It is a slippery business, this writing about media and politics. So tricky that professional Beltway editorial writers often completely ignore the most salient features of American politics in order to pen high-minded think-pieces about something they consider to be of The Highest Importance.
Take for example, consider this column from the Editorial Board the Washington Post which aims to grab its readers by their razor-shard lapels and shake them good and hard so that they awaken to the Imminent Danger which Donald Trump poses to the D.C. establishment which the Washington Post serves, Notice how, in order to drive home its Very Important Point, the WaPo Editorial Board is forced to ignore the single most important feature of Modern Conservatism.
See if you can guess what they missed?
The Post's View
Softening on Trump? Remember this.
DO YOU remember when Donald Trump crudely mocked the disability of a New York Times reporter, and then lied about having done so?
No? That’s just as the Republican candidate might hope. Now that he is nearing the Republican nomination, he says he will become more “presidential.” After winning the New York primary, he referred to “Senator Cruz” instead of “Lyin’ Ted.” You can expect multitudes of office-seekers and sycophants to follow Chris Christie’s craven path to believing, or pretending to believe, in a presidential Trump.
So it is important to remember.
Remember that Mr. Trump said that Mexicans...
Remember that Mr. Trump falsely claimed that thousands of American Muslims...
Remember that Mr. Trump insulted....
Remember that Mr. Trump lashed out..
Remember how Mr. Trump threatened...
Remember that Mr. Trump threatened and disparaged...
Remember that Mr. Trump vowed to ban...
Remember that Mr. Trump promised to round up...
Remember that he cited “Operation Wetback”...
Remember that Mr. Trump, unlike virtually every scientist in the world...
It goes on like that at great length, and concludes...
“Winning is the antidote to a lot of things,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said a earlier this year. As Mr. Trump marches toward 1,237 delegates, others will emulate that amoral embrace.
So remember. Winning is not an antidote to bigotry, violence, ignorance, insults and lies.
No, winnning is not an antidote to Conservative bigotry, violence, ignorance, insults and lies, but it is one hell of an effective anesthetic. Also whining works really well too.
And while I appreciate the WaPo assembling its anti-Trump theses Martin Luther-style and nailing them to the internet's cathedral door, I must fault them harshly for conspicuously failing to report the real story here. The real story is that Conservatives Do Not Give A Single Tiny Shit About The Past.
Period. Full stop.
In fact, as I have documented ad nauseum over the last +11 years, Strategic Forgettery -- the massive, ongoing Conservative campaign of historical revisionism -- is not a bug in our political process. From David Brooks to Rush Limbaugh, lying about the past is Conservatism's most critical feature. Without the aid of constant stream of real-time bullshit about their own immediate past, Hate Radio and Fox News would be out of business in a week, and the Republican Party would vanish from the face the Earth,
In 2009, with the aid of a mountain of Koch Brothers money, wall-to-wall marketing on Fax and Hate Radio and a compliant Beltway media, the Right was able to make the entire Bush Administration and the suddenly-inconvenient political affiliations on millions and millions of life-long Republicans just... fucking...vanish. One minute, they were the loyal meathead Republicans base who took Fox News as gospel and had loudly cheered on every GOP travesty from the Clinton impeachment farce to the war in Iraq...
...and the next minute they were political virgins again. Just plain, good, honest, god-fearin' Independent Constitutional Conservative Murrican folks who had never had any interest in politics and had never even heard of George W. Bush.
The real story is that he GOP has spent 30 years building a mighty media and electoral machine that depends entirely on its capacity to constantly reprogram the memory of its millions of rank-and-file members to conform to the needs of Conservative ideologues and power brokers on any given day,
And the notion that this machine is going to suddenly stop tweaking the memories of its base and begin exhorting them to spontaneously embrace the act of honestly remembering a whole lot of brutally uncomfortable and embarrassing truths is as ludicrous as tossing a carp out of an airplane and exhorting it to spontaneously learn how to breathe and fly as it plummets to the ground below.
Jesus, if he just wouldn’t rouge up his idiot baboon-ass and wag it around so provocatively, I could go to the gym and get out and enjoy a sunny day in my beautiful city.
However...
Calling Democrats' Bluff By DAVID BROOKS Published: May 8, 2005
Don't take people at their word. Don't listen to them when they tell you how to be virtuous.
They're faking it. They don't care about virtue, or you or the common good. They're just taking opportunistic potshots under the guise of sermonizing. They're just a bunch of hypocrites. ...
OK, let me break in just for a minute to say that while I don’t usually follow BoBo’s advice, in this case, since he is so stamp-his-tiny-porcelain-hoof insistent, and has set the table so nicely, just this once I’ll go along and agree that...
You’re a hypocrite. A pie-faced, Rattus Americanus Accomodationist hypocrite. A puckered hole where an actual journalist should be hypocrite. An “I don’t care that my Right Wing Masters have packed the Constitution into cattle-cars and have dispatched it to The Year of our Lord 1391...but the speed at which we’re rocketing down the tracks makes my tummy hurt sometimes” hypocrite. The Fundy AmWay vertical marketing plan’s top New York Sales Representative...hypocrite. A Spy in the House of ‘Duh...hypocrite. I just poked my finger right though your spongy skull. Now go ahead, smell my finger. Smell’s like “hypocrite” doesn’t it?
Is that what you had in mind, or should I continue?
Onward...
<>
Over this time, Democrats have been hectoring President Bush in the manner of an overripe Fourth of July orator. ... Sometimes you had to walk through Democratic precincts in a gas mask, the lofty rhetoric was so thick. But now we have definitive proof that they didn't mean it. It was all hokum.
Over the past few weeks, the president has called their bluff. ... So how has the St. Francis of Assisi wing of the Democratic Party responded to Bush's challenge? Does it applaud him for doing what it has spent the past years telling him he should do? Of course not. ... Are they saying that since Bush has moved so far in a redistributionist direction that perhaps the Democrats should budge slightly, too? Of course not. They're inventing lame reasons to explain why they shouldn't be for the policy they have been for over the past 20 years. Bush could tell them he loved their mothers and they'd invent reasons to be against him. Politics trumps policy. ... This is the difference between the party with a governing mentality and the party with the opposition mentality. The governing party leads. It takes the arrows. It casts about for productive ideas and slowly absorbs the other party's good ones. Bush has now absorbed progressive indexing of retirement benefits.
The opposition party opposes. It doesn't feel any responsibility to come up with positive alternatives. Its main psychological need is to be against its nemesis at all costs. If the governing party steals one of its ideas, it will oppose that idea. ... This is what's infected the Tories in Britain, and it's infected the Democrats here. When a Republican president embraces progressive indexing, something big is happening. When the Democrats oppose it, you know their party has betrayed an animating ideal.
Short answer: Drop private accounts and we’ll talk.
Drop ‘em right now. They were a Trojan Horse for the actual Bush Plan which is to raze all things Roosevelt. They have been glaringly shown to be a Poison Pill specifically designed to gut the program.
Admit it. Drop it. Move on.
And then we’ll talk about Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax...oh, and since we’re talking about Shared Sacrifice, we will also be talking about rolling back the Bush Billionaire Tax Bonanza to mere Clinton-era lavishness help pay for everything, right? Hell, we’ll even talk about how to help Americans save for their retirement, but on a different day, and only once you put Private Account Gun down, and step away from Grandma.
