Here You Go, Dishonest Coward

August 6th, 2011
by F. Grey Parker

Dana Loesch

In the heady days which followed the Christianist assault on a gathering of youngsters at a youth-in-government Summer camp in Norway, there was a staggering movement by America's rightist Islamophobes to deflect blame.

Any potential blame. So many ugly and misguided articles were published that it was simply stunning.

Nothing, however, was as convoluted as a piece which Dana Loesch posted over at Andy's Joint.

You see, it wasn't enough for Dana to join the right wing chorus of those saying the killer "was not really a Christian." It wasn't enough for Dana to deny that venomous right wing pronouncements might actually have had a real world impact on a warped mind. It wasn't even enough for her to simply get behind all the circled wagons amongst her fellow rightists and make self-serving claims of "censorship" and conservative "victimhood" to avoid a discussion about the power of rhetoric.

Dana wanted everyone to know that neither she nor her compatriots are "right wing" because the phrase "right wing" doesn't mean what everyone else in the world says "right wing" means. This is, of course, nonsense. I casually remarked that it was such and, in the typical fashion of a hostess who cannot debate, she offered an insult. But, she also conferred a challenge.

Challenge accepted, Dana.

She began "I loathe when American conservatives define themselves as “right wing” anything, even in jest — just as I loathe when the liberal press uses it as identification for American conservatives — because it is an inaccurate use of the term."

One might have expected her to next present her thesis. Instead, she posted a graphic of a classic piece of American World War Two propaganda showing a Nazi arm stabbing a Bible. This, you see, sets the tone for intellectual excellence one has come to expect from Andy's Joint.

What followed was a mish mash of selectively de-contextualized wikipedia quotes which lurch from the late 17th Century French origins of the phrases "left" and "right" and "Ancien Régime" to the early 20th Century Italian Nationalist League. 

Seriously. I am not making this up.

These links, in and of themselves, are not uninteresting reading. It is in her analysis where we see, once more, that a little wikipedia and the absence of an ability to engage in actual critical thinking are a very dangerous combination.

"Ancien Régime is an ideology diametrically opposed to that of American conservatism, which advocates for the bare minimum of authority," she states. This is simply absurd.

Dana Loesch and her fellows on, well, whatever side she calls it, have spent the better part of the last decade championing such powers of the state as targeted assassination, covert surveillance of citizens, indefinite detention without trial, warrantless searches and seizures, torture of suspects, the regulation of associations and legal control over decisions by and between between consenting adults, fear-mongering based on race, the demonization of broad cultural initiatives designed to alleviate the suffering of America's citizens and, lest we forget, the monitoring and marginalization of groups and individuals because of nothing more than their religious beliefs on the one hand and the institution of enforced cultural hegemony based on differing religious beliefs on the other.

The contemporary and so-called "American conservative" movement has coalesced around the fight to protect the unbridled activity of corporations and establish their status as unregulated partners with government.

You see, these are all the hallmarks of the Italy which, after its merger with the Fascists, the INL she references in her sophomoric missive was responsible for establishing. These were the achievements of the INL movement she says her movement is nothing like. Dana might know this had she ever read the works of, oh say, Alexander de Grand, for example.

But, she has a short wiki page from which to draw and wildly misinterpret, so what the fuck can I possibly know?

You get it.

To say that contemporary American "conservatism" is anti-authoritarian is a stunning falsehood. Their movement has fought for decades to elevate the state and corporations to a position where their authority cannot be legally questioned. Whether it's in the guise of "tort reform," codification of "right to work" laws or, most horribly, whether it has been in a set of pronouncements that hide behind devastating expansions of "national security," they have been working ceaselessly to limit the rights of those with whom they disagree from even petitioning for a day in court.

This isn't a "bare minimum of authority;" it's nearly absolute authority. It is authority without responsibility to the individual... if that individual happens to have an issue requiring redress that they don't approve of.

At long last, it has come to this. The popular voices of the American Right have reduced themselves to the status of so many children, throwing debris to distract us and chanting "you suck more" when confronted with terrible truths.

Dana did go further in her piece. She posted two absurd, right wing YouTube videos including an infamous piece of propaganda aimed at children which muses "we are not a Democracy, we are a Republic."

She would have you believe that these are purely and mutually exclusive constructs. A cursory reading of the Cliff Notes on Plato's "Republic" is enough to blow a hole through that canard.

C'est la guerre.

This is what simple-minded enemies of intellectual freedom have always done. They have cherry picked just enough words to fit on a flag or a pamphlet... and then?

They have masqueraded it as some form of newly-enlightened and grandly-improved philosophy when, in all actuality, its acceptance represents a diminishment of basic standards.

Sigh.

I will leave you with an anecdote. The entire vulgar exchange with this petty, little, pretty-face reminded me of a gob-smacking bit of foolishness I encountered a few years ago. A young man in my employ in the restaurant business stridently argued with me that the correct pronunciation of Hollandaise was "Ollendez." He made sure to correct all of his co-workers. It was left to me, their boss, to not only correct his correction, but to explain the concepts of "popular meaning" and "standard use."

The real hilarity is this... that young man was technically correct in his argument as to phrase origin and original use, whereas Dana, little dear that she is, is completely and baselessly wrong on every single point in her childish little prevarication.

Of course, that's what truly evil movements have done since the ascendance of modernity.

They have have made a cottage industry of selling evil... by making it sound good...

and look pretty.