Lifeboats as Far as the Eye Can See

To keep me amused during quarantine, Reality arranged for a veritable Lifeboat Parade of former Republican who are definitely not responsible for the condition of the party for which they have worked their entire adult lives and/or are completely shocked that their Republican Party is full of Republicans.

Sunday, on the AM Joy program, former RNC chair Michael Steele led the way, repeating the same fairy tale that he must practice every night in front of the mirror:  that when he ran the GOP he personally drove all the racists out of the party.

Yay!

But the moment he left they all came back.   And now the party is fucked.

Sad!

Steele was followed by "The Death of Expertise" author Tom Nichols, whose own expertise on the one subject on which he is called upon to opine -- the state of the Republican Party -- apparently only extends as far as the Berkshire mountains.  Because, according to Tom, during all the long and terrible decades during which the GOP was very publicly devolving into a shitpile of bigots, he, personally, never had any idea that his Republican Party was full of Republicans because, uh, see, he was in Massachusetts the whole time.

And just this morning there was Lincoln Project co-founder Jennifer Horn crying into Joe Scarborough's beer because she could not understand how her awesome 2015 Republican Party became -- overnight and with no warning or explanation -- the 2016 Trump Party.

Joe, of course, enthusiastically agreed:

Scarborough: When I went up and visited some of your events I saw people who I see now quoted on TV and they are unrecognizable.  Their words are unrecognizable from the groups and the meetings that I sat through just four, six years ago. So I guess as we go into an RNC that looks like, you know, a South American strong man celebration of his family speaking at some event, have you come to grips yet, have you come to terms yet, with what happened to our Republican Party? Again, we’re not — I’m not talking about the Republican Party of 2000. I’m talking about even the Republican Party of 2014, 2015.

And there it is.  The Big Lie which Conservative meatheads like Scarborough have every reason to believe will save them once again.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” -- George Orwell

"When you control the cameras, you can remake the past into whatever you want it to be." -- driftglass

No Half Measures