Broken-glass Republicanism

There's a two-fer going on over at Hullabaloo. Digby points out a fundamental characteristic of post-Goldwater Republicans: Gaining access to the levers of American government is no longer about improving the lives and security of American citizens; it's about power for its own sake, and occasionally for the sake of enriching themselves and their cronies, or dealing paybacks to their political enemies.

Without recognizing that, this recent item might seem at most a data point on a possibly interesting trend: Republican operators are starting to behave like sore losers before they've actually, you know, lost. It attempts to begin by striking a classic pose, but on the whole, fails:

Friends, neighbors, and countrymen of the Left: I hate your lying guts

WHEN I WAS speechwriting at the White House, one rule was enforced without exception. The president would not be given drafts that lowered him or The Office by responding to the articulations of hatred that drove so many of his critics.

This rule was especially relevant to remarks that concerned the central topic of our times, Iraq. Having left the White House more than a year ago, I conclude that the immunizing effect of that rule must have expired, because I now find that I am infected with a hatred for the very quarter that inspired the rule--the deranged, lying left. […]

I used to laugh these people off. Now I detest them as among the most loathsome people America has ever vomited up.

I have also grown to hate certain people of genuine accomplishment like Ted Turner, who, by his own contention, cannot make up his mind which side of the terror war he is on; I hate the executives at CNN, Turner's intellectual progeny, who recently carried water for our enemies by broadcasting their propaganda film portraying their attempts to kill American soldiers in Iraq.

I now hate Howard Dean, the elected leader of the Democrats, who, by repeatedly stating his conviction that we won't win in Iraq, bets his party's future on our nation's defeat.

I hate the Democrats who, in support of this strategy, spout lie after lie: that the president knew in advance there were no WMD in Iraq; that he lied to Congress to gain its support for military action; that he pushed for the democratization of Iraq only after the failure to find WMD; that he was a unilateralist and that the coalition was a fraud; that he shunned diplomacy in favor of war.

These lies, contradicted by reports, commissions, speeches, and public records, are too preposterous to mock, but too pervasive to rebut, especially when ignored by abetting media.

Most detestable are the lies these rogues craft to turn grief into votes by convincing the families of our war dead that their loved ones died in vain.

And so on. You can read the whole thing if capturing the full effect is that important to you. I'll promise you this: He's not lying. The boy's a hater. He wraps it up with this:

These are the people I now hate--these people who seek to control our national security. The best of them are misinformed. The rest of them are liars.

So I intend to vote on Nov. 7. If I have to, I'll crawl over broken glass to do it. And this year I'm voting a straight Republican ticket right down to dog catcher, because I've had it. I'm fed up with the deranged, lying left. They've infected me. I'm now a hater, too.


PAUL BURGESS of Spotsylvania County was director of foreign-policy speechwriting at the White House from October 2003 to July 2005.

Bear in mind that this gem was published not at some back-slapping hate site like Little Green Footballs but in the Fredricksburg VA Free Lance-Star:

Where does such spittle-flecked, petechial hemorrhaging animosity come from? After all, the Dems are preparing perhaps to recapture control of one house of Congress, not to strip him and his family naked and chase them down Main Street with whips. Digby provides some perspective for this outburst:

The Republicans have fielded five presidents since 1968 and only one of them can be considered politically successful. One out of five. The rest have crashed and burned each time on incompetence, corruption or some combination of the two. I think it's fair to say that neither the modern Republican party or the conservative movement is capable of governance. And there's a reason for that. […]

This is why I don't want any of us to think for a moment that winning and losing elections means the same thing to us as it means to them. Democrats believe in government and they want to make it work. Republicans see government purely as a means to exert power. Unfortunately, they are not very good at that because in the modern world sheer, dumb might is no longer possible. The best they can do is loot the treasury and leave the rest of their mess to be cleaned up by the Democrats.

What they really excel at is politics. Governance just hangs them up. And don't think for a moment that they will be chagrined or ashamed and crawl off into a hole to lick their wounds. Being defeated liberates them to do what they are really good at --- destroying the opposition and pushing their agenda with sophisticated, scorched earth political rhetoric. It's not natural for them to be on the defense and they don't like it. They are going back to their natural state --- victimhood and the aggressive attack.

Get ready. The Democrats will not only have to govern, but they will have to fix all the problems they've created while fighting them every step of the way. They're not going away. And they will pull out every stop to win every election, not because they necessarily want to govern but because that's how you keep score.

Thus, poor hate-infected Mr. Burgess's outburst may be of a piece (a piece of broken glass, perhaps) with the general ratcheting up of gratuitous smear ads by Republican candidates this month, the empty list of significant legislative accomplishments by the Republican-held congress (other than tax-cutting and yielding control over habeas corpus to the executive branch), and the utter aimlessness of American foreign policy.

Anyone expecting this atmosphere to generate bipartisanship anytime soon, regardless of who controls which branch of the government, is dreaming.

Republican voters--is this really what you signed on for?