You're never going to understand the contemporary fringe left until you understand what happened to Oliver Cromwell.
Maureen Dowd got caught plagiarizing a blogger in her
New York Times column the other day. But calling the lockstep mindset she's channeling "plagiarism" is superfluous. She's cribbing the homework of someone who writes something called
Talking Points Memo, after all. They can all finish one another's sentences, or start them to get the ball rolling. Makes no never mind. They never have an original thought, just endless permutations of the same drivel about George W. Bush.
They all think if they rearrange the words a little one more time, George Bush will be guilty and Karl Rove will be arrested or Alberto Gonzales won't be able to rent movies from Netflix or... something. Or maybe they'll all be tried in absentia in some weird traffic court based in a European country whose GDP is less than Al Gore's electric bill, and George will be forever unable to travel to some frosty HMO masquerading as a country to pick up the Nobel prize they'll never award him anyway. It seems like trying to invest heavily in tulip bulb futures at this point to any sane observer. George wasn't running in the last election; he's very, very unlikely to stand in the next one. But still they persist.
If you are a monomaniac, you try to convert others to your mania. Smart people give you the cold shoulder immediately. If you listen a little, you're going to have to listen a lot. It's the reason you don't make eye contact with people yelling at traffic in the street. It doesn't pay to seem interested and polite.
Raving lunatics think that if you knew what they know, you'd agree with them. That's why they tell you about the lizard people or the thermite used to blow up the World Trade Center or whatever Maureen Dowd's copying today. If after you hear their spiel you're still not interested, they figure the only reason you're not convinced has to be perfidy or stupidity. I've never heard anyone who hates George W. Bush assess anyone else's enthusiasm --or even ambivalence --towards the guy as anything other than those two things. Nothing can disabuse them of their fascination with the ex-president. They take a run at Cheney or Rumsfeld or some clerk once in a while out of boredom, but their heart's not in it. They want their pound of Crawford flesh.
You may recall the weird glee at the end of last year when they were sure Chimpy would issue all sorts of pardons over the Iraq War and they'd have blogpost material to plagiarize for months. George himself would prove them right after all. When none materialized, the information had to be absorbed into their tight little Area 51 worldview. It's a deep game George was playing, which didn't gibe with their contempt for his intellect. It never occurred to them that no one needed a pardon for anything, and that's why they didn't get one.
Elections mean things. Barack Obama can say that pouring water on three evil men's faces is no longer allowed. Fine. But he can never say it wasn't allowed before and be correct. It was all perfectly legal and aboveboard; that's why you know about it. Legal opinions were sought to make sure it was. The rest -- all eleventy billion mostly misspelled words in the comments section of Kos -- are superfluous. The Republicans ran the least attractive candidate for President since James G. Blaine in the last election, in the teeth of a recession, and lost. Can't say I'm surprised. None of what you said about George Bush meant a damn thing. You had a chance to test the validity of your arguments in 2000, and then dump your antiwar sauce on the leftovers again in 2004 and try again. You lost. He beat you easy the second time.
Oliver Cromwell chopped off King Charles' head in 1649. He ran the Commonwealth of England he established until his death in 1658. Three years he laid cold in the grave, until the son of Charles, head of the restored monarchy, dug up Cromwell's corpse and had him beheaded, his body hung in chains, and his head displayed on a pike. It's a little like yelling "You're not so tough" after the bully has already left, but that's all they could muster.
Why do the Talking Points Memo devotees persist? Their champion, the empty suit from Hawaii, isn't interested in doing more than posturing. Nancy Pelosi's finding out the hard way that just because the CIA was carrying water for the Democrats doesn't mean they're not ultimately on their own team. So what's a nutroots typist to do?
They plod and plagiarize on. They threw themselves on the ground for eight years and drummed their heels demanding that someone get George W. Cromwell out from under their bed, to no effect. In their hearts they know they wasted the better part of a decade of their life with what can only be described as frenzied inactivity, consumed with nothing. All they've got now is to hope for the equivalent of a bizarre posthumous execution, railing at the corpse of the administration they could never beat.
They thought if they let Barack loot the Treasury he'd help them out with the pound of flesh they so desperately need to validate their wasted Royalist kvetching. Suckers.
