Accountability

 

"I want to live in a world where there is deep shame by all the people who worked in the Trump administration. Like, I want to live in a world where, 25 years from now, when people, uh, they've got a gap in their resume because they don't want to put they were part of the Trump administration on their resume." -- Sarah Longwell, The Bulwark.

What a noble sentiment!  Would that we lived in a world where people who uncritically served and cheered on a corrupt and criminally incompetent administration that left disaster after disaster in its wake would end up feeling really, really bad about it.  So deeply ashamed that it would affect their employability.  

Sigh.

Hey, how about, just for goofs, instead of looking forward 25 years to a utopian future where feeling shame about serving and cheering on a corrupt and criminally incompetent administration had, y'know, consequences -- 

-- let's look back 25 years and see how this noble sentiment played out in the real world during what our Never Trumper friends would have you believe were the good old days of rectitude and personal responsibility. 

So, the year 2025 - 25 gives us...hey!  2000!

You might remember that was the year a Republican mob disrupted vote counting in Florida.  The year that five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices anointed George W. Bush president of the United States.

After that came Bush's catastrophic failure on 9/11.  Then lying us into the wrong war.  Then fucking that war up -- the worst foreign policy debacle in modern history, but enriched the vice president's cronies and former business partners.  Pissing away the Clinton surplus and saddling us with even bigger deficits than Reagan and Bush I combined.  Then came Hurricane Katrina.  Teri Schiavo.  The failed attempt to privative Social Security.  The attorney general scandal.  Then the collapse of the world economy.  And so many more!

So, if we rejigger Ms. Longwell's words just a little bit...

"I want to live in a world where there is deep shame by all the people who worked in the George W. Bush administration. Like, I want to live in a world where, 25 years later, when people, uh, they've got a gap in their resume because they don't want to put they were part of the Dubya administration on their resume." -- driftglass.

But that didn't happen, did it?   

You will remember that, having been in office barely a minute and in response to a reporter's question about the arrest of his friend, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., in 2009 for disorderly conduct outside of his own home, Barack Obama made this offhand but truthful remark:

"I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it's fair to say... that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home." 

You’d have thought that he had publicly wiped his ass with the Bill of Rights.  A president of the United States had the temerity to say, out loud, that some cops acted stupidly!  Massive blowback.  Massive outcry.  

Fun historical fact: eight years later,  the same people who pretended to faint in outraged droves over this would go on to elect elect a racist internet troll and adjudicated rapist who calls anyone who disagrees with him even slightly "stupid" and "terrible" and "weak" and "the enemy of the people" and "terrorists" and worse, on and on and on and on and on, every fucking day.

Anyway, hence, the so-called beer summit.

But when it came the actual war crimes committed by the Bush administration, the legacy media and Conservative media and Republican politicians all locked arms and decided on a strategy of purposeful ignorance.

From Eric Alterman in The Nation, May 6, 2009:

Even after the disgraceful performance of so many armchair warriors during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, who would have dared predict the willingness, nay, eagerness, of respected journalists and pundits to argue in favor of purposeful ignorance? Sadly, many of them have shown less interest in potential war crimes committed by the Bush administration than little Misha Lerner, the Jewish Primary Day School fourth grader who quizzed Condoleezza Rice about her inability to explain the legality of these policies to a group of Stanford students.

While many have made the case to varying degrees, Peggy Noonan made it most explicitly: “Some things in life need to be mysterious,” she said of America’s role in torturing terrorist suspects. “Sometimes you need to just keep walking.” 

This is the full Noonan quote:

 "Some things in life need to be mysterious.  Sometimes you need to just keep walking. ... It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that." 

Go down the list of every war criminal in the Bush administration and you will find none – zero – who ever paid any price for any of the atrocities they committed.

In fact, this was the mastermind of the Iraq debacle back in 2014 at a Politico event.

Go down the list of the most prominent Bush administration cheerleaders and torture enthusiasts and what do you find?

You find that none of them ever apologized.  None were ever chastised.  None were shamed out of their media gigs.  None of them ever missed a meal.

Instead, you find some of them, like Nicolle Wallace and Joe Scarborough, hosting shows on MSNBC, Wallace glossing over the entire Bush Administration with the phrase, “My former boss whatever you think of him”.  You find them with op-ed columns in The New York Times, the Washington Post and The Atlantic.

You find the scumbag who cooked up the absurd legal predicate for the Bush administration's torture regime, John Yoo, is now the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. 

You find Spit-Comb Paul Wolfowitz being appointed the president of the World Bank, a job he had to quit two years later only because of an unrelated sex scandal.

All the Fox News degenerates who led the scorched earth slander campaign against the anti-war movement all still have jobs, and before he died and went to hell, Donald Trump awarded Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  

So, Sarah Longwell, this is exactly how we got to where we are.  Rules and consequences.  Your party’s rules and your party's consequences, going back decades.

Republicans spent an enormous amount of time and effort teaching generations of Republican voters one, basic rule:  that, no matter how ignorant and bigoted and wrong they acted, it was their God-given right to never be held responsible for anything.  To never feel shame for being dead-rat stupid.  To revel in being vicious and cruel.   

And the consequences?  You can see those all around you every day.

You taught Conservative media and Republican politicians that the key to success was flattering and appeasing the mob.  

You taught them, the louder the demagogue and the bloodier the lie, the more the morons would cheer.

I Am The Liberal Media

Conservative Agenda-Affirming Care

A range of medical, social, and behavioral treatments that help awful people align their physical traits with their depraved ideology.

No Half Measures

Dumperor Zero

A tale as old as time.

Find a scapegoat.

Blame the scapegoat.

Kill the scapegoat.

Burn The Lifeboats

George Will Would Like To Sing "Daisy" For You

You may not know it, but two famous fictional villains sprang into existence in what urban planners refer to as the Champaign-Urbana Metropolitan Statistical Area, but what we Illinoisans know as Chambana.

There was, of course, the HAL 9000 computer, which became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois on January 12, 1992. Later, HAL would become dangerously insane and have to have his higher brain functions shut off.

