Periodic Check-In With Our Never Trump Overlords: Part II

It was touching really.  

Charlie Sykes asking, trembling in childlike innocence, "Golly Mr. Milbank, is it really truly true that the GOP was kinda awful and fucked up before Donald Trump?"

And Dana Milbank, shaking his mighty head ruefully, replying gently that, yes, it's true.  Pretty much all of this shit started with Gingrich and Limbaugh back in the early 1990s. 

Shuddering with sadness, Charlie climbed into Milbank's lap and cried and cried, while Milbank told him the Scariest Bedtime Story Evah!

And to his credit, as he told the tale, Milbank played all the notes. Vince Foster.  Timothy McVeigh.  Sharron Angle and "Second Amendment Solutions".   Mitch McConnell's commitment to sabotage and destroy the Obama administration at any cost.  The Drudge Report.  Karl Rove.  Birtherism.  Steve Stockman.  G. Gordon Liddy.  Gingrich and his GOPAC propaganda clinic.  The racism of the Tea Party.  Dick Cheney saying "Reagan taught us deficits don't matter."  And, of course, Limbaugh. 

 Pedants like me might feel tempted to leap with a string of "whatabouts" on the Mena airport and tan suits, but the gist was clear.

 It is a story that all of us know very well and in rich detail, but through his tears, as he wept, Charlie Sykes -- the premier Wisconsin Republican kingmaker who spent 30-years on the radio as "The Rush Limbaugh of Wisconsin" -- swore that this was all news to him.  That he had never realized any of it.  

Sykes:  You try to address a question that I wrestle with all the time.  How long has this been going on [nervous chuckle].  Where did this come from?  Was there some sort of a turning point?  So in your book, when you ask the question, "How did the GOP get where it is today?" you trace the roots of the conspiracies and the lies that are, y'know, have created the world, and you go back to 1994, when Newt Gingrich led the party to the midterm victory.  So talk to me about why you think that Gingrich was the pivotal figure in this devolution and deconstruction of the Republican party.

And then Milbank remembered that he was here to sell a book.  That he was on Charlie Sykes' podcast to sell a book about a subject which is old, old news to any Liberals   who might be listening.  And that it was probably a poor idea to piss off the host of the show on which you are now trying to sell that book.  So he took pains to soften the blow. Actual quote:

Milbank:  Sure.  And Charlie I want to say that it wasn't obvious to me in real-time that this is where this was going to go.  It was disturbing, but it wasn't obvious as to where this was going to go.  And I know there were a lot of good Republicans at the time, and people who were -- maybe yourself included -- who were aligned with a lot of this who could not at all see where this was going.  But in retrospect it makes a lot more sense.  So you had Newt Gingrich in the the 80s -- the late 1980s -- who were saying the real problem with the Republican party 

It was all the naughtybad Republicans and Conservative media goons waaaay over there who were cooking up this hellbrew, but not you Charlie.  

Never you.

Milbank: There was always sort of a nucleus.  People in the Republican party.  There was Bob Dole pushing back against [Gingrichism].   There was Charlie Sykes...

And that's when I lost interest.  Because there absolutely were people in real-time who saw where this was going.  The media looked the other way.  Covered for it.  Equivocated.  But it was there for anyone to see who was paying fucking attention.

Curt Meyer, CBS News, 2006 (page no longer exists):

Good Riddance To The Gingrichites

CBS' Meyer: GOP 'Chess Club' Ruled The House For 12 Years And Won't Be Missed

This is a story I should have written 12 years ago when the "Contract with America" Republicans captured the House in 1994. I apologize.

Really, it's just a simple thesis: The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not something we're supposed to do.

I'm not talking about the policies of the Contract for America crowd, but the character. I'm confident that 99 percent of the population — if they could see these politicians up close, if they watched their speeches and looked at their biographies — would agree, no matter what their politics or predilections...

Kevin Drum in 2006:

I'd like to believe that too, but there's just no evidence of it. Over the past 30 years the Republican Party has gone from Gerald Ford to Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich to Dick Cheney — i.e., from conservative to reactionary to crazy to batshit insane — and Rove's "two T's" are further evidence that they have no intention of rowing this back. They're obviously getting more desperate in the face of possible electoral defeat this November, but other than that they're just doubling down on the same old strategy of cultural bloodletting in the service of economic plutocracy.

The Liberal blogging didn't really take off until the early-to-mid 2000s, so much of what we were thinking and saying is lost to history, but once we could write stuff up and offer it to the public by hitting "Publish", the Liberal blogosphere quickly filled up with talented, smart, informed, muscular writers who could see very clearly what road the GOP was on.

From the late Steven Gillard, also from 2006:

The GOP began to change when men like Phil Gramm, Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey rose to power. They had been modestly successful academics who had avoided Vietnam, who embraced an extreme theory of politics. Democrats and liberals were traitors in all but name, Clinton's presidency was illegitimate, isolationism was fine. Everything was political. 

 

They had not served anyone but their cause, which they confused with their country. Outsiders like Rove, Abramoff and Norquist pushed their extreme ideologies with the fervor of fanatics.

As time went on, more and more people of extreme ideas and limited experience went to Congress. They had nothing but ideology to go on and that was their sole experience in the world. George Bush was their embodiment. A man of the upper classes who had rejected the worldliness and erudition of his peers to embrace the mythos of the self-made oilman. Not that he was, but he walked away from his education and heritage because he wanted to be something he was not, a success on his own.

