In my capacity of "He Who Listens To Cable Teevee Never Trumpers When They Talk Among Themselves" I hear things. Like the unnamed narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart", above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.
How, then, am I mad?
Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you about Michael Steele's visit to Joe Walsh's podcast.
It breaks down as follows.
First, the top line of Steele's resume remains his button-busting pride at the "winning coalition" he says he put together in 2010 which stopped Obama in his tracks. Which is typical, Republican revisionist bullshit. What actually happened was Steele's political fortunes were raised because Steele -- the Party of Old White Men's buffoonish "See? We're not bigots!" former codpiece -- was willing shut his mouth and ride the rising tide of overt, berserk Tea Bagger racism in the Republican Party.
These days he and Joe Walsh can be heard on Walsh's podcast braiding each other's hair while Walsh fawns over Steele political savvy in welcoming lunatics like him into the mighty Republican coalition that put an end to the Kenyan Usurper's sinister plans to turn Murrica into a socialist hellhole.
Actually, neither man mentions Obama at all. Obama's existence and the eight year racist Republican primal scream that followed his election have simply vanished from the tale. Instead, they both sigh and remember that period as the Good Old Days.
But of course those of us who (ahem) have archives and memories remember those days a little differently.
From me back in 2010:
Hoping the rest of the world wouldn't notice, today RNC Chair Mikey Steele hooked up with Rightwad Crazies in the political Men’s Room for a brief, degrading “Tory Hole” assignation.
Oops.
Tea partiers get audience with RNC chairman but not a shared public stage
By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele treated tea party leaders like an ugly date Tuesday afternoon: They were good enough to take upstairs, but not good enough to be seen with in public.
Steele invited leaders of the conservative movement over to the GOP's Capitol Hill headquarters (to the adjacent National Republican Club, technically) for a private meeting on the third floor. But Republican leaders, probably wary of TV footage showing a tea party takeover of RNC headquarters, denied the activists' request to use the facility for the news conference they had planned for afterward.
…The Money Quote:
The moment encapsulated well the Republican Party's dilemma as it tries to harness the considerable energy of the tea party movement. Steele's task is essentially to co-opt its leaders, keeping them from electoral challenges that could hurt the GOP's chances. Yet at the same time, he can't appear to the rest of the country to be embracing a movement known for extremist words and deeds.…Even as he roasts in the depths of Hell, at this moment Lee Atwater is laughing hard enough to lactate bile.
This was also the period during which Rush Limbaugh responded to Steele making some mildly critical remarks about Limbaugh by dropping a house on his head to remind him who, in this relationship, wears the boots and who shines the boots.
Steele reacted by crawling back to Limbaugh and begging forgiveness:
Steele to Rush: I’m sorry
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”
“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”
So that's the first segment.
The second segment featured Steele and Walsh being sad and bumfuzzled over what the heck happened to their party? How could it have come to this?
I dunno, Mike. Maybe that winning coalition of the you're so proud of -- that indestructible doomsday machine of bigots and imbeciles -- had something to do with it. Maybe groveling before Limbaugh's throne instead of working to drive him and the rest of this filth out of the party had something to do with it. But in Steele's hands, the past is always malleable, like clay, ready to be shaped and reshaped into whatever form he needs at the moment to sell himself to whoever will hire him today.
If you're interested, I wrote a longer thing about it back in 2016 when Ana Marie Cox wanted me to believe she had not "let him off the hook" when he was on her podcast as part of his perpetual Reputation Rehab tour. Spoiler: She let him off the hook.
Here's a little taste from that 2016 podcast:
Steele: You say voter suppression on the Republican side. I say voter control on the Democratic side. It works on Both Sides. I'm beyond excuse-making. I want to get to why things don't work the way we want it to work.
And, just for fun, here's another little taste:
Steele: The president [Trump] is much more of a Democrat than he is a Republican
For his sins, these days Steele can be found in constant rotation on MSNBC, either guesting or substitute hosting -- his hugely problematic past now as dead disco, and as safely entombed as Chernobyl by his friends in the media.
The third segment was about why Steele could never register as a Democrat, because there's no room for a "pro-life" person like him in the party. Maybe, someday, if the Democrats every really became a "big tent party" he would consider it, but he shall remain a member of the white supremacism, Hang Mike Pence, lying, treasonous insurrection party for the foreseeable future because he is [checks notes] a Man of Principle.
The fourth segment was about how Democrats should count their blessings that the GOP is as crazy as it is, because if not the Republican party would be running everything, because Democrats suck and are terrible at "messaging" and are elitist snobs who are out of touch with Real Murrica and how Dems are just a few years away from being just as batshit as Republicans because something something AOC.
And OMG, why aren't Democrats talking about infrastructure more!?
This public act of shouting into the abyss has been brought to today you by me, because...
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