The Republican Party Cannot Save Itself: Part I

“Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.” 

-- Isaac Asimov, Foundation

If you watch nothing more of the profile of Rush Limbaugh above, at least note the part where Republicans themselves state quite clearly that Rush Limbaugh and his mob of swinish dittoheads was the reason they rose to power in 1994 (2:28).  You also might get a kick out of taking a look at the praise for Limbaugh oozing from a young GOP strategist named William Kristol, (2:57) which is immediately followed by a clip of Limbaugh urging his goons to "keep some Liberals alive" so we can be put on display to warn future generations about the dirty America-hating, Commie menace that once was the American Left.

This is the same Rush Limbaugh, who used to do "caller abortions" (loud vacuum sounds accompanied by high pitched screams) to drown out callers who displeased him. 

The same Rush Limbaugh, who believed that gays deserved to die of AIDS.

Point being, if you had been paying any fucking attention to Conservative politics at all, it was alarmingly clear decades ago that this sort of relentless, demagogic, bile-puking bullshit had become the mother tongue of the Republican party base.  Which is why this bit of video from Charlie Sykes is, to my mind, some truly high comedy (skip to the :50 mark if you want to get right to it):

For the joke to work, you have to understand that for decades, Mr. Sykes was the "Rush Limbaugh of Wisconsin".  He bought his house, and his boat, and put his kids through college trafficking in exactly the same sort of smirking, treacherous slander against the Left that brought fame and fortune and real political power to Limbaugh and all of his hundreds of degenerate imitators across the country.

Then, about 10 minutes ago, Donald Trump ripped the public mask off of Mr. Sykes' GOP and showed the world exactly what a shitpile of bigotry, misogyny, pig-ignorance and paranoia the modern Republican party has always been. 

The true Republican party 

The real Republican party.

The Republican party we on the Left have made ourselves into pariahs shouting about decade after decade.

The Republican party the American media has, for the most part, categorically refused to believe even exists -- a practice which has allowed real GOP to not only hide in plain sight, but metastasize into something so monstrous that it that can no longer be saved.

And that is the joke.  Charlie Sykes, who spent his entire fucking career until about 10 minutes ago profiting by slandering Liberals and wallowing in Limbaugh-style hate-mongering has the yams to mock Bob Corker's meandering, mush-mouthed, whatever-the-hell-that-was --

We're in a strange place.  I mean its almost...uh...uh...y'know...been a... it's becoming a...cultish thing isn't it?  Uh.   Um.  And...uh (long pause) it's...uh...uh... it's not a good place for any party to... to end up...with a cult-like situation...as it relates to ...uh...to...to...to...a president that, uh, happens to be of, purportedly of...of the same party.

-- by rolling his eyes and snarking:

Sykes:  Yeah, but, y'know, if only he'd been warned about all of this. 

Mr. Sykes went on to pontificate about how it sure would have been nice if Corker had spoken out earlier: 

Sykes: You know,  Bob Corker...[Nicolle Wallace giggling]  I'm glad he's speaking out, but, y'know, it would have been nice if he would have spoken out earlier and more consistently instead of flip-flopping back and forth.  Y'know but, y'know here we're at the...y'know...it...at a moment where every week or so, the Trumpists...the president...takes somebody out and hangs them from a lamp post and says, "OK, who wants to be the next critic?"

Now I want to go on record right here and now as agreeing with Mr. Sykes on this one point:  the act of targeting a specific critic and bringing the full weight of an entire political apparatus down on them to destroy their careers -- of "hang[ing] them from a lamp post" -- is a pretty horrible thing for a president and his goons to do to a person.

And if Mr. Sykes had not blocked me on Twitter long ago for asking inconvenient questions, I would ask him (in the same, pious, moralizing tone he used to cavil Bob Corker) where in the wide world of country music does he thinks these "Trumpists" ever got the contemptible idea that it was OK to do something like that!  

3...2...1...

Sadly, we are long are past the point at which the prion disease (as Brother Charlie Pierce calls it) or the Rovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (which I call it because I got there first and I'm stubborn that way :-) has corroded the brains of the American Right to the point where collapse is is inevitable.

From the aforementioned Mr. Pierce:

Trumpism Is Just an Offshoot of the Real Cult: Modern Conservatism

Need proof? Take a gander at Iowa's Steve King..

We have, in fact, been past that point for decades ("In The Beginning...")

These days the Right no longer has even a rudimentary moral exoskeleton capable of holding it upright against the gravitational pull of its own depravity   And the Both Siderist crutch the media has been using for 20 years to prop up the corpse of the GOP into a grotesque caricature of relative respectability is steadily disintegrating.   

The Fall of the Right has arrived. 

And as they fall, they are trying to drag as much of the rest of the world down with them, which means we are now fully within the interregnum, and the only thing that remains to be decided --  the only thing that remains within our power to change -- is how long with this period of Conservative barbarism will last and how catastrophic it will be?

From The Lion in Winter:

Prince Geoffrey: My you chivalric fool... as if the way one fell down mattered. 

Prince Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

End Part I.

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