The Unblinking Conservative

An 82nd Airborne vet once joked that the army marked American military gear with U.S. to make it easier for troops to identify the enemy: just shoot anyone who is not US. In 2000, Americans elected – if we can call it that – not a man, but that mindset.

Those possessed of it think the world is one, huge tough neighborhood. You'd better grow up quick and grow up mean, so your fists get hard and your wits get keen, as the song says. To survive, you can lie, you can cheat, and you can steal. Torture too. But God help you if look weak doing it and fall prey to the sinister, unblinking Them.

Showing weakness is unpardonable. Thus, the belligerent statements, the obsession with not "cutting and running," and with not "blinking." The Virginia GOP mailed just out a absentee ballot application with an image [1] of Osama’s eyes (or are they Obama’s?) above the words “America must look evil in the eye and never flinch.” President Bush won’t blink [2]. Gov. Sarah Palin won’t either [3]. “You can’t blink,” she told ABC’s Charles “Charlie” Gibson.

Palin displayed her talent for that in commenting on the Alaskan “Troopergate” report issued October 10. In language anyone capable of reading plain English could understand, and citing chapter and verse of Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act, the investigation found her guilty of violations of the Alaskan Executive Branch ethics code.

But like a cigarette company lobbyist denying any link between smoking and lung cancer, Palin claimed the report said just the opposite [4]:

“Well, I’m very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing … any hint of any kind of unethical activity there. Very pleased to be cleared of any of that.”

You’ll never worry about letting them see you sweat if you can do no wrong.

In “'I Didn't Like Nixon Until Watergate': The Conservative Movement Now,” Rick Perlstein quotes [5] a religious conservative as an example of that mindset:

Pentectostal missiologist C. Peter Wagner, for example, has written, "We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means.... If the method I am using accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method."

Perlstein explains further,

I get the question all the time from smart liberal friends: what is conservatism, anyway? They're baffled. "As far as I can tell, anything someone on the right does is, by definition, ethical. It's not about the act, or even the motivation. It's about who's perpetrating it.

There is Karl Rove, about whom Matt Taibbi wrote [6] recently in Rolling Stone. Rove survives, he writes,

… because this generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime, and can't bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers. He survives because an increasing number of Americans secretly agree with Rove's vision of rules, laws and "the truth" as quaint, faintly embarrassing rituals that only a sucker would let hold him back.

Or a weakling. Or someone deathly afraid of being discovered as one.

And then there is Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) last Friday on Chris Matthews’ Hardball. Bachmann believes liberals and leftists and anti-Americans (oh, my!) have infiltrated Congress and should be exposed. Words are insufficient:

What is it like to live in fear, in a world where everyone not a clone of yourself is a threat and potential blood enemy? "This is not the way we should be doing it in America, Colin Powell said [7] Sunday on Meet the Press.

It is not a man, but that mindset America must defeat on November 4.