This vast desert of Republican lies and liars -- now enforced by the power of
the United States government -- that stretches out to the horizon in every
direction with not even a mirage of sanity to console us can feel
overwhelming, because, frankly, it is overwhelming. Which is why, every
now and then, I need to remind myself that this great desolation did not roll
up to our doorstep overnight. For decades, as a few of us shouted
warnings from our little soapboxes, the Republican malignancy was allowed to
grow and grow and grow, unchecked by those with the power to stop it until it
could no longer be stopped.
Such things have a beginning, and a middle
-- which is where we are now -- and, hopefully, an end.
So, when the weight of the story through which we are slogging feels
suffocating, I go looking for what we call in the writing game, the "telling
detail". This is from the Gotham Writer's Workshop from which, true story, years
ago I suddenly noticed some traffic coming to my wee little blog. Wild. Turns out they were using
something I had written as part of a classroom exercise. I
immediately sued them Harlan Ellison-style was very
flattered. Anyway, the "telling detail".
What is telling detail? Does it have anything to do with the advice to show and not tell? Chekhov described a story as "the casual telling of a nuclear experience in an ordinary life, rendered with immediate and telling detail." Telling detail, then, is a fundamental unit of fiction that captures the individuality and uniqueness—the very essence—of what is being described.
So let's us go looking for a "telling detail" about the clear and self-evident trajectory of the Republican party. But not from yesterday or today. Instead, let's visit the Before Time. Back to, what we are repeatedly told by our Never Trump allies, were golden years of comity and civility: a time back to which they long to go, and yet about which they are loathe to speak about.
Which seem kinda weird, doesn't it? I mean, if these really were the glory days of the Republican party and the American republic, why are they so goddamn allergic to talking about them?
Let's see if we can find a "telling detail" to explain that seeming contradiction. And, because we Liberal bloggers are so very lazy, I'm going to start by copying part of a post I wrote all the way back in August of 2008, during the waning days of the Bush Administration.
What? You say you've never heard of the Bush administration? Well that's kinda the point.
Looking Back...
...it was never simply that the Bush Administration was packed to the rafters with liars, traitors, looters and imbeciles.
It was that after being comprehensively sold out, fucked over and left to die by their Dear Leader, we live in a country where millions and millions and millions of Americans could still watch as this smirking waterhead --
-- stumbled from failure to war crime to catastrophe -- pausing occasionally to squat down over a copy of the Geneva Convention and light his beer farts with a burning Constitution -- and scream themselves hoarse that Yes! Yes! Holy Mother of God, Yes!
THIS is the guy we want!
Because they are children. Fucking blood-drunk children that no opalescent strand of magic words will ever coax out of the Stupid Tree.
They are the reason Rush Limbaugh will pocket nearly one-third of a billion dollars over the duration of his next contract instead of being found hanging in the Men’s Room of a failed Cape Girardeau used car lot with a note pinned to his plaid blazer blaming “the damned Negroes”.
They are the ones who sell their kids deeper into economic slavery every year. Who castrate themselves with a dull bread knife at the polls every single election cycle, and then spend the next two years whining that Dirty Libruls make their pee-pees hurt.
They are the reason we’re all in for three more months of the “If You Love Tire Gauges So Much Why Don't You Just Marry One!” --
-- Campaign of 2008.
If you were waiting for the the Main Event – where grownups sit and reason together over the great issues of the day -- tear up your tickets and spark up that fatty in the parking lot on the way out, pard, because there ain’t gonna be no show.
Because, Senator Obama, its not “like these guys take pride in being ignorant”
It is that these angry little wads of dumb are absolutely peacock proud of their shiny , impenetrable rind of real ignorance and Fake Jebus, which is why the conversation will never ascend to a genuine debate over real positions on real issues. Because as effectively as they have been trained-seal conditioned at oinking out with perfect certainty that Barack Hussein Obama is “Ultra Left”, they don’t have the first fucking clue what your positions are.I pause here only to note that the original occasion for this post was a remembrance of, as friend Tengrain put it, "this date in 2001 that Chimpy received the briefing entitled 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack US'" It was an act of bloggy solidarity which was a delightfully common thing back in those days. I wistfully note it here because, of the 11 other blogs that participated in this early, transgressive act of Remembering Stuff, only two remain active. The other nine are either abandoned, or gone altogether.
Time and again the Left fails to run these fuckers into the ground because we seem almost congenitally unable to understand that the Right isn’t remotely interested in matters of policy. Or strategy. Or facts. Or causality.
They are moved to action by none of that Liberal crap.
What gets their filthy hearts pounding and tiny hooves clattering is being handed someone they can despise and blame for their misery and fear, and in Barack Hussein Obama they now have someone eminently hateable for that oldest and most reliable of sins. Envy. They loathe him because he is better than they are.
Purely and simply better. At everything...
Now, having come this far, you might sensibly be asking yourself, "Why is this silly, nearly-forgotten 'tire gauge' thing worth my attention." What is it about it that makes it a "telling detail"? Or, if you prefer, a fractal that tells the entire story?
