Donald Trump and the Misremembrance of Things Past

The reason Liberals are so hated by, well, everyone, is not that we loathe America ... or that we want to foist some radical agenda off on an innocent, unsuspecting nation...

No, the reason Liberals are despised is that we refuse to forget the past.

Refuse to forget about your past.

And we refuse to shut up about it. 

-- driftglass, April 2011

Today, even as I write this, The Twitter is setting aside its shock over discovering that David Brooks is a clueless, privileged ass (#wherehaveyoupeoplebeenforthelast20years) and absorbing the New!Horror! that Donald Phineas Taylor Barnum Trump said something asinine and vicious about Senator John McCain.

Actually, no.  That's not 100% accurate.  Conservative Twitter and its Beltway enablers are are losing their shit over the mean and asinine thing Donald Charles Ponzi (aka. Charles Ponci, Carlo and Charles P. Bianchi) Trump said about Senator John McCain;  Everybody-Else Twitter is having a fine time asking Conservative Twitter why the fuck this particular vicious, asinine comment has gotten the Tiger Balm into their collective Underoos and not any other the other dozens and dozens of vicious, asinine and ludicrous things which the current GOP front-runner lets fly every time he opens his Trump Hole.

Now you could waste you valuable time arguing various aspects of this wonderful new facet of the Golden Turd in the Republican Punch-bowl that is Donald Harcourt Fenton Mudd Trump, but the wise Liberals knows that these days Conservatives fall into only one of two categories:

Those who are very, very stupid:

@bluegal @Mr_Electrico @GovernorPerry @realDonaldTrump bush never attacked him on war hero status that is a fact not libturd crap

— Jeff Smith (@hurricane13) July 18, 2015

And those who are economically dependent on the limitless credulity of the very, very stupid:

Advice to @realDonaldTrump: Apologize for this pronto. Otherwise beginning of end. Trump Attacks McCain for Being POW http://t.co/0goAc6mHb8

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) July 18, 2015

So, as always, "debating" the meatsticks on the Right and the parasites on the Right who feed on those meatsticks is an empty and pointless exercise.

However, what I think all of us -- wise Liberals, Conservative meatsticks and the parasites who build media empires on the paranoia and stupidity of those meatsticks -- can all agree on is that scurrilous and baseless attacks on John McCain -- especially going after a man's honorable military service -- should, as Governor Rick Perry has said, automatically mark a person as unfit to be Commander-in-Chief!

.@realDonaldTrump's comments today make him unfit to be Commander-in-Chief https://t.co/EVl1X66gHo

— Rick Perry (@GovernorPerry) July 18, 2015

And right here is where Donald Trump shows his accidental genius.  Because as the ragged-ass remnants of the Republican Establishment rises to condemn Trump --

The Republican National Committee issued a strong rebuke of Donald Trump’s mocking of Sen. John McCain’s military service Saturday, saying his comments “have no place in our party or country.”

-- surely someone somewhere is tapping them frantically on the shoulder and reminding them that any conversation about slanderous attacks on McCain risks leading right back to the slanderous attacks on John McCain by George W. Bush's campaign in 2000.

From Vanity Fair:

The Trashing of John McCain

...

On February 2, 2000, John McCain arrived in South Carolina red-hot, a 19-point-upset victor in New Hampshire over George Bush. In the final days there, some of Bush’s aides had pressed him to turn aggressively negative. Bush had resisted. His political guru, Karl Rove, overconfident for too long, had agreed.

Now, in South Carolina, Bush had lost close to a 50-point lead. With just 17 days before the vote, his back was firmly against the wall.

“Desperate people do desperate things,” Warren Rudman, the 74-year-old former New Hampshire senator and one of McCain’s national chairmen, told me. “When you look at a lot of campaigns, not just that one, when front-runners suddenly fall behind, their campaign consultants just go off the deep end.… People going down for the third time, they grab on for anything they can get ahold of, and if it happens to be something nasty, rotten, and false, that doesn’t make much difference.”

At a meeting of Bush’s top staff that first day, the signal went out “to take the gloves off,” Time magazine reported at the time.

“I always knew that if Bush got in trouble he’d push the doomsday button,” a respected Washington figure with solid ties to the religious right told me, asking that his name not be used. He said he’d been told the strategy called for an “underground campaign” by all the heavyweight groups of the Republican and Christian right, a campaign that would be modeled on Ralph Reed’s infamous, Atwater-like boast about his Christian Coalition work: “I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until Election Night.” Luckily for Bush, the source said, the showdown was in South Carolina, where the Christian Coalition had its greatest strength. They’d work through word of mouth in the evangelical community, and it’d never be picked up by the media. “Reed had pledged to Rove that he could deliver. Ultimately, it was all about power. They were all attaching their fates to Bush.” 

...

The “revolting” e-mail—alleging that “McCain chose to sire children without marriage”—was from Richard Hand, a professor of the Bible at Greenville’s Christian-fundamentalist Bob Jones University, Bush’s very first campaign stop, on February 2. With the school’s ban on interracial dating still in effect then, the veteran political reporter Curtis Wilkie told me “he might as well have gone to a goddamned Klan rally” as go to B.J.U.

