"Priebus" Is Greek For "Chum"

Chum.  noun

1.  a close or intimate companion:
2.  cut or ground bait dumped into the water to attract fish to the area where one is fishing.

Gather ye 'round while I lean hard on my sketchy knowledge of Greek mythology to clarify just exactly what we are all witnessing as Conservative pundits and  thought-leaders line up to take a bite out of Reince Priebus' ass.

Once upon a time there was a young prince named Absyrtus, who was the son of king Aeetes and brother of Medea.  Medea, the daughter of  Aeetes, helped Jason (of Argonaut fame) steal the legendary Golden Fleece from her father.  In one telling of the story, as Medea, Jason and Absyrtus fled by boat from king Aeetes, Medea stabbed her brother to death and then dropped pieces of him into the sea so that her horrified father would be forced to stop and pick them up, thus giving Medea and Jason enough time to escape with their loot.

Maybe you see where this is going.

Now that the Administration of President Stupid has come out of the gate in a state of complete chaos and collapse, there is one standing order among the members of the Conservative Brain Caste who built entire careers feeding a Beast which they are now frantically trying to disown and disavow:  to survive the shit-storm they created they need to scope out the closest exit and haul ass as they leave the Republican Party and...

Move

Far

Away.

You know, just like they the last time they put a gang of halfwits, plutocrats and lying, authoritarian-minded monsters in charge of the country!

The most public and hilarious sample of this hurryupquick rush to relocate the blame for the rise of President Stupid as faaaaaar away from themselves as possible is probably Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough who, in the space of less than a year and a half, has gone from using his MSNBC teevee show to give Donald Trump unlimited free publicity and foot massages...

...to running in circles screaming that Trump is really a Dimmocrat, and anyway, now that Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough is an "independent", obviously none of the responsibility for this stank is on him (and if you did not see that Tea Party Two-Step coming from a mile away, deduct 30% from your overall score.)

But on this particular morning, the funniest example is to be found buried about a third of the way into this article in which Republican insanity enabler Charlie Sykes and wingnut madness enabler Michael Steele carve up the remains of Reince Priebus' career and drop it over the side of the boat in the hopes of making their getaway.

From The Atlantic:

The Final Humiliation of Reince Priebus 

Like his party, the former White House chief of staff swallowed his principles in the name of power. He was repaid in savage indignity. 

OK, before moving on, I'll bet some of you clever dogs have already spotted the flaw in the predicating assumption underpinning Ms. Molly Ball's entire article.  Namely, that Reince Priebus nor his party had to "swallow" a damn thing, because long before the Rise of Trump none of them showed any signed of having any principles at all. 

Which is exactly how we got into this dark and terrible place.

Ms. Ball continues...

...

It has been a long, strange trip for Priebus, who came to Washington as GOP chairman in 2011 on a promise to reform a party in disarray. His story, in a way, is the story of the Republican Party itself: His initial wariness of Trump gave way to capitulation and then enabling. He swallowed his private qualms for the sake of the team, until his turn to be the victim of Trump’s pageant of dominance finally came—publicly disgraced, dismissed in a tweet.

“I see him as kind of a tragic figure,” said Charlie Sykes, a former conservative radio host in Milwaukee who has known Priebus for many years. “What began as a matter of duty on his part—the decision to go all-in on Trump—ended with this scorchingly obscene humiliation.”

Sykes’s pity for his friend was limited, however. “It’s sad, but it’s the result of choices he made,” said Sykes, a Never Trumper who is now an MSNBC commentator. “It’s not like he wasn’t warned.”

Ironically, Priebus’s own career in national politics began with an act of disloyalty. In 2011, he won the RNC chair by running against his own boss, then-chairman Michael Steele. Despite big wins in the 2010 midterm elections, party activists had become dissatisfied with what they viewed as Steele’s mismanagement and penchant for gaffes. Steele knew he would have challengers when he sought another term as chairman—but he didn’t expect a challenge from Priebus, his general counsel, whom he considered a teammate.

“This is the bed Reince has been making for himself since he was my general counsel,” Steele told me. “He’s a guy who’s always positioning himself for the next thing. Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?”...

And here we have a near-mint specimen of the utterly dysfunctional relationship that Republicans have with their own Past.  You see, the Republican Party, from top to bottom, is now so far through the looking glass hole that it would collapse tomorrow without a steady diet of ever-more crude and ridiculous lies (from Paul Krugman in The New York Times):

But looking back, it’s easy to see the rot spreading. Compared with Donald Trump, the elder Bush looks like a paragon — but his administration lied relentlessly about rising inequality. His son’s administration lied consistently about its tax cuts, pretending that they were targeted on the middle class, and — in case you’ve forgotten — took us to war on false pretenses.

And almost the entire G.O.P. either endorsed or refused to condemn the “death panels” slander against Obamacare.

Given this history, the Republican health care disaster was entirely predictable. You can’t expect good or even coherent policy proposals from a party that has spent decades embracing politically useful lies and denigrating expertise.

And let’s be clear: we’re talking about Republicans here, not the “political system."...

Because of their long record of shameless lying, without a meek and compliant Beltway Media to cover their backs, there is simply no way for any Republican to open the book on the past to find an alibi for some shit that happened today without shaking loose some bit of long-suppressed history from yesterday that incriminates them even further.

And so when I read Michael Steele taking a little trip down Memory Lane so that he can smirk about Karma being "a bitch" because Reince now has to sleep in the bed he "has been making for himself" for years --

“This is the bed Reince has been making for himself since he was my general counsel,” Steele told me. “He’s a guy who’s always positioning himself for the next thing. Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?”...

-- I could not help but juice up the throttle control on Mr. Steele's touring sedan and extend our trip down Memory Lane just a little further so that we might also recall Mr. Steele's own well-documented record of buffoonery, lying and, of course, "positioning himself for the next thing" by appeasing degenerate monsters.

From Politico, March 2, 2009:

Steele to Rush: I'm sorry

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”... 

For his sins, Mr. Steele is now a Respected MSNBC Contributor and has his own radio show on Sirius XM.

Where he endlessly extols the virtues of Both Siderism.

Karma could not be reached for comment.

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