Panic in Year Zero! Again!

 

Above, we find Ray Milland on the run from his Republican voting record while at the same time fighting his way through the savage jungle that's all that's left after [checks notes] trans people, Liberals, George Soros, the Kenyan Usurper, Vince Foster, Seth Rich, Dominion, immigrant caravans, Hillary's emails and Hunter Biden's laptop have destroyed civilization!

Ahem.

I am told by my friend Wikipedia that Sarah Longwell is:

...a Republican political strategist and publisher of the neoconservative news and opinion website The Bulwark. 

And this week, in The Bulwark, Ms. Longwell moved to make official the unofficial-but-clear preference of Republicans when it came to the dangerous subject of remembering the past:

You Have to Think of Trump’s Election as Year Zero

Because Republican voters say they don’t want any part of a Republican party that looks anything like it did before 2016.

Nope.  

Nope.  

And nope.  

As a veteran of three or four or seven of these Republican history resets, I realize in advance that I'm going to lose this fight too, because this time around the Beltway media and the Never Trump media and Republican base voters are all (for very different reasons) allied.  None of them want to talk about who-struck-John (Barron) during the Before Time, because they all struck John.  They're all responsible -- mutually and co-dependently -- for the fucking mess we're in.  

Remember the last history reset?  It happened after the Bush administration collapsed and all the base went scrambling for new public identities like roaches when the lights came on.  Across the country, from the mountains to the valleys to the whole rest of that song, millions of members of the Party of Personal Responsibility answered for all the shit they talked and all the ruin they rained on this country with...

Me?  A Republican?  Who supported George Bush?  Heaven forefend!  I, sir, am a Constitutional Conservative Libertarian Originalist, uh, Independent, uh, Tea Partier!  Never even heard of this "Bush" fellow.

Which it gives very little pleasure to admit that I predicted 17 years ago while the Bush administration was still grinding along, destroying the country: 

... In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade.

It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11” as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.

The two things I got wrong way back then were the result of the cheery optimism of my younger self: it didn't take anywhere near five years for the GOP and the media to bulldoze the Bush administration down the memory hole, and the erasure and denial was so thoroughgoing that I don't think schoolchildren are taught much of anything about that period.

13 years ago I used a Doctor Seuss story to write a whole thing about that prediction coming true in real time at it was happening.

The Republican history reset before that was during the first year of the Bush administration when Republicans used 9/11 to blot out all memory of all the monstrous shit they said and did during the Clinton administration.  Because, y'know, 9/11 changed everything.  

14 years ago I wrote a whole long thing about that Republican history reset here.

Before that, the Great Republican History Reset was during the first year of the Clinton administration when, after a 12 year spending spree, Republicans suddenly decided deficits were The Most Important Thing On Earth.  They also decided that, since Democrats are History's Greatest Villains, any tactic, no matter how sleazy or destructive, was in-bounds when it came to crippling the Clinton administration.  I covered the highlights of that here.  The Reagan/Bush administration committed a number of impeachable offenses, and a couple of acts of outright treason and were never brought to book over any of it.  Clinton lied about a blowjob and they Republicans impeached him.

These are just the greatest hits.  In point of fact, the inconvenient past is constantly under assault by people in the present with enough money and enough power and every reason it the world to want that past buried.  And the truth is, they usually get away with it.

And result of all these resets?  All of the butcher's bills run up by the Party of Reagan over the decades that have never been paid because ,damn it, we have to look forward, not back?  

The result was this racist asshole:

Who was elected by these racist assholes:

Because those  racist assholeshad been shown, over and over again, that no matter how batshit they acted, no matter what cataclysms they unleashed on this country, they would always be allowed to get away with it.

They would always get a do-over 

The clock would always be reset to Year Zero.  

 

Burn The Lifeboats