Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Conservative Crack-Up Watch

by digby

So we know that king neocon Norman Podhoretz is sticking with Bush to the bitter end, which is kind of sweet when you think about it. But the movement conservatives are bailing. Here’s a blurb from Richard Viguerie’s new book:

This is the first book that deals with the disappointment and even anger that most conservatives have with President Bush and the GOP-led Congress on major public policy issues. In this conservative manifesto, Viguerie applies conservative principles to 21st Century problems and issues. He also presents a detailed strategy for conservatives to take back control of the Republican Party and govern America.

With President Bush’s low approval numbers, the unrest among grassroots conservatives, and the potential for GOP losses in the 2006 and 2008 elections, this book is a roadmap for conservatives as they begin to rebuild the conservative movement, recapture the Republican Party, and move even the Democrats to the right. In Conservatives Betrayed, Mr. Viguerie proposes bold action for conservatives to take back the Republican Party from Big Government Republicans, including:

Withhold financial support from Republican committees and most Republican incumbents.

Withhold support from all 2008 presidential candidates.

No longer call yourself a “Republican” but rather a Reagan conservative or Reagan Republican.

Work for wholesale change in Republican leadership at all levels of government.

And think and act as a third force (not third party) independent of the Republican Party. While not advocating GOP defeat, Mr. Viguerie says conservatives should not fear the loss of Congress in 2006, since our best gains usually come after a defeat:

— 1976: Gerald Ford’s loss made possible Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.

— 1992: George H.W. Bush’s loss made possible the Republican congressional victories in 1994.

Losing is always a good tonic for the New Right, who always get a little disoriented when they hold power for too long. It messes with their sense of victimization. And, of course, they have to do this to save conservatism from the taint of Bushism.

But there’s more to it than that and it has to do with old Norman. Even before the last election, Viguerie was seeing the writing on the wall:

… for Viguerie and other conservative leaders, maintaining that discipline this year is harder than usual. The Republicans’ united front masks a growing struggle sparked by the president’s hawkish and ambitious foreign policy–one that may burst into the open soon after the polls close, whoever wins. “Most conservatives are not comfortable with the neocons,” Viguerie says. He decries the neocons as “overbearing” and “immensely influential. . . . They want to be the world’s policeman. We don’t feel our role is to be Don Quixote, righting all the wrongs in the world.”

Viguerie’s disquiet is widely shared by veteran conservative activists, who are increasingly blaming neoconservatives for placing Iraq at the center of the war on terrorism.

Viguerie is one of the great old men of the modern conservative movement. He’s a keeper of the flame. The GOP is just the political arm, not the center of the movement itself. Bush and his friends the neocons have failed conservatism, big time:

…the neocons now find themselves in a fight for their place in the Republican Party–and in a second term, should Bush win. Former Reagan administration official Stefan Halper and former British diplomat Jonathan Clarke, in a widely discussed book called America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, charge that Bush’s foreign policy was hijacked after 9/11, leading to a “betrayal of both Republican and conservative principles.” Francis Fukuyama, a former State Department official in the administration of Bush’s father, assailed some fellow neocons and Bush’s Iraq policy in a National Interest article. He argued that Bush overlooked the need for international support to build a sense of “legitimacy” for the Iraq invasion, antagonized many by announcing a pre-emption strategy, and “went into Iraq with enormous illusions about how easy the postwar situation would be.” Conservative columnists like George Will, Robert Novak, and William F. Buckley Jr. are stoking the fire. Will recently complained that ideology is crowding out facts in Bush’s Iraq nation building. “This administration needs a dose of conservatism without the [neo] prefix,” he wrote.

Behind the scenes, movement conservatives are disputing neocon ideas as well. Says Alfred Regnery, publisher of the American Spectator and numerous conservative books, “The administration got sold a little bit by the neocons. . . . We should return to a traditional, strong Republican foreign policy: We go to war only as a last resort, and we’re not in the business of building nations.” Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum, says the administration needs to “finish up the job in Iraq.” However, Schlafly says, “we don’t think we can be the policeman of the world.” She describes herself as “not a fan” of Wilsonian policies: “All this talk of democracy in Iraq is kind of ridiculous,” she argues. “What’s really important is that they have governments that are friendly to the United States.”

