I Wasn't Being Condescending. I Was Being Patronizing.

This week, our award for "Never Trumpers Sternly Lecturing Democrats About How They Are Fucking It All Up" goes once again to crew over at The Bulwark for this little gem.

James Hohmann:  ..and and then I think to your point, [Democrats have] become super condescending toward anyone who doesn't sort of "get it" in quotes and... and that is a huge turn off for so many voters that I've talked to around the country who I think, y'know are ancestral Democrats and just the... the... a lot of the condescension is that Democrats feel like they shouldn't have to explain to you uh why they're doing what they're doing

Charlie Sykes: Yeah the condescension and contempt can be really be deadly in American politics...

First of all, if you mean "Strom Thurmond Democrats" or "Reagan Democrats" just say so and don't conjure up a phrase like "ancestral Democrats" as if these goofs have been passing down locks of Martin Van Buren's hair from father to son for 180 years.  They haven't. They've been stone-cold Republicans for at least a generation largely because they hate and fear people of color and because your party rolled out the red carpet for them as they fled my party because of our slow but steady embrace civil rights as a core value.

So you can stop pretending these goofs have shit all to do with the Democratic Party.

Second, speaking for all Liberals everywhere, we are 100% cool with asshole voters and fascist voters and racist voters knowing we have contempt for them.  In this matter, we stand with the late Steve Gilliard from +16 years ago:

There's a tendency for liberals to try and be fair, to consider other viewpoints, so we get baited by [Conservatives] in debates on terms that they set. I'm going to act on the following: I don't care what conservatives think. The NRO Corner thinks I'm a racist, I don't care, their opinions on race are meaningless.

Instacracker doesn't like what I say?

That's the purpose of the exercise.

I want conservatives to read this site and come away steaming. I don't want them to think they will like a word I will say here. I don't want them to think I will consider their opinions or viewpoints. I want them to think: boy he doesn't like conservatives and really, really doesn't care what we say.

I'm tired of people acting like these people can be reasoned with or talked to. They don't want to talk, they want to drive us away into a corner and ridicule our ideas.

I'm not writing to make conservatives happy. I want them to hate my opinions. I'm not interested in debating them. I want to stop them...

But the meatiest and most hilarious point in all of this is the monumental hypocrisy of these very recently homeless Republicans suddenly deciding that condescension and contempt are so toxic that Democrats dare not brush up against it because it's a "huge turn off for so many voters".

Really?

Because I don't know if Charlie Sykes noticed during his many decades of unstinting service to the Party of Limbaugh and Gingrich, but when the base of Mr. Sykes' party went looking for political stimulation, they weren't pulling "The Wealth of Nations" or "Democracy in America" off the shelf.  Instead, they were taking out their dog-eared copy of "The Strange Death of Vincent Foster" or wanking themselves it a tube sock watching their cassette of The Clinton Chronicles for the umpteenth time.

Granted, most of the GOP base doesn't read much at all, preferring instead to let Limbaugh or Levin or Hannity or Beck or O'Reilly shit their condescension and contempt for people of color, poor people, gays, immigrants, women and people like me directly into into their skulls.  

Week after week.  

Month after month.  

Decade after decade.

But when they do bother to crack a book, or at least buy it and display it as a totem of their tribal loyalty, they invariably choose titles from the vast and hugely profitable genre of Wingnut Grievance Literature which frequently loiters at the corner of mere condescension and contempt only long enough to launch itself into full-on apocalypticism with  such titles as...

"If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It" -- by Hugh Hewitt

"Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism" and "Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism" by Sean Hannity

"Shut Up and Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the Media are Subverting America" and "Won by One: Defeating Obama, Saving America" by Laura Ingraham

"Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation" by Candace Owens

"DARK AGENDA: The War to Destroy Christian America" and "The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America" by David Horowitz

"If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans" and "Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America" and "Godless: The Church of Liberalism" and "Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama" -- by Ann Coulter

"American Marxism" by Mark Levin

"The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life" by Ramesh Ponnuru

"Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth" and "The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent" and "The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration" and "Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans" by Ben Shapiro

"To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine" and "Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate" by Newt Gingrich

"Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First" and "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" by Mona Charen 

"Conform: Exposing the Truth About Common Core and Public Education" and "Liars: How Progressives Exploit Our Fears for Power and Control" by Glenn Beck 

And Tom Nichols' forthcoming, Everyone But Me Is A Fucking Idiot. (kidding)

A vast genre of pettiness and ridicule into which Charlie Sykes' own book, "Moochers", fits quite comfortable.  

I could go on and on.  

And on.  

And on.  

But you get the idea. 

For these people and thousands of their fellow travelers on the radio, teevee, the internet, in magazines and via their steady output of hippie-punching hate-porn in book-form, hysterical loathing and contempt for people like you and me has been their fucking brand.  They built an entire political movement -- the modern Republican Party -- on that foundation in a decades-long project which also proved to be enormously profitable for the organization and individuals who eagerly participated in making the Left the GOP's all-purpose Emmanuel Goldstein.

And when all of those years of rage and lying and conspiracy-mongering and pandering to bigots had groomed the Republican base into an army of reprogrammable meatbags (which -- surprise! -- fell in love with the guy who spoke to them openly in the rage-drunk, lying, bigot-pandering, conspiracy-mongering vocabulary that had been drilled into their heads) a small number of those who, like Charlie Sykes, had built the modern GOP found themselves, like Lucifer, cast out of their own wingnut paradise.

Tossed out so quickly that they barely had time to grab much more than a toothbrush, The Weekly Standard's mailing list, the contact info of cronies and friendlies in the media who would immediately hire them, and their own, seemingly inexhaustible supply of [checks notes]  condescension and contempt.  

Since the rise of Trump, virtually every Never Trump appearance on cable teevee has positively seethed with condescension and contempt for the voters who had made made them wealthy and for the politicians who they had worked to get elected.

But it's not just Trump and his lackeys and the Republican voting base for which they have contempt.  They also despise Conservatives media.  They collectively loathe pretty much all Republican elected officials at the federal, state and local level with whom they spent so many years making common cause against you and me.  And they have grimly hung onto their vintage condescension and contempt for you and me -- for us reckless, mouthy Lefties who are (according to Charlie Sykes) are directly responsible for the GOP being racist, for blinding men like Charlie Sykes to the danger that was growing inside the GOP by "crying wolf" about the growing inside the GOP and, somehow, for the election of Donald Trump.

So before lecturing us Liberals n the fleck of entirely justified condescension and contempt in our eyes, perhaps Mr. Sykes should start excavating the entire lumberyard of the stuff in his own.

Burn The Lifeboats