Selling Their Souls

Ye gods, has it been that long (again)?

Well, anyway. This bit of brilliance has been making the rounds thanks to Atrios:

It's not true that the Conservatives I know don't give a damn so much as they are terrified that they were wrong.

Deeply, primally terrified. Their whole psychological infrastructure is cobbled together out of half-baked conservative bumper-sticker ideology, gun lust, socially illiterate hatred of "welfare cheats" and other largely fictional or apocryphal lazy people (read: niggers and other swarthy folk) who want to leech off of them while they work harder and harder for less and less. Despite a lot of bluster about Freedom and Individuality they are, at heart, happiest when they are conforming to the wishes of the Strong Man; when they know exactly their place in the hierarchy.

...

But in exchange for all of this wonderfulness, they have to hand over their souls to truly evil men.

...

This is the ancient, unbridgeable and eternally hostile schism between their template for humanity and ours. This is, I believe, why sometimes we fundamentally cannot understand each other; because we are running two radically different and incompatible O/S's.

...

And because everything – their very souls – rest on the foundation of the infallibility of Dear Leader, they'll happily kill anyone in any numbers who might force them to face up to the fact that Dear Leader is a duplicitous, lying sleazebag who has played on their fear and ignorance and patriotism to turn them out like $2 crack whores.

...

The good news is, we are still 49% of the game; wake up and pick off a mere 100,000 and we can begin to turn a lot of thinks around. The more gooder news is that our O/S thrives best when saturated in pure, clean Reality, and theirs rust and rots and flies apart at the seams when the lies that insulate it are peeled away.

It was a bear choosing excerpts from this post. Go. Read.

The problem is, Reality really is fungible, albeit not nearly as much as the madmen in office would like it to be. And when you bend Reality for too long, at too arrogant an angle, it knocks you over all by itself, to steal and rework shamelessly from Santayana. Worse, their arrogant experiment in molesting an entire region threatens to knock the rest of us over with them.

There was a time when fundamentalist terrorism was on the run. After September 11, 2001, we were united as never before. All that would have been necessary for this brand of evil to be an endangered species was for the men in power to not be arrogant, greedy, psychopathic fools.

Alas, they are.
--
(/) Roland X
"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim." -- Santayana (again)