They Knew.

They knew, or they were completely delusional.  

And in just this past week, we find four prime examples from prominent recently-former Republicans looking back past the "Danger!  Do Not Enter!" Forbidden Zone barrier of 2016 and noting just how long ago it should have been clear to anyone that they were building a Doomsday machine with no off switch.

Tim Miller knew.  And, looking back, it's clear now that Scarborough either knew it and won't admit it, or didn't know it because he's a fucking lump.  

And credit to Miller for cutting Squint off at the "McCain wuz a maverick" pass.  Yeah, sure, but he tapped Sarah Palin as his VP, because Palin was the one that got the base to stand up and salute.  

From NJ.com, October 4, 2008:

Palin: The Lowest Common Denominator

... Here's what Rich Lowry had to say: "Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, 'Hey, I think she just winked at me.' And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it." 

Post-debate, Hannity gushed about how attractive Palin was. At Palin rallies, you can buy buttons about how "hot" their VP is, etc. And yet they called Biden sexist for saying Palin was more attractive than he was? They called Campbell Brown sexist for wanting an example of Sarah Palin's foreign policy experience. 

Palin employed sex appeal in the debate in a display unbecoming of a 44-year-old mother of 5 and a candidate for one of the highest offices in the land. As a woman, I was embarrassed and sickened. And that is why republicans think she "won" the debate--because she employed cutesiness, recited all her rehearsed lines, and didn't answer any questions she did not want to ask. Often, she just out-and-out lied... 

And let's be clear: McCain knew exactly what he was doing when he took on Palin.  It was political Viagra for a limp campaign, and came from the same, clear-eyed, ruthless understanding of exactly who the GOP base really was, that his visit to Liberty University to kiss Jerry Falwell's poxy ass came from.   The same Jerry Falwell that McCain had publicly slammed as an "agent of intolerance" who represented the "outer reaches of American politics" just eight years earlier.  

You will also remember that reliable Conservative stalactite Kathleen Parker, had her bump-it blown back by the response from her loyal readers to her column suggest that Palin wasn't up to snuff.  From the long-gone Firedoglake:

Kathleen Parker Shocked To Find Her Party’s Full Of “Vicious”, “Threatening”, Delusional Wingnuts

By: Blue Texan Wednesday October 1, 2008

Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.
...
"After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

And she knows vicious. Here's Parker in 2003, on the Democratic presidential candidates:

Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot."

Suck it up, Kathleen. You've been tossing red meat to a caged rabid animal for two decades. No sympathy when it finally bites you.
Now, she whines:

...when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.

I'm truly speechless.

You will also remember The Most Ubiquitous Conservative Writer in the Solar System, wiping his brow in relief, because now that Palin was fading like a bad dream, everything was looking great for the future of David Brooks' Republican party.  This was mere months before Donald Trump oozed down the escalator.  And you all know what happened next.  

Next up we have Stuart Steven saying straight out that he was wrong, wrong, wrong about the Republican party.  That all the terrible things that "people" [he means "Liberals" but still can't say it] said about the GOP turned out to be true.  

Then we have Stevens' fellow Lincoln Square colleague, Rick Wilson, (get better colleagues, Stuart) who was flown to England and feted by the UK's Quiet Riot podcast so that he could drink their mead, eat their bully beef and lie about his origin story.  From the podcast:

I've done this longer than any other Republican leader.  I did this starting in 2015. I was the founder of the never Trump movement. Yeah. I've run the Lincoln Project now. Over 10 years now. 

Like hell  he was.  The "Never Trump" name and concept were just a hashtag on Twitter in early 2016 that cropped up during the Republican presidential primaries.  Then, thanks to glowing, round-the-clock coverage by MSNBC, goofs like Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol became the public face of a tiny number of Republicans who were freaked out that Wingnut Judgement Day might finally be just around the corner.

And what Wilson is trying to pass off as founding "Never Trump" in 2015 was just him doing normal, well-paid, campaign dirty work for a candidate.  He worked for the Rubio campaign until Rubio flamed out, then hiring himself out to the Cruz campaign.  Which is no more the "founding" of anything than working for Santorum in 2012 was founding a "Never Romney" movement.  

Also, fun fact, the Lincoln Project was actually founded in December of 2019 when Conservative grifters figured out that credulous Liberals would throw huge bags of money at any former Republican who would produce slick "Trump is an asshole" ads that never budged a single vote but was political PornHub to those credulous Liberals.  Founded by George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, Rick Wilson, Jennifer Horn, Ron Steslow, Reed Galen, and Mike Madrid, and two years later had all but collapsed due to sexual and financial scandal.  

Inside the Lincoln Project’s ‘toxic’ workplace

Interviews with nearly two dozen people with knowledge of the group’s workings reveal a culture of infighting, sexist language and disparate treatment.

But inside Wilson's shameful flim-flamming of our British friends, we find a grain of truth.  

After a lengthy disquisition in which Wilson shows that he knew perfectly well that going into the 2016 election, a huge percentage of the Republican base was motivated by an unhinged, racist hatred of Barack Obama, one of the Brits say, well yeah, but hadn't this sort of thing been going on for decades?

What about Nixon's Southern Strategy?  And that 30% who hate Obama isn't enough, is it? They have to be amped up.  That hatred has to be used by someone.  

Great point.   Wilson replies...

Wilson: Listen, the old theory of the Republican party was we knew that 25% of the base, if I may put it as bluntly as it used to be said in the room, were cousin fucking weirdos.  

Big laugh

Wilson: And you brought them out of the closet every four years. You hosed them off and you sent them off to vote.

