...And The Horse They Rode In On

The Never Trump Business Model

Yesterday several people decided to send along to me this glowing article about the awesomeness of The Lincoln Project and what hapless bumblefucks Democrats are when it comes to winning elections.

What the Lincoln Project Ad Makers Get About Voters (and What Dems Don’t) https://t.co/NxGA7hQ3qf via @politico

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) July 7, 2020

Which is damn peculiar for a couple of reasons.

First, is the idea that the Lincoln Lads just understand "voters" on a deeper, more spiritual level than those cloistered, egghead Democrats ever could.

Really?

Aren't these the same goof who will swear on the graves of their ancestors that they never had the slightest fucking idea that their Republican Party has been a reeking dungheap of bigots and imbeciles for decades?  Decades during which the Lincoln Lads enjoyed very prosperous careers as leaders and ad-makers and spokespersons and professional ratfuckers for that very same Republican Party?

So were they lying when they said they never understood their own voters?  Never knew that the political base they were targeting and pandering to all those years were racist meatheads?  Or are they lying now?

Second, is the idea that the Lincoln Project is being run by electoral supermen who -- whatever you think of their filthy tactics -- know how to win elections god damn it, so just get out of their way and let them run the show.

Look upon our mighty works, ye Libtards, and despair.

OK then, let's look upon their mighty works.

In 2000, those Lincoln Lads lost the popular vote by a wide margin, but won the White House thanks to five Republicans in black robes on the Supreme Court who stole the election for George Bush.

The Lincoln Lads did do very well in 2002 and 2004...by doing exactly what Trump is doing now -- relentlessly exploiting the fears and prejudices of American voters.  Finding America's most exposed nerve and stomping on it over and over again.  Back then it was telling Americans that if they vote for Democrats their kids will probably die in a terrorist attack.  There was Swiftboating.  There was voter suppression.  There were the Scary Terror Alerts that mysteriously ticked up every time George Bush ticked down in the polls.  There was gay bashing.  The racism.  Fox News and Hate Radio firing on all cylinders 24/7.

All this while Dick Cheney's cronies looted the federal government.

Sound familiar?

Then Reality began punching the GOP in the dick so hard that the Lincoln Lads couldn't lie or slander their way to victory no matter ho hard they tried.

The Lincoln Lads lost big in 2006, and even bigger in 2008 despite the fusillade of racist attack ads and whisper campaigns they launched against Barack Obama.  Despite Lincoln Lad Bill Kristol hegira to the backwoods of Alaska to find a flirty, camera-friendly grifter named Sarah Palin who spoke authentic frontier wingnut gibberish.  And despite Lincoln Lad Steve Schmidt positioning her as the Republican candidate for vice president.

The Lincoln Lads won in 2010...by going to the most reliable tool in their toolbox -- the rage, racism and paranoia of the average Republican voter.  Led by the Fake Tea Party, their already bugfuck party plunged shrieking down the Crazy Hole.  Death Panels! Birtherism!   ACORN!  And a Kenyan Usurper waiting just outside your door, ready to kick it in and take all your guns away!

And that's when the deeply principled Conservatives of the Lincoln Project decided they could take no more and broke with their party, right?

Nah.  The Lincoln Lads loved it.  Helped engineer it.  Reveled in it.  And prospered greatly from it.

Of course they lost in 2012, but was it really a loss with the Congress full stocked with wingnut lunatics willing to shut down every government function except endless Hillary witch-hunts which the Lincoln Lads fully supported?

Hillary regrets Benghazi. Probably not as much as Chris Stevens and his people. http://t.co/il4bB64SFW

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 27, 2014

Was it really a loss as long as Mitch McConnell was there to keep his boot on the throat of democracy?   Let's catch up with Lincoln Lad Rick Wilson just four short years ago to find out!

6/ Even IF it was bad politics - and it's not - this is a case where I'd accept a short term hit in the Senate to block an Obama nominee

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 15, 2016

Which brings us to 2016 with the same questions still unanswered.

How is it that the Lincoln Lads -- Earth's Mightiest Electoral Geniuses -- failed so utterly to stop their own party from nominating and electing Donald Trump?  They got behind just about every other warm body in the race from Lil Marco and Jeb! to Rafael Zodiac Killer and Carly "Blood Libel" Fiorina and puuuuuushed.

And ...nothing.  Earth's Mightiest Electoral Geniuses didn't budget the needle one iota.

Hell, the Lincoln Lads even dragged poor David French out his well-deserved obscurity writing bawdy Libertarian haikus for The National Review or whatever and threw him in the path of the Trump steamroller.

Meet David French: the random dude off the street that Bill Kristol decided will save America from Trump

None of it worked, because it turned out that the Left had been right about the Right all along.  That it was we who understood their voters on a deep, spiritual level all along.

Even at the 11th hour, as the rough beast the Republican Party had spawned slouched towards Washington to be sworn, the Lincoln Lads just could not stomach the idea of putting country first:

except I don't support Hillary, as I've said about 20,000 times now. If you're too dumb to look it up I can't help you

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) July 14, 2016

No one here supports Hillary. No one.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) October 21, 2016

Which brings us, at last, to the present day, and the one thing I want you all to consider:  Trump may be Death incarnate, but the Republican Party -- the Lincoln Lad's Republican Party -- is the Pale Horse he rode in on.

So unless your agenda includes an honest reckoning of exactly how the Republican Party got to be this way and a commitment to destroying the GOP root and branch, count me out.

Because taking down Trump and a handful of his worst myrmidons is not nearly enough.  As I wrote back in 2015 just hours after he slithered down the escalator, Trump is just the latest and most toxic symptom of the disease of Republicanism.

As I wrote a few years ago,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.  

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

And just like opening states up too soon in the middle of a pandemic, unless the spread of Republicanism by all of its various enablers and vectors is completely flattened and active measures are taken to keep it that way, it will come roaring back the minute the pressure is off. 

And taking down the GOP is not the Lincoln Lad's plan.

So what is their plan?  As far as I can see it's:

• Pounding away with the most sacred Beltway media lie of all:  Everything is the fault of the Extremes on Both Sides.
• Abolishing the past.  Yet again.  Especially their past.
• Limiting the damage to their party to decapitating the regime and a few of Trump's low-hanging henchmen while leaving the party infrastructure intact. 
• Taking over the party. 
• With the help of the same Beltway media friends and fellow travelers who have been giving them a massive free platform since 2016, declaring themselves to be the new Sensible Center, equidistant from the Extremes on Both Sides.
• Going right back to being the same depraved Republican Party they have been all along, but without an orange madman at the top who keeps saying the quiet part out loud,  

Thus will they be rid of Trump and become kingmakers of a re-branded but fundamentally unchanged GOP  and once again banish our inconvenient Liberal voices to the cornfield for the foreseeable future.

But don't take my word for it.  Head on over to  Never Trumper/Lincoln Project HQ at The Bulwark, -- where is is all but illegal to refer to Republicans as "Republicans" -- listen to a few minutes and make up your own mind.

Or listen to a few minutes of hand-wringing over the illiberalism on Both Sides and the horrors of the nonexistent Liberal Cancel Culture!  OMG, they're trying to silence David Brooks!

Why?

Whyyyyy?

Brothers and sisters, if you want to see actual Cancel Culture ruthlessly and efficiently at work, try being an America-hating, terrorist-loving Libtard surrender monkey --

- during the high-cotton days of the Dubya Administration.

Then come back and tell me I' m crazy.

No Half Measures