We're All Driftglass Now, Ctd.

(Graphic is from this post from 2010 because I have been pounding my fists against this wall since the day I started blogging)

Another week in the disastrous administration of President Stupid means another frantic chorus of "We Didn't Start The Fire"...

...from the Beltway media rogue's gallery of Conservative con men, meatheads and blood-drunk hobgoblins who definitely did start the fire.

Once again, Bloody Bill Kristol is scuttling towards the exit of a building he personally put to the torch:

Some of us want to distinguish Trump from the GOP, as a healthy GOP is good for America. But the distinction is getting harder to maintain.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 25, 2017

Once again (See also "The Amazing Disappearing Republican Party"), former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, senior Republican policy adviser and reliable Beltway Republican stalactite, Michael Gerson, has written a very serviceable column which, with very minor modifications, would be indistinguishable from the work of any dirty hippie blogger who has been pointing this shit out since back in the day when Michael Gerson was teaching Dubya to pronounce "mushroom cloud".

The conservative mind has become diseased

To many observers on the left, the initial embrace of Seth Rich conspiracy theories by conservative media figures was merely a confirmation of the right’s deformed soul. But for those of us who remember that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity were once relatively mainstream Reaganites, their extended vacation in the fever swamps is even more disturbing. If once you knew better, the indictment is deeper.

...

Those fever swamps are very old, Mr. Gerson.  Ancient. 

Those fever swamps are where people like you carefully chose to build your Party of Personal Responsibility. Those fever swamps are your mommy and daddy.  They are your bread and butter and literally the only fucking reason you have a seat at the media table in the first place.  

The basic, human questions are simple. How could conservative media figures not have felt — felt in their hearts and bones — the God-awful ickiness of it? How did the genes of generosity and simple humanity get turned off? Is this insensibility the risk of prolonged exposure to our radioactive political culture? If so, all of us should stand back a moment and tend to the health of our revulsion.

...

How could they be so inhuman?  Practice, Mr. Gerson.  Decades and decades of rigorous, daily practice calling people like me a traitor and profiting richly thereby.

Who is the politician who legitimized conspiracy thinking at the highest level? Who raised the possibility that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Who hinted that Hillary Clinton might have been involved in the death of Vince Foster, or that unnamed liberals might have killed Justice Antonin Scalia? Who not only questioned President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, but raised the prospect of the murder of a Hawaiian state official in a coverup? “How amazing,” Trump tweeted in 2013, “the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”

...

The "Vince Foster" myth -- along with ever other sick Clinton conspiracy ginned up by Right's Pretty Hate Machine -- has been a pillar of of your party's Wingnut Grimoire since the 1990's.  Unhinged hatred of the Imaginary Left  has been standard issue Republican vocabulary ever since your party sold its soul to Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh more than twenty years ago.  Unhinged hatred of the Imaginary Left  is now such a fundamental element of the GOP psyche, that now it just rooooolls off the tongues of the Pig People without them even noticing.

And appeasing those Pig People and teaming up with that Pretty Hate Machine is the only way you and your Party have ever won anything and you god damn well know it.

And you know who else knows it?  Who remember every bit of the history you are so desperate to hide?  We out here on the despised Left.  We French-loving, cut-and run surrender monkeys.  We Libtards and snowflakes and Social Justice Warriors and card-carrying members of the ACLU.  

We remember it all, from all the "good" Republican candidates in 2015 happily trafficking in the ugliest kind of Blood Libel against Planned Parenthood to titillate your party's depraved base -- 

Trafficking in this kind of radioactive poison to fire up the mob is as low as it gets, and anyone who jumps on this bandwagon is not only so unfit for public office, but unfit for public anything. 

So, needless to say, the entire GOP presidential field has been fighting over who can pitch the biggest tent on this most ancient and toxic of slanders. 

-- to Willie Horton in 1988:

So don't you fucking dare pretend you had no idea that any of this was going on.

Mr. Gerson continues:

Those conservatives who believe that the confirmation of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch is sufficient justification for the Trump presidency are ignoring Trump’s psychic and moral destruction of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Clinton, with a small number of changed votes, would have defeated Republicans. But Trump is doing a kind of harm beyond anything Clinton could have done. He is changing the party’s most basic moral and political orientations. He is shaping conservatism in his image and ensuring an eventual defeat more complete, and an eventual exile more prolonged, than Democrats could have dreamed.

No, Mr. Gerson.  No and no and no.