But until then, you have no credibility whatsoever. (“Credibility?” Look it up.)
Longer response? Well, since you mentioned it...
You know, I was watching the Timmy Russert’s Dance Fever today and saw a funny thing.
I saw Joey Joe Joe Junior Carville heroically resisting the urge to invite his Gorgon Spouse to climb up her own ass and vanish in a Ourobourian fart of completely deranged hatred, which is now also officially completely unmoored from Reality. Doesn’t even stop by the Real World anymore for dinner. Doesn’t even call up Reality once a year for eight minutes on Mother’s Day.
The question she was posed was about Arch GOP Fucknut Goblin, Pat Robertson’s comments about judges (sorry, tha would be the Reverend Fucknut Goblin. Jesus must be sooo proud.)
You remember, right? It was only a week ago, which I know qualifies as an off-limits, “youthful indiscretion” kind of thing in Bush-land and is all backwardsy-looking, but still...you remember, right? When Roberson declared that the Liberal Judiciary was a far, far worse threat to the nation than a “few, bearded terrorists” that “fly planes into buildings”?
Worse than Nazis. Worse than Commies. Those Evil Judges, they positively out-Heroded Herod!...and MoveOn.org has taken out an ad saying that that was an extreme position...so Timmy asked Our Miss Matalin about that very thing, and she came out Very Strong against Irresponsible Demagoguery.
She thought it was Awful. Just Awful!
And for a glorious moment I thought someone, somewhere on the Right had finally, finally, finally had awaked from beneath the lethally suffocating blanket of lying propaganda under which they all so eagerly snuggle and spoon.
That one of these hand-puppets finally scared up a just a little of the same Towering Moral Outrage with which the were so amply over-stocked during the “Let’s Fuck Up Bill Clinton” years...and decided that they could no longer abet a profoundly anti-freedom, anti-liberty, anti-democratic, anti-Christian Oil Junta.
And then the she opened her big, carp mouth and made it clear that it was the position of the Left that she was denouncing. Loudly. Con Mucho Venomous Gusto. Oh, sure, perhaps Robertson’s statement were “injudicious”, but it was the Left’s response to the Reverend’s call for judicial jihad that we’re the real outrage.
All while James Carville doodled distractedly. And one can only speculate what sort of “a hundred F-16s strafing a certain unhinged harridan” kind of cartoon art Jim-Boy was sketching out while The Wife publically cuckolded him by danced merrily with the Devil right in front of hubby; frenching Old Scratch Himself flush on the mouth, on teevee, on Sunday morning no less.
Man, what ever happened to the good old Cardinal Fundy Virtue of a wife “submitting graciously to the servant leadership of her husband”? Good thing she’s not actually married to the Bile Ducts that she so rabidly defends, ‘cause I think they favor a more vigorous, physical form of errant-spousal-discipline than just a few stern words. And what they would do to her would surely mess up her Immodestly Non-Burka Suit, and her Harlot lipstick.
Ah well.
Why bring this up?
Because she’s you, BoBo. You in drag.
At some molecular level you are just exactly that desperately unwilling to face up to the cancerous horror running mad and free though the guts of your own party. And to cope, you summon up heroic levels of doublethink to wish away the True Nature of the ogres and trolls that you obey so slavishly: a denial that has become so pathological that you invert the very ugliness that you serve but dare not name, and project it wildly outward onto the rest of the world.
Then again, from your position in the Political Catamite Seat, kneeling obediently between Deal Leaders thighs and fighting Condi for the post of Fluffer-In-Chief, it’s probably a little hard to actually see the Dear Leader’s lips move, or hear what he and his friends are talking about, so how about you spit out the Presidnetial Predator Drone for a minute, come up for air, and join us on a little jaunt down memory lane:
(Very recent memory too, which is why one can only assume that it was the muffling effect caused by having GW’s Sans-A-Belts wrapped around your skull, that caused you to miss the GOP Social Security Hit Parade. Funny, 'cause it was in all the papers...)
Or don’t you remember the giddy, Catholic School Girl days of early 2005, drunk with a fake mandate, when your party, BoBo, decided that Social Security would be the next target of the Fuck The New Deal steamroller?
Don’t you remember President Bush bragging in private that he was going to get rid of Social Security?
Don’t you remember the crowds of Bush Young Pioneers chanting “Hey, Hey. Ho, Ho. Social Security has got to go”?
Don’t you remember Cato Institute scrubbing their website once their own pet phrase -- “Private Accounts” -- was finally market-tested and found to be a disaster?
Don’t you remember the leaders or your party being outraged that Dem’s kept using the phrase “Private Accounts” which your party had been touting...even insisting that the Dem’s had invented it.
Don’t you remember that you guys won? The House, the Senate, the White House, the majority of governorships, the majority of judged...and yet once Lootapalooza took to the road and people started to notice that other than gutting the program via Private Accounts, Bush had no plan whatsoever, you all responded like you always do...by blaming the Democrats.
(BTW, yes, we do have a plan. It’s called “Social Security”.)
Don’t you remember that even Republicans finally had to admit that Private Accounts have nothing whatsoever to do with SS solvency?
Do you bother to remember that any honest scoring of Private Accounts yields a two-trillion dollar price tag? Enough to, you know, destroy the program...which as you damned well know has been the plan from the start.
Don’t you remember when Brit Hume went on teevee and simply lied his Botox-less Gumby ass off by cutting a certain quote by Roosevelt apart and pasting it together like a ransom note? And hey, by the way, has he or any of the rest of the Pravda Right lost their cushy news gigs yet for Deliberately Lying to the Public? Or it just always nakedly, brazenly “IOKIYAR” these days?
And finally, track back to the top of this post and take a good look at that picture. That was your party's First response to Social Security: Whip up a Molotov Cocktail of gay-bashing, traitor-baiting and fucking over the elderly and start lobbing it at anyone who dared question Dear Leader’s attempts to eviscerate Roosevelt’s Legacy.
So when you get caught with one chubby paw in the SS cookie jar and the other up grandma’s skirt (and I won’t even venture a guess as to where you prehensile tail is lodging itself these days) you are again simply incapable of admitting error or honestly critiquing any bullshit your Masters spout, no matter how overtly ridiculous.
Instead, when confronted with your own grotesque mendacity, you all go right to the All-Purpose, Iraqi Clusterfuck Playbook: Deny, deny, deny. Attack, attack, attack.
Or to misquote a legal truism as old as Imperial Rome, “When the Facts are with you, argue the Facts. When the Facts go against you, argue the Law. When the Fact and the Law both go against you, blame the Democrats, scream at the top of your lungs, and hope no one notices what an asshat you are.”
The opposition party opposes. It doesn't feel any responsibility to come up with positive alternatives. Its main psychological need is to be against its nemesis at all costs. If the governing party steals one of its ideas, it will oppose that idea. In this way the opposition party is pushed further and further to the edge. It loses control of its identity - it's simply a negative reactive force to whatever the governing party happens to be doing at the moment. It finds itself in a cycle of opposition, negativity and irrelevance.
