Sunday Morning Comin' Down

Brother Charlie Pierce is taking a little time off to bury the bodies of his political enemies in the Hockomock Swamp rest up, so it is likely that at least a couple of his more hardcore, political DT-types will be wandering in here demanding three fingers of two cents plain.

Which is fine.  Transients welcome.  But this week I will not be doing the usual Sunday Morning retrospective I have been doing more or less regularly for +11 years.

This week, rather than dwelling on why certain Teevee Lizard People have a reserved seat at America's most prominent Sunday morning political kabuki, instead of, say, arguing SEO strategies and drinking sterno with Jeff Gannon in a West Virginia hobo camp, I shall direct your attention to this timely reminder from 22 years ago that the reasons behind the rise of Donald Trump are not in the least bit mysterious to anyone who has been paying attention to American politics for the last few decades and who is not congenitally dishonest.

Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh 

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE,

Published: December 12, 1994

To all the advice for the new Republicans coming to Congress, add this from Rush Limbaugh: A hostile press corps lurks inside the Beltway.

"You will never ever be their friends," the talk-show host warned most of the 73 Republican freshmen at a dinner here tonight. "They don't want to be your friends. Some female reporter will come up to one of you and start batting her eyes and ask you to go to lunch. And you'll think, 'Wow! I'm only a freshman. Cokie Roberts wants to take me to lunch. I've really made it!' " The audience laughed.

"Seriously," he added. "Don't fall for this. This is not the time to get moderate. This is not the time to start trying to be liked."

The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November.

Mr. Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the class as its members tonight finished a three-day orientation here sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Empower America, two conservative Washington research organizations.

Barbara Cubin, an incoming freshman from Wyoming, told Mr. Limbaugh that because 74 percent of the nation's newspapers had endorsed Democrats, "talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide." On behalf of the women in the class, she gave him a plaque that said, "Rush Was Right." He also received a pin like the ones the freshmen wore, saying, "Majority Maker."

"Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those are the people who elected the new Congress," he said.

...

Smash-cut forward 22 years and we find the Right in the middle of a knife fight over who is going to get tagged for driving the wingnut gravy train that has made them all rich off the cliff.  From Vox:

Sean Hannity called a columnist an asshole. What happened next explains Donald Trump.

...

There is no bright line between Bret Stephens and Sean Hannity. They can both only exist in a conservative informational environment where independent intellectual authorities are disregarded and a certain set of politically convenient but indefensible ideas are treated as catechisms. The key difference is that Hannity is less pretentious about it.

Conservative politicians were all too happy to cater to these institutions — after all, they help them win. Several academic studies have found that Fox News has had statistically significant (if occasionally overstated) effect on Republican vote share in presidential elections.

This Faustian bargain is biting conservative elites in the ass.

Rank-and-file voters bought into movement conservatism as an expression of cultural grievance and racism, not deep commitment to limited government principles. When someone better at manipulating those grievances came along, conservative elites couldn’t stop him by calling him out of touch with the expert policy consensus. They had spent years delegitimizing that criticism.

...

The point being, this rough beast has been slouching towards Washington to be born for a very god damn long time,

And interestingly, the only people who do not have reserved seating at America's most prominent Sunday morning political kabuki, are the people who have been warning that this catastrophe was coming all along.