One if by Land. Two if by Sea. Three if by Hate Radio and Fox News Teevee.

As most of you already know, thanks to his ability to squint really hard and conjure mirages into mountains, and daydreams into deliverers, decade after decade, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has complied an unbroken record of manifesting, out of thin air, one Republican savior after another and one rising Conservative reform "movement" after another.

Of course they're always juuuust around the corner, "deep in the bowels of the G.O.P" or laboring industriously but anonymously away in statehouses, but always on the verge of springing into action. And thanks to Brooks' insider knowledge and special powers of observation, over and over again he has confidently reassured his readers that salvation was definitely heading our way at speed, so ignore those Liberal crackpots and alarmists in the steeple of the Old North Church, shouting and hooting and waving three lanterns.

(You remember the Longfellow poem, right? One if by land.  Two if by sea.  Three if by Hate Radio and Fox News teevee...)

Down through the decades as the danger from the Right very publicly loomed ever closer, the legacy media's message never changed:  Don't you little people worry your little heads about any of that noise, because the Conservative Establishment (whose spokesmodels found a welcoming home on every channel and in every newspaper) has got this!

By 2009, David Brooks' Republican party was already doomed to eventually become the instrument of some monster or another.  It was a roiling shitpile of bigots and imbeciles finishing out their first year of what would be an uninterrupted, eight-year-long hysterical racist primal scream: their reaction to the Democrats electing a Centrist Eisenhower Republican named Barack Obama who wasted his entire first term and much of his second trying to reach out to a mob of angry, racist lunatics who would have none of it, but which the Conservative Establishment kept insisting did not exist.

From his vantage point comfortably ensconced in the Acela Corridor quiet car,  Brooks remained willfully oblivious to all of it, leading a legacy media cottage industry dedicated to looking right past what was obviously happening right in front of them, and instead focusing on a series of Conservatives saviors who were just over the horizon and therefor invisible to mere mortals

Instead...

 

Serious people.  

Quiet conversations.  

"austerity brigades".  Heh.

Even as the Rough Beast -- the end-product of decades of Conservatives handing their politics and media over to monsters like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater and on and on and on -- slouched towards Election Day to be born, this avatar of the legacy media refused to behold what he had helped to create

Brooks, September 2015 with emphasis added for entertainment purposes:

The outsiders are about to slide. Trump’s Don Rickles act wears thin. His ego may be galaxy-sized, but his policy ignorance is a void that overspills the known universe. He’s the Wizard of Oz. When the bluster curtain falls down, what’s left is pathetic...

Instead, the party will veer on a course midway between outsider and establishment. It will probably end up with some hybrid candidate — sharp of tongue, gifted in self-expression and yet still anchored in the world of reality...

That’s where Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio come in. So far, Fiorina has looked like the most impressive candidate. She has a genius for creating signature moments. (“If you want to stump a Democrat, ask them to name an accomplishment of Mrs. Clinton’s.”) But her spotty record at Hewlett-Packard probably means she can’t start at the top of the ticket.

Dig this coo-coo diagnosis of Little Marco: 

Rubio is young and thus uncorrupted, and he is a genius at relating policy depth in a way that is personal. He has clarity of mind and can sum up a complex subject — Russia, the Middle East — in a way that is comprehensible but not oversimplified.

This debate was one moment in time, but you can see the vectors of where this campaign is headed. This is no longer Bob Dole’s or George H.W. Bush’s G.O.P. But it’s not going to completely lose its mind, either.

Narrator:  Brooks' Republican Party had, in fact, already completely lost its mind long ago.  

It’s going to be somewhat the same, but edgier and more renegade. Right now, Rubio, Fiorina and maybe Chris Christie are best positioned to occupy that space.

Sometimes the amount of money, time, energy and professional integrity that legacy media has been willing to burn through -- and is still burning through -- to keep people who wrong all along in the spotlight, and, as a corollary, the keep people who were inconveniently right all along the hell out of the  spotlight...takes my breath away.

Burn The Lifeboats