If you guessed anywhere in the ballpark of "Some damn Dirty Fucking Hippie", sadly, you would be wrong.
This was written by New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Eight years ago.
Just after George W. Bush's began his Epic Fail attempt to bulldoze Social Security, and just before the entire Bush Administration went tits-up and Mr. Brooks was forced to sprint like Hell away from its burning wreckage, dive into a "Both Sides Do It" spider-hole and hide out from his own words for the rest of his career.
At that moment in history, Wingnuttia needed all-hands-on-deck.
It especially needed one of its own with to use his newly-minted New York Times credentials
to quickly mount a loud, spirited, lie-and-misdirection based defense of George W. Bush's radical attempt to roll back the New Deal.
...
He has made the hard choices. By facing up to the fact that there are going to be benefit cuts, he's offended Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp, the supply siders and other important Republican constituencies.
So how has the St. Francis of Assisi wing of the Democratic Party responded to Bush's challenge? Does it applaud him for doing what it has spent the past years telling him he should do? Of course not.
The Democratic leadership has dropped all that shared sacrifice talk and started making demagogic appeals to people's narrow self-interest. Nancy Pelosi cries out that Bush's progressive indexing idea means "cutting the benefits of middle-class seniors." Representative Sander Levin protests it "would result in the biggest benefit cut in the history of Social Security."
What about the sober chin-pullers - the fiscally prudent worriers and deficit-fearing editorialists? Have they come out and applauded Bush for his courage? Are they mobilizing to take advantage of this moment? No, their silence is deafening.
And what about those moderate Democrats? For two decades they've been courageously saying we need to means-test Social Security, so we can focus our resources on those who need it. Now Bush has embraced their view. Are they saying that since Bush has moved so far in a redistributionist direction that perhaps the Democrats should budge slightly, too? Of course not. They're inventing lame reasons to explain why they shouldn't be for the policy they have been for over the past 20 years. Bush could tell them he loved their mothers and they'd invent reasons to be against him. Politics trumps policy.
George Bush has been willing to address a long-term, politically thorny problem. He's pursued it doggedly while most members of his party wish he would just drop it. But his Democratic counterparts are behaving like alienated junior professors. No productive ideas. No sense of leadership. Just half-truths from the peanut gallery.
This is the difference between the party with a governing mentality and the party with the opposition mentality. The governing party leads. It takes the arrows. It casts about for productive ideas and slowly absorbs the other party's good ones. Bush has now absorbed progressive indexing of retirement benefits.
The opposition party opposes. It doesn't feel any responsibility to come up with positive alternatives. Its main psychological need is to be against its nemesis at all costs. If the governing party steals one of its ideas, it will oppose that idea.
In this way the opposition party is pushed further and further to the edge. It loses control of its identity - it's simply a negative reactive force to whatever the governing party happens to be doing at the moment. It finds itself in a cycle of opposition, negativity and irrelevance.
...
And before it is swallowed by the Memory Hole forever, here, in part, is how one, fringe, pariah Dirty Hippie tried to correct the damage Mr. Brooks was inflicting from within the wall of his NYT fortress. (For the record, I had this written and posted about two hours after Mr. Brooks' column dropped. Man, I sure could crank 'em out back when I thought it made a difference.)
...don’t you remember the giddy, Catholic School Girl days of early 2005, drunk with a fake mandate, when your party, BoBo, decided that Social Security would be the next target of the Fuck The New Deal steamroller?
Don’t you remember President Bush bragging in private that he was going to get rid of Social Security?
Don’t you remember the crowds of Bush Young Pioneers chanting “Hey, Hey. Ho, Ho. Social Security has got to go”?
Don’t you remember Cato Institute scrubbing their website once their own pet phrase -- “Private Accounts” -- was finally market-tested and found to be a disaster?
Don’t you remember the leaders or your party being outraged that Dem’s kept using the phrase “Private Accounts” which your party had been touting...even insisting that the Dem’s had invented it.
Don’t you remember that you guys won? The House, the Senate, the White House, the majority of governorships, the majority of judged...and yet once Lootapalooza took to the road and people started to notice that other than gutting the program via Private Accounts, Bush had no plan whatsoever, you all responded like you always do...by blaming the Democrats.
(BTW, yes, we do have a plan. It’s called “Social Security”.)
Don’t you remember that even Republicans finally had to admit that Private Accounts have nothing whatsoever to do with SS solvency?
Do you bother to remember that any honest scoring of Private Accounts yields a two-trillion dollar price tag? Enough to, you know, destroy the program...which as you damned well know has been the plan from the start.
Don’t you remember when Brit Hume went on teevee and simply lied his Botox-less Gumby ass off by cutting a certain quote by Roosevelt apart and pasting it together like a ransom note? And hey, by the way, has he or any of the rest of the Pravda Right lost their cushy news gigs yet for Deliberately Lying to the Public? Or it just always nakedly, brazenly “IOKIYAR” these days?
And finally, track back to the top of this post and take a good look at that picture. That was your party's First response to Social Security: Whip up a Molotov Cocktail of gay-bashing, traitor-baiting and fucking over the elderly and start lobbing it at anyone who dared question Dear Leader’s attempts to eviscerate Roosevelt’s Legacy.
So when you get caught with one chubby paw in the SS cookie jar and the other up grandma’s skirt (and I won’t even venture a guess as to where you prehensile tail is lodging itself these days) you are again simply incapable of admitting error or honestly critiquing any bullshit your Masters spout, no matter how overtly ridiculous.
Instead, when confronted with your own grotesque mendacity, you all go right to the All-Purpose, Iraqi Clusterfuck Playbook: Deny, deny, deny. Attack, attack, attack.
Or to misquote a legal truism as old as Imperial Rome, “When the Facts are with you, argue the Facts. When the Facts go against you, argue the Law. When the Fact and the Law both go against you, blame the Democrats, scream at the top of your lungs, and hope no one notices what an asshat you are.”
But we do notice, BoBo.
Oh yes we do.
David Brooks remains on Book Leave.
But his public record remains open and available to anyone who bothers to take a look.
Jesus, if he just wouldn’t rouge up his idiot baboon-ass and wag it around so provocatively, I could go to the gym and get out and enjoy a sunny day in my beautiful city.
Don't take people at their word. Don't listen to them when they tell you how to be virtuous.
They're faking it. They don't care about virtue, or you or the common good. They're just taking opportunistic potshots under the guise of sermonizing. They're just a bunch of hypocrites.
...
OK, let me break in just for a minute to say that while I don’t usually follow BoBo’s advice, in this case, since he is so stamp-his-tiny-porcelain-hoof insistent, and has set the table so nicely, just this once I’ll go along and agree that...
You’re a hypocrite.
A pie-faced, Rattus Americanus Accomodationist hypocrite.
A puckered hole where an actual journalist should be hypocrite.
An “I don’t care that my Right Wing Masters have packed the Constitution into cattle-cars and have dispatched it to The Year of our Lord 1391...but the speed at which we’re rocketing down the tracks makes my tummy hurt sometimes” hypocrite.
The Fundy AmWay vertical marketing plan’s top New York Sales Representative...hypocrite.
A Spy in the House of ‘Duh...hypocrite.
