BEING AGGRO IS ALSO THE PLAN

John Cole, responding to Andrew Sullivan:

...Sullivan looks at poll data and finds the public supports the union concessions, but not ending collective bargaining, and wonders:

"Why doesn't Walker concede on collective bargaining, declare victory and move on?"

Because union busting is the plan, has been from the get go, and we are dealing with crazy people. There are no reasonable conservatives....

Well, yes, union-busting is the plan -- but (and I think I've said this before) we're also dealing with a right-wing movement in which compromise (defined as settling for even 99% of what you originally demanded) is a mark of utter shame and disgrace. Right-wingers aren't allowed to compromise; the only possible outcomes are total victory and betrayal by the forces of pure evil.

Remember All's Fair, the joint memoir Mary Matalin and James Carville wrote back in the '90s? Matalin's epigraph to the book, you may recall, was:

Follow me if I advance
Kill me if I retreat
Avenge me if I die

That motto -- she calls it a "Vietnamese battle cry," and it was used by Diem, but it was previously used by Mussolini and 18th-century royalist counterrevolutionaries in France -- is essentially the motto of the modern right, and "Kill me if I retreat" is only a slight exaggeration (you won't literally be killed, but you'll be damned as a RINO and declared beyond redemption).

And yes, Carville's epigraph in that book was "When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil" -- but the attitude of the modern right is "Wherever your opponent is, grab the son of a bitch, throw him in the trunk of a car, drive him to the ocean, toss him in the water, hold his head down underwater, then hang an anvil around his neck." And once the plan is put in place, woe betide you if you claim to be a right-winger but you want to dial it down. You may as well declare that you're going to attend a Barbra Streisand concert as George Soros's guest.