Donald Trump is not destroying your conservative movement.  He is just throwing a very inconvenient, million-candle-power spotlight on the rotting, squirmy, midden pile of racists, con men, imbeciles and demagogues that your conservative movement has always been.

Donald Trump is not "changing the party’s most basic moral and political orientations".  He is simply putting your party's longstanding-but-carefully-camouflaged obscene "moral and political orientations" front-and-center in a way that is visible from the orbit of Jupiter.  

And "eventual exile"?  Oh please, Michael, we've been through all of this before.  Remember Operation Endless Clusterfuck?  Ring any bells?  It was big news for awhile.  In fact, as I recall, it was men like you who put so many clever words into Dubya's mouth explaining how imperative Bush's Iraqi Debacle was, and how quick and ouchless it would all be, and how swimmingly it was all going...

...right up until it all went tits-up.  

Then do you remember what happened?  Because we here on the Left sure as shit do.

Almost overnight, your entire Republican party -- which absolutely should have died of self-inflicted madness 10 years ago -- was magically rebranded as a band of patriotic "independents" who had never even heard of George W. Bush.  Yes, thanks to unlimited Koch Brothers money and Fox News propaganda and the willingness of our debased media to go along with the scam, tens of millions of your party's faithful vanished overnight...

...and were replaced by tens of millions of brand new "independents" who all believed, with a wild and fanatical fervor, that Barack Obummer was a Kenyan Usurper who was going to kill their sainted white grannies with Muslim Brotherhoods and New Black Panthers and Saul Alinskys and Death Panels.

And they got away with it, Michael.  They got away with for two simple reasons.  

First, the only thing you Republicans truly excel at is lying.  Lying about your party's past.  Lying about its present.  Lying about its future.  Lying about math and science and God and history.  And most of all, constantly, pathologically lying about Liberals.  And as President Stupid has amply demonstrated, your party base will go along with literally any fucking lie no matter how ridiculous or perverse as long as it comes with a promise that they will never have to take any responsibility for all the misery and ruins that their malignant ignorance and racism as unleashed.

And, second, generally speaking, the American political media is shit.  For every noble scrivener who struggles to defy corporate policy and actually tell the truth about how the GOP has maimed this country almost beyond repair, there are a dozen well-paid Bush Regime Dead Enders desperate to rewrite the past to take themselves off the hook, and another dozen weakling, accommodationist Both Siderists who are more than happy to help drive your getaway car.

Finally, no list of this week's most craven, well-paid Bush Regime Dead Enders eager to rewrite the past would be complete without this amazing video from MSNBC's favorite multimillionaire-wingnut-frat-boy-gone-to-pot, Joe Scarborough.  A man who makes his daily bread these days by Shouting Very Loudly and feigning a perpetual state of shock that his Republican Party is -- OMG! --  full of Republicans.

And this late arrival from Fox News muppet, Howard Kurtz, who was similarly stunned to discover that his audience is largely composed of meatheads, shut-ins and the recently deceased (thanks to Alert Reader M.E.T)

Big-time backlash: When all polling on Donald Trump is dismissed as fake

I think it is once again high time to bring the words of the late Steve Gilliard back to the fight, if only to remind Squint Scarborough and Mistah Kurtz and Michael Gerson and Bill Kristol and all the rest of that squalid crowd that we on the Left have very long memories, that we have been on to your bullshit from jump, and we lost any interest in playing nice with you long, long ago.

From Steve in December of 2003, before everything had to be 140 characters or less:

...

For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn't. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn't enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.

Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.

Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.

It's time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.

It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.

Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi satellite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America's defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.

It is time to stop looking for an accommodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?

From Steve in January of 2005:

...There's a tendency for liberals to try and be fair, to consider other viewpoints, so we get baited by them in debates on terms that they set. I'm going to act on the following: I don't care what conservatives think. The NRO Corner thinks I'm a racist, I don't care, their opinions on race are meaningless.

Instacracker doesn't like what I say?

That's the purpose of the exercise.

I want conservatives to read this site and come away steaming. I don't want them to think they will like a word I will say here. I don't want them to think I will consider their opinions or viewpoints. I want them to think: boy he doesn't like conservatives and really, really doesn't care what we say.

I'm tired of people acting like these people can be reasoned with or talked to. They don't want to talk, they want to drive us away into a corner and ridicule our ideas.

I'm not writing to make conservatives happy. I want them to hate my opinions.

I'm not interested in debating them.

I want to stop them.

Also fuck the fucking Yankees.