To Die With The Lie

Those of us who have been writing for decades about the epidemiology of wingnut propaganda -- about how Conservative lies are crafted, weaponized and propagated through the Right's Pretty Hate Machine and on into the wider worlds like a virus -- have not been even mildly surprised at the wild, twisting course that Republican COVID-19 lies have taken since the beginning of the global pandemic.

Nor are we surprised that the entire Conservative meatbag herd can repeatedly absorb whiplashing, neck-snapping party-line reversals without breaking stride.  After all, this moment is exactly what they've been bred for.

And we are definitely not surprised that the mainstream media continues to act completely surprised every time it happens. Their corporate default setting of automatically Both Sidering every Republican cataclysm meant they had no ability to rise to this occasion, and of a fundamental refusal on the part of the mainstream media to come to terms with the nature the the Republican Party and the fire-hose of lies they constantly spew.

You see, Republicans don't lie like a teenagers caught out after curfew .  They don't lie once or twice to get out of a jam.  And they don't stumble into lying because of a misunderstanding.

Republicans lie for the same reason that fish swim in the water and birds fly in the air.  Constant lying is their environment.  It is the bell-jar full of Rush Limbaugh Beer Farts in which they live.  And since yesterday's lies are forever disintegrating almost as fast as they roll off the Fox News assembly line, to keep the system from collapsing, tomorrow's lies are forever being rushed into production.  Pathetic lies.  Stupid lies.  Lies that can barely stagger to the end of a paragraph before imploding under the weight of their own absurdity.

And.  It.  Does.  Not.  Matter.

All that matters is slapping the bullshit together and getting it out into the world as fast as possible.

As I wrote years ago and updated the day after Donald Trump came oozing down the Escalator of Doom to announce he was running for president:

...the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.  

So to avoid being caught flat-footed by the brazen ridiculousness of Republican lies and stunned the exponential speed at which they are spread, it it critically important to understand that lying is all they have. To be a Republican means that everything you believe is bullshit and that everyone you trust is a fraud.  And faced with a choice of admitting that they really are just that fucking stupid -- just as bad as we vile Libtards have said all along -- or Turning Rush Up Until Their Ears Bleed...

...Republicans will always choose the latter. As I wrote before Trump was even a glimmer in Laura Ingraham's eye, Republicans long ago made the decision to Die With The Lie and in that moment they lost their souls:

[Republicans] are not people who can be cajoled or tricked or persuaded into doing the right thing ever.  These are not people who can be compromised with.   These are not people with whom you can have a "debate" in any meaningful sense.  At the end of the day, the GOP is just a party full of loud, bigoted, pig-ignorant assholes, who have been gathered under one roof and weaponized with money and media because, as it turns out, there are just enough loud, bigoted, pig-ignorant assholes wandering the land to wreck the country if they all really put their backs into it. 

And some really rich, really terrible people really, really want them to put their backs into it.

Which brings us to one of the few upsides of having enemies of the nation like the Republican Party parked inside our borders.

It is their utter predictability. 

When I started blogging 15 years ago, figuring out, broadly speaking, how Republicans would react to every setback and every one of their self-created catastrophes was already mind-numbingly predictable.  This is because the single pillar that props up the Party of Bigots and Imbeciles -- a voting base that can be programmed to believe literally anything that Sean Hannity shits into their skulls on any given day and then immediately re-programmed to believe the exact opposite when that lie falls apart  -- is also their greatest weakness.  Because the only way the system can continue to work is for the Republican base to continually debase and lobotomize themselves into ever-more pliant meatbags willing to swallow ever cruder and more lethally toxic nonsense.

In other words, they just get stupider by the day.

The strength of the GOP comes from being cattle that can be herded wherever Fox News needs them to go.  But because they are a herd of racist ruminants, individual handlers and wranglers can't be out there freelancing.  They all need to operate from the same playbook, and because Republican voters get stupider every day, the playbook must be kept as simple as possible.

In fact, the Republican Party only really has seven moves.

At the moment we are up to #4:

4)  This will not stop them for hunting for a scapegoat -- an Emmanuel Goldstein at whose feet all guilt will be laid.  And yes, you can be damn sure that however bad things get, the crazy Libtards will be blamed for either causing the problem or making it worse.

And the New Big Lie Republicans are have settled on for the moment to deflect blame from their Dear Leader and scapegoat us crazy Libtards for either causing the COVID-19 catastrophe in America or making it worse can be summed up as follows:  "Something something but Whaddabout  Impeachment!"

Which gives us an opportunity to observe in near-real-time how Republican Big Lies are spread.

Media Matters has a very good breakdown here, starting with Patient Zero: Mark Levin, on February 29:

MARK LEVIN: They don’t have a plan for the coronavirus. Trash the president of the United States and everything he does. What is the Democrats’ plan to deal with the coronavirus? There is no plan. You know what they were doing when the coronavirus broke out? Impeachment trial against our president. And you know what happens when you have an impeachment trial? Those senators who never shut the hell up have to sit in their chairs and shut the hell up. They can’t have a hearing, they can’t propose budgets, they can’t do anything week after week. And you know what? They’d still be having a trial with their witnesses. Oh, we have to have John Bolton, and we have to have McGhan. We’d still be having trials. They effectively shut down the United States Congress while this virus was spreading and they dare point to the president of the United States and say, "Oh, what is he doing?"

