Will Laura Ingraham ever grow up?

This is a serious question as we approach the advent of post conservative civilization.
As the current crisis unfolds we may find that this is THE question to be debated.
Can she grow up at all-does she even need to?
And if she can't, then why is someone with a stunted preadolescent personality disorder allowed to opine on the radio?

She was on Imus this morning...still sounding fresh as daisy despite what must have been the bender of benders last night.
Not ten seconds into the appearance Laura launches into a vicious juvenile impersonation of Fox Cable News' pet liberal Susan Estrich.
Susan has been on a journey to the right lately as abler commentators than I have documented...a journey that has availed her nothing as Laura lampooned her speech patterns with childish gusto.
I suppose I need to make the point that there are no real ideological accommodations with today's degenerated brand of conservatism. Once you are identified in the enemy camp (Estrich's was campaign manager to the hated Mike Dukakis in 1988) you are branded for life.
Laura was giggling so hard at Estrich's expense you'd a thought Susan came to Junior High in lime green culottes or something...
It was a scary moment...not because I felt threatened or anything but because Ingraham sounded completely disassociated.
Y'know....nuts.
Never let it be said that the hard right in the country doesn't have it's own unspoken affirmative action policy.
They may not like queers, uppity women, persons of color, the poor and whatnot but they are very welcoming to the clinically deranged-how else to account for the rise and rise of Laura Ingraham?
Of course psychotics can't function for long without enabler, in this case Don Imus who egged her on with horrific glee.
Alas they had much to be gleeful about what with Schwarzenegger allegedly winning the recall in California last night.
True to form Ingraham hailed as a conservative revolutionary turning point and the death knell of liberalism in the U.S.A.
That by the way, if a favorite spin for the hard right in America, their every success big or small portends a vast permanent realignment in U.S. politics.
Neatly Ingraham leapt off the McClintock bandwagon and decided that Schwarzenegger, steroids, sex abuse, and all-was the man of destiny.
You'd think she had never heard of Monica Lewinsky or Kenneth Starr.
No she fell into the Schwarzenegger conga line with practiced grace.
Frankly I'm getting sick of calling people like Laura Ingraham hypocrites...it seems too trivial an observation given the way their brazen hypocrisy is used to conduct ideological warfare.
On the other hand, she has easily made her peace with Bush's brand of big government and concurrently Schwarzenegger's personal defects so it's getting harder and harder to call her a conservative.
As I've said before, conservatism is a dying phenomenon in America.
Like Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, modern movement conservatism has "promised" itself to death.
Most of those self same promises guaranteed victory in the cold war, prosperity at home, and harmony all over at no discernible cost to the voter or taxpayer.
Time after time the voters have paid in treasure, dignity and blood for these endless free-market utopian fantasies.
Having promised paradise and delivered naught but debt, war and division in return how does the conservative movement plan to perpetuate itself?
Simple by jettisoning it's last remaining principles in order to preserve the prerequisites of it's own power elite.
One of the ways the movement delays the inevitable is by glomming onto well financed amateurs like Schwarzenegger and then claiming a vast victory for the right when these inane weird personalities win at the polls.
Frankly they've raised this stunt to an art form in my opinion.
However the smooth Orwellian transferal of allegiance to Schwarzenegger....forecasts itself a dangerous drift in American ideological warfare.
We have liberals, moderates, conservatives and now reactionaries who have made so many compromises and botched governance so badly that they can only participate in electoral politics as pure power worshippers.
Laura Ingraham, girlish brutality and all, is one of these power worshippers.
It's a nice gig all in all, very warm, comforting, one can, Peter Pan, like retain a Junior High schooler's outlook on life sans reproof.
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The struggle therefore in 2004 and beyond isn't between conservatism and liberalism...real conservatives are an endangered species in Laura Ingraham's America The coming confrontation is going to be between liberals, constitutionalists, and progressives against the emergent power-worshipping class of the former right.
They are decadent, that is to say contemptuous of elections and democracy, authoritarian, well financed, and ruthless to a fault. It is system of thought dedicated to retaining power at all costs
We are therefore not contending with Ronald Reagan's quaint brand of feel good conservatism.
That particular ideology has come and gone in America, what has replaced it is debauched, truculent and utterly remorseless in every way.
To prevail against it, we ourselves must become harder...less willing to let bygones be bygones.
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