It's almost as if Republicans have known all along that their key to victory was pandering to the bigots and imbeciles who constitute the overwhelming majority of the Republican base.
And you know who Castellanos is, right? Worked for Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond and a parade of other Republican horribles, climbing the greasy pole of the Republican campaign consultancy until he made it to the big time and took his talent for cutthroat scumbaggery to the world presidential campaigns.
And what does such as one as this creature do now?
You already know, don't you. Or you're at least in the ballpark. Because there is a Club...
From Wikipedia:
Castellanos is currently a principal partner at Purple Strategies, major clients of the bipartisan firm have included the United States Chamber of Commerce, BP and PhRMA.
Castellanos is a guest commentator and contributor for CNN and has appeared on Meet the Press...
Castellanos writes online commentary for The Huffington Post and National Review, and is also a public speaker and member of the Washington Speakers Bureau...
In 2008, Castellanos was a resident fellow at [wait for it...] Harvard University's Institute of Politics.
The following year, Castellanos became a senior communications advisor to Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele...
And now?
Well, sensing the opportunity to put even worse monsters in power while at the same time grifting the same old bigots for some brand new money, Castellanos has wedged himself as far up Trump's ass as humanly possible
Because this is who Republicans are.
As America's premier chronicler of the frauds and follies of Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times it is my duty to inform you that this appellation is no longer strictly true.
From The Atlantic:
David Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of the forthcoming book
Blathering Nonsense From An Aging Hack Who Dumped His Wife For His Much Younger Research AssistantHow to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
I have no idea why The Atlantic has chosen to omit the fact that Mr. Brooks has been the Times' in-house PEZ dispenser of Conservative legacy media claptrap for +20 years. After all, Brooks' Times credentials are what snagged him all of his book deals and all of his other make-work gigs at places like Yale, Meet the Press, NPR and PBS:
Let's turn now to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart. That's New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Jonathan Capehart, associate editor for The Washington Post.
The Economist has hired the former editorial page director at The New York Times, James Bennet, who resigned last year after the newspaper published a controversial op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.).
...a proud democratic socialist through college. Then, in the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s, after watching the wretched effects some progressive social policies had on poor neighborhoods in Chicago, I switched over to the right — and then remained a happy member of Team Red for decades.
Serving until 1975, Despres gained fame as an independent Democrat, consistently opposing the policies of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. In 1963, a young Bernie Sanders worked on Despres' reelection campaign. Frequently on the short end of 49-1 votes, Despres became known as the "liberal conscience of Chicago. Because of his strong advocacy of civil rights and open housing, Despres also became known as "the lone negro on the City Council," even though he was white and the council had six black alderman allied with the mayor.
Despres spoke five languages, served as Chicago City Council Parliamentarian for eight years after 20 years of service to the city. Despres authored Challenging the Daley Machine, A Chicago Alderman's memoir.
Then, in the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s, after watching the wretched effects some progressive social policies had on poor neighborhoods in Chicago, I switched over to the right—and then remained a happy member of Team Red for decades. During the era of social thinkers like James Q. Wilson, Allan Bloom, Thomas Sowell, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Irving Kristol, the right was just more intellectually alive. But over time I’ve become gradually more repulsed by the GOP—first by Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, then by the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, and now, of course, by Donald Trump.
One could argue that the Reagan-Thatcher era ended when Reagan left office in 1989...but that's very misleading because when Republicans speak of that time, it's almost never an "era"; it's always a "revolution". The Reagan Revolution.
And what was the Reagan Revolution?
It was fully embracing Nixon's Southern Strategy, and building a constituency of bigots by railing against imaginary "welfare queens" and "young bucks" who were stealing money from hard-working, real Murricans.
It was Reagan launching his 1980 campaign with a wink and a nod and a "State's rights" speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi just a short walk from the site where three civil rights workers had been murdered and buried in shallow graves by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. David Brooks famously lost his shit when this fact was reintroduced to the public by one of his colleagues in 2007 and the entire internet joined hands to help Mr. Brooks sit his ass back down.
...And because he cannot cope with the idea that what he loved is a lie, like Miss Emily [from William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily], Mr. Brooks has instead set up housekeeping with the putrefying corpse of his Once And Future King.
He sleeps with it.
Chats with it.
Holds tea parties with it.
And will not tolerate any back sass about its goodness and purity.
