The Good Old Days

By now it should be perfectly clear that the load-bearing Big Lie of Operation Beltway Lifeboat Armada is that the Republican Party was just fine -- sane, reasonable, not-at-all-racist and certainly no worse than those Crazy Democrats -- until they all went suddenly and inexplicably insane sometime in 2016.  Sort of the political equivalent of  Saint Anthony's Fire during the Middle Ages:

The History of Saint Anthony's Fire

On 15 August 1951 one in twenty of the 4000 inhabitants of another village in France called Pont Saint Esprit (Bridge of the Holy Spirit) went mad. They had hallucinations, writhed in agony in their beds, vomited, ran crazily in the streets and suffered terrible burning sensations in their limbs.

The madness was quickly diagnosed. They were suffering from St Anthony's Fire, a dreaded illness that was common in the Middle Ages. The cause was poisoning from a fungus (ergot) that grows on rye grass. The fungus contaminated the rye flour used in making bread.

Ergot contains a chemical that makes the sufferers go berserk and causes gangrene of the hands and feet due to constriction of blood supply to the extremities. If it is not treated (and this was not possible in the Middle Ages), victims had the sensation of being burned at the stake, before their fingers, toes, hands and feet dropped off...

Except, of course, we know exactly what pathologies led us to this catastrophe, don't we?

In fact, we on the Left have been sounding the alarm for decades.  Warning that this day is coming.  That the Right was deliberately planting the seeds of fascism in plain sight.  Cultivating it in plain sight.  Harvesting it in plain sight.  Lying about it in plain sight.

So what happens now?

More than likely, exactly the same thing that happened before.

There will be a mad dash for the Bush-Off Machine, which is even now being re-painted and re-purposed as the Trump-Off Machine.  The Beltway will circle the wagons.  Those who embrace the New Big Lie will prosper.  Those of us who refuse will end up pretty much where we are now.  Poor, ostracized and shouting our dire prophecies into the abyss.

Again.

While the Republican party is left largely unscathed -- free to regroup and prepare to destroy whatever is left of our democracy the next time they're at-bat.

Again.

And how can I be so sure?

From me in 2013 during the Time Before Trump ("The Fall of the House of Bircher"):

They built this.

Yes they did.

A long assembly-line of Conservative miners, smelters, cutters, assemblers, welders and polishers stretching back through Fox and Rove and Bush, through Falwell and Weyrich, through Atwater and Limbaugh, through Reagan and Nixon, though Wallace and Thurmond...all playing with the awful tools of paranoia, rage, white supremacy and faith...all scavenging the barking mad remnants of the Confederacy and the Jesusland dreams of Christopaths to forge for themselves a mighty machine. 

A mighty, angry, crazy, bigoted reactionary electoral beast fed on drivel and dung and led by the nose from cause to cause and candidate to candidate, getting a stronger and wilder and more anxious to spit out the bit and run amok every day.

They were warned.

Yes they were.

...
They were warned, but they did it anyway. Kept mollifying thugs. Kept flattering bigots. Kept slaughtering science to appease the theocrats and the garden-variety stoopid. Kept whispering to the stone crazy that their paranoia was patriotic. And, of course, kept on dehumanizing and demonizing patriotic, reality-based Liberals who were trying their damnedest to keep their Pretty Hate Machine from rolling back the whole Enlightenment.

Kept doing it all -- louder and louder and louder -- long after it was clear that their cause was a catastrophe and their followers were insane.

And now, once again, they want to bury the evidence of their crime: hammer the monster they created into a sarcophagus and hope to Heaven that their enablers in the Beltway Media can once again be relied on to cover their tracks.

Except...

Except...

Except for two generations their Grand Batshit Strategy hinged entirely on encouraging their Uruk-hai to be loud and proud about their ignorance, their casual racism, their screeching aggrieved rage and their myriad hilarious derangements.

And however hard the Conservative Money Caste tries to bury their bastards under a million yards of sweet, amnesiac dirt, they ain't going back into the cold, cold ground:

To say that [professional radio hatemonger] Mark Levin is unimpressed with Karl Rove’s latest project would be an understatement. Levin kicked off the broadcasting week by issuing a clarion call to his listeners (FREE audio): “Who the hell died and made Karl Rove queen for the day? And his sidekick, Steven Law, with their disastrous records? 

“I want to invite as many people as possible to join the voices and forces of liberty; that’s what we are, that’s what we believe in,” Levin continued. “Not the forces of defeat in the Republican Party. Not the forces of big government and back room deals and crony capitalism; illustrative of Karl Rove and Steven Law and the whole cabal that is the Republican establishment. 

“These people need a hard, swift kick in the a– off the public stage,” Levin concluded...

Instead... (from Edgar Allan Poe):

...
No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than—as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver—I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words. 

“Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I dared not—oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—1 dared not speak! And now—to-night—Ethelred—ha! ha!—the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!—say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh, whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!”—here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—“Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!” 

As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell—the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
...

They built this.

We told them not to, over and over again, but they did it anyway.

Yes they did...

And on that day I will butter my humble bread with schadenfreude as I watch the stunned indignation of my Liberal allies who were damn-fool enough to lend their credibility to their Never Trumper pals in exchange for nothing -- watch as they wake to find that their pals have not only turned on them, but have used the credibility my Liberal allies gave them as patents of nobility to stake a permanent claim in the mainstream media as the new Reasonable Center of American politics.

I shall uncork a fine, vintage "I fucking told you so" when Brian Williams and Joe Scarborough and Don Lemon and on and on and on welcome Rick Wilson and Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes and on and on and on as heroes.  Brave truth-tellers who stood out as one of the few, clear, sane voices on either the Left or the Right during these past few crazy years.

And then they will be asked what the future holds for American politics, and by now we all know what they will say.

And thus, by sheer, multi-billion-dollar brute force, the corporate media will transform this latest "lie agreed upon" into the official history of the Age of Trump.

No, I Won't Be Going To Politicon!