Go Ask Alice, When She's Ten Feet Tall

Listening to Michael Steele interview Alice Stewart is the weirdest, most dissociative "We're Still Republicans But Not The Bad Kind" audio experience you can have for free. 

For those of you who are late to the party, Michael Steele is the former RNC chair who swears that, sure, before he ran the party it was, indeed, full of racists. However, during the brief interregnum when he was party chair he drove all the racists out of the GOP just like Saint Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland!  But once he had been cruelly deposed, all the racists came back.  Sad!  And thus, in his own mind, Michael Steele -- the black man who hired himself to front for a party defined by contempt for people of color -- bears no personal responsibility whatsoever for the GOP being what it is today.

And for his sins, Michael Steele is now a paid MSNBC contributor and was awarded a Senior fellowship at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

For her part, Ms. Stewart has spent her career working for the worst of the worst -- Santorum...

...Huckabee...

...Michele Bachmann...

New Bachmann press aide Alice Stewart was former news anchor and Huckabee aide

...Cruz...

...and so forth --  and is entirely unapologetic about every bit of it.  

And for her sins, Stewart is now a paid CNN contributor and was awarded a Harvard fellowship at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

And what's notable about these two prominent Republicans in conversation in July of 2021 is not just that they are delusional, but that each of them is delusional in their own distinct way that reflects their own, unique failings.   Like listening to two children arguing over whether Martians are three feet tall and blue or eleven feet tall and orange when, hate to break it to you kids, there are no fucking Martians.  But the way the respective delusions of these two adult professionals carom off of each other is what makes it weirdly entertaining and instructive.

First, their similarities.  They are bot still card-carrying members of the GOP.  They both despise Liberals like you and me.  They both like Joe Biden personally, but hate his agenda in which they see the hidden hand of AOC in "paying people not to work" and so forth.  They're both adamant that this is still a "Center/Right" country".  They both want to see Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion outlawed.  And they both clearly long for the glory days of their youth when Reagan bestrode the Earth like a colossus and there appeared to be no limit to the damage they could do in the name of Freedom.

But their differences are where the crazy really comes out.

Stewart wants the wind the clock back to 2015.  Of maybe just 2019. She is Terminator-focused on winning the congress back in 2022 and the White House back in 2024, and insists that returning unified control of the government over to the Ted Cruz/Rand Paul/Marjorie Taylor Greene/Mitch McConnell/ Paul Gosar/Jim Jordan GOP will somehow cure the party of its flaws and let it return to the good old days and values of [checks notes] Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.

The Republican Insurrection and the Republican Big Lie leave a bad taste in Stewarts's mouth, but she is 100% cool with everything else her party has done.  She would be delighted to keep Trump himself in the party if he would just chill out a little bit.  She definitely wants to keep the Trump base in the party and thinks if the party could just just move on all the, y'know, out-and-proud racism, insanity, violence and treason -- just put it all in the past -- that there are a millions of "rational Republicans" out there who are horny as hell to leap back in bed with the Party of Bigots and Imbeciles.  

Stewart's delusions about the existence of massive numbers of "rational Republicans" who she wants to add to the party without displacing the existing base of bigots and imbeciles reflect the profound depths of her sociopathy.  The fact the actual base of the GOP are Fox-drunk meatheads and white supremacists does not bother her at all, because in her mind you and me and everything we value are the real enemies.  And therefor the thought of keeping the existing Republican mob of racists and lunatics intact and in-harness as a tool for crushing the Evil Left once and for all is, to Stewart's way of thinking, a perfectly acceptable means to that noble end.

Steele believes the exact opposite: that the key to glorious Republican victory and the enactment of the despicable agenda that both he and Stewart believe in is to cut the base loose.  Just grab 'em by the Klan hood and chuck 'em out the door.  How exactly he would go about kicking them out of the party when, for all intents and purposes, they are the fucking party I have no idea -- but in response to Stewart's insistence that she still wants Trump around -- still wants him to be part of the party -- Steele says:

Steele:    But do we?  Do we?  Do we really still want him around?  I'll be honest with you, I don't.  I think he's an abomination.  I think he...I think he's an apostate to everything I grew up believing in the party, even in the face of some of the ugly stuff in the...recent history of the party.  I think Trump has been an avatar for a lot of that...really given a breath of fresh air to the Southern Strategy...

And in that confession, and in this one...

Steele: Like the worst cancer you could possibly have, cut that shit out of your body.  You need it gone.

..and this one...

Steele: To be honest with you, I don't want...I don't want a redneck white nationalist racist to be a Republican.  I don't want them in my party.

 ...you see Steele's delusions manifested.  

Until Trump ripped the mask off of his party, Steele could get away with the shuck that, hey man, the party wasn't this was when I joined up, when I rose in its ranks, or when I was its national chair.  Because to admit that would be to confess what everyone knows: that to succeed in Republican politics, either Mr. Steele had trained himself to not to see what his party truly was, or he knew that, as a black man willing to swallow his dignity and front for a racist party, his future was secure...as long as some fool didn't come along with a very big megaphone and give the game away.

And then along came this fool with a very big megaphone --

-- who gave the game away.

So the only way Mr. Steele can continue to keep his pathetic delusions intact (and continue his cable teevee viability) is to conjure into existence an entirely imaginary future Republican party full of so many rational, honorable humans (all of whom agree with the GOP's depraved agenda) that they can not only displace the entire Republican base, but will flock to Steele's banner in such numbers that they can sweep this New GOP to power and something something freedom.

When pressed on where exactly all these people are going to come from once he somehow managed to kicks 90% of Republicans out of "his" Republican party, Steele gets very metaphysical.  As if he were building a ballfield in the middle of an Iowa cornfield because a disembodied voice told him to.  

Except he's not.

Instead what he's proposing, in effect, is that Baskin-Robbins keep their name, but stop selling ice cream and instead offer the public what's left over -- empty cones, tiny spoons and napkins -- on the expectation that even bigger crowd will show up for that.  And when pressed even further for any example of such a thing ever happening anywhere, Mr. Steele had to go all the way back to the early 1990s when he was chairman of the Prince George's County Republican Central Committee and he and a small band of Republicans managed to get a few reforms passed.  Property tax stuff.  Charter school stuff.  That sort of thing.

That's it.  That is the quarter-century-old weak reed on which Mr. Steele's whole fantasy future GOP rests.

And this really is all that remains of the mopes who think Trump is icky but continue to remain loyal Republican party members.  

One zombie-eyed, True Believer who wants to snuff out Liberalism so badly that she's perfectly happy keeping Trump and his brown shirts inside the party but thinks that cladding a layer of non-existent "rational Republicans" on top of that radioactive crazy will be enough to cure the party of its excesses (Translation:  Can just go back to not saying the quiet part out loud...) and win smashing victories forever.

And one life-long Republican hood ornament who believes that the key to the future success of his GOP consists of...

1. Kicking 90% of the Republican party out of the Republican party and
2. Replacing those tens millions of bigots and imbeciles with even more tens of millions of imaginary new Republicans who believe all the same horrible shit that current Republicans believe but minus the overt racism.

This is the sound of two drunks...

Leaning against each other for support...

Wandering down a dark road to nowhere...

Each complaining that the other one...

Doesn't know where they're going.

No Half Measures