A Confluence of Gormlessness

My most recent post just happens to contain the following sentence: "Let us all hope that they pay dearly for this latest confluence of utter gormlessness in the service of unremitting evil." Some time after I wrote the post it occurred to me that confluence and gormlessness were pretty rarely-used words. Anyway I wondered if I could find the post by Googling "confluence of utter gormlessness," and yes, there it was right at the top of a very short list (most of the other Google hits were from either a) - databases from online dictionaries or b) - something called All Junky Pages Intentionally Illogical and Inconsistent - I wonder what that's all about.)

If I had stopped there it would have been enough to demonstrate the depths to which I will go just to provide myself the briefest minor amusement, which would hardly have been worthy of a post on the lowliest of cat-blogging and baby-pictures narcissistic mommy blog. (no offense to any of our readers who happen to be narcissistic mommy bloggers)

No, what made this random googling bloggable was when I widened my search to just 'confluence gormlessness' - at which point I stumbled upon a great post about six months old from Pandagon that contains the words confluence and gormlessness (although both are in the comments) - the post harkens back to a post from D-Day - the D-Day post recalls the impeachment of Bill Clinton:

Jesse L. Jackson in 1998:

Let us not be confused. Today Republicans are impeaching Social Security, they are impeaching affirmative action, they are impeaching women’s right to choose, Medicare, Medicaid, Supreme Court justices who believe in equal protection under the law for all Americans.

D-Day, Dec 21, 2007:

Being the anniversary week, C-SPAN decided to air large portions of the House debate [on the Clinton impeachment].

I couldn't stop watching.

You actually can read the transcripts here, but believe me when I tell you that the phony sanctimony from the Republicans is striking. I've never heard so many renderings of history, deep intoning about the Constitution and reverance for the rule of law come out in such a stream of pabulum in my life. Set against the background of the current Administration, which has lied us into war, spied on American citizens, tortured and indefinitely detained suspects without trial in secret sites all over the world, subverted the will of the people through deliberate deception, and brought this country to its knees, all in full view of many of these same lawmakers, the experience of watching them speak is almost otherworldly.

What the Republicans were actually doing is throwing a hissy fit.

Amanda Marcotte, Dec 22, 2007:

...it began to really dawn on me that Republicans and their allies in the media are fundamentally opposed to the idea of democracy. It wasn’t just that the Republicans and the media were trying to oust a duly elected leader on trumped-up charges with the hope that the sexy parts would distract people from the fact that they were attempting a coup, though god knows that alone would be enough. It was also that the more the media and the Republicans persecuted Clinton, the more popular he got, and then the more frantic the persecution got. It really showed how conservatives and the mainstream media hate the workaday voter, and hate the very fact that we have any say at all. The more people liked Clinton, the more his enemies hated him, because he became this proxy for their very hatred of The People.

I suppose if the nation was better educated, we’d have seen it coming. Republicans and their Democratic allies have never met a pro-capitalist military coup they didn’t love, and while the attempted coup on President Clinton was not a military coup, it was still in the same spirit as the coups conducted worldwide.

It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day screwing that's being handed out to the American people by the government and forget the long term year-to-year and decade-to decade screwing that's pretty much always been going on. So I welcome the result of my idle googling for the opportunity it presented to me to rescue a couple of excellent blog posts from the memory hole.

And in case you didn't get the message, this post makes a lot more sense if you read the posts at Pandagon and D-Day that I linked to. And what really comes out of it is how much the rules change when the Republicans control Congress instead of the Democrats, or when a Democratic president occupies the White House instead of a Republican. I understand that the system provides a very weak 'choice' between the lesser of two evils. Still, I continue to believe that even though the lesser of two evils is still evil, it is also still lesser. These two posts and the subject matter they explore are ample evidence of that.

UPDATE: Here's a video that illustrates my last point. Who would argue that Congressman Wasserman Schultz (D - Florida) is just as bad as a Republican? And get a load of the former Bush aide, Brad Blakeman. Speaking to my main point, how many Republicans were arguing just the opposite on Executive privilege during the Monica Lewinski affair? And what a fucking jakehole Blakeman is, constantly talking over Rep. Wasserman and the guy from HuffPo - a constant tactic Repukes use, and that the Lamestream media continues to allow them to get away with.

Congresswoman Wasserman on Karl Rove's Refusal To Appear

'nother update: This video with Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D - CA) is even better. Great analysis from Jonathan Turley.

Sanchez: Rove Should be in jail

TAGS: Memory Hole, The Wider Picture, Republican Toerags, Historical Perspective