Ten Years Gone

I write the ads that make the whole world rage
I write the ads of race baiting sewage
I write the ads that make the Libtards cry
I write the ads, I write the ads...

Ten years ago, ads like these and drive-by commentary like this --

Even Obama’s much-lauded Tuesday speech, which detailed his relationship with his church and focused on the issue of racial reconciliation, failed to shake the notion that Republicans had been given a rare political gift.

“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,” said GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, who crafted the 2002 ad tying then-Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden. “Not good enough.”

-- were the fruits of Rick Wilson's labor.

And very profitable fruits they were.

You see, up until about five minutes ago, Mr. Wilson had spent his entire adult life as a shit-slinging, Republican smear-merchant for hire.  And Mr. Wilson was very good at his job because he understood exactly what kind of knuckle-dragging, atavistic racists made up the GOP base and exactly what kind of venomous language to deploy to fire them up and get them to the polls.

In fact, as late as March of 2016, Mr. Wilson was one of Ted Cruz's corner men and was relieved when the Cruz presidential campaign finally filled its pockets with stones and walked into the sea.

On the upside, I don't have to defend Ted Fucking Cruz any longer.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) May 4, 2016

And now, just two years after being the reluctant defender of Ted Cruz (and thanks to the tireless promotional efforts of his many, many, many friends in the Liberal media) Fredrick G. "Rick" Wilson is the much-sought-after, New York Times best-selling Never Trump author of "Holy Shit!  The Republican Party is Full of Republicans!" and can pretty much pick and choose which publication will print his words.

This is all apparently the result of the mind-blowing epiphany -- "Holy Shit!  The Republican Party is Full of Republicans" -- that came to Mr. Wilson over the same long weekend in 2016 that the same mind-blowing epiphany came to every other life-long Republican Never Trumper who wanted to continue making a living by selling their opinions.  Which, when you think about it, is truly hilarious given the fact that Donald Trump could never in a skajillion years have won the nomination of the Republican Party if he had not been willing to sing from the Paranoid Racist Wingnut Hymnal more loudly and proudly than any other Republican candidate -- a hymnal that has been relentlessly shaped and refined and weaponized over the last 30 years by none other than men like Fredrick G. "Rick" Wilson.

In fact just today in The Daily Beast, Mr. Wilson has a featured article in which he likens the Republican base supporters of Donald Trump to addicts, and Trump himself to a pusher:

Trump Shoves Nationalist Needle Into His Followers’ Veins

While the 70-year-old Queens racist with authoritarian statist leanings has long clad them in nationalist rhetoric, Monday was the first time the word escaped his blubbery lips.

On Monday night, Donald Trump shoved the nationalist needle into the veins of millions of his followers, and slammed the plunger home. He finally said what we’ve known all along: He’s a nationalist...

And this time you can actually believe this assessment of Donald Trump and the Republican base because it's coming from a real Murrican patriot like Rick Wilson, and not from a buncha stoopid, flaky Libtards!

It isn’t feckless, PC social justice-warrior hand-wringing to remind you how dangerous nationalism is as a tool in the hands of those who believe racial identity defines a nation...

Makes you feel kinda warm all over, doesn't it?

Oh, and one more really important thing for every Never Trumper to remember.  If any nosy, Libtards come sniffing around, asking a lot of tricky questions about what was going on inside the GOP before Trump arrived, just remember that every single shitty, unhinged racist element of the Republican Party all sprang simultaneously and spontaneously into existence two years ago, at exactly the same moment that Rick Wilson was grabbing his hat, leaving the sinking ship and suddenly discovering his inner driftglass.   Before that, everything was just fine, and if we all stick to that story we're all gonna get paid!

Trump’s two years of twisting truth after truth past each one’s breaking point have led to a trillion pixels spilled calling out his serial deceptions out, with so far zero political consequences...

And so here is your fun fact for today.

Do you want to know what I was doing a decade ago, at almost exactly the same time that Mr. Wilson was putting the final licks of paint and bile on his Jeremiah Wright add?

A decade ago, in October of 2008, was a vituperative foul-mouthed blogger of the Left, who was, unbeknownst to me, digging my own professional grave by writing rude, strident posts like the one I am reposting below.

One in which I compared the Republican base to addicts.

Shocking!

And compared the Bush Administration to their pushers.

Bad blogger!  Bad, bad blogger!

Having ruined my reputation with such salty, strident talk a decade ago, needless to say that today I do not have a book about how stunned I was to discover in 2016 that the Republican Party was full of Republicans, nor do I have featured articles in national publications.  But I do have a tip jar and a birthday fundraiser, which you are free to support or not as you see fit.

Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!

And now, join me on a brief and sobering trip back to the weeks before the 2008 election and note with both fury and terrible sadness how almost nothing about the underlying facts of our politics and media have changed at all and, because of this, how much worse things have gotten:

Understanding the Right #1

Junkie logic.

The last lie a junkie tells himself isn't "I’m not an addict."

The last lie a junkie tells himself is "My being a addict doesn't matter."

And 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.