Thursday, July 21, 2016

Ten Years After with David Frum



Ten years is a nice round number.

Ten years from now it will be 2026 and I have no doubt whatsoever that Mr. Frum will be shown to be quite right, and that he will make sure to remind everyone what a prescient and quotable sonofbitch he is at every future contract negotiation.

But that's ten years from now.

What about ten years ago?

Well, it turns out, ten years ago this December, most of the neocon bottom-feeders like David Frum who were only too happy to help Dubya lie us into the wrong war were composing their alibis and slinking towards the exits as the wheels began to come off of the catastrophe they helped author.

From Vanity Fair, December 2006:
NEO CULPA

As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war’s neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.
Mind you, Frum's transformation from faithful myrmidon to faithless heathen was happening while he he was still making bank from books like "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror Mass" (with Richard Perle) and "The Right Man: An Inside Account of the Bush White House".

Meanwhile, almost exactly ten years ago at the opposite end of the respectability scale, your 'umble and disreputable scrivener was making this prediction
...
In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade.

It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11” as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.

So that’s where we are now.
Of course, I go the timing wrong.  It didn't take anything like five years for the GOP to engineer the complete unpersoning of George W. Bush. In face, by December of 2009, wall-to-wall Strategic Media Forgettery was in full effect:
...
And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their lives and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.
And once the media had decided it would let the scumbags on the Right skip out on paying the butcher's bill for the eight years of misery they had inflicted on the rest of us, the roll-out of a full blown, massively well-funded Wingnut Rebranding Scam called the "Tea Party" was not far behind.
Once again, there were tge Republicans lying openly and brazenly.

Once again, there was the Beltway media letting them get away with it.

Once again, a few, ragged Liberals shouting the truth and once again being shunned and ignored because nobody want's to hear that story.

Until, long after the lies had done their damage, a privileged Republican media goof who makes more a week than I will see in five years has a good laugh and says, yeah, there never was a Tea Party.  It was just Republicans in funny hats all along and they all fucking knew it.


Which brings us to there here-and-now.  

To the 2016 RNC at which is represented the poison fruit of an entire generation of Republicans who have been relentlessly conditioned for decades to believe that it is their absolute, God-given right to shit where they please, fuck up as they please and lie and lie and lie about anything they please whenever they damn well please and never, ever be made to pay even the slightest price for their open, suppurating bigotry, ignorance and sedition.

To the 2016 RNC, where Donald Trump has shown the world that he is incapable of pulling off a four day infomercial glorifying the Life and Times of Donald Trump without fucking up every step of the way.  

5 comments:

bowtiejack said...

How sweet it is !
Very nice work.

RUKidding said...

If Trump should win (shudder), Frum will claim that he always backed him.

These parasites always put themselves on the right side of history, and they're very good at monday morning quarterbacking their stories.

Kevin L Richardson said...

I do so love fire with which Driftglass lays waist to the lies and hypocrisy of the republicans and their enablers in the MSM

Bob Harrison said...

I'm the only person alive today who voted for Nixon .

squatlo said...

Beautifully written. Well damn done.