Your Bulwark Quote of the Day: "If You Had Told Me Ten Years Ago..."

Last week, The Bulwark co-founder Charlie Sykes was briefly sidelined by his reaction to his COVID shot, so his Bulwark co-conspirators Bill Kristol and Mona Charen filled in for him.  And boy howdy was the ersatz childlike incomprehsion of the Dry Drunk Republican mind when faced with what it has created ever on full display.  

One sentiment in particular stood out.

Kristol:  ...the failure of Republican elected officials and Conservative,  y'know, elites to stand up to the Big Lie... uh... and to stand up to Trump and Trumpism has been a huge problem.  Even the ones who haven't echoed it and... a lot have just... the failure to ... to, you say, to confront it when you have a real chance whether it's writing in the Wall Street Journal or... or speaking on the floor of the Senate or speaking at CPAC where you're going to get national attention, that's itself a huge problem.  It sort of implicitly suggests, well, it's a little... maybe these views are a little odd or a little off but they're not a serious problem.  But they are a serious problem.  Why do you think... I am sort of... this I've been struck by... I wouldn't... 

And here we go...

Kristol: ... if you had told me ten years ago,  y'know, the Republican Party could go in a pretty wacky direction and foreign policy could go Buchanan or Isolationist... it could go protectisty... it could go uh, y'know, I don't know, some really, y'know, flat tax or something like that... um even it could go... it would go very anti-immigration, I... all those...I wouldn't... I wouldn't have liked it.  I would have been surprised at how much it might have happened, y'know, I wouldn't have thought it would happen.  But I would have realized it  could  happen obviously -- you could see those strains very visibly.  

Translation:  Bloody Bill Kristol bloody well knew his party was nuts, but figured he and his elite cronies could still keep it safely lashed down in the laboratory and only take it out for walks on a short leash when they needed to win an election.  

Remember, that ten years ago, Bill Kristol was a very well-paid Fox News contributor who hewed closely to Team Evil's party line of always being on the attack, constantly slagging Liberals as America-hating monsters, and advancing whatever lies and conspiracy theories were on offer that week.  In 2008 Kristol was on Fox advising John McCain to forget all that stuff about the economy which no one understands anyway and go after "Liberal Democrat" Barack Obama hard on character.  Start beating the drum about Reverend Wright, Bill Ayrers, etc.  For example, here he is in 2011 in top, smarmy, smirking asshole form doing advance work for the glorious Republican plans for the reconstruction of Iraq health care alternative to Obamacare that never existed:

And here he is in a rare 2011 MSNBC drive-by explaining why it is silly and unreasonable to expect Conservatives to police their lunatics:

Well, since Mr. Kristol brought it up, just what exactly were those dirty, disreputable Liberals (who also turned out right about the Right all along) telling him ten years ago?

Ten years ago, Liberals were reminding people of the words of Steve Gilliard from an even earlier time of darkness under the regime of a Republican monster:

People say I'm optimistic. Fuck no. I know American history. Bush is a piker compared to the people who ran Mississippi in the 1950's. That was a police state, complete with secret police, disappearances and mob rule. Most American have forgotten that, but they shouldn't.

Bush's power came from our weakness and fear, we didn't protect what we should have when we should have. We gave him too much trust and he failed us all. Now, we have to reclaim it and that will not be easy. But is has to be done. Compared to the other challenges Americans have faced, it's not a massive thing, no one has to steal Tory land at gunpoint or dodge German bullets on Omaha Beach or face fire hoses and dogs, but it won't be easy either. But it needs to be done. And no matter how shitty it seems at any one moment, like reading the Times this morning, you don't get to lose heart. Why? Because if you can read this, you probably aren't doing that bad.

We were continuing to doggedly report week after week after week what an utter midden pile of Republican bad ideas and bad faith the Sunday Morning Shows had become.

To get past the establishment guardians at the media gates by any means available and get word out that the GOP had become an existential threat we became podcasters.

We pointed out that the Right was the way it was because it has never gotten over losing the Civil War. 

That the GOP's worship of mad dog Capitalism was, y'know, a bad thing.   

We pleaded with Americans not to forget which party Who fought like wild animals to let poor women die to pay for tax cuts for the rich and to make their scumbag base happy.

We used stick figures and simple language to try to warn Bill Kristol that the base of his party was a mob of reprogrammable meatbags under the sway of a racist ghoul named Rush Limbaugh.  

