flame thrower

Gary Kamiya has an interesting piece in Salon about what Right Wing water-carriers call "Bush Derangement Syndrome". 

Feb. 20, 2007 | Hating George W. Bush sometimes feels like a full-time job. I get up in the morning, open the paper, and it's Bush World. His ruinous handiwork is all over the place, whether it's Putin threatening to start a new Cold War, another Neanderthal anti-Enlightenment skirmish in the U.S. or some fresh hell in Baghdad. I turn on the TV and there he is, uttering reality-averse platitudes while mangling the English language in his best frat-boy twang. And then there's the Internet, where my bookmarked band of rhetorical assassins stir facts and commentary about his wretched tenure into a damning cocktail that I happily imbibe.

"Rhetorical assassin"?  I like that.  Can I get it on a t-shirt?

But this is all going to change. Pretty soon, we won't have Bush to kick around anymore. 

Yo, G.  I don't know if you noticed, but there's a whole two years between now and then, so it isn't going to be that goddamn soon.  The Reich Wing can do a lot of damage in two years.  Nonetheless, the notion of the party that we are going to throw (if we're not all radioactive or infected with super-drug-resistant e coli) when they kick that mental midget and his handlers out on their fat, criminal, proto-fascist asses, well, that is kind of a pleasant thought.

If form holds, a host of pious pundits will step forward to bleat that this celebration is "mean-spirited."

Yeah, and we'll tell Ms Althouse to shut her fucking pie-hole just like we do now.

These are the same smarmy aunties who decry Bush hatred as "extreme" and "obsessive" and fatuously intone that Bush "appears to have driven some people on the left crazy." Rubbish. Those of us who will be celebrating will be giving thanks for the end of a president who launched a totally unnecessary and disastrous war, declared a radical new doctrine of limitless presidential power, threw gasoline on what was once a small jihadi fire, severely weakened the economy, approved of torture and domestic spying, let bin Laden get away, accelerated the destruction of the environment, bashed science, engaged in vicious illegal vendattas against his opponents, winked at gay-bashing, handed out tax breaks to billionaires, lied constantly, made the U.S. hated around the world, and did it all while talking loudly in public on his personal hotline to Jesus. And that's just the short list.

What's not to celebrate?

Indeed.  Ding dong, the witch is dead and all that.

But then Kamiya, doubtless driven to muzzy-hued daydreams by his visions of a post-Bush world, begins to spout several paragraphs of mealy-mouthed pabulum, scolding us fire-breathing Angry Liberals in a tone of voice that sounds an awful lot like Joe Klein on a low boil.

This will mean learning again how to discuss, argue and debate issues in a more nuanced way, and being able to move beyond the raw, polemical mind-set that has flourished in the Bush years. I don't mean to bash the liberal blogosphere here. I have been critical of some aspects of the online reader revolution, of which the blogosphere is a big part, in particular its tendency to amplify the loudest, shrillest, most intemperate and crudest comments.

Yes, thank you.  The Liberal Blogosphere has been veddy, veddy good to me.

But here's where Kamiya loses his grip:

It is a happy historical coincidence that the Internet empowered millions of citizens at exactly the same moment that a power-mad, secrecy-obsessed administration launched a disastrous war, and at the same moment that the mainstream media disgracefully abandoned its post.

Um, no.  It is not a "coincidence" at all.  The world of liberal Internet punditry did not in fact spring spontaneously from the forehead of Duncan Black so that it just happened to be there idling on the side of the highway when Markos Moulitsas came wandering out of the wilderness with a few thousand of his closest personal friends.  Left Blogistan came into being because we forced it into being.  Like blades of grass pushing up through concrete, we have been continually trying to punch through the walls built up around the discourse by the spoiled, fatuous, cretinous dickheads who gleefully joined the Clinton lynch mob, but then went on an extended journalistic holiday as the Republican Party and the Bush Administration set about dismantling our great nation and turning it into the world's single largest banana republic, and we're still trying to punch through those walls every day.

By holding the media's feet to the fire, and giving millions of people a chance to vent their outrage at their government, the political blogosphere served a vital civic function.

Please note the past tense on "served a vital civic function".  In other words, "Thanks you dirty fuckin' hippies!  Now shut up and let the grownups enjoy the space you've carved out for us."

Lord god, this is the stuff that chaps my ass.  Go on home, kids!  Gary says we're outmoded.  We've done everything we can do here.  Now it's time to shut up so that people like David Fucking Broder will take the Left seriously.  Apparently, Kamiya sees us as some kind of liability for the Party.

Now, I kind of see his point when he says that some corners of Left Blogistan can be just about as puritanical, shrilly ideological, and hysterical as the Right.  I've had some experience with that, actually, but the fact of the matter is that Kamiya's victory celebration is premature.  It would be really nice to rest now, to leave off the desperate emergencies faced by our nation and write about food, music, and shoes, but that's exactly the sort of thing that will lead to President John McCain being sworn in when Chimpy gets evicted.  And we're not fucking having that.

Even when we see Chimpy, Shooter, Condi, and all the rest removed from power, there will still be a host of Malkins, Gibsons, Donohues, Kristols, Romneys, Brownbacks, Limbaughs, O'Reillys, and Krauthammers to hammer.  The NeoCons have insufficient self-awareness to feel any shame whatsoever for the fact that they've been wrong, wrong, wrong about everything they've ever focused the pencil-thin, wavering beams of their intellects on.  Like all bad liars, they just keep spewing more and more incoherent crap while the Wingnut Welfare system just keeps pumping cash into their pockets, propping up the NRO, and writing out big checks for another breathtakingly bad book by Dinesh D'Souza.

But Gary, thanks for sharing.  I am intimately familiar with how draining it is day after day to feel the appropriate amounts of outrage and vitriol about what's happened to my country, and it was somewhat comforting to read that you feel the same way.  Unfortunately, I am not so sanguine as yourself about the future of the relationship between Right and Left.  It would be very pleasant to believe that we can relax now and go back to speaking in a reasonable tone of voice without being ignored and ridden over rough-shod by the frothing screamers of the GOP.  I really would like to believe that things are going to get better on their own and that eventually Jonah Goldberg won't be able to get arrested on the talk show circuit, but somehow, I think that the next two years are going to be just as hard as the last six, if not harder.  And I doubt that we'll lose the need for high-volume, hot-headed "rhetorical assassins" any time soon.