NOW Conservatives Have a Problem With Rovian Campaign Tactics?

Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo at 2:27 AM on October 27, 2008.

So the wingnuts are turning on the rats who are deserting the sinking ship. And the rats don't like it. And it's all Sarah W. Palin and John McCain's fault. Here's Peggy Noonan:

In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism.

Noonan has been fluttering about rudeness for some time now. You'll recall that she famously blamed liberals for all this because they booed Trent Lott at a memorial rally for Paul Wellstone. Who could forget her having the unadulterated cojones to pretend to speak for the great liberal in heaven as he lectured Democrats on their vulgar behavior:

You hurt a lot of people. You didn't mean to, you meant to be Happy Warriors. But you offended and hurt and antagonized more than half the country. And you have to think about why.
Here, I think, is the reason: a dulling of the senses, a kind of despair that has led you to let politics completely take over your lives. That's the reason you treated a reflective and loving occasion as . . . well, as a big vulgar whomp-'em-stomp-'em rally with jeers and cheers and my casket as the stump from which you lambasted the foe.

This is what I feel you have to think about. You can make your life sick and small, you can fill it with poison, when you turn everything into politics. And what makes me sad is not that you used my death to get out the vote. It's not that you were cold. It's that the only way you could show any warmth was through politics.

That memorial was the triumph of politics at the expense of the personal. At the expense of what makes you human.

See, liberals were inhuman for booing Trent Lott, even as he laughed it off and carried on without even blinking. This behavior was, at the time, sold as the most despicable, disgusting form of indecent public behavior since the drawing and quartering of William Wallace.

And it was, you'll also recall, in the final weeks of a hard fought mid-term election where the Republicans were comparing war heroes to Saddam Hussein and the majority leader to Osama bin laden. No matter --- the liberals were vulgar and wanted to win too much for booing Trent Lott.

Peggy spent the next few years casually smearing Democrats and liberals in her patented unctuous prose:

The Democratic nominee in 2004 could win the election. There may be something to the idea that Democrats in general want to get rid of George W. Bush more than Republicans in general want to keep him. One of the men running in New Hampshire tonight could become the next president, and lead the war on terror. And our country cannot afford a bit of a nut.
Which get us of course to Howard Dean. But not for long. I do not know how Democrats in New Hampshire will judge him today, but I can say with confidence that the American people will not choose him as president, because they will not want him near the nuclear arsenal.

Which gets me to Wesley Clark. Forgive me, but he seems to be another first class strange-o.

Then liberals were "in love with death," and were leading the country on a low road that ends up in Auschwitz:

Terri Schiavo may well die. No good will come of it. Those who are half in love with death will only become more red-fanged and ravenous.
And those who are still learning--our children--oh, what terrible lessons they're learning. What terrible stories are shaping them. They're witnessing the Schiavo drama on television and hearing it on radio. They are seeing a society--their society, their people--on the verge of famously accepting, even embracing, the idea that a damaged life is a throwaway life.

Our children have been reared in the age of abortion, and are coming of age in a time when seemingly respectable people are enthusiastic for euthanasia. It cannot be good for our children, and the world they will make, that they are given this new lesson that human life is not precious, not touched by the divine, not of infinite value.

Once you "know" that--that human life is not so special after all--then everything is possible, and none of it is good. When a society comes to believe that human life is not inherently worth living, it is a slippery slope to the gas chamber. You wind up on a low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz. Today that road runs through Pinellas Park, Fla.

Nothing vulgar about that.

Recently, we had Noonan "wincing" when her good friend Ann Coulter called John Edwards a faggot, to lusty applause.

Our country now puts less of an emphasis on public decorum, courtliness, self-discipline, decency. America no longer says, "That's not nice." It doesn't want to make value judgments on "good" and "bad." We have come to rely on censorship to maintain decorum. We are very good at letting people know that if they say something we don't like, we'll shame them and shun them, even ruin them.

But censorship doesn't make people improve themselves; it makes people want to rebel. It tells them to toe the line or pay a price. People who are urged in the right direction and taught in the right direction will usually try to discipline and improve themselves from within. But they do not enjoy censorship from without. They fight back. They are rude in order to show they are unbroken.

This is human. And Grandma would have understood this, too.

I think the atmosphere of political correctness is now experienced by normal people -- not people who speak on TV, but normal people -- as so oppressive, so demanding of constant self-policing, that when someone says something in public that is truly not nice, not nice at all, they can't help but feel that they are witnessing a prison break.

As long as political correctness reigns, the more antic among us will try to break out with great streams of Tourette's-like forbidden words and ideas.

We should forbid less and demand more. We should exert less pressure from without and encourage more discipline from within. We should ask people to be dignified, hope they'll be generous, expect them to be fair. When they're not, we should correct them. But we shouldn't beat them to a pulp. Because that's not nice.

And then there was this. Good old Peggy, creating the very meme she now denounces as vulgar:

His problem was, is, his wife's words, not his, the speech in which she said that for the first time in her adult life she is proud of her country, because Obama is winning. She later repeated it, then tried to explain it, saying of course she loves her country. But damage was done. Why? Because her statement focused attention on what I suspect are some basic and elementary questions that were starting to bubble out there anyway.

Are the Obamas, at bottom, snobs? Do they understand America? Are they of it? Did anyone at their Ivy League universities school them in why one should love America? Do they confuse patriotism with nationalism, or nativism? Are they more inspired by abstractions like "international justice" than by old visions of America as the city on a hill, which is how John Winthrop saw it, and Ronald Reagan and JFK spoke of it?

Have they been, throughout their adulthood, so pampered and praised--so raised in the liberal cocoon--that they are essentially unaware of what and how normal Americans think? And are they, in this, like those cosseted yuppies, the Clintons?

Why is all this actually not a distraction but a real issue? Because Americans have common sense and are bottom line. They think like this. If the president and his first lady are not loyal first to America and its interests, who will be? The president of France? But it's his job to love France, and protect its interests. If America's leaders don't love America tenderly, who will?

And there is a context. So many Americans right now fear they are losing their country, that the old America is slipping away and being replaced by something worse, something formless and hollowed out. They can see we are giving up our sovereignty, that our leaders will not control our borders, that we don't teach the young the old-fashioned love of America, that the government has taken to itself such power, and made things so complex, and at the end of the day when they count up sales tax, property tax, state tax, federal tax they are paying a lot of money to lose the place they loved.

And if you feel you're losing America, you really don't want a couple in the White House whose rope of affection to the country seems lightly held, casual, provisional. America is backing Barack at the moment, so America is good. When it becomes angry with President Barack, will that mean America is bad?

What a nice way of saying that Obama isn't a real American. Good thing it isn't vulgar.

Noonan writes in elegant prose, but the meaning of her words are no different than what Sarah palin and the crazies at the McCain-Palin rallies are spewing. She's spent the last couple of decades helping to create this vulgar political world and now she's trying to separate herself from what she's done. And that's yet another way in which she's just a typical conservative like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh --- when her vulgar politics catch up with her, instead of standing tall and taking responsibility she pretends that she was somewhere else.

I hope that people don't get so caught up with these late breaking "conversions" to the one true faith that they forget that these people are not heretics or apostates. They are opportunistic cowards, pure and simple --- rats deserting a sinking ship --- and they will never, ever change.

Trust 'em? Not for a minute.

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Tagged as: hypocrisy, punditry, peggy noonan

Digby is the proprietor of Hullabaloo.