Like so many Modern Conservatives, David Brooks has been fucking the moldering remains of something long dead, gone and rotten for so long, it started to seem normal to him. And sharing a political marriage bed with a corpse in a kind of ideological necrophilia also just so happens to very much suit the despicable goals of the vile, little monsters who actually own and operate Brooks’ Party and his Movement.
And in his column entitled “History and Calumny”, the gagging reek of continuing this absurd, genteel indulgence of Brook’s nauseating brand of conservative paralogia and psychosis has finally gotten to be too much for the rest of us to stand.
Where were we?
Oh yeah. What constituted the Reagan Revolution
It was officially making "the government" the whipping boy for whatever was pissing you off today.It was -- with the assistance of Tony Scalia and Robert Bork -- killing the Fairness Doctrine, which, in-turn immediately gave rise to Rush Limbaugh and the entire Hate Radio industry. Longtime readers will note that, in all of his writing going back to his Weekly Standard days, Brooks is careful to avoid mentioning the existence of Rush Limbaugh, despite the fact that, by 1992, Limbaugh had George H.W. Bush literally carrying his luggage for him. And in 1994, Brooks' own paper ran a long article quoting Republican gushing over the fact that Rush Limbaugh and Hate Radio were directly responsible for Republicans taking over the House and Senate that year.
The Reagan Revolution was also 100 other things such as the disaster of supply-side economics, the treason of Iran/Contra, and breaking the back of labor unions, all of which Rick Perlstein has written about at great length. But the Reagan Revolution is also ongoing. It was a point on a continuum going back at least to Goldwater, and that spawned all the things that Brooks says makes him feel icky:
Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, then by the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, and now, of course, by Donald Trump.
Did you notice that, once Reagan had been dispatched, there is no longer any mention of times or dates or context? Brooks just drops the names of a couple of villains and a couple of political factions as he hustles his reader straight through more that three decades of very consequential American history like a bouncer kicking an abusive drunk to the curb.
Reagan, yadda yadda, coupla villains, Trump! Now let's move along!
Which, when you think about it for even a second, is a very strange thing for a U of C History baccalaureate to do.
I mean, sure, Tom DeLay was a thug piss-drunk on power (and booze) and Gingrich is a shitbag (whose career, I am at pains to remind you, was saved and rehabilitated again and again by Brooks' very good friend David Gregory) but aren't there some conspicuously huge holes here, even in Brooks' hyper-abridged, "Nothing to see here!" sprint through history?
Like, for example, the eight years we all lived through under the second-worst president in American history, George W. Bush?
Katrina? Terri Schiavo? The Brooks Brother riot? Iraq? WMD? Abu Ghraib? The collapse of the global economy? Any of this ringing any bells? Any at all?
Or course not. Because what Mr. Brooks of The Atlantic has produced is a museum-quality specimen of the four word motto of the Never Trumpers and the legacy media.
Say it with me now.
Served up with some obligatory whining about how the Democratic party still makes Brooks sick:
But my new suit is ill-fitting. I’m still not fully comfortable as a Democrat. And given that there are many other former Republicans who have become politically homeless in the Age of MAGA, I thought it might be useful to explain, first, what it is about the left that can make a wannabe convert like me want to flee in disgust...
Go fuck yourself David.
Now, back to the Rules of Remembering.
It's OK to remember Reagan, but only as long as he is properly revered as St. Reagan.
It's not OK to remember the Bush Administration because David Brooks spent eight years tongue-bathing Bush as a military and economic genius, declaring that Iraq would be a cake walk, promising that deficits were a thing of the past, and so forth. And mocking and slandering anyone who warned otherwise. And when asked about that very thing point-blank, Brooks flat-out lied about it, so no fair remembering Dubya.
It's OK to remember the Tea Party, but only as long as you remember it as something which "repulsed".
It is not OK to remember when Mr. Brooks was on Meet the Press, flashing his PhD in Knowing Racism Stuff , when right there, in front of God and everybody, he extrapolated from his single, jog-by observation of a Fake Tea Party Rally and a Black family reunion going on near each other that didn't result in a riot, that the Tea Baggers are the goddamn salt of the goddamn Earth. The best kind of people. And not at all racist!
Brooks: Listen, I was out jogging. You wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out jogging in the mall. I was at a tea party rally, tea party rally. Also there was a group called the back--Black Family Reunion, celebration of African-American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle, sitting at the same table, eating, watching concerts together. Among most of those people there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on a, on a warm Sunday afternoon.
