Shall We Stop This Bleeding?

Lincoln - Alexander Stephens from Chris Haley on Vimeo.

Conservatism is done, sir.  It is done.  Whatever dreams of glory you had back in the heyday of St. Ronald Reagan when you sowed the seeds of your own downfall, those dreams are dead. And whatever sad band of bigoted miscreants, imbeciles and con men may still remain after this election -- drowning in their own lurid lies and pathetic alibis, dancing on Lincoln's grave -- the Republican party is over,

From Business Insider, "Donald Trump broke the conservative media":

...

One of the chief problems, [Wisconsin Conservative talk radio host Charlie] Sykes said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had "basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers."

"There's nobody," he lamented. "Let's say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it's a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, 'By the way, you know it's false.' And they'll say, 'Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.' Or they'll say, 'I saw it on a Facebook page.' And I'll say, 'The New York Times did a fact check.' And they'll say, 'Oh, that's The New York Times. That's bulls---.' There's nobody — you can't go to anybody and say, 'Look, here are the facts.'"

"And I have to say that's one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there's no way to break through it," Sykes continued. "And I swim upstream because if I don't say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they'll ask what's wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true."

Ziegler said he faced much of the same problem.

"If you are a conservative talk show host, which I am, if you don't accept that it's likely Hillary Clinton has taken part in multiple murders, or that Barack Obama is a Muslim extremist sympathizer who was probably born outside this country — if you don't accept those two things, it's almost as if you're a sellout. You're a RINO. You're somehow part of the liberal elite. It's nuts. It's making my own show very difficult to do. It's almost where to the point where we are not able to function."

He continued: "It's almost like it's a disease, and it's taken over people. I don't remember this being the case four years ago. But something has happened. Something snapped. But now all of a sudden, if a story comes out, and it's not on Breitbart or endorsed by Drudge, it can't be true. Especially if it's about Donald Trump. Which is flat-out ludicrous."

Asked why none of his criticism of Trump seemed to put a crack in the real-estate mogul's armor, Beck paused.

"I think that people are very lost, and they don't know what to do at this point."

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Of course you don't remember "this being the case four years ago", because our years ago, you were inside the bubble, asshole. And from inside that wingnut event horizon, everything always looks superfuckingawesome!  But by it's very nature, the bubble is always constricting and as one Conservative holder-of-opinions after another has rudely discovered, those ever-shifting boundaries are constantly patrolled by the heresy hunters.  And one Leftist Devil once said, once purity itself becomes all you care about -- once it becomes a distillery race to see who can get to 100% -- the chicken farmers are never far behind:

The main Islamist group in Algeria, the GIA, ended up being led by a Mr. Zouabri, a chicken farmer, who killed everyone who disagreed with him. He issued a final communiqué, declaring that the whole of Algerian society should be killed, with the exception of his tiny remaining band of Islamists. They were the only ones who understood the truth.

Frankly, if I had my way, should Hillary Clinton be elected President in November, I would urge her to forget about holding her inauguration on the western front of the United States capitol and instead, have it right on the front porch of the Appomattox Court House in Virginia just to make the point absolutely crystal clear.

Of course you can fight on for a good long time -- you have an impressive stockpile of crackpot billionaires apparently willing to underwrite any ludicrous misadventure, and millions of obedient Fox News cannon-fodder "patriots" who are dumb and desperate enough to napalm their own dicks on Donald Trump's command.

The bleeding can go on for a long, long time if you refuse to have it any other way.  But your cause is lost, sir, and the war is over.