File This Under "Selling Your Birthright for a Mess of Pottage"

This imaginary book will soon be in your actual future.

Official Motto of the Lincoln Project -- "You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

Unofficial Mission Statement of the Lincoln Project -- "You can absolutely escape the responsibility of today by pretending yesterday never happened.”

For the second time in fifteen years I've watched Republican depravity, treachery and disastrous bumblefuckery hand the Left unopposed command of the nation's moral and political high ground on a silver platter.

After the implosion of the Bush administration the nation took stock of what it had been through and tallied up the steep and bloody price it had just paid for the corruption, high crimes and criminal incompetence of a Republican president who was loyally supported by Republicans in congress, Republican voters and America's sprawling Republican propaganda empire.

And now, as the Trump administration collapses before our eyes, the nation must once again come to terms with the terrible price it is paying for the corruption, high crimes and criminal incompetence of a Republican president who is loyally supported by Republicans in congress, Republican voters and America's sprawling Republican propaganda empire.

And for the second time in fifteen years, I am watching leaders on the Left pissing that enormous advantage away.

So prepare yourself for a future in which you and I no longer even exist.

A future where a dozen variations of the imaginary book pictured above will be authored by the same professional Republican goons and ratfuckers whose last book was some variation of this.

A future where virtually all of the inconvenient Republican history prior to 2016 will be swiftly and efficiently bulldozed down the memory-hole.  Just as all the hugely inconvenient fuckery that Republicans were up to during the Clinton Administration was bulldozed down the memory-hole the moment five Republican Supreme Court justices helped Dubya steal the 2000 election.

And all of those inconvenient Republican catastrophes that took place during the Dubya Administration were bulldozed down the memory-hole the minute the Kenyan Usurper was sworn into office.

And all of that embarrassing Republican slander and sedition that took place during the Obama Administration was bulldozed down the memory-hole the day President Stupid was sworn into office.

See the pattern?  Because it's perfectly plain to anyone with eyes.

What the past +30 years has proven beyond any doubt it that neither the mainstream media nor the Great Wad of the general public are ever going to accept the fact that the reason this country is so deeply broken is because one of our two major political parties -- the Republican Party -- is a mob of bigots and imbeciles led by ghouls, grifters and demagogues. The very idea offends the general public way down deep.   At the spiritual level; the place where they still hold the Myth of America so dear that the very idea that +60M of their fellow Americans really are a rabble of brain-dead racists who actively hate this country is literally inconceivable to them.

And so they will flee to anyone, anywhere who will spin them a comforting fairy tale that holds the terrible truth at bay, which is why the Great Wad will always cling to the Both Sides Do It lie like grim death.

Because brothers and sisters, it is an awesome lie!  The very best kind of lie!  A lie that lets lazy people feel smart and well-informed and righteous while at the same time absolving them of thinking any scary thoughts or taking any meaningful action of any kind.

This is why the mainstream media will never stop feeding the public the comforting lies they wish to believe instead of shocking them with uncomfortable realities they do not want to face.  Because money is the engine that drives the media.  Dollars.  Specifically, advertising dollars.  And advertising is based on one thing.

A decade ago, many of us on the left used whatever meager public voices we had to beg Barack Obama to for God's sake, stop trying to court the good opinion of George Will and David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer, and take a good look at the real Republican Party.  A party of bigots and imbeciles that was already terminally fucked in the head long before you took the oath of office and gets exponentially worse every year.

A party red in tooth and claw, who leaned into hating Obama with a kind of unhinged ecstasy.  From Mary Matalin writing in The National Review in 2012:

Mendacity and Malice Won

What happened? A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Obama used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division...

A party which would spend Obama's entire term in office relentlessly slandering him and sabotaging every single thing he tried to accomplish just for the pleasure of making us Libtards cry.  For example, here is former Representative Jean Schmidt having a spontaneous sidewalk hategasm when she thought the Supreme Court had gutted the Kenyan Usurper's Affordable Care Act and ripped health care away from tens of million of Americans.

