A Very Special No Fair Remembering Stuff Birthday Fundraiser: They Knew. They All Knew.

(Me on my 6th birthday, some numbers of years ago, in another country.)

This year, for my birthday fundraiser and in honor of the "No Fair Remembering Stuff" mission statement of this joint, I've gone down to the cellar and uncorked a rare and special vintage for you.

A rich and full-bodied post I bottled 13 years ago this week, and which has aged either wonderfully or terribly depending on your perspective.

I laid it down as a hedge against the day when the raging shitpile of bigots and imbeciles that is the modern Republican Party would finally kick the doors off the basement lab where Serious and Sensible Conservatives (and their collaborators in the mainstream media) had been hiding them and begin to rampage across the land in plain view of the general public.

As hedge against the day when those same Serious and Sensible Conservatives (and their collaborators in the mainstream media) would swear on the bones of Saint Ronald Reagan that they had no idea that there even was a basement lab, much less what kind of monsters were being cooked up therein.  That the rise of Trump and discovery that the GOP base was a deranged mob of bigots and imbeciles had been a completely unforeseeable tragedy -- a spontaneous disaster in which they played no part and for which the shared no blame.

Except, nah.

From October 27, 2009, this is "Nobody Left But The Crazies".

 

File Under Gresham's Corollary: "Bad crazy drives out everybody.".

From MediaMatters:

Kristol: GOP's future "center of gravity" lies with Beck, Limbaugh

October 27, 2009 8:05 am ET by Media Matters staff

From William Kristol's October 27 Washington Post column:

Obviously, many Republicans and conservatives -- and lots of moderates and independents -- will be grateful to Mitch McConnell if he can stop ObamaCare, and to Jon Kyl if he can induce the president to embrace a stronger foreign policy. But it's unlikely that the minority party in Congress will be the source of bold new conservative leadership over the next three years. Even if Republicans pick up the House in 2010, the party's big ideas and themes for the 2012 presidential race will probably not emanate from Capitol Hill. 

The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties. Some will lament this -- but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots.

Kristol began working out years ago what the last, few fusspot remnants of the Old GOP seem to only now be dimly perceiving: that there is absolutely nothing left inside the Party of Lincoln but crazy, and if you want to hang onto those sweet-sweet “Conservative pundit” paydays, you’d better cozy up to the rabid Cheney Regime Dead-Enders most ricky-tick.

Of course this will remain an ongoing, toxic disaster for the country until the cultural backwash that is the Party of God is universally repudiated, stamped with a fluorescent HazMat symbol big enough to be visible from orbit, and buried under a mile of electoral concrete (I have said elsewhere and only half in jest that President Obama's biggest job will turn out to be saving the GOP from itself.)

But as a freelance ontologist (“Will Visualization Information For Food’), I appreciate the 30 years of dedicated effort it took for Hate Radio charlatans, Christopathic multimedia colporteurs, FoxNews harlequins and all of their various elected finger puppets to gather together the nation’s bigots, yahoos and moral imbeciles under one political roof.

So way to go Rush! UR doin’ it rite!

And for no additional charge, here's let me pour you a sipper of this mellow dessert wine I laid down just a few days earlier, on October 23, 2009.  In this post I noted that George Will -- yes that George Will -- had taken up his quill to write an ooey-gooey love-letter to Minnesota's Craziest Political Escapee, Michele Bachmann.

Yes that Michele Bachmann.

Here is Mr. Will:

"... Some of her supposed excesses are, however, not merely defensible, they are admirable. For example, her June 9 statement on the House floor in which she spoke of "gangster government" has been viewed on the Internet about 2 million times. ..."

At the time I irresponsibly speculated that:

Will has come to terms with the fact that his Movement has now been swallowed whole by the yahoos and bigots that the GOP spent the last generation recruiting as foot soldiers. 

And if he wants to keep drawing a paycheck as "Conservative columnist, George Will" he'd better learn to cozy up to Unwashed Crazy.

Well it's 13 years later.  

George Will remains gainfully employed by the Washington Post where he still oozes bile onto its pages every week.

Without breaking stride, Bill Kristol has morphed from Trusted Fox News contributor and founder of .the Weekly Standard to Trusted MSNBC contributor and founder of The Bulwark  

And I'm still at this keyboard, pretty much every day, remembering things that men like Will and Kristol very much want everyone to forget.

I Am The Liberal Media