First They Came For The Libtards...

Every #NeverTrump book have the same adorably unspoken subtitle: "So it turned out the Libtards were right all along & I never had the slightest clue what was really going on inside my own party, so buy my book full of insights into what is really going on inside my party!"

-- me, yesterday

You've probably heard this story already, but it bears repeating.  From CBS:

"You're making a veteran suffer": Veteran's wife addresses Trump as she heads back to Mexico

One more sad headline in a long line of sad headlines, but there is one sentence that sets it apart. (emphasis added)

"My mom is a good person and she's not a criminal so f*** ICE," one of her daughters said.

Her undocumented status was exposed five years ago during a routine traffic stop. She was ordered to check in with ICE agents twice a year since she was considered a low priority case.

Her husband, who voted for Mr. Trump, said he didn't think that vote would affect his family.

The pain being inflicted on this Marine veteran and his family is far more savage than any price I have ever had to pay for any of my many acts of dumbassery, so it serves no one's cause to salt his wounds with my Libtard tears.

Maybe he'll know better next time.  Maybe not.  From Dana Milbank Pitts in the Washington Post:

Sgt. Temo Juarez was a Trump guy. An Iraq combat veteran who served as a Marine infantryman and then an Army National Guardsman, his friends called him a “super conservative.” With his wife, he brought up their two daughters in Central Florida. He supported Trump in 2016, eager for a change. 

But now, “I am eating my words,” he told the military newspaper Stars and Stripes in an interview published last week.

What is instructive is Mr. Juarez's completely predictable reaction when the Republican monster he thought he was turning loose on the rest of us actually turned on him.

Because it is exactly the same baffled reaction we heard from Trump-voting coal miners when someone explained to them in very small words that the coal-loving King MAGA they just elected was, in fact, going to brutally screw them over.

Exactly the same puzzled, bovine incomprehension from Trump-voting farmers who are finding out the hard way what "tariffs" actually mean.

Unbidden, Martin Niemöller's overworked poem --

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
     Because I was not a socialist...

-- comes to mind.

For those of us whose understanding of America is not skimmed from drive-by New York Times Magic Ruralism safaris, this is not hard to understand.  Impossible to excuse, but not hard to understand.

After all, the military has traditionally skewed Right --

Military Times survey: Troops prefer Trump to Clinton by a huge margin

-- so the idea that some Florida jarhead would vote for Il Douche because Freedumb!, completely oblivious to the inevitable blowback that would blow his family apart is not terribly shocking.

Likewise farmers are...farmers.  They skew fearful, parochial and Fox News:

You must excuse them. They are farmers here. They are afraid of everyone and everything. They are afraid of rain, and no rain. The summer may be too hot, or the winter too cold. If the sow has no pigs, the farmer is afraid he may starve. If she has too many pigs, he is afraid she may starve.  -- Old Man, The Magnificent Seven

These are, to borrow a phrase, the people of the land.

They have no special training in the political dark arts, so while they may be stupid or selfish or racist and just plain wrong about everything, well, that's just who they are.  Beeves on the stun line who don't know any better than to queue up to become some else's rib-eye dinner.

Over and over and over again.

But what about those Republicans who did have advanced training in the political dark arts --(emphasis added)

And Now On the Right…

Barack Obama’s speech on race drew generally rave reviews among commentators and columnists, and a stellar endorsement in a New York Times editorial. But early signs show that it will not stop conservatives from exploiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s comments against him should he turn out to be the Democratic nominee.

In fact, the GOP seems almost gleeful that Obama didn’t fully distance himself from Wright.

“It was a speech written to mau-mau the New York Times editorial board, the network production people and the media into submission. Beautifully calibrated but deeply dishonest,” GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, who crafted the 2002 ad tying then-Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden, told the Politico. “Not good enough.”

-- who now want America to buy their little book exposing the scandalous fact that the Republican Party is exactly as Liberals have described it all along?

What about those Republicans who ate and breathed focus groups and poll testing, who did their basic training at Fort Lee Atwater and received their masters degree at the Karl Rove School of Ratfuckery --

STEVE SCHMIDT: THE MAN BEHIND MCCAIN

If you want to really irritate Steve Schmidt (and seeing that he's 6 feet, 225 pounds, and can show a flash of temper, it's not recommended), just compare him to Karl Rove. The man in charge of John McCain's day-to-day presidential campaign is tired of reporters saying he's Rove's "protégé"—the implication being that he is willing to do anything to win. For the record: the two men go back only to 2004, when Schmidt, then a 34-year-old consultant, was hired to run George W. Bush's re-election war room.

Schmidt learned then what it means to play rough when your candidate is behind. Now, four years later, he is back at it. McCain is down in the polls, and the candidate has struggled to get a consistent message across to voters. When that happened to Bush in 2000 and 2004, Rove unleashed meaner speeches and uglier campaign ads. Under Schmidt's direction, McCain is doing the same...

-- who are now desperate to pretend that their Republican Party sprang spontaneously into existence two years ago?

Yasssss! Every word of this is true! The whole GOP is complicit! Must watch @CharlesMBlow

pic.twitter.com/aZ9ZjdV4BM

— Chris Evans 💬 (@notcapnamerica) August 4, 2018

What are we to make of life-long Conservative radio hate-mongers like Charlie Sykes --

...[Charlie] Sykes, in short, knew very well how his listeners felt on various issues. They were, after all, calling his show and emailing him every weekday, year after year.

