Grandpa Joe Promises To Do Shots With Reagan Until Bipartisanship

Today I'd like to share with you a list of words and phrases lifted directly from one of the letters to the editor that was recently published in my local newspaper:

The infamous Green New Deal
Marxist economics
Climate alarmism
Unrestrained stupidity
The Democrat Party’s army of social justice mobsters
Democrats...completely divorced from reality.
Nitwits
Pseudo-science and phony virtue
Demonize and destroy anyone resisting the party’s groupthink.
This cult that has become the Democrat Party
Herd mentality of a gullible, indoctrinated public
Unquestioning and compliant media.
Climate charlatans
Race hustlers.

Do I find this deeply depressing?  Of course.  What sane person wouldn't?  This is madness -- stark and strutting.  

But do I find this especially shocking?  Of course not.  Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention to American politics and culture for the last 40 years will immediately recognize this as the basic political vocabulary of tens of millions of Americans whose baseline mental state has been shaped by letting Hate Radio and Fox News take a dump in their skulls decade after decade.  

This is the mother tongue of the average Republican base voter out here in the Real World.  And in case you hadn't figured it out by now, it is far too late to stop this madness from spreading.  It has already spread.  It's already in the bones of our democracy.  In fact, it was probably too late 20 years ago, because it's not simply that these people are vicious and pig-ignorant  -- it's that they fight like the devil to stay this way.  

It's that they're proud of it.  

And because our political climate has been irreversibly wrecked by the Republican Party for at least the next generation, at this point the very best we can hope for is to contain their madness and mitigate the damage they can do.  Which means the rest of us in the not-crazy majority need to start running hard against the entire Republican party as an entity and stop wasting our limited time and energy pretending that figuring out the Trump voter is some great mystery, and that once we crack their code and begin communicating with them in their native language something something "Bipartisanship!"  

Because there is no mystery.  And this -- 

The infamous Green New Deal
Marxist economics
Climate alarmism
Unrestrained stupidity
The Democrat Party’s army of social justice mobsters
Democrats...completely divorced from reality.
Nitwits
Pseudo-science and phony virtue
Demonize and destroy anyone resisting the party’s groupthink.
This cult that has become the Democrat Party
Herd mentality of a gullible, indoctrinated public
Unquestioning and compliant media.
Climate charlatans
Race hustlers.

-- is their native language.  

Which brings us around around to America's favorite affable relic from a time that never really was and just about the only Democratic candidate that most Never Trumpers would even consider voting for:  Joe Biden.

Here is a sampling.

From the Intelligencer:

The latest version of this fantasy comes to us from the imagination of Juleanna Glover, a veteran Republican campaign operative who appears to have ascended into the stratosphere of Beltway insiders who form bipartisan lobbying shops and fête each other in the cramped and self-regarding Washington social scene (better known as the site of the legendary Georgetown cocktail parties where all the sharp edges of politics are softened). To her credit, Glover isn’t promoting some abstract third party of sensible centrists, but a very specific 2020 coalition to be led by Joe Biden:

The Democratic primary is shaping up to be cacophonous and chaotic. Biden should capitalize on his status as one of America’s most popular politicians, skip the risk and potential indignities of running and losing in what will be a vicious and mulish, leftward-lurching primary, and slingshot straight to the general election debate stage on a third-party ticket.

From Jennifer Rubin:

Democrats might need Biden more than they know 

...
Even if he is not the ultimate winner, he has the stature, the money, the name ID and the popularity to seize the party by the scruff of the neck and pull it back from the brink.

From McClatchy:

These are the Democrats winning the ‘Never Trump’ Republican primary

As Democrats debate which presidential contender could beat Donald Trump, anti-Trump Republicans—and recent ex-Republicans—can think of a few names.

They’re just not names that thrill Democratic activists.

“Joe Biden is the type of candidate who could get me to actually look at a Democratic candidate as opposed to an independent,” said former Florida Rep. David Jolly, who was a Republican until last year.
...

Agreed a Texas-based conservative operative, granted anonymity to protect professional relationships: “It would be really, really hard for me to vote for any of them, but Joe Biden would be my favorite among the Democrats. He’s a good person, what you see is what you get. He truly is kind of an everyman in a lot of ways...I’d take a hard look at him.”

Charlie Sykes is the editor-in-chief of the outlet The Bulwark, which strives to provide “a voice for non-Trumpian conservatives,” and he previously was a prominent “Never Trump” Wisconsin radio host...

“It’s possible that in the end I could be a reluctant Biden voter,” he said, though stressed it was too early to make commitments. “There are no circumstances in which I would be a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren voter.”

Tom Nichols:

Biden/Klobuchar

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 8, 2018

And if you have done as I have done (Don't do it!) and waded into the ooey-gooey swamp of Wingnut Welfare podcasts, there you will also find the name of Joe Biden being bruited about.  For example, Conservative Never Trumper Matt Lewis has himself podcast and on this particular episode he speaks with former Conservative Hate Radio shouter and Never Trumper John Zeigler, who has also got himself a "podcast".

