Some interesting articles in the Seattle Washrag this morning having to do with South Carolina.  Normally 47 people give a rip but for two factors:  Boeing is threatening to move more production there and the political leadership of the state, and I’m using that term loosely, can’t seem to stay out of the news.  So here’s what’s stuck in my craw.

Their idiot governor was part of the famous class of ‘94 that swept into Washington DC during the early stanzas of the Clinton opera.  Among their many accomplishments were shutting down the government (over Medicare among other things, something that conservatives are fiercely defending these days by the way) and impeaching the President.  As a sideline, a noticeable percentage of them subsequently specialized in every imaginable form of moral turpitude.

Mark himself rode into town on the strength of his piety and cost cutting ways.  He has worn both of those credentials with pride up to the present day.

So what has the conservative darling accomplished recently?  Well for starters, he shut the state down over his grandstanding about not taking $700 million in federal stimulus funds.  By the time that was litigated and slammed back down his throat the legislative session was toast.  They got nothing done.  On the heals of that he decamped to the Appalachian trail, and who knew that it ran all the way to Buenos Aires, and you know how that one played out.  Given that all things government are presumptively evil, some I’m sure find at least the first part of this agreeable in the extreme.  But what about the second bit?

The pious one is now barnstorming the state on what is described by many as a “reconciliation tour.”  Or to put it bluntly, he is giving his personal testimony to every Christian with an ounce of power and the time to listen.  This is standard fare for besmirched believers and serves all players in the drama well.  The forgiver accrues political power and the forgiven gets to return to the playing field.  It’s political kabuki at its finest and as long as everyone plays the part correctly, all is forgiven.  This will be true for governor Mark, just as it has been true of a long, long line of politically powerful and politically useful sinners for lo these many years (even mass murders are washed clean in this life if they confess according to the formula to the right people).  The fact that his wife wants nothing to do with him and is writing a tell-all is another thing.

So now, the man-who-won’t-resign is holding secret negotiations to shower Boeing with huge financial benefits, benefits by the way that will exceed the financial value of the stimulus money he so roundly rejected, to entice the company to come on down and give 3000 jobs to all those non-union workers who have no experience building airplanes and no education in what it takes to do so. 

(As an aside, given Boeing’s recent and appalling record at doing just about anything right, particularly delivering the 787, I can see why they would want to have even more work done in a part of the country best known for the Confederate Battle Flag on the State House Building and that last enjoyed a strong economy in the 1860s but that’s another matter.  Attention management.  Your problem isn’t cost control. It’s competence.)

So my question is, what does it mean anymore to be a conservative? 

Mark Sanford’s pecker problems have more to do with hubris than religion, so I’m not generalizing based on his fine example.  No party or political belief system has a lock on stupidity, hubris, and especially falling from grace, but American conservatives have turned the whole fall-forgiveness-redemption-back to work thing into high art.

But how do you square the part about handing Boeing massive chunks of the tax payers’ money other than it’s expedient?  Is that not a shining example of the moral relativism that conservatives bleat so loudly about when it comes to liberals?  Giving money to taxpayers who are down on their luck is bad.  And let us be clear that the reasons people like Sanford believe this are a toxic mix of big-business capitalism and a perverse 20th-21st century Calvinism.  But giving equal or greater sums of money to a large enterprise whose leadership has eviscerated one of the greatest engineering and manufacturing companies in the world and whose competitive strategy is based on taking work from people who know how to do it and give it to firms and people who don’t is a good thing?

None of this is surprising or even noteworthy other than it’s such a stunning example of what the GOP has become, at least on a national scale.  There, in the span of a single narrative it is: Big Business socialism wrapped in a thin free-market candy coating joined up with a fervent religiosity where anything goes as long as its done by the washed.