SFDB Quote Of The Day

"...the hard and frustrating and necessary work of self-government."

That I heard. That I understood. It is not musical. It is not in any way poetic. But it is a clear line drawn between the president and the person and the party that would like to take his job from him. It is now an article of absolute faith among Republicans that "the government" is an entity separate from "the American people," which they say the same way that the old Jesuits talked about "the mystical Body of Christ." It is now an ironclad commandment of conservative orthodoxy that "the government" is something parasitic and alien. There is a reason why conservatives talk about "government" and not "self-government," because to refer to the latter is to concede that "the government" is really the most basic product of our political commonwealth, that it is what we produce among ourselves so as to order the production of everything else that we do together. This is not an idle distinction. It is the entire message of last week's Republican convention, and it is the entire message of the campaign they are planning to run, and, make no mistake, it resonates deeply with millions of people because it has been spoonfed to them as a kind of noxious anesthetic for almost foty years now, a long enough time for it to seem as though it is the natural order of things.

-Charles Pierce, Esquire

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