Meanwhile:

Under fire, neoconservatives out of government are regrouping. This summer saw the rebirth of the Committee on the Present Danger–the third incarnation of a group first launched in the 1950s and restarted in the 1970s to promote a hard line against Soviet communism. Norman Podhoretz, one of the movement’s leading thinkers, laments the darkening mood of “gloom and doom,” in particular the “newborn pessimism among supporters” of the Iraq war. “Things have gone not badly, not disastrously, but triumphantly,” he declared at the group’s inaugural conference last month. The group posits that the United States now faces another existential threat and has dubbed the struggle “World War IV,” the Cold War being World War III. The group’s chairman, former CIA Director James Woolsey, says its rebirth recognizes that “people are to some extent choosing up sides. . . . Get the job done or go back to the ’90s” –before 9/11 and Bush’s pre-emption doctrine. “A number of critics have a nostalgia for an earlier era,” he warns. But with a toxic mix of Arab and Islamist totalitarianism, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorists, he says, “those days are gone with the wind.”

Woolsey predicts “the long war of the 21st century” will last decades. The fight between neocons and other cons might last just as long.

If the Dems pull off a win this fall, it’s well worth thinking about how to stoke these divisions over the next few years as the Republicans re-group. This fault in their coalition is a big one and its worth driving a wedge in as deeply as possible.

HT to Pastor Dan
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Oversold

by digby

So Holy Joe agrees with the far right neocon nutballs that the real reason we went into Iraq was to “pop the head of the snake in Iran” and himself says, “if I fault the administration for anything before the war — ’cause I think we did the right thing in going in to overthrow Saddam — it’s that they oversold the WMD part of the argument….”

Man oh man, the guy has brass ones.

MR. RUSSERT: And we’re back with Senator Joe Lieberman. Can the president commence military action against Iraq without a smoking gun?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: There are smoking guns, and that’s the important point to make. Look, I think that the president has to do a better job of explaining what we mean by a smoking gun. There’s a way in which people are now looking at the U.N. inspectors in Iraq as if some local prosecutor has sent people in to investigate an innocent man for a suspected crime and find the evidence. Saddam Hussein is not an innocent man. He made clear he wants to dominate the Arab world, which would be terrible for the Arab world and the rest of the world. He invaded his neighbors. He’s killed hundreds of thousands of people. We know that he had weapons of mass destruction.

You want to find the smoking guns? There are thousands of them in the report issued by the United Nations inspectors after they were kicked out of Iraq in 1998. Thousands of tons of chemical agents, thousands of liters of biological agents, and the aim of the United Nations resolution, in my opinion, was to send those inspectors in and to force Saddam Hussein to say, “I’ve destroyed the smoking guns that you knew I had in 1999.” He hasn’t done that, and unless he does, we’re going to have to take action to disarm him. Nobody wants to go to war, but sometimes you have to go to war to protect the lives of the American people. This may be one of those cases.

MR. RUSSERT: In your guess, it probably will be necessary?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well, so far, he’s done nothing but continue to deny and deceive and cheat. And I don’t want to look
back one day after he uses those chemical and biological weapons against Americans and ask ourselves: “Why didn’t we act to protect our security?”

Yeah, no overselling there. He’s a foreign policy genius.

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Cooties

by digby

Everybody’s talking about this blurb today, and it is kind of amazing. The president who claimed he would bring honor and dignity to the white house is apparently known for puerile fart jokes — and even emits them in the office to play jokes on his aides. Me, I much prefer a grown up president who privately has sex in the oval office than one who farts publicly. But that’s just me.

But this is the part I find interesting and the little blurb doesn’t elaborate at all:

A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior.

Forget the farting. What’s with the paranoia around women? (There is apparently a clinical term for it called “gynophobia” which I’ve never heard of until today.) It’s quite clear that he doesn’t know how to behave around powerful women he doesn’t control, judging from his inappropriate groping of the prime minister of Germany. And I’ve often wondered about his relationship to Rice, Hughes and Mieres — the office wives. Is he afraid that he’s going to accidentally pass gas or use a bad word in front of these women or does he let fly with women he knows and is just paranoid around strange women? I’m genuinely curious. This is very wierd for any 60 year old man much less a highly succesful politician.

He is such an immature person that I think it’s entirely possible that he’s still stuck in that pre-pubescent little boy state where girls are just “yucky.” That’s how his behavior comes off anyway. There’s some frat boy stuff, to be sure, especially in his behavior with other men. But I’m thinking that when it comes to women, he’s stuck even further back than that — cub scouts, maybe. Did mommy lock him in the closet or something?

