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 --
-- by yapping out debate derailers like this:
And this:
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
5 comments:
Only the last four years and the years 1965 to 1980 count. Right. Got it. Makes perfect sense.
What the hell is a dumbshit liar Tom Nichols doing posing on teevee as an expert?
You ask since, apparently, you haven't seen on teevee the fakes are featured, not faulted.
The people who make the “always racist GOP“ argument are the mirror image of the conservatives who said for years that the Democratic Party is just a front for socialism and pinko infiltration. It’s the sign that tells me I am not talking to a liberal who is a serious person.
_ The People who always make the GOP racist arguments are the racists who are attracted to the GOP by the racist pandering, by racist identity politics and most of all providing racist policies to make them know why they are with the GOP.
- His "sign" that a liberal is not serious is that they do not agree with him and provide facts he doesn't relish confronting because he enjoys the illusion?
Tom Nichols is beginning to sound like a Rudy law school graduate.
It's almost like he doesn't know about the Southern Strategy, or Lee Atwater's deathbed confession about it, or Billy F. Buckley's racism. Except, we know he does know about those things.
Take down...2 points! Nicely worded deconstruction of an "ex" Republican. I wonder which way he'll go as the GOP continues its slide into toxicity.
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