Originally Posted by roachboy

so it appears to follow for you, ace, that anything a republican administration does is huny dory, while the reverse is true for a democrat.
that has nothing to do with "reasonableness"...it is what neitzsche would have referred to as a slave mentality, that kind of cringing deference to recieved opinion the main function of which is to enable you to avoid posing questions that may be troublesome. i personally do not care what the psychological explanations might be for this servility. it doesnt interest me.

i do find the fact that this utterly servile relation to conservative talking points issues into a defense of resoluteness on the part of cowboy george: maybe this is an enabling mechanism that helps erase the fact of servility by projecting manliness onto another, so that you do not miss what you give away when you subordinate yourself to conservative ideology. projection is a fave in conservativeland. the mechanism is transparent to all but the inhabitants of conservativeland, who seem to live in a kind of truman show, except that even truman noticed eventually that something was fucked up.


i should maybe make my position on this newest bushfarce explicit: i was not surprised that he acted as he did. i am not particularly outraged about it simply because i find other, more grotesque instances of idiocy, corruption, mismanagement, incompetence more disturbing. i understand that libby acquired considerable significance both materially--what he did was serious, and the proceedings against him cannot be dismissed by a sane observer as a "political witchhunt" (a particularly empty retro-meme)--and symbolically. the symbolic dimension is the sad part: it is an expression of political impotence. the american system is not structured that an administration as overwhelmingly incompetent as that of the bush people cannot be gotten rid of until its term has expired. voter suppression in the selection process are irrelevant. congress is paralyzed: nothing the bush people have done will be actionable, and if there is something, it will be a very difficult procedural fight to even bring it to the floor (we'll see what happens with leahey's subpoenas re. wiretapping)...and popular sentiment is of no consequence--the conservative press lauds the administration for taking no account of popular sentiment. manliness precludes it. so apparently democracy only matters when it is convenient. which is that way of the right.

the bush people continue to ride their own internal logic of obliviousness and contempt down toward the singel digits in popularity ratings, grinding the whole of the american political and legal systems into a legitimation crisis even as they claim to defend them. and it doesnt matter--not to the administration, not to those few people who continue to support the administration--together, they see nothing--it is this pathetic context that libby functions as symbol, and the bush action is also far more problematic at the symbolic level than it is at the material level (for me anyway because the only surprise in this was that bush waited as long as he did to exculpate the loyalist effectively...)

sooner or later you have to look at the worldview you inhabit, ace, and try to figure out if it actually makes sense or not.
i do not care whether you adopt another politics--mine least of all--i really dont. but i do not understand how it is at this point possible for you or anyone else to continue confusing conservatism with a rational political viewpoint. you have 6 fucking years of seeing the implications of your ideology unfolded. and there is not one--NOT ONE--area that has not been made worse for the past 6 years. that you refuse to look is what makes your posts read as servile, ace, and that servility is what makes your posts contemptable.