Update: Coincidentally, Echidne has already inaugurated the Cootie Awards. You know who the first winner just has to be…

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Wingnut Fun House Mirror

by digby

Sen. James Inhofe” U.S. involvement in Iraq has been incredibly successful and developments there have been “nothing short of a miracle,”

LIEBERMAN: The situation in Iraq is a lot better, different than it was a year ago. The Iraqis held three elections. They formed a unity government. They are on the way to building a free and independent Iraq. Their military — two-thirds of their military is now ready, on their own, to lead the fight with some logistical backing from the U.S. or stand up on their own totally. That’s progress.

Norman Podhoretz: I must confess to being puzzled by the amazing spread of the idea that the Bush Doctrine has indeed failed the test of Iraq. After all, Iraq has been liberated from one of the worst tyrants in the Middle East; three elections have been held; a decent constitution has been written; a government is in place; and previously unimaginable liberties are being enjoyed. By what bizarre calculus does all this add up to failure? And by what even stranger logic is failure to be read into the fact that the forces opposed to democratization are fighting back with all their might?

Surely what makes more sense is the opposite interpretation of the terrible violence being perpetrated by the terrorists of the so-called “insurgency”: that it is in itself a tribute to the enormous strides that have been made in democratizing the country. If this murderous collection of diehard Sunni Baathists and vengeful Shiite militias, together with their allies inside the government, agreed that democratization had already failed, would they be waging so desperate a campaign to defeat it? And if democratization in Iraq posed no threat to the other despotisms in the region, would those regimes be sending jihadists and material support to the “insurgency” there?

The new Podhoretz article (via Henry Farrell) is fascinating stuff. Farrell entitles his post “Dead Enders” and I think that pretty well covers it. But Podhoretz has nailed himself to Bush’s cross so completely, I honestly don’t see how he can ever crawl down. In his view every Bush misstep is actually prudent or canny, every criticism of him is petty and wrong. Bush has played every hand brilliantly — even more brilliantly than Ronald Reagan played his hand (which Podhoretz only sees in retrospect having criticised the Gipper at the time much as the youngsters are criticizing the Codpiece.)

Keep in mind that Norman is responding to the criticisms of his fellow neoconservatives in this piece, not the crazed hippy left. Indeed, he ruefully admits that he actually agrees with the crazed hippy left in its assessment that Bush has not given up on the Bush Doctrine — needless to say, he’s quite happy about that while the CHL is not.

In Norm’s view, the Bush Doctrine has not only been validated by the great success of the Iraq and Israeli military actions, it will stand us through the next several decades of WWIV (I wish they’d decide on a number and stick to it) and will eventually save the world:

It is my contention that the Bush Doctrine is no more dead today than the Truman Doctrine was cowardly in its own early career. Bolstered by that analogy, I feel safe in predicting that, like the Truman Doctrine in 1952, the Bush Doctrine will prove irreversible by the time its author leaves the White House in 2008. And encouraged by the precedent of Ronald Reagan, I feel almost as confident in predicting that, three or four decades into the future, and after the inevitable missteps and reversals, there will come a President who, like Reagan in relation to Truman in World War III, will bring World War IV to a victorious end by building on the noble doctrine that George W. Bush promulgated when that war first began.

How nice for him to live in a time of epistemic relativism where he can look back on his life and claim vindication despite the fact that everything he ever said was demonstrably wrong. How sad for the rest of us that his fetid philosophy has come to full flower just as he’s shuffling off his moral coil and won’t be around to share the “victorious end” when it finally comes, decades from now. I don’t think J-Pod has his father’s gift for delivering elegant, self-serving absolution for decades of misguided bloodlust.

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Gene Cesspool
by poputonianDoes anyone know what channel this comedy is on? I’ve read about the episode where the dude got the death penalty for putting the celery by the tomatoes, but this one about a Republican with contaminated genes should also be good for a laugh or two.

“My church has long ago given up that practice in the 1800s, but putting that aside for a moment, it’s real clear that Americans, myself included, believe that marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman and not more than that, and also not same sex couples,” Romney told MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews.

Romney, of course, didn’t mention that about the time The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced polygamy in 1890, his great-grandfather was among those Mormons who fled to Mexico to start their own community where plural marriage continued to be practiced.
…
Romney’s family tree is rife with polygamists on the paternal side. Two great-great grandfathers, for example, had more than 10 wives each.
…
His great-great grandfather, Miles Romney, eventually took on 13 wives, including the niece with the same name of his first wife, Elizabeth Gaskell. In all, Romney’s family tree harbors six polygamous men with 41 wives, according to research by The Salt Lake Tribune.
…
“Within the Republican primary, when you get into South Carolina, God knows if polygamist roots will hurt him,” Ballenger says. “Maybe something like that would cost him enough votes.”