Levin was followed in quick succession by all the usual Republican ambulatory disease vectors.

The Daily Caller.

Breitbart.

Human Events, which not only helped push the Whaddabout Impeachment! lie as hard as they could, but also couldn't help blaming the Black Guy:

If your administration had invested as much energy into pandemic preparedness as it did on climate change our country would have been far more prepared for the coronavirus https://t.co/NRQtzSwYWJ

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) March 31, 2020

Sean Hannity, of course, and once Hannity blessed the Whaddabout Impeachment! lie as the Official Fox News Party Line, it was safe for every other human stool sample to get into the act.  Like Fox News' Greg Gutfeld on March 16.

Fox host Greg Gutfeld: Impeachment “distracted us from other things like a really weird outbreak in China.” 

During the March 16 edition of Fox News’ The Five, co-host Greg Gutfeld implied Democrats spent so much time on the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump that it distract from the initial COVID-19 outbreak in China. Gutfeld went on to make the argument that the media had no credibility when they did report the virus because “everything is apocalyptic, so nothing is.” 

And now that the contours of the New Big Lie had been worked out by the Brain Caste of the Republican Party, it came time to push the New Big Lie out of its wingnut whelping box and into the wider world.

Enter the Definer of Civilization's Rules and Leader (Perhaps) of The Civilizing Forces, Newton Leroy Gingrich:

Newt Gingrich is saying the country wasn't prepared for coronavirus because Democrats impeached Trump pic.twitter.com/eo6EMfpoWy

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) March 30, 2020

And the very next day we find Hugh Hewitt (the Cyborg Sent from the Future to Destroy America) helping Republican Mitch McConnell amplify that very same Republican lie:

McConnell: Impeachment distracted government from coronavirus threat

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday blamed the Democrats’ push to impeach President Trump in January for distracting the Trump administration from the threat posed by the coronavirus.

“It came up while we were tied down in the impeachment trial. And I think it diverted the attention of the government because everything every day was all about impeachment,” McConnell said in an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.”..

Rich Lowry, who is slightly more cunning than the average wingnut media killbot, doesn't come right out and say Impeachment = Pandemic.  Instead uses his hot fantod column in the National Review to scold Both Sides (but mostly us vile Libtards) for sapped our precious national bodily fluids with Fake Crises before the Real Crisis arrived.  So now everybody needs shaddap and cheer on President Cornered Rat as he fucks up everything he touches.

A Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Manufacture 

Trump critics and the media whipped up entertaining controversies when they had the luxury to do so. Now a real crisis is here.

On January 21, the United States confirmed its first case of the coronavirus. The nation’s political and media elite obsessed over Mitch McConnell’s just-announced resolution governing the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump... 

For more than three years, American national politics has been constantly on a crisis footing over presidential tweets, two-day controversies, and dubious storylines whipped up by the media and Trump’s genuine outrages. Little of it has been enduring, or nearly as important as the intense, wall-to-wall attention at any given moment suggested.

Trump and his opposition have been engaged in a performative dance of mutual animosity that is angry, hysterical, and, ultimately, inconsequential...

And now that it's Out There, anyone can play!

From the odious Geraldo --

All the heroes of #Impeachment; @RepAdamSchiff, @RepJerryNadler etc. must at some point ask themselves whether their efforts were worth it given the high probability the faux quest pre-occupied the nation & distracted our attention from #CoronavirusOutbreak

— Geraldo Rivera (@GeraldoRivera) April 1, 2020

-- to the ashamed-of-her-own-name chairwoman of the Republican Party --

Coronavirus came to America on Jan 15.

Meanwhile, Pelosi was all smiles signing her sham impeachment articles.

But that didn’t stop the Trump admin: CDC had already issued a Wuhan travel notice & @realDonaldTrump restricted Chinese travel soon after. pic.twitter.com/H5MUiUG2Mo

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) April 1, 2020

--to a local idiot bleating his version of the New Big Lie in my local paper just this morning.

There are many daily examples of chutzpah among those who criticize President Trump’s actions. A particularly egregious example occurred very recently with the talking point that “Trump should have been better prepared to deal with a pandemic.”

Since his election in November 2016, we’ve all heard the screams that Trump colluded with Russia, a phony charge that nevertheless forced his administration to spend valuable time over two years to address. We’ve seen people in the DOJ fired for not working to enforce lawful orders.

We’ve seen Democrat senators let nominations for dozens of worthy individuals for positions in the administration languish, unapproved, for years.

I propose the “resistance” be hoisted on their petard. They have earned the pandemic’s wrath, though all of us suffer its effects.

Alan Avery, Springfield

And that is the reason of the whole, depraved enterprise exists kids:  to engineer and propagate whatever lies are necessary in order to keep the Alan Averys of the world angry enough and stupid enough to Die With The Lie rather than look in the mirror and see what they have become.

No one put a gun to these people's heads and forced them to be like this.  All they ever had to do was change the fucking channel, but instead they made themselves into slaves and they fight like mad dogs animals against any attempt to bring them to the light.

They cannot be saved, which during ordinary times would merely be a pity.  But ordinary times are over now and it is long past time for rest of the country to recognize the Republican Party as the virulent threat to our democracy that they have been all along.

Writers Write