One tries to be as cynical as possible. It’s easier than going through life mystified at all the horrible shit that happens. But every once and a while even a practiced cynic encounters something so darkly twisted as to be both impressive and depressing. In this case, that new height of cynical exploitation was reached not by an act of cynicism, but by an act of imagined intimidation. But we’ll get to that a bit later.
After last month’s disastrous election, upcoming Speaker John Boehner’s chief of staff had a meeting with Randall Terry, one of the more ostentatiously anti-choice useful idiots of the right. Terry’s big thing is abortion, and Terry is flamboyantly theatrical enough that he’s got a very substantial following made up of people who vote and organize and generally think of themselves as important. Terry is a fool, but he’s not a total fool. He’s just hip enough to get that the Reds exploit the “abortion is murder” crowd at election time and then promptly forget them. Here’s his e-mail reaction (via):
Think back to 1994; to Newt Gingrich and the “Contract with America!” The country reacted against Clinton’s first two years, and the Republicans were swept into power because of voter rage. Then, what did they do for justice or for babies’ lives?
We can all now see that “the Republican Revolution” did absolutely NOTHING to change the direction of our nation morally, ethically, economically, or politically.
Worse yet, the 1994 “Republican Revolution” did NOTHING for the unborn babies that were slaughtered by the millions under the Republican watch.
[…]
We have Pro-Life DEMANDS for Mr. Boehner & House GOP
We Must Play Hard Ball: They Must Fear Pro-Lifers!
Terry may be shooting his wad a little prematurely here. Sure, we all want women to spend as much of their time pregnant as possible, but all-caps demands are easily swatted aside by “Mr. Boehner & House GOP” so long as Obama is still at 1600 and the Blues still control half of Congress. Which is what makes the following image (via Feministing) so precious, so deluded, and so perfectly symbolic of how useful fools like Terry and his ilk truly are:
(Incidentally, the text at the bottom is from Terry’s e-mail about the meeting. One wonders whether Boehner’s flunkies had the good sense to preemptively suggest prayer before Terry and company got the chance.)
The pro-life peons were undoubtedly ecstatic when they got this meeting. They prepared for it, they thought a lot about what they wanted to do, about what kind serious impression they wanted to make, and the heavy artillery they pulled out at the end was . . . a fetus paperweight. They brought it along, they made a big show of it, and they found it meaningful enough to photograph and send out in a bulk e-mail. To them, those nearly-to-term, infant-like fetuses are a symbol representing unlimited power. To them, it’s an image that came directly from god.
To the titans of the Republican Party, however, that little paperweight might as well be a flag of surrender. What seems so powerful and intimidating to the hopelessly sincere anti-choice nuts is just a useless piece of plastic to the men with real power. The poobahs consider pretty much everything else on the Red agenda more important than nibbling around the edges of a Supreme Court decision most of them don’t want overturned anyway. They are about as likely to dwell on that paperweight as they are to suddenly declare their love of the estate tax.
The establishment of a political party taking advantage of its base is nothing new. What makes this example so striking is that little plastic distillation of American conservatism, seen in such wildly different lights by people sitting in the same room. Imagine you’re on Boehner’s staff: you spend an enormous amount of your time corralling votes, spinning news, pressing for tax cuts, and generally doing the kind of things that keep those Hill staffers so caffeinated. You know that the House has little to no power to curtail abortion, especially with a Democratic Senate and White House. It would be difficult to not at least think about laughing when these hapless people, after their “intense meeting” (you have about three each day before lunch), plop down a fifteen cent tchotchke as their coup de grace and expect results.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is one hell of a disconnect; and it’s one that has been, is being, and will be ruthlessly and cynically exploited indefinitely. The true believers are never going to get what they want, and even when someone like Terry wises up just a little and realizes that the party takes them for suckers, all he can do is double down on the same goofy crap that’s gotten him nowhere already. It’s a self perpetuating system, the Reds will always need votes and money, and the nuts will always need someone to pat them on the head, even when they want so much more.
