Apostates In Our Midst
In Thomas Frank’s excellent new book Pity The Billionaire, he explains that The Right had to subvert reality, which we all know has a distinct liberal bias, and pin the blame for the on-going financial crisis on liberals instead of the conservative’s “the invisible hand whispered in my ear that financial regulations are tyranny, so stop it, you guys ” economic policies. But how to do that? Why by complaining that the Right is nothing but a bunch of cleverly-inserted sleeper liberals (I blame The Democrat Machine):
For the conservatives of 2008 and 2009, that left only one possibility: to declare their true faith in the myth and to cast out the previous generations of conservatives as heretics to free-market orthodoxy. They even excommunicated their old hero, George W. Bush, as a traitor to the cause of freedom. Bush helped matters along by confessing, “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” a line that will live forever on the websites of the insurgent Right.
Bush was not the only hurdle, however. In order for the rebellion to make sense, the entire history of the last few decades would have to be rewritten. Instead of a global embrace of market forces that historians see beginning in the seventies, we were now to understand that socialism had never been vanquished at all, that nearly every so-called conservative politician in those years was actually a a liberal in disguise, that no one (with the peculiar exception of Ronald Reagan) had really been faithful to the free-market dogma. The era of regulatory permissiveness that allowed the financial crisis to happen had become unmentionable, deliberately erased. It could not have happened, since conservatives knew now that progressives and crypto-socialists had controlled both parties and called the shots from the days of Woodrow Wilson to those of Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke.
But it couldn’t be that simple, could it? Nope, it turns out that the banksters are also closet lie-berals as Kevin Williamson (not the Dawson’s Creek/Scream guy, the other one who got his start as a Koch-sucker at IHS) patiently explains to busty radio cartoon Hugh Hewitt:
KW: Well, I don’t know that they’re necessarily all that anti-Romney, although they’re certainly more pro-Obama. The thing is that there is a great misconception that Wall Street is politically conservative, or even that big business, high finance in general is politically conservative. It’s not. If you look at the kinds of issues that most American conservatives really care about, where they are culturally, where they are morally, where they are religiously, these guys aren’t there. And not only are they not there, they’re actively opposed to it. I mean, these are guys making five, six, seven hundred thousand dollars a year who live in Manhattan and getting manicures and sending their kids to Choate and places like that. They’re not showing up at parent’s day in a Sarah Palin T-shirt. That’s just not who they are, not what they believe. But the one thing that they really are good at is using the rhetoric of being pro-business and being pro-free enterprise to kind of buffalo us conservatives, and get us to agree to all sorts of favors and subsidies and handouts for them.
Apparently it is big news to Kevin that these urban sophisticates are not Jesus-fearin’, forced-pregnancy lovin’, Federalist paper-cypherin’ gun-huggers and all this time they have been treating the rubes like so many farmers daughters what with their smooth-talkin’ Ayn Rand-quotin’ sweet-smellin’ ways. Ain’t that a pistol? It’s gettin’ so these days you can’t trust anyone to be a True Conservative lessin’ they’re wearing a tri-corner hat while puttering down to the mailbox on their Hoverround to pick up their disability check.
Lord willin’ the socialist US Mail gets it there in time…
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