We did not want to talk about those people. We did not particularly like those people. I come from... you can call it the RINOS or the country club Republicans or whatever you want to call it, but we were the guys who could win races and the weirdos could not win races, but that coalition, they were a part of it. Now they're in the government. 

You may have noticed two different flavors of lies here.

First, it was never 25%.  As Stuart Stevens now effectively admits, it was much higher than that.  Probably closer to 70% or 80%.

Second, "everyone in the room" means that everyone in Republicans leadership knew damn well what kind of dangerous nutcases these people.

And third, as to this "we were the guys who could win races" claptrap?  A lie by omission. The only way your country club Republicans clients could win anything was by flattering and pandering to "cousin fuckers".  By ratcheting up their hatred every election cycle, and using Fox News and Hate Radio to keep them at a full boil in between.  Without the "cousin fuckers" you'd never have won fucking thing and eventually they figured it out.

And do you know who was jumping up and down, shouting warnings about Frankenstein, and the Golem and the Sorcerer's apprentice while Rick Wilson was getting rich whipping the cousin fuckers into a frenzy?  From me in 2005 in a "Both Sides Do It" column by (who else?) David Brooks -- 

 ...I’ll name 15 leaders of your party who are intolerant, hate-mongering theocrats. Superstition-touting extremists. Your opinion leaders. The ones who get out the vote for your candidates and without which you cocksucking Cocktail Party Republicans would never win anything.

-- which is a sentiment I've repeated in dozens-- probably hundreds -- of posts ever since.

And just for sport, there is also this from me in 2011:

The sad truth is that Hate is the Right's Ring of Power. They're never going to give it up, because they know the minute they do -- the minute they're no longer allowed to pretend that Liberals are evil, freedom-hating fifth-columnist monsters who are dragging America into a Marxist abyss on the secret orders of our Kenyan Usurper Overlord -- their whole ideology would implode...

...they would never win another election...

...and tens of thousands of powerful, well-remunerated insiders from Rush Limbaugh to David Gregory who depend on that hate for their daily bread would suddenly have to go out and find honest work.

To be clear, it wasn't just me.  I was one voice in a great chorus of Liberal writers and bloggers who were all sounding the alarm.  That to stay in power, the leaders of the GOP were now explicitly bending the knee to Hate Radio and Fox News because their dependence on Conservative media to get out the vote and drum up contributions was now complete.  

To anyone paying attention with honest eyes, this was all clear as day when, in 2009, the head of the RNC had to go groveling to Rush Limbaugh to beg forgiveness for saying [checks notes] true things about that despicable scumbag.

Steele to Rush: I'm sorry

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

But the louder we Liberals sounded the alarm, the louder we were denounced as alarmist crackpots.  And this went on and on right up until Trump showed up and it had become all far too late to stop what was about to happen.   

What happened next? 

First, media corporations -- which were overstuffed with savvy pundits who had assured the public that the GOP was fine and healthy and this sort of thing could never happen -- began scrambling for talking heads who could explain the inexplicable.  

And, second, they wanted nothing to do with all those Liberal alarmist crackpots who, as it turned out, had been right all along.  Because those Liberal alarmist crackpots tended to arrive with receipts.  And those receipts made their vastly overpaid savvy pundits look like idiots.  Because we can't have that.

The much better alternative was to platform the shit out of a handful of now-unemployed Republican comms people who you all already knew, and who were only too happy to spin the story of the Rise of Trump in a much more savvy pundit-friendly way.  That this was some kinda Black Swan event.  A fever that was sure to break sooner or later.  A glitch in the Matrix that no one could have seen coming and for which certainly none of them were responsible.

But you know, come to think of it, you know who might be kinda responsible for a big chunk of the horrors that were now raining down on their heads?   Those damn Liberals.  Because, just maybe, it was them saying the Republican party was a racist party... made so many Republican voters mad that, well, they went ahead and started doing racism just to say "Fuck you!" to the Liberals.

Which was a theory floated by Charlie Sykes and a number of his guests when he was the public voice of The Bulwark... as the Bulwark was being relentlessly promoted by CNN and MSNBC the New York Times and the Washington Post.  Because for hardwired right-wing goons like Sykes, regardless of the circumstances, somehow, some way, the Left will always turn out to have been the villains.  

They either knew they were playing with something dangerous and radioactive, or they were willfully blind to it.  And as the toxicity of the GOP base spiked higher and higher year after year, the more they were either willing to go along with it for the money and the influence, or the tighter they had to squeeze their eyes shut to what was happening all around them.  

And once it all fell apart, then came the mad scramble for...believe it or not...credit.   Listen to any Never Trump podcast and within minutes you'll hear them boasting about how they were warning Republicans about Trump in 2016 or 2017 or 2018 and woe betide the fools who did not listen.  You will hear them rolling their eyes at how all those morons called them [checks notes] alarmist crackpots back in 2018 or 2019 or 2020.  And now look at 'em!  

Their whole marketing campaign is based on the single premise that they saw this coming when no one else did, which is why you should send them money and heed their warning that the Democratic party needs to become more Centrist.  And buy their book!

Now that they have successfully colonized what little was left of the "Liberal media" it's safe for them to mention, often in passing, that, sure, they knew the base was nuts.  That when your job is to get Republican elected, and bigots, imbeciles and Fundies are all what you have to work with, then that's what you work with.   

Too bad.  So sad.  Also buy my book. 

No wonder they hate Liberal bloggers and podcasters.  No wonder they continue to pretend we never existed.  We fuck up their entire business model.  

So, while we know we'll never be invited to cross the pond and feted by the Brits, as we eat their prime joints of venison and partridge and drink their Taylor Fladgate port and tell the true tale of what really happened, today I felt compelled to set the "Who, What, When" record straight once again.

Burn The Lifeboats