The Genre of "Republicans Shocked That The Republican Party is Full of Republicans" Continues To Pay Very Well

It's also, by any standard, a market that's terribly oversaturated with Dry Drunk Republicans jostling for premium seating on the lifeboats by trying to outdo each other writing about how bloody awful the Republican Party became ... overnight ... miraculously ... with no warning whatsoever ... after they had left.  

Consider the case of reliable Beltway stalactite Michael Gerson, whose columns would make perfect sense if he were, say, a Dutch-American villager who had sneaked off to the mountains to escape his nagging wife and happened upon a group of silent, well-dressed men with Rutherford B. Hayes beards playing nine-pins.  Whereupon Gerson got drunk with the men, passed out, and woke to find that he now sported a scraggly three-foot-long beard of his own with birds nesting in it.  Hurrying back down the mountain, he arrives at CPAC just in time for the last day where, to his astonishment, some guy named Donald Trump was the keynote speaker and not Ronald Reagan.  

OMFG!

But of course, Mr. Gerson is not character from a Washington Irving fable who slept innocently through he last 40 years of American political history.  Mr. Gerson was George W. Bush's chief speechwriter and a senior Republican policy adviser who scuttled quietly away from that clusterfuck of a presidency and, like most Bush regime dead-enders, was gifted a job-for-life in the mainstream press where he spent the entire Obama administration relentlessly slagging President Obama and us hopelessly unAmerican Libtards while conspicuously ignoring what was happening in plain sight to his Republican Party.

A past which, like virtually all Dry Drunk Republicans, Mr. Gerson dare not face with clear eyes.

And so, instead of an honest reckoning, week after week we get this sort of thing: 

Opinion: The GOP is now just the party of white grievance

"Now" is the foundation stone on which all Dry Drunk Republicans are building their church.  

One of the poisonous legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency has been to expand the boundaries of expressible prejudice.

Translation: Republicans are saying the quiet part loud now.

Through the explicit practice of White-identity politics, Trump has obviated the need for code words and dog whistles...

Code words for racism and dog whistles to racists have been the sinews holding Mr. Gerson's Republican Party together since Mr. Gerson was in short pants.

Many in the crowd surely didn’t consider themselves racists, but they were perfectly willing to make common cause with racists. In social effect, it is a distinction without a difference...

Mr. Gerson has accidentally describes the modern history of his Republican Party as it has existed since Mr. Gerson was in short pants.

All this should create a tremendous philosophic tension within the GOP. 

This sentence might make sense in an alternate universe where Republicans had a "philosophy" beyond harnessing the electoral power of bigots and imbeciles in order to ram through corporate deregulation and massive tax cuts for the wealthy.  But in our reality this just sounds stupid.

The party has been swiftly repositioned as an instrument of white grievance. 

Well sure, if you're willing to pretend that "the last 40 years" = "swiftly".

It refuses to condemn racists within its congressional ranks.

From their forever home in the eight circle of Hell, gales of laughter were heard from Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms.

Its main national legislative agenda seems to be the suppression of minority voting. 

"Seems".  How fucking adorable.

Trumpism is defined by the belief that real Americans are beset by internal threats from migrants, Muslims, multiculturalists, Black Lives Matter activists, antifa militants and various thugs, gangbangers and whiners.

How did Mr. Gerson hang onto his chief speechwriting gig when he can't spell a simple word like "Republicanism"?

The whole Trump movement, and now most of the Republican Party, is premised on the social sanctification of pre-cognitive fears and disgust.

A common feature among Dry Drunk Republicans is their absolute refusal to understand the difference between Cause and Effect.  The decades that men like Mr. Gerson spent working to turn the GOP into a monster factory is the Cause.  That monster factory begetting someone like Trump is the Effect.

Yet the largest single group within the new GOP coalition is comprised of people who claim to be evangelical Christians. And the view of human beings implied by Trumpism is a direct negation of Christian teaching...

I would refer you to one my earliest posts --"Little Red State Fundy" -- written 16 years ago, back when Mr. Gerson was putting words into Dubya's mouth, during what Mr. Gerson would have his readers believe was the Golden Age of his Republican Party.

Mr. Gerson then gives his readers a little sermonette on What It Means To Be a Christian. and concludes:

No one could possibly accuse White evangelicals of consistently defending this view of humanity in the Republican coalition. There have been only scattered peeps of protest as an agenda of dehumanization has advanced. The complete lack of a debate on these matters is an indictment. At some point, the issue ceases to be hypocrisy, because hypocrisy requires the existence of a standard.

"At some point".  How fucking adorable.

Go back to sleep, Mr. Gerson.  You're not needed here.  You're not wanted here.  

Go back up the mountain, find your drinking buddies and pass out for another 40 years while we cynical, bitter, uncivil, conspiracy-mongering, Christian-hating, shameless, failed, polarizing, desperate, destructive, delusional, betraying, toxic, scandal-plagued Liberal snobs (all terms and sentiments Mr. Gerson rained like hellfire on the Left during the Obama years) will once again break out the mop and bucket to clean up the rubble and ruin that yet another Republican president has left behind.

Burn The Lifeboats