It's Been a Long Time Coming

As your newest, bestest, #NeverTrump Republican buddies come to you for a shoulder to cry on about how Donald J. Trump has just gone and ruined their awesome Party of Lincoln, do the world a favor.  Before you tell them how much you like them and admire their honesty and, hell, why not come over to your house and fuck your sister, remind them that their party has been running this "Lie, Decry, Destroy and Deny" scam since long, long before Trump showed up.

In fact (you point out very patiently) it is this very "Lie, Decry, Destroy and Deny" tactic that Republicans at every level (including your newest, bestest, #NeverTrump Republican buddies) gleefully practiced every day for decades that is largely responsible for turning the Party of Lincoln into a such an unsalvageable shitpile of bigots and imbeciles that it could nominate and then elect a monster like Trump -- the walking, talking manifestation of this pathology. 

From me, twelve very long years ago:

...

[The Republican party has] created a massive, unstable ammunition dump of their own toxic words, their own Procrustian standards of faultlessness, and now they don’t dare admit that any one of them has ever made a mistake. And to maintain the sham that they are not a Confederacy of Liars on a scale that makes Clinton on his worst day look like a candidate for sainthood, the dogma of their own perfection and infallibility has utterly supplanted fact and reason, which you must admit does fit very neatly with the preexisting Fundamentalist Delusionalism of their base.

The only thing that keeps the rice-paper thin wall between their own Clinton-era rhetoric and their own Bush-era actions is sheer, brazen, unremitting denial. To even whisper the possibility that Dear Leader might be wrong about something – about anything – is to risk that the whole filthy Ponsi scheme falling apart beneath them.

They can’t go back or even slow down without risking that moment of honest reflection with they fear worse than Death itself, so the are condemned to going on and on, running faster and faster, hoping somehow that they can stay ahead of the tsunami of blood and sorrow that their lies have set loose in the world.

Their once proud political Party -- the Party of Lincoln for fuck's sake -- is now just another torchlit mob led by the likes of James Dobson, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. And flanked by Tom Delay and Bill Frist and their pustulent ilk on one side and a craven and neutered propaganda machine masquerading as a “Free Press” on the other, they plunge madly on, dragging all of us along deeper and deeper into darkness, shouting out their battle cry. 

Deny! Deny! Deny!

And once you have patiently laid all of this out to your newest, bestest, #NeverTrump Republican buddies, listen very carefully to their answer.

It if begins anything like "But I didn't know..." or "But Both Sides..." then do the world a favor and tell them that while they may not cry on your shoulder, they can definitely kiss your ass.