UPDATED to include last snippet. Most people quoted in the article don’t think this will matter in Romney’s political success or failure. I have no idea and was just making fun of the fact that Romney is having to defend himself about that marriage definition thing. I think Chrissy Matthews, on the other hand, is just plain fascinated that some men once had multiple wives.

Too Much Power

by digby

For those who are looking for a way to make the accountability argument in congressional campaigns this fall, here’s an example from my congressman, Henry Waxman:

There is a desperate need in Washington for more oversight, transparency and accountability. The checks and balances of our Constitution don’t work when the White House and the Congressional leadership work together to shield government corruption and abuse from scrutiny.

The past five years of one-party rule have produced one of the greatest concentrations of power in America’s history. The Republican-controlled Congress has ceased to function as an independent branch of government. Genuine legislative debate has vanished. Congressional committees rarely exercise their oversight responsibilities.

The consequences have been disastrous. Congress never held hearings that challenged the White House’s distortion of intelligence in its rush to war in Iraq. Congress never questioned the President’s reckless fiscal policies. And Congress never protested when Administration cronies were installed as heads of essential federal agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Not surprisingly, the disappearance of oversight and accountability has been an invitation to corruption. A growing list of Washington Republicans, from lobbyists to members of Congress to the Vice President’s chief of staff, are either under indictment or under investigation for shakedowns, bribery and other crimes.

Fortunately, there is an agenda that will promote core American values and revive the nation’s faith in government. Democrats on the House Committee on Government Reform have introduced legislation that would restore open government, block political cronies from being appointed to essential public health and safety positions, prohibit government spending on covert propaganda and stop the growing politicization of science.

Our Hurricane Katrina Accountability and Contracting Reform Act would ban “monopoly contracts” used to shield politically well-connected companies from price competition in government contracts, and it would stop the revolving door between government and industry that has created billions in wasteful spending. Our Open Government bill would bring back the old-fashioned idea that government information belongs to the public; it would halt the proliferation of pseudo-classifications like “For Official Use Only” and “Sensitive but Unclassified” that the Bush Administration has used to hide embarrassing facts.

Unfortunately, the public has heard virtually nothing about these proposals. The Republicans running Congress have kept them bottled up so effectively that not one single piece of the Democratic good-government agenda has been brought up for a vote in the House.

While each week brings to light new evidence of corruption, subterfuge and wasteful spending, there are many well-developed proposals for change waiting for a fair chance to be enacted. They will get that fair chance if Americans elect a Democratic Congress in 2006 and send a signal that they want honesty and accountability restored to government.

The Republicans are running against John Conyers and Charlie Rangel to stimulate their racist base. And they have good reason to fear them, they are tough, take no prisoners Democrats.

But Henry Waxman is the guy who made the tobacco executives testify under oath on national TV that they believed smoking was not addictive. He is extremely effective. If he becomes the chairman of the House Committee On government reform, the Republicans know he is going to successfully shine a light on in the dark corners of republican rule for the past five years.

Waxman has shown certain areas worthy of investigation and there are others. The key, as the MYDD campaign memo points out is to “pick a fight, any fight” and use it to illustrate for voters the Democrats’ intention to clean up this mess in Washington. If they believe that Democrats can be effective in changing things they’ll vote for them.

Thx to commenter George for the Waxman article.

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KISS

by digby

Codpiece quoted General Abazaid (God help us) in his press conference today with what I assume Karl and Karen think is a new twist on their favorite zinger:

“If we leave [Iraq] before the mission is done the terrorists will follow us here.”

Bam! Right between the eyes!

I would normally say we should use logic and reason by pointing out that all the terrorists aren’t in Iraq — as the foiled British plot recently showed — so being in Iraq can’t prevent terrorists who are elsewhere from coming over here.

But that’s too complicated. When a Republican says “if we leave Iraq before the mission is done the terrorists will follow us here” the Democrat should reply, “well, unlike the Republicans, I won’t let em in.”

Democrats get too fine with this stuff. Trash talk is trash talk and they should just throw it back in their faces.

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Selling Jon Benet

by digby

Bob Geiger (posting again at this old digs) wrote about the media obsession with the Jon Benet Ramsey over the week-end:

In their warped news judgment, the media is deciding for all of us that we should be more concerned about the minute-by-minute developments with John Mark Karr than the fact that our brave men and women continue to be lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are making a decision every hour that a story of such incredibly specious importance, is more relevant than the deaths of our men and women serving in uniform overseas.

