As God As Their Witness, They Thought This Turkey Would Fly

New York Times' five-time "Buckeye Newshawk Award" honoree and winner of the coveted "Silver Sow Award", David Brooks, shown here six years ago telling his audience the same thing he had been telling them for decades -- that the Republican Party is doing just dandy!

In fact, mere months before Donald Trump swept the GOP up into his lying, racist arms we find Mr. Brooks celebrating the GOP's ship being righted after a momentary and unimportant glitch that had definitely been corrected:

The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way.

-- David Brooks, November 4, 2014.

And as Trump was poised to sweep easily past all competition and win the GOP nomination on the basis of his open racism and seething contempt for democracy, we find Mr. Brooks brimming with confidence that Donald J. Trump was just another momentary glitch.  A weird but ultimately meaningless anomaly who would soon flame out, clearing the way for the inevitable ascendance of Marco!

Donald Trump Isn’t Real

But in Iowa on Monday night we saw the limit of Trump’s appeal. Like any other piece of showbiz theatrics, Trump was more spectacle than substance...

We can expect similar Trump underperformance in state after state...

His concession speech was an act of pathetic self-delusion.

What happened in Iowa was that some version of normalcy returned to the G.O.P. race. The precedents of history have not been rendered irrelevant...

The amazing surge for Marco Rubio shows that the Republican electorate has not gone collectively insane...

The Republican Party usually nominates unifying candidates like Marco Rubio. The laws of gravity have not been suspended. He has a great shot. But he has to show one more burst of imagination.

-- David Brooks, February 6, 2016.

So before before we have a little fun at Mr. Brooks' expense, a little truth.

For those of you old enough to remember, consider that around the time Les Nessman was trying to warn the good people of Cincinnati that a devastating tornado was bearing down on them (by re-purposing his "What to do if the Commies invade" handbook), Governor Ronald Reagan was beginning his campaign for president by stepping onto the hustings in Philadelphia, MS -- racist dog-whistle in-hand -- to double down on Nixon's Southern Strategy and proclaim his great love of state's rights

And right about the same time Dr. Johnny Fever was worried about talking to God, the Party of Lincoln decided to open up the front door and invite God-bothering plague bearers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson right on in.

So damn near 40 years ago while we were sitting in our basements or living rooms laughing our asses off as the Pinedale Shopping Mall was bombed with live turkeys...

...far away and without much fanfare, the Republican party was committing its fate and fortunes to a series of deeply immoral, partisan, political strategies which would send them crawling, then lurching, then rocketing inexorably towards this day of reckoning.

And for all of that time they have played a reckless but immensely profitable game of cultivating their wingnut base with one hand and denying their existence with the other. They have even gone so far as to build an entirely self-contained alternated media universe so their rank-and-file could wall themselves off from scary reality forever and believe whatever Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh wanted them to believe.  And it has been a very successful enterprise.  Their angry, ignorant re-programmable base as been their margin of victory in virtually every election for the last 20 years.  It built mighty print, radio and teevee empires.  And from  from David Brooks to Sean Hannity, it has made the agronomists and overseers of this wingnut factory farm incredibly wealthy and influential.

All along the way there have been plain-as-day warnings that this would not end well.  Those warnings were summarily mocked and ignored.

All along the way there have been helpful Liberals desperately trying to convey one, simple message:

Those Liberals were uniformly marginalized and dismissed.

And when the wheels came off during the Bush Administration -- when it was so fucking clear that something was badly malfunctioning deep in the bones of the Party of Personal Responsibility -- instead of coming clean and owning the disasters they had authored, old Bush-peddling frauds like David Brooks swiftly declared a new gospel of Both Siderism and raised up a new cathedral to is before the smoke had cleared from the Worst Administration in American History.

A brand new faith of fence-straddling and cowardice masquerading as reticence and humility "which purloins the language of morality and humility from honorable faiths in order to cobble together an infinitely flexible dogma of ouchless redemption without confession or atonement for Mr. Brooks and the rest of our loathsome media elect."

And then there arose a Donald Trump -- the rough beast of the GOP's own carefully curated rampaging Id, its hour come round at last. slouching towards Washington D.C. to be born.  base of the Republican Party -- a base which Conservative leaders like David Brooks have long cultivated with one hand and disavowed with the other.  This has been their little game, and a mighty profitable game it has been. It has been the margin of Republican victory in virtually every election for the last 20 years.  It built mighty print, radio and teevee empires.  And it made men like David Brooks incredibly wealthy and influential.

And it has damn near broken this country beyond repair.  

And yet despite an unparalleled, decades-long record of being wildly wrong about damn near everything of importance, the same terrible people continue to occupy the same privileged places --

--  in the same media ecosystem that helped spawn the trolls and hobgoblins that are eating us alive.

There's probably a lesson in here somewhere.

I Am The Liberal Media