I just poked my finger right though your spongy skull. Now go ahead, smell my finger. Smell’s like “hypocrite” doesn’t it?
Is that what you had in mind, or should I continue?
...Over this time, Democrats have been hectoring President Bush in the manner of an overripe Fourth of July orator.
...
Sometimes you had to walk through Democratic precincts in a gas mask, the lofty rhetoric was so thick. But now we have definitive proof that they didn't mean it. It was all hokum.
Over the past few weeks, the president has called their bluff.
...
So how has the St. Francis of Assisi wing of the Democratic Party responded to Bush's challenge? Does it applaud him for doing what it has spent the past years telling him he should do? Of course not.
...
Are they saying that since Bush has moved so far in a redistributionist direction that perhaps the Democrats should budge slightly, too? Of course not. They're inventing lame reasons to explain why they shouldn't be for the policy they have been for over the past 20 years. Bush could tell them he loved their mothers and they'd invent reasons to be against him. Politics trumps policy.
...
This is the difference between the party with a governing mentality and the party with the opposition mentality. The governing party leads. It takes the arrows. It casts about for productive ideas and slowly absorbs the other party's good ones. Bush has now absorbed progressive indexing of retirement benefits.
The opposition party opposes. It doesn't feel any responsibility to come up with positive alternatives. Its main psychological need is to be against its nemesis at all costs. If the governing party steals one of its ideas, it will oppose that idea.
...
This is what's infected the Tories in Britain, and it's infected the Democrats here. When a Republican president embraces progressive indexing, something big is happening. When the Democrats oppose it, you know their party has betrayed an animating ideal.
Short answer: Drop private accounts and we’ll talk.
Drop ‘em right now. They were a Trojan Horse for the actual Bush Plan which is to raze all things Roosevelt. They have been glaringly shown to be a Poison Pill specifically designed to gut the program.
Admit it. Drop it. Move on.
And then we’ll talk about Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax...oh, and since we’re talking about Shared Sacrifice, we will also be talking about rolling back the Bush Billionaire Tax Bonanza to mere Clinton-era lavishness help pay for everything, right? Hell, we’ll even talk about how to help Americans save for their retirement, but on a different day, and only once you put Private Account Gun down, and step away from Grandma.
But until then, you have no credibility whatsoever. (“Credibility?” Look it up.)
Longer response? Well, since you mentioned it...
You know, I was watching the Timmy Russert’s Dance Fever today and saw a funny thing.
I saw Joey Joe Joe Junior Carville heroically resisting the urge to invite his Gorgon Spouse to climb up her own ass and vanish in a Ourobourian fart of completely deranged hatred, which is now also officially completely unmoored from Reality. Doesn’t even stop by the Real World anymore for dinner. Doesn’t even call up Reality once a year for eight minutes on Mother’s Day.
The question she was posed was about Arch GOP Fucknut Goblin, Pat Robertson’s comments about judges (sorry, tha would be the Reverend Fucknut Goblin. Jesus must be sooo proud.)
You remember, right? It was only a week ago, which I know qualifies as an off-limits, “youthful indiscretion” kind of thing in Bush-land and is all backwardsy-looking, but still...you remember, right? When Roberson declared that the Liberal Judiciary was a far, far worse threat to the nation than a “few, bearded terrorists” that “fly planes into buildings”?
Worse than Nazis. Worse than Commies. Those Evil Judges, they positively out-Heroded Herod!...and MoveOn.org has taken out an ad saying that that was an extreme position...so Timmy asked Our Miss Matalin about that very thing, and she came out Very Strong against Irresponsible Demagoguery.
She thought it was Awful. Just Awful!
And for a glorious moment I thought someone, somewhere on the Right had finally, finally, finally had awaked from beneath the lethally suffocating blanket of lying propaganda under which they all so eagerly snuggle and spoon.
That one of these hand-puppets finally scared up a just a little of the same Towering Moral Outrage with which the were so amply over-stocked during the “Let’s Fuck Up Bill Clinton” years...and decided that they could no longer abet a profoundly anti-freedom, anti-liberty, anti-democratic, anti-Christian Oil Junta.
And then the she opened her big, carp mouth and made it clear that it was the position of the Left that she was denouncing. Loudly. Con Mucho Venomous Gusto. Oh, sure, perhaps Robertson’s statement were “injudicious”, but it was the Left’s response to the Reverend’s call for judicial jihad that we’re the real outrage.
All while James Carville doodled distractedly. And one can only speculate what sort of “a hundred F-16s strafing a certain unhinged harridan” kind of cartoon art Jim-Boy was sketching out while The Wife publically cuckolded him by danced merrily with the Devil right in front of hubby; frenching Old Scratch Himself flush on the mouth, on teevee, on Sunday morning no less.
Man, what ever happened to the good old Cardinal Fundy Virtue of a wife “submitting graciously to the servant leadership of her husband”? Good thing she’s not actually married to the Bile Ducts that she so rabidly defends, ‘cause I think they favor a more vigorous, physical form of errant-spousal-discipline than just a few stern words. And what they would do to her would surely mess up her Immodestly Non-Burka Suit, and her Harlot lipstick.
Ah well.
Why bring this up?
Because she’s you, BoBo. You in drag.
At some molecular level you are just exactly that desperately unwilling to face up to the cancerous horror running mad and free though the guts of your own party. And to cope, you summon up heroic levels of doublethink to wish away the True Nature of the ogres and trolls that you obey so slavishly: a denial that has become so pathological that you invert the very ugliness that you serve but dare not name, and project it wildly outward onto the rest of the world.
Then again, from your position in the Political Catamite Seat, kneeling obediently between Deal Leaders thighs and fighting Condi for the post of Fluffer-In-Chief, it’s probably a little hard to actually see the Dear Leader’s lips move, or hear what he and his friends are talking about, so how about you spit out the Presidential Predator Drone for a minute, come up for air, and join us on a little jaunt down memory lane:
(Very recent memory too, which is why one can only assume that it was the muffling effect caused by having GW’s Sans-A-Belts wrapped around your skull, that caused you to miss the GOP Social Security Hit Parade. Funny, 'cause it was in all the papers...)
Or don’t you remember the giddy, Catholic School Girl days of early 2005, drunk with a fake mandate, when your party, BoBo, decided that Social Security would be the next target of the Fuck The New Deal steamroller?
Don’t you remember President Bush bragging in private that he was going to get rid of Social Security?
Don’t you remember the crowds of Bush Young Pioneers chanting “Hey, Hey. Ho, Ho. Social Security has got to go”?
Don’t you remember Cato Institute scrubbing their website once their own pet phrase -- “Private Accounts” -- was finally market-tested and found to be a disaster?
Don’t you remember the leaders or your party being outraged that Dem’s kept using the phrase “Private Accounts” which your party had been touting...even insisting that the Dem’s had invented it.
Don’t you remember that you guys won? The House, the Senate, the White House, the majority of governorships, the majority of judged...and yet once Lootapalooza took to the road and people started to notice that other than gutting the program via Private Accounts, Bush had no plan whatsoever, you all responded like you always do...by blaming the Democrats.
(BTW, yes, we do have a plan. It’s called “Social Security”.)
