Everything Is Coming Horribly True

In a way, the joke’s on the Republican Party: After decades of masquerading as the “stupid party,” that’s what it has become. But if an unapologetic ignoramus wins the presidency, the consequences will be no laughing matter.

Even if we can avoid the calamity of a Trump presidency, however, the G.O.P. still has a lot of soul-searching to do. Mr. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of the party’s anti-intellectual drift. The party needs to rethink its growing anti-intellectual bias and its reflexive aversion to elites. Catering to populist anger with extremist proposals that are certain to fail is not a viable strategy for political success.

--  Max Boot, professional Bush Regime Dead-Ender,
writing in the New York Times today

Ten years ago, the late Steve Gilliard succinctly summed up Max Boot as follows:

Max Boot writes middle class war porn, Why would anyone take him seriously.

Ten years later, Gilly is gone and Max Boot is invited to contribute to the New York Times.

Ten years later, "Right about the Right all along" Liberals are still pariahs, but now, at no additional charge, we get to watch from the sidelines as the media creates a bull market in the confessions of tortured 11th-hour wingnut apostates whose orthodoxies --

Scholarly policy makers like George P. Shultz, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Bill Bennett held prominent posts in the Reagan administration, a tradition that continued into the George W. Bush administration — amply stocked with the likes of Paul D. Wolfowitz, John J. Dilulio Jr. and Condoleezza Rice.

In recent years, however, the Republicans’ relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will. The Tea Party represented a populist revolt against what its activists saw as out-of-touch Republican elites in Washington.

There are still some thoughtful Republican leaders exemplified by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who devised an impressive new budget plan for his party. But the primary vibe from the G.O.P. has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger.

--  are every bit as horrifying as the heresies they now denounce.

For my money, America's leading tortured 11th-hour wingnut apostates have not been tortured nearly enough.