To Washington Post Letters: Steven F. Hayward wrote: "The single largest defect of modern conservatism, in my mind, is its insufficient ability to challenge liberalism at the intellectual level. . . ."

No. The single largest defect of modern conservatism is that it has ruined the nation. Conservatives do not have ideas; they have interests. Conservatives are not "thinkers"; they are rationalizers who give an intellectual gloss to their belief that an alliance of predatory businesspeople and religious extremists should rule the rest of us.

The wreckage caused by modern conservatism lies all around us, and speaks for itself: If conservatism isn't dead, it should be.

DANIEL ROSEN Baltimore Source: Washington Post 10/9/2009

By Prophet451

Fuck you. No, I'm not joking. I'm sick of this bullshit. 

I'm sick of the way you've corrupted the public discourse. The way you've made it acceptable to hurl any insult you like at public officials. The way you blame us for the current atmosphere of hatred by accusing us of starting it with hating Bush. Like Bush didn't come on the heels of eight years of your tireless efforts to destroy Clinton by any means necessary, like Bush didn't give us good reason to complain. A couple of posters on a website compared Bush to Hitler and you've used it as free license to compare Obama to Hitler 24/7 and I'm sick of your hypocrisy, where it's acceptable to say shit about Obama that you would have had an apopletic fit (and did) if anythign remotely similar had been said about your guys. Keith Olbermann calls Cheney a fascist when he was actually using fascist tactics and you think that gives you the freedom to call Obama a fascist, socialist, Marxist constantly for no reason at all. Fuck you and your bullshit false equivelancy.

I'm sick of the way you've made the populace stupid. Around a fifth of your populace thinks the sun orbits the earth, over half think evolution never happened. Your populace actually believe the media has a liberal bias. Not because it has, you have the most conservative media in the free world, but because you've shouted it so loud and so often that you've brainwashed the public into believing it, like the battered wife who parrots her husband's insults. You've got a whole segment of the populace shouting about socialism and fascism and none of them know what the fucking words mean. You've convinced them that fascism is a left-wing thing. You've got them so turned around that some of them actually believe global warming isn't happening. Fuck you.

I'm sick of the way you try to destroy the whole concept of government. You've tricked the people into believing that government can't do anything right, always being careful to exclude the army because you love your bullets and bombs but you've so destroyed the public's ability to reason that they don't even think of interstate highways, the space program, the national parks program, etc. Government is always great when it's doing what you tell it and inevitibly corrupt when it isn't. Fuck you.

I'm sick of your rewriting of history. You've bleated so loud and long that Reagan was a great president, that the New Deal didn't work, that cutting taxes increases revenues, that you actually have the people believing this bullshit. And these are the same people who will go on to become teachers and fill their student's heads with this self-same bullshit. Reagan was a mediocre president at best who had teh good fortune to be in power when the USSR collapsed under it's own weight and you bastards have turned him into teh Second Coming. You've rewritten history so that everything foul and hateful and wrong can be attributed to a Democrat while everything worthwhile is a Republican's glory. Fuck you.

I'm sick of your dragging the centre ever further to the right. How many whackjob fringe ideas have you dragged into the mainstream? The aforementioned idea that tax cuts increase revenues, the Laffer Curve, the idea that Welfare harms the poor, the idea that there's rampant fraud in Welfare, the idea that whatever is good for corporations is good for the country. And you push these ideas through your corporate media and you do it so long and loud that they become part of the accepted political landscape and because it is easier to tell a lie than to debunk one, we never get away from this rancid shit. Fuck you.

I'm sick of your casual criminality. Teddy Kennedy, a man who's boots you were not worthy to lick, was just buried and all I've heard from my rightist friends for days is Chappaquidick, Chappaquiddick, Chappaquidick. Your fucking golden boy raped the Constitution, mainly because he wanted to; tortured random people (and waterboarding is torture, fuck you too) essentially because he wanted to; spent like a drunken sailor, essentially because he wanted to; invaded a soverign nation, essentially for the loot and destroyed people's lives, essentially for the evilulz and you bastards are obsessed with a fucking accident a Democrat had decades ago? You don't go on about Laura Bush killing some guy decades ago. Fuck you.

