The Fail-Safe Election

From Fail-Safe:

President:  Colonel Grady, this is the president of the United States. The mission you are flying has been triggered by a mechanical failure. It is a mistake.  I order you and the other planes...to return at once.  Do you hear? At once!  Colonel Grady, I repeat. This is the president.

Grady:  I can no longer receive tactical alterations by voice.

President:  I know that, but...

Grady:  What you're telling me, I've been specifically ordered not to do!                   

President:  Damn it, Grady, this is the president!

As of this writing, while the trends are favorable, before every vote is counted it would be the sheerest hubris to talk about who won and who lost the presidential election.  So for now the outcome is still tucked inside Schrodinger's Ballot Box waiting to be actualized by actual counting.  

However there should be one fact that stands out bold and clear to anyone who has eyes to see: that the staggering amount of free publicity and hard cash lavished on the Lincoln Project on the theory that their unique insights into the Republican mind would pay big dividends for the Democrats was a complete bust.  That, outside of the tiny circle of Never Trump Republicans who seem to exist almost entirely on teevee and Twitter -- surprise! -- neither the tens of millions of dollars that credulous Liberals poured into the Lincoln Project...

...nor the Liberal Political PornHub videos they cranked out budged even a fraction of the Republican base one inch. 

In fact, after four years of mayhem and madness, Republican support for Trump actually deepened, widened and hardened this time around.  From Brother Charlie Pierce:

He Got More Votes Than Last Time

Almost half of the country looked at the way Donald Trump has functioned as president since 2017 and said, definitively, that they wanted four more years of it. We are who he thinks we are—a huge proportion of us, anyway.

So how the hell did that happen?

Well, I'll tell you, but first allow me just a moment to bathe in the dark hilarity of me --  a dirty, disreputable Libtard blogger nobody -- having to once again explain to Republican political professionals how their fucking party actually works.   A party which they made their first fortunes building, and are making their second fortunes bitching about.    

So let's start with a term I coined and have been using for long time now to describe the Republican base.  "Reprogrammable meatbags" -- A term which which I have been told many times sounds too harsh, but is simply the literal truth.  After all, we are all bags of meat.  And as to the other thing, indulge me a quick story which I've told once or twice on The Professional Left podcast.  

It's about a long-time professional associate of mine -- one of many I've known over the years -- who is straight out of MAGA central casting.  Retired, White, affluent and one of those "I'm no racist, but..." racists.  Hated Obama with that unhinged fury that so many of us remember..  Hated Hillary even more.   Loves Trump like a glutton loves his lunch.   And has gone all-in on every wingnut conspiracy extant for as long as I've known him: to him, Hillary's assassination of Vince Foster, Obama's forged birth certificate, and every toxic Republican lie in between are all settled matter of historical fact.

This particular guy used to send the latest Brietbart vomit along to me 2-3 times a week with some stupid "Ah!  Gotcha now Liberal!" comment.  I'd expend about 90 seconds debunking it.  He'd bitch about all fact-checkers being in the pocket of Big Soros.  Then I'd debunk that.  And then he shrug it off because everyone knew Both Sides were equally bad anyway, so what did it matter, and then change the subject.

Rinse and repeat.  For years this went on, until he went radio silent back in 2017.

Well one day he emailed me a long tirade excoriating Peggy Noonan as a typical, stupid, hateful, lying Libtard because Noonan had written something critical of Sarah Palin.  

Yes, that Peggy Noonan.

I took 90 seconds to explain that Noonan was, in fact, a life-long Republican.  A speechwriter for Saint Ronald Reagan, among other things, and how the fuck was it that I knew more about his party and its leaders and mouthpieces than he did?

He responded that, based on the couple of Noonan's paragraphs that his Screaming Eagle Superpatriot FaceBook group had been circulating, it sure seemed like she was a typical, hateful, stupid, lying Libtard, but what did it really matter because everyone knows Both Sides were equally bad anyway.

And that right there is what I mean by reprogrammable.  

The modern Republican Party didn't spend decades and billions of dollars assembling a political party out of stolid, Irving Babbitt-quoting, William Buckley-loving burghers.  

Instead they spent it building a Pretty Hate Machine powered by rage, racism and paranoia.  

And to keep the machine running smoothly Party leaders didn't turn to Edmund Burke for inspiration.  Instead, they took George Orwell's 1984 as their instruction manual, which is how, over the course of decades, the Party rank-and-file were relentlessly propagandized into automatically reject any criticism of the Party as a thoughtcrime.  To automatically repudiate any critic of the Party as a part of some vast Soros/Liberal/Fake News conspiracy.  To automatically edit out any memories of previous Party claims that contradicted today's Party dogma.  And, if cornered in the fragile moment between the collapse of yesterday's lies and the invention of tomorrow's lies, to automatically dive behind the mighty shield of Both Siderism to stave off reality until a new lie could be delivered.

They built a Party and an accompanying ideology which, to quote the inimitable Digby from 14 years ago, cannot fail, but can only be failed, and which our new Never Trumper friends found out far too late had become self-sustaining and no longer needed their thin veneer of elite media respectability to win elections. 

And so knowing what you know about how the reprogammable brain of the average Republican is wired, take a moment and ask yourself what Republicans were seeing in one Lincoln Project ad after another. 

Not what you were seeing; what they were seeing.

I would argue they were seeing a barrage of videos trying to shame them and deceive them into doubting their Dear Leader and his loyal Party.  They were seeing ads from former Republicans (who, in the judgement of the rank-and-file, are traitors and therefor worse than us Libtards) who they had never heard of before but had been run out of the Party and were now all over teevee mocking them as toothless rubes.

In other words, they were being told by exactly the sort of people they had been conditioned to automatically distrust to do the one thing they had been specifically trained not to do.

So it failed.  

Bigly.  

And if there were any justice in the universe, the Lincoln Project would go into the books next to “Hot Rod” Hundley as the guys who held Donald Trump to under 69 million votes.

But there ain't no justice and the checks have already cleared.

And really, isn't that the important thing?

PS.  Apologies in advance for any typos you may find.  I'm running on fumes, but I wanted to get this out of my head and posted today before I sack out for a hour or two.

UPDATE:  And so, having racked up a truly impressive record for complete irrelevance this election, the Lincoln Lads feel emboldened to announce...

The Lincoln Project announces their NEW agenda.

Senior advisor, Michael Steele, announces their plans to “resurrect the Republican Party in a way that it could become a governing majority in the future.”

“Those principles and those ideals we espouse...to me, still matter.”#TLP pic.twitter.com/33m6Cz0CRB

— Angelux (@Angelux1111) November 4, 2020

Burn The Lifeboats