There Goes The Neighborhood, Ctd.

In the face of the most brazen hijacking of Constitutional authority "Trump proves that everything Republicans ever ran on is either a lie or disposable." --@TheRickWilson on #TheMichaelSteelePodcasthttps://t.co/4c4xzDfpOs

— Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) February 17, 2019

Welcome to "Lifeboat Building" with Michael Steele.

This weeks's special guest Rick Wilson.

The former chair of the RNC and a life-long Republican hit-man talking about how awesome and principled the Republican Party used to be --

.@TheRickWilson: This is a completely revolutionary moment where the Republican party is collapsing in on itself. They don't believe in anything anymore. They have no philosophy, no underpinning values except for what makes #Trump happy. #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/pfZK8D9CZr

— AM Joy w/Joy Reid (@amjoyshow) February 16, 2019

-- before Donald Trump came along and somehow hypnotized the entire Republican Party base and turned them into racist zombies.

Complimenting each other on their sagacity for noticing five minutes ago that something was wrong with their beloved Party of Atwater and Rove Reagan, and issuing dire warnings that, if this goes on, someday Republicans will rue the day yadda yadda yadda.

Except, of course, that is not how the history of the Republican Party unfolded at all.

In fact, for the entire run of Mr. Steele and Mr. Wilson's careers, the Republican Party has been pretty much exactly as it is now -- a party of racist zombies -- who were pressured to exercise slightly better public manners.  Whipping the racist zombie horde into a biennial frenzy and directing them to the polls is how Republicans won elections.  It's how Mr. Steele and Mr. Wilson got paid.

And everyone in the media knew it.  Everyone in the leadership of the Republican Party knew it.   In fact, back before the dawn of recorded history, before Michael Steele was making his living groveling to racists like Rush Limbaugh --

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.”...

-- we Liberals were writing what were once called "blog posts" sounding the alarm about the what was really happening inside Mr. Wilson's beloved Party of Cheney and Bush Reagan.  Blog posts like this one.   From me.   13 years ago:

Reactionary

...

Because if the entire Right Wing understands anything it is this – as frustrating and degrading as it is to men like Trent Lott, Tom Tancredo, G. Felix Allen and Rick Santorum who really, really want to shout their love for all things Segregated and/or Despotic from the rooftops, it is still not socially acceptable to publicly embrace and celebrate your Inner Klansman.

Thus they must commune with their Swine Army in code.

They must use lightly encrypting hatespeech to manipulate the Rove Rods to get the Electoral Reactor Core seething hot enough to activate the base...but always keep the Bobo Koolant level of soothing denial, spin and outright lies juuust high enough to keep the Moderates from being directly exposed to and freaked out by the unshielded Core of the GOP.

This is, by way of example, exactly the dilemma G. Felix Allen now finds himself in. Allen is in every way a transparently counterfeit imbecile. A Johnny-Reb-Come-Lately who has mined such electoral gold as is available in his blighted part the country to men with money, name and good hair who are willing to jump into the bigoted cesspit of Konfederate Kaucasian Kristianity with both feet.

Except people keep asking questions about his past and his persona while on camera!

Sure, slingin’ “macaca” around may get you a flattering laugh as a sly ol’ boy down at the Cross-N-Burn bar. And jumping out of your Tunisian skin to bitch that someone was “casting aspersions” who asked simple questions about your Jewish heritage might get you a pity fuck from the Council of Conservative Citizens' Comfort Women’s Auxiliary.

But G. Felix Allen seems almost congenitally unable to comprehend that in the Information Age, voices carry.

And outside of the Heart of Confederate Darkness, moderate GOP voters who are kept carefully shielded from the truth and lulled into a cozy, supply-side coma by the Bobo Koolant are genuinely horrified when the Core of their Party is suddenly exposed and they are forced to face with eyes wide open the naked, roaring, venomous, unreconstructed filth that actually fuels and pilots the Conservative’s Pretty Hate Machine.

But back then, when an honest look at the disastrous path the Republican Party was on might have spared us the rise of a monster like Trump, this sort of talk was absolutely verboten among the Very Serious People who rule our politics and our media.  And those of us who dared to speak in these terms were marked as a pariah forever precisely because we dared to do what journalism is supposed to do: speak critical truths to powerful people when doing so is most necessary and least unpopular. 

Instead, the Right and the Center allied themselves to preserve a status quo in which everyone knew the GOP was a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles, everyone profiting from it, and everyone agreed not to talk about it no matter how many alarms we crazy Libtards sounded.

And then Donald Trump arrived and told the racist zombie horde that being true to who the Republican Party had taught them to be in private -- listeners to Hate Radio and watchers of Fox News and ragers about imaginary Libtard conspiracies lurking around ever corner -- was nothing they needed to be ashamed of.  After all, since these were the very listening, viewing, reading and thinking habits their party's leaders had praised and encouraged sub rosa for decades, why all the sneaking around?

Why shouldn't they tell the Libtard political-correctness police to go fuck themselves and proudly shout their rage and paranoia and racism from the rooftops?

You see, the terrible truth which neither the media nor the Never Trumpers dare to admit is that Trump has not changed the base of the Republican Party --

-- at all. 

Instead Trump simply offered them what every con man offers his marks.

The basic idea is this.  It's called a confidence game. Why?  Because you give me your confidence?  No. Because I give you mine.

-- Mike, House of Games

He gave them that which they hungered for above all else.  What no other candidate for the Republican nomination would give them.  By declining to speak to them in attenuated, encrypted Meet the Press-friendly dog-whistle code -- by using the blunt, vicious vocabulary of the base to become one with them -- he took the GOP base into his confidence.

He gave them his trust.

And in exchange he gained their undying loyalty.

Which is why it doesn't matter to the Republican base that, even if Trump's stupid fucking Wall were ever built, it would do absolutely nothing to actually address the myriad bullshit justifications for its construction that Trump keeps inventing.  Because for the party base, Trump was never promising a mere wall-as-immigrant-barrier.  He was promising them a vast, public, officially-sanctioned monument to their hatred, big enough to be seen from space, strong enough to hold back the future, durable enough to last 1000 years, erected by a Republican demagogue who told them at the top of his lungs what Republicans like Rick Wilson and Michael Steele had only whispered to them, discreetly, shamefully, behind closed doors.

That their insatiable rage was perfectly justified.

That their racism was noble.

And that their paranoia was patriotic.

Behold, my Twitter Legal Defense Fund!