Snarkeology 101: An Introduction

Recently our public discourse has been graced with a number of books that claim to show conclusive evidence that history began prior to 2016.  

Shocking, I know. 

For decades, any Liberal showing up in the public square warning about the alarming trajectory the GOP was on was treated by America's recently-former-Republican (before they were former Republicans) as Dr. Zaius treated Taylor in Planet of the Apes.  

Angrily indignant.  Arrogantly dismissive.  

To borrow a little prose from Rod Serling's Planet scripts, we terrified them from the first, and we still do.  They're afraid of us and they hate us. 

Why?

Because they were the Defenders of the Faith and Guardians of the Terrible Secret.  Because they have always known the truth -- the terrible and dangerous truth -- about their own party.  And so all their lives they have dreaded the moment that terrible truth might break out into the open.  Dreaded it, like death itself.

And then one bright summer day, down the escalator came Donald John Trump, who was everything they feared.  And off he went, shambling from rally to rally, speaking out loud the Terrible Secret beneath the prissy, bow-tied, Burke-quoting veneer of the GOP.  

Of course they hated him.  Of course they feared him.  But for reasons that were diametrically opposed to the reasons Liberal hated and feared the rise of Trump.  

All the GOP Defenders of the Faith had ever needed to do to make the grotesque truth about their party vanish was to use their various media platforms to pretend that whatever happened...never happened.  Or, hey, look over there!  Some crazy Liberal about to do some crazy thing I'll betcha!   To bulldoze it down the memory hole.  To burn their Bush/Cheney bumper stickers, put on stupid hats, swear they'd never heard of George W. Bush, and start calling themselves Tea Partiers or Constitutional Conservatives or Independents or whatever.  

And then rely on a meek and compliant media to roll right over.  

Like Dr. Zaius, to save the Big Lie on which their faith was founded, all they ever had to to was plant some Both Sides Do It charges, dynamite the cave with the evidence in it, cast out the heretics, and order would be restored.  

But Trump could not be muzzled or bulldozed because he spoke, loudly and without shame, to the racist, delusional base of the GOP in the language that they knew.  The language of Limbaugh.  The language of Gingrich.  The language of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly.  The language of George Wallace and Lee Atwater.  

Trump called to them in their Mother Tongue, and they flocked to him and suddenly no amount of finger-pointing and Both Sidesing and whatabouting was making the problem disappear.  Trump was their very own Rough Beast, its hour come round at last, slouching to Cleveland to be born.  

And that's why the soon-to-be-recently-former-Republicans hated him and feared him.  Not because he was a liar and a degenerate and a racist with a very visible fascist bent, but because he was giving the game away.  And once it had all gone too far and there was no way left for them to pretend that the GOP was just going through a phase or running an unusual fever that would surely break once Trump went too far,  the soon-to-be-recently-former-Republicans were forced to take last tool available to them out of the denialist trick bag.

An embargo.  

Specifically a temporal embargo in which the time-honored, all-purpose alibi magic words "Both Sides Do It" were replaced with a new alibi phrase: "These last five or six years." or some variation thereof.

Suddenly, "these last five or six years" was everywhere.  On the lips of every recently-former-Republican in every venue.  On their podcasts.  On cable news.  In the op-ed pages of America's premier newspapers and magazines ("The Five or Six Year Wager").  It was aa invocation  every bit as magical as Both Sides Do It.  

For recently-former-Republicans it meant that, however awful things got with the GOP, none of it had been their fault.   In fact, they should be honored as sages and prophets for seeing what was becoming of the GOP before anyone else!

For a meek and compliant media it meant that they weren't utter failures at the most basic job of journalism, because no one could have known or predicted that the GOP would suddenly and inexplicably lose its mind.   In fact, they should be honored as heroes for bravely reporting ... on things that were happening ... in plain sight.

And for Liberals, well they could just shut the fuck up.  Since everything wrong with the GOP had happened suddenly and without warning over these last five or six years, all that crazy alarmist talk they had been engaged in for decades was just...crazy alarmism.  In fact, all of their decades of crazy talk about the GOP becoming a deranged racist shithole might have actually caused the the GOP to spontaneously become a deranged racist shithole in 2016!  Yes, that theory has been floated multiple times by several recently-former-Republicans including  Bulwark founder and MSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes.

But now there is a new development in the tale of these last five or six years.  Through some weird planetary alignment, there is suddenly a spate of proper, respectable books by proper, respectable authors that break the temporal embargo and dare to excavate artifacts from the pre-2016 Forbidden Zone. 

And, no, I don't mean The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America by insane garbage person David Horowitz.

I'm referring to books like American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy by David Corn and The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party by Dana Milbank and Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s by Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer.

And more shocking than the existence of such heretofore heretical texts appearing in the mainstream of American political discourse is the fact that, at least a few of these authors have managed to wrangle invitations to talk about their remarkable discoveries on podcasts run by recently-former-Republicans.  

And the results might most charitably be described as ... detached.  As if these authors are describing some historic battle that took place long ago the far edge of these recently-former-Republicans' property, beyond a stand of trees and over the rise of a line of hills.  

Sure, they were peripherally aware that a battle was taking place, and occasionally one of the field commanders would wander over to their house for a drink or a meal.  But the details of who was fighting, on behalf of what,  and what weapons they were using were all far away abstractions that didn't really involve them or affect them in any significant way.  And of course, no one could have imagined that the battle would have world-changing consequences that would lead to anything so bad that it couldn't be memory-holed with a sufficient tonnage of Both Siderism.

So now that the temporal embargo has been temporarily lifted, I'm thinking that, just maybe, revisiting some specific episodes from the Forbidden Past might not by the exercise in absolutely futility that they were back when I wrote 'em.

And so today I'm starting an occasional and soon-to-be award winning feature called Snarkeology 101, which will reach back into the past bring forward once again some home truths about the GOP that were in evidence long before these last five or six years.

Maybe we'll start with Mittens Romney and the Public (but now forgotten) History of the Campaign that Failed.

I Am The Liberal Media.