As I said, we dirty hippie bloggers begged President Obama to take on the existential threat that was the real Republican Party instead of asking David Brooks' imaginary Republican Party to dance over and over again, but nobody listens to dirty hippie bloggers.  And so, after the complete collapse of the Bush administration, Republicans -- with a massive assist from the mainstream media -- were allowed to simply disappear from the scene and re-brand themselves en masse as "independents" and "tea partiers" until the coast was clear.

Then they regrouped and elected Donald Trump.

And so here we are again, with a Republican party now fully revealed as the party of bigots and imbeciles we dirty hippies have always said they were.  With the mainstream media now fully revealed as the craven, complicit husk we have always known it to be.

Here we are again, hobbling our way through yet another ongoing series of hellacious Republican presidential clusterfucks which has once again provided the entire world with indisputable proof that the Left really has been right about the Right all along.

And that was the exact moment that Liberals waaaay up the food chain from me decided it would be an excellent time to started throwing themselves at the Never Trumpers like drunk prom dates.

And before we continue, I need pause for a moment to make one thing abundantly clear: I actually believe in redemption and forgiveness and all the rest of that good stuff.  Not only does my faith required it of me, but it's also a very practical way to make it through life with a minimum of agita.

However before getting to the forgive and the forget, first must come confession.

Then repentance.

Then contrition.

Then atonement.

Then and only then can come absolution.

But this is not the path most Never Trumpers are willing to walk.  They are a smug and entitled little clique used to a life of deference and never being held accountable for anything.  As one disreputable Liberal blogger put it almost exactly one year ago ("The Aristocrats") they are the dispossessed Russian aristocracy of American politics:

And once it all blew up in their faces -- once it became obvious (yet again) that they never had the slightest idea what was really going on in their own country and that the Left had been right about the Right all along and -- the Never Trumpers reacted exactly you would expect entitled royalty to react.

Exactly like exiled Russian aristocracy after the revolution.

Aristocrats who had been run out of their out of their country by the serfs they had exploited.

Aristocrats who suddenly found themselves financially dependent on the largess of people they detested.

Aristocrats who, with that special, asshole-arrogance that comes with an inbred sense of entitlement, become indignant when their hosts don't snap to and do as they're told.

Aristocrats who still believe in their God-given right to command a national spotlight and who go right on airily insisting they know what the serfs really want.

So no contrition for them.  Instead what they demand is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called, in a different context and a darker time, "cheap grace":

From The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945):

...

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing….

Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian ‘conception’ of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins…. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God.

Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. ‘All for sin could not atone.’ Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin….

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance,1 baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate...

And this I do not consent to.

So, having seen the nightmare consequence of letting Republican off the hook once before -- of letting them lie about their own past and their own complicity while standing in the ruins they left in their wake -- it seemed inconceivable to me that for the sake of some transient, feel-good validation, the Liberal establishment would make exactly the same mistake again.

That having once again slogged our way to the undisputed moral and political high ground, the Liberal establishment would decided to give it away to Rick Wilson and Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt and Joe Walsh.

But they did, because, as I have already mentioned, nobody listens to dirty Liberal bloggers, especially those who have the bad taste to keep remembering embarrassing things in public.

So, since no one is listening anyway, let me tell you what our collective future probably looks like.

As the Lincoln Project become the ascendant, anti-Trump voice in the American political media, prepare for more and more of your allies (who also happen to be members of that same professional media ecosystem) to get more and more irritated at anyone who keeps asking really basic questions about, say, Rick Wilson's very recent past.  You know, the same sorts of basic questions -- What did you do before this?  Why did you leave?  Have you ever done bad stuff?  Can we talk to your former employer? -- that my stepdaughter had to answer to work at McDonald's.

Prepare to see the George W. Bush Administration mostly redeemed.  Come on, he did some good stuff!  And he's such an affable, god-fearin' man.  And that whole Iraq thing, well there is plenty of blame to go around and a lot of it was Cheney.  Really, ol' Dubya gets a bad rap.

Prepare to see the Sensible Center relocated to somewhere well to the right of Joe Scarborough, with the spectrum of Serious and Legitimate political opinions which will be permitted on cable teevee to range from David Brooks and Bill Kristol on one side, to Joe Walsh and Tom Cotton on the other.  And once again, you and I and all of our inconvenient questions and encyclopedic memory of the past will vanish completely, because just like last time, what will go down in the books as "history" will depend entirely on who controls the cameras and where they are pointing them.

