While You Were Busy Watching The COVID-19 Growth Curve...

...your Never Trumper friends were busy building themselves a lifeboat the size of the USNS Comfort.


You already know that, according to the Never Trumper Guide to American History (Revised Edition), their Republican Party was humming along just fine doing the Lord's work until it went suddenly and inexplicably insane three-ish years ago, and definitely not a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles which has been getting exponentially worse for decades.  (Note: Even though their individual calendars do not align, Never Trumpers all agree that the GOP's spontaneous overnight devolution into gibbering halfwit fascism happened mere moments before or mere moments after they heroically staggered out the door.)  (Emphasis added.)

Trump Has Broken the Republican Party—and Conservatism—for Good
There is no going back.

by William Kristol,  April 2, 2020 1:04 PM

...I don’t see how either the political institution of the Republican party or the intellectual movement of conservatism recovers from what we have seen over the last three years—but especially the last three months.

And as you already know, according to the Never Trumper Guide to American History (Revised Edition), even if their Republican Party's slide into barbarism might have begun a little earlier, it was definitely an principled, honorable intellectual powerhouse back in the good old days when they [checks notes] turned the party over to Gingrich and Limbaugh --

--  impeached Bill Clinton over trivia, pissed away the Clinton Budget Surplus, lied us into the wrong war, fucked that war up, let New Orleans die,  presided over the collapse of the global economy and so forth.

The intellectual decline of the GOP is astonishing, especially when your remember how different it was just 15 or 20 years ago. https://t.co/HeNz6rjhKy

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) April 2, 2020

But my real "Wow!" moment last week came when I listened to MSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes and MSNBC contributor David Frum discussing how Republicans plan to get away with having supported Trump after Trump is gone. 

In order understand how surreal this exchange is, you need to first understand that, before Charlie Sykes was gifted the position of MSNBC's in-house Never Trump whisperer, he had spent his career as a far right Conservative radio hack in Wisconsin.  The "Rush Limbaugh" of Wisconsin.

And, as you might recall, David Frum was a speechwriter and analyst for George W. Bush.  And not just any speechwriter: as he coiner of the phrase "the Axis of Evil", Mr. Frum helped craft the propaganda that lied us into war with Iraq.  He was also the hagiographer of his years inside the disastrously failed Bush Administration (The Right Man) which the blurb describes as:

...Most significant, he tells the story of Bush's transformation: how a president whose administration began in uncertainty became one of the most decisive, successful, and in the US at least, popular leaders of our time. Frum is a front-row observer and participant. Not since Peggy Noonan's account of her time in the Reagan White House has an insider portrayed a sitting president with such precision, verve, honest admiration, and insight. The Right Man will command international attention for its thoughtful account of George W. Bush in the midst of his greatest challenge. It will be an essential reference for anyone seeking to understand who the US president really is and how he is likely to lead his country and the western world in the future.

So if you're sufficiently bored in quarantine and have a deeply perverse sense of humor, you would read Mr. Frum's breathless account of the greatness of George W. Bush.   Or if you'd prefer something even more embarrassing, you could skim the lump of horn-tooting porridge he wrote with arch-neocon scumbag Richard Perle about how George W. Bush was going to defeat Evil in the world.  No kidding.  It is literally called An End to Evil.

Suffice it to say that you would be hard-pressed to find two refugees from the collapse of the Bush Administration (and the war of sedition, slander and sabotage their Republican Party launched against Obama the day he was inaugurated) who have profited more from the mainstream and the conservative media's joint Strategic Forgettery Project:  that massive, ongoing process of Conservative historical revisionism (abetted by their collaborators in the mainstream media) by which the Right has held itself together through decade after decade of failure and catastrophe.

You see, after every Republican catastrophe there comes their cult;s most solemn and sacred ritual: the excavation of a memory hole big enough to bury the whole fucking fiasco, root and branch as fast as possible.  Dig the pit, dump the body, quicklime it, pour enough Chernobyl-grade bullshit over the site to sarcophagize the whole thing and then post signs warning future generations of the Dire Consequences of poking around anywhere near the truth.  This massive, ongoing process of Conservative historical revisionism (abetted by their collaborators in the mainstream media) is the means by which the Right has held itself together through decade after decade of increasingly bloody failure and ruin (I've written about it many, many times, and put links to some of those posts under one roof here.)

So when you read the following exchange  (from this Bulwark podcast) in which between Messers Frum and Sykes game out how, once Trump is no longer in power, "Trumpers" (aka "Republicans") plan to get themselves off the hook for all the horrible shit they are saying and doing right now...

...bear in mind that were it not for the mainstream media and the conservative media colluding to absolve Republicans of all horrible shit they said and did during the Bush years and the Obama years by pretend that the immediate past was either A) irrelevant, B) off-limits or C) never happened (and that anyone who brought the past up was being shrill and hateful and somehow unfair) both between Messers Frum and Sykes would have been ridden out of polite society on a rail years ago. 

See you on the other side...(emphasis added)

Sykes:  ...You wrote, "When this is all over nobody will ever admit to supporting it."

