Right Wing Posturing

There is an excellent article in Salon by Michael Lind on the goofy posturing that passes for "politics" among America's Republican & Libertarian parties:

At a faux populist, or rather Fox populist, "tea party" in Austin on April 15, Texas Governor Rick Perry warned that "we've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we're a pretty independent lot to boot."

Will my native state say to the United States what Governor Perry was once caught on tape saying to a journalist: "Adios, mofo"? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the other 49 and the District of Columbia should not get their hopes up yet. Perry is unlikely to declare the restoration of the Republic of Texas.

By flirting with the language of treason, the governor, who faces a tough primary challenge from the more moderate Kay Bailey Hutchison for the 2010 Republican gubernatorial nomination, was simply pandering to the base of the Republican party in Texas. In my childhood that base consisted of transplanted Rockefeller Republicans from the Northeast who were more liberal than many Texas Democrats. Today the Texas GOP is defined by the political descendants of the Confederates and the segregationist, anti-New Deal Dixiecrats, with a healthy admixture of militia types who worry the enlargement of Interstate 35 is part of a UN conspiracy to create a NAFTA Superhighway. They could be compared to dinosaurs, if only dinosaurs were not a figment of the imagination of Darwinists and other liberals.

But Perry is also thought to be considering a run for the presidency, and his secessionist rhetoric would play just as well with the GOP base outside of Texas. Since Ronald Reagan nobody has been able to obtain the Republican nomination for the presidency without vilifying the U.S. government in terms that would please the late Jefferson Davis. But like the original Confederates, today's neo-Confederates don't really have any objection to the federal government -- as long as they control it. It's only now that they have lost a couple of elections that they are pretending to discover that the government recently run by George the Second was a tyranny worthy of George the Third. The inauguration of Barack Obama has occasioned an outbreak of separatist posturing on the right, most of it fundamentally insincere, all of it petulant and juvenile.

There's more. You need to go read the original to get the part where Milton Friedman's son advocates creating a libertarian enclave near San Francisco and the right wing nut Peter Thiel wants a "no females" anti-democracy where only "right thinking" people get a voice in government. Lind goes on an poleaxes them as a bunch of buffoons.