It Doesn't Matter That the Cult of Saint Ronnie Is Full of Hypocrites (Cults, You May Have Noticed, Are Always Full of Hypocrites, It's Part of What Cults Are All About)

Clever liberals never tire, it would seem, of pointing out that Saint Ronnie Reagan's actual record of tax increases and anti-nuclear diplomacy (among endlessly many other things the historical as against the imaginary Reagan actually did in the White House) cannot even remotely be squared with the proposals or ideals of today's Republican party.

But I agree with BooMan that however often this Reagan worship amounts to hypocrisy, or confusion, or plain stupidity, it is obviously enough for Movement Republicans that Reagan got the reactionary anti-New Deal anti-Great Society ball rolling in earnest after the humiliation of Goldwater and the failures of Nixon. Reagan turned the bloody-minded idiot tide that bodied forth in Newt Gingrich's Contract Hit on America, in the Killer Clown administration of George W. Bush, and in the Summer of Tea.

Not to mention the fact that Reagan the disgusting AIDS-enabler, Reagan the paymaster for Death Squads and torturers, Reagan the heartless safety-net dismantler, Reagan the plutocratic union-buster, Reagan the white-racist theocratic dog-whistle politician, Reagan the rampaging enemy of our vulnerable precious planet (who demolished and derided the prescient ecological policies of Carter), Reagan the apostle of lowest common denominator brainless greed, Ronald Reagan the living breathing man on earth did more than enough evil idiotic shit to deserve well the worship conferred on him by the authoritarian death-cult of contemporary Republicanism, whatever his occasional concessions to sense or accommodations of Democratic opponents in his day, if you ask me.

But, yes, Republicans would disapprove of much their Saint actually did whether they know it or not, yes, self-promoting Republican celebutantes in the spotlight say patently illogical nonsensical non-factual ungrammatical things on a regular basis, yes, Republican policies flip-flop opportunistically beyond reckoning, often amount to little more than bald lies and fraud (what do expect from a party whose platform harms the majority but must either win the support of the majority or demoralize the majority into not voting?), yes, yes, yes, yes.

It is foolish in the extreme to fancy any of these numbskulls themselves can be persuaded by clever exposures of such apparent hypocrisies or to fancy that such exposures provide their opponents with a substantial alternative to their Movement. We are talking here about creationists and death-cult anti-abortionists, for pity's sake, about climate change denialists, economic illiterates, Randroid greedheads... You think they are swayed by debate club nonsense? You think you can build an alternative movement from such trifles?

Look, you can spend the rest of your life pointing out the minute idiocies and hypocrisies of these loons and bully-boys and scoring smug points in blog posts written for the like-minded if you want to. There are, to be sure, some mordant pleasures to be had in such occupations, don't get me wrong. But surely you must know that given the utter folly and true evil (there's no better word for it than that, don't be afraid to use it) of Movement Republicanism in its present consummation, they can only be defeated by their utter marginalization into relative harmlessness in the face of the more powerful and attractive case and movement of those of us who would advocate the equity-in-diversity facilitated by sustainable consensual secular social democracy.

Tossing darts at the phoniness of the cult of Saint Ronnie or at saucer-eyed Michelle Bachmann won't take us where we need to go.