Because he is still very much a True Believer, Sully [Andrew Sullivan, "high from huffing Reagan’s jock and Thatcher’s panties"] is not capable of looking Conservatism square in eye and seeing that Dubya and McSame are not its aberrations, but its apotheosis. He has shaken off some of the lesser, uglier doctrinal teachings of his faith, but still clings fiercely to the abstract, rapturous purity of its core dogma and will probably never be able to wrap his head around the fact that Ayn Rand's little wingnut terrarium is not a heroic creed, but a moral spider hole for misanthropes, rich degenerates and rich degenerate-wannabes.
-- driftglass
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Quotation of the Day
5 comments:
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Yeah, I think that Sully's problem is linked to his unwavering religious faith - he simply can't see beyond it (and doesn't want to). Though sometimes I wonder if he's had at least enough intellectual honesty to get this far (be a conservative who sees Bush for what he really is), perhaps he'll go the rest of the way.
ReplyDelete[P]erhaps he'll go the rest of the way.
ReplyDeletePerhaps; nothing is certain. But I'm not holding my breath.
"Honest, Dad! Bail me out one more time and I swear I'll get my shit together."
Sullivan is one of the few conservatives that I can read without retching, although his pro-religious gyrations and genuflections get me close.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy busting Sully's chops--I wrote a long piece on his book The Conservative Soul--but I've never written anything as blistering as this quote.
Thanks to you, driftglass has just gained another subscriber!
Driftglass is truly a genius polemicist.
ReplyDeleteAmen to Drifty. He or she nailed it. We've had 28 years of Reaganism dominating America's political and cultural realities, and the result is... what? Well you know that. We took the greatest goddamned nation on the planet and we fucking spent it broke under the influence of those right-wing nutballs, who were all about, "don't worry about the future, borrow and spend today, you'll never have to pay!". Well you just can't keep a modern economy going without a modern *non-corrupt* government to make sure it doesn't go off the rails, and you can't have a *non-corrupt* government unless you're willing to *pay* for the goddamned thing, without that what you got is Mexico with better roads, with everybody in government having their hands outstretched and shit not getting done because interfering with shit like Halliburton electrocuting our troops and feeding them cockroach feces filled food will cut off your motherfucking bribes. But nooo, the Reganism deal was "hey, we don't have to pay for government!" and the stupid fucking bastards that are the American public bought that pile of reeking feces fair and square, and the conservative movement was right alongside them all the way saying "yay! we're drowning government in the bathtub!"
ReplyDeleteAnd so we are where we are today, our industrial infrastructure destroyed, our health care system a shambles, and our economy turning into a pumpkin at midnight. 28 years of that toxic Reaganism bilge. Sully might still worship Saint Reagan. But man has to be known by his results. And the results of Reaganism have been a national disaster that is still unfolding and everybody's still in denial but pretty soon nobody's going to be able to be in denial, when we have food shortages because farmers can't get credit to put their crops in the ground, when we have fuel shortages because the Fed is printing dollars with all the abandon of a Weimar Republic and nobody wants to take the worthless toilet paper anymore in payment for their oil, when we're motherfucking freezing in the dark even... and even then, the stupid-ass motherfucking Reaganauts are still gonna say it's the fault of anything other than their incompetent failure of a governing philosophy that is responsible for the disaster, and a significant portion the stupid-ass American public will nod from under their piles of blankets as they shiver and agree that it's all the Democrat's fault.
50% of people are below average. Them's the facts. And, unfortunately, average just don't seem to be too damn smart nowdays...
-- Badtux the Rude Penguin