Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Naughty By Nature" Edition.

This Sunday on "Meet the Press", America's Most Indefatigable Establishmentarian Testicle Cozy -- David Brooks -- said the truest thing he has ever said:

We have such a dumb establishment.

Yes, we do David.

In other words, if you wade through the economic literature, it's hard not to agree with the Cleveland Fed's Jerry Jordan: We are living at a once-in-a-generation moment of economic opportunity. As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?

-- David Brooks, March 2001

Yes really, really do.

The Pelosi Democrats  

Are they going to become the stupid party?

ARE THE DEMOCRATS about to go insane? Are they about to decide that the reason they lost the 2002 election is that they didn't say what they really believe? Are they about to go into Paul Krugman-land, lambasting tax cuts, savaging Bush as a tool of the corporate bosses? Are they about to go off on a jag that will ensure them permanent minority status in every state from North Carolina to Arizona?...

-- David Brooks, November 2002

Reliably and extravagantly dumb year after year after year.

So put a pin in that for a moment and gambol on down the dial with me to "This Week...With Martha Raddatz" for this remarkable exchange between the odious Alex Castellanos and the toxic Richie Rich Lowry over the State of the Party of Lincoln.  First, Lowry breaks out some vintage No True Scotsman...

LOWRY:  Yes, the reason, Martha, we did this issue, we wanted to make two points.  One, Donald Trump is not a conservative.  He's shown no interest, really, in a limited government, liberty, "The Constitution," these animating causes of conservatism.  And two, we wanted to make the point that it's not the so-called establishment, necessarily, that's opposing Trump.  In fact, as we speak, you have elements of the political establishment among Republicans hiding under their desk, figuring out how they can possibly co-opt or deal with Donald Trump.   We wanted to make the point that it's principled conservatives who oppose Trump.  We want to win this election.  We want to do it with a conservative.  And we think we can.

...

LOWRY:  No, I reject the notion just because he's at 30 percent in the polls before anyone has actually voted in a caucus or a primary, this thing is effectively over.   And look, we knew we'd get a lot of blowback from this issue.  We knew Donald Trump would call us a loser.  But I think it's particularly rich that Donald Trump invoked William F.  Buckley and said Buckley ...would be ashamed of what we have done when actually, Bill Buckley wrote about Donald Trump in 2000.  He called him a narcissist and a demagogue and nothing has changed in the last 15 years.

Castellanos counters that he knows the True Scotsman, he has done blow off the asses of Miami hookers with the True Scotsman and Mr. Lowry should scuttle on back to his ivory tower and leave the business of Conservatism to True Conservatives like Alex Castellanos and Donald Trump:

ALEX CASTELLANOS, CHAIR, PURPLE STRATEGIES:  Well, I think as much as I love "National Review" and thank you  for making me the conservative I am today, I think they've shown up at the war long after the last shot's been fired here.  They -- they're telling the Republican Party to pull its rip cord long after we've hit the ground and gone splat.

Just seven days to go before the Iowa caucus and "National Review" is saying we should be the party of Ronald Reagan, not Donald Trump.

Well, that's great, but I checked and Reagan is not on the ballot.

The choices we've been left with, it appears, are Ted Cruz, who's thrown the conservative cause under the bus for his own political gain many times, and Donald Trump, who some voters, I think, are beginning to see as, well, he's not Ronald Reagan, he's not the long-term future of the Republican Party, but maybe he's the turnaround CEO, the interim leader who can clean up our books, keep the country from going bankrupt and stop the Russians from kicking sand in our face.

RADDATZ:  -- you wrote just months ago that Trump was a power hungry strong man, that the party should not give the reins to. Why is he suddenly the man the GOP should trust?

CASTELLANOS:  Well, I wrote, actually, last August -- I mean what Rich is saying in "National Review" is not news.  I wrote Trump is a strongman we don't need August of last year.

And since then, have worked to try to find alternatives.

Guess what?  We don't have any. And whose fault is that? I think a lot of the fault, actually, belongs to the conservative intellectual leadership of America that you see in this issue of "National Review."  The conservative cause that animates the Republican Party, we don't appeal to young people, we don't appeal to millennials, we don't appeal to young women, we don't appeal to minorities.  We appeal to only cranky old white guys like me...

What upscale white supremacist rags like the National Review and toadies like David Brooks and go-along-to-get-along black shirts like Castellanos will never say out loud is that the reason Donald Trump has gobbled up the GOP is not the promise of some stupid wall or drinking Iraq's milkshake.