Frum:  Well, we've had in the past two weeks an appetizer serving of that truth.  Look at how  ...  not only have defenders of the president pivoted, to say that he did take the Corona-virus seriously, that he never called it the flu.  They are now outraged when anyone reminds them of what they were saying only six weeks ago.  And, um, Donald Trump has talked about bringing legal action against an advertiser who quoted him describing the virus as "the Democrat's new hoax".  "I never said that," he says.  Well of course he did say it.  Um, but, there's going to be a reinvention of the past and as this crisis plays through the country, as it takes its terrible toll in life and suffering, as it takes its terrible economic toll, um, I think we're on or way to seeing Donald Trump leave office as one of the most execrated presidents in American history, and as he does, the people who supported him will then begin to explain, "Well, I...I was never for Trump.  I was against the media's unfairness.  I was against media bias.  I...I never liked his spending.  Obviously he was never a True Conservative.  And all that evidence you have of me defending him...it's kind of hateful for you to bring that up."  That is where we are going.  We had a little appetizer in the past few days.  More to come.

Sykes:  We are seeing this extraordinary attempt at revising history and I think we're going to see a lot more between now and November.  But, but a lot of it seems to at least be in, Trump World, the revision of what he did and said.   And I still see people saying, "We support...we still support Donald Trump despite all of this evidence."  And it will be kind of a stress test not just for the democracy as a whole, but very much for these Trump defenders who have managed to defend and rationalize almost everything, and at least at the moment they seem poised to do it again including -- and I'm not going to name names -- but I mean people who, y'know, you and I have read and followed for years who have been very, very critical of Trump -- in fact, maybe at one point were Never Trump -- who are still basically saying, "No, it's not fair to criticize the president.  He did everything he could. This is the revisionist history.  Uh, you're trying to evaluate him on hindsight.  It's all the Chinese."  So I'm still not seeing people breaking with Trump yet.

Frum:  Well, let me read you something from Hanna Arendt that I think applies very strongly to this case.  She wrote, "Lies, by their very nature, have to be changed.  And a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but a great number of lies depending on how the political wind blows."  And that's what is going on now.  You had to believe one set of lies... To be a Trump supporter in good standing you had to believe a certain set of lies in January, and a different set in February, and a different set of lies again before March 13th, a new set of lies between March 13th and this past weekend, and one more new set of lie. And there will be more new lies .. by the time we're done, uh there will be more new lies still to come.  I compared the Fox News pivot over the weekend of March 13th to The Daily Worker on June 22nd 1941.  If you went to bed on June 21st 1941, as a reader of The Daily Worker, you were told that the war between Great Britain on the one side and Nazi Germany on the other was an imperialist war in which the United States must stay neutral.  And you woke up the next morning and it was now no longer an imperialist war, but now a war between democracy and fascism and the United States must enter as soon as possible.  And American communists adapted themselves to that whipsaw.  And Fox viewers have had to adapt themselves to a very similar whipsaw.  And they are struggling for ways to make sense of it -- as you say, the attempt to make the story about China and not about the American reaction to China is part of it  There will be more.

Sykes: So since we're quoting Hanna Arendt, let me give you another one where she is also talking about ... this ... the, the, the use of lies.  She says, "The totalitarian mass leaders base their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that under such conditions one could make the people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.  Instead of deserting the Leaders who had lied to them, they would protest they had known all along that statement was a lie and would admire the Leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

Frum:  Oh that's...that's... [inaudible]

Sykes:  That's like Rush Limbaugh, who will go, "See, I never believed that. This was ... this was just Trump trolling the Libs."

...

Frum: ... I think for the 25% of America that is strongly invested in Trump and for the additional 20 to 25 points ... taking this up to 45% ... that are mildly invested in Trump, I think [the] comparison to their stake in Trump -- the background to the quote you read in the beginning, that "No One Will Admit It's Over" -- is not those nightmare regimes in the middle of the 20th century, it's actually -- and I hope no one has had a friend in this situation, but I have -- a friend who gets caught up with some scam.  Time-share.  Something like that.  And what happens is, the friend believes the scam, and believes in a whole way of life, and believes in the seller.  And when you try to help the friend gets angry at you because you're attacking...  And later, when the whole thing comes crashing down and your friend loses his money and he has to ... he can no longer deny that you're right, he will never forgive you.  He will forgive the crooks, but he will never forgive the people who warned him against the crooks.  The crook just took his money.  You made him feel dumb.  And I think that is a little bit what's going on in Trump World, and I think one of the reasons for the increasing hysteria you on talk radio and on Fox News is ,um, they are bracing themselves for the accusation that "You lied to people. You deceived people" and  ... and ... what we're seeing here is the beginning a group ... tribal ... ego-defense.  

Sykes:  You can feel that, that decibel level rising when you talk about the hysteria.  I mean...I .. uh... I ... uh... I picked up on this about two weeks ago, that it was becoming more shrill, a little bit more hysterical, lashing out.  And I think you described the psychology behind it absolutely perfectly, because this is going to be a very, very difficult moment for them going forward.  So just let me talk about it, get your sense of this moment.  Because we have been talking about this quote unquote "pivot"...

Wow.

Just fucking wow.

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