The region's other famous fictional villain is Mr. George Fredrick Poppin' Fresh Will, who became operational somewhere in Champaign, Illinois sometime during the 17th century. He, too, would eventually become dangerously insane and have to have his higher brain functions shut off, at which point the Washington Post gave him a permanent position on the op-ed page, He can also occasionally be seen sharing his stories of the siege of Constantinople between stories about missing persons and stories about UFO on a thing called NewsNation, which is [checks note] station 13,432 on your cable teevee dial.

Because his higher brain functions are kaput, Mr. Will is only capable of repeating various climate denial mendacities, and the simple song he was taught back when he was but a barefoot boy, with cheek of tan.

 

And that song is called, Both Sides.

Both   Sides

Both   Sides

No other frame will do

I'm half crazy

From huffing Conservative glue...

Today's Both Siderist regurgitation takes this form:

Abracadabra! It’s the dueling Harris and Trump economic magic acts.

Between Harris’s price controls and Trump’s tariffs, this campaign is a travesty of economic policy.

Adding a dash of substance to her one-word political program (“Joy”), Kamala Harris says that as president she would tell the Federal Trade Commission to first define “excessive” price increases, then prosecute the living daylights out of the miscreants responsible for cornflakes costing (by some undisclosed metric) too much...

And this:

Harris, to whom the private sector is as foreign as Mongolia...

Then, at roughly one third of the way through the wordcount comes this:

Donald “Tariff Man” Trump’s Harris-esque contribution to this year’s magical beliefs expands upon his 2016 promise that Mexico would pay for his “beautiful” border wall. Now he says China, like all nations that export goods to the United States, will somehow pay the additional tariffs...

And this:

He also promises to cut energy costs in half — in 100 days or less. And the six-times-bankrupted financial wizard says he will lower auto insurance costs — details pending...

Then Will takes a moment to piss on anyone with a byline who has not immediately lined up to crucify he Harris/Walz campaign on a cross of hot-takes, anonymous slander and neg-vibes -- 

Today’s sophisticated journalists are unlike those hard-bitten, fedora-wearing journalistic skeptics in the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play “The Front Page.” Their successors in today’s newsrooms have tumbled base-over-apex for Harris, she of hitherto hidden — very hidden — depths, and for the grandpa coach, paragon of “Midwestern values” that have suddenly smitten the press corps.

-- then wanders off, wondering aloud who is to blame for the fact that everything these days seems to smell of urine.  

I Am The Liberal Media

The Conservative Road to Damascus is a Merry-Go-Round

It just goes around and around, over and over again, and always ends up in the same place.

If you have been paying attention you may have noticed this trend over at Conservative, Inc.

Every few months for the past eight years or so, some prominent Conservative out there who has cadged for  themselves a sweet media gig based on their Superior Knowledge of The Subject of Politics and Conservatism stumbles over the fact that something they believed to have been inviolable Conservative orthodoxy was bullshit all along.  

In fact, history has shown that, with the exception of Beltway pundits, no group has been more loudly, repeatedly and disastrously wrong about the true nature of the Republican party and the Conservative movement than [checks notes] elite Republicans and Conservatives.  

Yet somehow they all still have elite mainstream media jobs.

And you know who turns out to have been right about the Right all along?  

Yeah.  That's right.  Us America-hating, terrorist-loving, godless, commie, baby-killing Liberals.  Whose are all still treated like pariahs by the mainstream media.

Over and over again.  Around and around the Conservative Epiphany Merry-Go-Round goes.

This post started out as an examination of this New York Times op-ed last week by David French:

The Great Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Movement

Maybe a blog post of tsk-tsking.  Maybe revisiting the hurry-up-quick way that French tidied up his extremely problematic professional history enough for the Sulzberger family -- who are always thirsty for yet another Conservative to bring under the Times' banner -- to put him on payroll.  

But I set all that aside over the busy travel/socializing weekend, which was  followed by time spent errand-running and podcast prepping and doing, and when I came back to the subject of David French, I wanted to widen the aperture a little.  

After all, French is in no way unique.  Not the only one who, after decades of living La Vida Falwell, "suddenly" noticed a glitch in the Republican Jebus Matrix at exactly the same moment that Donald Trump ripped the mask off the Republican party and showed the world who they had really been all along. 

Before he passed, I wrote dozens of posts about the late Michael Gerson's long, strange journey from Evangelical thug and key advisor and speechwriter for George W.Bush...to his gig at The Washington Post where he spent eight years relentlessly savaging President Obama in very unChristian terms...to his very slowly dawning realization that his Republican party really was going to nominate Donald Trump...to his very slowly dawning realization that his Conservative Evangelical movement was, in fact, 100% cool with Donald Trump.

It's been a well-trod path, this denial!denial!denial! decade after decade that anything was fundamentally wrong on the Right.   That to win elections, the Republican party had been filling itself up with garbage people for decades: bigots and imbeciles whose votes and viewer attention had been purchased by way of promises of all sorts of nonsense by party elites.  

And, just like the collapse of the housing market, it turns out that all the specialists and experts and journalists who were supposed to be keeping an eye on the basic soundness of the system were profiting from looking the other way.  

But rather that going along with the increasingly absurd reportage from the cloistered garden of the Beltway media about the state of American democracy, there were a few of us out here in the Real World telling a very different story about what we were seeing and hearing.  

And, just as happened with the collapse of the housing market, anyone who was out there contradicting the received wisdom of the Beltway media was dismissed as a crackpot and an alarmist, because all the Very Serious People just knew that foundations of American democracy were rock-solid.  That the two-party system was functioning as it should.  

It's gonna be Rubio!

And when it all fell down, how uncanny it was -- how deeply uncomfortable it made all those Very Serious People -- that the real Republican party turned out to be just as we America-hating, godless commie Liberals had been describing it all along.  A party of bigots and imbecile, grifters and demagogues, cynics, fascists, homophobes, oligarchs and collaborators which those professionals with Superior Knowledge of The Subject of Politics and Conservatism like Michael Gerson and David French had denied and denied and denied existed at all.

