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[Replaced_Texan]

From The Poor Man:

• There's a pretty interesting conversation going on at QandO (a very libertarian-leaning blog) about the current conflict between the various factions fighting for primacy within the "big tent". One comment really caught my eye:
  
  

  My theory is the differences you identify, John, are coming to the surface. And as they become more pronounced, so does the hate speech directed toward the politics of the left. In other words, rather than defining what the GOP is, those on the right are attempting definie itself by what it is not. The Right needs to gloss over the differences within the party by uniting the party against the left. And as the GOP becomes more powerful and the differences of its coaltiion more apparent, this becomes more difficult, as it does for any coalition in power. As the power of the GOP grows, the level, intensity and tone of scorn toward the left must accordingly increase. The GOP must define itself by what it is not. ("While we have our differences, at least we aren't a bunch of traitors like Hillary and Ted. Those un-American bastards. Why don't they just crawl back into the spider hole with Saddam and Osama because we all know they hate America.")

  This really gave me a new perspective on why the right-wing punditocracy and bloggerati have been using this line of attack more and more frequently. That's why Reynolds is willing to swallow the Kool-Aid about The Left wanting to destroy America. That's why Powerline can get away with prima facie ridiculous positions on Jimmy Carter's patriotism, even though many Christians agree wholeheartedly with his egalitarian worldview. The Reynoldses and Hindrockets (and Hannitys and Coulters) of the world recognize that there's simply no other way to maintain such a broad coalition for any length of time, so they choose an issue on which they all agree wholeheartedly - what they refer to as "national security" - and flog the notion that The Left's position on that issue is the polar opposite of what all the "grown-ups" and "sensible people" believe. They achieve this by hyper-focusing on readily-available walking targets like Michael Moore and Ward Churchill.
  
  I point this out not because recognition of the right's employment of these tactics is any great revelation; rather, what suddenly occurred to me while reading the above comment was that, quite literally, not only do most on the right not even believe in their own attacks on the left, but the more savvy ones have absolutely no desire to ever see these living straw men go away, because they allow the politically-convenient hawk/traitor dichotomy to be portrayed as the entire range of possible positions on the war on terror. Sure, they might identify an individual such as Churchill and honestly believe that he's a traitor, but the rhetoric that paints everyone who disagrees with the Bush Administration's radically proactive foreign policy as equivalent to Churchill is just that: useful rhetoric. It's empty. It's meaningless. And, most importantly, its target audience is not, as one might expect, just the undecided masses of those for whom the realm of politics is peripheral and nebulous. Rather, the primary target audience is the other members of the pro-Bush coalition. In some cases, it really is just red meat, a way to keep the individual soldiers of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders motivated and fired up. But the rest of the time, left-demonizing is like ideological make-up sex for Evangelical conservatives and hawkish social libertarians: we may not get along all that well, but at least we can still fuck the left together.
  
  And whatever rhetorical tools are necessary to carry out said fucking will continue to be used more and more frequently, with ever more reckless abandon - because otherwise, the paleocon-neocon honeymoon is over.

I'm beginning to understand why Bilmore loves the Democratic Underground so much.