I'm sick of you praising pure evil. You're letting Dick Cheney be the standard-bearer for Republicanism. Dick Cheney, a man so nakedly evil that even his friends call him "Darth"; a man so callous that Lex Luthor would recoil in terror; a man who probably has dismembered hitchhikers in those man-sized safes and kills plants by his mere proximity. Fuck you.

I'm sick of your attempts to tilt the playing field permanently in your favour. Democrats filibustered a few of Bush's most hateful judicial picks and you pricks started screaming about doing away with the filibuster but now you're in the minority, you're filibustering absolutely everything you can and whining when you don't get the chance. You ignored everything the Democrats had to say when you had power and now that you don't, you scream that everyone must be bipartisan. You don't budge a fucking inch on anything but you insist that everyone must compromise to meet you. That's your idea of politics: Don't move an inch, force the other guy to come to the right to meet you and call the result a "compromise". Fuck you.

I'm sick of your corporatism. You dress it up in false populism but anyone with half a brain can see that you're the brought and paid for subsidiary of big business. You keep pushing tax cuts as the answer for absolutely everything, you keep sabotaging every attempt to control the excesses of big business. You geuinely think the world would be a better place if it was a combination of Bill Gibson's dystopian vision of a corporate dominated world and Ayn Rand's bullshit Objectivism, yet another entry in mankind's endless attempts to find a moral justification for naked greed. You've taken the clinically insane spewings of a woman literally to the right of Hitler (pardon my Godwins) and the 1984-like vision of a dystopian author and convinced yourselves that would be a good place to live. Big business is the enemy of the people, always has been. The ideal for the corporate class is to have a small pool of people rich enough to buy their fucking crap and a much larger pool of people so poor and with so few options that they can be used and abused at the corporation's whim. A corporation's objective is not to look after you, it is to make ever-larger profits by any means necessary. You bastards want to reinstate fucking slavery to the corporate class and you've made the public so fucking stupid that they actually swallow the bullshit you're serving up, they actually want to enslave themselves to the corporations that abuse them at every turn. They actually care more about the corporations right to make obscene profits than they care about their child's right to live on a habitable planet. Fuck you.

Fuck you, you scumridden shitehawks, you make me sick. Just fuck off and die.

 By Prophet451, DemocraticUnderground.com (http://bit.ly/deargoprant)

Below is a list of articles written which I feel every progressive, or at least people who still believe in reason and evolution, should read.

I have chosen them for their ability to cut through the clutter of academic and philosophical verbiage, and get right to higher truth about the insane and dangerous phenomenon of American Extreme Right Wing Politics.  Hofstaeder once called them the "Radical Right." That might have been appropriate in the 1960s, but today, corporate-backed lobbying armies and influence merchants, using a Fox News fueled media hysteria and a small army of populist demagogues have transformed them into what I call the "Rabid Right," or the "Hatriots Movement."

While some are just good angry rants, most are the foundational grist that give rise to the rants, thus serving as backgrounders helping to inform people about how we got into this nearly ruinous condition, who did it to us, and why we're probably not likely to ever escape it in your lifetime without economic collapse, armed conflict, or both. I will be adding to this library routinely, eventually moving it to a formal library software I am working on, so please check back often for new additions.  I hope you enjoy them (in a manner of speaking), and pass them on.

Note: If you like this sort of compendium, you may also may want to see my "Essays Every Progressive Should Read" page.

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What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:  What is conservatism? and What is wrong with conservatism? by Philip Agre, UCLA

Related, by same author:  Coup Watch: The New Jargon *Important*

 

Shifting to the Right: USA 1950 to Present

If you read nothing else on this page, READ THIS.

The purpose of this writing is to demonstrate and document the rightward shift of the political spectrum that has characterized domestic politics in the United States. This examination begins in the 1950s and takes the reader to the current American political paradigm. This marginalization and demonization of left-of-center politics in American discourse has its roots in the McCarthyism of the 1950s and has survived in one form or another to its present state.

15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it's also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age. The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.  If you're in that top 1%, life is grand.

The Urban Archipelago: It's The Cities Stupid

It's time for the Democrats to face reality: They are the party of urban America. If the cities elected our president, if urban voters determined the outcome, John F. Kerry would have won by a landslide. Urban voters are the Democratic base.

