Never Turn Your Back on a Never Trumper

"You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye." 

-- Hunter S. Thompson

Repeat after me:   There is no such thing as a "former" hard-core Republican.

A causal, occasional Republican voter?  Sure.  They can kick the habit.  Over the course of many years I've voted for Republicans once or twice on down-ticket races or in board elections where I knew the person and they were extraordinarily well-qualified.  Hell, in my misspent youth I also voted for John Anderson, because Reagan was clearly dangerous, but Carter wasn't pure enough for my noble and rarefied political tastes.

But this it not so for the hard-core Republican.  The party activist, campaign coordinator, door knocker, serious donor, straight-party ticket voter, pundit, elected official, analyst or pollster.  Anyone who has evidenced a keen and active interest in advancing the Republican party's depraved agenda over any length of time.

They've been in the life too long.  They have been too conditioned.  Too bent.  Their brains and political pleasure centers have been permanently rewired.  And so, like any other kind of toxic, lifestyle addiction, the best you can ever hope for with your hard-core Republican is a state of recovery that they can maintain one-day-at-a-time until they shuffle off this mortal coil

But until they join Ronald Reagan in Republican Heaven, they will always be junkies who, given the slightest opportunity to rationalize themselves into just one more little taste, will backslide right back into their bad habits every fucking time.

Like, for example, Steve Schmidt, darling of the Acela corridor rebels because 9/10ths of the way through his career as a stone-cold Republican button man he freaked out that his Republican party was full of -- gasp! -- Republicans and, without missing a beat, started talking like, well, me.

And he was doing a pretty fair imitation of me right up until yesterday when he just could not stop himself from chasing that sweet-sweet Both Siderist dragon one more time...

Steve Schmidt attacks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for ‘dishonest progressivism’ — and says it’s bad as ‘Trumpism’

... “And what Trump is doing is radicalizing American politics,” the conservative strategist continued. “And he is a beneficiary the more radical politics becomes. When it becomes a game of incitement between a far left who says everybody is going to have a government job, everybody is going to have daycare, everybody is going to have retirement, free schools, free college education — as we careen toward $30 trillion in debt.”

Schmidt added: “When we have dishonest progressivism and we have dishonest Trumpism and an alienated middle that surrenders. They break their will to fight back. They become disenfranchised and hopeless about the idea that free market capitalism or liberal democracy can prevail in a radical era. That is the danger.”...

For 40 years, Mr. Schmidt's party has seized every opportunity to run up deficits as part of a calculated, long-term, poison-pill strategy to create a "But we haz no munnies!" alibi for gutting the social programs they have always hated.  So when you hear Mr. Schmidt whining about how radical it is for a candidate to talk like FDR and why we cannot possibly meet the basic needs of our citizens because something something free market capitalism, and then rolling it all up into a big, Beltway-pleasing "The Extremes on Both Side" fatty that he passes around the table to his fellow junkies, you can be pretty damn sure that ol' Stever is no longer in recovery.

Which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone. In the fight to dismember the Republican party the best we can hope for with a Never Trumper is that they act as a helpful political bomb-sniffing dog.  And if so, that's great.  They should be accorded the same respect as any other, useful service animal -- well-treated but they do not get to set the fucking agenda.  

But never, ever be surprised when a Never Trump service animal suddenly takes a chunk out of your leg, shits on your bed, and then dives immediately into their "Extremes on Both Sides" hidey-hole.

Because you can never turn your back on a drug.  And as I wrote a decade ago, that is exactly what Conservatism is.  And why, once again, this November is not just an election.

It's a last-ditch intervention.

...in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull.

Listen to any aging wingnut sighing and jerking sadly off to a tattered photo of Saint Ronnie -- despite the fact that the catastrophes we are now reaping were sown by his ruinous ideology -- and you can hear every addict who ever lived pining for that first Perfect High. The one they spend the rest of their days chasing, regardless of the size of the debts they run up or the ruined lives they leave in their wake.

Clinton? Objectively, Clinton qualifies as the greatest Center/Right President in history, and with balanced budgets, GATT, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, record surpluses, foreign and domestic terrorists brought to book, and an actual military victory, he arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else.

And they hated him for it.

Why?

Because Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.

And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.

So what is the last lie a Conservative tells himself? The last lie that the junkies and their suppliers both fight like hell to keep alive and twitching?

That, whether or not their ideology is depraved or deluded, it doesn’t matter because:

“Both side are always equally wrong about everything all the time.”

Doesn’t matter the who or what. The when or how. Doesn’t matter who was driving the bus towards the cliff and who was waving the red flags, throwing their bodies in front of it, trying to make it stop. Doesn’t matter who was trying to douse the conflagration with hoses shredded by 20 year of Reaganism, and who was lobbing milk cartons full of jellied gasoline onto the bonfire.

It is the lie the hagged-out Cokie Roberts pushes week after week after week on “This Week…”

It is the lie that David Fucking Brooks pushes in the pages of the New York Times.

It is the lie that made David Broder the “Dean” of the Villagers; the lie on which the quarterly profits of the entire Murdoch media empire now rests.

Because these people and thousands more like them are not journalists or “pundits” or expert who offer facts or interpretation or a philosophical framework for illuminating and contextualizing the events of the world.

They are pushers, selling that last, nihilistic lie to the junkies on the Right who will pay any price and cut any throat to escape the fact that they are personally and specifically responsible for the destruction of the country they claimed to love in the name of a God they claim to believe in.

Which is why November 4th is so much more than an election.

November 4th is an Intervention, because the junkie-pusher spiral of the Republican rank-and-file and their leaders has finally hit bottom: we need to heal this country or lose it, and arguing -- "reasoning" -- with wingnuts and their enabling shills and hacks is as pointless as trying to reason with addicts and dealers.

The only way this country is going to be saved is by taking it away from them, school board by school board, city council by city council, congressional district by congressional district, state by state, election by election until they are driven back into the political sewers from whence they came.

Behold, a Tip Jar!