Quote of the Day

It's astonishing that liberalism now has a built-in theological meaning, i.e. "Godless." That's the point of Coulter's latest best-seller, as it was Hannity's in his repulsively titled book, "Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism." The point is to portray your political opponents as part of a Manichean struggle against existential evil. And so "liberalism" is literally demonized. In this way, politics collapses into religion, and the political debate becomes the hunt to expose and punish heresy. That hunt has been around for centuries; and people love it. The left specialized in it once; and still does. But the right has now coopted an entire ancient faith in this gambit. Whatever else this impulse is, it isn't politics; and it isn't real faith. It is, however, what American conservatism has now largely become. - Andrew Sullivan

God damn he makes me crazy. He has this amazing ability to nail one point, and completely fuck-up another, all in the same paragraph. Why does he do that? I think he's like a lot of the media and politicians - balance at all costs, even if you have to lie about one side of the argument.

It's this whole "center" thing that makes me crazy, because it's intellectually dishonest. People must have a motivation for doing it. Again - money. Duh. People like Hillary Clinton do it because they think they need to in order to get elected, and politics is really about money. People like Andrew Sullivan do it because of their business, which is in part about being a celebrity, so they need other people to back their point of view and make them relevant. They think appealing to the center will accomplish that, putting as their first priority relevance, and hence money, before being honest. There are very few professional writers who simply comment factually, and put forward their honest viewpoint regardless of how it may be perceived by the masses. Dan Fromkin at the WaPo and Paul Krugman of the Times are two good examples.

So, how does this apply specifically to the quote from Sully? After he cites examples of the right wingers literally lying and manipulating to stigmatize a word (liberal), he says "The left specialized in it once; and still does" without offering a single example. Liberalism is not what Sully thinks it is, where his viewpoint was cemented by socialist politics of decades ago.

Some liberals want to dump the word in favor of "progressive" because they've given up the fight against the smear job Sully and other right wing freaks do on a regular basis. I'm not going to give up on the word yet, and hope that if we are exceptionally forceful in our convictions of what is right and wrong, and use the word "liberal" as if it's the enlightened ideology, the general public might start coming around. Because, if we give up on the fight, all the wingers will do is change the word they attack to "progressive". They certainly are a cunning bunch of lying bastards.

But more to the point, are liberals godless? In the way Sully frames religion and politics, he takes the right to task for implying that the left is godless as if being godless is a bad thing! The two concepts are mutually exclusive. Are liberals godless? Yes - No - it doesn't matter! That's the whole point of liberalism. Being godless is just as moral as being all up in Jesus' or Mohammed's ass. American conservatism, on the other hand, has a built-in requirement that you flog yourself for Jebus, or you're not really a conservative.