Digby, riffing on Lambert, preaches a fine fire and brimstone sermon on deference…

Lambert points out something important relating to my post yesterday on The Aristocrats:

When Bush got all snippy with Jim Webb, George Will distorted the quote precisely to highlight Webb’s supposed lack of deference.

All the Beltway 500 code words—Civil, Dignified, Ungracious—for trashing Democrats and preventing them from saying what needs to be said have to do with Republicans reinforcing this fundamental aristocratic value of deference.

It’s the same deal with Civil, Moderate, and Bipartisan are also code words for reinforcing deference.

That’s why it’s important to mock, belittle, insult, degrade and make Republicans laughable at all times and in all conditions. These are all tools for eliminating deference from our political discourse.

Naturally, when we do this, the Beltway 500 clutches its pearls and calls us Shrill or Rude. That’s a good sign: It means we’re displaying the lack of deference appropriate a Democracy.

I think the single most sickening example of this phenomenon was the mewling and puking on the part of the Washington establishment over the revelation of an extra-marital affair by one who never understood how to behave in the company of his betters. The way they told it, Washington DC is just like Bedford Falls,Zuzu’s petals and all, upholding the values of mom and pop and McDonalds 2-for-1 apple pies — an aristocracy of small town kids who just happen to be millionaire insiders in the capital of the most powerful nation on earth.

I’m going to publish a long excerpt of the following article, because I’m not sure there is anything in the American media that better illuminates the phony sanctimony and the sickening hypocrisy of the political ruling class. You will note that the author says quite explicitly that the nation does not share the superior values of their betters.

You should go read it…it’s a Sally Quinn column in the Washington Post of November 2, 1998, and it’s frangrant with all the rancid pretenses of the inside the beltway chattering class.  Digby makes mincemeat of it.  I wish I was this good:

Dear Me! These mandarins and court scribes, these lords and ladies of the beltway, took great umbrage at Bill Clinton’s lack of deference to their completely phony bourgoise pretensions, and that simply was not done. So they crucified him.

Meanwhile, the very well bred cretinous moron who currently occupies the White House behaves like a disgusting pig in foreign capitals and is reputed to enjoy "fart" jokes in the oval office and has never been similarly derided for his uncouth ways. One can only speculate why that might be so.

And all these bluenosed hypocrites who excoriated Clinton for his lie ("I will not be lied to!") about a personal matter and complain that the office lost its moral authority, seem not to be personally exercized about the repeated, endless lies of the Bush administration that landed us in the most unnecessary, intractable foreign policy crisis in the nation’s history. Broder and his snuff-snorting fellow courtiers aren’t nattering on about how Junior "trashed the place." But then the only place he’s trashed is the United States of America, where the silly peasants live — and Iraq which is filled with a bunch of dirty foreigners. In the nation’s capital everyone is perfectly happy because as far as they are concerned, the "right" people are in charge. And that’s all that matters.

Some of us may recall they did the same thing to Carter.  There was a time I wouldn’t have credited the hostility toward democrats by the beltway gasbags as something driven primarily by notions of class, but more by politics, and specifically, the after effects of the Reagan era morality of greed.  Democrats were bleeding heart brie feeding effete wusses.  The future belongs to the muscular capitalists who don’t give a good goddamn about anything but the bottom line.  But Bush has been a miserable failure at everything he ever put his hand to, and the cronyism and corruption of his administration is something that even Grant’s ghost can laugh at, and now I understand a little better the tribalism going on here.   This isn’t about greed, so much as how blue your blood is.  The smirking spoiled rich man’s brat who gets cranky whenever he’s contradicted gets deference from the Washington pundocracy that no democrat ever would, because he’s got the right pedigree.  It isn’t money that matters, it’s how old the money is. 

We peasents are obliged to be respectful.  It is not our place to point out that the king is a blathering idiot.