The Monster Beneath The Mask

Dr. Wynn: Well, he's your patient, if you knew that the precautions weren't strong enough, you should have told somebody.

Loomis: I told everybody! Nobody listened.

-- Halloween, 1978

For the record (and Lord, how I hope there will be a record), your humble scrivener began writing about the rise of Trump less than 48 hours after he came slouching down the Escalator of Doom --

...in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

-- and for the last three years, this tiny blog in the middle of Middle America  has been sounding one consistent alarm:

Donald Trump Is The GOP

A warning that Donald Trump was not some one-off, Black Swan event, but rather the logical and inevitable end-product of the Republican Party performing exactly as it had been designed and built over the last 40 years.

Every poll these days shows what Liberals have known and have been saying all along -- that Trump is the Party and the Party is Trump.  And yet our free press  -- that  venerable constitutionally-chartered American institution which is supposed to tell us the truth and shame the Devil -- not only failed repeatedly and catastrophically to take this threat seriously, but actively lied about the threat.  Downplayed it.  Jokes about it.  Deflected and diffused is into a fine mist of toxic Both Siderism which blew equally in all directions.

And this is the other, deeply depressing truth which we Liberals  had to come to terms with a long time ago.  The fact that our vaunted Fourth Estate more often than not acts as a Fifth Column. The fact that our corporate media simply does not live in the same world as the rest of us.

This is why the Beltway media was never going to admit that Trump is the GOP and the GOP is Trump no matter what.  It's why every Both Siderist hack in Christendom blithely went right on Both Sidering right through the nomination and the election (and blocked and insulted vituperative foul-mouthed bloggers of the Left like me who were jumping up and down on our tiny soapboxes screaming that, no Both Sides were NOT the same.)  It's why cable news made a corporate decision to run live coverage of empty podiums at Trump rallies over and over again rather than use those precious minutes to talk about anything substantive.  It's why the Never Trumpers carefully pre-positioned themselves as the "We Told You So" wing of the GOP who would sweep to power and rebuild their shattered party after Hillary Clinton's inevitable victory.

We on the Left knew going into the 2016 election cycle that the corporate media was not going to raise any fundamental questions about the depravity of the Republican Party, because the corporate media never raises any fundamental questions about the depravity of the Republican Party.  I know this because, as I wander through my archives (+8,600 posts and still going) if I squint my eyes slightly it becomes virtually impossible for me to tell the difference between what I was writing about the GOP last week, and what I was writing about the GOP more than a decade ago:

You know that if you really, actually flushed the scum of the Earth your Southern Strategists have so carefully cultivated down the drain, the Republican Party wouldn’t win another election – anywhere – for another generation...

You know it and, more importantly, they know it, which is why they own you.

They are the emergent and inevitable result of the hate-driven moral absolutism, racism and pathologically perverted variant of Christianity that is the bedrock of the Modern GOP. And as long as they are allowed to remain as the pillar of your Party, it will always end in tears…

And it is precisely because we on the Left have been right about the Right all along, that when I look at the loud, clanking, ludicrous, racist, lying, terrifying freak-show that is Donald Trump --

-- I no longer really see Donald Trump.

Like the narrator of Philip K. Dick's "Faith of our Fathers" after taking "phenothiazine, which as you doubtless know is anti-hallucinogenic" I see a squirmy, monstrous, alien thing-of-many-faces lurking beneath the human features.  

It had no shape. Nor pseudopodia, either flesh or metal. It was, in a sense, not there at all; when he managed to look directly at it, the shape vanished; he saw through it, saw the people on the far side -- but not it. Yet if he turned his head, caught it out of a sidelong glance, he could determine its boundaries. It was terrible; it blasted him with its awareness. As it moved it drained the life from each person in turn; it ate the people who had assembled, passed on, ate again, ate more with an endless appetite. It hated; he felt its hate. It loathed; he felt its loathing for everyone present...

When I look at Donald Trump, beneath the mask I see...

...all the Conservative hate mongers who spent their lives bringing this monster to life...

...and all the Conservative hacks who built the monster with one hand, and now, with the other hand, dab daintily at the crocodile tears they shed over how monstrous the monster is acting...

...I see all the elected hobgoblins and ghouls...

...who feed the monster because the monster is delivering all their depraved dreams to their doorstep...

...I see all the unhinged gorgons and vampires who have been normalized and mainstreamed and syndicated in newspapers across the country because the corporations that own those papers dare not do otherwise...

...and I see all the grifters and evil clowns who came along for the ride, got rich, got sad, got over it and are back on the same grift...

...all the sellouts who willingly pimped for a Party that hated them because the money was good...

...and all the amoral opportunists who spent years using their wordsmithing gifts to make the monster factory into a juggernaut, and now use their wordsmithing gifts to pretend they had no idea there was a monster factory at all...

...I see the fucking Christopaths and their venomous piety...

...did I mention the fucking Fake Christians and their poison piety?...

...I see corporate media moguls who gave the monster billions of dollars of free air time and never gave a shit because monsters are great for ratings... 

...and the smarmy morally-bankrupt bottom-feeders who would hand their own mothers over to a Saudi dismemberment squad if the monster told them to, and would then take to the Senate floor to scream about the Libtards for an hour or two...

...I see the slimy professional Both Siderists who have made themselves wealthy and powerful by the sheer relentlessness of their whinging and sighing and impotent hand wringing all while lying about the existence of the monster over and over and over again...

...and the Bush Regime Dead-Enders whose relentless propaganda paved the path to the White House for the monster, and who have been wrong about everything since forever but for some reacon can never be fired or even questioned...

...I see the billionaire fascists who gleefully footed the bill for the misery and madness you see all around you...

...and the other billionaire fascists who built mighty media machines that ruthlessly shouted down opposition, slaughtered the truth, glorified ignorance and racism, spread Republican lies into every corner of America, and bullied the mainstream press into cowering in the corner...

...I see the Never Trumpers who made their first career out of feeding the monster and are now making a second career out of pretending they never knew there was a monster at all...

...I see the entire Bush Regime, which was, in so many ways, just a dress-rehearsal for the rise of the monster...

...and of course, I see real monster.  

The inexhaustible go-go juice that makes the whole monster factory run and made everyone involved in building the monster factory wealthy and successful.

The reprogammable meatbag Republican base whose paranoia, rage and racism are the fruits of decades of careful cultivation...

...and about which Libtards like me have been sounding the alarm for a long, long time.

Once again we find that the most terrifying monsters do not skulk around castles or stalk their prey on the moors under the full moon.

The most terrifying monsters of all live right next door.

My birthday fundraiser continues...

Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!