They can’t get enough of it. And either there is serendipitious synchronicity in the air, or the NY Times pushed up its feature series on child porn to take advantage of the situation. I just watched CNN’s Kiera host the reporter who did the investigation, Kurt Eichenwald, and spend at least 10 minutes discussing the various disgusting things these child predators do. Yesterday the story was about fake child actor sites that featured clothes or covered children in sexy poses in order to circumvent the child porn laws.

Here’s my question. Considering this new awareness of the use of overly sexualized visual images of children by pedophiles, why has nobody taken the networks to task for repeatedly showing those Jon Benet beauty pageant videos ten years after the fact? They had them on a loop the first time around and ten years later they are showing them again. Over and over and over. It’s always made me uncomfortable. It seems to me that the news networks are feeding pedophiles’ sick urges the same way these online sites are by repeatedly showing these creepy vids. Are they actually getting big ratings by tittilating the audience with thinly veiled child pornography? Ewww.

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Switchers

by digby

This seems like a story some enterprising Real Journalist would want to pursue. It seems that there have been a bunch of party switchers in the red states this year. These are at the local and state level where politics is immediate and personal, so it takes some real chutzpah to do it. There have been more switchers than at any time since 1994 when the red states went completely red in the first place.

There’s only one little difference. They are all Republicans switching to Democrat.

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Bugging The Liberals

by digby

Michael Barone has long decried the unfair, hyper-partisanship of the Democratic Party. Back in 2000, during the recount, he characterized it this way:

By all accounts, including those of the Democratic legislators who campaigned for him around the country, Bush is a good listener, responds candidly and with respect to others’ arguments, is willing to compromise, and keeps his word–qualities useful in building legislative majorities. In contrast, Al Gore seldom worked closely with his former colleagues on Capitol Hill and is widely disliked by many, even in his own party. His strong partisanship, evident now in the way his campaign is challenging the Florida results, means that he would have to go against the grain to seek bipartisan action on the Hill.

When Bush won in 2004 he put it like this:

Love is stronger than hate. That is the lesson of the 2004 election results. Millions of Democrats and leftists have been seething with hatred for George W. Bush for years, and many of them lined up before the polls opened to cast their votes against him — one reason, apparently, that the exit poll results turned out to favor Democrats more than did the actual results.

But Republicans full of love, or at least affection, for George W. Bush turned out steadily later in the day or sent in their ballots days before. They have watched “old media” — The New York Times, the broadcast networks CBS, ABC and NBC — beat up on Bush for the past year, and they have listened to the sneers and slurs directed at him by coastal elites for a long time. Now they had their chance to speak. They did so loudly and clearly, giving Bush the first popular-vote majority for president in 16 years.

A year ago he wrote:

This summer, one big story is replaced by another — the London bombings July 7, the speculation that Karl Rove illegally named a covert CIA agent, the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, more London bombings last week. But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media — The New York Times, etc., etc. — to delegitimize yet another Republican administration.

This project has been ongoing for more than 30 years. Richard Nixon, by obstructing investigation of the Watergate burglary, unwittingly colluded in the successful attempt to besmirch his administration. Less than two years after carrying 49 states, he was compelled to resign. The attempt to delegitimize the Reagan administration seemed at the time reasonably successful. Reagan was widely dismissed as a lightweight ideologue, and the rejection of his nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 contributed to the impression that his years in office were, to take the title of a book by a first-rate journalist, “the Reagan detour.” As time went on, as the Berlin Wall fell and Bill Clinton proclaimed that the era of big government was over, it became clear that Reagan was a successful transformational president — something the mainstream media grudgingly admitted when he died in 2004 after a decade out of public view.

You think they’d learn. But for the past five years, the same folks have been trying to undermine the presidency of George W. Bush.

I guess Barone was in a coma during the 90’s.

But you can see that throughout Bush’s presidency he has been very upset at Democratic partisanship. In fact, he thinks the Democrats have been trying to delegitimize Republicans for decades.

But it’s more than just partisanship now. Here’s Barone today:

In our war against Islamo-fascist terrorism, we face enemies both overt and covert. The overt enemies are, of course, the terrorists themselves. Their motives are clear: They hate our society because of its freedoms and liberties, and want to make us all submit to their totalitarian form of Islam. They are busy trying to wreak harm on us in any way they can. Against them we can fight back, as we did when British authorities arrested the men and women who were plotting to blow up a dozen airliners over the Atlantic.