The current Republican party has three wings, economic extremists, imperialists and social fundamentalists. All three are closer to the Bolsheviks than American political thought. Bush persists in a failed war because he cannot be wrong. Norquist wants a smaller government, no matter how it doesn't work. Robertson and Dobson want a Christian America at any price. All these extremists want to impose their vision of America at any price.

And moderates have bent to their will for their own gain. Easy money, majority status, they have reaped the benefits of the work of the extremists, They did not stand up to them, did not confront them, but took their money and supported them instead of their conscience.
...

We are battling extremists, ideologues, people for whom compromise and treason are next to each other in the dictionary. There is no talking to them, no making deals or finding the center with these people. They have to be stopped. They have to be investigated and even jailed. They are people for whom deals mean victory for them and betrayal for you.

You cannot negotiate with a rabid dog.

I could go on for a million more words, but I'll end with this post which I remember with special fondness because it began as a long comment I wrote when I was a commenter at Steve Gilliard's News Blog, which I then fished out of there and dressed up all purdy when I struck out on my own in 2005.  And which Steve was gracious enough to repost at his blog.  

17 years ago and I still stand by every word.  And please note how eerily Donald Trump's capture of the GOP in 2022 parallels Tom DeLay's iron control of the GOP in 2005:

Mr. Driftglass moves out on his own

The little-“p” politics of this is fascinating. Over the long run that the GOP is demographically/ electorally doomed to become the minority Thurston Howell Party again. Either when the Fundy Shining Path Rebels that make up their margin of victory make one too many batshit demands, are told “No” once too often.

(If you want to get a clear picture of how this will look, rent “Fatal Attraction” or “Play Misty For Me”. I’m not going to be ignored, George!)

So either they take their bat and ball and stomp disgustedly back to Mordor, or a handful of moderate Republicans get so freaked out by the Randall Terry Wing of the Party that they bolt or stay home.

But short run…Tom DeLay is now a Household Name. Been waiting 10 years for that to happen and always amazed that Republicans had no fucking clue who he was, even though you’d tell them five or a hundred times. Sheesh. All RAM and no Hard Drive with some people.

Every GOP Leader knows the Gingrich Lesson: No matter how much the membership owes you, they’ll go absolutely Lord of The Flies on your Piggy-ass the minute you becomes a measurable liability. Newt was so completely “I Am The Reich” that he would have been perfectly happy to go into the bunker and fight it out until the GOP was razed to rubble had he not been stopped by his own House Republicans.

And since the Suddenly Huge Liability named Tom DeLay is now just “Tell Tale Heart”--thundering away under the GOP floorboards, threatening to drown out everything else, the question is, will that same dynamic play twice?

Well DeLay ain’t Gingrich. He learned from that episode, and they don’t call him The Hammer for his shipwright skills. He spent a decade forcibly collecting GOP testicles and caching them in his private Crown Royal bag. At the slightest provocation he will to politically and personally destroy anyone who doesn’t bend a deep knee to His Gorgon Awfulness.

And both the Texas and National Republican parties have shown absolutely craven willingness to rewrite the Rules on the fly any time the Beast’s wet-bar needed to be restocked with virgin’s blood, or whenever a law or policy might make threaten to cinch-in the bottomless lust he and his stooges have for Power, Money, Trinkets and Perks, even a trifle.

So (hahah!) they’ve kinda disarmed themselves to accommodate him, and now they’re stuck very much up on that very windy gibbet with him. So if you were running in 2006 and playing How Do I Save My Pink Republican Skin while DeLay is holding your ass held hostage, what do you do?

Got to time it juuuust right. Jump away from Herr DeLay too soon and he’ll blow your head off. Jump too late, and your face will be morphed into Tom DeLay…into Randall Terry…into, I dunno, Osama Bin Laden? in every ad, every day, for the entire election cycle.

My simple suggestion for voters in 2006?

Shoot the hostage ;-)

And the point is this.  There were plenty of people who accurately predicted the trajectory of the Republican party long before Trump showed up, and used whatever means were available to them to warn whoever would listen about the terrible danger the Right and their enablers in the mainstream media were plunging us into.  And many of those people are still alive and kicking.  They're still writing and speaking about the danger we are, and still using whatever means are available to them to warn whoever will listen.  

And they're still roundly ignored, mocked, dismissed and reviled by both the Beltway and the fledgling Never Trump medias, because they (we) keep showing up, unkempt and unwanted, with inconvenient receipts that put paid to the fairy tales the Beltway and Never Trump medias traffic in.

These are the same people who did all that ignoring and mocking and dismissing and reviling back when all of what came to pass might have been prevented.  These are the people who pretended everything was jake and that anyone who said otherwise was an alarmist crackpot...right up until Donald Trump swept to power and drove then into the wilderness.  

And the fate of those people?  The people who lied and lied and lied to themselves and their audiences for decades?  Until it was far too late?  

Well golly, you can't swing a dead cat on cable news or on the op-ed pages of America's leading print publications without hitting five or six of those people -- all with cozy media sinecures, all still sneering and rolling their eyes at us crackpot Liberals -- shaking their heads sadly and offering the public and each other a much more palatable and profitable product: the very comforting, absolving  fairy tale that no one could have seen this coming.

I Am The Liberal Media