COBRT0114 Attempt To Access Item Beyond Bounds of Memory

"If we can't make memories, we can't heal." -- Leonard Shelby, Memento

As you've probably heard me say on this blog one millions times since I opened for business back in 2005. the Republican Party as it existed for the last 30 years has been eaten alive from within, and in 2016 the racist/nativist/malignantly ignorant core of the GOP finally ground what little was left of the bones of the Party of Lincoln to bake its bread.  

And now this entirely-unfettered monster is coming for the rest of us without bothering to camouflage itself any more because of the brutal fact that...

...our modern house divided against itself cannot stand. 

We cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

We will become all one thing, or all the other.

However much deluded children like ABC News' chief political analyst may flap their arms and pretends that a hundred Independent Candidates Will Bloom and something something overthrow the K'rupt Duopoly, for the foreseeable future, the Democratic Party isn't going anywhere, and something will rise from the rubble where the Party of Eisenhower once stood.  

And, as every honest observer has been saying for longer than I care to think about, the GOP as we have known it only has one of two possible futures: either the last four Reasonable Republicans left on Earth will somehow create the political infrastructure and marshal the internal fortitude to force the GOP to divest itself of it's own racist/nativist/malignantly-ignorant base and heal itself enough to limp back into something that resembles a George H.W. Bush template...

...or it must be destroyed.  Put down like a mad dog for the good of the country.  

There is no third option.

And as the election of 2016 shows with tragic clarity, the Republican Party is simply incapable of healing itself.  There is not enough "internal fortitude" left in that entire shitpile of bigots and imbeciles and con men and looters to organize a game of charades, much less any serious opposition to the whims and ravings of the puppet of a hostile foreign power who is using The Bastard President to smash the last of our democratic institutions to bits.  Hell, the other elected leaders of the Party of Lincoln are so frantic to slash taxes and regulations for their paymasters and gut the social safety net for everyone else that they can't even manage a collecting finger-wag as The Bastard President openly sides with Vlad the Elector against his own country.

Remember, these are the same Republican elected officials who lost their collective shit every hour on the hour for the last eight years over nonsense like Barack Obama wearing a tan suit or putting his feet up on his desk.  The same Republican elected officials who lied and slandered and held the United States government and the global economy hostage over and over again.  Whose major accomplishment were meaningless votes to strip people of their health insurance and endless witch-hunts over manufacture "scandals".

And the reason for they did all of it -- the reason for eight years of berserk rage against a decent man over shit they invented followed by two weeks of craven groveling before a racist lunatic who actually is wrecking the place -- is the worst kept secret in America.  The reason they did it all is because the paranoid,  malignantly ignorant, racist base of the party love this shit.

Love it.

The bargain that Fox News, Hate Radio and the Republican Party struck with the base of the GOP years ago was that, in exchange for their votes and their patronage and their dog-loyalty today, they would never, ever be forced to answer for the reckless, traitorous shit they said yesterday.

After eight years of criminal incompetence, treason and disaster under Bush, the Conservative scum who had worshiped Dubya were allowed to quick-change costumes overnight and emerge as politically virginal "independents" who had never even heard of George W. Bush, but sure as shit hated the black guy!

Because Freedumb!

And after eight years of Republican lies, sedition and obstruction under Obama, the same Conservative scum are now being allowed to pretend that none of it ever happened and that Democratic opposition to The Bastard President's objectively insane policies and corrput and incompetent appointments is Reckless and Unprecedented because Mitch McConnell says so:

2016 Sen. McConnell: There will not be hearings or votes.

2017 Sen. McConnell: Treat our nominees the same as Obama's pic.twitter.com/5cpr0I8CO4

— Senate Democrats (@SenateDems) January 31, 2017

The Republican Party cannot heal itself because Republicans have chosen to lock themselves into dark, suffocating, ever-shrinking bunker of their own lies.

Instead they have tried to build an impregnable wall around their own history and their own words and mark anyone who dares to remember their past accurately and speak it out loud as their enemy.

A decade ago I wrote that the Republican Party was rotting from within because of its...

...inability to form any new political memories after 1997.

For the record, that same column, I also wrote --

...
Why has the Fourth Estate – right before our eyes -- become a bunch of cowardly Fifth Columnists?

Why, when confronted with clear and overwhelming proof of their complicity and gutlessness -- when asked the simple question “Why?” -- do they go all squirmy and twitchy and outraged?

Why do Conservatives get to stand on desks with their hair on fire and shriek the most ludicrous, vile and mendacious hogwhiz – year after year after year after year after motherfucking year -- unchallenged? Why do these same howler monkeys -– who have been not just wrong but spectacularly, catastrophically wrong about everything, every time -- keep getting invited back in front of the cameras and onto the pages of major newspapers?

And when they rise from their crypts yet again to spackle yet another layer of Conservative lies on the wounded world – to send another wave of our kids off to die for no good reason, circle the wagons around another corporate monster, piss another precious pint of what’s left of our nation’s good name down the sewer, tax-cut-and-spend us further into debt – why do the same “journalists” who were ever eager to carve another slice out of Clinton’s ass over trivia, now piss themselves in like puppies in a thunderstorm and hide under the bed as Conservatives rape the truth two feet in front of them and them rub their noses in it?...

Which I could have written today, word-for-word, with one difference.  Ten years ago I thought it was still barely possible that Party of Lincoln might be able to drag itself back from madness and fascism. I did not think it was likely, but I believed, just maybe, the sheer magnitude of the disasters wrought by the Bush Administration might do for the GOP what the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne did for Gotham City: 

Alfred Pennyworth: In the depression, your father nearly bankrupted Wayne Enterprises combating poverty. He believed that his example could inspire the wealthy of Gotham to save their city.

Bruce Wayne: Did it?

Alfred Pennyworth: In a way. Their murder shocked the wealthy and the powerful into action.

Ten years later, and it is beyond clear that, even back then, it was already far too late.  That we were sitting shiva around a corpse that was twitching and blinking only because of the malignancy that was growing inside.  

The Republican Party cannot heal itself because they cannot bear the thought of looking at their own reflection and seeing a snarling, unrepentant, fear-dumb beast leering back at them.

Instead. they declare war on mirrors.