It's Stuff Like This That Gives Me Trust Issues

As everyone knows, one of the first things they teach you in Online Close-Up Magic University is misdirection.  Or, in the parlance from another corner of the Marvel universe, don't watch the mouth, watch the hands.

So while many a trusting soul has been listening to the Never Trumpers on teevee talk about their mortification that Donald Trump and the Republican Party etcetera, a few of us have been listening to them talk amongst themselves.  And it should come as no surprise just below all the hand-wringing, there is a fundamental schizophrenia in the way they talk which I have taken to calling Dry Drunk Republicanism.  Yes, they have given up the Demon Rum of blindly supporting the GOP, but the Republican way of thinking and reacting and lying is so hardwired into them that they automatically revert to hippie punching and Both Siderism when the conversation becomes uncomfortable.

Considerer run-of-the-mill Republican hack, Linda Chavez, who served under both Reagan and Bush I and would've been Bush II's Secretary of Labor had she not gotten into some trouble over hiring undocumented domestic help.  In her doomed campaign for the senate against Barbara Mikulski, her campaign lexicon included such time-tested Republican tropes as  "San Francisco-style, George McGovern, liberal Democrat",  "anti-male", "radical feminist" and "fascist feminism".

Ms. Chavez currently spends her Fridays on Mona Charen's "Beg to Differ" podcast panel (a Bulwark online joint) where they recently tackled the subject of the United States' damaged international reputation.  There was broad consensus that Trump had trashed it and that Europe is being sensibly cautious about trusting the United States, but Ms. Chavez was moved to add the following:

Chavez:  But I would also suggest that this didn't, again. just start five years ago with the campaign and election of Donald Trump.

OK so far.

Chavez: The United States has been an unreliable partner and I think going back even to the, um, you know era of Vietnam and... and other times when, um, you know we we have backed out of, uh, areas where we were very committed, uh, often after pulling others in with us into conflicts.

Should never have been in Vietnam in the first place, but OK.  And then comes the record scratch.

Chavez: And certainly we saw that during the Obama years with respect to Afghanistan and Iraq and, so, I, y'know. I think that it isn't so much a partisan issue as it is that America has seemed in recent years, um, as being less sure of itself and its, uh, its role in the world...

Strapped herself into her Seven League boots and leaped entirely over the staggering foreign policy clusterfuck that was the Bush/Cheney administration and instead invoked the Kenyan Usurper.  Because mentioning that the worst foreign policy debacle in modern American history was a Republican Party project eagerly pimped by all of Chavez's Never Trump friends would have caused her tongue to burst into flames.   

So instead...Obama!

Because that's the way the Never Trump brain is wired.  

This irreconcilable political schizophrenia burned right onto their motherboards.  On the one hand, among Never Trumpers, there are varying levels of acknowledgment that their Republican Party is a catastrophe.  An open, suppurating wound on democracy controlled by traitors, lunatics and demagogues who would happily burn the country down if it made Liberal cry.

On the other hand, there is an equally astringent reaction when Democrats actually act on that knowledge.  These Never Trump Republican have such a deeply embedded sense of arrogant privilege born of lying to themselves for so long -- repeating the false mantra that "this is a center/right country" for so long -- that it is somehow insulting and offensive when Democrats do not humbly offer up their policies for ritual slaughter by the madmen of the GOP.  When, instead, they attempt to govern responsibly in a time of crisis by recognizing the GOP for what it is -- a reactionary and reflexively obstructionist shitpile of bigots and imbeciles -- and carefully maneuvering around the lunatics standing in the middle of the road with a bazooka.  

Observe how casually Bulwark podcast guest Josh Kraushaar rewrites the history of the Obama administration to force it to comport with his complaints about the Biden administration.

First, the setup:

Kraushaar:  The thinking in the Biden White House comes down to this: that they wanted to get this passed as soon as possible.  They think that it's politically beneficial that it's going to juice up the economy in the run-up to the the midterm elections and they they just didn't think that it was worth getting... they didn't think they would get ten Republican senators to get to that filibuster-proof majority, so they didn't think it was worth getting the Mitt Romneys or the Lisa Murkowskis and the Susan Collinses on board only to see that effort fail and have to go through the regular... or through the you know the reconciliation route. I, y'know, I think when you're... when you're a president who ran almost predominantly on unity bipartisanship...you make an inauguration speech about bringing both sides together... I think even making a significant gesture and trying to find some common ground even if it doesn't work out -- even if even if it doesn't, y'know, ultimately in the end come to fruition -- would have paid significant political dividends.

