In Which Charlie Sykes Just Starts Ripping Me Off Wholesale

Mr. Charlie Sykes yesterday:

Year Zero
No, conservative victories did not begin with Trump.

Welcome to Year Zero, where conservative history begins anew.

Until now, conservatives were merely feckless losers, low-testosterone failures in search of leadership, energy, and the sort of #winning that has now only just begun. So it was not surprising that the mockery of the “ghost of John McCain” would get a standing ovation at last weeks’ CPAC, or that the legacy of the last two GOP presidents would be erased.

“The Bush family, the entire legacy, has been erased from conservative history at this conference,” MSNBC’s Garrett Haake noted...

Me, last week:

The Collapse of the Never Trumper Dream Palaces

...And they can't very well do that with assholes like me hanging around, recklessly reminding everyone what the Republican Party was like before Trump, because the only way for Never Trumpers to exonerate themselves and their media enablers is to once again bulldoze the entire history of the modern Conservative movement and the Republican Party right down the memory hole.  Once again reset the historical clock and declare that the arrival of Donald Trump to be the new Day Zero:  the new (as the poet Ursula Fanthorpe once wrote) "moment when Before/Turned into After".

Except, of course, when Never Trumpers like Charlie Sykes straight-up rip off the Liberal critique of his Republican Party (and they all do it)  they're not doing it to thank us for being right about the Right all along. Not doing it to illuminate the past or repair the damage they and their Republican party have done to our country.   As I wrote last week:

All of this is happening because the mission of the Never Trump tribe and their enablers in media is not to condemn Donald Trump -- their mission is to exonerate themselves.  

Period.  Full stop. 

And now Mr. Sykes has taken that final step into pure, Orwellian doubethink:  the act of willfully forgetting all previous acts of willful forgetting.

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth

As I have written about literally hundreds of times over the past 14 years (yes, it really has been 14 years)--

Strategic Forgettery

Like a Virgin 

Bush-Belly Sneetches

Crisis on Infinite Conservatisms: The Unending Reign of the RetCon Men

The "David Brooks' Great Project" Series

Lethe Beach Party

-- the act of continuously abolishing the past and resetting the mental clocks of the Republican base is not some recent development.  In fact, it is such a burned-on-the-motherboard feature of the modern GOP and their enablers in the media that without the decades which men like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and  Charlie Sykes spent taking a dump in the skulls of the GOP base -- dumbing them down to the level of reprogrammable meatbags trained to instantly forget everything they believed just moments ago -- there would be no modern Republican at all.  And there would certainly be no Donald Trump.

And now that Charlie Sykes -- respected MSNBC contributor, best-selling author and editor-in-chief of Bill Kristol's latest True Conservative grift -- finds himself in need of reclaiming his political virginity, well, why not just loot the Libtard larder?

Pour his new whine into our old skins?

Take our Conservative butcher's bill and snip-snip-snip it into his indignant alibi?

After all, obviously Liberals have no allies in the Beltway media and nobody reads their stupid, Leftist trash anyway, so who would be the wiser?

Or, to quote Mr. Sykes himself from so far down in the Valley of Irony that sunlight can no longer reach him:

Because it’s Year Zero and facts and history can be anything we want them to be. Right?

Apparently so, Mr, Sykes.

Apparently so.

Behold, a Tip Jar!