Pining For The Good Old Days of Bill O'Reilly

If you've been paying attention you may have noticed that many of your Never Trump BFFs are wasting no time return to their pre-Trump default settings now that Trump is in the rearview mirror.

For example, over at Mora Charen's Bulwark podcast we find Ms. Charen whatabouting Ron DeSantis' "Killing Floridians to Own The Libs" electoral strategy:

Charen:  Charlie [Sykes], I'd like you to respond to that.  Because y'know Damon [Linker] says, well, y'know the... the... uh, DeSantis is sort of playing a troll here [as his wingnut appeasement stunts get Floridians killed]. He wants the left to attack him.  And certainly, um, that may that may be right.  On the other hand ... 

Here it comes...

Charen:  ... you could argue that, um, that the Democrats have been really poor at messaging this. We talked about the poor messaging -- you did -- about the, uh, about the infrastructure bill...

Yes, Charlie Sykes had just gone on at great length about how Democrats Suck So Bad at messaging because the infrastructure bill doesn't have a cool enough name.  These days Sykes also manages to work into pretty much every podcast and teevee appearance this genius metaphor which he definitely thunk up all by hisself about the Right as drug addicts who keep getting worse because they need to keep upping the dosage:

Sykes:  Because the the business model of all of these [Conservative media] outlets is to, y'know keep, uh, y'know keep increasing the... the dosage. Um, I've co... I've compared them to sort of y'know, meth labs in... in Breaking Bad.  That they have to keep, uh, selling more and more potent stuff...

I still believe that, like most Never Trumper critiques of the Right, this is a metaphor Sykes ripped off from some unnamed Liberal by venturing into the Forbidden Zone of the Time Before Trump, and then ventured even further into the Super Duper Forbidden Zone of Things Liberals Were Writing Back When Charlie Sykes Was Calling Us Crackpot Alarmists and pocketing what he found there:

For example. this is from some crackpot Liberal alarmist back during the Age of Bush and which has been which has been reposted on request and shared widely many times since:  

And in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull.

Listen to any aging wingnut sighing and jerking sadly off to a tattered photo of Saint Ronnie -- despite the fact that the catastrophes we are now reaping were sown by his ruinous ideology -- and you can hear every addict who ever lived pining for that first Perfect High. The one they spend the rest of their days chasing, regardless of the size of the debts they run up or the ruined lives they leave in their wake...

Back at the dawn of the Age of Trump, this same crackpot alarmist Liberal also used this quote from William Burroughs' "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness" with a big h/t to Neo Tuxedo for the quote --

"The junk [heroin] merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."

-- in a long, long post tracing the cycle of Republican base voters addiction to rage and paranoia and Conservative dealers who kept the supply coming back to at least 1987.  And the reason that crackpot alarmist Liberal cited both Burroughs and the Alert Reader who passed the quote along is because here on the Left we actually believe in giving credit where credit is due.

Leaving that aside for the moment and getting back to the speed at which our Never Trump friends are going back to their evil old ways, no one reading this blog will be surprised to find that after a long diatribe concerning the collapse of the (hilariously oxymoronic) "thinking class" of the American Right -- 

Charen: ...we see, y'know in these ... this parade for example of, uh, Conservative opinion leaders headed by Tucker Carlson.  But it didn't start with him, y'know' traipsing over to pay obeisance to, um, Victor Orban who's an outright authoritarian, um, and Damon [Linker]'s great piece about, uh, about, y'know Michael Anton having a long conversation -- not... and not critical, um -- with a guy who is a calling for, uh, an American Caesar or an American, uh, dictator. When those things begin to be out there in the ether it's, y'know, among the Thinking Class it isn't long before they are... they... they penetrate right down to the local level.  So those are the... those are the pathologies that are out there.

--  Mona Charen paused only long enough to incant those Magic Words which signify her fidelity to the One True Faith and membership-in-good-standing of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides do it.

Charen:  And of course there are similar things, um, on the Left...