But Gerson was a real trooper, and even as the political and ideological movements to which he had devoted his entire adult life were shown to have been colossal frauds, he never retracted any of the slander he spent eight years heaping on Obama and Democrats, never stopped pretending that his Republican party had lost its mind suddenly and with no warning, never stopped trying to blame Both Sides, never stopped trying to Tone Police us dirty hippies, and, of course, never lost his gig at The Washington Post just because he had been horribly wrong about everything.  

Comes now David French, who, to his credit, actually gets a little further down the road than Gerson ever did when he acknowledges that "many of the critics of the pro-life movement were right all along":

I still believe there are many deeply sincere pro-life Americans. I see their anger in response to Trump’s statements, even when they’ve previously supported him. They are people who genuinely believe that all human life is precious and should be protected from conception until natural death.

But I also recognize that many of the critics of the pro-life movement were right all along. When push came to shove, the pro-life position was either secondary to other values or it genuinely was punitively tribal — enthusiastically aimed straight at the supposedly licentious left but ready to be abandoned the instant the commitment to unborn children might endanger the larger MAGA political project. Abortion is the poison pill that Trump doesn’t want to swallow.

And at no extra charge, Mr. French also got a little taste of the brand of Evangelical Christian love and forgiveness that his side had been handing out to us America-hating, terrorist-loving, dirty, commie hippies for as long as I can remember:

At its worst, the pro-life movement was also deeply cynical. Many of its members have spent the last eight years mocking and bullying pro-life conservatives who’ve refused to support Trump, even when we rightly said he was a terrible ambassador for a virtuous cause. I’ve been called a baby-killer or murderer or heretic more times than I can count.

Mr. French ends on this note:

The older I get, the more I’m convinced that we simply don’t know who we are — or what we truly believe — until our values carry a cost. For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has made the case that life begins at conception. Alabama’s Supreme Court agreed. Yet the Republican Party can’t live with its own philosophy...

But I choose to end on this one.  It's from Ayn Rand's crappy science fiction novel "Atlas Shrugged", but it seems too appropriate not to appropriate:

You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I-I am the man who has granted you your wish.

Bonus Content.  

This is from Time Magazine, February 07, 2005.  Nearly 20 years ago.  Same issue, in fact, in which Michael Gerson was named one of Time Magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals".

Give it a read and and see how the dangerous trajectory the Republican party was already on was clearly visible to any reasonable person who bothered to pay attention:

Does Bush Owe the Religious Right?

...

What do they think Bush owes them? His campaign barely had time to sweep up the confetti last Nov. 3 before the victorious President got a congratulatory bouquet of praise, threats, warnings and demands. "In your re-election, God has graciously granted America — though she doesn't deserve it — a reprieve from the agenda of paganism," wrote Bob Jones III, president of the namesake South Carolina university that his grandfather founded to foster "Christ-like" character. "Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing." But if Jones saw the victory as an opportunity to be seized, others were preaching the biblical virtues of patience and caution. "Can we handle success and increased influence with grace and prudence?" Watergate conspirator turned prison evangelist Chuck Colson wrote in a column. "Sad to say, the church has managed to shoot itself in the foot almost every time it has achieved power in society. So what we need right now is a bracing dose of humility."

Having helped wage a presidential campaign over big issues like a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, conservative Christians are not likely to be content winning skirmishes like the one that newly installed Education Secretary Margaret Spellings fought last week against the cartoon character Buster, famous for being Arthur's best friend. She objected to one episode that featured Buster visiting a real-life lesbian couple in Vermont. After her warning about the dangers of exposing young viewers to "the lifestyles portrayed in the episode," PBS decided not to distribute the show to its 350 publicly financed stations.

As Bush begins his last term in the White House, the voters who believe they did more than anyone else to put him there are asking themselves and him: What now? And when, if not now? "He's not the typical politician who 'understands' us," says Michael Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association. "He's one of us."

...

Evangelical activists, for their part, say that as Bush looks forward, he should also look back. They claim that what brought churchgoing Christians (including a record number of Hispanics) to the polls more than any other issue last year was gay marriage. Initiatives banning it were on the ballot in 11 states and passed in every one, overwhelmingly in almost every case. So religious groups were startled and angry when Bush, bowing to what he said were political realities, seemed to signal in a pre-Inaugural interview with the Washington Post that he would not press the Senate to pass the federal ban.

The reverberations came almost instantly. Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who sends a daily e-mail to 125,000 Christian activists, says his computer mailbox was jammed with hundreds of complaints, many lamenting, "I worked my heart out for this guy." The Arlington Group, a coalition of conservative religious organizations, quickly fired off to Bush political guru Karl Rove a private letter signed by such figures as Bauer, Don Wildmon of the American Family Association, Focus on the Family's James Dobson, conservative standard bearer Paul Weyrich and evangelist Jerry Falwell. They laid down a none-too-subtle threat that the Administration's "defeatist attitude" on gay marriage might make it "impossible for us to unite our movement on an issue such as Social Security privatization where there are already deep misgivings."

I Am The Liberal Media

Dispensing an Unlimited Supply of Lies, Racism and Treason, 24/7/365

I Am The Liberal Media

After The Harvest The Thresher Rolled Merrily Along

Y'know, I've been writing about the Republican Doomsday Machine for long time now.  

Here's a quick sampling.  

From "Ain't no Party Like a Whig Party" (2014):

You will find no mention of the terrible wingnut Doomsday Machine that Conservatives like David Brooks eagerly helped construct and set in motion -- a machine built to create precisely the havoc which Mr. Brooks now weeps over.

From "Joe Scarborough Uses Up His Question Mark Quota For The Decade" (2018):

[Addressing Joe Scarborough] Your party ignored decades of dire warnings from people like me and went ahead and built a political Doomsday machine to fuck over people like me.  And in November of 2016, your good friend Donald Trump and his Russian handler Vladimir Putin took it away from you and are currently using it to blow shit up that you actually care about.

From "Adam Kinzinger's SuperPAC to Hang Out if You Ever Want to Rap or Just Get Weird With Somebody" (2021)

So Conservatives like you [Charlie Sykes] spent decades wrecking the country and creating a Republican doomsday machine with no "off" switch.  And now that that doomsday machine has run out of your control, you think it is mean and unfair that the people you spent decades ignoring, reviling and generally fucking over don't trust you because you won't deal on the square with the fact that You.  Built.  This.

