Trump Proved That Bush Proved That Reagan Proved That Deficits Don't Matter

"...Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due."

-- Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, January 9, 2004 

As we all know by now, every so often, as the accumulated horrors of Republican atrocities become too much to bear, Republicans and the Beltway media collaborate to reset the beginning of recorded history to a brand new Day One.  For example, as Bill Clinton was sworn in, they decided that it would be best for Murrica to pretend that the actual Reagan/Bush years never happened and instead erected mighty monuments to Imaginary Reagan, who was obviously the Greatest Prezit Who Every Lived.

Then, after George Bush stole the 2000 election, Republicans and the Beltway media once again agreed that the Clinton administration (except for the blowjob) had never happened.  The new, new Day One of recorded history would now be January 20, 2001 and nothing that Republicans had said or done before that would ever be mentioned again.  For a fuller accounting of this massive Orwellian crime against democracy, see "Like a Virgin".

Then, after we elected Barack Obama to help us climb out of the smoldering ruins that eight years of Bush Administration corruption, incompetence, war crimes, torture and lies had left in its wake, Republicans and the Beltway media once again agreed that the new, new, new Day One of the beginning of recorded history would now be January 20, 2009.  To complete the illusion, the yammering meatheads who had backed Dubya to the hilt for eight catastrophic years would be allowed to put on funny hats, start calling themselves "Independents" and "Tea Partiers" -- super-duper-patriots who swore they never even heard of George W. Bush or the Republican Party but whose beliefs somehow aligned perfectly with the GOP.

Meanwhile, however deranged, racist and openly seditious the Republican Party became, Republicans and the Beltway media would always find a way blame it on Barack Obama ("Why Won't Obama Lead?") or The Extremes on Both Sides.  Which is easy to do once you have forbidden any discussion in the media anywhere of exactly how the Republican Party came to be an unhinged monster factory.  After all, how can one discuss the horrifying decades-long lineage of the GOP that led to the present day, if the new, new, new Day One of the beginning of recorded history was January 20, 2009?

From the first chapter of 1984:

He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

One especially toxic side effect of the Beltway media and the GOP collaborating to abolish linear time has been the rise of an entire class of media parasites who were now free to make an excellent living repeating the same wingnut bullshit blaming the Libtards and the Feminazis or writing the same shitty column blaming The Extremes on Both Sides over and over again, decade after decade in the certain knowledge that their collaborates in the media wouldn't dare violate the Beltway's deepest taboo by delving into the past and comparing what that pundit said Back Then to what that pundit was saying Right Now.

Among the Very Serious Media Professional Havers-of-Opinions who have gotten rich by pretending the past never happened, the most successful is Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times.  So successful that we named this Beltway taboo after him.  The Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks:

And among the bomb-throwing, race-baiting, lie-vomiting heroes of Hate Radio, no one has enjoyed a longer run of sustained success by simply ignoring the lies he told yesterday in favor of the lies he is telling today than Rush Limbaugh.

Of course, given the fact that for decades Limbaugh's listeners have been little more that reprogrammable meatbags who will believe literally anything he shits into their skull on any given day, Boss Rush doesn't need to tart up his Orwellian claptrap in the shapeless, tapioca-soft language of David Brooks, but the results are identical.

Again from 1984:

 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.

Which is how, on July 16, 2019, Rush Limbaugh could say this on the air and not be run out of town on a rail by his Dittoheads (from Media Matters):

After bashing Obama for deficits for years, Rush Limbaugh now says budget deficits never mattered

Limbaugh: "Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore. All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus"

Media Matters goes on to detail Limbaugh's long, long history of railing against Barack Obama as (among other things) a "coward" without the "spine" or "gonads" to admit he is responsible for the federal deficit. Of being "the architect of deficits and debt unheard of in this nation."

Because as every good Republican knows, Rush has always been at war with Eurasia.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

PS:  While going back through 1984, I was reminded once again how much this particular paragraph gets at what is feels like to have been a Liberal blogger for the past 14 years...

For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word doublethink. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless. 

Escapist literature my ass.