Fixing Typos In The New York Times

From Timothy Egan in the NYT (h/t @Shoq)

Trump Is the Poison His Party Concocted
...
They say he’s trashing the Republic brand. They say he’s “stirring up the crazies,” in the words of Senator John McCain. But Trump is the brand, to a sizable degree. And the crazies have long flourished in the Republican media wing, where any amount of gaseous buffoonery goes unchallenged.

And now that the party can’t control him, Trump threatens to destroy its chances if he doesn’t get his way, running as an independent with unlimited wealth — a political suicide bomb.

Trump is a byproduct of all the toxic elements Republicans have thrown into their brew over the last decade or so — from birtherism to race-based hatred of immigrants, from nihilists who shut down government to elected officials who shout “You lie!” at their commander in chief.

It was fine when all this crossing-of-the-line was directed at President Obama or other Democrats. But now that the ugliness is intramural, Trump has forced party leaders to decry something they have not only tolerated, but encouraged.
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One small correction:  Trump is not the "byproduct of all the toxic elements Republicans have thrown into their brew over the last decade or so."  He is the "byproduct of all the toxic elements Republicans have thrown into their brew over the last 40 years or so." 

In other words, pretty much the entire brain caste of the Conservative movement and the Republican Party (and their Beltway media enablers) have been roaring down the road to Donald Trump and blowing merrily past every warning sign for pretty much their entire adult lives.

And the implications of this fact are so damning that for a very long time, virtually no one outside of the precincts of the despised Liberal blogosphere has dared to say a word about it out loud.   And every time we spoke the truth, the Beltway Both Siderist/No Labels horde was there to bury that truth under a fresh pile of "Yeah, but the Democrats..."

From me, a long time ago:

The Big Lie

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Rush Limbaugh “returned to radio as a talk show host at KFBK in Sacramento, California” in 1984. 

That was 22 years ago.

Al Franken began firing back in the same medium as Limbaugh when he began anchoring a show on Air America, which did not even exist until 2004.

That was two years ago.

So Rush had a twenty-year head start. And in that time his imitators created an entire, integrated radio/teevee/print/cable media Universe based almost entirely on egging the pig people on to mindlessly hate Liberals and blame queers and “feminazis” for every evil on Earth, real or imagined.

For twenty years a polyglot witchbag of sociopaths, Christopaths, Neocons, drunks, demagogues and whores have gotten rich and re-elected by banding together to demonize Liberals and tell the scum of the nation over and over and over again that being the scum of the nation is a noble calling. Or, to misquote H.L Menkin, “No Fox executive ever went broke overestimating the hateful stupidity of the pig people.”

And for twenty years – while the mass purveyors of carefully calibrated hate and rage and xenophobia on the Right gathered more and more power and got more and more vulgar and vicious in their rhetoric – what did the Left try to do? 

We tried to find common ground. To meet our opponents half-way.

To compromise…with people who sneered at the very idea of working together and said quite openly that compromise was “political date rape”. 

While the Emperor of Weaponized Bile, Newt Gingrich, took over the House with a campaign explicitly based on calling Democrats “traitors” at every opportunity, and Limbaugh was being honored as the “Majority Maker” by those House Republicans, we on the Left were still trying to do and be all the nicey-nicey things that Alan Simpson is now all weepy and wistful for.

And it didn’t work. And while we played by Marquis of Queensbury, the orcs laughed in our faces, overran the joint, and bequeathed to us as its apotheosis the worst, most despicable, most incompetent, most Constitution-loathing Administration in American history. 

Al Franken and Air America did not arise in a vacuum. The came into being as a desperate, eleventh-hour attempt to fight back against a twenty year multimedia blitz of unremitting, unrebutted Conservative lies and bigotry.

They arose because no one in the Mainstream Media had the guts to take on the GOP Propaganda Machine head-on. Instead, the MSM collaborated, because collaborating in the Big Lie was a much better, safer career move.

...

And I have absolutely no doubt that after Trump flames out or is bought off, the Villagers will fold the entire, uncomfortable matter into a tiny bundle and shove it down the memory hole so fast you will not believe it.

Except, of course, if you are a resident of the despised Liberal blogosphere.  In which case, why would believe anything else?