From "John Boehner Lines Up For His Shot of Cheap Grace" (2021):

Cheap Grace Republicans like Weepin' John [Boehner] want to be remembered for having heroically said spicy things about the state of their party long, long after it was too late.  And would very much like America not to remember the role they played in building that party in the first place and in mocking and slandering anyone trying to warn them that they were building a democracy-destroying doomsday machine.  In this case, what Weepin' John would very much like America to refrain from remembering that, for all of his boozy bluster, he voted for Trump.

Twice

And the electoral Doomsday Machine which I wrote about was one that arrogant Conservative elites thought they could control because they always believed there was a magic switch.  A magic AZ-5 switch (see the video) -- a Dubya switch or a Jeb! switch or a Chris Christie switch -- that would cool things down if the machine started to run out of control.

But there wasn't.

From "The Doomsday Machine" (2022):

For decades, while the establishment media masturbated itself blind in their Platonic Cave, the GOP has been worked diligently to create an unstoppable Gingrich/Limbaugh political Doomsday Machine.

A Doomsday Machine that could not be reasoned with or bargained with.

A Doomsday Machine with no "off" switch.

And they succeeded.  

What really depresses me, dear reader, is the fact that I wrote about exactly this accelerating phenomenon on the Right using exactly this same metaphor long before Trump was anything but a skeevy New York real estate scumbag, and long before Barack Obama was a blip on the presidential radar.  The year was 2006.  The month was September.  The post was "Reactionary".  Here's the graphic.

And here's a short snip:

Because if the entire Right Wing understands anything it is this – as frustrating and degrading as it is to men like Trent Lott, Tom Tancredo, G. Felix Allen and Rick Santorum who really, really want to shout their love for all things Segregated and/or Despotic from the rooftops, it is still not socially acceptable to publicly embrace and celebrate your Inner Klansman.

Thus they must commune with their Swine Army in code.

They must use lightly encrypting hatespeech to manipulate the Rove Rods to get the Electoral Reactor Core seething hot enough to activate the base...but always keep the Bobo Koolant level of soothing denial, spin and outright lies juuust high enough to keep the Moderates from being directly exposed to and freaked out by the unshielded Core of the GOP.

The only thing that changed in 2015/2016 was that the  Electoral Reactor Core had been kept running so hot and openly racist during the GOP's Fake Tea Party phase that by the time 2015 rolled around the base was hungry for someone who would go all the way.  Yank the rods out, dump all the coolant and stop speaking in code.  

It is a lie that somehow Trump hijacked the Republican base.  Quite the opposite: they happily tossed him the keys and begged him to drive.  Because after being flattered and pandered to by party bosses and Conservative elites for decades -- party bosses and Conservative elites who always promised them the moon and stars to get 'em to the polls but left the high and dry and scurried away back the respectable side of town once the election was over -- the racist base finally figured out that they had all the power.

That they were the party, not the party bosses and Conservative elites.

And once they figured that out, they manifested the candidate of their heart's deepest, most racist desire.  A candidate who would speak to them in their own language.  Not the perfumed code-talk of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but the language of Gingrich and Hate Radio and Fox News.  A candidate who would take the party bosses and Conservative elites by the throat and make 'em squeal and cry and bend the knee to the mob instead of the other way around.

And what further depresses me, dear reader, is the fact that I also wrote about this exact dynamic long before Trump was anything but a skeevy New York real estate scumbag, and long before Barack Obama was a blip on the presidential radar.  This time the year was 2005.  The month was April.  The post was "Little Red State Fundy sez...".  

So how did we arrive at where we are now?

Well, imagine you had an objectively grotesque idea that was going to make you a lot of money, but was also going to kill and injure a lot of people.  How could you make it palatable enough so that once you put it into action, the rest of humanity would not rise up and destroy you?  

Marketing!

For example, claiming that the objectively evil institution of human chattel slavery was actually ordained by God, and clad in scripture.  From the March 21, 1861 "Cornerstone Speech" by Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens.

They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal...

The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made "one star to differ from another star in glory." The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.

Then claiming that, since God had obviously ordained that white men should rule over all creation, opposition to this law of nature was obviously insane:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics.

Which is why the objectively horrifying concept of white supremacy not only survived the complete the annihilation of the Confederacy and the destruction of the South, but sprang right back into power all over the South the minute the Union army was withdrawn, and stayed in power until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.  It's why it also survived the Civil Rights movement and went on to become the bedrock of Nixon's Southern Strategy, the rocket fuel of the Reagan Revolution, and the rage that drives the reliable base of the Republican party to this very day.  

Because once the monstrous economic system of human chattel slavery had built a virtuous Christian shield around itself, the ideology of white supremacy -- an ideology of divinely authorized hatred and racism -- became self-sustaining.   Slavery could be eliminated.  Jim Crow could be defeated.  But the ideology of white supremacy rolled merrily along, because there was always going to be trouble and strife in the world.  And for unscrupulous men, trouble and strife were always going to be opportunities to advance their own agendas by finding scapegoats to blame, then rallying the meatheads to hate the scapegoats, then conning the meatheads into believing that only way to save the nation from the wicked schemes of scapegoats was by elevating these unscrupulous men to positions of political power.  

And that is exactly what the modern Conservative movement did.  It took the building blocks of white supremacy and built a bigger, broader coalition of hate out of them by adding gays and immigrants and unions and non-Christians and mouthy women and dirty, commie Liberals and the media and on and on and on.

And they had a name for this new nemesis of all that was good and holy.  And that name was Big Gummint!

Big Gummint was the Enemy of Freedom!

Big Gummint's dirty, commie social programs were stealing your tax dollars, Mr. and Mrs. Hardworking Murrican, and give them to moochers and takers and Welfare Queens.  

Big Gummint was stealing your job and your future and giving it to you-know-who.  

And the only way to defeat Evil Big Gummint and its cabal of blacks and women and gays and liberals and so forth, was to smash it!  Slash it!  Shrink it!

