The Fuhrer Next Time

From me, 19 years ago:

In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade.

It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11” as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.

So that’s where we are now.

I was directionally correct, but after watching Republicans and the legacy media haul the history of the Bush administration down the the River Lethe, weigh it down with stones, sew it into a bag and toss it in, I realized that, as cynical as I was,  I underestimated both the sheer moral hollowness of Republican voters and how complicit the legacy media was willing to be in bulldozing the Bush administration down the memory hole.

I recalibrated my estimation of how much trouble we were in downward, and have not been off the mark since. 

Because there were no shameful admissions.  No rueful laughter at their toxic folly.  Because they had already learned the most important aspect of Conservatism:  under no circumstances will Conservatives ever be required to admit they were wrong or had made a mistake.  Everything will always be either someone else's fault, or everything they did was the result of a painful Hobbesian choice they were forced to make because, as the legacy media and Conservative media have both drilled into them for decades, Democrats are always, always, always as bad or worse than Republicans.  

So, by 2008, Republican scum had already begun to tart themselves up as "independents."

By 2009, David Fucking Brooks was already legitimizing these Republicans-in-Independent-camo in the pages of the New York Times.

By 2010, they had tromped through the Bush-Off Machine and fully morphed into the Fake Tea Party, bellowing about deficits, taxes, Death Panels, Birth Certificates and the Scary Radical Negro president.

But... but... however hard they tried to scrub it off, these assholes who had had been the braying, strutting cheerleaders of everything Dubya had done were desperate to get back to the awesome "when none can call our power to account" aspect of being a Conservative -- 

Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why, then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?--Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.

 -- but, like Lady MacBeth, they could never quite cleanse themselves of that big, bloody Bush administration stain.

And why?  Because the leaders of their own party refused to do the one thing the base wanted above all else: make George W. Bush the villain.  Sacrifice him to exonerate them.  Wicker Man his ass.  Instead, those eight years of ruin and failure were just, sorta left there.  A rotting carcass in the middle of the room, lightly covered with a sheet, but everyone still had to step around it to get where they were goin, and the smell still hung in the air.  

And then along came Trump, who told the base exactly what they wanted to hear.  From Politico, February 14, 2016:

Trump Goes Code Pink on George W. Bush

It was weird that an angry Code Pink-style protester interrupted last night’s Republican presidential debate with a barrage of familiar Democratic talking points about George W. Bush—that he lied the country into a disastrous war in Iraq, failed to prevent the September 11 attacks, and even whiffed on an opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden. It was especially weird that the protestor was one Donald J. Trump, who happens to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

Trump didn’t just call the Iraq war a mistake. He called it “a big fat mistake.” And he didn't call it an inadvertent mistake because of faulty intelligence. “They lied!” he thundered. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction … and they knew there were none.” ...

Then Trump turned and pointed the finger directly at "Jeb!" 

[Trump] spent much of the night mocking George’s brother Jeb as a weak, incompetent, lying loser. 

And it is a measure of how completely clueless about the state of the Republican base the legacy media, Republican elites and Conservative pundits all were that they rose almost as one, in surprise and bemusement and pearl-clutching umbrage, to begin drafting Trump's political obituary for doing such a thing.

But this was the sort of thing the base of the Republican base had been dying for.  Not shamefaced deflection and denial, but full-throated, unequivocal absolution.  It wasn't their fault!  They had been deceived!  Tricked!  Hoodwinked!  Cheated!  Bamboozled!  

This was what Trump offered.  Reassurance.  Validation.

Remember, the Republican party spent decades and billions of dollars carefully cultivating a base of xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, white nationalists, gun nuts, Conservative Christian theocrats, bigots and imbeciles.  Anyone who listened to Hate Radio or watched Fox News for five minutes could see it.  And yet, to make itself acceptable a legacy media which the base despised, Conservative pundits consistently pretended that base did not exist.  Instead, pundits pretended that the base was made up entirely of thoughtful, yeoman farmers and shopkeepers who lived in a place called Real America, and spent their days quoting Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman back and forth to each other over the back yard fence.  

To win elections, party leaders needed a base that was stupid enough and paranoid enough and rage-drunk enough to consistently vote against their own interests because Democrats were Murrica-hatin', terrorist-luvin', baby-killin' commies.  But at the same time they also needed that base to shut the fuck up about how stupid and paranoid and rage-drunk they were when the normies were paying attention.  

Bill Buckley in the streets, George Wallace between the sheets.

And then along came Trump who told them, fuck all that.  Fuck the elites who tell you to be ashamed.  Fuck the Fake News that tells you things you don't want to hear.  Be proud of your bigotry.  Lean in to your misogyny.  Revel in your cruelty.  Wipe your asses with the Constitution and laugh when Liberal whine about it!

Trump's 2016 appeal began with telling the base to celebrate everything the party elites told them to be ashamed of, and absolving the GOP base of all the heinous shit they had said and done that had blown up in their faces during the Dubya years. 

So whether Trump is wheeled out of office in January, 2029, drooling and gibbering, or he goes out toes-up on a gurney before then, the MAGA mob isn't going anywhere.  And because the rule is that the MAGA mob must never, ever be required to admit they were wrong or had made a mistake, you can bet your last $10 egg that the next Republican demagogue to win the MAGA mob will do it by finding a way to absolve them of all the heinous shit they are saying and doing now, that will have blown up in their faces by the then.

No Half Measures