As you know, twenty years ago, before the Frankenstein's monster they'd built
kicked the doors off the lab and came for them, most of your favorite Never
Trumpers were either grinding out Weekly Standard paeans to the genius
of George W. Bush and the idiocy of Liberals suggesting there would ever be
deficits again, or they were fresh out of college and working as low-level
gofers in the campaign of one Republican goof or another, or one Conservative
think tank or another.
None of this is disputed. It isn't talked about by the legacy media or
by Never Trumpers because it is hugely inconvenient, but when skipping very
lightly down the byways of history, they don't pretend the past never
happened, they just own up to a very highly expurgated and redacted version of
the past.
What is disputed, aggressively, is that any of that has any bearing on the
state of things as they are now. That yesterday has any real connection
to today, which is ludicrous on its face: look into the mists of time at
the George Wallace and Richard Nixon campaigns of 1968, and you will see
Donald Trump's face leering bask at you.
What is also aggressively disputes is that, even if the past has some bearing
on the present, there is no way anyone could possibly (to borrow a little
phrasing from Bill Shakes)
"look into the seeds of time/ And say which grain will grow and which will
not." It is an article of faith among the that they are guiltless because no one could have seen the disaster that was coming, not even the savvy political savants who make of the Never Trump elite.
Except, at exactly the same time they were working hard to elect cranks, or
cranking out political propaganda for the Bush administration about how
swimmingly the Iraq war was going, a cohort of Liberal bloggers were not only
diagnosing the bigoted and deadly impulses were raging through the
heart of the GOP with astonishing accuracy, but also generously explaining in clear, simple language what exactly Republican leadership
needed to do to stop the party's headlong plunge down the long, dark, fascist
road that led to Donald Trump.
All the signs were there, long ago, and this is the advice we offered to our
Republican fellow citizens, free of charge, that would disenthrall them
from the madness that was quickly overtaking them:
Kick [the bigots and monsters] out. It’s as simple as that.
Call out Republicans who use intolerance as just another tool in the
get-out-the-vote toolbelt by name.
Repudiate them.
...quit pretending that racist policies are just falling unbidden out of the
sky, and that you have no control over them. Quit pretending the
behavior of Republican candidates has nothing to do with the Republican
party.
But you have to actually do that shit, instead of trying to
market reeking poison as yummy-yummy pecan pie and assuming the rest of the
world is too stupid to notice.
This is also why it is so fucking exhausting to hear people who absolutely
know better but who's professional lives would be wrecked by admitting it,
yammer on about how all this came upon us suddenly, spontaneously and with no
warning in 2016.
That's a lie. And everyone who can remember past events beyond what they
had for breakfast, knows it's a lie.
Because one of those Liberal bloggers who were giving very clear instructions
about how to save the Republicans party from itself were was me. And
they were published on the blog twenty years ago.
From me, August 7, 2005:
“I was born a Poor Black Child.”
Is
he kidding?
You decide.
Here’s a line from near the end of
this article: “[Mehlman] also invoked his late grandfather, a Baltimore
shopkeeper, who was a member of the NAACP."
Well if
that’s not hard-currency street cred, well I just
don’t know what is!
OTOH, I have a relative who, word has it, was the
last man hanged for horse thievin’ in Montana. I also have one who’s an
Evangelical Christian slightly to the Right of Ralph Reed. And there are some
moonshiners, and rev’nuers, and teachers and drunks.
All of which
means ab-so-lute-ly nothing...except that Kenny Mehlman’s
grandfather would probably by deepy, deeply ashamed of
him if he knew the kind of Gadarene Swine he was running with.
Read on...
GOP Plans More Outreach to Blacks, Mehlman Says
Goal Is
to Broaden Party Base, Help Swing Future Races
ATLANTA --
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman stood before a roomful of
black journalists last week fielding pointed questions about his party's
mostly shaky relationship with black voters.
Asked about the
southern strategy that used race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the
once Democratic South, Mehlman acknowledged that Republican candidates often
have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial
tensions. But he pledged that such neglect is a thing of the past. "Our plan
for 2006 and 2008 is to increase African American turnout," he said
crisply.
Republican candidates who exploited racial resentments to
solidify white support, he added, were simply wrong.
Unconvinced,
one questioner asked whether President Bush was guilty of appealing to those
very resentments when he appeared at South Carolina's Bob Jones University
when his GOP primary campaign was listing in 2000, even though the
fundamentalist Christian school banned interracial dating. Mehlman did not
flinch -- but neither did he directly engage the question. Bush "has been a
model" of how the GOP and blacks can "restore their historic bond," he
said.
