Charlie Sykes Would Really Like Someone To Explain To Him How Things Got So Fucked Up

Just, please, can anyone take Mr. Sykes by the hand and explain to him how things got so bad?

Historians? Haruspices?  Fecalists?  Anyone?

Well, OK, not just anyone.  For example, Mr. Sykes  does not want to hear from anyone who might tell him anything that would make him feel personally uncomfortable or in any way implicate him it the rolling fascist catastrophe that the Republican party as become.

Instead, in a move reminiscent of Richard Nixon dispatching John Dean to Camp David to write up a summary of everything Dean knows about Watergate, Mr. Sykes is taking pains to record himself as aloof and innocent of the disasters he and his fellow Never Trumpers left in their wake.  Instead, he would like some third or fourth or fifth party to come to him and lay out for him, step by step, how the Party of Saint Reagan came to be such a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles "in these last seven years".

(Oh yeah, word of warning.  If you listen to the podcast I am about to reference and are fool enough to take a shot every time Mr. Sykes or Tim laberta says "in these last seven years", at about the 30 minute make you'll have to be hospitalized with alcohol poisoning.)

Charlie Sykes:  You and I have had this conversation over the last seven years.  But I'm looking at them [the string of deranged Truth Socials from Trump] and thinking, how can anyone look at these and -- how can anyone listen to him, or watch him -- and think, "Yeah, let's make him president of the United States again.  This guy is acceptable.  This is somebody that I think of as a role model.  A somebody that, y'know, I want to put in the most powerful position in American politics."?  

driftglass:  Oh!  Oh! I know! Call on me!

Sykes:  I just want us to step back for a moment here, Tim [Alberta].   Because, there are tens of millions of people that still look at him and admire him, and they may know that he's deeply corrupt or that he's lying to them, and they don't care.  And I guess...we're political journalists.  We follow this.  We pundits and we're like, "Why is this happening? Why is this happening? Let's look at this piece of wreckage over here."  

driftglass:  Seriously.  The entire Liberal blogosphere is sitting right over here.  Just ask.

Sykes: And... and I was thinking last night, y'know, maybe we're the last people around who can really explain what's going on.  

driftglass: No shit Sherlock.  But not for the reasons you're thinking of.

Sykes: Who do we need to explain what has broken in America?

driftglass:  Ask the Liberal bloggers who have been right about the Right all along.

Sykes: Do we need sociologists?  Do we need theologians?  

driftglass:  Ask the Liberal bloggers who have been right about the Right all along.

Sykes: Do we need psychologists?  Do we need historians?  

driftglass:  Ask the Liberal bloggers who have been right about the Right all along. 

Sykes: Are you following where I'm going here?

driftglass:  Sadly, yes.  Because while all those people would be great, the very first people you should be talking to about "what has broken in America" are the Liberal bloggers who have been right about the Right all along.  Conversely, the very last people anyone should probably be listening to are the people who were been loudly and belligerently wrong about the Right all along.  The enablers.  The accelerators.  Those who blithely ignored all the red flags until it was far too late, and mocked those of us who were waving those flags.  Those who, say, used their position on Wisconsin radio and in Wisconsin politics to turn Wisconsin into a wingnut shithole and the whelping box for some of the worse Republican hobgoblins in politics today.  

 Sykes: Because it feels as if we're watching what's happening with a certain level of incomprehension about what's happened to American culture, to the American brain, the American mind.  All of this stuff.

driftglass:  No Mr. Sykes, the word you're groping for isn't "incomprehension".  It's "denial".  As you look into the howling, deranged, racist abyss that is the Republican party, you and your Never Trump pals are incapable of facing the obvious and inescapable fact that You.  Built.  This.  You did it proudly, loudly and right out in the open.

Also enough with this "American culture... the American brain... the American mind" bullshit.  It is the Republican brain that is rotten.  It is the Republican mind that is lost.  It is Republican madness that has corroded American culture.  And all of it started in the fetid Petri dish of the Conservative media in which you proudly and profitable served for 30 years.

Sykes: That maybe something broke decades ago that we missed or overlooked.

driftglass:  Or in which you proudly and profitable participated for 30 years.

Sykes: And maybe it's not completely political.  I'm sorry to go deep on you this morning, but I...I do feel like we're caught in this doom loop and I'm thinking, y'know, did we need to step out of the doom loop and get some perspective on how we got where we're at right now.

Tim Alberta:  Oh boy.

Sykes:  See, I warned ya.

Alberta:  It's the right question and I'm not at all convinced I have the right answer...

There are any number of writers and analysts who have been right about the Right all along and who could (and have tried to) tell you, in vivid and scrupulous detail, "how we got where we're at right now."

And we know where those conversations always end.

Because however ardently they might claim otherwise, the true and unredacted story of how their Republican party got this way it is not a story our Never Trump allies want to hear.  

Burn The Lifeboats