Bret Stephens Believes It’s 1:55 AM, the Electoral Bar Is Closing at 2:00...

..and, sure, he's a smarmy, preening asshole but, hey, Hobson's Choice amirite! So, Dems, what're you gonna do to 'mpress me huh?  

Spin 'round.  

Do a lil' dance.

 An' it'd bedder be good, goddamnit.   Bedder be great! 

Cause I got lotsa choices. Lotsa lotsa choices!

This was New York Times employee Bret Stephens less that two months ago in that stiflingly mildewed drawing room puppet show called "The Conversation" in which the 817-year-old Gail Collins attempts to yuck it up with whichever junior-most Conservative on the payroll drew the short straw:

Harris is an even weaker candidate than Biden. Not that I’ll vote for Trump, but I don’t think I can vote for her.

And this is Bret Bug today:

Poor ol' Bret really thinks he's Ellen Foley from Paradise By The Dashboard Light.

But he's not.  

He's just another bitter, jumped-up Conservative loser who's been wrong about everything since forever, but is protected from the harsh marketplace consequences of his incompetence by the largess of the House of Sulzberger.  

And so today we get this drivel:

But: Trump.

That’s the all-purpose response for many voters to any doubts about Harris’s qualifications. It makes November’s choice easy for anyone sincerely convinced that the former president poses an existential threat to the perpetuation of our political institutions. It also makes it easy for Never-Trumpers who hope that a decisive electoral rebuke of the former president might return the G.O.P. to its pre-MAGA incarnation as the party of John McCain or Mitt Romney.

And this, which has a light gloss of verisimilitude (the GOP isn't going back to it's "its former ideological leanings" because they were all a lie), on top of the ludicrous dismissal of Trump as a genuine threat):

Yet Trump victory or no, the Republican Party isn’t likely to revert to its former ideological leanings. And the argument that Trump is our Mussolini, scheming with ever-greater malevolence and cunning to end the Republic, is getting a little long in the tooth.

And of course, what would a Stephens shitpost be without a steaming side dish of Both Siderism?

Trump may be much the worse sinner, but Democrats aren’t blameless when it comes to weaponizing the instruments of state power to interfere with the will of the voters.

The Alert Reader will notice how closely Stephens' POV tracks with so many other recently-former Republicans.   The entire Republican party is written off as a toxic disaster.  Never Trumpers who think otherwise are Pollyannaish dopes.  And, of course, the Democrats -- who Stephens has spent his adult life career slagging for a living -- can be dismissed as not "blameless" for how utterly fucked the Republican party has become.  Because his head would explode in a cloud of smarm if he were ever forced to admit that the Left had been right about the Right all along.  

And completely absent from this bill of particulars?  Bret Bug himself.  Like other members of his sneering, little tribe of recently-former Republicans, Stephens holds himself above it all, accepting no responsibility for any of it.  His job is to just cruise along in high Earth orbit, and muse about how terribly disappointed he is in everyone else.

Then, after all the negging [Negging ("to neg", meaning "negative feedback") is an act of emotional manipulation whereby a person makes a deliberate backhanded compliment or otherwise flirtatious remark to another person to undermine their confidence and attempt to engender in them a need for the manipulator's approval.]  comes the 2:00 AM electoral Lothario's Big Pitch

For what my vote is worth — very little, considering I live in New York — I’d much rather cast a ballot for Harris than stay home. But votes need to be earned.

So sorry Bret.  The clock has already struck 2:00, the bar has emptied out and no one is interested in your pathetic offer.  

Time for you to toddle on home and jerk off to Reagan's 1961 Medicare is the slippery slop to Communism speech (of which we're 98% certain you own in original vinyl in near-mint condition) until you pass out.  

 

Burn The Lifeboats