Too Crazy For Boystown, Too Much Of A Boy For Crazytown

Jim Henley is completely right about this:

You can’t understand the Obscure Executive, or The Movement or whatever you prefer to call it unless you internalize the bizarre truth: They really believe this stuff. It’s tempting to think of the network of contractors and water carriers and foundations as cynical operators, just a particularly bloody-minded effort in rent-seeking using Rovian attack politics to manipulate dupes into further fattening already bulging wallets. No. The jabber about GOP schisms among “theocons” and “moneycons” and “security hawks” ignores the overlap of all three tendencies at the core of the contemporary Republican Party and “conservative” movement. Democrats are the party of treason isn’t just something bloggers and barflies believe. It’s the firm conviction of very wealthy and powerful stalwarts of the American Right... We look at the Democratic Party and see co-opted, managerialist shills. They look at the same group and see the Manson Family.

It's hard for our type to comprehend this, but it's true. Much of real right-wing power in the United States, right up to senior White House staff, sees the world like this. They simply cannot understand why anyone to their left behaves as they do, and the only answer that makes sense to them is "TREASON!!!" They honestly believe that "secular progressives" (as Bill O'Reilly likes to call us) are pining to turn America into the New Caliphate.

And this is nothing new. Here's Robert Parry in Secrecy and Privilege, describing the incoming Reaganite perspective after the 1980 elections:

In a scalding assessment of the CIA’s Soviet analysis, the transition team accused the DI of “an abject failure” to foresee a supposedly massive Soviet buildup of strategic weapons and “the wholesale failure” to comprehend the sophistication of Soviet propaganda. The transition report even questioned the patriotism of the career analysts who supposedly had underestimated the Soviet commitment to world domination. "These failures are of such enormity," the transition report said, "that they cannot help but suggest to any objective observer that the agency itself is compromised to an unprecedented extent and that its paralysis is attributable to causes more sinister than incompetence."

Of course, this seems utterly bonkers to us, but remember: from their perspective, simply telling the truth is treason.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Posted at January 21, 2008 09:32 AM

