2021 Never Trumpers are a Third-Rate Cover Band Version of the 2005 Liberal Blogosphere

This is Max Boot -- who we all remember as the #1 Super Bush-Era Iraq War Pimp guy -- in the Washington Post today:

The Republican Party is beyond salvation — even without Trump

Boot starts with Cornyn, but honestly could've stuck a pin in the GOP anywhere and it would have gushed crazy:

...But what is even more disturbing about Cornyn’s tweet is the upside-down assumption that it’s normal for a president to spew deranged, ungrammatical, abusive tweets — and that there is something wrong with a president who refuses to do so. 

And then, in standard essay style, opens the aperture to encompass the entire GOP:

Most people thought that President Donald Trump’s tweets were bonkers — but for a large portion of the GOP, they have now become the standard by which his successors will be judged. Republicans have gone down the rabbit hole where sanity and sobriety are inexplicable and indeed suspicious.

And then widens it further to cover the pillars that support the unhinged GOP, but notice the caveat.  Boot has come a fair distance since the Age of Bush -- almost caught up to there Liberals were in 2005! -- but like most Never Trumpers, still hangs onto the the vestigial reflex that get's Republican cause and effect exactly backwards.  That Trump was somehow a political Philosopher's Stone -- a magical force that radically altered the atomic structure of the Republican Party -- when the truth is entirely the other way around.  That the GOP spent decades building and refining a hermetically sealed, racist Monster Factory that eventually produced a Trump because Trump most accurately and loudly reflected the swaggering ignorance, bigotry and bottomless, whining grievance of the GOP base.

And so...

Three of the major tenets of the Trumpified GOP have been on public view the past week — if you can bear to watch.

Hostility to science...

Racism...

Authoritarianism...

Check, check and check.

This is by no means the whole of the GOP --...

Yeah it kinda is.  Sure, one could say that water, sugar and high fructose corn syrup aren't the "whole" of a Bomb Pop, because is also "Contains 1% or less of Citric Acid, Natural And Artificial Flavors, Guar Gum, Cellulose Gum, Xanthan Gum, Blue 1, Red 40" but when something is 99% one thing and 1% something else, it is long past time to stop pawing through the dungheap looking for that pony.

... -- but the Trumpy wing is by far the most vocal, militant and important. 

The "Trumpy wing" of the party is the party.

The “mainstream,” by contrast, is weak, vacillating and uncertain. 

This "mainstream" constitutes nothing more than the artificial flavor and dash of food coloring that helped this deeply racist and democracy-hating party keep up appearance for far too long.  And by the way, "mainstream" is a noun that means "the ideas, attitudes, or activities that are regarded as normal or conventional; the dominant trend in opinion, fashion, or the arts" and I have no fucking idea what "mainstream", pre-Trump GOP ideas, attitudes or activates Mr. Boot could possibly be referring to.  

Former House speaker John A. Boehner is a case in point: He denounces the “crazies” who have taken over, but he admits that in 2020 he voted for Trump — the leader of the crazies — because “I thought that his policies, by and large, mirrored the policies that I believed in.”

So Weepin' John Boehner is the "mainstream".    

Wow.

I will, however, agree 100% that whatever burned out, pre-Trump Republican resin might exist within the GOP would indeed have to be utterly "weak, vacillating and uncertain" to continue to identify as a Republican, or to scuttle into the shadows and claim that they're now "independents" and free from the Demon Rum of partisanship.

And the reason I agree with with Boot's 2021 observations is that I wrote about this same dynamic in the Republican Party...almost exactly 16 years ago today.  Y'know, back when there was stull a chance that the avalanche of Republican ruin and madness that has nearly killed this country might have been dissipated of only prominent Conservative and "mainstream" influencers had bothered to look where Liberals were pointing.

It's a post from April 24, 2005 entitled "Little Red State Fundy" and it ends like this.

And to people who had been very clear all along that they genuinely believed in a Theocratic Nanny State and thought that precipitating Armageddon and triggering the Second Coming should be the highest calling of any worldly government, were handed over the police, courts, government, treasury and nuclear weapons stockpiles of the United States of America.

And in the end -- just as they had been warned for the past twenty years -- there was nothing whatsoever left at all for Moderate Republicans, Undecideds, and Libertarians.

You can read the whole thing here if you're of a mind to.

Anyway, my point is pretty simple and if you've been reading this blog for awhile, you already know it.  The Left has been right about the Right all along.  Period.  Full stop.  And whether Never Trumpers like Boot and Charlie Sykes and Tom Nichols and Tim Miller and Steve Schmidt and, well, jeez, half the MSNBC lineup these days are sincere, or partially sincere, or saying what they have to say to hang onto their media gigs, or trying to run out the clock until Trump is memory-holed and they can sneak back into the good graces of the GOP , or just running a scam...the fact remains that all of them amount to little more than pale, cover-band copies of what Liberals have been writing and saying for decades.

And it continues to be both passing strange and darkly amusing that while Never Trumper's entire media schtick consists of playing mediocre versions of "Kashmir" --

-- they continue to pretend that Led Zepplin doesn't exist at all.

Burn The Lifeboats