Charlies Pierce: "Pulling Up the Ladder"

[antigop]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Pulling_Up_The_Ladder

Tout le Beltway is a'twitter about this commercial that Wendy Davis ran in her race for governor of Texas. The commercial makes the point that Greg Abbott, her Republican opponent and the state's attorney general, who is confined to a wheelchair after being paralyzed in a freak accident for which he sued and won a massive, $10 million settlement, has spent his whole career in office advocating against the kinds of lawsuits that made Abbott rich. (Here's Abbott suing to overturn the Americans With Disabilities Act, which was signed by that RINO bastard from Texas, George H.W. Bush.) It has been a tough campaign down there, but, for some reason, the Davis ad has allowed Abbott to gin up a firestorm in the mainstream media about what a terrible injustice has been done to him, Greg Abbott. Outside of the wingnut blogosphere, Aaron Blake of The Washington Post got the ball rolling, and Ben Dreyfuss in Mother Jones turned in the mother of all misinterpretations, missing the point of the ad by a mere half-a-continent or so. There's barely any room on the fainting couch, what with all this bipartisanship.

We will set aside all discussion of whether the commercial was worth the candle politically; Davis has been less of a candidate than people thought she would be, and remains likely to lose the election. And we will set aside the simple argument about whether Abbott's actions in office make him a hypocrite. The Davis ad is an important one because it strikes at the heart of what movement conservatism has made of the Republican party, which once was the party of the Pure Food and Drug Act, trust-busting, the Interstate Highway System, the Clean Water Act, and the EPA. Over the past three decades, however, beginning with that epochal moment when Ronald Reagan said, in his first inaugural, that government was the problem -- not if you were a defense contractor, one thinks, or a mullah who wanted missiles -- the Republican party has profited uniquely from a massive internal contradiction that would have given a less well-funded institution the blind staggers. And the party has doubled down on that contradiction year after year, decade after decade. Simply put, the Republican party deliberately has transformed itself from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of I've Got Mine, Jack. And it rarely, if ever, gets called to account for that. As a result, and without substantial notice or paying a substantial price, and on many issues, individual Republicans have been able to justify the benefits they've received from government activity that they now oppose in theory and in practice. This is not "hypocrisy." That is too mild a word. This is the regulatory capture of the government for personal benefit. That it makes a lie, again and again, of the basic principles of modern conservatism -- indeed, that it shows those principles to be a sham -- is certainly worthy of notice and debate. It is certainly worthy of notice and debate that the conservative idea of the benefits of a political commonwealth means those benefits run only one way. Modern conservatism is not about making the government smaller. It's about making the government exclusive. It's not about streamlining the benefits of the political commonwealth. It's about making sure those benefits flow only to those people who have proven through their ability to work all the other levers of power that they deserve those benefits.

[Ninga]

1. K&R! Nt

[1StrongBlackMan]

2. Great OP ...

However, I disagree with a single point:

From the OP:

And, since the elite political press pretty much has chickened out on its job of highlighting how the entire modern conservative ideology is built on this kind of slippery manure, it's up to the Democratic party to do it,

No ... It's up to pundits, with their wide readership, to do so on a daily basis; it's up to Democrats, Liberals and Progressives to do so in our daily political interactions.

[Paladin]

3. This ought to be required reading for the DU pearl-clutchers....

....who misinterpreted the Davis ad and ended up essentially siding with the Abbott campaign. Some days I wonder if it's all worth the effort...

[Doctor_J]

4. This could be remedied really quickly with some media realignment

Our representatives are too craven to do anything about legislatively. Unfortunately the only viable solution would get me banned from DU, and in fact is not (yet) palatable to enough people for it to happen. But if 1200 radio stations were pounding Greg Abbott and Charles Krauthammer and Tom Delay and Paul Ryan and the rest of these hypocrites 24/7, the GOP would soon be nothing but a bad memory.