I’m Sick and Tired of the ‘America Sucks’ Conservatives!

You never realize how flippin’ weird your family is ‘til after you leave the house. That’s the strangest thing about being a kid: However you’re raised, you sort of assume it’s normal. Doesn’t matter if it was a traditional upbringing with a mom, a dad, a dog, 1.5 siblings, and mandatory membership in the Clean Plate Club; doesn’t matter if you were raised on a hippie commune with Mother Moonbeam and Father Sunshine. For better and for worse, the human mind is remarkably malleable.

When I was growing up, my Mom always ordered my McDonald’s hamburgers “ketchup only.” I don’t know why. But I assumed that was what I liked. One night, when I was a college freshman, we hit the McDonald’s drive-thru and I tried to order a “ketchup only” burger. Everyone in the car yelled at me for holding up their food with a specialty order, so I relented and got it “regular.”

Holy moley! It was WAY better with all that other stuff on it! Couldn’t believe what I had been missing!

Normalizing our experiences is part and parcel of the human condition. It’s one of the secrets to our adaptability. Wielded wisely, it helps us survive.

But when used unwisely, you learn the wrong lessons of history.

Two decades-plus ago, America was reorienting itself to a post-9/11 reality. We had just won the Cold War without firing a shot, but after the Twin Towers fell, the Pentagon was hit, and anthrax was mass-mailed to the leaders in Congress, the lesson seemed to be twofold:

First, we must proactively connect the dots of terrorist activity. Failure to do so just got thousands of Americans killed. Next time, that number could be in the millions.

And second, the U.S. can do anything it sets its mind to do. We’re the nation that put a man on the moon, beat the Soviets, and invented rock and roll! America is where the impossible is possible. So hell yeah, we can do this!

We were still basking in the afterglow of our Cold War victory.

The late, great Sam Kinison’s comedy album, “Live From Hell” (which featured such delightful ditties as “Russians Are Losers”) captured the hubris of the time:

The Russians haven’t been to the moon. You know why? Because they’re space [wimps]. …You really wanna impress us? Bring us back our [expletive] FLAG, [tush]hole! WE were ON the moon! You show us some moon rocks, or kiss THIS.

Ex-Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal. In today’s edition, she posited that the ill-fated 2003 Iraq War was the byproduct of American Exceptionalism run amok:

One thing I came to conclude about the men and women who put [the Iraq] war together was that they had grown up in such a blessed, prosperous and stable country that they had a false sense of endlessly sunny skies. Personally they hadn’t been unlucky—they were at the top of the pile, had never been losers. They thought good things would follow their good efforts in the same way study had produced honors at college and discipline had produced their professional rise. They didn’t think dark because they’d never known darkness. It was a disadvantage. To make solid decisions at that scale you have to know in your gut that history’s an abattoir and the floors are slippery. The price a government or party pays for being dramatically wrong can have foreign-policy reverberations that last generations.

In the days — and even the years — after 9/11, proactive engagement seemed to be the solution to the growing chaos. Much of the Greatest Generation were still alive, after all, and the great lesson of World War II was the folly of appeasement: Anti-war isolationists were discredited and shunned. Even ex-national heroes, like Charles Lindbergh, were “isolated” from polite society.

Back then, calling someone a “Neville Chamberlain” was a damning insult.

Meanwhile, the United States of America was the world’s lone superpower. Our reach was unlimited. The old rules no longer applied; today was the Age of American Exceptionalism!

This was the “childhood” of our leaders. It was the new normal.

And we took it too far.

The problem, alas, with overreaching in one direction is, you invite a course-correction that goes way too far to the other side. If you’ve been around politics long enough, you’ve seen that pendulum swing back and forth — and then back again.

In the last 10 years, the pendulum swung to such a ridiculous extreme during the height of the #MeToo Movement, culminating in such mind-numbing platitudes as “Believe All Women.” And today, it’s swinging back. The #MeToo proponents overreached, and now they’re paying the political price.

The movement’s excesses demanded a course correction.

There’s currently a divide in the MAGA movement. The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose Iran’s development of nuclear weapons: A CNN poll puts it at 79% (including 83% of Republicans); a Fox News poll has 73% of Republicans approving of Israel’s strikes on Iran.

But a small number of dissenters, led by Tucker Carlson, are trying to split MAGA. To them, the lesson of the Iraq War wasn’t just to be skeptical of intelligence reports, selective when choosing the military option, or wary of overreaching.

No sir. They went WAY farther than that.

For the Tucker Carlson contingent, the lesson of the Iraq War is that intelligence reports are always wrong, WMDs don’t matter, our military always makes everything worse, and America lacks the moral leadership to tell anyone to do anything.

They’re the “America Sucks” conservatives. Instead of American Exceptionalism, they see the exact opposite.

John Stossel calls them the “Woke Right”:

[Researcher] James Lindsay, claims this "woke virus" now has spread to the right:
"There is a radical segment embedded within MAGA ... that acts the same way, uses the same tactics, acts like the woke left."
I was skeptical. But to make his point, Lindsay pulled off a new hoax.
He rewrote parts of "The Communist Manifesto" and, using the pseudonym Marcus Carlson (a play on Karl Marx), submitted it to the conservative magazine American Reformer.
His article criticized classical liberal ideas like free markets, global trade and individual freedom, like Marx did.
Yet the conservative magazine published it.
Even after a reader pointed out that it was "The Communist Manifesto," the magazine kept its article up, writing, "It's still a reasonable aggregate of some New Right ideas."
The New Right, says Lindsay, acts like the woke left.
"There's the victimhood mentality, the cancel culture, struggle sessions. They bully people online with swarms; they rewrite history." [emphasis added]

This rewriting of history often comes in the form of radical departures from truth. Under the guise of “just asking questions,” they reinterpret history to strip our forefathers of nobility, crediting instead the worst dregs of humanity.

It’s why Tucker Carlson hosted a two-hour sit-down with “historian” Darryl Cooper, telling his audience that Cooper “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” Cooper proceeded to downplay the Holocaust, claimed that any mass-murder of Jews was unintentional, and that Winston Churchill — and not that German guy with the funny mustache — was the “chief villain of the Second World War.”

And whereas America sucks, Russia is now amazing. Greatest country in the world! Ukraine is bad (and full of troublemakers), so they deserved to be invaded, and this was all America’s fault for being warmongers anyway. But Russia didn’t do anything wrong. Not at all! Russia is frickin’ Narnia.

Ain’t that weird?

The utter bizarreness of Carlson’s slobbering love-letter to Russian groceries was a sight to behold. I swear, I’ve seen new fathers in the maternity ward who were less excited to see their newborn babies than Carlson was over old Russian bread:

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the “America Sucks” Republicans.

Only it’s not “America” that sucks.

They do.

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