"Have a cookie, Marlin. Have a cookie and go play with your toes."
Charlie Pierce:
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The Intertoobz is alive this morning with the plaintive wail of Congressman Marvln Stutzman of Indiana, who finds that he is being disrespected by history even as he is in the process of making it.
"We aren't going to be disrespected...We have to get something out of this. And I don't know what that even is."
Have a cookie, Marlin. Have a cookie and go play with your toes.
A largely unremarked element of the etiology of the prion disease currently afflicting the Republican party -- and therefore, alas, the country -- is the carefully cultivated, and by now deeply inculcated, sense of conservative victimhood that has been a prime element of conservatism's emotional appeal since long before Richard Nixon rose to power on it. They are always beset. They are always besieged. They are always surrounded -- by intellectuals, by scientists, by the all-powerful Left that exists primarily in their imaginations, because it certainly doesn't exist in American politics, and hasn't since the days of Joe McCarthy. Culturally, this always has been expressed partly by the endless conservative bleating that somebody, somewhere is getting laid. The Gospels tell us that the gates of hell will not prevail against Christ's church. The Republicans find their faith imperiled by Barney Frank's marriage. There is always a shadow on the wall, a monster in the closet, a mysterious rustling in the teeming underbrush of the conservative Id.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Endless_Victimhood