And (if you will allow me a brief aside) this is what  cracks me up about all the "We need them now but we'll dump them later" progressives I run into on social media.  And so to them I ask the following:  Who exactly is this "we" that will dump the Lincoln Project once "we" are done with them?  Did "we" suddenly inherit an ownership stake in The New York Times?  Are "we" now on the executive boards of NBC and CNN and NPR and did I just miss it?  And if "we" suddenly have it within our power to decide who gets camera time and who gets axed, how come "we" can't get Chuck Todd fired?  Or Bret Stephens?  Or Joe Scarborough?

Hell, "we" can't even summon the collective firepower to get Meet the Press to stop putting Hugh Fucking Hewitt on the air, so enough with this "We'll get 'em tomorrow" piffle.   Because the Liberal establishment is already busy trading that tomorrow away because for some reason they cannot get it through their heads that these outcast and unrepentant Republican torpedoes and henchmen are using them -- standing on their shoulders and embezzling their credibility -- and not the other way around.

So, what happens when the Trump regime is decapitated and a handful of the worst offenders are driven momentarily into the shadows, but the party apparatus itself is kept intact and is taken over by the Lincoln Project lads and their fellow travelers?

Because you know damn well that's the end-game.

That was the plan in 2016 when the Never Trumpers gambled that Hillary Clinton would clobber Trump, who would, in turn, drag the GOP down with him, thus leaving the door open for them to could sweep to power as the "We Warned You" brigade, and it remains the plan today.

But trying to (re)build a competitive "True" Conservative political party without donors, a national party infrastructure and tens of millions of rank-and-file supporters is trying to build a skyscraper without steel and concrete and glass.

So where will they find those tens of millions of supporters?  Poach them from the Democrats?

Of course not.

Magically activate the roughly one-third of the country who are contentedly drunk on cheap Both Siderist popskull and have proven beyond a doubt that they will not step out and take a stand on any issue ever?

Never.  Gonna.  Happen.

The only viable cache of potential voters large enough and available enough for a new "True" Conservative political party would have to come from the same toxic source from which the GOP has been cultivating and harvesting voters for decades -- that zombie army of tens of millions of reprogrammable racist Republican meatbags who currently swear that the sun rises and sets on Donald John Trump.

And once Trump falls, those people are gonna do exactly what they did after the Fall of Dubya.  As your humble scrivener wrote more than a decade ago:

 Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

So with tens of millions of racist Republican shitheads scrambling to once again escape responsibility for yet another catastrophe they created, be prepared for The Lincoln Project and their fellow travelers to go into the Mass Absolution Business.

Big time.

Republican politicians will be pardoned for their misdeeds and allowed to cop a plea of "I was doing what I thought was best for my constituents under these terrible circumstances"...as long as they kiss the ring of the new Republican Party power-brokers 

Republican voters will be granted a general reprieve for, well, y'know, reasons.

Lots of reasons.  Hillary was a divisive monster so they had no choice.  Democrats are dirty, dirty commies.  Barack Obama was a Hateful Divider who ruined the economy and something something economic anxiety.

Whatever.

The important lesson Republicans have had drilled into them over and over again for the past 30 years is that if they just stick together, if they just lie and deny hard enough and loud enough, in the end they will always be allowed to get away with murder because neither the mainstream media nor the Great Wad of the general public want any part  of that fight.

So just like last time, it won't matter how ludicrously flimsy the predicate for this Great Amnesty will be and it won't matter how much you and I might shout --

-- because they will keep getting away with it.

Because just like last time, all that will matter is who controls the cameras and where they point them.  And they won't be pointing them at you and me, kiddo.  They will be pointing them at a small clutch of professional Republican goon and ratfuckers who will be credited by the mainstream media with Saving the Republic.  But this time when Republicans voters and the lion's share of Republican politicians are let off the hook, they will be getting their Great Amnesty thanks to the terms under which the Liberal establishment surrendered to the Never Trumpers.

By agreeing that 2016 is the new Year Zero.

By agreeing that every Republican's actions prior to 2016 are off-limits now and forever.