Exciting isn't it!

I had planned on a much longer review of Mr. Lewis' trainwreck of a podcast and may write one up one of these days.  For now, let's just say that Mr. Lewis -- who fancies himself a Sensible Center-Right/Never-Trumper and Heroic Truth-Spurter  -- confesses that he has been "so happy lately to be able to focus his ire on the Left" because slagging Libtards is his factory default setting.  He further warns that the only way he could even consider supporting the filthy, Commie Democrats in the next election is if we nominate Joe Biden.

So what is it exactly about Joe Biden that makes the Never Trumper's toes curl ever so slightly to the left?

It's the same sweet offer that has put Never Trumpers on the op-ed pages of America's newspapers and on every cable news program despite the fact that they are politically impotent and irrelevant. 

The overwhelming, collective Beltway desire to pretend that the past never happened.

From Brad DeLong at Vox:

You listen to [Never Trump conservatives] like Tom Nichols or Bruce Bartlett or Bill Kristol or David Frum talk about all the people they had been with in meetings, biting their tongues over the past 25 years, and your reaction can only be, “Why didn’t you run away screaming into the night long ago?”

And the answer to Mr. DeLong's question to be found in the old joke about the man who goes to a psychiatrist and complains that his brother is crazy because he thinks he's a chicken.  The doctor says, "Why don't you have him committed?" The man replies, "I would, but I need the eggs."

The reason the Never Trumpers didn't run screaming into the night long ago is that they needed the votes.  They needed the clicks.  They needed the subscribers.  They needed the prestige and influence that pretending to speak for that vast mob of voters gave them.  In other words, they were only too happy to build the Republican monster factor and profit handsomely thereby, and only abandoned it because the last monster to roll off their production line insisted on saying out-loud and in public all the horrifying things that the Never Trumpers were perfectly happy to countenance when they were said quietly, behind closed doors.

And what Joe Biden offers them is a way out by going along with the obvious farce that Donald Trump is the problem, and once Trump is defeated, Biden and the ghosts of Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan can get back to the glorious bipartisan days of yore.

"Mean pettiness has overtaken our politics," Joe Biden says.

"If you notice, I get criticized for saying anything nice about a Republican. Folks, that's not who we are." https://t.co/NkJuIoh4fP pic.twitter.com/3KeB5iSTze

— ABC News (@ABC) March 12, 2019

That trapped just beneath the repulsive, racist surface of the Republican Party there lurks a vast, untapped pool of comity and civility just waiting for good ol' Joe Biden to release it:

“I get in trouble,” Biden said at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C. “I read in the New York Times today that one of my problems is if I were ever to run for president is I like Republicans. OK, well bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said as he made the sign of the cross.
... 

“This is a pretty dysfunctional town,” he said. “It’s like we’ve divided the country into pieces. How can we be one America if we continue down this road? I don’t care what your party affiliation is."

Except, as Jonathan Chait notes, the idea that Donald Trump is an aberration of an otherwise-healthy Republican Party is ludicrous. The Republican Party itself is the problem.

The Most Unrealistic Promise Democrats Are Making Is to Restore Bipartisanship

...The Obama presidency was an eight-year experiment in the possibility of obtaining Republican support for major initiatives. It is impossible to imagine a more conclusive result. Despite having jacked up the deficit during the entirety of the presidencies both before and after Obama’s, Republicans spent the entire time insisting on massive fiscal austerity despite facing objectively the most favorable conditions for stimulus spending since World War II. Obama’s offer to support John McCain’s cap-and-trade plan and Mitt Romney’s health-care plan drew almost zero Democratic and zero Republican votes, respectively. Republicans wouldn’t even accept a deal to trim Medicare spending in return for tax reform. 

McConnell publicly stated his logic at the time: putting the bipartisan imprimatur on Obama’s policies would make the policies popular. More than mere strategy was at work. By waging partisan war against any of Obama’s initiatives, Republicans helped persuade their voters that his ideas — even those with a solid moderate Republican pedigree — were dangerous socialism. And the more fearful Republican voters became, the harder it was for Republicans to negotiate anything with Obama.”...

There is no hope of salvaging the tens of millions of reprogrammable Republican meatbags who, like the guy who writes my local paper every few weeks,  sincerely believe that people like me are Marxist nitwit social justice mobsters, climate charlatans and race hustlers who are completely divorced from reality.

The rest of us have no control over that.  The damage is done and it will be fucking up our politics for decades to come.

What the rest of us can do is demand that our candidates and our media stop insulting our intelligence and trying to curry favor with a nonexistent Center, gutless "independents" and a few dozen Never Trumpers by lying about what a dungheap of bigots and imbeciles the Republican Party actually is and how exactly it got that way.

Behold, a Tip Jar!