The Great Reset Is Already Underway

By sheer force of their vastly overrepresented presence in the mainstream media, Never Trumpers like Bill Kristol have almost finished resetting 2016 as the new Year Zero of modern political history.

Once that reset is finalized, everything that happened before Year Zero will effectively be off-limits.  Everything that happened after that is a damn shame.  And no one but Donald Trump (and the Extreme Left) are to blame for any of the havoc and tragedy you see all around you.

Of course if you live a normal life and do normal things you might not have realized yet that a small gang of well-connected Republicans are putting the finishing touches on a new, revised edition of Modern American History which is already being incorporated into the HR regulations and style books of most of the mainstream press.

If you live a normal life and do normal things you may have read this article by Bloody Bill Kristol and think that he has given up on the GOP as a dead loss.

Is the Republican Party a Lost Cause?And if so, should it be?

No, Bill, your Republican Party is not a Lost Cause.  Your Republican Party was built on the "Lost Cause" --

The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, or simply the Lost Cause, is an American pseudo-historical, negationist ideology which advocates the belief that the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was a just and heroic one.

-- which is why Alabama's Republican Senate primary came down to two racist hobgoblins trying to out-Nathan Bedford Forrest each other. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The key to understanding everything written by virtually every Never Trumper (and BTW, happy anniversary Rosetta Stone!) is that it is an article of absolute faith among thm that there is no relationship whatsoever between their Republican Party and their Republicanism -- which existed intact as a mighty vessel for enacting their morally superior ideals until 2016  -- and Trumpism, which is a racist and barbaric force that appeared from nowhere and mesmerized the entire Republican Party.

One minute they were having drinks with other enlightened members of the GOP Brain Caste and affably plotting how best to use Rush Limbaugh's and Newt Gingrich's style of racist, bomb-throwing as an electoral battering ram..

...or get George H. W. Bush elected with ads like this ...

...or get George H. W. Bush's dry-drunk, halfwit kid elected by derailing John McCain's primary run with a racist whisper campaign conquest...

...or the conquest of Iraq ...

... or the demolition of Obamacare...

...or the theft of a Supreme Court seat from the Kenyan Usurper...

...then suddenly and without warning the Orange Bad Man showed up and body snatched their entire virtuous, enlightened and not-at-all-racist Republican Party!

That's exactly how it happened officer!  We swear!

In the service of this fairy tale, Kristol takes his readers on a maudlin on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand journey in which Donald Trump and his post-2016 enablers are clearly and repeatedly identified as History's Greatest Villains --

On the one hand, with embarrassingly few exceptions at every level, the Republican party is Donald Trump’s party. So in many ways it deserves to be a lost cause.

On the other hand, after November 3, the GOP may stop—more or less suddenly, and more or less convincingly—being Donald Trump’s party. It might even stop being the party of Trumpism...

-- before getting to the real point:

On the sixth hand (I know, we’re in octopus territory here): Maybe we should root for the GOP to be salvaged, while acknowledging it won’t be saved by us people like us. After all, if the GOP is to be rebuilt, it will likely have to be done by people who have been complicit in Trumpism. Because one thing that is certain is that the Republican apostates will never be forgiven by their erstwhile colleagues. Not because we were wrong about Trump, but because we were right.

So Never Trumpers will be personae non gratae. The only people who will be afforded the opportunity to save the GOP are the ones who helped wreck it.

This is why Never Trumpers must get everyone of importance to affirm that henceforth 2016 will be the new Year Zero and why Liberals with our dangerous memory superpower must be kept locked out of the national media conversation at all costs.

Because Kristol and his Never Trumper running buddies can only ascend to the exalted status of martyred Conservative sainthood if history began in 2016, if Trump is the Alpha and the OMAGA of everything that is wrong with the GOP and that 30 years of Never Trumpers working energetically to build the Republican monster machine that spawned Trump somehow had nothing to do with Trump being spawned by the Republican monster machine.

So do not wait for a course correction, because it will never come. Nor will there never be any admission of failure.  Nor will there ever be an apology.  Because the one trait shared by all Conservatives whether they are mouth-breathing, "Fuck Your Feelings" Republican voters, or refined gentlemen penning op-ed columns in America's most respectable newspapers is this:  a smarmy moral brittleness that leaves them incapable of ever confessing to any error of any kind.

This is me shouting as loud as I knew how to shout that the Right had vanished into terrible darkness from which they could never escape.   Written in 2012, from the Forbidden Zone before our new Year Zero.

Just another crackpot Libtard pariah, obviously too strident to be taken seriously.

After decades of following the twisty course of Conservative arguments and debating friends and colleagues, I know one thing to be true: the futilely of trying to get Republicans to talk honestly in the 1990s about, say, Bill Clinton amounted to little more than a dress-rehearsal for futilely trying to get Republicans to talk honestly about Bush, Cheney, DeLay, Iraq, 9/11, deficit-exploding tax cuts, climate change, radical banking deregulation, radical environmental deregulation, the assassination of abortion providers, contraception, labor unions, mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds, and couple of dozen other topics I could reel off.