Don’t you remember that even Republicans finally had to admit that Private Accounts have nothing whatsoever to do with SS solvency?
Do you bother to remember that any honest scoring of Private Accounts yields a two-trillion dollar price tag? Enough to, you know, destroy the program...which as you damned well know has been the plan from the start.
Don’t you remember when Brit Hume went on teevee and simply lied his Botox-less Gumby ass off by cutting a certain quote by Roosevelt apart and pasting it together like a ransom note? And hey, by the way, has he or any of the rest of the Pravda Right lost their cushy news gigs yet for Deliberately Lying to the Public? Or it just always nakedly, brazenly “IOKIYAR” these days?
And finally, track back to the top of this post and take a good look at that picture. That was your party's First response to Social Security: Whip up a Molotov Cocktail of gay-bashing, traitor-baiting and fucking over the elderly and start lobbing it at anyone who dared question Dear Leader’s attempts to eviscerate Roosevelt’s Legacy.
So when you get caught with one chubby paw in the SS cookie jar and the other up grandma’s skirt (and I won’t even venture a guess as to where you prehensile tail is lodging itself these days) you are again simply incapable of admitting error or honestly critiquing any bullshit your Masters spout, no matter how overtly ridiculous.
Instead, when confronted with your own grotesque mendacity, you all go right to the All-Purpose, Iraqi Clusterfuck Playbook: Deny, deny, deny. Attack, attack, attack.
Or to misquote a legal truism as old as Imperial Rome, “When the Facts are with you, argue the Facts. When the Facts go against you, argue the Law. When the Fact and the Law both go against you, blame the Democrats, scream at the top of your lungs, and hope no one notices what an asshat you are.”
Because the Trump scandals are real and devastating, and the Whitewater scandals were, y'know, imaginary.
-- driftglass, today
Based on the skimpy real estate slide show of David Brooks' new multi-million dollar Capitol Hill retreat, it is hard to tell exactly what psychoactive vegetation grows in Mr. Brooks' garden. But based on his column in The New York Times today (the column that paid for his new multi-million dollar Capitol Hill retreat, as well as the other multi-million dollar domiciles he has bought and sold recently) Farmer Dave must be raising some mighty potent shit out by the pool area.
Because once we get past the obligatory hand-wringing over the debauched character of the racist clown that Mr. Brooks' Republican Party nominated and elected --
The third important lesson of the hearing is that Donald Trump is characterologically at war with the norms and practices of good government. Comey emerged as a superb institutionalist, a man who believes we are a nation of laws. Trump emerged as a tribalist and a clannist, who simply cannot understand the way modern government works.
Trump is also plagued with a self-destructive form of selfishness. He is consumed by a hunger for affirmation, but, demented by his own obsessions, he can’t think more than one step ahead.
In search of praise he is continually doing things that will end up bringing him condemnation. He lies to people who have the power to publicly devastate him. He betrays people who have the power to damage him. Trump is most dangerous to the people who are closest to him and are in the best position to take their revenge.
-- things take a turn towards the decidedly weird.
And I think I know why, about which more later.
The weirdness manifests itself in a carefully weasel-worded alibi in which Mr. Brooks gently eases his friends in the Republican congress off the hook by asserting that no matter how unhinged, lawless and destructive President Stupid may be, there is just no available mechanism for dealing with an unhinged, lawless and destructive President.
Sad!
As proof, Mr. Brooks offers this bizarrely pixilated assessment of what we all saw yesterday.
The second important implication of the hearings is that as far as we know, Donald Trump has not performed any criminal act that would merit removing him from office.
Sure, he cleared the room so he could lean on Comey to go easy on Michael Flynn. But he didn’t order Comey to shut down the investigation as a whole or do any of the things (like following up on the request) that would constitute real obstruction.
And sure, Trump did later fire Comey. But it’s likely that the Comey firing had little or nothing to do with the Flynn investigation.
This morning there are roughly one million lawyers on teevee (and another 20 million on the job, and another 10 million JDs-to-be in law school) debating how many bungles can dance on the head of this pin. And the overwhelming consensus among all of them whose names do not rhyme with "Snark Skeesowitz" is clearly this: if articles of impeachment could be drawn up on Richard Nixon for grunting his assent to obstruction to a third party, then fuck yes President Stupid can be impeached over personally and directly leaning on the director of the FBI after clearing the room of witnesses, and then bragging about firing him because of Russia on teevee.
Because impeachment is a political process and not a legal one, which Mr. Brooks damn well knows. Just as he damn well knows that the reason our political systems and institutions are broken is because they are hostage to the depraved whims of the same mob of Republican bigots, plutocrats and imbeciles that nominated and elected President Stupid in the first place.
Here is Mr. Brooks' former op-ed "boss" at The New York Times. Andrew Rosenthal, brutally subtweeting Mr. Brooks on the same op-ed page:
Others tried to make it seem as though Trump had not technically obstructed justice, and made much of the notion that he never said something like “I’m ordering you to fake the results of the investigation.”
That didn’t work either. There is no hiding the plain and simple fact that Trump abused his power. His primary goal was not, I believe, to protect Michael Flynn, but to protect a person far more important to Trump: himself.
Here is Andrew Sullivan, Mr. Brooks' former roommate in the Imaginary Reasonable Conservative bunk house (with emphasis added):
But the details to buttress this picture add weight and texture to all of it. Comey credibly asserted that the president asked for personal loyalty to him, and not to the Constitution; that Trump sought leverage over Comey in a highly inappropriate private dinner for two; that he cleared the Oval Office of everyone else so that he could ask Comey alone to drop the inquiry into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russia; that when Comey refused to obey, the president fired him; that when asked why he fired him, the president openly cited the investigation into Russia; and that he then brazenly threatened the FBI director if he spoke the truth about their interactions in hearings or the press.
What else do we really need to know?
Or look at it this way: We now have a witness of long public service, clear integrity, with contemporaneous memoranda and witnesses, who just testified under oath to the president’s clear attempt to obstruct justice. Any other president of any party who had been found guilty of these things would be impeached under any other circumstances...
And that last sentence right there is what is so deeply problematic for Serious Conservative pundits like Mr. Brooks. Because that last sentence right there is not only manifestly untrue, but the reason it is manifestly untrue represents the first mile marker on a long and treacherous road down which Serious Conservative pundits dare not go.
Because that road leads directly through the heart of the most dangerous territory on Earth for every Serious Conservative pundit: The Past.
As I have written several thousand times on this little blog o' mine, waging continuous war on The Past is
...the single defining characteristic that binds all Conservatives together -- the Reagan wig and Confederate flag clown pants big enough fit both Andrew Sullivan and Sarah Palin -- is their truly otherworldly ability to implacably ignore objective reality when it conflicts with whatever silly-ass nonsense they are lying about this week.
The Past is the Terrible Thing against which they have erected their mighty wall of Strategic Forgettery. It is the reason the media obediently abides by The Gingrich Rules and The Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks and why infamous bottom-feeding crackpots like Bill Kristol and Hugh Hewitt are suddenly Respected Political Analysts on the teevee machine.
In fact, the very reason for our present crisis is that our country is drowning in a vast, Republican-inflicted, media-enabled conspiracy of forgetting, and once we start down the road of remember our own past, the entire Conservative universe -- from Brooks to Hannity -- begins to fall apart.
