Hello Kossaks!
I've been meaning to start a diary here for a long time. But I am an extraordinarily lazy individual. I am, however, occasionally motivated to make fun of my right-wing troglodyte family back home. So I thought, why not combine the two? Hey, you got peanut butter in my chocolate!
I've been involved in a seven year on-going flame war with certain members of my family, who are the only Republicans I know. This flame war was ignited by the former President Bush, at the outset of the Iraq war. It's been sometimes nasty, but mostly good fun.
I'm betting I'm not alone in this experience.
This is the latest, to my brother, laying down some new ground rules that reflect the changing lay of the land.
On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Michael XXXXXXX wrote:
<snip>
As a student of history, however, I am watching the Obama spectacle with fascination: millions of dopey, star-crazed followers being led by a charismatic personality down the road to serfdom. Amazing.
Best,
Michael
Mike,
Denial - it is powerful, dangerous, and one of the psychological symptoms of being alcoholic.
You are utterly shit-faced on right-wing-potato moonshine. As one of the remaining "dead-enders", or "modern conservatives", you have, in an inebriated stupor, gone and banged your head, blacking out some 20+ years of memory. This redacted memory is now practically universal among boozed-up conservatives.
You are acting as though the conservative philosophy was never put into practice in the actual real world resulting in an epic chain-reaction of calamity and detriment.
This denial affords you, the conservative, carte blanche to stumble merrily about; otherwise numb to the harsh cruelty that an unyielding world ultimately and always inflicts on the believer of dearly held fantasies. You are a "functioning alcoholic". You continue to drink from the well, but spare yourself the knowledge that it is poisoned.
You need tangible, current, this-universe information regarding the toxicity of the concoction you're still imbibing. Here is this mornings headline from MSNBC:
Economy suffering 'maximum recession stress' | Government data show largest economic contraction in nearly 27 years | The economy contracted at a staggering 6.2 percent pace at the end of 2008, the worst showing in more than a quarter-century
Michael, this headline does NOT presage the coming "serfdom" resulting from the policies of the four week old Obama administration. This IS the result of - lets at least agree on this little sliver of reality - the policies of the past.
See Mike, things are historically bad now. It is very nearly insane for you to tell me we are screwed for changing course. You are ignoring the pink elephants who have shit all over the room.
When your party lost power, a magical "reset" button had not been pressed. It did not mean that the last couple of decades did not happen. Being relieved of responsibility to govern does not mean being relieved of reality, or of responsibility for what that governing has wrought. Yes Mike, when we were kids, we loved Alex P. Keaton. He was fresh. He was funny. But we were kids. And it is not cute that you're still doing him. Since your team lost, it is not 1982 again and you are not 14 years old anymore and there are no more open and limitless possibilities for enacting the untried and untested policies of conservatism. It was tried. It died.
This is an intervention. I want you to get better. I want all of you conservatives to get better. We will get you through this, just as I got through it some seven years ago when I renounced the conservative ideology.
But there are ground rules to an intervention. Going forward, it will no longer be acceptable for you to make statements in a vacuum. In the future, I must know that you are not drunk. Your statements must bear some affiliation, however tenuous, with this worlds real events and time-line.
You will make at least a token effort, to make some passing reference, which gives me any indication, that it's conceivable to believe, that you are aware, however vaguely, that the current state of the nation could arguably be described as, at a minimum, sub-optimal.
In your statements, you will implicitly indicate your awareness that the most extreme Republicans in history did in fact control all branches of the federal government in six of the last eight years. It is not just some beautiful dream you had, you verily got exactly what you wanted.
It is further required that you be open to imagining that it is possible to concoct a scenario whereby, at least in theory, one could plausibly say that a relationship exists between the political administration of a nation, and the sequentially posterior circumstances that that nation finds itself wading knee-deep in. This relationship is not sexual in nature, but more likely of the cause-and-effect variety.
Now, what will these new guidelines mean in practice? Brought into the space-time continuum that we currently inhabit, a typical statement from you would now have to look something like this:
"Sure things are really fucked up, but it's not my fault. De-regulation had nothing to do with the behavior of the markets. Yes it stands to reason that that would be the case, but it's sheer coincidence, and this is why..."
or
"It's actually a good thing that we are still at war in Iraq. I know I told you seven years ago to just wait, in five years you'll see a Middle East that resembles Sweden in everything but name, but we need jobs, and war creates jobs..."
or
"Yes it appears that I am advocating for more of the same. And I am. But the problem was, we didn't go far enough..."
That would at least be a start.
Finally, as a "student of history", it must be asked of you, before you tell me anything more about how we're headed to hell with Obama, what is it that you have learned from the last eight years?
Mr. Student, what have the last eight years taught you?
I'd really like to hear your answer.
With love,
Scott.