Your Bulwark Quote of the Day: "Retcon"

So The Bulwark co-founder Charlie Sykes has learned a new word.

And that word is "Retcon".

It is a word which originated and has seen long use in the comic book world --

Retroactive continuity, or retcon for short,[1][2] is a literary device in which established facts in a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which breaks continuity with the former.[3]

-- but Charlie Sykes heard some of the hepcat youth of The Bulwark staff use it and now he can't keep it out of his mouth. By my count, he repeated it 15 times, starting here:

Sykes: Can I just start off by talking about retconned. Retconning. Because I... I... I... did my newsletter about this today, y'know, a reader to point out that all these all the hipster pundits, including folks, on... on The Bulwark podcast have been using this phrase retconned a lot and she says "Hey, maybe you should define it for the rest of us."

Because apparently Bulwark readers don't know how to use The Google to look things up.  

Which is sad.  

Anyway, I bring it up to note that apparently using "Retcon" in a political context is now considered some kind of major lexicographic breakthrough among "all the hipster pundits" so Mr. Sykes is now all over it like scarfs on a Birx.

And the reason this cracks me up is...well...this is from me six years ago --

Crisis on Infinite Conservatisms:  The Fall of the RetCon Men 

-- talking about the speed and volume at which Charlie Sykes' good friend and fellow Never Trumper, Joe Scarborough, was rectonning the shit out of his own very public support for Donald Trump:

Which is why the single funniest damn thing on teevee today has to have been the Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough mercilessly chastising Donald J. Trump for lying about Trump's own very public remarks and then blaming "the media" for deliberately misrepresenting what he had said...

...which was followed immediately by Joe "Never Punch Down" Scarborough lying about Joe Scarborough's own very public support of Donald J. Trump and blaming "stupid people in political circles" for deliberately misrepresenting him. It was...perfect.  I mean, Squint was already a shoo-in for the silver medal in Olympic Frantic Backpedaling, but did you see him stick that fucking landing?

And then there was this from me from four years ago -- 

Crisis on Infinite Conservatisms:  The Unending Reign of the RetCon Men 

-- in which Mr. David Brooks repeatedly attempted to retcon the Obama Administration out of existence in order make a horribly stupid political point.  

Then there was this from 2019 in which we once again find Charlie Sykes' good friend Rick Wilson retconning his inconvenient past away:

The Ongoing Adventures of The RetCon Men 

Here's a snip post from a 2019 post entitled "Letter to a Colleague":

The Right has gone so completely around the bend -- and have been trained to attack the Liberal Media so reflexively -- that there is nothing to left to discuss with them.  And speaking for all Liberals everywhere, I have nothing left to say to anyone who still feels the need to pretend otherwise.  The period after after the invasion of Iraq was probably the last chance for leaders in the media to lead such a discussion ... and they blew it.  Comprehensively.  Because if we started holding people accountable for the things they said and did during the Bush Administration, golly, who knows where it might end?

Who knows how many members of the Beltway Insiders Club might have to go get honest work?

And so we on the Left once again found ourselves shouting into the abyss as the corporate media circled the wagons and let it all slide.  As the nation's op-ed columns and cable news seats filled up with Bush regime dead-enders whose careers were being aggressively retconned.  As the GOP base was allowed to put on funny hats and pretend to be Tea Party Patriots who had barely even heard of George Bush.   

There are many more, but to bring it full circle,  there's "The Tea Party at 12: No Bands Playing, No Flags Flying " from last month

...

Over at the Never Trump Revisionism Factory we find Matt Lewis using the corpse of the Fake Tea Party to retcon himself into the now-lucrative pantheon of Republicans who "have long argued" yadda yadda and something something warned years ago...

It’s the Tea Party Anniversary. Here’s Why I’m Not Celebrating.

The famous “Santelli rant” happened 12 years ago last week. I mark it out of sadness. It led us straight to MAGA-land.

...

While many of my Never Trump conservative brethren still see this movement as a largely positive phenomenon, I have long argued that there was a straight line from the Tea Party to MAGA. For sane conservatives, this was the beginning of the end...

Which may have been the impetus for Charlie Sykes to inviting him onto The Bulwark podcast where they could commiserate over various things.  

 

All of which is to say that without massive, ongoing retconning, the entire self-congratulatory Never Trump media ecosystem would collapse, dry up and blow away.  

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

 

Burn The Lifeboats