Which is why Mr. Brooks uses the balance of his column in The New York Times to re-imagine the the Great Penis Hunt of the 1990's (h/t Brother Charles Pierce) as some apolitical act of God or nature. Like every other chapter of fake history in Mr. Brooks' Great Project, Mr. Brooks presents the GPH completely flensed of the despicable, partisan motives and methods of the leaders of the Republican Party who worked like mad to whip every Arkansas swamp shack rumor into The Greatest Constitutional Crisis In Modern History.
Mr. Brooks makes is no mention of the role the Conservative propaganda machine (led by the American Spectator magazine supercharged by Richard Mellon Scaife money) played in inventing one fake Clinton "scandals" after another. No mention of the role of the Republican House under the leadership of Newt Gingrich played in trying to reverse-engineer anything they could dig up or make up into a bill of impeachment long before anyone had ever heard of Monica Lewinsky. No mention of Whitewater's Javert-with-unlimited-billable-hours, Ken Starr.
Instead, Mr. Brooks turns the entire Republican attempted-coup-by-impeachment scheme -- from Whitewater through Blue Dress -- into a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger cautionary tale about the consequences of investigating presidents generally:
If past is prologue, this investigation will drag on for a while. The Clinton people thought the Whitewater investigation might last six months, but the inquiries lasted over seven years. The Trump investigation will lead in directions nobody can now anticipate. When the Whitewater investigation started, Monica Lewinsky was an unknown college student and nobody had any clue that an investigation into an Arkansas land deal would turn into an investigation about sex.
This investigation will ruin careers far and wide. Investigators go after anybody they think can yield information on the president. Before the Whitewater investigators got to Clinton they took down Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, Webb Hubbell, Susan and Jim McDougal, and many others.
But of course, The Past can only be prologue for those who remember it fully and clearly. So how perfectly ironic it is that doing this very thing -- remembering The Past fully and clearly -- is also the greatest single existential and financial threat to Conservatism generally, and to Mr. David Brooks' ability to afford his new multi-million dollar Capitol Hill retreat specifically.
Very Serious Conservative Junior League Person of the Year (1998), Ross "Chunky Bobo" Douthat longs for the good old days before the Republican Party went mad.
If fact, he has such a chubby or the Great Conservative Past that never was, he has dropped one of the most hilarious Freudian typos I have seen in print in a long time:
A long time ago, in the era we now know as B.T. (Before Trump), it was possible to envision a Republican primary campaign that would be a real contest of ideas, a clash of genuine policy visions — and therefore different from the empty I’m-not-Obama, no I’m-not-Obama contest of 2012. My favored scenario would have pitted Marco Rubio against Rand Paul: The former representing a reform-minded conservatism in domestic policy and a hawkish internationalism abroad; the latter representing a more libertarian domestic agenda and a noninterventionist posture overseas...
I realize that no one at the New York Times actually cares enough about what their wingnut welfare affirmative action hire writes to bother with fact-checking it, but I'm pretty sure that we're in the thick of the 2016 Republican primary campaign, not the 2012 Republican primary campaign.
However, Mr. Douthat's adorable fuck up right at the beginning of his latest exercise in dutiful Republican turd-polishing:
...
So a vote for Rubio is a vote for adaptation and ambition — for a conservatism that seeks to reassure the anxious middle on domestic policy and shore up the Pax Americana overseas. A vote for Cruz is a vote for rigor and retrenchment — for a more intensely ideological conservatism at home and a narrower definition of the national interest abroad. A vote for Trump is a vote for rupture — for a conservatism defined more by identity politics than ideology, more by nationalism than libertarianism, more by caudillism than the Constitution.
I have sympathy for all three of these tendencies — if not necessarily the men who currently embody them — and I think the ideal nominee would find a way to synthesize them, to sift the best and the worst of each.
But that nominee may not exist. So it’s up to the voters to choose which Republican future they prefer, from a lineup that offers not just echoes of the same old conservatism, but a real and pressing choice.
-- does open the door on what is fundamentally and irreparably broken on the Right: the fact that (as I have written about on this blog to the point of tedium) they only continue to survive by continuously lying about their own recent past. A past which is fresh and clear in the minds of the rest of us and which has been documented more thoroughly than any other period in human history.
At the low end of the spectrum, the lies come in the form of that endless, ever-replenishing ocean of ALLCAPS batshit "President Obama orders U.S. service members not to say 'Christmas'"-type conspiracies upon which much of the Right's beliefs float like tectonic plates. These lies that are passed around at the speed of light from one cluster of wingnut shut-ins to the next. These are the lies which sites like Snopes ("Bankrolled by foreign socialists, I hear!") spend 80% of their time debunking and which the Pig People go right on taking as gospel because, let's face it, without the Kenyan Usurper to blame for their every itch and hangnail, they risk having to face the fact that the Liberals have been right all along, that they really just bigoted, halfwit dupes and they really have spent most of their adult lives being played for chumps by a political movement which done nothing but fuck them coming and going.
And that is a reality which Conservatives are frankly too weak to face, which is why the ratings for Fox News and Hate Radio and Donald Trump will go right on being yoooge.
At the high end, the lies and the liars have to be more genteel. They have to align themselves with the sensibilities of the donor classes and the owners of media companies. To pass as Serious, they have to make at least a passing nod to the horrors of the immediate present, but preferably by allocate blame equally to Both Sides and definitely without implying that the events happening now are in any way related to the toxic shit the Right has been pumping into America's political groundwater for 40 years,
History for the Elite Conservative liars must be presented as a series of discrete and non-contiguous moments in which even the briefest critique of the events of today may only be made in transit between Conservatism's Bright Fake Past and it's Glorious Fake Future.
Yes, Ross Douthat, is does suck that the 2016 primary campaign of your Republican party is nothing but a childish, playground game of "I’m-not-Obama, no I’m-not-Obama".
But so was your party's 2012 primary campaign, which was definitely "Before Trump".
Or don't you remember?
2008 was the year a desperate GOP turned Sarah "Obama pallin' around with terrorist" Palin loose on America to the delight of the Pig People who prop up your party. (No coincidence that 2009 was the year the Koch Brothers rolled out the Bush Off Machine so that the Pig People could burn their Bush/Cheney lawn signs, put on tri-corner hats, without missing a beat, begin pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush.)
Or don't you remember?
In 2004, your party ran and won on a platform of hating gays, trashing Liberals as pro-terrorist, slandering John Kerry's honorable military record, and warning Murrica that Osama bin Laden would probably murder their children of they voted for the Dixie Chick party.
Or don't you remember?
Of course, misremembering the past is something we all do. For example, just today I found out that I had mistakenly grafted the ending of one Arthur C. Clarke novel onto the body of another. Or as Proust said, “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
But publicly and calculatedly lying about major events of the recent past? In defiance of overwhelming evidence? That is another matter entirely. It is despicable. It is dangerous. It is cowardly. And apparently it also guarantees at least a few lucky Americans a wingnut welfare affirmative action job-for-life at America's newspaper of record.
David Brooks of The New York Times has written a 4,500 word essay
on the subject of The Travails of Evangelical Christianity in
America Today, and The Glorious Future of Evangelical Christianity in
America tomorrow.
