Friday, July 31, 2020

Curating The Past With Lifeboat Republicans


I'm going to cheat a little and recommend right off the bat that you go check out No More Mr. Nice Blog's delightful vivisection of Peggy Noonan's latest revisionist dribbling.  It is an excellent example of how Republicans who are now charging for the lifeboats are starting to throw elbows...at each other.

How each subgroup is desperately trying to make sure that their own, personal, self-exonerating revisionist historical fairy tales becomes Thee Official Histories of Our Parlous Times.

Noonan, a dog-loyal, lifelong Republican lieutenant, goes after Never Trump Republicans for trying to weasel out of responsibility for all the heinous shit they've been up to over the past couple of decades --
But Never Trumpers never seem to judge themselves. Many of them, when they were profiting through past identities as Republicans or conservatives, supported or gave strategic cover to the wars that were such a calamity, and attacked those who dissented.... Never Trumpers eloquently decry the vulgarization of politics and say the presidency is lowered by a man like Mr. Trump, and it is. But they invented Sarah Palin and unrelentingly attacked her critics. They often did it in the name of party loyalty.
 -- while assiduously avoiding any mention of the fact that she was up to her wine-hole in exactly the same disgraceful claptrap during exactly the same period.

I get the same surreal feeling when I grit my teeth and wade through Charlie Sykes' podcast over at the Bulwark lifeboat shipyard.  The more comfortable Sykes gets with admitting that the Republican Party did, in fact, exist prior to 2016 and was, in fact, building a glide path for someone like Trump to come to power, the more he writes himself completely out of that picture.

Like Noonan (and David Brooks and Michael Gerson and Joe Scarborough and Steve Schmidt and Bret Stephens and pretty much the entire Lincoln Project on and on and on forever) Sykes casts himself as one of history's Lawful Neutral sentinels -- hovering above the pyroclastic feculent blast-wave of Republican politics over the past 30 years, observing and reporting on it but not interacting with or affecting it in any way.

For me, listening to these goons finally, grudgingly talking about the monstrous course their Republican Party has taken as if it all happened in some other country to some other people is like taking a tour of the National WWII Museum.  And as you walk through the "Rise of Fascism" exhibit your tour guide calls your attention to some of the low points.

"That was bad.  And that was bad.  And that was really bad."

And he's right.  Those grotesque mile-markers along the road to fascism were bad.  Really bad.

And then you notice your tour guide's name.

"Albert Speer".

Wait a minute.  Weren't you, y'know, deeply involved in all of this really awful stuff?  Didn't you actually build the fucking Führerbunker?

"This tour is over!" shouts Albert, and storms away.



For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men



No Half Measures

4 comments:

dave said...

the gop learned it's lessons on middle school playgrounds...that's how we got trump. a simple. moronic, hateful, fearful, greedy, powerful bully..who can beat up who...

they also think that saying 'NOT IT!' will absolve them of responsibility. like on the playground...and it works swell. if you never ever grew up...

Robt said...

AFter 4 years the resusitation of the Fiscal Conservative is brought back from the dead over pandemic aid, or is it reelection distress?

The Nooner's would embrace and find the subtlest of words of acceptance if a republican president pardoned Charles Manson. The pardoning president nominating him to health and Human Services and the entire republican Senate confirming him in grand kavanaugh style . As the House Minority republicans claim they did it in the GOP media networks in calculated hoes of their Charlie Manson base voters will credit them too.

I do declare, Peggers and MS. Lindsey are sisters.

As it was, Lindsey survived on the McCain Lifeboat until it sank forever. He dog paddled like a good People to the Trump Life boat and will remain and bail water leaking in. Until that life boat meets Davy Jones's Locker.

It is not enough to deny life boats. Desperate for life these republicans will hoard every life jacket , floating preserver or chunk of drift wood to hold them up.

Unknown said...

So much goodness in this post! A proper takedown of Lushy Noonan, an Albert Speer joke(!), and this:

"hovering above the PYROCLASTIC FECULENT BLAST-WAVE of Republican politics..."

Now there's a descriptor I'm not gonna be able to get outta my head for the foreseeable future! Well played, sir.
(extended golf clap)

And all spot on as usual.

joejimtree said...

No doubt that he was a bully, but I figure he had his chauffer beat the other kids up.