WHAT CHARLIE PIERCE SAID!
“Conservatism in this country has abandoned forever the effort — nay, the fight — to build a viable democratic political commonwealth in this country. It is the fundamental expression of conservatism’s underlying dementia. It accounts for conservatism’s current implacable assault on empiricism, on mathematics, on reason, on science, and on reality itself. For a number of reasons, some of them political and some of them economic and many of them a result of retrograde theology that should have been buried with William Jennings Bryan, conservatism has decided to make war not only on the lands and the institutions that the political commonwealth has produced — for me, the high point of the debate last week was when the president… actually mentioned land-grant universities! — but also on the ideas we hold in common, the knowledge we have gained through the hard, ceaseless — and, on a number of occasions, very bloody — work over the 200 years it took to build that commonwealth. Simply put, there are things that we are. They are not the idiotic America-fk-yeah platitudes that have sickened us over the last year — Rick Santorum, yapping about how pioneer families carved out their existence on their own, without ever mentioning, say, the Grange, or even the U.S. Army; Paul Ryan, a man who got decently educated on my dime, and you’re fking welcome, dude, crowing about self-reliance, or Willard Romney, who was born in the dugout, up four runs already, with the bases loaded and nobody out. Rather, it is about the things we have determined that we own in common, and most especially, the ideas.”