Whenever hepublicly belly-flops into the empty swimming
pool of his own boundless ignorance of how America lives and works and
thinks and feels in the Land Beyond The Hudson (as he did
last week), Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times
frequently retreats to the one safe place where he can pontificate
in galactically-sweeping language and no one will dare gainsay him.
The pulpit.
In the pulpit, Mr. Brooks is free to sermonize on the State Of The Human
Soul ...
For anyone new to the game, looking up at the mile-high coal face of a 4,500
word essay on Evangelical Christianity in America Today and Tomorrow by
Mr. David Brooks, the idea of parsing such a huge slab of Brookspeak -- 5.6 time larger
that his usual, 800-word extrusions -- may seem daunting.
Monumental. The work of generations.
But it's really not ... if you remember the essence of the game.
When deconstruction any piece of David Brooks work product, the most important
question to ask yourself is, "What is Brooks trying hard not to talk about?" What stretch of inconvenient history is he trying blot out or
skip over?
And that is where you find the honey in the rock.
Remember, in virtually everything he writes, Mr. Brooks is working to refine
his Great Project, about which yours truly has been writing for
longer than I care to think about:
Since the 2000s --- when he made a living writing
liberals-are-stupid-and-crazy hit pieces as the managing editor of
The Weekly Standard -- until today Mr. Brooks is almost congenitally
incapable of speaking truthfully about what has happened to his
Conservative movement and his Republican Party during the several decades long
period when he was one of the Right's most active and ubiquitous
evangelists.
There is barely a mention about the influence of Newt Gingrich or Rush
Limbaugh to be found anywhere in his writing. There is no Lee Atwater,
no Southern Strategy, no Powell Memo. One of the only columns where
Brooks bared his fangs -- when he lost it and went on
a fulminating rampage
-- was occasioned by the suggestion that
St. Ronald Reagan
had campaigned in the South by repeatedly playing on the racism of Southern
whites. Also the Tea Party was just a bunch of heartland patriots who
love Murrica and not racist in any way. Also the GOP has purged itself
of that tiny handful of crazies and is doing just great now!
The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their
brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people.
They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North
Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at
least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a
reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then
Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and
entered the Tom Cotton phase.-- David Brooks, November 5, 2014.
And then along came Donald Trump and did to the fairy tales of Brave
Republicans and Noble Conservatism that Mr. Brooks has been peddling his
entire adult like exactly what Donald Trump did to official documents
which the Presidential Records Act requires that every president
preserve:
Under the Presidential Records Act, the White House must send all written
communication related to the president's duties — memos, letters, papers,
emails — over to the National Archives. During his time in office, former
President Donald Trump famously ripped documents up to shreds and tossed
the paper fragments to the floor.
Of course, most honest response to the rise of Trump -- his zealous
popularity among the base and the the almost overnight collapse of any
opposition to him among the GOP elite and the Conservative media -- would have
been to admit that, damn, I guess the Left really was right about the Right
all along. This would be then be followed by a retreat from public life
for the next decade to rethink every rah-rah bullshit story you had ever
written about those Brave Republicans and that Noble Conservatism.
But even now, among recently-former Republican Never Trumpers like David
Brooks, there is still no graver mortal sin than admitting that the Left has
ever been right about anything, much less right about the Right all
along. Because to admit that wouldn't just be owning up to one mistake,
or two, or ten. For men like Brooks, that would mean negating their
entire life's work. Nullifying their identity. Annihilating their
"self".
So that was never gonna happen.
Instead, Mr. Brooks went to work on substituting a new, True
Conserative-valorizing revisionist history for the old one.
In Mr. Brooks' new revisionist history...
...Conservatism's glorious past is still glorious,
...but with no warning whatsoever, the Right went completely and inexplicably
insane.
...This all transpired suddenly 5-6 years ago...
...and no one saw it coming.
...Many friendships were lost because, suddenly, Good Conservatives no longer
recognized...
...these suddenly newly Bad Conservatives.
...Have I mentioned how sudden this all was?
...That there were no alarm bells whatsoever. No Big Red Lights
blinking. That all of this caught all of us professional political
havers-of-opinions and Good Conservatives completely by surprise.
...But take heart, because as bad as things may look now, a bright, new Future
Conservatism is just around the corner! From
Brooks in 2018:
A Renaissance on the Right
By David Brooks
What’s bad for the gavel is good for the pen. The Republican Party is
in the midst of a cataclysmic transformation. But all the political
turmoil is creating a burst of intellectual creativity on the
right...
So what does any of this have to do with the extra large owl pellet on the
subject of Evangelical Christianity in America Today and Tomorrow that Mr. Brooks
harked up onto the pages of The New York Times today?
It's simple.
All Mr. Brooks' has done with his TL:DR On The Mount this week is
swap the word "Conserative" out from his new, revisionist Conservative history
and swap in the word "Evangelical".
While differing over politics and other secondary matters, [Evangelicals]
are in theory supposed to be unified by their shared first love — as
brothers and sisters in Christ. Their common devotion is supposed to bring
out the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, faithfulness,
gentleness and self-control.
But then, with no warning whatsoever, suddenly 5-6 years ago...
This is what has happened over the past six years to millions of
American Christians, especially evangelicals...
“As an evangelical, I’ve found the last five years to be shocking,
disorienting and deeply disheartening,” says [Tim Dalrymple, president of
the prominent evangelical magazine Christianity Today].
Many friendships were lost because, suddenly, Good Evangelicals no longer
recognized these suddenly newly Bad Conservatives.
Think of your 12 closest friends. These are the people you vacation with,
talk about your problems with, do life with in the most intimate and
meaningful ways. Now imagine if six of those people suddenly took a
political or public position you found utterly vile. Now imagine learning
that those six people think that your position is utterly vile. You would
suddenly realize that the people you thought you knew best and cared about
most had actually been total strangers all along. You would feel
disoriented, disturbed, unmoored. Your life would change.
Have I mentioned how sudden this all was?
Over the past few years, the atmosphere within many Christian
organizations has grown more tense and bitter. As an evangelical friend of
mine noted...
But the culture at [Christian news organization] World deteriorated
over the past few years...
Over the past several years I watched fellow journalists Peter
Wehner, Michael Gerson and David French earnestly and in good faith engage
with Trump-backing Christians, trying to understand what was going
on...
But take heart, because as bad as things may look now, a bright, new Future
Evangelicalism may be just around the corner!
Amid the storm, new coalitions are gradually forming, across many
different kinds of Christians...
Hints of Christian renewal are becoming visible...
This experience of breaking, rethinking and reorienting a life
could be the first stage in renewal...
As for this last part, I hope Brooks is right. I really do.
Because we Liberal Christians are pretty goddamn tired of being out here,
fighting this particular fight all alone. But as for rest of Mr. Brooks' fairy
tale, it's arrant bullshit.