Distancing the party from its recent past and promising a
more inclusive future has become a ritual for Mehlman since he became chairman
of the GOP in January. It is part of an audacious bid to chip away at the
Democratic Party's most loyal constituency: black voters.
...
Despite
periodic Republican outreach efforts, nearly nine out of 10 blacks voted for
Democratic presidential candidates over the past four decades.
But
Bush's success in modestly increasing black support in battleground states
such as Ohio with a culturally conservative message during the 2004 election
caused some religious and cultural leaders to see an opportunity for the GOP
to overcome its difficult history with black voters.
"I can't go to
the party with Democrats right now because they are playing some strange
music," said Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr., a registered Democrat and pastor of
Hope Christian Church in College Park. Jackson said he opposes abortion rights
and same-sex marriage.
...
Since conservative icon Barry M.
Goldwater ran for president in 1964, Republican presidential candidates have,
on average, captured less than 12 percent of the black vote, according to
David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political
and Economic Studies, a Washington research organization.
The
problem he said, is that Republicans often are perceived as hostile to the
concerns of black voters, whether it is affirmative action, the stubbornly
high black unemployment rate or better funding for urban schools.
...
"The
willingness to go after the black vote is the first big hurdle we had to
overcome," Gillespie said. Now, he said, "there is a cultural barrier we have
to overcome, in terms of the long-standing affiliation black voters have with
the Democratic Party."
...
"There are some obvious signs that we are
on the verge of a breakthrough when you look at what we have to do to be
successful," said Michael Williams, a black Republican elected to the Texas
Railroad Commission, a statewide energy board. "If we can just move to 20 or
25 percent of the African American vote, that is a cataclysmic change in vote
count."
...
Often, Mehlman speaks in deeply personal terms. He told
the black journalists that he views open housing, voting rights and civil
rights bills passed in the 1960s as the most important laws of the 20th
century. He also invoked his late grandfather, a Baltimore shopkeeper, who was
a member of the NAACP.
...
At some point one is compelled to ask, do Republican’s all collectively
suffer from that “Memento” neurological disorder?
Do they simply lack
the ability to form any new memories past, oh, 1952?
You hear
Gingrich daubing his piggy-eyes and decrying the lack of civility in public
discourse... apparently hoping that the rest of us are so politically A.D.D. and
distracted by shiny objects as the average Republican that we’ll all forget that
it was Newt! (with his GOPAC Little Red Book) who worked
tirelessly to make using a specific, approved list of hatespeech words and
phrases to personally vilify and destroy opponents as routine a Republican
tactic as the jerking off into the Confederate Flag.
You hear the
Republicans categorically refusing the discuss the Downing Street Memo, the
complete collapse of the casus belli for the war in Iraq, the rampant corruption
and looting and terrorist recruiting windfalls that war has led to...not because
any of it lacks the whiff of High Crimes for which the GOP are always anxious to
persecute others (even when they have to make it up) , but because all of that
happened five minutes ago.
And you hear Ken Mehlman anxious to market
Lincoln to the masses while at the same time very pointedly
ignoring the fact that the unreconstructed lineal descendants of the same
traitors who went to war again Lincoln’s United States over their right to keep
human beings as chattel...these despicable Jeff Davis worshippin’, American
Swastika flyin’ chuds now run the political party for
which Ken Mehlman is the hired spokesmodel?
Poor, poor
Republicans.
They’ve got this, uh, “Negro” problem.
Which,
to be brutally candid, comes down to this: Can’t live with ‘em, and can’t lynch
‘em anymore.
And there is a certain, weird synchronicity between the
card Ken Mehlman is trying to palm, and the current Intelligent Design nonsense,
and basically the whole rest of the Republican Agenda.
Specifically,
that to believe a single word that comes out of their lying Gin Holes you have
to step way, waaaaay over the “open minded”-line and smack into I-Drink-Gasoline
blind-assed, brain-damaged petro-snockered not to notice the veritable Forest
Primeval of Big, Ugly Truths about the GOP that tower over the whole party,
positively striking anyone who is not a congenital idiot hip and thigh, cheek
and chin.
As wretched a sliver of toenail fungus as Ken Mehlman is,
I would have given him good marks for identifying the problem
-- “Republican candidates who exploited racial resentments to solidify white
support, he added, were simply wrong.” – if he didn’t turn right around and try
to pretend that Bush did not use appeals to intolerance (specifically his speech
at Bob Jones) as a routine party of the GOP Southern Strategy.
Distancing
yourself from your past because you have actually changed your wicked ways and
atoned for your sins is one thing: trying to distance yourself for what you did
FIVE MINUTES AGO, while you are still spattered with the fresh blood of your
crimes, is ludicrous and insulting and the hallmark of drunks and sociopaths.
