On The Question of Rebranding

 

Julie Hotard asks:

@driftglass.bsky.social What is your opinion on how quickly?

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— Julie H. Hotard Ph.D., Disinfo expert (@upine.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 11:34 PM

This question is actually a lot more complex than you might imagine, because it is not in the Conservative nature to ever under any circumstances admit to being wrong.  In fact, for decades the only permissible way to own up to being wrong on the Right was to confess that your opinions or tactics or whatever just weren't Conservative enough.  

Which is why George W. Bush's serial fuckuppery culminating the Iraq War debacle coup de grace broke a lot of Conservative brains. 

When it comes to the simple act of forming their mouths to say the words "I was wrong" they go all Arthur Fonzarelli:

Even today, leading legacy media Cons can be found either manufacturing excuses for why they weren't really, really, for real wrong to back Bush's farrago of lies that put us into Iraq.  

From Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, March, 2023

I Supported the Invasion of Iraq

But a just cause doesn’t make for a just war.

Twenty years after the United States led a coalition to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the conventional wisdom is now that the postwar fiasco proved that the war was a mistake from its inception. The war, as it was executed, was indeed a disaster, but there was ample cause for launching it.

Or strike a truculent, fuck-you-libtard pose and declare that Bush's clusterfuck was a great idea.  

From Bret Stephens, The New York Times, March 21, 2023:

20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War

If you lived through those times you will no doubt remember the ferocious and, for a time, entirely successful Conservative media campaign to paint the war as a rousing success even as evidence of everything falling apart kept piling up.   

On the tony side of town, every Sunday Show seemed to be stacked three-deep with administration stooges and legacy media hacks assuring everyone that it was all going to plan.  On the rougher side of town, the Conservative bloggers and Hate Radio goofs were out in force, tagging anyone who whispered a discouraging word as a terrorist-loving, Murrica-hating commie.

And if there were some rough spots, well, let's give it another six months before we start to worry.

From Wikipedia:

The Friedman Unit, or simply Friedman,[1] is a tongue-in-cheek neologism. One Friedman Unit is equal to six months,[2] specifically the "next six months", a period repeatedly declared by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to be the most critical of the then-ongoing Iraq War[3] even though such pronouncements extended back over two and a half years.

And it all worked...for a while.  Until, eventually, the cost in blood and treasure of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq became impossible to cover up any more.  Then came the torture revelations.  And Teri Schiavo.  And Katrina.  And the collapse of the global economy.  And, hey, where did this gargantuan deficit come from?  What the hell happened to our budget surplus?

So, what happened when the unmovable object of a party base that is congenitally incapable of admitting mistakes collided with the irresistible force of a clusterfucked war, a drowned American city and a collapsing global economy?  Well, suddenly, like a fart in a cyclotron, the Republican base was gone, baby, gone.   Body-swapped almost one-for-one, for a huge crop of brand-new "independents".  

As I wrote of the Republican base back in 2009:

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

These "independents" were also emerging like cicadas in their millions from the Fabulous, Tea-Baggulous Bush Off Machine as the Fake Tea Party --

-- about which so much laudatory ink was spilled by a lying and complicit  legacy media who very definitely also did not want to dwell on who had been right and who had been disastrously wrong during the Age of Bush.  

Revisiting this same Republican base 16 years later and we find -- surprise! -- they never actually gave a shit about Iraq or New Orleans or torture or Teri Schiavo or the deficit or, well, any of it.  All they have ever cared about was being right in a way that let them feel superior to us stoopid, know-it-all Liberals.  

Owning the Libs.  Drinking Liberal tears.  

Which is why they went all-in on a dry-drunk halfwit like Dubya Bush -- twice!.  It was a giant "Fuck Your Feeling" to Democrats, who had just finished paying off the deficits that Reagan and Bush Sr. had run up, balancing the budget and creating 20 million new jobs.  

Because -- again, surprise! -- delivering on all of that stuff and more -- things Republicans had said were the most important things in the world but had never once delivered on -- did not make Republicans feel all warm 'n fuzzy inside.  Quite the contrary: they fucking hated Bill Clinton for it. They hated him so much they "lawfared" his ass. Impeached him and tried to remove him from office over a blowjob.  

Wrote this whole long thing about it 16 years ago. 

And then, after they had given their slavering loyalty to Dubya, they weren't just shown to be utterly and humiliatingly wrong.  They were shown to be utterly and humiliatingly wrong in front of the Liberals.  

The agonies of 1,000 demons being given holy water enemas could not have felt worse.  

But stop and consider for a moment how they were shown to be utterly and humiliatingly wrong.  By what means?  Through what lens?  Because as we all know, these people have no problem just wishing away anything they do not want to believe.  The J6 attempted coup?  Obviously that was Antifa!  

Or Nancy Pelosi!  

Or FBI infiltrators!  

Or, hey, wait a minute?  Maybe J6 was actually a good thing! 

Maybe the 2020 election was actually stolen and the coup plotters are actually martyrs and political prisoners!

The difference between the Before Time and now is that, back then, it was still possible for a tiny bit of light from the outside world to leak into their ideological bunker.   Republicans could still see the failures in Iraq and Bush's criminally incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina through a small, cracked legacy media window on the wider world.

So, what lesson did they take from being humiliated by Bush's lies and incompetence?  The lesson that, those holes and leaks needed to be boarded up and spackled over right now!

Next time, they needed to hire an even bigger, louder liar telling even bigger, louder lies.  One who would never back down in the face of potentially humiliating reality, but would unflinchingly live out this lesson from "A Guide For The Married Man".

Deny.  Deny.  Deny.

The base would demand that their Conservative media be completely aligned with the will of their new Dear Leader.  That the last vestiges of "news" be purged from their "news media", and that all talking heads lie about everything without apology.  From now on it was to be all propaganda all the time, and Republican elected officials had damn well better sing out their enthusiastic support for the party's new Stalinist direction. 

So, in response to the question, "How quickly will the bootlickers turn on Trump and the broligarchy once they fuck up?" I would answer that the question itself reflects a pre-Trump understanding of how the GOP works now. 

To misquote an old communist excuse for why communism never worked, "Trumpism cannot fail.  Trumpism can only be failed."  The violent, brainwashed zombie Republican base will not tolerate being humiliated in front of the Liberal again.  So all failures, disasters, bloodshed and corruption will be January Sixth-ed.  

Sure, a tiny handful of Trump ass-kissers may finally reach their gag-reflex limit and slink off to pretend that they were part of the resistance all along, but for the other 99%  whatever shit blows up in their faces will be chalked up to Fake News.  

Or it was all part of the Giant Liberal Conspiracy.  

Or it never happened.  

Or, somehow, it really was a good thing.

I Am The Liberal Media