Oh How They Cackled! Oh How They Roared!

Oh how they made mock of it on their Very Big Webzine:

Ted Cruz and the Politics of Groveling

Plus: Happy Birthday to The Bulwark!

by Charlie Sykes

...Called before the Throne of Tucker [Carlson], he apologized, and then apologized harder, then tweeted out his humiliation.

Cruz begged forgiveness for calling the January 6 insurrection a “violent terrorist attack.” In his self-flagellation, he called the comments “sloppy and frankly dumb.”

It did not go well.

And desported themselves gleefully on their Very Big Podcast

Tim Miller: Cruz’s Grovel

And why not?

I mean, just imagine, a leader in the Republican Party -- a man powerful in his own right -- groveling at the feet of some mere media entertainer.  Some goof with a microphone.

Oh how they giggled!  

And oh how they snorted!  

There might even have been some capering going on.  

Because nothing in the world could better confirm their opinion of how far the GOP had fallen since they were chased out of it as the sight of a member of the party elite bending the knee and kissing the ass of a racist asshole who traffics in the lowest kind of filth because he knows his audience of bigots and imbeciles sops that depravity up with a biscuit and asks for seconds!

How they chortled and they guffawed, because lemme tell ya son, that sort of shit would never have flow in the GOP before Trump came along and ruined everything.  Why the very idea that, back in the Good Old Days before Trump, you would ever find a high party official begging some wingnut media hack for forgiveness is so farfetched that...

Wuzzit!

From Politico, years before Trump came oozing down the Golden Escalator:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

...

Steele, who won a hard-fought chairman's race on Jan. 30, told Politico he telephoned Limbaugh after his show on Monday afternoon and hoped that they would connect soon.

“I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren’t what I was thinking,” Steele said. "It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people … want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not."

It's true!

In point of fact, Republican have been beholden to racist assholes with microphones for decades.

So how is it that a Liberal nobody blogger in the middle of Middle America knows this about the GOP and veteran Republican professional media persons like Tim Miller and Charlie Sykes do not?  

Guess you'll have to ask them.  

As for me, I got confirmation about this sick, symbiotic relationship between Conservative Hate Media and the GOP when party leaders bragged about it in The New York Fucking Times 28 years ago:  

Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh

BALTIMORE, Dec. 10— To all the advice for the new Republicans coming to Congress, add this from Rush Limbaugh: A hostile press corps lurks inside the Beltway.

"You will never ever be their friends," the talk-show host warned most of the 73 Republican freshmen at a dinner here tonight. "They don't want to be your friends. Some female reporter will come up to one of you and start batting her eyes and ask you to go to lunch. And you'll think, 'Wow! I'm only a freshman. Cokie Roberts wants to take me to lunch. I've really made it!' " The audience laughed.

"Seriously," he added. "Don't fall for this. This is not the time to get moderate. This is not the time to start trying to be liked."

The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November.

Mr. Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the class as its members tonight finished a three-day orientation here sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Empower America, two conservative Washington research organizations.

Barbara Cubin, an incoming freshman from Wyoming, told Mr. Limbaugh that because 74 percent of the nation's newspapers had endorsed Democrats, "talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide." On behalf of the women in the class, she gave him a plaque that said, "Rush Was Right." He also received a pin like the ones the freshmen wore, saying, "Majority Maker."

"Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those are the people who elected the new Congress," he said...

In early 1990s, as Hate Radio was emerging as an apex Republican powerbroker -- a force to be feared and catered to -- 

“Bush even carried Limbaugh’s bag”

June 1992: President George H.W. Bush, facing a demoralized conservative base in his re-election bid, welcomes nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh for a night at the White House pic.twitter.com/JU80u3RyFM

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) October 9, 2020

-- Tim Miller was (by my calculations) still in grade school.

And Charlie Sykes was busy establishing himself as [checks notes] the Rush Limbaugh of Wisconsin.

Funny old world.  

Memory Is The Liberal Superpower