Professional Left Podcast Episode 972: Little Note Nor Long Remember

"The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!" --  Tennessee Williams

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A Tale Told by an Idiot...

...full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Since the topic everywhere today is the 2-hour shit-stain of a State of the Union delivered on Tuesday night by the decomposing remains of the Dear Leader, I feel sort of obliged to talk about the subject.

However, since I took one for the team by watching the whole, grotesque spectacle (and the godawful pre-freakshow pundit vamping, and the excellent post-SOTU response from Virginia's new governor, Abigail Spanberger) in order to be able to speak intelligently on the matter on both The Bob Cesca Show and The Bradcast, I don't feel particularly in the mood to spelunk into that particular midden pile again.

Let us all agree that the bard nailed Trump's SOTU tour de farce 420 years ago with these lines from Macbeth, because Trump is indeed:

a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. 

And his 2-hour long crime against democracy and rhetoric was indeed:

a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

However, since my duty is to inform as well as entertain, let us together venture once again into the forbidden zone of the Before Time and see if we can find the seedlings of what grew into the monstrous, democracy-killing strangler plant that was on display for all to see on Tuesday night.

Yes, it has been more than a minute since the events of the Fake Tea Party's alternative State of the Union which they held off delivering for an hour so the actual Republican party could deliver it's own terrible alternative State of the Union, which followed President Obama's State of the Union on Jan 26, 2011.

What's of interest to me about that night is that I would wager that not one in a hundred of you politics nerds can remember a single word of Paul Ryan's (remember Paul Ryan!) official GOP rebuttal, other than, perhaps, a general and correct impression that while the zombie-eyed granny starver  (h/t brother Charlie Pierce) acknowledged that Obama had walked into a "severe fiscal and economic situation", the balance of Ryan's speech was spent scolding Obama for not dealing with the worst economic catastrophe in 74 years using the only tools in the Republican's bag.

And what tools are those?

If you guessed massive budget cuts, plus a strong suggestion that taxes were too darn high, give yourself a round of applause.

It was weak and dull and forgettable, and honestly he only reason I remember it at all is that "Economic Situation" was the name I DJed under during the late 1980s.

However, I'd also wager that a whole lot of you do remember at least part of Michele "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann staring past the camera for six straight minutes while  delivering some batshit Tea Party nonsense in her aggressively cheerful robot Jesus voice.   

The sum and substance of her breezy twaddle were not terribly different from the  zombie-eyed granny starver's bitching -- OMG, Obama's spending so much money when he should be cutting, cutting and cutting.  ! OMG, "people" are begging him to stop!  OMG, Lookit them deficits!  And OMG, have you seen the unemployment numbers!  Under George W. they were never like this.  

She even had this giant graph behind her showing how much better Bush was than Obama at the jobs thing.  And people remember it because it was something oddball.  Something new.   From The Guardian, January 26, 2011.

Michele Bachmann's state of the union response reveals state of US right

Tea Party leader made surprise intervention after official Republican reaction to Barack Obama's address

A televised attack on Barack Obama's state of the union address by one of the Tea Party's leading lights broke with convention last night and showed just how fractured rightwing opposition has become in the US.

Michele Bachmann, leader of the rightwing movement and a congresswoman from Minnesota, made a surprise intervention after the official Republican response to Obama's second state of the union speech, from congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Bachmann attacked "a bureaucracy that now tells us which lightbulbs to buy", and used a graph to illustrate that while there had been " unacceptably high" deficits under the Bush administration, these had now "exploded".

She followed a call for a new "miracle" with a reference to the US's 1945 victory at Iwo Jima and the famous picture of soldiers raising the US flag, which she said symbolized "all of America coming together to beat back a totalitarian aggressor".

Bachmann, who is seen as a possible presidential contender in 2012, said she was not seeking to compete with official Republican remarks – her response was made for activists from the Tea Party Express but screened live by CNN – but her approach differed from the more conciliatory remarks made by Ryan...

Bachmann was already under fire for her views on US history, particularly as revealed at a recent Tea Party event in Iowa, when she said the founding fathers "worked tirelessly" to abolish slavery. 

