Imagine if you will a political movement invented out of whole cloth by a few dozen refugees from a mighty political party which those refugees had spent decades building out of the dregs of humanity. Bigots. Imbeciles. Homophobes. Xenophobes.
Gun nuts. Conservative evangelicals. Misogynists.
Monarchists. Anarchists. Nihilists.
White nationalists. Actual Nazis. And Grover Norquist.
Imagine further that this party's molten core of rage, paranoia and racism was contained within a thin outer shell of outward-facing media respectability. I wrote about the machinery of it all here, 19 years ago.
But, as predicted, that toxic molten core eventually became impossible to control. After decades of ominous leaks, dangerous control systems failures and denial after denial by party leaders, in 2016 the Republican party's toxic molten core finally and spectacularly broke containment --
-- sending many of its architects and engineers scurrying into exile as political refugees. Eventually those refugees showed up at the doorstep of my Democratic party. Y'know, the party that didn't destroy itself by building a foundation of lunatics, grifters and racists...and then lying to the rest of the world about it until it all blowed up real good!
These refugees were all former big-shots in the Republican party. People who had made their living getting monsters elected by slandering people like me as evil, baby-murdering demons --
-- while ignoring our warnings that, if things went on this way, the toxic core of their party would sooner or later melt down and destroy this country.
So, as a condition for joining our cause, some us asked for an apology. Not a lot to ask. Just to act like fucking adults and own what they had done. Cop to the fact that they they had been wrong, and that we had been right.
Instead we got...nothing. No apologies. No retractions. Not even any acknowledgement that their bloody fingerprints are all over the Republican doomsday machine that eventually spit them out of the party.
Apparently that was just too damn much to ask.
Instead those who were the targets and victims of their lies and slanders were told to sit down shut up and get over it. That this was an emergency, and in an emergency it was rude and wrong and potentially put our democracy at risk to ask any questions of our new "allies" or to hold them accountable for anything they had ever said or done.
From that day forward, any ally who would say that Trump was a naught bad man was a good-enough ally, and the watchword from then on would be "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". And lemme tell ya, the absolute raft of shit I took as a voice in the wilderness, warning that if we didn't screen these assholes at our party's political borders, sooner that you could imagine, our voices -- the voices of those who had actually been right all along -- would be swept aside and displaced by this politically homeless contingent of outcast Republicans who still thought Liberal's were scum, Reagan was a saint, and that Trump was just a temporary glitch in the otherwise-morally superior Conservative matrix.
And so it was written that no potential ally -- no matter what kind of morally malformed godawful ruinous nightmares they may be -- could be turned away if they said the magic words "Donald Trump is a naughty bad man". They must automatically be let into the inner circle, no questions asked, and rewarded with book-deals, op-ed gigs, permanent seats on cable teevee panels.
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" quickly became a universal and axiomatic truth that was never to be questioned. And once that was accomplished, Never Trumpers used it as a battering ram to colonized what little was left of the "Liberal" media and all but silence actual Liberal writers and speakers.
So when I saw this Dire Warning Banner Headline over at Never Trumper HQ I laughed and laughed and laughed.
And laughed.
And laughed.
And laughed
For the record, of course I think Democrats shouldn't go anywhere near Musk. Shouldn't touch him with a barge pole long enough to snatch Starlink satellites in orbit.
"You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye." -- Hunter S. Thompson
That's not the point.
The point is, Never Trumpers conjured up the cheap grace dictum of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend no questions asked." out of thin air and conned credulous Liberals in to repeating. It became their very own political "letters of transit" --
-- which they used to wheedle the kind of high-level/highly-profitable access to our party and our media which us dirty hippy pariahs (who had been right about the Right all along) never had and will never have in a thousand years.
And once they were on the inside -- once they had gained access to the cogs and levers of the Democratic party and what passes for the "Liberal media" -- they immediately began using that access and influence to transmute our party to their liking.
The point is, thanks in no small part to your energetic efforts before the Republican party ran you out, your former party is now a rapidly expanding fascist sinkhole that threatens to engulf the nation. So howzabout you head back across the aisle, use all the influence and wealth you have been given and all the media and political contacts you still have among Republican brutes and grifters, and devote all of your energies to trying to clean up your former party before it kills us all...and keep your damn, dirty hands off of my party?
3 comments:
One of my first comments yesterday after the blow up blowed up was "Great, now I suppose Elmo is gonna start quoting liberal bloggers..."
Which he won't, because he doesn't read them, but that won't stop him from stealing the same ideas they've been writing about for decades. Which will be hilarious because he'll act like they're brilliant because he is the one who thought of them.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
You forgot to mention the Methodists
But David Jolly...
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