Where Do You Think They Learned It?

Before Donald Trump and his Republican henchmen incited the bloody 01/06/21 insurrection against the government of the United States (as the perfect coda to the worst administration in American history), the previous most unimaginably awful crime against American principles and values a president and his henchmen could possibly commit was making torture an official policy of the United States government.

Which is exactly what the Bush administration did.  In secret, of course, while they categorically denied it in public and their myrmidons ruthlessly slandered anyone who suggested that the Bush regime was capable of such terrors.

Until the photographs got out.  

Then continuing to lie about Bush and torture became impossible and overnight the vocabulary of the Right pivoted from indignant, flag-swaddled denial to ... something else.   Something that, more than a decade later, helps explain why Republicans now broadly believe that if they can hedge and straddle and deflect and Both Sides the bloody 01/06/21 Republican insurrection long enough and loud enough -- if they can kick up enough chaff and rally enough straw men -- this to shall pass.

For example, The Wall Street Journal (always so free and easy with the slagging of Libtards who doubted the decency of Commander Cuckoo-bananas) suddenly lawyered-up, getting very "Well, technically..." about the evidence tat was now spilling out.  The Wall Street Journal continued on unharmed.

Infamous bar-fly and Beltway Conservative icon Peggy Noonan famously counselled that, as a great nation, we should just “keep walking” because “some of life has to be mysterious.”  Noonan kept her position and status and continues to be welcomed as a respected guest on the Sunday Showz.

As one of the chief architects of the Bush regimes legal justifications for torture and the "unitary executive" theory that would grant a president unlimited dictatorial power, you would think that John Yoo would have been driven out of civilized society in a manner that would involve tar, feathers and rail.  But you would be wrong.  Yoo is now the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and spent the past four years as an unapologetic champion of virtually every one of Trump's monstrous trangressions.

Marc Thiessen was also an real cheerleader for the Bush torture regime and a Bush speechwriter.  For his loyal service to the American Fascist Party, he was gifted a permanent syndicated column in The Washington Post where he spent eight years calling Obama a dirty commie traitor, and our years enthusiastically gobbling Trump's withered mushroom knob.

There were no greater fans of torturing brown people than Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, whose fortunes have only risen since the Age of Dubya.

And as recently as 2014, we find Nicolle Wallace -- former George W. Bush press secretary and America's Never Trump "It" Girl -- energetically defending her former boss and his torture crew:

"I don't care what we did": What Nicolle Wallace's rant reveals about America's torture problem

Former GOP operative and current co-host of "The View" issues tirade -- showing how normalized torture has become

... 

So here’s what Wallace said on Tuesday, while gabbing with her buddies on MSNBC: “"In the history of this country, I think months after 9/11, there were three people who we thought knew about imminent attacks and we did whatever we had to do.” Having misled viewers into thinking a huge, secret and continent-spanning torture regime was actually just focused on merely three suspected terrorists (no biggie; what’s a little waterboarding between friends?), Wallace added, solemnly, “I pray to god that until the end of time, we do whatever we have to do to find out what's happening.” It was “asinine” and “dangerous” to claim that systematic torture “makes America less great,” the person who’d just implied god supports torture said. All that matters, Wallace argued, is whether torture “help[s] us kill people who want to kill us.”  But liberals, she complained, want to focus on “political correctness” — i.e., not committing war crimes.

For her sins, Ms. Wallace has been gifted her own hour of prime-time on MSNBC where she does a brisk business laundering the reputations of former and current Republicans and has effectively disappeared the entire eight years of failure, disaster, incompetence and war crimes under Bush by compressing it into a single word: "myformerbosswhateveryouthinkofhim".

The list goes on and on and on.

Mark Twain once observed that, “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.”

And having observed how Bush's most ferocious and tireless defenders not only kept their jobs after that administration collapsed, but were frequently promoted into positions of even greater influence, we can now say without fear of contradiction that ouchless Republican redemption equals treason plus time plus a shit-ton of Beltway media money. 

No Half Measures