Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Bait and switch

In the lobby of the federal agency where I work, a wide screen TV has been installed on the wall at the end of a bank of elevators. Quite aside from the curious decision to spend money on a television that people are likely to watch for perhaps four seconds while they wait for an elevator, the TV is almost always tuned to MSNBC – nothing surprising there, given the ideological bent of the current administration. But I just saw something that continues to stick in my craw. David Frum was on a talk show, and the helpful label at the bottom of the screen read, “Conservative Frum: Palin departure a ‘milestone’”.

Never mind whatever significance may attach to Palin leaving Fox; why is Frum still described as a conservative? He is, and has been for a considerable period of time, nothing but one of the left’s useful idiots, a so-called “moderate” whose views are practically indistinguishable from the Democrat party line. His most savage critiques have been reserved for the conservative base, and his relationship to traditional conservative values rather resembles the surgeon’s relationship to a tumor.

Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here: how about if conservatives start self-identifying as “liberals” or some other leftist tag? I can see it now:

Liberal Mark Levin assails the president’s attack on the bill of rights.

Bolshevik Rush Limbaugh professes impatience at the slow pace of the withering away of the state.

Trotskyite Rand Paul denounces Obama’s reactionary, bourgeois, hand-me-down FDR policies.

Anarcho-syndicalist Paco condemns Obama's war on the working man.

4 comments:

Michael Lonie said...

Sounds like a good idea to me, Paco. Unitl the Regressives hijacked the word in the 1930s to disguish their admiration for fascist and Communist states and desire to do here some of the things that were being done in them*, the word Liberal meant someone who believed in liberty. Now it means just the opposite.

*Who said that his Democratic Administration was going to do in America some of the things that were being done in Italy, some that were being done in Germany, and even some that were being done in Russia, but they were going to do them in an orderly manner?

Yes, it was Saint Franklin. I have to conclude that he thought that totalitarianism was OK, so long as it was done in an orderly manner, whatever that meant.

mojo said...

Let's star an "Alien Reptile" party, and have whoever we like (or don't) be a founding member.

(That morph's canned, isn't it?)

AR! AR!
When you wish upon a star!

rinardman said...

How bout we all just switch our registration to Democrat.

In name only, of course. Then, infiltrate the Dem party, and turn it into something more reasonable.

Spiny Norman said...

Yes, rinardman, turnabout is fair play.