After five years of fake terror alerts, calling critics “traitors”, scaring
the living hell out of people to win elections, ever more tax cuts for
billionaires when you are already billions in debt, the memorable Swift Boat
Social Security “Granny’s a Fag Loving/Troop Hating Whore” Liars ad campaign,
lies-lies-and-more-lies about Iraq, Terry Schiavo and an all-out War on the
Judiciary climaxing with thinly veiled threats and and calling non-Christopath
Judges worse that terrorists (Insert you own list of Top 20 List of Republican
Treacheries here)…then some dizzy bitch speaking for the RNC actually says
that, “anger is not an agenda” and her pin-head doesn’t implode in cloud of
pink cloud of meat, bone and hypocrisy…you have to fall down laughing AND you
know you’re doing something right.
(Although I’m forced to agree to this extent: Anger is not the WHOLE
Republican agenda. There’s also xenophobia, paranoia, whining victim
mentality, criminal fiscal irresponsibility, hatred of Science, “magical
thinking” and a worship of Ignorance all wired together with cancerous cult
ideology founded on a debased and perverted view of Christianity. So they've
got that goin' for them.)
-- to describe what had been going on inside the GOP since the time when this
guy --
-- gave this hateful pig-fucker --
-- a seat at the GOP's High Table and anointed him as a Republican kingmaker.
17 years ago I also wrote about how the Little Red State Fundies
had become the GOP's indispensable foot-soldiers. And while the
beautiful minds of the Conservative elite contented themselves with pretending
that these loathsome zealots were a harmless minority, every one of them knew
(but none of them dared say) that without those Little Red State Fundies
licking envelopes and knocking doors, their party would never, ever win
another election.
In that post from 17 years ago I also clearly laid out exactly
what was happening inside the GOP now that the Little Red State Fundies
had figured out that they were the real power within the party:
...
And Little Red State Fundy delivered the margin of victory and was
featured in many, many magazines: without Little Red State Fundy, the
Republican Party could never, ever, ever win anything.
And now everybody knew it. Then she said, "Now who shall help me Rule the Earth."
"We will!" said Moderate Republicans, Undecideds, and
Libertarians.
"I am quite sure you would," said Little Red State Fundy, "but
see, now you are all my bitches."
Then she called Randall Terry and Tom DeLay and Ann Coulter and Jerry
Falwell and Rush Limbaugh and James Dobson, and they and the rest of the
Shining Path Republicans used what was left of the Constitution as
ass-floss. And judges were terrorized into silence. And those deemed ungodly were beaten in the streets. And they invaded whoever the fuck they felt like, for whatever fucking
reason they chose. And the very idea of a Free and Fair press died.
And to people who had been very clear all along that they genuinely believed in a Theocratic Nanny State and
thought that precipitating Armageddon and triggering the Second Coming should be the highest calling of
any worldly government, were handed over the police, courts, government,
treasury and nuclear weapons stockpiles of the United States of
America.
And in the end -- just as they had been warned for the past twenty years -- there was nothing whatsoever left at all for Moderate
Republicans, Undecideds, and Libertarians.
That was 17 years ago and even a stupid non-coastal Libtard like me could clearly see
what the GOP had become and where it was headed.
Hell, Aaron Sorkin was dunking on them over and over again, right there on his multiple-award winning network teevee show --
-- during in the late 1990s.
And yet, decade after decade, the Brain Caste of the Right and America's most
revered havers-of-opinions like Mr. David Brooks continued to pretend it wasn't happening.
Continued lying about
it.
Lying to themselves. Lying to each other. And lying to the
country.
Until the day their party nominated and elected Donald Trump. And then,
suddenly, the Brain Caste of the Right and the America's most revered
havers-of-opinions were shocked!shocked! to discover that their Republican
party had been full of Republicans all along -- that the party's dog-loyal
Evangelical Christopath base had been Evangelical Christopaths all along.
And after four years of non-stop corruption, racism, lying and madness what
did the Christopaths do? They goose-stepped to the polls en masse to re-nominate Trump, and, in the general election, they came out for him in even
greater numbers than they had in 2016.
...Other conservatives are rising to defend that order, including
National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who later this month comes out with his
epic and debate-shifting book, “Suicide of the West.”
-- three of the men Mr. Brooks now names as leaders of this Evangelical
reformation which may be right around the corner just so happen to be three more Iraq War pimps and fellow-travelers from back
in the good old days of stomping hippies and lying about the GOP:
I’ve seen this same sort of journey among many of my friends who at least
at one time identified as evangelicals. Over the past several years I
watched fellow journalists Peter Wehner, Michael Gerson and David French
earnestly and in good faith engage with Trump-backing Christians, trying
to understand what was going on. Now they are courageously and
passionately opposing the Trumpification of American Christianity. They’ve
become leading spokesmen for reform...
This post is already too long for anyone to have made it this far without
oxygen and a Sherpa guide, so let me just add that I do not share Mr. Brooks'
belief in the earnestness, good faith, courage or passion of Michael
Gerson for the simple reason that I remember the past which Mr. Brooks
works so very hard to forget. And if you'd like to read a long, long
post on the subject, you should click on this link here.
"The Bonfire of the Sanities". Here's a short snip from the beginning:
Our story begins with our nation struggling to dig out from the
wreckage that the Dubya Administration left behind. A failed and
despicable administration -- the worst in American history until the
rise of Donald Trump -- in which Michael Gerson, a deeply Conservative
Catholic, served with unswerving loyalty, and to which he owes his
position in the Can-Never-Be-Fired-No-Matter-How-Fucking-Wrong-They-Are
Pundit Guild.
And from the very beginning, Mr. Gerson clearly loathed and resented
Barack Obama and did not hesitate to use his Washington Post column to
say so. Which is no surprise. Gerson is first, last, and
always a Republican -- a Republican who, in 2008, stood in front of the dumpster fire
that was the Dubya Administration doing what all Republicans were doing
at the time: trying frantically to change the subject by lobbing
anything they could at the Democrats who were running for the honor of
cleaning up their fucking mess
So Mr. Smoking Gun/Mushroom Cloud had no compunction about attacking the character of candidate Obama.
According to Gerson, Barack Obama was so "rootless, reactive and panicky" that he picked Joe Fucking Biden as his running mate. I
mean, how foolish was that, right?...
Obama was a lightweight who had destroying his sterling reputation by
daring to run a campaign for political office:...
In case you don't speak weasel-tongue, "cool, aloof manner and his patronizing" is Conservative pundit for "uppity".
Of course this all amounted to nothing because in the long and terrible
shadow cast by the complete failure and collapse of the Dubya
Administration, Republicans were pretty much doomed in 2008. And
so Mr. Gerson found another gear as a member of the grim, relentless
opposition. For the next eight years, there was virtually nothing
President Obama could do (or refrain from doing) that Gerson would not
deem to be either calculating or naïve or feckless or hateful...
But who knows. Maybe one day, when he grows up, Mr. Gerson, can finally become a
real Christian.
However, as it says in a book I once read, "faith without works is dead."
And until I start seeing some clear, tangible signs that all of these shocked and alarmed hypocrites and Pharisees are finally willing to come to terms with how deeply they defiled the most basic tenets of the faith they claim to believe in order to advance their political agendas -- and how those decades of selling Christ out over and over again in order to obtain dishonorable secular victories led directly to the rise of Trump -- I have no reason to believe a word of it.
PS: I'm sure there are typos to be found here, but I'm presently too tired to track them all down and comb them all out.
