Birthday Fundraiser: Day One -- History Did Not Begin In 2016

In keeping with the millions of words I've spilled and the thousands of graphics I've done over the past 15 year for my little, single-shingle blog out here in the middle of Middle America, I suppose this week leading up to my 60th birthday and The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes (tm) I should try to impart some startling new revelation or some new configuration of English words concomitant with gravity the events bearing down on us.

And maybe later in the week I'll be so moved to do so.  

But today I'm going to dig way down deep into my archives and ask all of the Never Trumpers and professional pundits and bluechecks (who I know damn well cruise this blog regularl) to answer a question for me, either in the comment section or via email (driftglass99@gmail.com) or DMing me on Twitter (@Mr_Electrico).  If you're one of the invertebrates who blocks impertinent Liberals for asking inconvenient question and you want your reply kept private, tell me and I'll do so. I may be a vituperative, foul-mouthed blogged of the Left, but I am a man of my word.

You see, I wrote this back in April of 2005.  Back when Tom DeLay was the GOP's Donald Trump.  

As you read it, please remember that politics was not (and is not) my business.  I have never run a campaign, and have no special access to focus group or polling data.  In fact, at the time, I was a member of the senior management team of the (now defunct) workforce development office at the City of Chicago.  I routinely put in +100 hours a week there, and was got my news where most everyone else did; the national newspapers, local network teevee, bits and pieces via cable news streaming sites like Rockin' Roosters (I didn't have cable at the time) and the Sunday Shows.  My blogging had to be done in secret, either very early in the morning, very late at night, on the weekends, or at the hippie coffee shop a few blocks from my office during lunch (if anyone at work had caught on to my "driftglass" identity, I'd have been fired by the end of the week.)

So bear in mind as you read this that I wasn't then (and am not now) a professional pundit or Haver Of Opinions who lays claim to a special expertise about what is really going on that is vouchsafed only to those few with deep insider, back-room knowledge.  Instead, like Will Rogers, all I know is just what I read in the papers.  And, like the late Same Ervin, "I can the understand the English language, it's my mother tongue."

Here is what I wrote more than 15 years go ("Hey Kids!  Tom DeLay Sez: Come join me on my Excellent Adventure!"):

For my Moderate Friends, it's time to face some unhappy facts. The biopsy came back, and the news ain’t good: turns out while you were dreaming your happy Tax Cut dreams, the always amusing and hardworking Christianofascist wing of your party metastasized.

Consider this from Dana Milbank in today’s WaPo:

Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" decided that [Supreme Court Justice Anthony M ] Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse. 

Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy's opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles "is a good ground of impeachment." To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference on
"Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the "good behavior" requirement for office and that "Congress ought to talk about impeachment."
...
Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law." Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' "
...
A judge in Atlanta and the husband and mother of a judge in Chicago were murdered in recent weeks. After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to "engage in violence." 

"The people who have been speaking out on this, like Tom DeLay and Senator Cornyn, need to be backed up," Schlafly said to applause yesterday. One worker at the event wore a sticker declaring "Hooray for DeLay."
...
This was no collection of fringe characters. The two-day program listed two House members; aides to two senators; representatives from the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; conservative activists Alan Keyes and Morton C. Blackwell; the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's parents; Alabama's "Ten Commandments" judge, Roy Moore; and DeLay, who canceled to attend the pope's funeral. 

The Schlafly session's moderator, Richard Lessner of the American Conservative Union, opened the discussion by decrying a "radical secularist relativist judiciary." It turned more harsh from there.
...

I know, my little Moderate Republican Lambs, that you are desperately trying to believe that the Schiavo case is some weird exception. As are the thinly veiled threats against federal judges by the leaders of your Party. And the bold new experiments in a wholly fake press “reporting” wholly fake news. And your Preznit trying some sweet, “sweep his legs!” kung fu moves on your mom’s Social Security. And Evangelical sock puppets being given more teevee face time as spokesmodels for your Party than John McCain, Lincoln Chafee, Arlen Specter combined.

