From a piece called the "Long Con" about how modern political Conservatism is about duping idiots for personal gain:
In this respect, it’s not really useful, or possible, to specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins. They are two facets of the same coin—where the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself. The proof is in the pitches—the come-ons in which the ideological and the transactional share the exact same vocabulary, moral claims, and cast of heroes and villains.Perfectly devoid of self awareness, the writer goes on at length about how Conservatives have an unthinking hate reflex for caricatured Liberals... (His own hate reflex for caricatured Conservatives is, of course, nuanced and reasoned and originates somewhere in the classy neighborhood of the frontal lobes, rather than the trailer park of the medulla oblongata.)
Meanwhile, we have Michael Tomasky, whose entire career arc has been one long angry atonement for the sin of having to move to Manhattan instead of being born there, suggesting that the ignorant, cousin-humping rednecks south of the Ohio should just go away:
It’s lost. It’s gone. A different country. And maybe someday it really should be. I’ll save that for another column. Until that day comes, the Democratic Party shouldn’t bother trying. If they get no votes from the region, they will in turn owe it nothing, and in time the South, which is the biggest welfare moocher in the world in terms of the largesse it gets from the more advanced and innovative states, will be on its own, which is what Southerners always say they want anyway.I'll just go ahead and drop this Billy Beck quote yet again...
"All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war."What's dismaying is how many seem to be eagerly champing at the bit for it.
