The Fox News narrative is coming together. It goes like this:
The massacre in Tucson that left six dead and thirteen wounded, including Congresswoman Giffords, is the act of a lone madman. Efforts by liberals to politicize the shooting are grossly unfair. Attempting to cast Jared Lee Loughner as a rightwing extremist is absurd; if anything, Loughner is a lefty. His Face Book page listed the Communist Manifesto as a favorite book, along with Mein Kampf, We the Living and Peter Pan. And he smoked pot. When you combine Marx, Hitler, Rand, Barrie and Tommy Chong you get the typical communist/anti-communist fascist Objectivist druggie, who is quite possibly a pedophile; in other words, a typical liberal Democrat. Loughner’s only redeeming quality is a fondness for semi-automatic handguns with extended round clips; (he must have acquired this positive trait from reading Hitler and Rand). However, had Loughner’s library included Going Rogue or rightwing propaganda published by Regency Press, drawing conclusions from what a madman wrote on his Face Book page is an irresponsible rush to judgment.
The real victims are Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and every other rightwing pundit exercising his or her rights to incendiary free speech-for profit. Of course, brief condolences to those the Democrat lunatic murdered.
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This is the reason I stopped satirizing conservatism -- or whatever the fuck Fox is peddling. It’s certainly a constant drum beat of fear and loathing. I’m only half-joking when I write that it would be a seamless transition should Ailes replace Glenn Beck’s Woodrow Wilson/Progressive Fascism conspiracies with Manson’s Helter Skelter. Nuts is nuts. How did the party of Reagan become the party of Limbaugh? At what point did the Republican Party decide to let Clear Channel and Rupert Murdock run the show? There’s no rational explanation why national Republican leaders should fear pissing off a radio shock jock with a well-publicized arrest for prescription drug doctor shopping. What’s Limbaugh going to do if a Republican Congressman refuses to apologize for being truthful about the self-proclaimed Emperor’s nakedness, fire him? The subservient relationship between Limbaugh and supposedly serious lawmakers is a combination of Conrad’s Lord Jim and Kingsly Amis’ Lucky Jim. Thomas Pynchon is the only writer alive who could capture Republican Party politics with the right touch of post-modern absurdity and dense complexity.
The brandy must be refreshed -- and there is always more dirty laundry.
