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Monday, August 22, 2005

Conservative Dummies

"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid,” wrote John Stuart Mill, “but most stupid people are conservative." Quite so, but the conservative dummies to which I refer today in particular are more of the ventriloquist variety.

It is a matter of breathtaking scandal, of course, that neocon/theocon thugs will stifle and denigrate dissent in this democracy they claim to love (no doubt like a glutton loves his lunch). They dismiss with a scornful wave as “a mere interest group” the unprecedented millions of antiwar activists who rightly protested Bush’s disastrous war of choice before it even occurred. They refuse to let progressives attend the town hall meetings where the President who works for them betrays them with his every word. They delete comments and trackbacks that would criticize the crazy monologue of their online discourse. They invite few dissenting expert voices to the broadcast media outlets (many of them literally corporate conglomerations of media and militarism) where vital issues are discussed and explained in public. They cloak their bloodsoaked budgets and their bloodthirsty plans in unprecedented secrecy.

But for me it is an even more breathtaking scandal the way these neocon/theocon thugs will commandeer the voices of the voiceless even as they choke the voices of living dissent into silence.

For the current debased deranged crop of conservatives, every fetus and every person in a vegetative state is conscripted into servicing the Republican noise machine, reduced to a helpless foot soldier tirelessly advocating Republican talking points. Every single liberal and progressive victim of the attacks of September 11 in the progressive bastion of New York that social conservatives otherwise disdain with venomous vigor is transfigured in death and in silence into a megaphone declaiming conservative pieties. It is not for the mothers of dead soldiers to say what it means when their children are torn from the world and from their arms for the lies of this Administration.

The Republicans alone can speak for the dead, it seems. And it is only for death-dealing that the Republicans appropriate the voices of those who cannot protect themselves from these unspeakable depredations.

There can be little doubt that for the neocons and theocons every fetus, every person in a vegetative state, every victim of violence in the whirlwind blowback of Anti-American hostility around the world, every soldier dying for lies on a foreign field is little more than a ventriloquist’s dummy, with a Republican hand there to make the silent lips mouth the cheerleading words that fewer and fewer among the living are willing to speak now as bodies and deficits catastrophically balloon before our horrified eyes.

It’s a wonder the conservatives haven’t taken up the cause of animal rights. I hear that nine out of ten nonhuman mammals support Bush’s Presidency according to the latest RNC polling, even if few of the human ones still do.

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