Today's Vast RW Conspiracy

That's been rattling around in my head for a while now. So why does Limbaugh feel the need to slag NASA for finding water on Mars?  

I'm thinkin' a couple or three things here:

1- He has to push back against the normal tendency to give Obama credit for anything (it happened on his watch, so yeah).

2- If there's life on Mars, and it confirms an already-known-as-probable connection to life forms here on Earth, then it further erodes (ie: finally and completely dismantles) the bible's creation myth; and there goes sin; there goes the redeemer; there goes the religion - poof it's all gone.

3- If they can't find some kind of specious denial, then it all plays against the "conservative" strategy to move us closer to authoritarian rule which depends on blending church with state (see #2 above).

But then (not to give y'all whiplash or anything by swerving violently), I gotta ask, why are the wingnuts so strident about "fighting radical Islam"?  Why are the "threats" always Iran and ISIS and al-Qaeda, instead of the real ones like a resurgent Imperial Russia or Global Corporatism or the crashing biosphere?

I think what we're looking at here is pretty much the same old game of Fear Mongering, but nobody's gonna get much traction from the Arms Race / Missile Gap thing, plus this is the age of Branding & Differentiation, so they have to transition to something more topical and up-to-date, so we get something like, "What we have here is a Theocracy Gap - we can't afford to let those Moozlum bastards get ahead of us on this!"

People who're supposed to know about such things are telling us that the governments that're more authoritarian will be better able to react to the enormous shit wave that's beginning to swamp the world because of Climate Change.  The near-total disruption of everything we think of as stable and permanent; all those systems of Politics and Economics and Civilized Societies; all of that will change in a big way, and a shitload of that change will not be for the better.

Controlling the power of the government is the goal for these guys (btw - fuck Godwin, I'll go with Fascism - or TheoFascism if you prefer - on this one); theocracy being both the means to that end, and the mask of benevolence necessary to rationalize and excuse the brutality that always follows.

They don't like democracy. The don't trust us with our own governance. They insist on our complacency and our compliance, which makes us complicit in our own downfall.

And now, for your dining and dancing pleasure, here's a quick look at Proto-Limbaugh and the original Dittohead.

If it was any less tragic, it wouldn't be so fucking funny.