The Devil You Know

You've probably read that "a coalition of influential Christian conservatives is threatening to back a third-party candidate" if Candidate-for-Life Benito Giuliani takes the Republican nomination. It's a hollow threat--not because they wouldn't do it, but because Benito Giuliani is the Candidate-for-Life. That said . . .

Here's Democratic madwoman in the attic, Digby, crying for the nth time that the infotainment segment of the American economy (that is, the American economy) refuses to call these people radicals, whereas it mocks MoveOn etc. etc. ad inf. as a bunch of short-deck lunatics. In an update, she reveals the dark underbelly of the dim animal that is the Donkey:

My point is that a significant conservative constituency is actually threatening to run a third party candidate if they don't get their way and yet all we ever hear about is how the Democrats are being led down the path to perdition by the Move-On hippies who are pushing them to respond to the large majority of Americans who want the US to begin withdrawing from Iraq.

If you're at all like me, then you read this and wondered how any person with a pulse could conclude with the evidence at hand that the "Move-On hippies," along with that most popular stage dummy, the American People, "want the US to begin withdrawing from Iraq." They are, after all, busy trying to elect Democrats. And you know the saying about walking and chewing gum.

This is the standard operation for Digby and her Democrats: to bitch and moan that effective politics are presented in the media as effective politics. Meanwhile, her own coalition of timorous shut-ins toes the standard line: "More and better Democrats." I am not the only one to notice that the more precedes the better. The Democratic party has clearlyt noticed, for one.

If Digby, DailyKos, and the rest of Donkle Netrootsia were as serious as they endlessly claim to be about ending the war in Iraq, about truly yanking the center of American politics a few centimeters to the left, about getting the Democratic party as an institution to represent their milquetoast democratic socialist agenda, then they'd do precisely what that "coalition of influential Christian conservatives" is doing: threaten to bolt the party; threaten to support a third party; threaten to stay home. If they were serious about it, they would indicate in certain terms to the party-in-Congress that their majority is contingent on their effectuation of a particular agenda. But dear lord, then Cokie Roberts might call them radicals, or worse, leftists! Someone call for the smelling salts.

Digby, DailyKos, and the rest of the Netrootsia isn't serious about ending the war in Iraq. That much is patently clear. Against efficacy they weigh respectability, whose measure is a Congressional majority and respectful copy by Tim Russert's staff writers. Ennobling, isn't it? Respectability wins every time, because respectability brings institutional authority. "Dirty hippies" is the grossest of self-flattery. The real dirty hippies are the black-masked anarchists, the sign-waving ANSWER kids who the imagined leftwing of the Democratic party roundly condemn for daring to bring up the School of the Americas or IMF shock-therapy economics at an antiwar rally. The real dirty hippies don't care what Katie Couric calls them.

None of this is new. From the earliest usenet boards to the moderated diaries of DailyKos (a progression that prooves, incidentally, the fraudulence of Progress), self-identified Democrats and liberal activists have hurled themselves against the edificial liberal media myth with ardor if not alacrity, heaping opprobium on a series of enemies, "memes," and purported misrepresentations. It's a crusade by way of displacement, for their anger at their imperial representatives can never boil over--anything more than a simmer and the Donkle might lose a seat in Congress. That would be one less Democrat, I note, to cede warmaking authority to the President, which would be one less unsuccessful, abortive primary challenge to keep the kids busy over at Kos.

Digby and the Democrats are as authoritarian as their not-so-counter counterparts of the Right. They're gaga over positions and titles. What a tawdry spectacle it was when the Democratic-majroity Congress came to session and they began crowing "That's Madame Speaker to you," about the woman who, many months later, has done precisely nothing to end the occupation of Iraq. Indeed, since the Democrats took over Congress, The United States has escalated the Iraq conflict and has laid groundwork both in the Persian Gulf region and in the American Legislature for aggression against Iran. But what is the cost of another million dead Iraqis compared to control of two branches of the Federal Government?

Now more than ever it should be clear that these people are equal enemies of peace.