It's OK to remember that Tom DeLay was and is a scumbag of the highest order.
But it is not OK to remember how Mr. Brooks used DeLay as raw material when building his indestructible Both Sides Do It fortress after the collapse of the Bush administration (about which we are also forbidden to speak.) From David Brooks in 2006:
...There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.
All were on display Tuesday night.
The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind.
The Republican Party was represented by its collapsing old guard — scandal-tainted Tom DeLay trying to get his name removed from the November ballot. And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.
The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.
The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.
But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people...
And it is super-duper not OK to remember how, after the collapse of the Bush administration, the Both Sides Do It lie metastasized from the habit of terrible and lazy journalists into the state religion of the legacy media and the all-occasion alibi/permission structure for the Republican base to lower itself deeper and deeper into depravity and madness.
And, finally, it's OK to think of the Republican party as something which was giving Mr. Brooks a dire case of the rumbly tummies more than 30 years ago, but it is very much not OK to remember the many, many, many times over those decades when Brooks confidently announced the coming of Glorious Republican Renaissance which was always just around the corner.
Or that the 2016 Republican nominee was definitely gonna be Rubio!
Or, just ten years ago, when Brooks said this:
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.
If you've been reading this blog awhile, you'll recognize this bit I wrote back in 2013 with a little emphasis added:
...it is now painfully clear that Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.
And odds are he'll get away with it too.
And how precisely it pairs with Brooks' writing in The Atlantic this week:
For context, let me explain a little more about my political peregrinations. I think of myself as a Whig, part of a tradition that begins with Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party in the 18th century, continues through the Whig Party of Henry Clay...
Getting the "Whig" bit right more than a decade ago was fun and all, but the balance of that post -- that it has always been Mr. Brooks' long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince -- is what his cover article in The Atlantic was all about.
By once again using his apex position in the legacy media to contorting the past by obliterating Republican catastrophes, turning villains into heroes and other villains that cannot be erased or inverted into one-word antique curiosities, Brooks transforms a 50-year trajectory of elite Republican willful myopia, complicity, incompetence, outright lies and relentless Both Siderism...
...into a fairy tale where, at every step along the way, Brooks' judgement was sure-footed and far-sighted.
This is the keel of a mighty, superyacht-sized lifeboat he is building for himself.
It's called the "Dave's Not Here" and on it he plans to continue to sail away from his own past in style.
And, once again, odds are he'll get away with it.
Burn The Lifeboats
The playwright David Mamet once wrote...
Embracing Trump’s politics, David Mamet has become the Kanye West of American lettersThe author of ‘Recessional’ offers up a bevy of conspiracy theories
The screenwriter Aaron Sorkin builds on that definition. He says that strong drama...
Aaron Sorkin: How I Would Script This Moment for Biden and the Democrats
But there’s something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So here’s my pitch to the writers’ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.
Christopher Booker wrote a book called “The Seven Basic Plots,” arguing that...
As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues
...the novelist Mary Gaitskill once told The Atlantic.
As the novelist and New York University writing professor Darin Strauss has put it...
Compelling characters have what the British author and writing instructor Will Storr calls...
But, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt told Storr for his book...
The novelist E.M. Forster reminded us...
The Obama MemosThe making of a post-post-partisan Presidency.In a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post columnist, who had assembled a number of right-leaning journalists to meet the President-elect. Accepting such an invitation was a gesture on Obama’s part that signalled his desire to project an image of himself as a post-ideological politician, a Chicago Democrat eager to forge alliances with conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. That week, Obama was still working on an Inaugural Address that would call for “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Will’s yellow clapboard house. He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan...
Like climate change, the madness of the Republican party is man-made.
Like climate change, the conditions that created a Republican party base stupid enough and racist enough to manifest a calamity like Trump were a long time in the making.
Like climate change, all along the way there were ample signs warning where the Republican party was headed and how dangerous it would become.
Like climate change, the warning signs kept getting clearer and scarier.
Like climate change, the clearer and scarier the warning signs got, the deeper into denial the professional Conservative denialists sank.
Like climate change, the clearer and scarier the warning signs got, the more those trying to make the public pay attention to the impending disaster were ignored or shouted down or blame-shifted or "whatabouted" to the margins.
Like climate change, there are huge, monied interests with vast resources funding Conservative denialism.
Like climate change, the acceleration of the wild lethality of the Republican party exactly fit with the warnings that professional Conservative denialists had been loudly dismissing all along.
