Conservatives in Wonderland

If the conservative movement were a mental patient, it would surely be diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.

At this week’s Republican Presidential Debate on CNN, the dominant emotion was self-righteous anger, along with a strong dose of indignation. Anger at President Bush, anger at the Democrats and anger at the nation for parting ways with the conservative agenda. For example, the candidates wailed about how our troops needed to stay in Iraq until the mission was complete. Rudy Giuliani even shouted about the good things that would fall into place “if we can get this right.”

But on this and virtually every other issue, the responses made it clear that these conservatives live in a fantasyland built from the ashes their own failures. Not a single candidate acknowledged the generally accepted fact that the mission in Iraq has reached the point of a zero chance for "success." Providing security and stability to the Iraqi people in the face of a multi-faceted civil war is something our military is not capable of “getting right.”

And counter to what the candidates profess, withdrawal won’t unleash chaos because chaos has already been the rule of life in Iraq for years. Only a delusional mind would believe that a nation we already have virtually no control over would “burst into flames” once we leave. We provide a modicum of security for government officials, but little more. Terrorists and death squads already operate with impunity. Once we leave, politicians will simply get security from their own tribal factions. And while progress, such as it is, may go from a trickle to a stop, it’s an arrogant fantasy to think that our presence is a magic glue holding things together.

But Rudy Giuliani didn’t limit his arrogant fantasies to the subject of Iraq. He also screamed about the health-care mess, bitterly claiming that the system is broken because it’s “government dominated.” That’s right, the multi-billion dollar for-profit industry isn’t dominated by the greedy health care providers or the pharmaceutical industry—it’s dominated by our very own government.

Is he insane?

We should be so lucky for our government to take control of health care, which it clearly has no control over outside of Medicare despite Giuliani’s delusions. But hey, according to conservatives, “the government has never gotten anything right!” Well, under the Bush Administration the government has gotten a lot of important things wrong. But we trust the government to get a lot of life and death enterprises right. The military. The police. The fire department. The coast guard. The forest service. So why not health care? Are the other industrialized nations that much more capable than we are? Or are their politicians just much more capable than our very own Republicans? I don’t hear any mainstream conservatives talking about privatizing law enforcement.

Going on to achieve the Lunacy Trifecta, Giuliani later echoed the sentiments of many Bush conservatives by commenting on the jail sentence handed to convicted felon Scooter Libby, saying he thought Libby was a good candidate for a pardon. As Rudy resentfully pointed out, “a man’s life is at stake.” But Rudy seems unconcerned that the integrity of the Presidency is also at stake. That the outing of a covert CIA officer is also at stake. That the lives of that officer and her husband were at stake, and were damaged by Libby’s lies. That ethics were at stake because the office of the Vice President waged an unethical smear campaign to cover its lies about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities and then tried to cover tracks by lying to a special prosecutor.

Stakes like those don’t seem to register in conservative fantasyland. Because they don’t serve the cause of making conservatives look like capable heroes. And darn it, conservatives have to look perfect in order to feel good about themselves. That’s their fantasy—that they can do no wrong, just like America itself.

But the more conservatives try to push fantasies and delusions and wishful thinking, the more transparent and pitiful they become. Consider the new show on Fox News, “The 1/2 Hour News Hour”, which is meant to be a conservative version of “The Daily Show.” Its mere existence tells us three things about Fox. One, that it is desperately trying not to wither into complete and total irrelevance. Two, that Fox has never really been about news or journalism. And three, that it doesn’t get the joke—Jon Stewart doesn’t skewer Bush and Cheney and the others because they are conservatives—he makes fun of them because they are so damned dangerously ridiculous! And when moderates, progressives and liberals become as idiotic and incompetent, The Daily Show will make fun of them, too.

Conservatives choose to live in a fantasy world to avoid confronting the realities of their own failures, many of which have been egregious and calamitous of late. But the longer they spew wishful thinking and ignore hard facts, the further away they get from the electorate.

If “Angry and Deluded” describes the bulk of the conservative platform, 2008 is going to be a really bad year for Republicans. And a good year for America.

- JT Compton

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