Now Is The Winter Of Conservative Discontent By: Mark W Adams

Cross Posted at American Street

Great conservative discontent among conservatives - - - Laura Ingram's redundantly obvious talking points

I'm sad to admit that late, late, last night ... in fact very early this morning after MSNBC and CNN shut down their live coverage of Iowa and went to replays of the evening's coverage, I turned on FOX Noise.

They too had gone to the way-back machine and were replaying their call of the caucuses, with the ever vile Laura Ingram on the panel hyperventilating, and actually letting out a squeal of delight when Rush Limbaugh called into the show.

Rush wanted to talk about the Democrats, and rub it in that this was a "devastating and humiliating loss for Hillary…" But the panel wanted to talk about Huckabee first, needing to hear from their Master's Voice what to do to stop Old Huck.

Seriously, Ingram was frantic about stopping Huckabee, and judging by the collective idiocy of Wingnuttystan collected by Blue Texan at FDL and expanded upon at Sadly, No!, (with updates) the GOP establishment is flipping out.

More under the fold...


The Fox Panel came around to the idea that the two winners were now going to be put under a microscope. You bet they are, and Ingram was all too eager to spew out three or four Romneyesque talking points to take down Huckabee right off the top of her head.

They should be afraid of Huckabee. His unfunded populist rise is absolute repudiation of the mendacious, corporate controlled, downright evil right-wing noise machine spearheaded by the Fox propagandists and spoon-fed to the very folks who just said they've had enough.

Her ignorance of the Democratic Party's internal debate over the last year struck me as odd.

"Who on the Democrat ... Democratic side is really going to challenge Obama?"

Hell, we've been bickering all year long. Doesn't Ingram read the comments at Daily Kos to get her material? Doesn't everybody? Hasn't she been engrossed by the debate between Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein and Mark Schmitt over at The American Prospect on the Theory of Change? Isn't she aware that we've been stripping our candidates down naked and flailing them with copies of Marx' Das Kapital on a daily basis just for kicks?

No? People like Ingram still get all their news from Right Wing talk radio and Faux Noise? Shocking! Well let's put a stop to that....

Suddenly I understood. She didn't mean a lively discussion about the contrasting positions of our candidates. She wasn't talking about the seven thousand debates that have not been on Fox where Dennis Kucinich was always distempered and Mike Gravel called all the others "weenies.". She meant, "who on the Democratic side will go bat-shit ballistic and womp that uppity Obama in the teeth like conservatives do?" You just can't count on the damn liberals to do anything right, including cannibalism, let alone personal attacks on race, gender or hair style.

I had no idea how much they really hate Huckabee. Their disgusted, condescending attitude was something they usually reserved for liberals, and they're scared to death of Huckabee. Amazing.

Ingram's right. No Democrat would ever go to the horrible lengths the wingnuts effortlessly use to personally and unfairly tear down anyone in their way, even one of their own. I never saw them treat Pat Robertson this way when he flirted with politics. But then again, Robertson never posed a legitimate threat, or treated tax cutting policy as optional. You can tell Reagan is dead and his 11th Commandment not to criticize fellow Republicans is buried along with him.

Fox has been beating up Huckabee for a while, presenting him as more dangerous than Hillary Clinton. It's a very odd, but a transparently understandable dynamic. Also horribly flawed. Even if they succeed in bringing down Huckabee, they will have alienated a huge portion of the GOP base at a time when they can't afford division.

Another thing they cannot afford is the public remembering that ultimate authority in this country is not how many votes you can buy, but how many voters you can convince that you honestly have their best interests at heart. Huckabee is very convincing when he says he places a higher priority on people over profits and now has proven support by a good number within Republican Party.

If ending corporate greed trumps war and tax cuts in Middle America's GOP meeting halls, you know the end is near for the modern conservative movement. The Right's rich, pampered blowhards just can't abide that kind of attitude.

I'll celebrate that any day. Shutting out Rush Limbaugh and his ilk is almost as important as beating the GOP nominee. Huckabee is doing our dirty work for us.

Just a few final notes on the weirdness of Iowa and the media narrative.

• Overall, Huckabee brought in fewer actual people to caucus for him than 3rd place Hillary Clinton in an election that gave a resounding victory to an African-American for the first time ever, yet Huckabee is THE story.


• McCain gets beat by Fred Thompson (who last week was calling it quits) and is riding his 4th place finish into New Hampshire with the momentum of some kind of victory. Call me cynical ... or at least confused.
  


• John Edwards comes in 2nd after getting outspent 6 to 1 and beats the Clinton Machine (and every Republican) by doubling the number of voters he claimed in 2004, yet still can't get any decent media coverage despite his bringing in a record amount of donations last night -- all after MSNBC's Pat Buchanan announced Edwards' hopes to go on were dead. Buchanan is better at making money for Edwards than Ann Coulter. Who knew?

• Joe Scarboro and Mika Brezinski cozying up together on the same side of the breakfast table at the airport cafe makes me long for Regis and Kelly. Please make them stop.