The Greatest Story Never Told

Dear Salon,*

Yeah.  We get it.

Fox News built a f**ked-up Frankenstein, dumb, angry and divorced from facts. Now Donald Trump will devour them

Conservative media destroyed conservative politics. The right's impossible to take seriously. Then came Trump!

We get it because here on the foul-mouthed, pariah Left, we've been writing about it since forever.

...

For the uncharitable among us, the [Tom Edsall column entitled "Has the G.O.P. Gone Off the Deep End?"] is like tucking in to a ten-foot-long schadenfreude hoagie, trimmed with everyone from a former Tom DeLay aide to Bloody Bill Kristol, all weeping great big Burkean tears and bitching to beat the band about how the inmates have taken over the asylum.

Of course, what they're really furious about is that the monster they tinkered together to stomp Liberals to grue and carry them all to power -- a monster their betters has been warning them against building in increasingly panicked tones for years -- has now, in fact (as one long-forgotten wag once put it) and as predicted, kicked the lab door off its hinges and run amok.  The Party of Lincoln is now Rush Limbaugh's gimp-suited plaything and has stacked Congress with enough deeply paranoid, face-defiant, lockstepping meatsticks that, as Ed Rogers, (a top aide to both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush) notes, to kill "the art of governing in Washington"...

The thing is, from my perspective out here in a cornfield in Illinois, while the Right is clearly insane, I don't find them "impossible to take seriously" at all.

In fact, out here in the fields, where Governor Hedgefund is running the Koch Brother playbook step by step, gleefully kicking the shit out of the poor, the weak, the sick, unions, children and the elderly and generally immiserating anyone who doesn't think Brownback's Kansas and Walker's Wisconsin are justa few more budget cuts away from being Galt's Gulch, we take the Right very seriously.

Republicans have shown that if they are not allowed to run the country, they are perfectly willing to destroy it, and our elite media has shown that they are perfectly willing to drive the getaway car.

Since the day Party of Lincoln handed their future over to Neo-Confederates and fundamentalists, the rise of Fox News and Donald Trump was inevitable.  And as far back as 1964, a few, alert Liberals like Rod Serling were saying as much in the nation's editorial pages:

…

What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.

We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct.

…

“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.” 

That was a half a century ago, and since then the rise of the Right "from the sewers to a position of new respectability" has been the single most important and catastrophic political phenomenon in modern American history...

...the single most written-about and thoroughly-documented topic of conversation on the Left...

...and the single most consistently and conspicuously ignored story by the mainstream media. 

And why this third thing should be true -- why the mainstream media expends such enormous effort and energy to ignore the ongoing eruption of a devastating volcano in their own back yard -- would sure make a terrific story.

Too bad we no longer have a media capable of reporting it.

*Corrected because I'm an idiot.