Please do not buy into the frame that this is all just incompetence for it is not. As George Lakoff wrote last year:

Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault. Bush will not be running again, but other conservatives will. His governing philosophy is theirs as well. We should be putting the onus where it belongs, on all conservative office holders and candidates who would lead us off the same cliff.

While there was a whole liot of incompetence going on, let’s don’t lose sight of the fact that going into Iraq and doing it on the cheap were conncious decisions mad from the conservative woldview. Putting all of this off onto incompetence alone muddles that point.

All the Goper presidential candidates still posit that going into Iraq was the right thing to do. We must make them pay for that belief.

We saw it happen in Katrina, obviously.

But it’s also what happened in Iraq.

The worst case scenario is “chaos is the plan.” The next worst is hegemonic, imperial ideology. But “incompetence” is just not on the cards. Disasters of this scale don’t happen without careful planning….

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

… we should take incompetence, unseriousness, and ungrown-upness off the table, and not document them?

Yes, they shouldn’t be our ultimate framing, but I don’t think we should be afraid to point them out either.

But if matters end there, I would say that would be a complete distortion, and not helpful to us in doing the things that need to be done.

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

…the same way that better care for the already-insured isn’t where the health-care narrative should end.

I agree with y’all that the ideal framing is that this is the true face of modern conservatism, a rogue’s gallery that includes Richard Nixon (the designated No True Scotsman), the heroic Gerald Ford that pardoned him, the heroic Ronald Reagan who sold poison gas to Saddam Hussein and traded arms to Iran for hostages, the heroic George H. W. Bush who played footsie with Noriega and pardoned Cap Weinberger, and the heroic Commander Codpiece. And, of course, Tom Delay, Newt Gingrich, etc., etc.

Unfortunately, most Americans are hugely resistant to conceptualizing and condemning the totality of authoritarian corporatist conservatism.

We need to develop a lot of different narratives. This is a big story, and it’s probably not going to be successfully told in one single-bullet meme.

… how receptive do you all think the American public is to conceptualizing and condemning the totality of authoritarian corporatist conservatism?

Clearly, a majority of Americans voted for Democrats to take over Congress (though, the Senate is essentially at parity) to stop the war in Iraq.

But how much of America is ready to recognize that the Repubs have (if this is any sort of decent world) lost their DC privileges for at least a generation?

That may be a bit of an overstatement but still, there is reason to believe from this report that the young do get it.

Highlights:

“A major, multi-mode survey of America’s young people recently conducted by Democracy Corps shows young people profoundly alienated from the Republican Party and poised to deliver a significant majority to the Democratic nominee for President in 2008.”

“The looming disaster Republicans face among younger voters represents a setback that could haunt them for many generations to come.”

“Young people react with hostility to the Republicans on almost every measure and Republicans and younger voters disagree on almost every major issue of the day.”

Gave me a small smile, hope it does the same for you all.

http://democracycorps.com/reports/analys…

… we had better get the public to this point. (Answering VL’s question:

… how receptive do you all think the American public is to conceptualizing and condemning the totality of authoritarian corporatist Conservatism?

)
That’s were the Republican assault on the Constitution works in our favor. Separation of powers stuff is something I think people get, even if the fershguggeh Dems don’t lead on the issue…

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

of the SCOTUS. when one looks at emerging demographics, the inclination of the young towards more progressive values, the “browning” of america in general, yes it does look bad for “conservative” ideology and its adherents. still, i’m pessimistic. it seems to me that each day pols are more and more distant from the political reality of the rest of the country. the unwillingness of congress to arrest abu al, esp in light of domestic spying, is a good example. any truly progressive pol who wanted to be in office forever should frame this as “big brother republican are spying on your grandma’s email and cell phone calls!” and yet, i only seem to hear such an argument from the blogosphere. and not even all of that.

For the MSM, this is the truth that dare not speak its name.

Perhaps more than anything, they don’t want soccer moms and NASCAR dads to connect the dots. Equivalation plays a big part — only crazy, partisan hippies think a non-stop record of unconstitutional, corrupt, incompetent, and murderous behavior is a pattern worth recognizing. Fer crissakes, Scooter Libby drops his kids off at daycare, so what could be wrong?

Using calipers to measure the Clenis is fair play. But using them to show that the whole playing field is tilted is beyond the pale.

The Dems’ passivity while all this has played out is a largely function of unwillingness to conceptualize that today’s American politics is not a battle among gentlemen. It’s not by a damned sight. But it’s somehow not in our cultural makeup to acknowledge that one of our predominant political organizations is rotted from stem to stern (though it is OK to make “liberal” officially a swear word). And lord knows, Andrea Mitchell et al. will gnaw their own paws off before ever letting you know that it is.

Incest is nicest, isn’t it?

She won’t ever have to gnaw her paws off. She needs them to count her money with.

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.

it is said heard rumblings under their feet over and over. Rarely at first, maybe a couple of times a year. Then they began to come oftener. Some people became nervous and found reasons to visit their seaside villas if they could. Others said, well, this is bad, but the grapes are close to ripening and if they are not picked they will rot, we can make no wine, and my family will starve. Perhaps we will leave after the crop is safely in.

ChiDy (about whom I had a dream last night…we had both gotten jobs at a power company. Wish I could figure out where it was as we were both very happy about this. And no sex was involved at all. Very odd. But anyway…) sez

spying on your grandma’s email and cell phone calls!” and yet, i only seem to hear such an argument from the blogosphere. and not even all of that.

which requires me to suggest a comparison of time lags in various areas. How many things—the war, Bush’s general wickedness, the hijacking of DoJ, the politicization of every department of government—have we been screaming about for years and yet are just now bobbing to the surface of the water in the press? The very word “impeachment”, thus far applying only to the Bozo in Chief, is only now being mentioned by the Respectable, even if it is to scoff it off as well-deserved-but-too-late-to-do-any-good.

Patience, grasshoppers. A minor tidal wave is in the papers this very day. The foundation we have established is solid, while the one the evildoers have corrupted is rotted out from under them. The last step is to convince enough of our fellow Vesuvians that standing with us is the safe place to be while the pressure is let off, and that afterwards the vineyards will bear better than ever.

In their march toward their seizure of power, the Conservative movement learned to propagate the message with a conviction, unity of purpose, and ability to turn on a dime that would have made Stalin envious.

However, the authoritarian nature of the Conservative movement demanded that the message be propagated from the top down. (That’s another meaning of “Drudge rules our world. The left blogosphere isn’t ruled by anyone, not even Lord Kos.) This explains the nature of the Conservative Critique: They use, say, contributions or shibbolehths as proxies for the real question, which is: Are you part of the tribe? There’s no analysis of the actual content (except that which is susceptible to manipulation by computer, and/or, as with the serifs, most likely planted).

By contrast, we’re a network with many centers. And where the Conservative movement is vulnerable to attack at its rotting head in the Beltway, we are much less susceptible, because we’re distributed.

(Of course, one way to counter our distributed nature would be to suck down all the data on the network, datamine it, and analyze it, but… That’s tinfoil hat stuff.)

No authoritarians were tortured in the writing of this post.