Happy Belated Birthday Tom Nichols!

A very belated happy birthday, actually, since good ol' Tom turned 60 on December 7, 2020.  Which makes him a few weeks younger than me.

The reason I mention it is because good ol' Tom gets very, very irritated by any good faith effort to seriously diagnose what the fuck happened to his Republican Party by responding to the clearly cited history of the GOP  --

Nope.
Becoming the party of American apartheid is what the GOP did when being the party of Red-baiting ran out of gas. The transformation began in SF in the summer of 1964.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) February 3, 2019

-- by yapping out debate derailers like this:

Yeah, this is why I never found that guy particularly interesting to talk to. There's a long story here that involves the left saying "Trump is the inevitable exposition of the Right since 1964" and it's just tiring and trite imo.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 8, 2021

And this:

So be it. This is always an out of context discussion, as if the 15 years before 1980 never happened.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 9, 2021

And while I'm flattered that Tom confused me with Charlie Pierce during that exchange (and fervently wish the Esquire magazine payroll department would make the same mistake) this is all kinda beside the point.  In fact, what's going on here is the sort of desperate appeal to "topicality" they taught us in high school debate prep as a last resort go-to if we found ourselves getting slaughtered.  When you just can't beat your opponent's logic and facts, one final Hail Mary you can try is to torpedo the entire debate by arguing that the opposing team should never have been allowed to present their case in the first place because it falls outside the parameters of the debate topic which had been established for that academic year.

Tom's arguments on this topic always come down to an arbitrary assertion that the only appropriate subject of inquiry into what the fuck happened to his Republican Party are the years after he left the crime scene.  After he started talking about the moral and constitutional dereliction of "those" Republicans.  

So just the last four years, more or less, with Tom as good ol' Sweet Face, swearing to the posse that he definitely had nothing to do with that infamous Hole in the Wall gang which, yeah, OK, they did pass through this way awhile back but are definitely not hiding out in the bordello across the street.  

Butch Cassidy: "I swear, if Sweetface told me that I rode out of town ten minutes ago, I'd believe him."

But movie metaphors prove nothing, so let's settle this as gentlemen.  With math!

Tom is very concerned that Liberals like me insist on pretending that the "15 years before 1980 never happened."  Well, that's not what I'm arguing at the moment, but OK.

Now unless the internet is lying, Tom was born in 1960 just a few weeks after me, which means that "15 years before 1980" we were both four years old going on five.  And 15 years later, in 1980, we were both 19 heading for 20.  

Now maybe Tom spent his pre-teens in his Goldwater Garanimnals playing with his Build-a-Burke Young Republican Play Set.   And maybe he spent his teen years falling asleep to Phyllis Schlafly's "The Eagle Forum Talks To Teens About Feminazis, Fluoridation and the Evils of Medicare" on the Philco, but I didn't.

During those years my family moved from a leaky trailer in Colorado Springs to a tiny town in Iowa (which has since been virtually abandoned) to the Philippines, where my dad was a principal and my mom was a teacher.  This at the height of the Vietnam War, and so I went to school with the children of officers and diplomats and the elite of Philippine society.  After that, my parents took the long way back to the United States so we could See The World (Fun fact: We found out later that we left the Philippines on the same ship as General William Westmorland after he'd been replaced by General Creighton Abrams.)  From there we moved to a suburb of Chicago where adventures were few but getting my ass kicked as an alien outsider who wasn't born there was a frequent occurrence.  

I spent my teen years trying to get out of high school (which I despised), trying to get high and trying get laid, not necessarily in that order. By the time 1980 rolled around I had a crap job in Chicago that led to a much better job later.  I had a shitty apartment.  And because of a quirk in the law, I was no longer of drinking age in Illinois.  I had been for all of two months in 1978, and then Illinois changed the legal drinking age from 18 to 21, so on January 1, 1979 I was kicked right back into minor status.  But there were ways around that which I exploited with abandon.

All of which is to say that Tom and I both spent most of that "15 years before 1980" as children and at the time I, for one, wasn't giving politics or the state of the two party system a whole lotta though.  

Or, as it says in one of Donald Trump's two favorite Corinthians:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.

But, as 1 Corinthians 13:11 goes on to say, "when I became a man, I put away childish things."

And this is clearly the conversation that Tom and pretty much every other self-righteous Never Trumper very much wants to avoid: the question of what was going on in the political world when they were grown-ass Republican men and women, making decisions and acting with agency in the adult world?

Or, put another way, is it your testimony that, as an intelligent, well-informed and politically active adult, you were somehow completely oblivious to the seething, escalating, Conservative-media-stoked rage, racism and paranoia that powered your Republican Party during it's mad, quarter-century-long dash from the rise of monsters like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, to the nomination and election of Donald Trump by your Republican Party? 

Because if you really had no idea during all that time that your Republican Party was, y'know, full of Republicans, well, a couple of things.

First, there is an excellent, short explainer of those depraved decades entitled "In The Beginning.." available here.  I highly recommend it.

 

Second, if you really are this completely unaware of the modern history of your Republican Party as it has unfolded during your entire adult life -- a history which even a trivial dumbass Liberal nobody like me knows in rich detail because I bothered to fucking pay attention while I was living through it -- I have to ask ,what the ever-loving hell are you doing on teevee passing yourself off as an expert on politics and the GOP?

No Half Measures