I don’t have much time, and frankly even less inclination, to deal with Moran’s latest attack on conservatives.  But the fact is, he’s editor at American Thinker and is given column inches at Pajamas Media, meaning he’s a symptom of all that’s gone wrong with both the blogosphere and the Republican Party and its relatively few now centralized messaging centers since the birth of political blogging.

Good.  Got that off my chest.

Now quickly to the meat.  Like  many Big Government dullards and status quo champions — and the contemporary GOP messaging apparatus is absolutely flush with them — Moran has taken  to arguing that, because Obama and Harry Reid can shut down the government and blame Republicans for the shutdown, the GOP can’t do anything that might cause Obama and Reid to shut down the government and blame Republicans for the shutdown.

In Moran’s strange world, messaging only moves one way:  sure, the GOP can claim it isn’t attempting to shut down the government (which, by the way, has always been a winning proposition for them, despite the largely liberal myth that grew in the aftermath of such shutdowns, causing timid pantswetters like Moran to wet their pants on cue) — and hell, they can even pass resolutions that fund all the rest of the government except the implementation of Obamacare, meaning, they can actually literally vote NOT to shut down the government — but because Harry Reid and Obama are likely to balk, causing a government shutdown, well, then it’s the Republicans who shut down the government, not Reid or Obama.

And that’s because in Moran’s world, not only can Republicans / conservatives NOT deliver their message to the public:  “we’ve allowed funding on everything except this healthcare mess that is being unequally enforced and that many Democrats have described as a ‘trainwreck’,” but additionally, they are perpetually responsible for forcing Democrats to behave badly.

Kind of like the battered wife who, had she just cut the tomatoes like her husband liked them, wouldn’t have had to take the latest beating.

Moran, like many GOP mouthpieces, is a battered wife. He both lives in fear and, worse, finds a false comfort in the security, familiarity, and stability that comes with the union, the occasional beating from his man being the price he’s willing to pay for the protection of an alpha.

Many of the rest of us, though, refuse to be kept, beaten, trained handmaidens to a some progressive bully in an ribbed white tank top.

So when Moran writes:

Just so I have this straight…

Cruz doesn’t want to shut down the government he only wants to defund Obamacare by preventing funds for implementation via the CR. The CR won’t pass the Senate and Obama won’t sign if it defunds Obamacare. So the government will be shut down anyway despite Cruz not wanting to shut down the government even though he knows full well the result of denying Obamacare implementation funds to the CR will result in exactly what he says he doesnt want.

If he doesn’t want to shut down the government, why add the poison pill of Obamaare defunding? One must assume that his ultimate goal is a government shut down unless he’s dropped some acid and thinks a CR with Obamacare defunding is going to pass.

— what he’s doing is rationalizing his decision to stay a kept man. Because what he rather obviously and intentionally misses in this line of forced “reasoning” is that, first off, the GOP House can keep passing resolution after resolution funding each and every part of the government people care about, forcing Reid and/or Obama to keep the government shut down, knowingly, deliberately, and ostentatiously.

And the whole time this is going on, Republicans can be making the case to the American people that they are preventing the  very “trainwreck” many Democrats, nearly all businesses, the majority of doctors, and just about any private citizen who’s given it any real thought, is inevitable should implementation of ObamaCare continue.  That is, that they have only refused to fund one law that the President has acknowledged by his decrees and actions isn’t workable, yet out of pride continues to impose on us, anyway.  As if the passage of the law that led to the Republican takeover of the House and so many state assemblies and Governorships is some fated force of nature that can never be turned back.

Or, to put it in a way Moran might be able to fathom: yes, Rick, the government will be shut down anyway despite the GOP’s very deliberately not shutting it down.  And that’s because it will be shut down because Reid and Obama insist on continuing with the implementation of a trainwreck that the President himself understands so poorly that he was forced to grant — like a king waving his scepter — larger businesses an exemption from the law, while private individuals will be forced to comply.

The government will be shut down because Reid and Obama continue to deny the will of the American people, who don’t like ObamaCare, don’t want it, and will in time — with messaging coming from the few left on the establishment right who aren’t like Rick Moran, in a constant state of bedwetting and Hobbit hunting — learn exactly who is preventing them from going to a national park, etc., or, in the case of Democrats, getting their rebates, subsidies, and entitlement checks.

So not only will the media not be able to provide Democrats cover for long, once people wake up to the reality of the situation, but this is a stand that could very well bring back blue collar Democrats and conservatives, the kinds of people who have simply stopped voting.

This is all very clear and as an argument, very easy to make.  It is, from a political standpoint, a winner for the GOP, were the GOP still the party of conservative principles.

Sadly, it isn’t.  It’s the party of big government statists who like their corporatism with a little less of a tax burden and less emphasis on “social justice.”

So in a way, we should congratulate Rick Moran.  Because it takes real skill pretending you can’t fathom how actually fighting might help you in, you know, a fight — and maintaining the posture that the politically savvy move — pragmatism!  realism! — is always to allow the progressives to beat you for not keeping their beer cold, or for mouthing off in front of their poker buddies.

Because at some point that’s going to win you the pity vote.  From moderate women. And probably Latinos.  After which, a century of GOP dominance!

Glad we cleared that up…

(h/t several people, from Doug Ross to StrangernFiction)