Total destruction gives conservatives a better erection than Viagra. Look no further than Kurt Schlicter's column over at Townhall.com today, aptly entitled "Let's Destroy Liberal Academia." It reads like the soft porn of conservatives' manifesto.
To be a conservative is to desire the complete and absolute destruction of anyone and anything that isn't conservative.
It excites them. Thrills them right down to the tingle in their leg. The prospect of burning down the house, the country, the rivers and streams, and even the polar ice cap is thrilling to them. The stuff of wet dreams.
Schlicter:
Sure, the legions of administrative timeservers, otherwise unemployable tenure ticks, and loan-loaded future baristas who infest our colleges will be plenty sad. After all, their free ride will come to an end when we derail their gravy train.
And it shall be glorious, for the tears they shed when forced into a world that demands achievement, effort and accountability, will be a powerful tonic for productive citizens like us who have carried these obnoxious parasites for the last few decades. We won’t mourn modern academia’s passing. Once a college education was an aspiration. Now it’s a punchline.
First step. Make it all zero-sum. Your opponents are cardboard cutouts, sucking off the public teat while making a mockery of whatever institution you hold dear. For Schlicter, who surely carries the water for his conservative idol David Horowitz, today's target is public universities.
Understand that the purpose of modern American “education” is not to educate students. It is primarily to provide cushy, subsidized sinecures for liberal administrators and faculty while, secondarily, providing a forum to indoctrinate soft young minds in the liberal fetishes du jour. Actually educating students ishard, and a meaningful education is anathema to liberalism. In the liberals’ ideal world, the universities would simply fester with leftist nonsense and not even bother with trying to teach their charges anything at all. And today, it’s pretty close to being the liberals’ ideal world.
Yawn with me, as he also holds up the DeVos/Koch institution of selective higher learning -- Hillsdale College -- as one of the very few examples of true education.
Schlicter doesn't care about whether public universities are good or bad. He simply wants to destroy them. He lusts after whatever acts of destruction he can inspire his fellow destroyers to commit. He wants to do this because they are The Enemy and The Enemy must be destroyed.
Whatever the target, it will always as an Us versus Them, winner-take-all escapade. War. For six years, we've heard nothing but how Things Must Be Destroyed. For the years before that, wanton destruction was the primary guideline for public policy. Because that's what conservatives do.
Here are a few targets:
Medicare
The Affordable Care Act
Social Security
Immigration Reform
Government
Food Stamps
Iran
Iraq
Syria
Public schools
State parks
These are only a few items on their very, very long bucket list of Things To Destroy.
Listen carefully to conservatives talk about the King v. Burwell case that will be argued this week. Here's a quote from one of the architects:
“This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene,” Greve said about the Affordable Care Act during the AEI panel. “I don’t care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it. I don’t care who does it, whether it’s some court some place, or the United States Congress. Any which way, any dollar spent on that goal is worth spending, any brief filed toward that end is worth filing, any speech or panel contribution toward that end is of service to the United States.” Greve has continued to comment on King v. Burwell, including when he recently compared health reform to the Holocaust.
Total destruction of a law that allows people access to health care. By extension, we can also conclude they're just fine destroying those who need health care, too. Because destruction isn't picky. It's fine with them to kill a few people to destroy something they don't like. I'm not guessing here. They said it outright.
Conservatives want to destroy Iran, Syria, Islam, and Muslims worldwide. Not conquer, but destroy. They love war because war means destruction, and destruction brings them that high they can't get anywhere else.
Their reward for total destruction is a simple thing. They get to keep the smoking ruins for themselves. If they destroy it all, they win the game! Then they turn on each other, like they're doing in Congress right now.
Scorched earth politics. Reconstruction isn't in their vocabulary. It is that moment where they smash everything that gives them the boner other men take pills to achieve.
They have no plan for the people destroyed if the Supreme Court kills the Affordable Care Act over a bullshit interpretation of the law. They had no plan for what they would do with Iraq and Afghanistan after they razed those countries and they have no plan for what they would do with Iran because they simply do not care. A few lives in exchange for their thrill is fine with them. Even thousands and millions of lives lost are fine with them.
The only thing that matters to them is how rapidly and completely they can destroy the target.
In another context, we would be putting these folks in prison. Instead they're getting elected to public office.
What the hell is the matter with this country?