We passed along portions of the single greatest post of 2010 -- Russell King's Open letter to conservatives -- 

...You're going to have to come up with a platform that isn't built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from your own; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.

Your party -- the GOP -- and the conservative end of the American political spectrum have become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it's tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred. Let me provide some examples -- by no means an exhaustive list -- of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.

-- and pointed out that despite the staggering size and depth of the proof Mr. King offered in support of his position, it had absolutely zero impact on thoughts or actions of Conservatives.  

It had gotten so bad that by 2011 even Andrew Sullivan had gotten tired of Kristol's act:

Bill Kristol's Mindset

Every now and again, the mask slips and we see what the neocon scion really cares about. Fiscal responsibility? Debt reduction? This was a man who barely mentioned the debt or spending under the fiscally ruinous Bush-Cheney years, and mocked those who did. And the reason is simple: this is a writer concerned solely about partisanship and power...

They can't even bother to disguise their rank cynicism and partisan tribalism any more. Their core objective in this Congress: what Mitch McConnell said.

Hell, as far back as the earliest days of the Liberal blogosphere -- 16 years ago -- we find your host going so far as using a children's bedtime stories to try to get through to the thick skulls of wingnut hobgoblins like Bill Kristol that something nightmarish had become dangerously unmoored and was running amok at the very heart of their party:

Little Red State Fundy sez... 

I picked a few examples from my own archives, but there are literally decades of writing -- tens of thousands of posts -- from all over the Liberal blogosphere making the same points over and over again.

And this from Crooks & Liars from 2014 is certainly worth your time:

Rachel Maddow Savages Bill Kristol, Ignores Liberal Blogs That Have Written About Him For Years

And yet in 2014 we still find Bill Kristol -- after he'd been sacked from Fox News and mere months before Donald Trump came oozing down the escalator and into the hearts of Fox Nation --  with that  Death's Head grimace still glued to his face, still touting Fox as fair, balanced, "real" news, still reflexively slagging Liberals as commie dupes, still trashing Obamacare as just another failed, Liberal job-killing, social engineering experiment gone horribly wrong and still shitting on MSNBC, the cable network that was soon become his employer.

So with all of that behind him -- the Left's history of sounding ever more dire warnings about the trajectory of the GOP and Kristol's ever more smug, condescending denialism that anything was wrong at all -- imagine my complete lack of surprise that Bill Kristol in 2021 is "a little amazed" at the willingness of his now-former party to "go just Authoritarian."

Kristol:  I am a little amazed by the willingness to go just Authoritarian.  To really go anti-democratic.

Charen: Yeah.

Kristol:  Both among the elites, but... and among the voters obviously. I mean the willingness to just take that extra step and this is why this Big Lie is somewhat different from the other Big Lies. By... the other lies -- the lies about immigration are damaging and then... and should be refuted -- but this is a Big Lie about the actual political system and constitutional system and is that... what... what I mean... has that surprised you too? I mean just I guess I thought there would be more... more attachment to the constitutional order, in some sense or other, and to, y'know, the political order that... of America against the... the Trumpist assault.

And what is there left to do but shake one's head in amazement when Mona Charen -- whose contributions to the sum total of human knowledge consist of three odious books, "Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got it Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First", "Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)" and "Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense" -- casually lets slip that she never had the slightest fucking clue what was really going on insidr her own party, right under her own nose ever as she was making her living mocking Liberals as credulous chumps.

Charen: Especially coming from a political party whose leaders are constantly beating their breasts about being constitutionalists, right?  That was their big selling point.  And, in fact, that was at least part of the supposed message of the Tea Party which, I now think, I vastly overestimated the sincerity of. Um, but they supposedly were, y'know, wanting to return to a more... um... an older version of the constitutional order and so forth.  And, uh, with their tri-cornered hats and whatnot, um yeah...

Finally, Bill Kristol obligingly lays out the two halves of the Dry Drunk Republican mind.

First, the obligatory self-congratulations for noticing the threat from inside their own party -- the threat they created and lied about -- 40 years too late.

Kristol: You know we all warned [that] four years of this would have would do damage back in 2015/2016 and I think it has done a lot of damage. 

Second, looking back with nostalgia and wishing the GOP could return to the good old days of...2014/2015.

Kristol: I guess that's what... and I think, therefore, these debates about what we're... what do we do now?  I think it would be great if the Republican Party could frankly come back to the Republican Party of 2014 or 15...

Have I mentioned recently that busted up lifeboat timbers make excellent kindling?

 

Burn The Lifeboats