"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." -- Lobbyist Grover Norquist.

And obviously the only way to do that was to cut off it's funding through massive tax cuts for the wealthy and across the board deregulation of powerful corporations.  But don't worry about cuts to any of the stuff that matters to you, Mr. and Mrs. Hardworking Murrican.  These sweeping tax cuts will pay for themselves!  Just ask respected Conservative haver-of-opinions and managing editor of The Weekly Standard, David Fucking Brooks.  (From 2001, but the link to The Weekly Standard article died when The Weekly Standard died.)

The New Stupid Party

LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of excellence that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime,

Last week the Congressional Budget Office came out with a budget forecast. The report immediately got submerged in a chatterstorm about whether Congress or the White House would dip into something called the Social Security trust fund, but the essential facts are these: The CBO economists estimated that the federal government will run a surplus of about $150 billion in 2001. That’s a lower surplus than the CBO estimated a few months ago, before the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge. But even in these adverse circumstances, the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006.

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund."

By now, the new machinery was fully in place.  Thanks to Reagan bringing Conservative Evangelicals into the Republican coalition of  monsters, the ancient evil of white supremacy and it's sweeping contempt for all "others" and anyone allied with those "others" now had a religious shield to hide behind.  And in September of 2001, the reactionary faith-based defense system of Modern Conservatism was suddenly right there, out in the open, with its poisonous, bigoted fangs bared for all to see.

  

A few years ago when I wrote -- 

...we are not in the fourth year of the Trump Administration.

We are in the fortieth year of the Reagan Revolution. 

-- I wasn't kidding.  

Just as the ideology of white supremacy outlasted the depraved economic system it was created to justify, so too has the Right's unhinged hatred of Big Gummint (and its evil cabal George Soros, Bill Clinton's kill-list, Hillary Clinton's email, Obama's birth certificate, Pizzagate, Hunter Biden's laptop and whatever) outlasted the crackpot economic dogma of Tax Cuts Will Solve Everything which that hatred was deployed to enact.  

And the thing is, all your bestest Never Trump pals knew all this.  Knew that the base was racist and nuts and getting worse.  Knew that pandering to that base was the price their favorite candidates had to pay to get through a Republican primary.  

After all, how could they not know?  How could professional political operatives working inside the Republican party not see what was happening right in front of them, and how could the highly paid, widely respected cream of the Conservative public intellectual pundit class not see the trajectory their party was on, when dirty commie nobody Libtards like me with no access to anyone "inside" could see it so clearly and write about so passionately long before Trump was anything more than a skeevy New York real estate developer?

They knew all of it, but were willing to go right on cashing those checks and chalked it up to "political sophistication" until the moment when it was very much too late to undo the damage they had done and unmake the monster they had created.  

And while it's great and all that recently-former Republicans like Miller and Longwell are now building lucrative media careers out of exactly the same materials and observations that made us Liberal into media pariahs not so many years ago, it would be nice if some Never Trumper somewhere would admit just once that, by Jove, the Left really were right about the Right all along.  

Instead of, y'know, blocking us any time we bring up the inconvenient past.

I Am The Liberal Media

The Seven Horcruxes of True Conservatism

Long ago, for safekeeping, the soul of True Conservatism was cut up into Seven Horcruxes.  These are Conservatism's foundational axioms which, up until a minute ago, pretty much every Republican agreed with -- both the 98% of the party that lined up behind Trump, and the 2% who were shocked! shocked that the 98% lined up behind Trump.

And every time one of these horcruxes is destroyed -- either by decay and disuse, or by actually being enacted, after which that "shocked!shocked!" 2% get shocked all over again by discovering that, in real life, their dearest Conservative masturbatory fantasy was actually horrifying -- True Conservatism gasps a little more loudly and dies a little bit more.

First Horcrux:  Deficits are evil and can only be reduced by massive cuts to social programs, which is legit because poverty is caused by moral deficiency and the poor being kept helpless on the Commie Liberal "plantation".

Second Horcrux:  Massive tax cuts/reregulation/the "free market"/private charities will solve all problems, including any disruptions cause by massive cuts to social programs.

Third Horcrux:  Racism isn't real.  And even if it is, Democrats [Did you know They Founded!! The!! Klan!! Huh!! Huh!! Didja know that!!!] -- are the real racists.  

Fourth Horcrux: Abortion is murder and repealing Roe v. Wade is a moral imperative.  Pretty much self-explanatory and self-evident.  But just for fun, hey, guess who wrote this?

"The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better. "

Yeah, that was Conservative thought leader David Brooks in April of 2005.

Fifth Horcrux: An armed society is a polite society, but gun-grabbing commie Dems want to take everyone's guns away and leave us all defenseless.

As mass shooting have become daily events in the United States, even some of the most, it seems to be slowly dawning on a number of True Conservatives that, just maybe a country that has a wingnut media which pumps apocalyptic rage and paranoia toxins into its audience 24/7 shouldn't also be a country that is drowning in guns and open-carry/zero-training/stand-your-ground laws.

Sixth Horcrux: Packing the courts with Federalist Society killbots by whatever means necessary is completely legitimate in the fight against Liberal commies.

Via the Savior of the Republic, Rick Wilson:

3/ The Senate can and must deny Obama the chance to make an appointment to the Supreme Court. We have both the votes and the power to do so.

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) February 13, 2016

See also, "Justice Sunday" above.

Seventh Horcrux: All of the above is necessary because Liberals/Democrats are terrorist loving, Murrica hating weaklings who want to turn us into Soviet Russia!

If you doubt that simply consult the totality of Conservative media -- from the Limbaugh sewers to the National Review salons -- going back to Before the Time of Agnew.   All of it -- every paragraph, every sentence, every comma and period -- all of it is animated by fear mongering, barely concealed racism and a seething contempt for you and me and everything we hold dear.  

Here are a few excerpts from one speech by dead Rush Limbaugh, delivered at CPAC barely one month after Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009.  His "Of course I want Obama to fail" speech:

I am safe from any liberal attack, in public, because they would be afraid of offending Stalin...

