Suck my ass

Now that things have completely gone to shit for the Repubs, they're beginning to embrace reality. The so-called moderates are starting to see the more radical wingnuts turning on them. Don't come looking to me for absolution now that you get it.

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It's very hard, after more than three years of anticipating, dreading and now watching the catastrophe blossoming in Iraq, to tolerate the pathetic whimpering of former hawks who've finally managed to drag themselves into the searing light of reality -- and feel ill used because they must suffer the slings and arrows of the deluded goons who still refuse to leave the cave of winds. Welcome to the camp, guys. Ivan over there will show you around.

Back in days of the real gulags, the Stalinists used to talk about "useful idiots" -- well-meaning but hopelessly naive Western politicans and intellectuals (i.e. parlor pinks) who could be used to advance the proletarian cause, even though their reward in the event of an actual revolution would have been a one-way ticket to Siberia. For the comrades of the modern authoritarian right, guys like Sullivan and Djerejian served a very similar purpose. But now they're not so useful any more, in fact they've been revealed as deviationists -- which means they must be struggled against, lest they infect the party cadres with their counterrevolutionary poison.

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An excellent piece by Billmon.

Tip o' the Brain to Atrios.