Frank Rich: The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off

[Me.]

“SOMEDAY we’ll learn the whole story of why George W. Bush brushed off that intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” But surely a big distraction was the major speech he was readying for delivery on Aug. 9, his first prime-time address to the nation. The subject — which Bush hyped as “one of the most profound of our time” — was stem cells. For a presidency in thrall to a thriving religious right (and a presidency incapable of multi-tasking), nothing, not even terrorism, could be more urgent.

When Barack Obama ended the Bush stem-cell policy last week, there were no such overheated theatrics. No oversold prime-time address. No hysteria from politicians, the news media or the public. The family-values dinosaurs that once stalked the earth — Falwell, Robertson, Dobson and Reed — are now either dead, retired or disgraced. Their less-famous successors pumped out their pro forma e-mail blasts, but to little avail. The Republican National Committee said nothing whatsoever about Obama’s reversal of Bush stem-cell policy. That’s quite a contrast to 2006, when the party’s wild and crazy (and perhaps transitory) new chairman, Michael Steele, likened embryonic stem-cell research to Nazi medical experiments during his failed Senate campaign.

What has happened between 2001 and 2009 to so radically change the cultural climate? Here, at last, is one piece of good news in our global economic meltdown: Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country — the G.O.P. included — can no longer afford.

Not only was Obama’s stem-cell decree an anticlimactic blip in the news, but so was his earlier reversal of Bush restrictions on the use of federal money by organizations offering abortions overseas. When the administration tardily ends “don’t ask, don’t tell,” you can bet that this action, too, will be greeted by more yawns than howls.” Cont...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15rich.html?_r=1

[peace frog]

1. Well-written and entertaining stuff, however

they'll be baaa-aaack. Culture Warriors may be down but they ain't out, not by a long shot. They're laying low, living off wingnut welfare, refining the message and plotting their triumphal return to power. Which will happen once the economic depression begins to wear Americans down to the point that they are once again open to wingnut bamboozlement. It may be couched in new language and aimed at a new downtrodden demographic, but the Culture Wars will be back. Count on it.

[alfredo]

2. They have already dug into the Red Scare tactics by calling Dems Socialist.

They say it as if Socialism is a bad thing.

[TBF]

8. Not to mention that they're alive and well on this website. I've seen

quite a lot of red baiting here as well.

[alfredo]

9. But it wouldn't be fun if we all thought alike.

[Me.]

5. I Have Greater Hopes For Where We'll Be In Eight Years

The various 'structures', government and religious, may try to stay mired in the past, and cling to what once was, but I do think this was a change election. Not so much in D.C., but in the country at large. I think that once people get truly get fed up, as we did in the last eight, it forms a prejudice against what was and it's very hard for any of it to make a come-back. They may think they surround us, but really, with their ayatollahs and humanist hatred, they are more in danger of becoming a circular firing squad than anything else. In any case, we may have at least '40 years' before the patient can be resuscitated and Tony P. and his ilk will be dead and buried by then.

[47of74]

3. Americans also learned that hypocrisy's name is Republican

Looking at the likes of Larry Craig, Jim West, Rush Limbaugh, David Vitter, and so on Americans learned that hypocrisy's name is Republican.

[Lorien]

4. Indeed. The GOP is the party of death. Most on the hard right want to kill

all blacks, illegals, foreigners, feminists, intellectuals, atheists, liberals, etc....they want most of us on the planet to die, yet they "care" about stem cells. Sorry, but it's impossible to reconcile the two!

[47of74]

10. That's what really put me off the RTL movement

They're all up in arms about life that's still in the womb, but once born they couldn't care less about human life.

[upi402]

6. "distracted" my fucking ass! They KNEW it would happen and LET it happen

They will not get a pass by claiming to be inept or distracted from me. FUCK THOSE TRAITOROUS MURDERERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[get the red out]

7. I fear them, but the demographics are against them

I instinctively fear their resurrection in the future, but the demographics tend more and more against them. Young people are far more liberal on social issues and don't understand the hate, and more and more immigrants are changing the demographics away from the racist right-wingers. I keep telling myself this because these people are like the boogyman to me and I always fear them breathing down our necks. They have been a persistent evil for a long time and I can't imagine such evil being totally vanquished.

[peace frog]

12. For right now, yes

but we have to know that momentum will swing in the opposite direction again, and we must be ready to counter it.

[malaise]

11. But the political standing of this crowd crashed along with the stock market

History repeats itself.

Nice read.