Like climate change, once the wild lethality of the monsters and quislings and cowards which the Republican party has manifested became too catastrophic to ignore, most professional Conservative denialists went right on making a living pretending that none of this was happening. (A few professional Conservative denialists began to recognize the catastrophe for what it was, but still swear that it all began spontaneously and without warning in 2016.)
Like climate change, the destructive power of one or two or even three violent, "once in a century" events, while, tragic, are no longer the issue. Because...
Like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, the terrible damage done to our democracy by Hurricane Trump will someday come to an end, but the environment which manifested that particular monster has now changed irrevocably. There will be more and worse monsters slouching out of the GOP's political whelping box for the foreseeable future. In fact, they are with us today, all over the country, itching for their chance to unleash their particular brand of ruin upon us.
However, unlike climate change, the transformation of the Republican base into an army of reprogrammable meatbags was not the poisonous byproduct of some other process or industry. Something that could at least be mitigated if, collectively, we mounted an urgent, spirited and ongoing campaign to do so. This is not the case in the Republican party.
In the Republican party, polluting our politics and zombifying the base was the point. And having achieved all they set out to do, the majority of the party is perfectly content with what they have become, while the tiny minority who have been cast out of the party dream of lifeboats.
From The Bulwark:
Romney Winks
Mitt Romney is getting a little tired of you asking him whether he’s going to endorse Kamala Harris. He wonders: Can’t you people read between the lines?
“I’ve made it very clear that I don’t want Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States,” Romney said at an event in Utah yesterday. “And you’re going to have to do the very difficult calculation of what that would mean.”
The Utah senator has never before implied so strongly that he’s actively rooting for Kamala Harris. What remains fascinating is that he still won’t say it out loud.
He says his reticence is deliberate. “There’s a good shot that the Republican Party is going to need to be rebuilt and reoriented, either after this election, or if Donald Trump is reelected, after he’s the president,” Romney went on, as is his habit. “I believe I will have more influence in the party by virtue of saying it as I’ve said it. I’m not planning on changing the way I’ve described it.”...
This is madness, and to their credit, the author says as much.
Why he thinks the GOP will be headed for reorientation if Trump wins again, rather than for four more years of lockstep devotion to the least of Dear Leader’s whims, we couldn’t begin to tell you. ..
The pose Romney is striking here is a common one for many anti-Trump Republicans, ex-Republicans, and conservatives—even ones whose primary political goal is somehow finding a way to move the Republican Party past Trump. These people are open, ideologically, to the premise that Harris would be a far better, safer president than a re-elected Trump. But they’re also still trying to maintain their credibility and moral authority in a coalition whose current sole bedrock principle is the Democrats are always worse.
Ultimately, the little Fig Leaf Gavotte that Romney is doing here -- and that so many other Never Trumpers have done and are still doing-- is, at once, boring, sad and darkly hilarious.
They brought this on themselves, and now they want someone or something to save them from the disaster which their ambition, their hubris and their patrician I-don't-want-to-know-what-goes-on-down-in-the-bowels-of-the-party cowardice created.
But nothing can save them, because by their own hand the ambient political environment of their party has accelerated beyond their ability harness and use it. They cling to flotsam on a storm-tossed sea they manufactured, and dream of lifeboats.
Sometimes those lifeboats are flimsy, made from simperingly parsed words about not supporting a tyrant but not endorsing the not-tyrant.
Other lifeboats are to be found on teevee and in the op-ed pages of American newspapers, where whitewashing and rehabbing the reputations of recently-former Republicans has become an integral part of every legacy medis corporation's business plan. Or in dreams of using their now-outsized media presence to reshape the ambient environment of the Democratic party to suit their tastes.
Other times those dreams take the shape of an entire armada of lifeboats, waiting like so many cruise ships docked nose-to-tail at Cozumel, for the immediate crisis to pass. Then, once the skies have cleared, presumably under the leadership of newly-minted Hero of the Resistance, Admiral Liz Cheney, the luxury fleet will sail back to power, and back to calling Democrats baby-murderers and "the face of pure evil".
But there is no sailing back to 1980 or 1984 or 2000 in glory. First, because all of that is gone for good. And second, and because all of those nostalgia-swaddled Republican landmarks were actually the warning signs along the road to the malignant political ecosystem which not only spawned Hurricane Trump, but is already busy gestating the next monster...
...and the next...
...and the next.
Which is why we...
