Digby Goes Down

When Digby is down, I'm out. Digby today has two crushing posts, one on the imminence of an utter capitulation by the dems on telecom/bush immunity for all crimes and the other on HTLMencken's brilliant piece "Rage, Rage, Against the Undying of the Right" which fully explicates for those of us who have not been listening heretofore just how the Right is going to keep raping and pillaging our society right through the second coming of Obama and to the end of time. Some of Digby's commentators aren't utterly sure that we are about to see the roll out of--lower taxes, big government bad, pardons for all republicans and a free necktie party for all dems, the repeated use of the word democRAT, denunciations from the pulpit, lectures on sin from republicans with their pants around their knees and their dick in someone's mouth from the bathroom stall in some flyover state, vietnam syndrome, iraq syndrome, accusations of hating the troops, accusations of spitting on the troops, pictures of dancing leather men instead of smiling lesbian grandmothers, mass bailouts of capitalist failures, total collapse of the economy as all money is siphoned out for war and Bush's personal aquaintances, blah, blah, blah.

One of HTLMencken's points is that Democrats refuse to believe that it just stays dark in the Republican historical imagination, and they keep talking the same shit no matter what. Meanwhile, according to Mencken, the Democrats keep trying to turn the page, look for a brighter dawn, or whatever-the-fuck-metaphor appeals to you. Some of Digby's commenters actually proposed that Americans have "had the scales ripped" from their eyes or are finally starting to get history, or something.

Which brings me to my point, which is that yesterday on NPR Tom Ashbrooke was interviewing some expert-guy and he explained in the most super double top secret explainiest way ever, so it must be true, that the country *wants change* and actually wants change from the *last sixty or eighty years* of all this partisanship--they don't just want to throw bush and his cronies out, they don't just want a do-over after the defenestration of Al Gore, they don't just want a return to Reagan after the dark years of Clinton, they don't just want a reppeal of Jimmy Carter and his sweaters they actually are utterly and entirely sick of every single political event since before FDR. In other words, presumably, reading between the lines and trying to ascribe some kind of rudimentary sense to this nonsense--they want *both* the big government bail out of the New Deal to get the country working *and* they want to reject the New Deal and all its evil works in favor of unregulated capitalism and the utter crushing of the individual worker. They both want schools, libraries, rural electrification, hope, food, social security, medicaid, head start, we're all in this together *and* they want ruthless crony capitalism, savings and loan failures, abramoff, sweat shop labor, mercury laden waters, lead pollution, gas guzzlers, Vietnam and Iraq wars, crippled soldiers, busted armies, loss of international reputation, footsies with saudi dictators, oil dependence (but I repeat myself) and etc...etc...etc...

Wanting all that they presumably want a unity ticket that can both reject and affirm every political philosophy and policy of the last sixty to eighty years--would that be the storied Mumia/Tancredo ticket or the even more hysterically confused "McCain/Obama?" At any rate, after listening to NPR for a while, I think Digby and HTML's point is made and cannot be unmade. Liberals, liberal interviewers, and the people who trust them are irretrivably born not only yesterday but in the dark. And they spend a hell of a long time getting their eyes open.

aimai