Matthew Dowd is a Fundamentally Ridiculous Person

The GOP can never again argue they are the party of family values, integrity, or fiscal responsibility in any credible way. They can thank President Trump for that.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) March 20, 2018

As we dirty hippies have known all along, the fate of the future depends on controlling the perception of the past.  And in the struggle over what becomes gospel and what become heresy, no faction has worked harder to warp the modern political history of the United States than the Republican Party and their enablers in the mainstream media.

And they do it by continually resetting the official Beltway Date On Which History Began -- a subject about which I have written once or twice over the past 13 years:

Oh Jebulon, if pretending for the last six and a half years that history began on January 20, 2009 has taught us anything it's that nobody in the GOP is interested in taking a guided tour of "the last decade", especially a tour led by some foof named Bush. --  August 8, 2015

...it is ideologically and psychologically impossible for Conservatives to admit that history began before January 2009.  --  September 27, 2014

For the Palinites, the lie is that history began on January 20, 2009, when the Black Guy became president; for the Sullivanites, the lie is that history began in 2003, when George W. Bush apparently snuck into Ronald Reagan's crypt and peed on the Great Man's mortal remains. -- February 8, 2010

[Conservatives] lie constantly about their own past.   They never supported Bush.  They never thought Clinton should be impeached.  There never was a budget surplus. And so on.  Or, conversely, there were WMD in Iraq.  Bush was a great president.  History began on January 20, 2009.  And so on.  They are junkie-dependent on massive doses of Strategic Forgettery to keep from facing the ugly reality of their real pasts. -- September 25, 2012

Of course, contrary to Mr. Dowd's ridiculous lie, the modern GOP has never been a  party of family values, integrity, or fiscal responsibility.  In fact, for decades the modern GOP has been energetically laying the tracks which Donald Trump rode to the White House.

But anything that whiffs of a general acknowledgment of these indisputable facts would raise no end of inconvenient questions which would incinerate the careers of Beltway Both Siderists like Mr. Dowd.  

And so the Great Resetting begins yet again, as Mr. Dowd and his colleagues conspire in plain sight to declare "two years ago"  to be the new official Beltway Year Zero. 

Behold, a Tip Jar!