Armageddon is upon us, children, in the form of the Washington Post's newest plagiarist. Or, rather, people who aren't him but wish him well so fervently they're willing to go all jihad-y against anyone who points out his dishonesty. Apparently Bozo the Right-wing Clone's fellow "Red State" squeaking, oddly messianic whiners are smarting over revelations that when he says "I wrote dis wif my brain" he really means "I cut dis from d'un article-jobby I foumd on de Google." So now, typically unable to argue a point on the plane of reality where gravity works and logic matters, they're on the attack.
But that's not what this is about. You can read all the third-grade earnestness of their call to fake action via a million links on Eschaton. And tremble, mortals!
What troubles me is that this troubles anybody. Not the rubber-toothed yappies' latest armchair war whoop. Yawn times many. But that a right-wing media figger has been exposed as a fundamentally dishonest party hack. This is worth any measure of surprise? If so, I'll keep you riveted for days with pictures of birds flying, fish swimming, and the sun not orbiting the earth.
Not to startle anybody (boo!) but there's more to this whole left/right deal (whoo-ah!) than the respective primacies of our golden rule and their golden Reagan (booga-booga-booga!). To keep their commemorative plates spinning, the right-wingers need to lie. "Need" like tea "needs" water. Like a Breatharian "needs" a kick in the head. It might not be a conscious thing (there's my damned liberal escape clause), but the whole "lean right" thing works a lot better with an unholy jolt of disingenuousness.
Can anyone really look at boxed-in, suicidally deranged Saddam Hussein (pre-arrest) and see a threat to anybody in Texarkana (assuming the Texarkanan didn't go to Iraq and wave an Israeli flag made out of "Huck Fussein" bumper stickers while singing that goofy "America We Stand As One" thing)? Of course not. Are the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay simply hanging out in the Cuban sun, enjoying their grilled fish with fruit, rather than being drowned, tortured, and killed? Um... no. Is there a legitimate scientist in the world who doubts that tobacco smoke kills people, that air pollution kills people, that rising sea levels expose more sea water to sunlight that evaporates the water that affects the wind and temperature that makes the hurricanes that top the levees that hold back the lake that, when un-leveed, kills people? Yeah, there probably is, but you have to stretch "legitimate" to cover a whole lot of dishonesty and a bunch of the superstitions that only take root in the infant mind when combined with scary stories about fire.
Do these realities affect the carve-Bush's-head-into-Thomas-Jefferson's-space-on-Mount-Rushmore crowd's praise for the guy in the empty crown? No, non, and Β‘no!
So they lie. To themselves, potentially (damned liberal escape clause again!), certainly to each other, and to the rest of us as well. Sharing a publishing company with charmingly prissy (lying) "baseball fan" George Will and (way super-lying) grumpy third-stringer Charles Krauthammer doesn't make the lies of WaPo's new lying-blogger-doofus (remember him?) surprising.
But, I sense some of my lefty acquaintances ruminating, how are we supposed to get along with them if we accept that the broad majority of the politically obsessed minority within the right-wing minority of our country is dishonest? The answer, my friends, ain't blowin' in the wind. (That line was partially plagiarized from a Bob Dylan song.) Dr. Dave's prescription crosses party lines to plagiarize, sorry, paraphrase racist thug James Baker: "[Screw] the [broad majority of the politically obsessed minority within the right-wing minority of our country]. They didn't vote for us."
(Note: "Dr. Dave" is not a real doctor. Consult your physician before starting any honesty program and call 911 if symptoms persist. Loudly call "9-11" every couple minutes if you decide to stick with the whole dishonesty thing.)