I sometimes wonder if liberalism is not just a psychosis or a psychology, not an ideology... 

I have learned how to tweak liberals everywhere. I do it instinctively now. Tweak them in the media. And no reason to be afraid of these people. Why in the world would you be afraid of the deranged? ...

President Obama with the communications skills, you know he could wipe out the Republican Party. He can wipe out the Republican Party if he would inspire this country to be the best it could be, but we don't have to worry about that because that's not what he wants. He wants people in fear, angst and crisis, fearing the worst each and every day because that clears the decks for President Obama and his pals to come in with the answers, which are abject failures, historically shown and demonstrated... 

That the Democrats and Obama are asking you to feel better simply on the basis that they're going to get revenge for you, but your life isn't going to improve, somebody else's is just going to be destroyed and they want you to be happy over that. That's sick...

And beware of those different factions who seek as part of their attempt to redefine conservatism, as making sure the liberals like us, making sure that the media likes us. They never will, as long as we remain conservatives. They can't possibly like us; they're our enemy... 

This is the sewage of raw rage and paranoia that Conserative media scum -- including all of your favorite Never Trumpers -- spent decades pumping into the eager, thirsty veins of their reader, listeners and views. This was their native language.  Their mother tongue. 

And the all-powerful, all-occasion magic spell backstopping all seven horcruxes has been this Conservative fail-safe:  If you ever find yourself caught in a lie you can't deny, remember, Both Sides Do It (and Democrats are always worse.)

Soooo...

...if we take a look at the current condition of these seven pillars of Conservatism, what can we learn about the present state of the Conservative soul?

1.  Deficits?  Dead.  The canard of "fiscal conservatism" has gotten stomped near-to-death by every  successive Republican administration since Reagan.  And now, however hard Kevin McCarthy tries to reanimate that corpse, and however energetically our Conservative Never Trump "allies" try to blow on those embers...there are no embers.  The Trump years have proven what Liberal have said all along:  Republicans never gave a damn about deficits.

2.  Don't worry about massive cuts to social programs because, uh, tax cuts!  And, uh, deregulation!  Dead.  This has never been true, and once Dark Brandon got the entire Republican party on their feet, cheering for never cutting Medicare and Social Security, from hundreds of miles away, high atop the Fox News tower, once could almost hear the agonizing cries of Paul Ryan's granny-killin' soul leave his body.

3.  Racism isn't real/Democrats are the real racists.  Dead.  If you're a youngling you may not remember that, even though Nixon opened the front door and rolled out the red carpet for the bigots in the 1960s, Republicans continued to "LaLaLaICannotHearYou" the subject of their party's built-in racism until about five minutes ago.  As I have written many times  places, the average Republican comes off like they have a PhD in American civil rights, but only from history from the 1850s until around 1964.  

Then their knowledge gets terribly murky and uncertain.  

They'll recount the story of Republican Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves as if they, personally, had commanded the Union troops on Little Round Top, instead of being the goons who weep every time a Confederate traitor flag was pulled down, and rage every time a statue commemorating a Confederate traitor was removed.  

They'll lean hard on the puffed up fairy tale of Bill Buckley drive the Birchers out of the Conservative movement when, in fact, he very much did not.

Debunking a Longstanding Myth About William F. Buckley

The popular notion that the National Review founder expelled the fringe from the conservative movement is wrong.

And they'll swear they've never even heard of Lee Atwater.  

One of the last high-profile defeats for a Very Serious Conservative Public Intellectual in this dumb argument was back in 2007, after  the publication of The Conscience of a Liberal in 2007 by New York Times columnist, economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman.  In his book, Krugman recounts the details of Ronald Reagan's infamous 1980 Philadelphia, Mississippi campaign speech.  Which caused his fellow New York Times columnist and GOP-apologist, David Brooks, to go absolutely ballistic, except due to longstanding NYT tradition, he was not allowed to cite his colleague Krugman by name, so his column was an 800-word rant against the "slur" and "calumny" of someone, somewhere against Reagan's sainted personage.   

Then pretty much the entire internet, from the high-born to your's truly, very publicly sawed Brooks' ass off and served it to him on the good china.  After that, Brooks was marginally more circumspect,  limiting his columns to his jog-by of a Teabagger Rally happening near a black family picnic and since  no one was punching anyone, it was obvious to Brooks that the Tea Party wasn't racist.

And there was Brooks in 2009, cocking his ear at the deafening, racist primal scream of a Republican party reacting to the election of Barack Obama, shrugging, and swearing he can't hear a thing:

Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s critics, so I can’t measure how much racism is in there. But my impression is that race is largely beside the point.

I wrote a whole long thing about the subject here ("David Brooks Doesn't Know When To Sit Quietly And Say Nothing") if you're interested.

The GOP went so far as to hire a black guy named Michael Steele to front for their racist party for a few years.  His job was basically to give someone the bigots in the party could point at and say "See!  We've got a black!" as their party's seething racism became harder and harder to ignore.

Trump killed that horcrux dead, and ever since useful idiots and sock-puppets-for-hire like Brooks and Steele have been explaining how all of this came as a complete surprise to them, that no one coulda seen any of this coming, and so forth.  And let's not forget Tucker Carlson's many recent and invaluable contributions to the subject:

The Tucker Carlson Text That “Set Off a Panic” at Fox: “It’s Not How White Men Fight”

The New York Times revealed the message that so worried executives that it precipitated the shock exit of the anchor.

A racially charged and bloodthirsty text sent by Tucker Carlson about the assault of a protestor by Trump supporters was reportedly a key factor that precipitated the anchor’s shock exit from Fox News last week...

4.  Abortion is murder and repealing Roe v. Wade is a moral imperative.  Dead.  Because Brooks (see above) has finally gotten his wish:  Roe has been struck down and millions of American women have been stripped of a right they had assumed to be inviolate.  Does anyone in their right mind think this has made our politics...

From the AP:

DeSantis signs Florida GOP’s 6-week abortion ban into law

From Politico:

North Dakota governor signs 6-week abortion ban into law

It takes effect immediately.

