Birthday Fundraiser: Leon Trotsky Never Had A SuperPAC

(A photo of your humble scrivener in more innocent times.)

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Today, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times came as close as he will probably ever come to acknowledged that his Republican party is irretrievably fucked in the head.

The Republican senators went to the White House and saw a president so repetitive and rambling, some thought he might be suffering from early Alzheimer’s. But they know which way the wind is blowing. They gave him a standing ovation.

Of course, what Mr. David Brooks will never acknowledge is how his Republican party got that way because that way lies culpability and shame and no Opinion-Having Job For Life for David Brooks.  And so, I\instead of simply taking his readers on a walking tour of the wide, straight and clearly-marked path his Republican party followed into Hell, Mr. Brooks choose (once again) to...

...Blame The Entire Society:

America’s Judeo-Christian ethic celebrated neighborliness over pagan combativeness; humility as the basis of good character, not narcissism. It believed in taking in the stranger because we were all strangers once. It dreamed of universal democracy as the global fulfillment of the providential plan. 

That biblical ethic, embraced by atheists as much as the faithful, is not in great shape these days. As Sacks notes: “Today, one half of America is losing all those covenantal institutions. It’s losing strong marriages and families and communities. It is losing a strong sense of the American narrative. It’s even losing e pluribus unum because today everyone prefers pluribus to unum.…” 

Trump and Bannon have filled the void with their own creed, which is anti-biblical. 

...carefully blur the distinction between "Americans" and Republican voters:

As other relationships wither, many Americans are making partisanship the basis of their identity — their main political, ethnic and moral attachment. And the polls show that if you want to win a Republican primary these days, you have to embrace the Trump narrative, and not the old biblical one.

...and snatch a hilariously flawed historical analogy off the shelf to make his Very Big Point:

The Week Trump Won

One hundred years ago on Friday, John Reed was in St. Petersburg watching Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolsheviks take over Russia. It was interesting to read his account, “Ten Days That Shook the World,” this week — the week when Donald Trump and Steve Bannon solidified their grip on the Republican Party and America’s national government. 

The big thing you notice from Reed’s reporting is how useful it is to have a secular religion. In the midst of the chaos of 1917, the communists alone knew exactly what they believed. They had a clear intellectual framework that they could use to explain events...

Yeah, but Trotsky never had billionaire crackpots like the Mercers and the Kochs and the Adelsons and on and on and on and on willing to spend unlimited amounts of money over the course of decades in a deliberate campaign to sabotage the fundamentals of representative democracy, did he?

And Lenin did not have a sprawling, multi-billion dollar multimedia brainwashing machine at his disposal, did he?  One with its own teevee and radio networks, its own newspapers and radio stations and churches and the full backing of the establishment?  

And the foot-soldiers of the wingnut vanguard aren't exactly starving peasants and anti-war protesters, are they?  They are, by and large, well-fed, middle-class white male bigots and imbeciles who have let Rush Limbaugh take a dump in their skulls for 25 years and never gave two shits about their sick or starving countrymen or the war their Dear Leader lied us into.  Who only took to the streets once the Black Guy was sworn into office and whose Great Cause included Birth Certificates, Death Panels and rampant fear that the New Black Panther Party (All Hail Alinsky!) would soon be kicking down their door, taking their guns and turning them over to the Muslim Brotherhood at the behest of the Kenyan Usurper.

The wingnut vanguard, in other words, are nothing more or less than the same old Republican base who have been a cancer on our society for Mr. Brooks' entire career -- tens of millions of reprogrammable meatbags whose paranoia and rage are the result of decades of of deliberate cultivation by the plutocrats who own and operate Mr. Brooks' Republican party.  So the takeover of  one faction of Mr. Brooks' Republican party by another faction  of Mr. Brooks' Republican was hardly the surrender of Kerensky (although Mr. Brooks' treats it as such --

Even Alexander Kerensky didn’t abase himself so humiliatingly.

-- because in Mr. Brooks' tale of woe, Liberals, the Democratic party and the +65M people who most emphatically voted for Hillary Clinton and against this madness simply do not exist.)

Instead this was nothing more or less than a long-delayed absorption of one division of GOP, Inc. by another division.  An intra-corporate knife-fight that spilled into public view over who gets to use the meatbags on behalf of which cabal of billionaires.

Finally, Mr. Brooks once again gets his dates wrong as well.

This is not "The Week Trump Won".

The week Trump won was back in November of 1994 when Mr. Brooks' Republican party finally gave itself over -- body and soul -- to the politics of Newt Gingrich and the mass-media weaponization of ignorance, rage and racism of Rush Limbaugh:

That was the week Mr. Brooks' Republican party decided -- publicly and irrevocably -- to embrace the forces of darkness and take that wide, straight and clearly-marked road into Hell that led inevitably to the election of President Stupid, and the final, craven, capitulation of the leadership of the Party of Lincoln to Donald Trump and his Pandemonium Carnival.

From me, back in August, 2015:

...

Something stupid this way comes.

Again.

Charles Halloway: I know who you are. You are the autumn people. Where do you come from? The dust. Where do you go to? The grave.

Mr. Dark: Yes. We are the hungry ones. Your torments call us like dogs in the night. And we do feed, and feed well.

Charles Halloway: To stuff yourselves on other people's nightmares.

Mr. Dark: And butter our plain bread with delicious pain. So, you do understand a little.

-- Ray Bradbury, "Something Wicked This Way Comes"

Once again our elite media is looking-with-alarm at the latest beast to lurch out of the GOP monster factory.

Once again they pretend to be appalled by the symptoms of the plague that is ravaging our democracy, and once again they dare not name the causes of a pestilence which they helped to engineer, opting instead to dab daintily at the open, suppurating pustules that cover our body politic with damp, Both Siderist towelettes.

So since no one listens to a fucking word we Liberals say anyway, I thought I would trot something out from the cellar appropriate to the occasion...