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