Our covert enemies are harder to identify, for they live in large numbers within our midst. And in terms of intentions, they are not enemies in the sense that they consciously wish to destroy our society. On the contrary, they enjoy our freedoms and often call for their expansion. But they have also been working, over many years, to undermine faith in our society and confidence in its goodness. These covert enemies are those among our elites who have promoted the ideas labeled as multiculturalism, moral relativism and (the term is Professor Samuel Huntington’s) transnationalism.

[…]

We have always had our covert enemies, but their numbers were few until the 1960s. But then the elite young men who declined to serve in the military during the Vietnam War set out to write a narrative in which they, rather than those who obeyed the call to duty, were the heroes. They have propagated their ideas through the universities, the schools and mainstream media to the point that they are the default assumptions of millions. Our covert enemies don’t want the Islamo-fascists to win. But in some corner of their hearts, they would like us to lose.

The poor conservatives are always on the run from the liberal enemy. And recently we have learned that the hippies are even worse than the commies were— or at least there are more of them. It’s a wonder they have managed to survive this onslaught of treasonous liberalism as long as they have.

In all seriousness, I shudder at the implications of Barone’s beliefs should things get really out of hand in this country and people like him feel compelled to use the vast police powers they covet. It’s a very dangerous way of thinking among some people who have huge chips on their shoulders.

But I also admit that this up-is-down-ism simply drives me up a wall. A reader sent me the link to Barone’s column this morning with the header, “this will make smoke come out of your ears” and he was right. I read this and it made me feel as if I’m living in an alternate universe.

But I have to remember that Barone is exhibiting the most fundamental characteristic of conservative culture and recognize that the smoke coming out of my ears is what keeps the conservative movement together.

Rick Perlstein’s recent article on conservative culture spelled it out very well:

Purple Hearts are constitutive of conservative culture. So are Purple Heart Band-Aids. Both (conservatives feel) bug liberals. So is the simple pre-adolescent pleasure of blowing things up. That really bugs the liberals. The tone of conservative culture shades easily into a righteous lust for pissing people off. A billboard off the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago for a talk-radio station reads, “Liberals Hate It!” For, if you piss people off, that proves you are beleaguered.

Over the last few years, as their own success challenged conservatives’ feelings of marginalization, they just started working harder to sustain it. Fox News helps; that is why the vice president of the United States insists that any television in any hotel room he uses already be tuned to it before he’ll deign cross the threshold. For conservatives, moving right will always be a losing career move, a sacrifice: “Veteran ABC newsman John Stossel … abandoned his liberal perspective, became a libertarian — and paid a heavy price, he recently told NewsMax in an exclusive interview…”

And don’t expect any of this to change much if Republicans lose the House in 2006 and the White House in 2008 — or if Stossel somehow ends up in the gutter. A true conservative loves a test of faith: It only proves him stronger in his convictions. I often exchange e-mails with two favorite conservative activists. I started out with a plan: One of them posts frequently on FreeRepublic; another writes on his blog of FreeRepublic’s “shrieking lunacy.” I’ve tried to get them to fight each another. It never works. They’ve got me, a liberal, to bug. That is how conservative culture works so well: the joy of feeling as one in their beleaguered conservatism. I’ve found, paradoxically, that, for this determined remnant, conservative identity becomes stronger the more discredited conservative governance becomes. They seem to take their lumps in stride and emerge all the more confident in their ideology from the challenge.

(Read the whole thing. It’s a corker.)

As we contemplate a possible take-over of the congress this fall, I think we have to keep this in mind. It is ingrained in conservative culture to “bug the liberals.” In fact, at this point it’s the only thing holding them together and we are going to have to gird ourselves for the fact that being in the minority will only make it worse.

I am going to do some study to figure out how I can resist being “bugged.” You cannot ignore them. They simply won’t let you and society demands that you interact. (And anyway, we tried that and wound up with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh being considered “mainstream.”) You can’t try to become more like them. They will only try harder. You can’t lock them all up and you can’t kill them. They never grow out of it. It’s a dilemma.

What would the psychologists say about how to deal with people who embrace victimization as their organizing principle, no matter what the circumstances, and whose tribal identity is dependent upon annoying and demeaning the other tribe? I think it’s a good idea to think about this because if it’s true that conservatism as we know it is only held together by its shared sophomoric need to bug the liberals, then it is key that we find a way to deny them what they need. (Clearly, the reality of holding all political power in the most powerful nation on earth didn’t do it. Barone is on the verge of calling for an new HUAC.)

So what will work?

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