Taking on the naivete of liberals who don't grasp the neocon threat.

[Merlin]

My son wrote to tell me about this Charles Pierce mini rant in Eric Alterman's blog on Monday. He describes Pierce as "a Boston Globe journo who writes in weekly to Altercation. He's a gut-punching liberal rhetorician, and, at least when he writes for E.A., the best voice of righteous progressive outrage there is..."


http://www.msnbc.com/news/752664.asp?0dm=C13UO
(control "F" ("find") for "Pierce")


Charles Pierce
Newton, Mass.

Peter Beinart is one of those liberals for whom I wish we still had some use. I mean, he's smart. He's prolific. He's completely sincere, and he's really terrible on television ・which, given the ignorami who seem to prevail in our media/political culture, I consider a great recommendation for both his intellect and his character. But, boy howdy, reading his review of the Krugman collection in yesterday's TIMES, the man sounds like he's spent the last 15 years floating amid the moons of Neptune. Consider this passage:

"Guest lists that cross ideological lines can help liberals understand the conservatives they write about. And many Washington conservatives genuinely don't see the Bush administration as radical: they see it as having ratified a big-spending, culturally liberal status quo."

Breathtaking, isn't it? I mean, where does one begin? It isn't like the conservative agenda is hard to discern; when Grover Norquist says he wants to strangle government in his bathtub, he isn't speaking metaphorically. He means it. Tom DeLay doesn't speak in code, and he runs the House of Representatives. The people who've put our current foreign policy up on the rocks have plotted the course in public ・and, occasionally, in Mr. Beinart's own magazine ・for the past 15 years. They didn't act out their impeachment kabuki in the root cellar, and they didn't muscle the Florida election in the dark.

And the fact that a lot of them haven't yet gotten everything they wanted is hardly proof that the administration doesn't want all the same stuff, too. It's evidence that some Republicans ・and even some Democrats ・would rather not see the Republic taken all the way over a cliff. If it pains Mr. Beinart to know that some of his dinner pals want to demolish everything in which he believes, and that they are halfway there already, I am truly sorry, but the Krug is right and he's wrong on this one. I don't want these clowns understood. I want them defeated ・permanently, the way the Whigs were ・and the earth salted so they do not rise again.

[Bandit]

1. The last sentence is exactly my sentiments also

And the earth salted so they do not rise again. I also imagine that is exactly how they feel about me and they have all the power :scared:

[cprise]

2. They have to GO.

Smoked-out, tarred, feathered and convicted. We have to make these guys comedy mainstays for at least the next 50 years. This isn't about 'conservatism' in general: There must be no room for the neocon type of power madness and self-delusional racist instincts.