I Told You So. That's It. That's The Post.

 Apparently many people are starting to notice that Republican voters are reprogrammable meatbags (tm) who are so addicted to Fox News/Hate Radio bullshit and Both Siderism that they are permanently lost to reason.  

Here's a center cut from Wajahat Ali's article today in The New York Times:

‘Reach Out to Trump Supporters,’ They Said. I Tried.

I give up.

...
I’ve even tried and failed to have productive conversations with Muslims who voted for Trump. Some love him for the tax cuts. Others listen only to Fox News, say “both sides” are the same, or believe he hasn’t bombed Muslim countries. (They’re wrong.) Many believe they are the “good immigrants,” as they chase whiteness and run away from Blackness, all the way to the suburbs. I can’t make people realize they have Black and brown skin and will never be accepted as white.

I did my part. What was my reward? Listening to Trump’s base chant, “Send her back!” in reference to Representative Ilhan Omar, a black Muslim woman, who came to America as a refugee. I saw the Republican Party transform the McCloskeys into victims, even though the wealthy St. Louis couple illegally brandished firearms against peaceful BLM protesters. Their bellicosity was rewarded with a prime time slot at the Republican National Convention where they warned about “chaos” in the suburbs being invaded by people of color. Their speech would have fit well in “The Birth of a Nation."

We cannot help people who refuse to help themselves. Trump is an extension of their id, their culture, their values, their greed. He is their defender and savior. He is their blunt instrument. He is their destructive drug of choice...

Since it was posted a few hours ago, this article has been liked, reposted and recommended (and hated) hundreds of times on social media.   Jennifer Rubin, one of the musty, neocon throw-pillows Fred Hiatt's keeps around on the Washington Post's op-ed page positively creamed over it.

And that's all just great.

Except...

Except...

Except when Liberals like me were sounding the alarm about what was happening in plain sight on the Right decades ago -- warning how dangerous it was and how it was accelerating, back when the media actually telling these kinds of blunt truths about it might have made a difference -- we were not getting columns in The New York Times, nor massive boosts on social media, nor the glowing endorsement of Bush Regime Dead Enders.

Instead we were made into pariahs.  We were shoved into a corner and told to shut the fuck up.  

Here's a sample of the rank heresy we American-hating Libtards were peddling back in the Before Time.  One of literally thousands I have written.  This one is from October of 2008:

Understanding The Right #1 

...Clinton? Objectively, Clinton qualifies as the greatest Center/Right President in history, and with balanced budgets, GATT, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, record surpluses, foreign and domestic terrorists brought to book, and an actual military victory, he arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else. 

And they hated him for it.

Why?

Because Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.

And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain. 

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender. 

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.

So what is the last lie a Conservative tells himself? The last lie that the junkies and their suppliers both fight like hell to keep alive and twitching?

That, whether or not their ideology is depraved or deluded, it doesn’t matter because:

“Both side are always equally wrong about everything all the time.”

Doesn’t matter the who or what. The when or how. Doesn’t matter who was driving the bus towards the cliff and who was waving the red flags, throwing their bodies in front of it, trying to make it stop. Doesn’t matter who was trying to douse the conflagration with hoses shredded by 20 year of Reaganism, and who was lobbing milk cartons full of jellied gasoline onto the bonfire.

It is the lie the hagged-out Cokie Roberts pushes week after week after week on “This Week…” 

It is the lie that David Fucking Brooks pushes in the pages of the New York Times.

It is the lie that made David Broder the “Dean” of the Villagers; the lie on which the quarterly profits of the entire Murdoch media empire now rests.

Because these people and thousands more like them are not journalists or “pundits” or expert who offer facts or interpretation or a philosophical framework for illuminating and contextualizing the events of the world. 

They are pushers, selling that last, nihilistic lie to the junkies on the Right who will pay any price and cut any throat to escape the fact that they are personally and specifically responsible for the destruction of the country they claimed to love in the name of a God they claim to believe in.

Which is why November 4th is so much more than an election.

November 4th is an Intervention, because the junkie-pusher spiral of the Republican rank-and-file and their leaders has finally hit bottom: we need to heal this country or lose it, and arguing -- "reasoning" -- with wingnuts and their enabling shills and hacks is as pointless as trying to reason with addicts and dealers.

The only way this country is going to be saved is by taking it away from them, school board by school board, city council by city council, congressional district by congressional district, state by state, election by election until they are driven back into the political sewers from whence they came...

Of course we didn't shut up.  We kept right on writing.  Right on being mocked and slagged and ignored by all on those very same Very Serious People who are now running around with their hair on fire wanting to know how all this happened and why no one warned them. 

And I was going to end this post right here until an Alert Reader called this Tweet by David Frum to my attention.  David Frum, whose many accomplishments include being the Bush speechwriter who put the words "Axis of Evil" into Dubya's mouth, and never being without a paying gig for more than a minute since.

And reform begins with acceptance of some grim and unwanted realities.

The problems are not "on both sides."

The illiberal authoritarianism of some dean of students somewhere is not equivalent to illiberal authoritarianism by the Attorney General of the United States.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) November 19, 2020

You'll excuse me now while I go back to my heretic's corner and die laughing.

No Half Measures