Ghosts Of The Before Time: May 30, 2005 -- We Warned You

While this is not exactly a dip in ancient waters, now that legacy media and Conservative media and Never Trump media have collectively declared the Before Times to be strictly off limits to any recollections that don't involve weeping over how shabbily Robert Bork was treated or elevating Ronald Reagan to sainthood or carping about Abbie Hoffman, there is no act of You’ll-Never-Get-a-Gig-at-The-Atlantic-With-That-Attitude more transgressive that profligately remembering stuff from back in the day.

So, since after 20 years at this coal face, there isn't a hope in Hell of me ever, ever, ever being offered a writing gig at brick-and-mortar publication, even if no one listens now just as no one listened then, that is exactly what I plan to go right on doing.  

So today, a snip from May 30, 2005.  An open-letter of sorts (those were big back in the olden times) to those chimeral Moderate Republicans who were only ever visible out of the corner of your eye.  Try to look straight and they vanish like a fart in a firestorm.  

Anyway, give it a read if that is your pleasure and then reflect on why it is that, once Republicans acclaimed Donald Trump as their lord and savior, the Liberals who have been sounding the alarm for decades that the Republican party was on a trajectory towards something like this are still treated as kooks and pariahs, while the Conservatives who were caught completely flat-footed by the rise of Trump and who first swore that such a thing was impossible, then swore that the rise of Trump was a fluke, then swore that is was merely a fever which would pass once people realized yadda yadda, then swore that Liberal were probably to blame  .. how is it those people who have such a long history of being so wildly wrong are now the once you see larding the op-ed pages, the cable teevee panels and aver other mainstream media platform?

And, not to get too meta on you, but if you are so inclined, reflect further on the fact that, as the media was being colonized by recently-former Republicans and us very inconvenient Liberals with our very inconvenient receipts being shoved into the corner, there were a few of us who warned that, if the Left did not loudly refuse to cede one inch of the moral high ground to the Never Trumpers (who had spent the last 30 years making a living and getting monsters elected by calling us dirty, commie baby-killers) -- that they could be welcomed as subordinate allies but only after they conceded the obvious fact that Left had been right about the Right all along -- that before you know it, any mention of the Before Time would become taboo (No Fair Remembering Stuff), and voices on the Left would be shoved even deeper in the corner while the legacy media would elevate or amplify people like David French, Matthew Dowd, Rick Wilson, Michael Steele, Steve Schmidt, Charlie Sykes, Tom Nichols, David Frum and David Brooks.  

And as I recall, even as this was all happening right before our eyes -- even as MSNBC was giving tens of millions of dollars worth of free promotion to websites hurriedly cobbled together by recently-former Republican while Liberal sites starved, even as credulous Liberals poured tens of millions of actual dollars into the coffers of the Lincoln Project for ads that accomplished nothing while Liberal sites went begging -- credulous Liberal were scolding people like me for making a big deal out of it.  After all, I was told a 1,000 times back in 2017, 2017 and 2018, this was just a temporary arrangement.  It was just until Trump was gone.  Then, instead of using their newly-dominant positions in the media to scold Democrats for not being Republican-lite, they would be told to go back to their own party and clean up the awful mess that they had made.

Anyway, for your reading pleasure, here's me from 20 years ago:

...So to the many Moderate Republicans who are angling for their tiny places in history – for the elementary school cafeterias and highway on-ramps that they hope will one day be named for them – I would ask in all seriousness just how in the Hell do you think history will judge you?

At this point, you know the Administration was and is lying to you.
You know that our children are dying for those lies and the treasure-house of respect and honor that two centuries of successive Administration have carefully stored up is now being pissed away into the sands of Iraq.
You know that liars and thugs are being appointed to vital, high-profile jobs.
You know the courts are being packed with ultra right wing lunatics.

You are the same people and belong to the same Party that was more than happy to spend tens of millions of dollars going after Clinton on the whiff of a hint of a suggestion of something untoward, and you were quite willing to sit at that fishing hole and lob dynamite into it for seven long years until you knocked something loose.

In light of that, what I don’t quite understand is how you’re going to explain to posterity how you refused to bother to even investigate any of this. How you’re going to sell “I never knew” and “I never bothered to find out” to the history books as anything other that rank cowardice and towering hypocrisy once the multiple, interlocking Bush Ponzi Schemes fall apart, given how much evidence of wrongdoing is right there in front of you.

Well we all know how that turned out , don't we?

And now,  just for kicks, here is the first two of the 76 comments on that post (most of which were spam ads for auto loans and real estate -- it was a different time).  A reader wrote and I responded, as the pedant that I am:

Anonymous said:

For history to judge a man harshly those writing it must render such a verdict. The writers of history often reflect the thinking of a nation's populace, prodded into a rumination heavily influenced by the sentiments of the many. I don't see Bush suffering too badly under the microscope of future historians. We are a nation of xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, militaristic half-wits. The citizenry mostly agrees with the psychopaths in the White House. Our schools churn out millions unable or unwilling to read or write. Most of the population is content to swill beer, ogle porn and worship NASCAR drivers. These are the people historians will appeal to in their tomes, exposing Bush as a murdering, criminal vulgarian? Please, it's not going to happen. Think of the query "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a crashing sound?". If historians judge Bush badly but no one pays attention to their verdict have they made a sound?

driftglass said...

"The citizenry mostly agrees with the psychopaths in the White House."

You're wrong on three counts.

First, have a care slinging "most" around too easily. Around 49% of the citizenry very definitely does not agree with the psychopaths in the WH, and the margin of victory was around 100,000 votes in one state and not millions. Furthermore, every measure of Administration popularity has been dropping steadily since Christmas. Reality is slowly overtaking propaganda, as it always does. Yes, a high percentage of the populace are superstitious and bigoted and generally a waste of perfectly good carbon, but when wasn't this the case, so...

Second, you misread history if you think that there were ever some bygone, halcyon days when the average American whiled away his leisure time by wading though Tacitus and debating Clausewitz with his friends over a beer (swilled or otherwise.) Never happened. However, popularized histories have always made it into the mass markets, from Shakespeare to Spielberg.

Third, I for one have nothing but nice things to say about the ogling of porn, but as to NASCAR, I must admit, how anyone can pay rapt attention to hour after hour of left turns stumps me.

I Am The Liberal Media.