Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

2 Responses to “Haven’t you people done enough damage to the country?”

1. 1 vesta44
   Jan 5th, 2009 at 9:19 am

   Yeah, that’s all we need is another shrub in the White House (NOT!!!). He’s done such a great job with Florida, I’d hate to see what he’d do to the rest of the country (if he’s anything like his father and brother, we’d be in a worse world of hurt than we are now).

2. 2 Thomas
   Jan 6th, 2009 at 7:55 am

   He’s the more competent and less intellectually stunted of the two. That’s not necessarily a good thing. W was a tool of the worst social conservatives and an active but less than capable lackey for wealthy people and corporate interests. Jeb is only slightly less a tool for the social conservatives, but would likely be a much more effective agent in shifting wealth and power away from ordinary Americans.

   The Bush family is a pox on our nation. Like a vampire, W’s legacy will try to rise from the grave. Already there are attempts to mitigate the damage to his reputation; in five years there will be full-fledged conservative revisionism campaigns. The past is not decided, it is a battleground, and we will have to fight the war of W over and over.

   Conservatism, in and of itself, consists of being loud and wrong, and then claiming to have been right. That’s not a throwaway line for comic effect — I mean that. I frequently quote Buckley: “stand athwart history and shout, ’stop!’”. Standing in the way of progress, being on the wrong side of history, is the Conservative’s job description. Their modus operandi is then to try to revise and extend their remarks with the benefit of hindsight to make themselves appear to have been far-seeing, rather than merely in the way. That’s why the grievance culture is so important not only to their electoral program, but to their intellectual program: now must suck and be wrong. If now is good, then how we got here wasn’t so bad, and all their dire warnings about change were silly. If where we are is in deep shit, then they can make hay from their past whinging.

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