From CNBC:

Abortion pill mifepristone is banned or restricted in some states despite Supreme Court ruling

From Forbes:

Idaho Becomes First State To Restrict Interstate Travel For Abortion

...better?

And how is overturning Roe working out for the party that spent 50 years trying to overturn Roe?

From the Washington Post:

Abortion divides 2024 candidates and confounds many within the GOP

From ABC News:

Republicans will 'lose huge' without finding 'middle ground' on abortion, [Republican] Nancy Mace says

Hey dumbass, Roe was the middle ground.  

5.  Guns, Guns, Guns.   Dead.  Slaughtered over and over again in that endless fusillade of AR-15 bullets that has become the background music of American life.   As mass shooting have become daily events, it seems to be slowly dawning on a number of True Conservatives that, just maybe, a country that has a wingnut media which pumps apocalyptic rage and paranoia toxins into its audience 24/7 shouldn't also be a country that is drowning in guns and open-carry/zero-training/stand-your-ground laws.

6.  Pack those courts, and damn the cost!  Dead.  Even as the radical decisions that Federalist-rotted courts at all levels has all but killed the public's faith in the competence...

Poll: Two-Thirds of Americans Don’t Have Confidence in Supreme Court 

The drop in confidence comes as the Supreme Court debates the future of the abortion pill.

 ...and integrity of the judicial system...

The Supreme Court Is Lawless 

Join us in an urgent project to track the dangerous ideas and decisions of this activist court.

...the open and shameless corruption...

The real reason for the Supreme Court’s corruption crisis

Who watches the philosopher kings with lifetime appointments?

...and petty derangements...

Rage-filled Samuel Alito Baffled [That] His Fairness is Being Questioned. 

You will respect my authority, Justice insists.

...of the most conservative judges on the highest court in the land has driven the final nails into its coffin.

So...with six of the seven True Conservative horcruxes stripped away and destroyed either by the indifference of the GOP base or by the catastrophes created by True Conservatives actually getting their dearest wishes granted, what, at last, is left to sustain the rapidly disintegrating True Conservative soul? 

Just two things.  Their hardwired sense of moral superiority/contempt for dirty Liberals like you and me.  And, of course, the all-powerful, all-occasion conjure words that keep this last, mingy fragment of their soul from turning to ash: Both Sides Do It (and Democrats are always worse.)

And if True Conservatism had just wandered off into the woods and disappeared with only these two outrageous lies to keep then warm, I wouldn't have cared.  But they didn't exit the stage did they?  Instead, they were allowed to take over the stage.  These failures and outcasts and authors of our present miseries were, instead, allowed to fucking colonize every corner of non-Fox/non-Newsmax media.  

And everywhere they took root their message has been the same:  

Sure Trump is a monster.  

And obviously our republic is in danger from my recently-former party.  

But surely it must be equally obvious to all normal, sensible Americans that only viable way out of this mess is a Center-Left/Center-Right coalition of Sensible Centrists.

Because, as I'm sure we can all agree, the excesses on the crazy, zealot Left are very nearly as dangerous as the excesses on the crazy, zealot Right.

Because, as we all know, Both Sides Do It.

Except, of course...

Both Sides Don't

The Despairing Posture of Their Fail

    Standing, from left: Andrew Kelly, Adam White, Scott Winship, James Pethokoukis, 

Yuval Levin, Kate O'Beirne, W. Bradford Wilcox, Peter Wehner. 

Seated, from left: Michael R. Strain, April Ponnuru and Ramesh Ponnuru. 

Photographed at Gunston Hall in Virginia.Credit...Eric Ogden for The New York Times

Less than one year before Trump oozed down his golden escalator and into the hearts of the GOP base, the Conservative Brain Caste were hard at work convincing themselves of their bright future --

-- that would never be.

This +6,000 word article from The New York Times is a darkly comic relic of that Before Time -- 

Can the G.O.P. Be a Party of Ideas?

-- when the Brain Caste of Conservatism tended their intellectual vineyards on the slopes of an active volcano, blissfully ignoring the rumbling Earth beneath their feet and the sulfurous fumes wafting up from the nether regions. 

Except as we know, it was not the case that the Brain Caste of Conservatism spent decades living large on the fertile slopes of that active volcano, only to get caught innocent and unawares when the volcano erupted.  

The Brain Caste of Conservatism built that fucking volcano.  

They built an entire, closed society on its slopes, and profited handsomely by stoked its fires a little hotter every year, and making a few more sacrifices to the fire gods every year.  And even as it rumbled louder and louder, and its fumes got more and more acrid, they still thought of the volcano as their property.  Something they owned and could keep in-harness, doing their bidding.  

Which may be part of the reason why, despite the bloated length of the article, it feels incredibly claustrophobic.   Like a stateroom on the Titanic packed cheek-by-jowl with wealthy captains of industry, eating the very best food, drinking the very best port and earnestly planning for a magnificent tomorrow that we now know will never exist.  

In every paragraph the name of another Very Serious Conservative Person or white-shoe Conservative institution is dutifully dropped.  The American Enterprise Institute.  "There was Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, fresh from his easy primary win in Kentucky..." The Wall Street Journal.  "Mike Allen’s Playbook column on Politico." The National Review.  "Yuval Levin, a former policy adviser to George W. Bush and founder of the earnest quarterly journal National Affairs..."  The YG [Young Guns]  Network.  "April Ponnuru, Ramesh’s wife, who was working as a senior policy adviser to Senator Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican."

There are obligatory mentions of when so-can-so gloriously entered an elite Ivy university, what magazines or thinks tanks so-and-so founded and what kind of steak so-an-so was chowing down on "at the Palm, the Dupont Circle steakhouse" as they imparted their pearls of wisdom.  But at its core this comes hilariously close my description back in 2013 of what I was calling David Brooks' Great Project: ...a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

Except this bunch weren't calling themselves Whigs.  They're "reformicons".  

And the treacherous country through which they were begin led was not just  full of scary hippies but also:

...the presidential prospects of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann and absurdist moments, like the Republican presidential-primary debate in which all eight participants said they would reject a hypothetical deal with Democrats in which one dollar of increased taxation would be exchanged for 10 dollars of reduced spending.