Republicans had insisted before Obama's address that they were not worried by a Tea Party view getting airtime. Michael Steel, spokesman for the House of Representatives' Republican speaker, John Boehner, had said in an email: "Whether it is through a press release, Twitter, the internet, on television, radio, via Facebook, or by other means, virtually every member of Congress will share their thoughts on the president's state of the union."

Not everyone was understanding, however. Columnist Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post said: "Bachmann ignored the fiscal calamity that began on Sept. 15, 2008. She ended her speech, delivered distractingly while looking off-camera, by saying, 'We the people …' Yeah, we the people want to know what that response was all about.

Please not for future reference those last two paragraphs, because what we were seeing – and what many of us were warning about – was MAGA Republicanism in its adolescent state.  

By this point it was already fully nuts and drunk on absurd conspiracy theories.  And when Jonathan Capehart said that Bachmann ignored the fiscal calamity that began on Sept. 15, 2008, that wasn’t the half of it.  She didn’t just ignore the Great Recession:  she pretended it never happened.  

During her speech she had a giant graph behind her “proving” to the bigots and imbeciles how much better Bush was than Obama at the whole jobs thing.  The X-axis represented years, and the Y-axis represented the unemployment rate.

Except the X-axis only showed every other year.  2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009 and so on.

And in her thoroughly whitewashed and rewritten Tea Party version extremely recent history through which the whole world had lived, inn 2007 and 2008, the unemployment rate under Bush was very low, but just a few months after Obama took office, the rate jumped way, way up!  

Clearly Obama is destroying America!  Period.  Full stop.  

Well Jeez oh Pete, does anyone out there in our studio audience remember anything else besides Barack Obama being terrible that might have happened on Bush’s watch – say, around December of 2007– that might have accounted for this sudden spike in the unemployment numbers.

From Federal Reserve History:

The Great Recession – December 2007-June 2009

Lasting from December 2007 to June 2009, this economic downturn was the longest since World War II.

The Great Recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, which makes it the longest recession since World War II. Beyond its duration, the Great Recession was notably severe in several respects. Real gross domestic product (GDP) fell 4.3 percent from its peak in 2007Q4 to its trough in 2009Q2, the largest decline in the postwar era (based on data as of October 2013). The unemployment rate, which was 5 percent in December 2007, rose to 9.5 percent in June 2009, and peaked at 10 percent in October 2009.

The financial effects of the Great Recession were similarly outsized: Home prices fell approximately 30 percent, on average, from their mid-2006 peak to mid-2009, while the S&P 500 index fell 57 percent from its October 2007 peak to its trough in March 2009. The net worth of US households and nonprofit organizations fell from a peak of approximately $69 trillion in 2007 to a trough of $55 trillion in 2009.

As the financial crisis and recession deepened, measures intended to revive economic growth were implemented on a global basis. The United States, like many other nations, enacted fiscal stimulus programs that used different combinations of government spending and tax cuts. These programs included the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. 

Oh yeah.  That's right.  On Bush's watch, the entire world economy imploded and it was only thanks to the massive (if maddeningly imperfect and inadequate) recovery assistance rendered by the Obama administration that the world was saved from a second Great Depression, and the permanent collapse of, among other things, the United States auto industry.

There were and are literally hundreds of articles on the Great Recession at the fingertips of anyone who gave a damn about the truth.  For example:

The New York Times “The Recession’s Hidden Victims”: Stories about homeowners who lost their homes and how families coped with foreclosure.

Los Angeles Times “Lives on Hold”:  A multi-part series following individuals who lost jobs and struggled to rebuild their lives.

NPR “A Decade Later, the Great Recession’s Human Costs Linger":  Audio stories and written accounts of people still feeling the effects years later.

The Atlantic:  “The Lost Decade: What the Great Recession Did to American Families”: A deep look at how long-term unemployment reshaped communities and family structures.

ProPublica “In the Shadow of the Recession”: First-person, in-depth reporting on people dealing with medical debt, housing instability, and job loss.

These are stories about real families who were evicted or forced to downsize after losing income.  Real workers who lost not just jobs, but their careers and their identity.  Young adults delaying homeownership, marriage, or kids. Communities devastated by factory closures and foreclosures.   The long-term damage done to people' mental health and sense of financial insecurity.

But all of this Michele Bachmann just hand-waved away.  Instead, in her Tea Party Republican version of history, unemployment was all Obama’s fault.  