You will notice that it doesn't even occur to Kraushaar that he is talking about a disaster relief bill that is needed immediately to deal with an ongoing national emergency.  To him,  it's just another value-neutral chip in the game to be measured by how "politically beneficial" it may or may not be to the players.

And because this is the way his mind works, he doesn't understand why the Biden administration won't waste valuable time by engaging in what Kraushaar knows perfectly would be a completely empty political gesture. 

Kraushaar's mental wiring also prevents him from remembering that Republicans have already had their chance to negotiate.  During the waning months of 2020, Democrats repeatedly came to the table with ever smaller relief packages, while Republicans continued to flop their "skinny" bill on the table and say take it or leave it.  So, once the votes had been counted and Democrats controlled the Senate, the Biden administration left it.

Finally, what possible "significant political dividends" are there to be found in pretending to court Susan Collins' vote?  Who is left in the world that is still fence-straddled so precariously between the Democrats and the Violent Insurrection Party that not giving Susan Collins a cookie will tip them into the fascist's back yard?

And then comes the record scratch moment when the Alert Listener realizes that, like most Never Trumpers, Kraushaar has rewritten the past to suit his dogmatism so radically that there's no point in trying to reach him.  This is how he "remembers" the first couple of years of the Obama administration:

Kraushaar:  I think the political risk for Biden now, and we saw what happened with Obama when he when he went the partisan route in 2009, 2010.

Books have been written about the Republican plot to sabotage the Obama administration from Day One.  Thousands of gallons of ink and millions of pixels have been spilled in newspapers and magazines on the subject.  For all I know, Lin Manuel Miranda might be out there right now working on a Broadway musical  called "Obstruction!".   Even on this humble blog of mine I have bent a quill or two to the task of recording just how uniform and fanatical the Republican obstruction of Obama was.

From Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post in 2012:

Republicans had it in for Obama before Day 1

...

At first, we thought organized Republican recalcitrance against the president started in October 2010 after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) famously said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Then came Robert Draper’s book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives,” this spring. As the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reported in April, the book reports on a dinner of leading Republicans held the night of Obama’s inauguration.

For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.

"If you act like you're the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” Draper quotes [Rep. Kevin] McCarthy [R-Calif.] as saying. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”

And Stein highlights this useful passage from Draper’s book:

The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward:

Go after Geithner. (And indeed Kyl did, the next day: ‘Would you answer my question rather than dancing around it — please?’)

Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)

Begin attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. (The first National Republican Congressional Committee attack ads would run in less than two months.)

Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.

Now Greg Sargent at The Plum Line is sounding the alarm over a revelation in “The New New Deal” by Grunwald. Vice President Joe Biden told the author that during the transition, “seven different Republican Senators” told him that “McConnell had demanded unified resistance.” This was after the 2008 election but before Obama and Biden took office.

“The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’ ” Biden says.

Nevermind the nation was falling off the fiscal cliff. Nevermind the global economic system was hanging in the balance. Nevermind we were on the verge of another Great Depression. When the nation needed single-minded focus, the Republican political establishment put power over the national interest...

This is the past as it actually happened. 

But this accurate and true history of the Republican Party before Donald Trump arrived directly contradicts the dogmatic insistence by most Never Trumpers that the GOP was a sane, reasonable and healthy political institution until Trump showed up and magically transformed it into a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles overnight.  

And so Kraushaar simply adjusts the past to suit his present needs:

Kraushaar: The historical record will show that Biden really didn't try to reach out to folks like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins like, I think that... that there was a lot of spin about the Obama first year in office...

Kraushaar goes on to explain that since "moderate" Republicans like Adam Kinzinger and Mittens Romney were responsible for Biden winning, they really should be accommodated.

Kraushaar:  Those were the winning votes... those were the winning votes for Biden that put them over the top in the election so you would think you want to keep your coalition together...

With the exception of a few, rare outliers, there is no appetite among the Never Trumpers to deal honestly with how and why their party came to be a knife at the throat of our democracy.  It's too painful, too professionally costly, and would demand that they reject some of their most basic assumptions and dearly held beliefs.  So they will continue to wheedle and equivocate and bargain and  backslide like a hard core drunk facing the loss of the bottle.  

And with their enablers in the mainstream media always on hand to refill their glass and tell them that one more shot won't hurt anything -- 

Dana Bash Pretends GOP Will Ever Bargain In Good Faith With Biden

CNN's Dana Bash used the notion of bipartisanship as a cudgel to beat Democrats over the head with during an interview with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

-- I don't expect this ongoing farce to end anytime soon.

No Half Measures