Your Never Trump Phrase of The Day: Never, Ever

As in our Never Trumpers "allies" are never, ever going to admit how things got to be the way they are.  Never going to admit why things got they got the way they are.  Never going to take responsibility for their part in it.  And never, ever going to admit that the Left was right all along.

Listen for yourself.  

This is Bulwark co-founder Charlie Sykes in conversation with [notes from the transcript] "legendary figure in the Conservative movement" Mickey Edwards who represented Oklahoma's 5th congressional district in Congress and "for 16 years...was a member of the Republican leadership in the House and chairman of the party's policy committee".  He was also past chairman of The American Conservative Union and one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation.  

And he didn't see nuthin.

They're just going to go right on lighting votive candles to St. Reagan, rolling the rosary of "Bill Buckley stood up the the Birchers!" between their fingers, shrugging their collective shoulders and sneering at us asshole Liberals who cried wolf.

Except they have no working theory that explains why it is that, when that wolf stalked in close enough for their bleary eyes to see it and their turned-up noses to smell it --  close enough for it to rip their throats out -- it was, in every particular, dimension and trajectory, exactly the species of wolf that the Left had been warning about for decades.  

The "But.. but... Buckley!" story the elders of their tribe tell the younglings has much more hagiographic myth than meat on its old bones.  From Jonathan Chait 

One of the cherished myths of conservative history holds that William F. Buckley cast the John Birch Society out of the movement for its lunatic thinking. The true story, detailed by Alvin Felzenberg in National Review, is much less stark. The Birchers were indeed stark raving mad, and their beliefs included the conviction that water fluoridation was a Communist plot to weaken the populace, and Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist agent. But the Birchers were far too numerous and influential to alienate completely. 

 

Buckley tried to walk a careful line. He called for Robert Welch to resign from the John Birch Society, but did not denounce the group itself. And even in his dealings with Welch he tried to maintain decent relations. “You will no doubt be hearing from around the country that I have been criticizing you and the John Birch Society. I want you to know that that is incorrect: I have been criticizing you, but not the Society …” he wrote Welch. “We shall continue, then, to do much disagreeing about this and no doubt in vigorous language; but I hope we can maintain a pleasant personal relationship. I am prepared to, if you are.”

And however much Edwards and Sykes want to guard their political virtue by gilding and shining up that hoary, old tale, the fact remains that, whatever actually happened, happened in the early 1960s.  Before humans walked on the Moon.  Before the return of Nixon.  Before most Americans had a color teevee.  

What's depressing and ultimately defeating about the mind of Dry Drunk Republicans like Edwards and Sykes is the dissociative way they treat intervening decades between then and now.  Remember it's been 30 years -- an entire generation -- since the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich.  And yet, while both men acknowledge that Limbaugh and Gingrich existed and that their effects have been pernicious, they seem to consign them to some weird alternate universe that is far away and had little or nothing to do with them, while their highly polished and highly edited "memories" of Reagan and Buckley are as near and hot and fresh as your first cuppa coffee in the morning.

I rather pity them, because in a very real sense, men like Edwards and Sykes have nothing of lasting value left.  They have more than enough money, and they can summon an audience of millions with one phone call to their friends in the media.  But their life's work has turned to shit.  Their beliefs have been exposed as farce.  That wolf that the Libtards had warned them about (and that they ignored until it was far too) late has blown down their houses of twigs and straw, and the only brick structure left standing on the Right is securely occupied by the spawn of Limbaugh and Gingrich.  

This is why men like Edwards and Sykes hang on so hard to an idealized version of the past: because they want so much to be descended from saints and heroes and not grubby political hacks, bigots and  accommodationists.  Put's me in mind of the story -- possibly by Mark Twain or Winston Churchill, but I'm sure one of you clever people will correct me if I'm wrong -- of the lowly garden snake who spends all his time boasting that his great-grandfather was a brontosaurus because he had little enough else to be proud of.

Sad.

Finally, no Dry Drunk Republican retconning of history would be complete without a big ol' slab of Both Sides Do It that depends entirely on erasing a big ol' slice of the past.  See if you can spot it!

Edwards:  But I have to say, I mean, uh, watched AOC the other, y'know, on TV, uh, saying, "Well we should just over override the Senate parliamentarian."

Yes, because to Dry Drunk Republican, AOC is the entire Democratic Party.

Edwards: Y'know first it was, y'know, uh, go to the rescission so that, uh, you change the rules to do it this way, and then if the rules say now you can't do that, well then, oh, just override it, uh, there was talk about, um, if Biden won, y'know, it would pack the Supreme Court, uh... uh... there was other so...

Yes, because to this doddering old fossil, anything any Liberal ever says speaks for the entire Democratic Party.

Sykes: Right.

Edwards: The... the left has kind of given up on... on the norms of, uh, liberal democracy too!  And... and so I... I think what we we're seeing is that on the Left and the Right both, people just want the outcome they want they want -- the... the policies they want -- and they don't really care about the constitution.  They don't care about process.  They know... You know democracy is about process, it's not about, uh, outcome but...

Sykes: And that's and that's boring compared to outcomes right?  You can get people's blood fired up with the outcome. Talking about process requires, y'know, years of of habits and the  development of respect for those habits and I worry about spiraling radicalization.  That is each side becomes more focused on just winning regardless of the process the other side will say , "Well look... look what they do!  Why can't we play by those rules?" And we're seeing that right now that every violation of norms then invites the other side to also violate the norms.

Except we just had a constitutional scholar as president didn't we?  One who might as well have stepped straight out of your fondest Centrist opium dreams.  One who repeatedly and earnestly extended to your party every opportunity to work together on the nation's critical problems.  Who repeatedly  demonstrated that he would set aside the aspirations of the Liberals who elected him to accommodate Republican who hated him if they would just move one God damn inch towards the center.

And from his first day in office, your party told President Barack Obama to go fuck himself.

Your party returned every Democratic offer of civility and cooperation with rage, racism, lies, obstruction and sedition.  And laughed about it.  Gloried in it. 

So you know what?  Maybe Democrats haven't abandoned constitutional norms at all.  

Maybe we've learned the hard way the same lesson that Lincoln had to learn the hard way.  That when a significant fraction of the country is in the hands of fanatical insurrectionists bent on destroying the country, waving the constitutional at them and saying "Pretty please" does very little good at all.  Instead, to save the nation. power must be pried out of the hands of the fanatical insurrectionists and their movement must be destroyed by whatever means are available.  

So frankly,  Republicans should consider themselves damn lucky that the most extreme measures that any Democrat is currently proposing involve rebalancing the courts, voting to overrule a  parliamentarian and modifying the filibuster and not re-staging Sherman's March across every Republican shithole state that is currently scrambling to further deprive its minority citizens of the right to vote.

Burn The Lifeboats