Dear Bill Keller: Conservatives never left the 60s and that's the problem

Hey, Bill Keller, you and I need to talk. It's about your column from Monday saying that the right wing in this country is "finally having their 1960s," which, um...yeah. I know it must have seemed like such a good idea on the 11th green on Sunday afternoon or after your fourth Boodles martini on some sun-blasted yacht deck, but your premise, here, prima facie, kind of sucks like a chest wound, buddy.

"Something's happening here/What it is ain't exactly clear," you quoted, but please, let me get comfortable here and maybe Uncle Bill is going to enlighten me about that time the brave insurance conglomerates marched across that bridge into Selma, AL and got beaten back by the vicious truncheons of a crowd of people with diabetes, asthma, pelvic inflammatory disease and other pre-existing conditions.

No? Or are you perhaps falling prey to their weird psychic tic among baby-boomers that everything you like (Ted Cruz, Ashton Kutcher's speech on jobs, repealing Obamacare) is just a new (albeit lesser, natch!) version of yourselves and everything you don't like ("Girls," same sex marriage, selfies, women embracing their sexuality) is evidence of some kind of pathology and moral decline? Maybe?

Anyway, this image you've cooked up in your head of showboating ignoramuses like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rand Paul (R-KY) as some kind of "go-for-broke" iconoclasts for the times á la Abbie Hoffman in the 1960s is completely specious. In no way, form or fashion could Paul or Cruz be seen as a crusader for any higher idea or notion of justice. Those two men are a pair of swindlers who happen to be campaigning for president.

Ted Cruz stands for nothing further than the greater glorification of Ted Cruz. Rand Paul is much the same, but hey, could you maybe buy some gold, too? You've got it all wrong, Bill. I sincerely question your level of discernment here.

But then again, how smart can you be, when you keep offering a pipeline to the world for the fourth-grade-level, 3-martini burbling of Maureen Dowd and the moral hazard maundering of Upper Class Twit of the Year David Brooks? It's almost like you all include Paul Krugman just so you can make him sit at a different table in the Grey Lady's canteen and snicker about him behind his back.

But let's back up here to another famous Bill who was born with a silver foot in his mouth, that slicked-up fascist bully-boy William F. Buckley Jr., who opined that a conservative is a person standing athwart the flow of history shouting, "STOP!" It appears to have escaped your notice that this modern conservative clown show isn't so much a new protest vanguard as a group of people standing athwart the flow of history with their fingers in their ears, going, "LA LA LA LAAAAAA!"

We know these obstructionist jackholes were alive when Newt Gingrich tried this stunt in the 1990s and ended up getting locked out on the porch of the GOP frat house in his underwear in the middle of the night. Were they just not paying attention?

In parting, let me offer you this, Mr. Keller. Stop writing columns. Well, that and the fact that you are 180 degrees wrong on this topic. If the last election cycle has shown us nothing else, it's that for conservatives, it's permanently the 1960s. They are frozen at that moment in time for eternity. The last old white men and their wives who make up the GOP are still trying to keep women from taking birth control, still trying to keep people of color from voting and still furious that there's a brown-skinned man in the White House who isn't a butler.

I suspect that these people who are getting so exercised about Obamacare have miniskirts, "longhairs" and "that jungle music" on their agendas as the Next Big Threat to the Homeland. That is, after we stop the Red Menace that is implicit in this socialist takeover of health care, in which the government is ordering millions more people to give money to private insurance companies for coverage.

Those dirty reds!