And, hell, why repeat myself when I can just copy and paste all the stuff I warned you two years ago was coming down the pike...

The New Big Lie would incorporate some elements of the Old Big Lie ("Both Sides Do It") --

We should ALL,the Dems,the GOP,the media,admit our role in turning politics into theatre. Being outrageous equals clicks,viewers & therefore ratings & $ for media & fame for politicians. Being normal gets you ignored & a primary challenger for being “too weak”.

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) September 8, 2018

I fear we’re headed toward a place where hefty majorities of both sides of the electorate are going to regularly embrace unsupported and blatantly false assertions.

Technological fragmentation of media enabled it, and siloed fan-servicing media practices are accelerating it... https://t.co/DK1UwQNpA9

— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) September 8, 2018

-- and some minor variations, but the major themes would be:

1. Surprise!  Donald Trump is not a real Republican.  Despite the fact that he rolled up historic victories in the Republican primaries, easily wiped out an entire field of better-qualified Republican contenders, was nominated by the Republican Party, won on the Republican ticket, and has made the Republican congress into his willing political bidet, somehow Donald Trump is not a real Republican.  This is a lie which Joe Scarborough is particularity fond of, having repeated on his teevee show, by my count, about seven million times over the past three years.   Joe Scarborough, who might as well have handed Trump a personal check for 100 million dollars for all the free air-time he gave him.


2. Also, for you kids keeping score at home, Donald Trump is not a real Conservative either.


3. Because Donald Trump cannot be a real Republican (nor a real Conservative) a deus ex machina must be quickly tinkered together to explain how he was nominated and how he won as a Republican.  And thus "Economic Anxiety" was born -- the magical plot device which, though never actually explained, by sheer, sledgehammer media repetition became the commonly accepted excuse for why, in less than one year, Donald Trump transformed David Brooks' Burkean, forward-looking "detoxified" Republican Party of 2014 into the shitpile of racism, ignorance, paranoia and rage Republican Party of 2015.


4. The creation of an agreed-upon canonical time-line that divides all of history into BE (Before Escalator) and AE( After Escalator).  Before Escalator:   David Brooks' Burkean, forward-looking "detoxified" Republican Party  After Escalator: A shitpile of racism, ignorance, paranoia and rage  of "Economic Anxiety".  

So prepare for all of that.

Prepare to see the Bush-Off Machine retooled, repainted, gassed up and rolled out as the Trump-Off  Machine.

Prepare to witness the glorious fulfillment of Mr. David Brooks' Great Project.  From me, a very long time ago:

...it is now painfully clear that Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political  economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

And odds are he'll get away with it too.

And once actual Liberal voices have been all but ablated from the American political media, prepare to see your new BFFs at the Lincoln Project begin to turn their guns on your favorite "crazy leftist socialist" soon after the 2020 election.

As they come for your Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, prepare to see this massive lurch to the right affirmed by quotes citing all the praise the Liberal establishment is currently heaping on the Never Trumpers.

"But you said Bill Kristol was an honorable man.  But you said Rick Wilson is a national treasure."

Prepare for the GOP to go right on being exactly the same monster factory is has always been, but marginally more cunning.  The same old shitpile of bigots and imbeciles, but without the leader of the party saying the quiet racist crazy part out loud every god damn day.

Prepare for Donald Trump to permanently become the low bar which Republican politicians will be required to clear.  Which means that, if you're a Republican, as long as you don't masturbate on camera while quoting "Mein Kampf", congratulations, you're now a bona fide Sensible and Serious Republican!  Just like Eisenhower!

And as the New Republican Party busies itself grooming more careful and cunning fascists like Tom Cotton for high office, prepare for every Beltway media outlet to lose their collective minds the minute the Justice Department under a Democratic president goes after any of the Trump Traitors.

The chorus of "But you said 'Lock Her Up' was wrong!  But you said prosecuting your political enemies was wrong!" will be deafening.

(For those of you who are unfamiliar with the expression, selling one's birthright for a mess of pottage is a reference to the Biblical character of Esau, who sold his birthright for a meal of lentils (Genesis 25:29-34). It means to hastily and foolishly trade something of great, but deferred value for something of low, but immediate value.)

No Half Measures