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"  The Intertoobz is alive this morning with the plaintive wail of Congressman Marlin Stutzman of Indiana, who finds that he is being disrespected by history even as he is in the process of making it. &amp;quot;We aren&amp;#039;t going to be disrespected...We have to get something out of this. And I don&amp;#039;t know what that even is.&amp;quot; Have a cookie, Marlin. Have a cookie and go play with your toes. A largely unremarked element of the etiology of the prion disease currently afflicting the Republican party -- and therefore, alas, the country -- is the carefully cultivated, and by now deeply inculcated, sense of conservative victimhood that has been a prime element of conservatism&amp;#039;s emotional appeal since long before Richard Nixon rose to power on it. They are always beset. They are always besieged.They are always surrounded -- by intellectuals, by scientists, by the all-powerful Left that exists primarily in their imaginations, because it certainly doesn&amp;#039;t exist in American politics, and hasn&amp;#039;t since the days of Joe McCarthy. Culturally, this always has been expressed partly by the endless conservative bleating that somebody, somewhereis getting laid. The Gospels tell us that the gates of hell will not prevail against Christ&amp;#039;s church. The Republicans find their faith imperiled by Barney Frank&amp;#039;s marriage. There is always a shadow on the wall, a monster in the closet, a mysterious rustling in the teeming underbrush of the conservative Id.  In my lifetime alone, I&amp;#039;ve seen Nixon play this like a violin, Goldwater delegates proudly chanting their sagebrush songs of rebellion, Agnew intimidate the media with their own intellectual achievement, as though an advanced degree was smuggling drugs, and now this bunch, the natural heirs to decades of conservatives who have fought the dragons in their own minds, and who, like Marlin Stutzman, seem mystified that they have not yet been awarded the Order Of The Legion Of Courage. Vainglorious louts, driving the nails into their own palms. They are children playing dress up. Everybody&amp;#039;s Aragorn for Halloween. Meanwhile, the government is shut down, the country a laughing stock, and real people with real problems to overcome go hungry, or get sick, or find their lives flaking away at the edges while Marlin Stutzman rings the doorbell, says trick-or-treat in Elvish, and then walks away, bitching about the quality of the M&amp;amp;amp;Ms. FULL COVERAGE OF THE SHUTDOWN FROM CHARLES P. PIERCE\u2026 \u2022 THE MORONS: A few profiles of the congresscritters behind the shutdown \u2022 THE DEMOCRATS: The sellouts in the Democratic Party \u2022 THE REPUBLICANS: Public Policy Polling&amp;#039;s profile of their radical beliefs \u2022 AND SO MUCH MORE\u2026  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a24998/endless-victimhood/>