And they weren't being led by the humble David Brooks, but by the humble Yuval Levin:

And Levin himself, soft-spoken and self-deprecating, with a quiet fervor for intellectual history and economic argument, has emerged, with no advance work or self-promotion, as “a one-man Republican brain trust,” in the words of David Frum, and “probably the pre-eminent conservative intellectual of the Obama era,” as Jonathan Chait, a political columnist for New York magazine, has written.

While David Brooks, who continues to sweep the desolate horizons with his atomic-powered rose-colored glasses and continues to swear that he and he alone can see --

[o]ff in the corners, though, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment on the right. 

-- is now an éminence grise of this intellectual opium den, and uses his New York Times catbird seat to repeatedly cheered Levin on. Even going so far as to plagiarize his own words from two years earlier to praise Levin.

There was a general understanding that something tectonic was happening in Conservative politics, but that seismic data was filtered through an out-of-touch aristocratic certainty that the paranoid rage and racism (which they studiously pretended did not exist) that animated the Fake Tea Party was just a new source of energy that could be made to serve the interests of reformicon elites:

“I think the Tea Party has been a very great good for the kind of change that needs to happen,” Levin said. “It’s a source of great energy. It’s a reaction to the right kinds of problems. It didn’t arise with a policy mentality. A real grass-roots movement doesn’t, generally.”

Because all the clever dogs understood the game.  Understood that, c'mon. just because you run as shoutycracker insurgent, doesn't mean you need to actually govern like one.

He, too, shrugged off Cantor’s defeat. “I don’t think Eric Cantor lost because he gave a few speeches advocating reforms,” said Rubio, who seems to understand that being elected as an insurgent — riding the crest of a movement — doesn’t mean he has to govern as one. 

I guess none of these intellectual giants ever heard of the legend of the Golem. 

Or saw or read The Sorcerer's Apprentice. 

Or read the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley about discovering too late that you have created a monster that you cannot control.

Or saw the classic 1931 film, Frankenstein, by James Whale. 

Or saw any of the dozen movies or TV shows that have since been titled simply "Frankenstein".

Or saw The Bride of Frankenstein.
Or Son of Frankenstein.
Or The Ghost of Frankenstein.
Or Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
Or House of Frankenstein.
Or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Or Young Frankenstein.
Or The Curse of Frankenstein.
Or The Revenge of Frankenstein.
Or The Evil of Frankenstein.
Or Frankenstein Created Woman.
Or Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed.
Or Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell.
Or Frankenhooker.
Or I, Frankenstein.
Or Frankenstein vs. Baragon.
Or Lady Frankenstein.
Or The Frankenstein Chronicles.
Or Frankenstein: The True Story.
Or Flesh for Frankenstein.
Or Frankenstein Reborn.
Or Frankenstein (II).
Or Friend Frankenstein.
Or Frankenstein JR.
Or Frankenstein, Jr. and the Impossibles.
Or Mister Magoo Meets Frankenstein.
Or Army of Frankensteins.
Or Frankenstein's Army.
Or Frankenstein vs. the Creature from Blood Cove.
Or The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Or Victor Frankenstein.
Or The Prometheus Project.
Or Frankenstein Meets Dracula.
Or Frankenstein vs. Dracula.
Or Dracula vs. Frankenstein.

Shall I continue?

Or Frankenstein Created Bikers.
Or Frankenstein '80.
Or Frankenstein 90.
Or Monster of Frankenstein.
Or Frankenstein 1970.
Or Frankenstein Drops In.
Or I Was a Teenage Frankenstein.
Or Rock 'n' Roll Frankenstein.
Or Frankenstein Unbound.
Or Frankenstein's Daughter.
Or Frankenstein Island.
Or The Monster Squad.
Or Mad Monster Party?
Or Gothic.
Or Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl.
Or Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dr. Frankenstein.
Or Frankenstein's Fatal Flying Guillotine.
Or Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein.
Or Frankenstein's Great Aunt Tillie.
Or Frankenstein: Day of the Beast.
Or Santo vs. Frankenstein's Daughter.
Or Transylvania 6-5000.
Or Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter.
Or Frankenstein: Italian Style.
Or The Frankenstein Theory.
Or Frankenstein and Me.
Or Tales of Frankenstein.
Or Scooby-Doo! Frankencreepy.
Or Frankenstein's Hungry Dead.
Or Frankenstein vs. the Mummy.
Or Blackenstein.
Or Frankenweenie.
Or The Monster of Frankenstein.
Or Frankenstein Crybaby.
Or The Horror of Frankenstein.
Or Bikini Frankenstein.
Or Beach Blanket Frankenstein.
Or Frankenstein and the Werewolf Reborn!

Hell, they never even read the story of Little Red State Fundy by your own humble scrivener, which predicted all of what transpired with near-100% accuracy.

That the monster they had made -- and on which they had become entirely dependent for financial viability and political power -- would finally grow too strong for them to control.  And when the monster came to collect on all the crazy, racist IOUs with which the Republican party had been paying them off for decades, that's when the volcano would finally blow its stack.  

And that's why revisiting this +6,000 word piece of elite Conservative PR from 2014 doesn't read like the story of the masters of the universe. 

With all that has transpired since then, it reads like a snapshot of the last living moments of bitter political wraiths who are now doomed to haunt the ruins of their old home place.

Or like the stories told of the souls of damned men which have been cast into inanimate objects. Powerless witnesses to what is going on all around them.

Or perhaps a little like the story of Sergei Krikalev -- the Soviet cosmonaut who was stranded on board the Mir space station for 311 days longer that scheduled because the Soviet Union collapsed while he was in orbit, so the country that had sent him into space no longer existed.    Because these are men and women who got used to orbiting high above it all, speaking only to one and other in their own abstract language, believing they were directing human affairs far below.  And now they have no place to land, and no political or ideological precinct that cares what they have to say.

So let's finish this where I started.  The title of this post is a play on a line from The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe.  Here is how that story ends.

...And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. 

He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. 

And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

 

I Am The Liberal Media