But the clearest indication of how completely our Trusted Never Trumper Allies have sealed themselves back into their old, warped epistemic panic room is Linda Chavez's radical reimagining of the Bill O'Reilly era at Fox News as a Golden Age of decency and fair-mindedness (one strongly suspects that Ms. Chavez misses her Fox News paycheck like a glutton missed their lunch):

Chavez: I mean I look back for example at, uh, the Clinton and the Obama eras and I look back at Fox News during that period.  I was a Fox News commentator for 14 years. 

Yes kids, this is something she's proud of.  But please continue.

Chavez: [I was] welcome on all of their shows. Um, I haven't changed the way I talk about issues -- I... I could go on those shows and feel comfortable presenting a conservative perspective but one that was in... based, uh, on evidence and, uh, not just out there sort of throwing red meat to the crowds.  On programs like The O'Reilly Factor.  Uh, well The O'Reilly Factor has been, y'know basically replaced as the top show on Fox by Tucker Carlson.  And whatever Bill O'Reilly's faults might have been -- um and certainly he had personal, uh, foibles that brought his downfall.

So serial workplace sexual predations are "foibles" now.  Cool.  I think at this point Chavez has paid out more than enough rope to hang herself, but I'm dying to see how this fairy tale ends, so please go on.

Chavez:  But [O'Reilly] was a far fairer arbiter, uh, of issues, uh, than somebody like Tucker Carlson...

And death by firing squad may be a more humane form of execution than death by, say, 1000 rabid rat bites, but at the end of the process you're still dead.  

The fact is that O'Reilly always was a monster even during The Before Time.

The Rolling Stone: 

Bill O’Reilly’s Dangerous War Against Dr. Tiller

O’Reilly waged an unflagging harassment campaign against the abortion provider before Tiller was murdered in 2009

Salon:

O'Reilly's campaign against murdered doctor

The Fox News star had compared Tiller to a Nazi, called him a "baby killer," and warned of "Judgment Day"

James Wolcott in Vanity Fair:

HOW WILL HISTORY REMEMBER BILL O’REILLY?

The accusations against O’Reilly are damning. But, given the fates of recently faded TV stars, it is also possible he won’t be remembered at all.

...For two decades, as the host of The O’Reilly Factor, he was king of the crab feast. O’Reilly was such a ratings monster that it seemed like he was never going to be crow-barred out of the host’s seat because of racist slurs, flagrant misstatements, boorish behavior on the set and off, and allegations of domestic violence. He and Fox News were even able to absorb the cost of alleged impropriety over the years, including the public mortification of the 2004 lawsuit lodged by associate producer Andrea Mackris, which enlightened us to Bill’s phone-sex kinks and inability to distinguish between a loofah and a falafel. Even this was rationalized as an Unfortunate Incident, a speed-bump America had moved past.

Rachel Maddow, MSNBC:

And the fact remains that O'Reilly continued to be exactly the same breed of monster during the Age of Trump even after Fox News finally shelled out tens of millions of dollars to make him go away:

The pandemic is extremely deadly but not the Black Plague. Far-left wants chaos and carnage so President Trump will lose re-election. They are not interested in facts and will try to punish people who provide perspective.https://t.co/bO41JPJYCt

— Bill O'Reilly (@BillOReilly) April 9, 2020

But the damage O'Reilly left in his wake during his years at Fox News is just one of the thousands of inconvenience historical facts that our Staunch Never Trump Stalwarts are frantic to erase from the annals of Conservative history.

So let's tally it wat has happened during just this one short hour, on just this one day, on just this one little corner of the Never Trump world.

We find Linda Chavez making up a glorious Conservative past that never existed.

We find Mona Charen automatically injecting Both Siderism into any discussion of Republican treachery and catastrophe whenever she can.

We find Mona Charen whatabouting DeSantis and his Killing Floridians to Own The Libs by dragging "Democratic messaging" into it.

And in Charlie Sykes we once again find that Never Trumpers have nothing to say about the Right in 2021 that their alarmist crackpot intellectual superiors on the Left weren't warning them about decades ago.  

In other words, our True Blue Never Trump brethren and sistren are having no trouble finding their way back to their shitty pre-Trump factory default settings.

Just as we always knew they would.

No Half Measures