No, the reason for Donald Trump's staying power at the top of every Republican poll is the same reason the Tea Party scam took off like a rocket when the Koch Brothers cooked it up and rolled it out.   Because Trump promises the wingnut base the greatest bailout of all.  The Yuuugest amnesty of all.  He promises to finally and permanently expunge the record of all the craven, lying, lunatic, disastrous bullshit they have been enthusiastically supporting for the last 30 years, not by sobering them up from their long, belligerent  political stupor, but by extending their bender forever by doubling down on the pre-existing infrastructure of the tea party scam.

You see, the reason that Conservative elites refuse to see what is happening right under their noses is that --irony! -- Conservative elites really do not understand Conservatism.

You know who does understand Conservatism?

Those damn dirty Liberals, that's who.  Because as despised Beltway exiles and the supervillain of every Conservative Big Gummint fairy tale, we Liberals have are privileged to have a clear, outsider perspective on how the Pretty Hate Machine actually operates.  And since we know that there never has been any such thing as a genuine "Conservative" movement in this country, we know there is no point chasing around dorm room twaddle about what Edmund Burke would think of the NLRB or "How many Imaginary Reagan's can dance on the up-slope of a Laffer Curve?" that obsesses the Conservative elites.  Instead we come to a clear understanding of what actually constitutes "American Conservatism" by asking the obvious, utilitarian question: "What characteristics do virtually all American Conservatives from Rush Limbaugh to David Brooks have in common?"

Because, in the end, it's not who we pretend to be, but what we do that defines us.

It turns out, the answer is surprisingly simple.  American Conservatism is an ideological and political system which:

1. Believes that Liberals are the most dangerous existential threat to America.
2. Believes that any Democratic president who attempt to govern as a Democrat is ipso facto illegitimate and therefor should and must be obstructed and destroyed at any cost.
3. Depends for ideological and political cohesion on a massive, ongoing and self-reinforcing regime of historical revisionism and "doublethink" (from Wikipedia "The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies...")
4. Depends for ideological and political cohesion on an ongoing process of ideological purification in which those who disagree with you to any degree are obviously either stupid or secretly in league with the Liberals and therefor no longer to be trusted.

This is what American Conservatism amounts to and this is why Donald Trump is gobbling it up.

Because until eight months ago, Trump existed entirely outside of the political process and so, under his protection, the GOP based believes that can finally have their holiday from taking any responsibility for all the wretched, ruinous bullshit they supported all these years extended infinitely in every direction. With Trump, their delusions are no longer limited to pretending that they never heard of George W. Bush.  With Trump, the meatbags who danced in the streets and bellowed "We won, you lost, now shut up!" when they re-elected Dubya in 2004 -- 

-- are being empowered to go further and start saying out loud that maybe the Iraq War was a dumb idea and maybe Bush kinda sucked as a president while at the same time not get any of those icky "The Liberals were right about Bush all along" cooties on them, because it wasn't their fault, man!

Because the entire system is rigged against them and controlled by that jackbooted Kenyan tyrant, his Librul goon squad and their RINO Republican puppets, man!

Via Fox News throw-pillow Howard Kurtz, who "interviewed" Ted Cruz this weekend:

CRUZ: Oh sure, that goes with the territory, but any Republican who is running should not be confused and think that the mainstream media are our friends. They are partisans. They wake up every day fighting for liberal political agendas. The New York Times wants Hillary Clinton to be the next president, and every day from now until the election they're going to push stories advancing that...

From Boss Limbaugh (h/t Karoli at Crooks & Liars):

Rush Limbaugh was busy doing some damage control on his show today about who exactly is responsible for Donald Trump's rise on the national political stage, while reassuring his listeners that he, Fox News, and the hardliners on the right hadn't had a thing to do with it.

"It's Obama's radicalism that actually begins the process which creates a scenario where somebody like Donald Trump charges in to fill an absolutely, impossibly huge vacuum," he said.

From morally bankrupt wingnut con man and Chris Hayes' BFF, Ben Domenech:

Trump is the product of unconstitutional authoritarianism of Obama and the fecklessness of a GOP elite that has failed to offer real change.

— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) January 22, 2016

By every measure that makes a person a Conservative -- demonizing and slandering those who disagree with you, relentlessly delegitimizing any Democratic president who tries to govern as a Democrat, and incessantly lying about the past -- Donald J. Trump is indeed a 100%, dyed-in-the-wool, True Blue American Conservative.

And the reason Donald Trump is able to drink the Republican party's milkshake all up is because -- irony! -- the Conservative elites who are now freaking out at the prospect of him (or Cruz) winning the nomination are the same the Conservative elites who spent billions of dollars and the last 30 years conditioning their base to be stupid enough and angry enough and delusional enough to be receptive to someone like Donald Trump.

Or as Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times put it:

We have such a dumb establishment.

Yes we do, David,

We really, really do.