Dedicated to the proposition that it can happen here.
While I continue to be banned from What’s Wrong With the World for commenting while (allegedly) trollish, I do check in on those folks from time to time to see what kind of progress they have made towards the resuscitation of Western civilization. I’m sorry to say that I can’t give a particularly glowing report on the progress of their project to-date. They continue to post along frequencies in the cyber-spectrum ranging from disheartened grumbling to shrill invective; never yet the blaring brass of a trumpeted triumph.
Meanwhile, dissent is still being answered with their patented “good cop, bad cop-hit ‘em high, hit ‘em low” routine as seen in the comments section following this post on gun control. The loyal opposition on this thread is primarily provided by a blogger calling himself “Morning’s Minion”. Mr. Minion is visiting from a site that is apparently universally scorned by the WWWtW cabal. Here we see self-appointed WWWtW enforcer, William Luse, reacting in his characteristic, intellectually impotent, manner to Mr. Minion’s refusal to back away from his eminently sensible argument:
Lydia, this is the second or third time I've seen him accuse you of wanting to execute prisoners to relieve prison overcrowding, even after you've retracted it more than once. If he does it again, I hope you'll delete his comment.
And here we see the economically dismissive “thebyronicman” addressing the earnest attempt to communicate in a civil manner of another commentor according to his usual m.o.:
Policraticus,
You could have said absolutely nothing whatsoever in far fewer words. Next time, give it a try.
Sweet charity. But, lest I stand rightfully accused of lacking fairness-and-balance, I am now going to recommend and endorse a recent post by WWWtW author, Jeff Martin (Maximos). Here is the link. I encourage any person who is interested in the current plight of the conservative movement to read it and give it some thought. It is replete with trenchant rhetoric such as:
The Republican party has strangled the small-government policy program in its crib, replacing it with a tawdry emphasis upon a select blend of upper-bracket tax reductions, coupling this program with a world-historical deficit-spending bender; identified economic conservatism with a regressive and debilitating package of corporatist and neoliberal economic policies that threaten to render trade imbalances and deficits permanent and structural; papered over the instabilities with a profligate monetary policy, which itself reinforced the other insalubrious trends; established as a principle of American governance that any profits accruing to financiers in consequence of these policies would be valorized as the triumph of the American way, while any losses would be socialized, so that avarice need never receive its recompense; embarked upon a foreign policy that even Woodrow Wilson might find audacious and hubristic, in the process ordaining unjust war and torture as central precepts in the right-wing catechism; sought to legitimize an unprecedented demographic and economic experiment upon the American body politic, all at the behest of the narrow coterie of corporate interests who cut the campaign finance checks; cynically deployed "social issues" as instruments of voter mobilization, then snickered behind the backs of the salt-of-the-earth folks who voted for them on the basis of those issues (revealing that they really do think as they were portrayed by Thomas Frank), dropping those initiatives in favour of grand schemes of policy reform that hadn't a snowball's chance of seeing enactment; formed ranks behind a President poised to violate campaign pledges regarding judicial nominations, when he wished to nominate his incompetent cronies and lickspittles to the Supreme Court - need I continue?
As impressive as the righteousness of the above is the fact that it is all one magnificently Teutonic sentence!
I greatly fear that the scorn displayed by Maximos is the result of his perception that America is moving ever further away from the allegedly benign form of totalitarianism favored by the WWWtW faithful, towards a neocon mode of liberalism that is neither New Deal fish, nor Morning in America fowl. But, let us, nonetheless, not look this gift horse in the mouth.
