'Chaos rules, and I am its Prince'

[deminks]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/18/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-putin-215387

Would somebody please help me out here: I’m confused,” read the email to me from a conservative Republican activist and donor. “The Russians are alleged to have interfered in the 2016 election by hacking into Dem party servers that were inadequately protected, some being kept in Hillary’s basement and finding emails that were actually written by members of the Clinton campaign and releasing those emails so that they could be read by the American people who what, didn’t have the right to read these emails? And this is bad? Shouldn’t we be thanking the Russians for making the election more transparent?”

Put aside the factual inaccuracies in this missive (it was not Hillary Clinton’s controversial private server the Russians are alleged to have hacked, despite Donald Trump’s explicit pleading with them to do so, but rather those of the Democratic National Committee and her campaign chairman, John Podesta). Here, laid bare, are the impulses of a large swathe of today’s Republican Party. In any other era, our political leaders would be aghast at the rank opportunism, moral flippancy and borderline treasonous instincts on display.

(snip)

How did the party of Ronald Reagan’s moral clarity morph into that of Donald Trump’s moral vacuity? Russia’s intelligence operatives are among the world’s best. I believe they made a keen study of the American political scene and realized that, during the Obama years, the conservative movement had become ripe for manipulation. Long gone was its principled opposition to the “evil empire.” What was left was an intellectually and morally desiccated carcass populated by con artists, opportunists, entertainers and grifters operating massively profitable book publishers, radio empires, websites, and a TV network whose stock-in-trade are not ideas but resentments. If a political officer at the Russian Embassy in Washington visited the zoo that is the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, they’d see a “movement” that embraces a ludicrous performance artist like Milo Yiannopoulos as some sort of intellectual heavyweight. When conservative bloggers are willing to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars from Malaysia’s authoritarian government to launch a smear campaign against a democratic opposition leader they know nothing about, how much of a jump is it to line up and defend what at the very least was attempted collusion on the part of a brain-dead dauphin like Donald Trump Jr.?

Surveying this lamentable scene, why wouldn't Russia try to “turn” the American right, whose ethical rot necessarily precedes its rank unscrupulousness? It is this ethical rot that allows Dennis Prager, one of the right’s more unctuous professional moralists, to opine with a straight face that “The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.” Why wouldn’t a “religious right” that embraced a boastfully immoral charlatan like Donald Trump not turn a blind eye toward—or, in the case of Franklin Graham, embrace—an oppressive regime like that ruling Russia? American conservatism is no better encapsulated today than by the self-satisfied, smirking mug of Carlson, the living embodiment of what Lionel Trilling meant when he wrote that the “conservative impulse” is defined by “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

(end snip)

[Cary]

1. "Borderline treason" is mealymouthed

Isn't it?

[deminks]

3. Treason doth neuer prosper? What's the Reason? for if it prosper none dare call it treason. nt

[Cary]

5. But the author called it "borderline treason."

Not treason. If he dared used the words "borderline treason" did "borderline treason" prosper?

I have run into a fair number of people who mince words regarding "conservatives" and some years ago I was of that sentiment too. The problem here is that "conservatives" are not the least bit interested in meeting in the middle. They will take any compromise and use it against us. And to make things worse they are completely without reason so their positions are ridiculous in the first place. So I gave up on mincing words or trying to be courteous so as not to hurt "conservative" feelings.

I am occasionally dressed down by erstwhile leftists for being so extreme. What does not prosper is yielding to fascists.

[spanone]

2. K&R...

[COLGATE4]

4. Today's Republican Party is composed of two types:

The religious conservative fanatics, whose only interest is in fucking things up ASAP so that Jesus can come down to earth and begin his reign; and the opportunists whose only interest is in acquiring and using power (generally represented by mucho $$$). There's no talking or dealing with either type.