It has been amusing to watch the fans of maximum government contort themselves into evermore imaginative defenses of state power. But now we’ve moved beyond just being clueless about the Universal Service Fund or the free-lunch program to bold, naked agit-prop.
The latest labyrinthine screed starts with the heavy-rotation claim that conservatives are so very much more “extreme” than ever, winds through the familiar ground of Virginia “Scare Quotes” Foxx, various smears, conspiracies, and jealousies to wind at up at the conclusion that all shades of conservatives are Michele Bachmann.
I kid you not.
The linchpin of this teetering shambles is the Club for Growth, memorably described as “a national far right, market fundamentalist group.” These crazed fundamentalists allow Club for Growth members to rank members of Congress via up or down votes. Right now, Rep. Michele Bachmann has the top ranking in the House with an 86 percent approval rating. Via this standing, Club for Growth congressional scorecards on tax votes, expansion of government etc. are morphed into Michele Bachmann Fan Club memberships.
To tease the logic out explicitly, including the suppressed premise that Michele Bachmann is always wrong about everything, which we will grant for the purposes of this exercise, you get this:
- Michele Bachmann is bat-shiat crazy.
- Club for Growth rates Michele Bachmann highly.
- Therefore, everyone the Club for Growth rates highly is bat-shiat crazy.
This kind of cranial ooze makes the Underpants Gnomes seem like Warren Buffet. But it gets better.
Over on the Senate side, the Club’s the top ranked member is Sen. Jim DeMint. With a number even higher than Bachmann’s — 89.5 percent. Somehow I don’t think Jim DeMint works as well as a booga-booga scary extremist when trying to tell residents of the Carolinas to run for their lives into the loving arms of Mother Government.
Let’s test that theory out too. Emphasis changes the original:
In short, DeMint is nuts and the poster child for the modern, dangerously uninformed, fear mongering, tea partying right. He neither cares nor has any meaningful capacity to help govern the country. He is Ann Coulter with a vote – a destructive force interested in little more than ginning up people’s worst fears and instincts to his own advantage. Say what they will about his voting record, but if he is the quintessential modern conservative – the person that Virginia Foxx and her deep-pocketed think tanker friends and allies seek to emulate – then there really is a profound shakeout afoot in the conservative movement.
The good news for thinking and caring people is that, like most hard-line ideological purges, such a shakeout is, in the long run, almost certain to leave behind a “club” that’s shrinking rather than growing.
