Ah, Comity!

by tristero

Attention, all you Emily Post trolls who need smelling salts after encountering the nasty vicious netroots:

“Now, listen, I’ve voted ‘present’ two or three times in my entire 25-year political career, where there might have been a conflict of interest and I didn’t feel like I should vote,” Boehner said. “In Congress, we have a red button, a green button and a yellow button, alright. Green means ‘yes,’ red means ‘no,’ and yellow means you’re a chicken shit. And the last thing we need in the White House, in the oval office, behind that big desk, is some chicken who wants to push this yellow button.”

That’s right. John Boehner said Obama’s a chicken shit.

And this is why, girls and boys, all talk about a less toxic political atmosphere with the current Republican party is sheer nonsense. Oh sure, Obama – if we are lucky enough to wake up Wed and find him elected – could find a spare Hagel lying around, or a Jim Leach to nail into his Cabinet,and that’s probably a good idea in the long run. But the reality staring us straight in the face is that the leadership of the Republican party – and a huge GOP majority having influence in the party’s ideological and strategic direction -have no interest in anything remotely resembling bipartisanship.

And neither does anyone I know personally who’s supporting Obama. Not with these murderous, corrupt clowns. We want the extreme right and their agenda out of our national politics, driven back to the margins of American discourse where it belongs. Maybe someone out there truly yearns for a less nasty politics, but not me, not now. Not with extremists who call me “traitor,” who have listed my friends as some of the 100 most dangerous people in America or placed them on terrorist watch lists, and who, from their seat as a US Representative pronounce a candidate for the American presidency a chicken shit.

Since I’m sure our resident rightwing friends will take what I just said out of context, let’s be clear. I am not saying that a robust, vibrant, and bipartisan effort on serious issues will remain ipso facto impossible or is necessarily undesirable. Nor am I saying that Democrats and only Democrats always have the “right” answer to a problem – clearly they don’t. I am saying, however, that it is absolutely impossible with the Republican party as it is now, and in its forseeable paleolithic palinized future, for Democrats to work together productively with the extremists at the top of (and throughout) the party except on the most circumscribed of issues. To get anything serious done, they will have to be fought. And that will not be pretty. I see no reason for Dems to back down and plenty of reasons to respond tit for tat, with interest.

You cannot “work with” the extreme right, but you can defeat them. Obama’s tactic appears to be to ignore them and isolate them from the atrophied remnants of the “moderate” Republicans, which he will encourage. Fair enough, that’s part of a strategy, but it’s not sufficient. To defeat Bushism and other trends of the American extreme right will take, as it always has, concentrated . sustained, and effective resistance in addition to Obama’s “divide and conquer” tactics. It requires us to denounce scoundrels like DeLay and humiliate buffoons like Boehner as well as a consistent, persistent, hounding of the media to do their job to expose these people for what they are.

These are incompetent frauds driven by a dangerously belligerent ideology grounded not in American values, but only sheer ignorance and fear. There is no reason to show them respect or kindness. They simply must be pushed away from the corridors of power, left to mutter in their plush think tanks and at their gun shows ’bout how Obama is using hypnosis, how the beginning of the end was fluoridated water, and how gay marriage is the only human factor that causes global warming.