The answer is why Conservative media launched this ludicrous, coordinated attack, and which was just one of many equally ludicrous, coordinated attacks.
DAN ABRAMS: Tonight, the right-wing media and the McCain campaign continuing to attack Obama over tire gauges. Yes, it has come to this—Obama‘s sensible suggestion that people properly inflate their tires to help save gas has been over-inflated, and somehow, become a rallying cry for derision from the far right in particular.SEAN HANNITY, FOX HOST: He says the solution to our energy problems, if Americans will tune up their cars and inflate their tires.ANN COULTER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: No, I like that one. I‘m in the same spirit, I think the solution to our nonexistent healthcare crisis is my proposal that everyone eat an apple a day.RUSH LIMBAUGH, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: They continue to push this tire gauge thing. It‘s an energy plan. They claim to have found proof somewhere that over-inflating your tires—if we all did it—would save something like 50,000 gallons or barrels a day or some such think. It‘s just absurd.
Why, why, why? Take a wild guess. From the same August 6, 2008 NBC transcript:
JONATHAN ALTER: If they‘re looking for an excuse, A.B., I mean, if you don‘t want to vote for him and need some excuse other than that, you know, he‘s black, you can maybe say, “Well, he‘s a vacuous celebrity,” even though he‘s not vacuous.A.B. STODDARD: I kind of agree with both of them. I mean, I do think it‘s the low road. I also think it‘s effective. I did believe that if you brought that original Britney Spears ad to McCain a few months and said this is what we‘re going to do, he would have said, “Not me, no way.”But I do think it works and I also agree on the same time that, you know—Barack Obama, he created the image in Berlin. He created a speech so that he could be photographed among hundreds of thousands of people in a swarm. And there are people looking to resist Barack Obama and looking for a reason besides he‘s black and they found it.
This is why we are now drowning in a ocean of Republican lies. They are not being spewed out a-mile-a-minute by the Trump regime and their apparatchiks in state-run Republican media to convince anyone outside of the cult of anything. They are there to provide a continuous stream of excuses which the base needs to continue to cling to the Dear Leader.
The reprogrammable meatbags who were willing to pretend that Dubya Bush never said what he said or did what he did, are, by and large, the same reprogrammable meatbags who are now revising their realities every hour on the hour to pretend that Trump never said what he said or did what he did.
So when I hear Trump lying about, well, everything, I also hear Dubya lying about Osama bin Laden. And when I hear "They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats" and a thousand other slanders, I also hear "I‘m in the same spirit, I think the solution to our nonexistent healthcare crisis is my proposal that everyone eat an apple a day." and "terrorist fist jab" and Death Panels, and a thousand other slanders.
Because while lyrics are different, the song remains the same. In fact, the only thing that has substantively changed is the fact that Republican elites lost control of their own doomsday machine.
From me again, this time back in 2019:
...See, for the last half century or so, the Republican party has kept two completely different sets of ideological books.
There was the racist, paranoid, Democrats-are-gun-grabbing-baby-killers, media-conspiracy red meat bullshit they fed the bigots and imbeciles to get them to the polls. This has been the electoral rocket fuel of the GOP (and the bread and butter of Fox News and Hate Radio) which Republican party leadership and the Beltway media have consistently dismissed as either irrelevant or nonexistent.
And then there was the real agenda which the leadership of the GOP and the Conservative movement carried out on behalf of the men who wrote the checks. This is the agenda of court packing, gutting regulations, massive tax cuts for the rich, killing the social safety net, etc.
Then along came Trump: a pure grifter and sociopath who didn't even bother to pretend to care about the party establishment's second set of books and instead went all-in on the juicy, crazy, toxic, racist bullshit the GOP has been feeding its base under the table all along. This is how he won the hearts and minds of the rage-drunk meathead base and why they remain nearly 100% dog-loyal to their Dear Leader to this day.
(By the way, this is not a new observation. Unlike every Never Trumper out there flogging a book about how Trump corrupted their awesome party, I've been writing about the depraved GOP base since I started blogging 14 years ago. Ed. [Now 20 years ago])
What the Republicans got when they nominated and elected Donald Trump was the Chieftain of the Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair. Someone who has been so steeped in treason and lies and corruption for so long that his rotting brain can no longer comprehend the difference between right and wrong. Cannot understand why he should have to hide anything because everything he does is, by definition, awesome and beautiful and completely legitimate. This is what decades of letting Limbaugh and Hannity take a shit in their skulls has trained every wingnut to believe without question. That whatever they do -- however grotesque and insane it may be -- is automatically praiseworthy and brilliant because they believe it.
Because their peers praise them for it.
Because they dine out on each other's madness and regurgitate it back into each other's mouths.
Which is how it came to be that the entire Republican Party -- from the very top to the very bottom -- is now irreversibly mad. And so, given this condition of self-reinforcing lunacy, why wouldn't their Dear Leader strut around on live teevee bragging about the thick, luxuriant, treasonous shit with which he has pomaded his hair.
Because in the eyes of his demented followers, it is actually quite beautiful...
And it goes without saying that, since 2019, it has all gotten exponentially worse.
Burn The Lifeboats
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