate about conservative politics in general. for what its worth, i rarely get offended by the posts he offers, no matter how foul--i simply marvel that the framework within which he operates enables positions like his to appear coherent.
the problem is right ideology, not moosenose or any number of others like him.
vis-a-vis rove, the parallel to julius streicher was exact: same type of logic, different object. the central appeal of contemporary conservative politics is its usage of the logic of racism. you can see it in most of the moves that define the terrain: that the extreme right represents the "real america" that is persecuted by "outside" forces...the way those who oppose the extreme right are characterized is always ridiculous--as groups whose only function is to not be what the right likes to pretend it is: manly, erect, not bothered terribly by complexity, very military in a kind of village people sorta way, with an almost unseemly affection for Following Orders, waving the flag, cheesy graphics, the militarization of values, the notion of national destiny etc.....
this "logic" was key to the development of limbaugh's appeal... his talk show operated as an ideological laboratory for the right through the whole of the clinton period.
for a position like this, 911 must have seemed like a gift from heaven, the sort of thing the right had been praying for without having the manly virtue to do it directly.
so you have this "war on terror"-----a direct reflection of the internal logic of conservative ideology of the past 15 years or so: the fantasy Other which is never coherently analyzed in itself, but which operates as a signifier mostly because it is repeated endlessly, everywhere or nearly, across the whole of the conservative media apparatus--the only coherent function of the figure Terrorist--and its protoype in the tiny intellectual world of the right--"liberals"----is to show the loyalists of the right what they can pretend to be by showing them what they are not.
what makes this like racism is both the construction of the Adversary and the way in which the logic of the discourse itself is non-falsifiable---politics according to the right media apparatus is a matter of quasi-religious faith, something outlined in transcendent terms--of the type that reagan's speechwriters exploited endlessly, these rhetorical flights into high patriotic cheese.
all the while the same message--"we"--the "real americans"--are being stabbed in the back by x (the Enemy of the Day here)...."they" want to destory "us"
from an outside viewpoint, that the primary motive that would encourage belief in this kind of horseshit is increasing cultural and economic insecurity driven by the mutation of capitalist organization away from a nation-state framework--with all the problems of social reproduction/control that this entails--is so obvious as to almost not require a positive statement. but since in right world, it is axiomatic that capitalism is an unqualified good, then rationalizing this sense of collapse has to be done on other terms---wholesale avoidance is one way to do it--so "we" who are the "real americans" are being assaulted by a whole series of otherwise unrelated forces, the condensed expression of which is the enemy of the moment.
from which it follows: if the right's political power is falling apart, best to reinforce the group-hate of the Enemy---the forces of Satan if you are appealing to the evanglicals, Terror if you are appealing to the 1/3 of the country that still supports the iraq debacle--"liberals" if you are trying to go back to what worked before, the prototype.
fortunately for all of us, most folk in the empirical world who lean right here seem to have a variable relation to this ideological framework, moving in and out of its logic depending upon the issue.
but there are many folk who are simply faithful to the "logic" of the rove-style right
so the kind of racist nonsense you see in moosenose's posts--and from other ideologically driven conservatives--simply reflects the centrality of the logic of racism in conservative politics.
this is no surprise. it explains much about such appeal as this frame of reference has had.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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