Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Gerson

I prospered because I bowed lower than my brothers before the Egyptians.  And now the Egyptians bow low before me.

-- Dathan, The Ten Commandments

From the safety of his geostationary orbit 128 miles above the Republican Party, life-long Republican Party member and George W. Bush speechwriter, Michael Gerson, writes another sad little missive about those those diggity darn Republicans far, far below who are in such a pickle!

Republicans stain themselves by sticking with Trump

Themselves. Them. Not "me". Them. Thus begins the tsk-tsking cavil lecture of yet another Republican who stood proudly with a party that has been coasting along on the momentum of the Southern Strategy for his entire adult life.  Yet another Republican who stood proudly by an Administration which resorted without hesitation to the tried-and-true Republican electoral strategy of Fox News, Hate Radio, mass-slander --

Mr. Rove made the comments at a fund-raiser in Manhattan on Wednesday, saying: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."

"Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said, 'We will defeat our enemies,"' Mr. Rove continued at a gathering in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State. "Liberals saw what happened to us and said, 'We must understand our enemies."'

and demonization --

Vice President Dick Cheney says the United States will risk another terrorist attack if voters make the wrong choice on Election Day, suggesting Sen. John Kerry would follow a pre-Sept. 11 policy of reacting defensively.

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told supporters at a town-hall meeting Tuesday.

-- to win re-election in 2004.

Suddenly such men as these are shocked and outraged that the Republican Party is full of...Republicans!

Maybe Earth's gravity is the reason their consciences were all squashed and malformed for all those decades back here, on the ground, with the rest of us.  Maybe it took the sweet release of the zero gee environment of their safe, luxurious, climate-controlled compartments aboard the Beltway media space station to finally nurture the tiny, green shoots of their formerly-stunted sense of moral outrage.

Or maybe they're just amoral windsocks twisting in whirlwind of their own making.

Mr. Gerson continues:

...

For Republicans, accommodation with Trump is not just a choice; it is a verdict. None will come away unstained. For evangelical Christians, it is the stain of hypocrisy — making their movement synonymous with exclusion and gullibility. For GOP job seekers, it is the stain of opportunism. (Consider the sad decline into sycophancy of Chris Christie.) For conservatives, it is the stain of betrayal — the equivalent of supporting George Wallace in 1968 as an authentic populist voice.

All this leaves completely horrible options: sitting the election out, supporting a third-party candidate, contemplating a difficult vote for Clinton. But these are the only honorable options. As one Republican friend wrote me of Trump: “He would destroy everything Hillary Clinton would destroy, plus one more thing: the Republican Party.”

Mr. Gerson continued his peroration on The Facebook (n/t Raw Story)

How does any of this return lost greatness to our nation? Sometimes I want to shake people (intellectually,not physically) who favor political “disruption” and ask: Disruption in favor of what?

*cough* Ron Fournier *cough*

Look at what you are doing! Look at what you have done! The Republican Party is now firmly harnessed to the wild, uncontrollable horses of fear and exclusion. It has already sustained damage with Latino voters that may take a generation to undo. And now many Republicans will find rationalizations to support Trump. That is natural — the reality of politics in every time. Many people simply go with the winner. But this isn’t a normal time. I believe that the decision to support Trump, like an embarrassing tattoo, will follow them the rest of their lives. Republicans are not merely making a choice; they are looking into the abyss.

The "abyss", Mr. Gerson, was the Bush Administration which you served with such pet-poodle-loyally.  Trump is merely the pointy, fascist rocks at the very bottom of your very long fall, rushing up at you out of the dark heart of the GOP which men like you have always pretended did not even exist.

So quit fussin' and strugglin', Michael.  If you are still a member of the Conservative leadership caste in 2016, it's too late to repent now.  You have already made a lifetime of horrifying decisions to get you where you are, and now Judgement Day is here baby!

Besides, people like you will do great under a Trump Administration.

Because fascists love their morally flexible grovelers, lickspittles and collaborators.  And if there are three things Mr. Gerson really excels at...