Indecision 08 Wingnut thread

[Sir Squid Diddimus]

awedamn.

[Cain]

Pro-tip: work for any bank whose collapse would impact very badly on Goldman-Sachs.

Paulson is a G-Sachs man through and through, and will not let it be hurt by the current financial crisis (which is why he would not let AIG collapse, but let Lehman brothers sink without a trace).

[Cain]

YES, ITS THE MOTHERFUCKING 90S ALL OVER AGAIN!

Via Sadly, No:

This rush to buy guns, whether real or not, has become a conservative shibboleth lately, stemming from the avidly held prospect that an Obama administration would outlaw gun ownership, and the even more eagerly dreaded couch-time fantasy of a socioeconomic catastrophe that calls for the stockpiling of canned and dehydrated food and ammunition, the appointment of a 'bug-out vehicle' (in the imagined form, perhaps, of a suburban minivan with a jerry-built roof turret and spikes welded to the wheel hubs), and the merciless shooting of revenooers, bushy-haired and/or dusky-hued strangers, strangers in general except for attractive young women in distress, stray dogs and other previously non-huntable wildlife, and actual or potential thieves of canned and dehydrated food and ammunition.

The ongoing stock market crash has given a keen edge to this perennial daydream, this powerful intersection of the desires of the cod-Libertarian science-fiction fan and those of the cod-populist rural crank. When Confederate Yankee drops the name "Barack" at the end of his tale, it's meant to invoke something that he, himself might not be able to explain in plain language, but that's nevertheless pretty easy to understand for anyone who's experienced the antics of the Confederate-Yankocracy since the mixed blessing of the Internet enabled them in media other than the micro-scrawled journal and the talk radio call-in line.

It signifies a return to the wingnut ethos of the Clinton years, before the conspiratorial, wackadoo right wing fell in love with George W. Bush, and thus with government power and weird neo-royalist notions of the Executive Branch. It's a return to the "jackbooted government thugs" iconography of the '90s, in which incidents such as Ruby Ridge and Waco were seen as defining a historical fault line between an illegitimate, runaway Federalism and a perpetually threatened organic America — the often agrarian, invariably pre-capitalist order imagined and extolled throughout the early 20th Century by characters from William Jennings Bryan to Father Coughlin, and later as even sillier farce by conservatives from Pat Buchanan, to G. Gordon Liddy, to Rod Dreher. Armed militias, or at least groups of yo-yos with guns, sprang up to oppose a hallucinatory, originally Birch-concocted trend toward world government and to defend the sanctity of the Constitution — whose feckless shredding they would later, as we know, cheer, as soon as a spite-lofted pseudoconservative administration again controlled the White House.

In brief and to sum up, an Obama presidency will yield us a bounty of delicious 180-degree reversals, hanging contradictions, forehead-smacking discontinuities, and flaming self-pwnages from our wingnut pals, as their entire political edifice turns heliotropically to face the warming light of the new Hated Thing. Their doings of the past eight years will seem, to them although not to ourselves, like fragments from a dream. They will charge the George W. Bush presidency with a Reaganlike aura of indistinct, dumb uplift and nonspecific moral rectitude. And they will struggle to recapture those great days of America, always so intrinsic but so sadly vanished, held always and each time just out of their grasp.

[Payne]

Someone has been brushing with the preemptive troofpaste again.

[Iason Ouabache]

The next decade is going to be even more fun than the last!!! 

[Iason Ouabache]

Wait.. a Wingnut actually making sense and turning against the Republicans??? 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks.html?_r=3&em&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect...

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it's 2-to-1. With tech executives, it's 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it's 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community...

[Sarah Palin] is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away. 

[Cain]

Nah, its just Brooks pretending to be even-handed, as he does every so often.  He'll go off the deep end again in a moment, or engage in moral equivalency or something.

Besides, what he is doing here is a modern day version of the aristocrats calling for intellectuals to defend the Ancien Regime in France, once the revolution was over.  "Write essays praising absolute monarchy, and I shall give you this lump sum of cash as a prize".

[trillian]

[Vene]

I'm sold, Obama '08

[Jasper]

This sign represents a fundamental fundamentality of this election's fundamentalness.

[Kurt Christ]

Y'know...it's mostly Sikhs that wear turbans, rarely Muslims.
Obama is now officially a crypto-Sikh.

[trillian]

I love how "hussein" is in quotes... like it's some sort of secret muslim nickname or something

[Sir Squid Diddimus]

that's disgusting.

[Payne]

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I don't know if it's just my area, but the Obama freaks I know are also hardcore gun-toters who are stocking up on ammo in case Obama loses.