An Operation Memory Hole Project Update: Peter Wehner

Over the past couple of years, many of us on the Left have have made a it our business to pull up our lawn chairs and document each step in the only infrastructure project the Beltway media really cares about:  Operation Memory Hole.

From me, two weeks before the 2016 election:

If you have followed the long, sickening collapse of American political media over the last 30 years, you know that after every Republican catastrophe there comes the most solemn and sacred ritual in the business:  the excavation of a memory hole big enough to bury the whole fucking fiasco, root and branch as fast as possible.  Dig the pit, dump the body, quicklime it, pour enough Chernobyl-grade bullshit over the site to sarcophagize the whole thing and then post signs warning future generations of the Dire Consequences of poking around anywhere near the truth.

With that accomplished, the American political media is then free to get back to the important business of mooning over Paul Ryan's abs and wondering why the Democrats refuse to deploy their magic Green Lantern powers to compel Republicans to stop wrecking the place and wallowing in deranged conspiracies and actually, y'know, grow the fuck up and govern.

And so here we find ourselves once again, at the very first stages of the next great act of national Strategic Forgettery, when the stink of desperation and failure blend with the odor of greasepaint and hair-spray.  The split second after the Big Bang when everything is hot and dangerous and the exact shape of the Next Big Lie has not emerged  yet.  It is a scary, frantic time during which members of our Elite Media will be seen across this Land of the Free flinging every bit of poo in their magic bag against every wall they can reach in order to achieve the most vital imperative of all:

And so here we are, deep in the shit, and as predicted, virtually the entire Beltway media has spared no expense to relocate the source of the catastrophic failure of the democratic process as far away from themselves as humanly possible, becoming a veritable bump-stocked Pez-dispenser of the same self-absolving lies which were taking shape back in 2016.

It begins with the biggest Big Lie of all -- the categorical denial that there was anything fundamentally and uniquely wrong with the Republican Party before Donald Trump arrived.  Ergo...

Since it could not be the real "Republican Party" that's to blame, it must be "Trumpism".

Or maybe it's everyone's fault!

Or maybe it's the Liberal's fault!

Any lie of this genus will do, as long as it accomplishes the critical function of relocating the blame for the rise of Trump as far away from the brain caste of the Republican Party and their collaborators and enablers in the media as human possible.

Which brings us to Peter Wehner who "served in the previous three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer" for The New York Times" and who is working very hard to play every tin whistle on the True Conservative bullshit calliope.

First, establishing himself as the hero of his own creation myth because, after a lifetime of helping build the Republican monster machine, he noticed "three summers ago" that monsters were coming off the assembly line.

When I first took to these pages three summers ago to write about Mr. Trump, I warned my fellow Republicans to just say no both to him and his candidacy.

Then comes the by-now depressingly predictable, wildly redacted and cloyingly perfumed version of the history of his Republican party that begins with Bill Clinton --

For decades, Republicans, and especially conservative Republicans, insisted that character counted in public life. They were particularly vocal about this during the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, arguing against “compartmentalization” — by which they meant overlooking moral turpitude in the Oval Office because you agree with the president’s policy agenda or because the economy is strong.

-- skips completely over 30 years of Hate Radio, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, the entire pandimensional clusterfuck that was the Dubya administration, the Fake Tea Party, the entire, unhinged primal racist scream that was the GOP during the Obama years and lands with a mighty "thud" on January 20, 2017 --

All that has changed with Mr. Trump as president. For Republicans, honor and integrity are now passé.

It is a stunning turnabout...

This, right here, is the lie.  The pickax with which Mr. Wehner does his part make sure the Memory Hole is deep enough and wide enough to bury his sins.  Because this most emphatically wasn't a "stunning turnabout".  This was the logical and entirely predictable end-product of a Republican Party which Mr. Wehner spent his lifetime building, and away from which Mr. Wehner has spent the last few years running as fast as his legs will carry him.

Some of us who have been lifelong Republicans and previously served in Republican administrations held out a faint hope that our party would at some point say “Enough!”; 

What in the long, depraved history of the Party of Atwater and Limbaugh and Falwell and Rove and Cruz and On and On and On could have led any honest observer to believe this was true?

Next, notice by-now depressingly predictable abuse use of pronouns here:

No such luck. Mr. Trump’s corruptions have therefore become theirs. 

Not "ours" but "theirs". 

Not Mr. Mr. Wehner's Republican Party, but some other Republican Party, waaaay over there.

Then, adorably, comes the most fleeting of hand-waves in the direction of the faint possibility that, just maybe, someone who, (according to Wikipedia):

...served in three Republican presidential administrations (Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush).[1] Wehner was a speechwriter for Secretary of EducationWilliam (Bill) Bennett before becoming Special Assistant to the Director at the Office of National Drug Control Policy.[2] Wehner was then Executive Director for Policy for Empower America, a Conservative group[2] that was founded by Bennett.[3]

...served George W. Bush as Deputy Director of Speechwriting in 2001 and became the head of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives in 2002.[2][1] After leaving the Bush White House in 2007, Wehner joined EPPC as a Senior Fellow.[3] In 2012, Wehner served as senior adviser to the Mitt Romney presidential campaign.[1]

...is the co-author of two books: City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (with Michael J. Gerson) and Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism (with Arthur C. Brooks).[1] In City of Man, published by American Enterprise Institute Press, Wehner and Gerson argue that the free market and capitalism, when properly functioning, act "as a civilizing agent" that improves society's moral condition in key ways by prizing "thrift, savings, and investment" and discouraging "bribery, corruption, and lawlessness."[4] The title of the work was suggested by Yuval Levin.[5]

-- should have picked up on the fact that his party has been a giant, festering, racist dungheap for decades.

It’s quite possible this should have been obvious to me much sooner than it was, that I was blinded to certain realities I should have recognized.

Sadly, even though Mr. Wehner's works have --

...appeared in an array of publications, such as Commentary, Christianity Today, the Financial Times, National Affairs, Politico, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Weekly Standard. Wehner has also appeared on cable news channels, C-SPAN, and talk radio.[1][2] Wehner became a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times in 2015.[1]

-- today he somehow cannot spare more than a 26 words to parse the staggering, damning implications of this sentence.

Instead, he treats these 26 words like a guilty man tossing a bag of dog shit over a neighbor's fence -- something smelly and incriminating, to be gotten away from him of as quickly as possible -- and then speeds immediately away to the much more important business of scolding that other Republican Party:

In any case, the Republican Party’s as-yet unbreakable attachment to Mr. Trump is coming at quite a cost...

The Republican Party which is full of naughty people who have placed their professional self-interest ahead of heeding Mr. Wehner's warnings three summers ago.

In very much the same way that men like Mr. Wehner placed their professional self-interest ahead of heeding the just such dire warnings from the Left, decade, after decade, after decade. 

Behold, a Tip Jar!