Jonah Goldberg wrote an anti-Obama post that says little but "God, gays and guns." The are many more words, most of them childish insults and the obligatory Star Trek reference, but that's all it amounts to. So one of the intellectual giants of the right can't really come up with anything to say against Obama. I've pointed out more problems with Obama than Jonah has. If Jonah were capable of analysis he would approve of the authoritarian slant of Obama's views, but there's no chance of that happening. There will be no attempt to debate Obama on his merits; that's not how the right wins elections. It will be nothing but smears and lies to the end.
Since most people vote with their wallet, the right is in trouble. If they win, the results will be utterly fatal for the Republican party, which will be permanently fixed in people's minds as the party that destroyed the economy. The louder they scream about God and gays, the more people realize that those issue have no relationship to their real world, where the stores should be filled with shoppers getting ready for school--but are not.
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Liberalism is often a problem at the presidential level.
WTF?
If they win, the results will be utterly fatal for the Republican party, which will be permanently fixed in people's minds as the party that destroyed the economy. The louder they scream about God and gays, the more people realize that those issue have no relationship to their real world
First, I would suggest reading Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement, where he demonstrates pretty clearly that the kind of Republican die-hards you're talking about don't have the capability to distinguish between the "real world" and fantasy:
By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this — once you've gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.
By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you've gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no "anything else." All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this "our thing," a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that's all.
Second, I would say that this is a country that has had three good examples of what to expect from Republicans in the last 35 years or so, and they haven't learned a goddamned thing. Vietnam didn't cure us of a desire for senseless war and jingoism. Corrupt Republican presidents like Nixon and Reagan didn't make anyone suspicious of Dubya, or convince anyone to start paying attention to what the sneaky bastards are up to in DC. Even now, as bloggers like Digby were crowing about how 85% of the country feeling like we're "on the wrong track" was a sure sign that Obama was going to win, I said that you're expecting way too much if you think that this idiot nation is going to connect all their woes to the Republican party as a whole, without somehow telling themselves that McCain will be a clean slate, totally unconnected to Bush or the party. And whaddaya know, the same idiots who think everything's gone to hell are evenly split on whether to give four more years to the same policies just because they're scared of a half-black man. Hell, all it took was a barrage of press about the escalation (I refuse to call it a "surge") working to make a significant percentage of people become more optimistic about the whole Iraq adventure. Somewhere, H.L. Mencken is chortling his ass off at his own visionary powers.
Sorry. I think this country is just way too stupid to ever learn from anything. I'm just going to start learning Mandarin Chinese to have a head start on ingratiating myself with our eventual overlords.
Vietnam didn't cure us of a desire for senseless war and jingoism.
But it did cure us of the desire to fuel those senseless wars with a draft.
Blognoscenti, I'm counting on the fact that people who don't think will vote based on their emotions, and with the economy getting worse they will be in a bad mood. I'm counting on spite and stupidity and ignorance. You know, Americans. That might not be enough, but it gives me some hope.
I agree with you in general, however, regarding the Mandarin as well.
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