Bylines Like Mardi Gras Beads

I continue to be amused on-the-cheap by how the mainstream media continues to shower people with opinion-having gigs whose sole qualification for the job is that they have spent their entire adult lives being dead wrong about the most consequential political story of their lives...which is now the subject about which they are being paid to opine/

For example, today we find Tom Nichols in the pages of The Atlantic, sitting shiva for his Republican Party:

The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages

The GOP has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.

Ol' Tom then treats readers to the eighth longest metaphor in modern American letters by devoting [checks notes] 740 paragraphs to the history of the Communist Party before getting around to...

This should all sound familiar.

The Republican Party has, for years...

You know what? It does sound familiar.  

In fact, it sounds exactly like what OG Liberal blogger Digby was writing way back in 2006 when she tweaked the old Bolshevik adage about Communism to draw attention to the almost Stalinist way in which modern Conservatism was making and unmaking its heroes, villains and unpersons based on the needs of the moment:

Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed. (And a conservative can only fail because he is too liberal.)... In this I actually envy the right. When they fail, as everyone inevitably does at times, they don't lose their faith. Indeed, failure actually reinforces it... The Republicans are smart enough to rid themselves of failure by always being able to convince themselves that the failure had nothing to do with their belief system.

And OG Liberal biographer Rick Perlstein claims that he came up with this apt little epigram even earlier.

Point being that during all those years that Tom Nichols spent lying to himself about his Party of Reagan, there were plenty of voices on the Left clearly and cogently describing exactly what trajectory the GOP was on, and what kind of horrors awaited all of us if it wasn't stopped.  

Or. to misquote Godfather II (as one does), the Republican Party has been dying from the same heart attack for the last forty years.  

And yet Tom Nichols not only spent those years in complete denial about it, but is very, very sensitive on the subject and gets super pissed when anyone brings it up.  So how did it come to be that ol' Tom was the one whose political expertise The Atlantic chose to tap to write 822 paragraphs on the fall of Communism, sandwiched between a handful of words about the Republican Party?  Words that read remarkably like what Liberal blogger were writing about the Right almost exactly to-the-day 15 years ago?

Since no one who runs in those circles is likely to answer basic questions like these anytime soon, I doubt we'll ever find out exactly why this particular department of the wingnut welfare program just goes mindlessly on.  On the other hand, since no one will explain or even acknowledge that it is deeply warped to hire people to write about a subject about which they have been so flagrantly wrong for so long, until proven otherwise we should assume that the motives involved are dark, vile and salacious.  

Remember When I Told You To Burn The Lifeboats?