What We're Fighting
Fanaticism, intolerance, delusional thinking, the marriage of ideology and power.

In other words, everything on display this weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference held near DC. It amazes me that these people can still call themselves "conservative" with a straight face, given their total abandonment of fiscal responsibility, foreign policy realism, and commitment to limited government. But I guess when you run everything, principle seems as quaint as those fusty old Geneva Conventions.

Some lowlights from Salon's coverage of this nightmare:

California Rep. Chris Cox had the honor of introducing [Dick Cheney], and he took the opportunity to mock the Democrats whose hatred of America led them to get Iraq so horribly wrong.

"America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," he crowed. Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq." Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.
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Neither Cheney nor Rove said anything very interesting. As he does most years, the vice president essentially rehashed Bush's State of the Union, although he mercifully omitted any reference to the Federal Marriage Amendment. Rove's speech was about the growth of the right from "a small principled opposition" to "a broad and inclusive movement that is self-assured, confident and optimistic, and forward leading, and most important of all, dominant in American politics today."

Their mere presence was more significant than their words, putting the White House imprimatur on an event that featured, in addition to the Swift Boat Veterans, venomous CPAC regulars like Ann Coulter, Oliver North and Michelle "In Defense of Internment" Malkin. It was yet more evidence that this administration puts little distance between itself and the most reactionary forces in the Republican Party.
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In his speech, Santorum tried to unite the various constituencies behind the anti-gay marriage amendment with the Orwellian argument that such an amendment is actually necessary to keep government out of people's private lives.

"I know there are some people who may be economic conservatives and not consider themselves cultural conservatives," he said. Addressing himself to them, he tried to explain how banning gay marriage is crucial to laissez-faire governing. "Think about those communities where marriage does not exist," he said, invoking their poverty and illegitimacy. "What you see is a model of what life would look like in a country that has fathers and mothers not wedded together in strong relationships to raise children." In poor neighborhoods, he said, there's a strong government presence, "because if Mom and Dad isn't there to raise the child, someone else has to bridge the gap, and that someone else is always the government."

Santorum didn't quite explain how proscribing gay unions would strengthen families in poor communities. The assumption seemed to be that homosexuality would make a travesty of matrimony. Like a suburban block where undesirables insist on moving in, its worth would go down. "If we deconstruct marriage in society, if we say marriage is whatever you want it to be, then marriage loses its intrinsic value," he said.

"I'm talking at a very protective level about what is important to our society if we are to be a free people," he said. "The less virtue we have in our society, the more the need for government to control our lives, to govern our lives." In other words, government needs to enforce virtue in order to keep government out of our lives.

This kind of reminds me of something that bothers me from time to time: why don't these people who are so concerned with the "sanctity of marriage" go after shows like "Trading Spouses" or "Wife Swap"? Do they ever make the connection that the same Fox that relentlessly pushes "Trading Spouses" as well as "Sex-Crazed Island" or whatever the hell that trash is called, also runs the unofficial propaganda outlet of the administration led by that "godly" president they so venerate?

Does it occur to any of these people that Rupert Murdoch is probably laughing at them until he wets himself?

Meanwhile, the author of this piece does do us the service of a reminder that some real conservatives out there see and deplore the excesses of the radical reactionaries currently in the saddle:

In January, Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the treasury during the Reagan administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal's far-right editorial page, published a damning column in the progressive Z Magazine about fascist tendencies in the conservative movement. "In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush," he wrote. "Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush … Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy."

This American Conservative article from last month makes much the same case. Both pieces allude to what I've long viewed as the telltale sign of incipient fascism: the tendency to dehumanize one's opponents. Once one makes the mental leap that all liberals, Jews, African-Americans, gays or whatever group hate America and are either active or passive traitors, it's a fairly short step to calling for their incarceration, physical suppression or worse. Erstwhile conservatives now on that path can look up ahead to where people like Ann Coulter, Michael Savage and other "personalities" are enthusiastically waving them onward.