The Haunts of the Very Republican

Meet Denver Riggleman.

Denver Riggleman is a life-long, head-to-toe Republican.

Denver Riggleman is also a noted Bigfoot erotica expert.

Denver Riggleman is also a soon-to-be one-term congressman from Virginia. 

During his 2018 campaign Representative Riggleman earned Donald Trump's full-throated endorsement even though Trump clearly had no idea who Riggleman was or that he wasn't yet a congressman or that his Twitter handle wasn't @DenverRiggleman:

As he endorsed Riggleman this week for an open Virginia congressional seat, the president referred to the Republican newcomer as the incumbent.

“Congressman @DenverRiggleman of the 5th District in Virginia is a popular guy who really knows how to get the job done!” Trump tweeted at 10:50 p.m. Monday. “Really big help with Tax Cuts, the Military and our great Vets. He has my Total Endorsement!”

The president also got Riggleman’s Twitter handle wrong. 

As a House Republican, Riggleman went on to vote pretty much straight party-line including dutifully voted against impeaching Trump.

What a good Republican!

And presumably it would've gone on like that until the Rapture except, last July, Riggleman officiated at the same-sex marriage of a couple of friends of his and for that the Virginia Republican Party burned him at the stake.

Oopsie!

Apparently Riggleman forgot to read the fine print.  And after his own party primaried him out of a job, that was the moment when Denver Riggleman, life-long Republican and half-term congressman, suddenly discovered that -- OMFG! -- his Republican Party was full of Republicans  Vipers! Vipers  everywhere!  

And Trump?  That guy's the worst!  Why didn't someone ever do something about him?

Eventually Denver Riggleman made his way over the The Bulwark podcast where yesterday he and Charlie Sykes uncorked a big jug o' self-regard and vowed to find out how all this happened and, uh, y'know, do something about it!

Riggleman:   I was a bouncer.  I just wasn't a military. Bouncer for years.  You want to fight?  I'm  dirty.  I'll grab tables, bottles.  We can go at it, right? But you know I'm just so sick and tired of people that are fearful, lack courage.

Remember this is coming from a guy who only found out his Republican Party was full of Republicans five minutes ago, and only found his courage once they primaried his ass out of his job as another foot-soldier in Trump's congressional goon squad.

Riggleman: And then, um, and again it goes back to how do I fight this? Do I want to fight this? Have I already done my stick, right? Have I done my part Charlie? I...y'know...this is what I think about every frickin' day.

Sykes:  I will tell you I think about exactly the same thing! I told somebody the other day.  When you say y'know have you done your part, and I said,  "You know I have been fighting against uh Donald  Trump longer than people were in World War II."

Longer that people were in WWII? Wow! Sounds impressive!  Except all this really amounts to is Mr. Sykes' puffed up way of saying he's been a Never Trumper for four or five years.

Sykes:  So, yeah, from, y'know this anti-Trump campaign has been has had a duration longer than World War II at least for the Americans. But...and then I have to tell you that that virtually everyone in our small little world is wrestles with the same thing, going, "Okay, we can't.  We're exhausted.  We're beaten down.  We're not going to win all of this.  And that temptation to get in the R.V. and just head West...the temptation to go off to the lake to go off to the mountains is so intense...

Well I wouldn't know.  I don't have a vacation home by the lake...or one in the mountains...or an R.V. for that matter.

And speaking of WWII, wouldn't the world have been so much better off it had prevented that cataclysm rather than fighting it?  If responsible leaders had aborted the rise of fascism in Europe long before that fascist movement produced a Mussolini or a Hitler?  Before Germany rearmed and the tanks rolled into Poland?  Or, as noted 20th century philosopher and saucier Peter Clemenza once said, "You know, you gotta stop' em at the beginning."

And this is why Never Trumpers like Charlie Sykes are so categorically opposed to looking beyond the "last four or five years" to the origins of the fascist monster factory that the GOP has become.  Because if Mr. Sykes ever had the guts to look in a mirror that was, say, six years old...or seven...or ten. or twenty...he'd see a loyal and prosperous servant of the Reich staring smugly back at him.  

As The Shrill One wrote yesterday in The New York Times:

When Did Republicans Start Hating Facts?

A straight line runs from Reagan to the Trump dead-enders.

...

The main point, however, is that under Reagan, irrationality and hatred for facts began to take over the G.O.P.

There has always been a conspiracy-theorizing, science-hating, anti-democratic faction in America. Before Reagan, however, mainstream conservatives and the Republican establishment refused to make alliance with that faction, keeping it on the political fringe.

Reagan, by contrast, brought the crazies inside the tent.

Many people are, I think, aware that Reagan embraced a crank economic doctrine — belief in the magical power of tax cuts. I’m not sure how many remember that the Reagan administration was also remarkably hostile to science...

But as long as they control the microphone, this is not a conversation that Never Trumper's will be having with anyone anytime soon. Instead they will go right on patting themselves on the back themselves for noticing that the proverbial horse had left the proverbial barn 40 years after that horse ran away and died and the barn burned to the ground.  And all while complaining bitterly that we on the Left just have no fucking idea how hard it is to fight these bad people:

Sykes:  And I... I'm not sure that people on the Left really understand how tough a dilemma this is. Y'know, they... they think that, well (in a pouty voice) "You just should become a Democrat.  You should become a liberal."  No... no, that's ... that's not ... that's not ... what ... what ... really, y'know ... a ... a real alternative here.  I don't think ... we're simply not going to abandon everything that we believed. but we're going to have to abandon a lot of the alliances and the allegiances that we've had in the past...

Except we on the Left haven't just spent the last few years fighting Trump.

We've spent decades in an impoverishing, exhausting, uphill slog in which we have always been wildly outspent and outgunned.  

Decades being dismissed as traitors and crackpots as we pitted our pitiful little blogs and newsletters and podcasts against powerful and lavishly-financed forces inside the GOP and the mainstream media -- forces which turned the GOP into the monster factory that created Trump, and which were proudly led by men like Charlie Sykes.  

No Half Measures