The GOP's Final Insult

I was eager to overlook this latest contemptibility from the right: there's so much of it, it's impossible to keep up, and besides, one's passable mental health requires frequent vacations from pseudoconservatism's mounting, not to mention virtually interchangeable, offensiveness.

But then, yesterday, I went and did a foolish thing: I peeked at a Politico piece all too suggestively, seductively titled, "Not all Kennedy critics hold fire," the despicable contents of which only refueled my disgust at the previous day's briefest of "research."

To wit, it had been but a few hours since Ted Kennedy's death. I had just finished writing a remembrance when it occurred to me that even the far right, surely, would take this sad opportunity to display some modicum of humanity and decorum. Surely. So, unable to think of a better source in which to test my naive hope, I headed to Michelle Malkin's site, where at first I was vindicated: the customarily frothing blogger was urging a momentary cease-fire from all the usual hate and vitriol, out of respect for the recently dead, although she couldn't resist a jab at the "nauseating excess" of media praise for the long-serving senator.

I was impressed. This, for Ms. Malkin, was admirable restraint. But the far right includes, well, the far right's foot soldiers of course, not merely its commentators and politicos. And that's when I went and did the first foolish thing; I peeked at Michelle's comment section.

At the time there were already three full pages of it, and at random my eye initially landed on some reader's wish that the universally admired senator from Massachusetts was "burning in hell." I recall experiencing a kind of instantaneous mental recoil at that; indeed, I believe my head even somatically snapped back a little. This must be some aberration, I thought, merely some psychopathic deviation which is going unmonitored, and thus unexpunged.

So I scanned the accompanying comments, only to find that the commenting psychopath was no deviation. He, or she, was hatefully mainstream, swimming in an acidic sewer of like-minded malevolence. Interestingly, not one of these animals even began to catalogue any underlying reasons for all the hate; it was just a stampeding herd-mentality of regurgitated bile.

Meanwhile, the right-wing vomit was flowing down and throughout, as well as up. Noted the Politico, next day: "Andrew Breitbart, a Washington Times columnist who oversees Breitbart.com and BigHollywood.com, tapped into the anti-Kennedy vein in the hours after the senator’s death was announced, posting a series of Twitter messages in which he called Kennedy a 'villain,' a 'duplicitous bastard' and a 'prick.' "

"I'm more than willing to go off decorum to ensure THIS MAN is not beatified," continued Breitbart with a touch of the obvious. To which I'll add a bit more obviousness: One can understand some obscure blogospheric moron scribbling such crap for the lowest common denominators of blogospheric consumption -- the blogosphere is, after all, the world's foremost bistro for anti-intellectual wretchedness -- but this clown is a paid columnist for a D.C. daily which at least purports respectability. True colors, I guess, and all that; but maybe the Times' editors are only waiting for Andrew to secure a primetime slot at Fox.

Remarked the Politico: "Few -- if any -- others on the right were willing to attack Kennedy so directly so soon," further observing that, for instance, "House GOP Whip Eric Cantor took a break from his usual partisan 'whip up' email Wednesday morning 'in consideration of the news.' "

But what the Politico meant by "others on the right" were high-profile rightists -- not, as just a few abominable minutes spent with Ms. Malkin's readership revealed, those many, many others among the viscerally diseased right-wing base.

Still, there's no actual political strategy that inheres in the base's thrashing about in inhuman hate. In a way -- and one of course hopes they remain this way -- they're harmless, just pathetic little imbeciles who thrive on seething, mindless hostility.

What really perturbs and revolts, instead, is, in the wake of Sen. Kennedy's death, their leadership's putrid amiability. Suddenly, they're all warm smiles, lamenting in interview after interview that if only Teddy had lived, they would this very minute be negotiating a fabulous health-care deal. Oh, 'tis a pity, they whimper; Ted Kennedy is no more, and now they have no outlet for their transcendent bipartisan yearnings to fulfill the virtuous "cause of his life."

My God. Republican insincerity has reached yet another new low -- the final insult to Edward M. Kennedy's memory, playing the cheapest of politics to block or impede America's betterment. Anything for the right's pathologically antisocial base.