So it is a bit difficult to believe Sykes, whose recent bout of confessions have included an interview with Politico where he describes his surprise to learn that many of his listeners are racists. “When I would deny that there was a significant racist component in some of the politics on our side, it was because the people I hung out with were certainly not,” Sykes says. “When suddenly, this rock is turned over, there is this—‘Oh shit, did I not see that?’”

As Esquire writer Charles Pierce has written, “Sykes knew damn well who his “allies” were when he was calling the First Lady “Mooch,” or when he was calling a black man who’d died in police custody “a piece of garbage,” and when he referred to “the pigs of mothers who are too lazy to put their children in a crib and roll over the top of them while sleeping on a futon on the floor.”

“Sykes knew who his ‘allies’ were when, as Milwaukee’s Shepherd Express reported, he aired a blackface rap parody,” Pierce continues. “It features a young, black woman calling herself Chapter Jackson, who acts out every racist stereotype of poor, black, single mothers that bigoted audiences find hilarious. Ms. Jackson is knee-deep in black babies in a house full of women slutted up like prostitutes while she writhes and raps that her life is a constant party paid for by taxpayers. She repeats the obscene refrain: ‘All you have to do is f— and nine months later you get in the big bucks.'”

The appeals to racism by Sykes and Belling so struck writer Alec MacGillis that his 2014 New Republic feature story on Gov. Scott Walker was mostly about how the governor’s political success was inextricably connected to the poisonous, racially divided climate the talk show hosts helped create in Wisconsin...

-- who now basically live at MSNBC and pop-ups every seven minuted to pimp yet another book exposing the shocking truth that the Left was right about goons like Charlie Sykes all along?

Or take the case of Michael Steele, who was not a politically illiterate coal miner or a farmer, but an elected Republican party official who shamelessly pandered to the party's racist power-brokers back when he held an actual position of influence within the GOP --

Steele to Rush: I'm sorry

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”...

-- and who now wander from one cable teevee panel to the next like the Ancient Mariner demanding to know who the hell let all these awful Republicans into his Republican party?  From Raw Story:

Former GOP chairman takes Trump to task for attacking LeBron James: ‘Nothing short of racist’

What shall we make of Joe Scarborough who, at long last and at the point of a sword, has finally been forced to grudgingly admit that the Cheetos-smeared Libtard bloggers were right all along --

-- but who also very clearly wants to keep the dangerous discussion of what the fuck actually happened to his Republican Party safely contained to puppet-show "debates" between active Conservative media scumbags like disgraced, former Fox News sexual predator Eric Bolling and temporarily reformed Conservative media scumbags like the aforementioned Charlie Sykes.

On Morning Joe Tuesday, for the second day in a row, the Weekly Standard‘s Charlie Sykes faced off against CRTV’s Eric Bolling, formerly of Fox News. The topic, once again: Donald Trump as moral and political leader of the GOP.

Also notice the massive linguistic shift among these newly "woke" Republicans -- from "we" to "they", from "our" to "their", from "us" to "them" -- now that the racism to which they have always pandered in private has become public knowledge.

The list of Republicans who, once again (as I wrote back in 2008, long before Donald Trump entered the scene) "like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms" is considerably longer, but since I have already taxed your patience enough, lets start to amble in the general direction of my point, which is this:

The "Shocked, shocked to discover Republicans inside the Republican Party!" defense --

- only works if you are stupid to believe that all of these highly-paid Republican professional pollsters, analysts, focus-group testers, campaign managers, message-crafters, elected leaders, think tankers, op-ed writers, Big Thinking panelists, magazine publishers, radio and teevee radio hosts who have literally only ever had one job -- to advance the fortunes of the Republican party -- never had the slightest fucking clue what was going on inside the party which they served their entire adult lives.

Nixon's Southern Strategy?  Reagan's obsession with "welfare queens" who drive Cadillacs and "young bucks" who eat T-bone steaks with money mooched from hard-working white people?  George H.W. Bush?  Lee Atwater?  "Willie Horton"?

They would have you believe that they had never knew of any of these things. 

Which leads, automatically and inconveniently. to the next obvious question: If all of these  professional Republican movers and shakers and havers-of-opinions have been this comprehensively and spectacularly wrong about the one-and-only line on their resume -- "Knowing waaay more about politics and the inner workings of the Republican Party than politically illiterate coal miners, farmers, Marines, and shitty Libtard bloggers" -- then why in the fuck is anyone anywhere still paying to hear their opinions about anything?

That's option one.

Option two is much simpler.  They just lying.  They're lying just as frequently and flagrantly as Donald Trump, but their brand of lying absolves the craven Beltway media machine that enabled the rise of Trump in the first place, and so the craven Beltway media machine is falling all over itself to helping them get away with it.  

And what about those inconvenient Libtards?  Those exhausted, living-on-tip-jar vituperative foul mouthed bloggers of the Left who have been shouting into the abyss for decades and who have been right about the Right all along?

Well clearly we do not exist at all.

Behold, a Tip Jar!