In other words, it doesn't work: to protect their egos (and, often, their incomes) instead of doing what we teach every child to do -- apologize when you are wrong -- the Right has collectively jumped past a spiritual event horizon and into a soul-darkness from which there is no return: a darkness in which imps and devils are always patiently waiting to take your hat and coat and make you extremely comfortable on the gentle, downward-sloping road to Hell.

This darkness comes with a promise and a catch: the promise is, that the Right will never, ever be called to account for the endless lies they have told and endless betrayals they have committed; the catch is that they can never leave, and no matter how repellent their neighbors become and no matter how humiliating and horrifying the lies become, they are obliged to shut up and go along with the program. With this promise comes the terrible, goosestepping power of a mob under harness, but with it also comes a grotesque fragility because to keep the darkness alive the Right has become a confederacy of Mrs. Havishams, rotting away in the gloom.

And to make matters much, much worse, their decaying mansion sits on top of such a massive, leaky stockpile of lie upon lie, betrayal upon betrayal, hypocrisy upon hypocrisy and treason upon treason that the danger of one, stray non-Fox Approved fact accidentally glancing off another non-Fox and sparking off a conflagration is omnipresent.

The entire Conservative enterprise is built on delusion and old dynamite, which is why every clock much forever remain stopped at one minute after Reagan's inauguration, every fact must be smothered under the stasis field of Rush Limbaugh roaring, rage-drunk bluster.  It is the sarcophagus of a dead ideology where the walls are now so densely postered and palimpsested with the detritus of Conservatism's lurid, lying history that its denizens cannot find the exit anymore, and its floors are so sticky and pitted with the grue of its savage, tribal, beat-in rituals that no one bothers to even look for the door.

Which is why  no deviation can be permitted, no error can be admitted and no apologies can be allowed...

Back in 2012...and 2010...and 2008...and 2007...and 2005...and 1994...

...nobody wanted to hear it, especially parasites like Bloody Bill Kristol and his merry band of professional Republican hit-men.

Which is why claiming that you were right about Trump in 2016 is now a mark of special grace among Conservatism's elite, but being right about the Right all along marks us Libtards as dirty, loud-mouth extremists too dangerous to be allowed anywhere near that conversation.

Because here's what I got wrong back in 2012:

Now the bender is over.

Outside, Reality's beating sun is stationed in the treetops, so bright and close to the Earth that it vaporizes shadows inside of pockets and purses, and through the sodden walls of their fragile fastness Conservatives they can feel its slippery photons circling their ideological clubhouse, sniffing the hinges and lintels like wolves, looking for a way in.

This time, there is no trick-or-treat scamper to safety for them in the kindly, Tea Party gloaming: no way to scuttle off to the next wingnut spider hole in a tri-corner hat and tights pretending they'd never even heard of George W. Bush. No, the rotting hulk of the Party of Lincoln has become their crypt, and inside of it there is nothing left for them but to sink forever deeper into the shadows until they become one with the darkness.

And from deep inside their narrow house, you can hear the terrified squeals of Conservtism's pasty, self-righteous, rigidly ignorant, sexually-terrified wingnut child-men trying frantically to spackle up the little holes through which modernity, complexity and reality continue to leak...

I was wrong, because the decades-long, depraved, fuck-everything Republican bender wasn't quite over.  There were still a few dollars for mercenaries like Sykes and Wilson and Kristol to wring out of our democracy.  Still a few  powerful, credulous, establishment idiots to bilk with bland reassurances that everything was gonna turn out fine.

That, in fact, a glorious Republican renaissance was right around the corner!

The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase. 

--  David Brooks, November 5, 2014.

And when none of that happened -- when Trump easily swept to the Republican nomination and it turned out that Sykes and Wilson and Kristol and Brooks and Scarborough and Rubin and Steele and Gerson and Nichols and every last fucking one of Conservatism's electoral wizards and political geniuses had been lying through their teeth all along about the Right all along -- that's when they hit bottom.

That's when the bender was over for them.  When, deep inside the sarcophagus of Conservatism's dead ideology there came a parting of the ways.

One group -- which consists of 97% of the Republican Party and most the the Conservative media -- has chosen to plunge further into the abyss, happily chugging whatever toxic Flavor-Aid their Dear Leader hands them on any given day.

YOLO bitches!

The other group -- the Never Trumpers, which consists of a tiny and electorally irrelevant fraction of a fraction of the fractured GOP -- has no intention of climbing out of the grave which they've dug for themselves.  Instead they're going to go right on using the enormous megaphone which they have been gifted by the "Liberal" media to insist that there is no grave at all.

That up until 2016 the GOP was actually doing just fine.

That they themselves are Simon-pure and that Trump is some inexplicable cosmic phenomenon and not the logical end-state of a doomsday machine they themselves set in motion decades ago.

And that if you really want to worry about fascism coming to America, you should quit fretting about those bumbling, dim-witted "Trumpists" and start worrying about the Cancel Culture of those dirty, loud-mouth Libtard extremists--

Today In "Liberals Are The Real Hitlers": Bret Bug Stephens 

-- who refuse shut the hell up about the inconvenient past.

No Half Measures