See
Ken, it is not a few, isolated Republican Candidates in some misty past that
exploited hate to snag elected office: that is the
Republican Party. That is your playbook.
This is how you win, and to hear the spokesminion of the GOP whinge on with a wink-an-a-nod about
how he is “Shocked, shocked to learn that Gambling is going on inside the GOP,”
while his pockets are stuffed to overflowing with electoral ill-gotten gains
would be cartoon-laughable if it weren’t also so grotesquely insulting.
You
want to show you’re serious?
Kick them out, Ken. It’s as simple as that.
C’mon, Ken: 2004 shows what
Republicans do when they’re deadly serious. Crack open the GOP piggy-bank and
hire a top-shelf marketing firm run a couple of hundred Swiftboat”-strong ads
against the haters in your party. Call out Republicans who use intolerance as
just another tool in the get-out-the-vote toolbelt
by name.
Repudiate them.
Which leads me to ask, believe it or not, What do the 2004
Elections and Ohio’s surprise insurgent candidacy of Paul Hackett have in
common?
Numbers. Stats. The little thingies under the !@#$%^&*()
symbols on your keyboard that makes a Quant Jock’s heart sing, baby!
2004
was the GOP maxing out their Douchebag Credit Card. 2004 was them spending every
last bit of energy and cunning to pick the shelves clean of every last racist,
gay basher, and Christopath, under optimal conditions, during a time of war,
with the Commander-in-Chief (when he wasn’t getting that all-important beauty
sleep down in Rancho Jim Beam) was personally out stumping, deploying the whole,
vast resources of the Executive Office to tell people that if your didn’t vote
Buch/Cheney...terrorists would kill your children.
And he only won by
100,000 votes in Ohio.
One can disagree about the honesty of those
numbers, or the means used to get them, but you can’t ignore the fact that,
running flat-out, afterburners WIDE open, leaving no reservoir of slime untapped
– with the wind roaring at their back -- the All Powerful GOP came thiiiis close
to losing it all.
Like the parasitic organisms that they are, they
have ridden their Segregation Hobby Horse as far as they can, and it’s still not
enough. It’s still not a reliable source of nutrients. They need more. They need
a “nest egg”.
The problem, of course, is that if the day ever dawned
that the Jeff Davis Dance Party ever started making
serious, concrete efforts at rapprochement with the African
American Community, AND started backing up the weak reeds of Kenny’s words with
actual action, the Dixiecrats -- who form that solid,
I-doesn’t-matter-how-much-you-piss-in-our-faces, cancerous heart of the GOP --
would bail.
And the Republican Party would collapse overnight.
However,
for no additional charge, I will let the Kenny-bunk-mate in on
a little secret: If ever the Republican Party were to actually bother to
disinter the Rosetta Stone of its Original Values and act on them, they and I
would have a lot to talk about.
Step away from the Dominionists and
bigots and the traitors who ginned up ruinous war, and start talking about Old
School conservative principles – good stewardship of the environment (instead of
shitting on Science because facts are inconvenient), sane fiscal discipline
(instead penury of peons and tax-cuts forever for the richest humans who ever
lived) and not trying to ram some wretched perversion of Christianity down
everyone else’s throat – and there is room to have a discussion.
Here’s
another, small idea.
Go over the website of the Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies – one of the organizations cited in the article –
and actually read this quote from their front page:
“Blacks depend on the Social Security System (OASDI) more than whites. 37% of
black seniors depend exclusively on Social Security for their income, compared
to 18% of white seniors." Black workers are also nearly twice as likely to
collect disability insurance payments (4.2%) as whites (2.8%), and
proportionately more black children receive survivor benefits (21.6%) than are
in the general population (15.2%).”
And then stop trying to gutfuck Social Security.
Walk the Talk, Ken,
and quit pretending that racist policies are just falling unbidden out of the
sky, and that you have no control over them.
Quit pretending the behavior of Republican candidates has nothing to do with
the Republican party.
But you have to actually do that shit, instead of
trying to market reeking poison as yummy-yummy pecan pie and assuming the rest
of the world is too stupid to notice.
Until them you’re just a
mumbling fraud, trying to pick a few pockets with blood-slick hands and hoping
no one will notice.
Until then, CUE...
Ken Mehlman,
holding the GOP in his clammy hands.
Priest: Ken Francis Mehlman --
do you renounce Dixiecrats?
Ken: I do renounce him.
Priest:
And all their works?
Ken: I do renounce them.
Priest: And all their pomps?
Ken:
I do renounce them.
Uhhh, then again...
...maybe not so much.
Still, Godfather, that whole
“McCain has a black baby” thing?
Worked like a fucking charm.
So you've got
that going for you.
End of 2005 repost.
No Half Measures