Bush came under attack for it, mostly from Democrats and commentators. McCain said little. (It wasn’t until nine days after the primary that he declared that the G.O.P. is “the party of Ronald Reagan, not Pat Robertson … the party of Abraham Lincoln, not Bob Jones.”) But Danielle Vinson, an associate professor of political science at Greenville’s Furman University, who studied the primary in depth, told me that what the media didn’t grasp is that “B.J.U. people are very active, very political; they’re a great campaign resource.” As it turned out, Wilkie said, “Bush knew what he was doing going to Bob Jones”—shrewdly “pandering” to the evangelical vote, just as called for in the Reed game plan.

...

“This whole thing, it was orchestrated by Rove, it was all Bush’s deal.… It was pretty rank,” said Fletcher, “and they had an institution that was peddling all that shit, and it was a university, Bob Jones University. I’m telling you, if there was a campaign headquarters in South Carolina, there it was. Hand was part of it, but Hand wasn’t the only one.”

Mark Carman, who owns the Capitol City News & Maps store, told me of going to a candidates’ debate in Columbia, “and when we got back to our car, there was a flyer under the windshield wiper saying something about McCain having a Negro child. My wife is African-American—she just tore it up.”

...

McCain’s closest aides were so stunned by the angle of the attack that at first they tried to shield him from it. “We expected one thing, and it was quite the opposite,” said Fletcher, who personally saw the “Negro child” flyers “all over every car” at the debate. “We figured they would go after him on some sort of philandering issue. McCain had pretty well knocked all that down [by admitting in his 1999 autobiography that, at some point after his five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison, he’d been unfaithful to his first wife], but I always figured that would sort of be the underground thing there. But, man, the child thing.… I’ve seen the worst form of racist sons of bitches in the world in David Duke, but this was unbelievable.”

Almost daily, the ugly buzz grew. Another prominent rumor was that Cindy was a drug addict. In 1994 she’d admitted that she had a prescription-painkiller problem and blamed it on two spinal surgeries and the stress of her husband’s role in the Keating Five scandal. (He was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a disgraced financier.)

There were other whispers as well: McCain had slept with prostitutes and given his wife V.D.; he’d turned traitor in the “Hanoi Hilton,” or was mentally unstable from his captivity, or was a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed to destroy the G.O.P. (There was then, and still is, a wacky Web site devoted to those last theories. The former Green Beret behind it, Ted Sampley, is back at it today with a savage “Stop Hanoi John Kerry” diatribe; he also supports the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Beyond Sampley, most anti-McCain vets in South Carolina opposed the senator on political and/or veterans’ issues—not for his war service. A top McCain aide told me he didn’t think the vets’ antagonism was nearly the factor that the more personal attacks were.) For just meeting with the gay Log Cabin Republicans, McCain was labeled the “Fag Army” candidate.

...

In 2000, Team Bush destroyed McCain using tactics far, far more despicable than Trump's offhand remark today.  And for his sins, the Party of Lincoln nominated George W. Bush for President.

And four years later?

Well surely someone somewhere is urgently tapping the impotent muppets of the Republican Establishment on their other shoulder and whispering to them a dire warning that all of their pearl-clutching outrage over Trump's sleazy attacks on McCain's military record risks re-opening the book on the vastly more despicable and more lavishly funded attacks on John Kerry's military record during George W. Bush's re-election campaign in 2004:

From the New York Times:

Friendly Fire: The Birth of an Anti-Kerry Ad

By KATE ZERNIKE and JIM RUTENBERG

Published: August 20, 2004

...

A series of interviews and a review of documents show a web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures and President Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove.

Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family - one a longtime political associate of Mr. Rove's, the other a trustee of the foundation for Mr. Bush's father's presidential library. A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Mr. Bush's father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice. And the group's television commercial was produced by the same team that made the devastating ad mocking Michael S. Dukakis in an oversized tank helmet when he and Mr. Bush's father faced off in the 1988 presidential election.

The strategy the veterans devised would ultimately paint John Kerry the war hero as John Kerry the "baby killer" and the fabricator of the events that resulted in his war medals. But on close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth' prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men's own statements.

Several of those now declaring Mr. Kerry "unfit" had lavished praise on him, some as recently as last year.

...

In 2003, Team Bush gutted Kerry using tactics far, far more despicable than Trump's offhand remark today.  And for his sins, George W. Bush was re-elected to a second term as President.

And so, from Manchurian McCain and the Swiftboaters to Birthers and Death Panels, Trump has grasped the Republican party's most fundamental truth.  The one it (and its enablers in Beltway media) strive so mightily to hide from the public.  That the more the GOP has come to depend on an ever-shrinking base of paranoid, rage-drunk Fox News/Hate Radio goofs, the deeper into overt, fascist propaganda filth the path to political power within the GOP has become.

If anything, Donald Atwater Segretti Cheney Trump deserves credit for having the guts to do his own dirty work instead of jobbing it out to professional ratfucking perverts like Karl Rove and Jerome Corsi.

By some wild and awesome fluke, Donald Trump's asinine comment has momentarily kicked a hole in the solid wall of Strategic Forgettery which the media has erected around the Age of Bush.

And five'll get you ten that not one member of the Beltway press has the nerve to step through the gap and report on what they see on the other side.

Meanwhile, a certain blood-drunk sociopath employee of ABC News tries to transmute today's Republican bed-shitting into gold:

Difference btwn Reps & Dems: Reps repudiate Trump (and Buchanan earlier). Dems fine w/ Clinton scandals (& Obama relationship w J Wright).

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) July 18, 2015