Sorry bucko, this is the New Normal: while you were busy explaining to family and friends (me, for example) that the fringe Right was on a nice, tight leash and would never bust out of it's Petri dish and go pneumonic...they were busy putting all the joint property in their names. So congratulations: While you were cleverly “playing” them, you became the “fringe” and they became The Party.

In other words, while you were busy congratulating you sly self, you forgot to read the Fine Print and, brother, you gone and done joined the Klan!

So you can either get comfortable with wearing sheets and marching in formation, or run, do not walk, the Fuck Out of their Abattoir, but what you can’t do is continue this ruinous and infantile pretense that it’s not happening, or that it’s not bad, or that it’s not you fault.

It is happening.
It is that bad.
And it is ENTIRELY your fault.

So, for what seems like the umpteen millionth time, let’s take a good hard look at your new ”friends”, and then you explain to the rest of the country – and to the rest of the planet – why you persist in letting these feces-based life forms own and operate your party and act in your name.

First, Wingnuts clearly hate America as passionately as any Taliban. They hate the plurality of it, the tolerance, the check-and-balance crap that deters them from curb-stomping gays and Liberals and “the coloreds” whenever they fucking well feel like it. They’re delighted with the notion of a fascist America (as long as they are the one’s holding the machine guns) and are practically kicking the back seats of the Big Republican Bus asking Bush over and over, “Are We There Yet!?”

They adore the idea of a Strong Man lining up the degenerates and mowing them down in Slow Motion on Pay-Per-View. They jizz over their chubby, pink feet at the thought of stadia full of smart-ass “humanists” being tasered into “sounding off that you luv the Virgin Mary” and mass graves full of dead feminists. Their head’s are open sewers swirling with happy masturbatory blood-thoughts of beating their betters to jelly, raping their women, and having an Approving Christian Father in the White House who smiles munificently on their carnage.

It is the eternal dream of the weak, the cowardly, the stupid and the impotent.

They dream of showing up with gore-smeared faces, dragging along the head of some fag they murdered with their teeth, and dropping it at the feet of a Beloved Leader who first absolves, and then makes them proud of their perversion. To such people, the fact that their Overlords are a gang of reckless liars, thugs and whores is not simply irrelevant –- it is a source of radiant pride. They draw their strength from the deepest recesses of torch-lit human barbarism. They are at war with reality itself, and they smile at every lie their Masters tell. Every manwhore who is uncovered – figuratively or otherwise – makes the shrug and smirk and then dance a drunken little jig that says, “See! See! We can do anything and you can’t stop us! Anything! ”

This is the behavior you validate and actively endorses every time you vote for or contribute to Republican causes.

So when Bush or DeLay or their codpieces and minions open their bibble-spigots and extrude another steaming pile of laughably ignorant shit all over the media, instead of being even moderately embarrassed or feeling like hypocrites, your new friends are thrilled. However, they believe they’re still a few Scalia/Thomas-grade Supreme Court nominations away from being able to come right out and shoot their critics down like dogs in the street in the name of the Prince of Peace, so the best they can do for now is run in tiny circles, screaming incoherently at the tops of their lungs.

That is who they are. They make absolutely no secret of agenda is, what they’re willing to do to accomplish it, and what they plan to do after they overthrow the United States, so how about you Wake the Fuck Up and answer one, simple question: Why in the name of God do you insist on helping your enemies destroy the nation you claim you love?

And here's the question.  If an ordinary citizen like me living an ordinary life far from the corridors of power could see what was happening to the GOP and where it was headed 15 years ago, why couldn't any of the Beltway's career professional political insiders be bothered to notice that there was something wrong until five minutes ago, long after it was too late?   And if your only excuse is that you really are that cluelessly godawful at the one thing you are paid to know, why the fuck do you still have that job and why should anyone trust your professional opinion about anything?

Or, on the other hand, if you could see what was happening and you went along with it, covered for it, slandered anyone who tried to raise the alarm because the money was good...well, same question: why should anyone trust your professional opinion about anything now?

No Half Measures