The Wrecking Crew

By Thomas Franks

Casting his eyes from the Bush administration’s final months of plunder to the earliest days of the Republican revolution, Thomas Frank uncovers the deep logic behind the graft and incompetence of conservatives in power. He shows how leaders dedicated to a doctrine of government by entrepreneurship proceeded to sell off the state, channeling the profits to cronies and loyalists. He surveys the federal agencies doomed to failure by the inept and even hostile staff appointed to run them.

The Powell Memo — How the Modern Conservative Movement Got Wings

How did conservatives, once considered "Fringe" in America, come to so dominate our media and public narratives? Some feel this memo is the key to it all. You must understand it, for all the rest of what is on this page to really resonate with your inner rage.

Not everyone agrees this was the seminal work it's reputed to be, in terms of its inspiration for many right wing triumphs in the past 35 years. But I find this article unconvincing in trying to minimize what has resonated with the memo–especially in recent years.

More: The Powell Memo and the Teaching Machines of Right-Wing Extremists
 

A Day In The Life of Joe Conservative

Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

by Richard Hofstaeder

The legendary political historian wrote this essay in 1964.  It could have been written for this week's edition of Time Magazine, with Glenn Beck on the cover.  About Hofstaeder

24 Kinds of Libertarian

A cartoon that says so much about people who know so little. I really hope the cartoonist makes a fortune from posters. It should be on everyone's wall.

Like A Virgin — by @Mr_Electrico

Blisteringly brilliant summation of just how and why the Right wing emerged from an amateurish band of Clinton haters (ignoring his sheer brilliance as a Republican president), into a pathological order of fascist zombies focused only on regaining the throne of power no matter who or what opposes them–including the very Constitution they claim to love (but barely understand).

Dear Republicans — The Rant You Wish You Wrote 

If you're a Progressive, and this doesn't capture how you feel, you probably don't have cable.

An Open Letter To American Conservatives

Since I pimped it heavily on Twitter in late March, 2010, this has begun the new gold standard in rants about the mess these gangsters in the #GOP have made. 

Fuck The South — Another Rant You Wish You Wrote.

Fuck the South. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves – yeah, those are states we want to keep…

Dear Red States — Still a classic, and still a treat.

American Conservative Movement in Pictures

My good friend @stephanieWDC went to a teaparty (Washington 9/12 Teaparty, 2009) and recorded the most frightening glimpses of a nation of racist proles gone mad.

A Method to Their Madness

TheNation.

They may be easy and fun to mock, but doe not underestimate the power of the Rabid Right. They are a grave threat to democracy, and the future of the United States.

Two Santa Clauses —or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years

by Thom Hartmann

A mistake or two does not deflect from this spot-on analysis of the cynical con-job done on America using tactics refined by the same Conservative Rabid Right/Republican machine elsewhere illustrated on this page.

The Idiots Who Rule America

by Chris Hedges

As a culture, we may have yielded too much of our nation to the middle managers who were needed as foot soldiers by the corporatists who have turned us into wage slaves. We have no good ideas, because we have no more people with the courage–or motive–to have them.

Proud to Be a Liberal

by Brian Elroy McKinley

Excellent overview of some of the most misunderstood (and misrepresented) aspects of Liberalism, and why it's always been seen as the very core of American values (according to almost any non-partisan historian or political scientist).

Goodbye Cruel World

By Jane Smiley

The world would be a better place if the American right wing had never existed

Liberalism Resurgent

By Steven Kangas

The famous essays by this web pioneering liberal, who,in 1999, mysteriously–and almost inconceivably–managed to commit suicide in the washroom, down the hall from the office of ultra right wing billionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife, a frequent target of his political views.

The Republican Noise Machine

by David Brock.

Still as current as ever, this was the seminal work on Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy. It's a vital read for any progressive.

Best Letter-To-Editor, Ever!

Daniel Rosen 

One of my very first posts to this blog (still not quite ready for prime time), and it’s a gem,  to my limited  mind.  In response to the stealthy and disingenuous screed by Stephen Hayward (AEI) on Sunday, this letter was sent to the Washington Post.  Short and sweet, it takes just 100 word to eviscerate conservatism better than 10,000 word essays by some pretty bright progressives ever seem to do. I may print wallet cards with it.

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