Then Bachmann pitched a fit over all the money Obama is just throwing away for no good reason.  

The sum and substance of her breezy twaddle was not terribly different from the  zombie-eyed granny starver's bitching -- OMG, Obama's spending so much money when he should be cutting, cutting and cutting ! OMG, "people" are begging him to stop!  OMG, Lookit them deficits!  And OMG, have you seen the unemployment numbers!  

Under George W. they were never like this.  

This is from her speech that night.

And what did we buy with all that money?  A leaner, more efficient government?  No.  We bought a bureaucracy that tells us which lightbulbs to buy and put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's healthcare bill. 

Obamacare mandates and penalties may even force many job creators to just stop offering health insurance altogether.   Unless, of course, you're one of the more than 222 privileged companies or "unions" that's already received a waiver under Obamacare.

In the end, unless we fully repeal Obamacare, a nation that currently enjoys the world's finest health care might be forced to rely on government run coverage.  And that could have a devastating effect on our national debt for even generations to come.  

For two years, president Obama made promises just like the ones we heard him make this evening.    Yet still we have high unemployment, devalued housing prices,  and the cost of gasoline is skyrocketing! 

For those of you who were there at the time and paying attention this should cause a shudder of recognition at all that it foreshadowed.  

Then all the golden oldies came a'tumblin' out.  

Gotta gut the "job destroying" EPA.  

Pass a balanced budget amendment.  

Drill baby drill! 

Get rid of some unspecified number of "regulations" which may cost our economy one hundred million dollars.  

And Obama should repeal Obamacare immediately and support "free market solutions". 

Tort reform! 

Allow suckers to buy crap insurance out of the back of a van!

Kick out all the big spending scum! 

And this is just the beginning, because we swept to power in the midterms!

The Alert Reader will have noticed by now how neatly Michele Bachmann's "Obama ruined everything and Bush was awesome" lies from 15 years ago prefigure Trump's "Biden ruined everything and I was awesome" lies in his speech on Tuesday. 

And going back to the 2011 Guardian article, the Alert Reader may have also noticed how Michael Steel’s blasé attitude towards the Fake Tea Party prefigured the downfall of the Conservative elite.   

All the pieces that would grow at lightning speed into a full-grown fascist threat to American democracy led by a corrupt, lying sociopath were there.  All you needed to do was look.  The pre-MAGA Republican willingness to repeat big stupid, easily-debunked lies.  Demonizing Democrats as nearly destroying the country.  Casting themselves as the lone saviors of the republic.   And establishment Republicans like Steel not taking the internal threat seriously.  

So for our recently-former Republican Never Trump "allies" who definitely read his little blog o' mine, I'll leave you with these wise words from Peter Clemenza:

Burn The Lifeboats

I’m Familiar with Danger Mouse and Mighty Mouse and Jerry Mouse.

And the lesser-known but equally important Timothy Q. Mouse.

I have listened to Modest Mouse.  

I've used a Transparent Mouse (a novel idea), and am using a Laser Mouse right now.

I have read "The Mouse That Roared".  I've also read "Flowers for Algernon" which seems depressingly appropriate at the moment.  

But I'll be damned if I've ever encountered Transgender Mouse, which, according to Grandpa Syphilis, is an actual thing on which we're spending a few taxpayer pfennigs which is why [checks notes] Elon Musk is awesome and we need to cut Medicaid and fuck over American farmers.   

Yes, I watched the whole awful thing, and I wondered where in the world?  And to my complete lack of surprise, that story originated in the addled brain off rom psychological train-wreck Nancy Mace, and was then filtered through all the usual poison garbage sites -- 

Daily Mail

Shocking revelation woke Biden administration scientists spent millions turning monkeys and mice transgender

Nancy Mace makes stunning admission about trans lawmaker  

South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace slammed the Biden administration for using more than $10million in taxpayer money to fund ‘painful and deadly transgender experiments' on mice. 

Breitbart

Trump Reads Out ‘Appalling’ Examples of Waste Discovered by DOGE: ‘$8 Million for Making Mice Transgender’

Fox News:

$10M in taxpayer funds spent creating transgender animals: Rep. Nancy Mace

-- until, at last, Grandpa Syphilis puked it out on live teevee in front of an international audience. 

This was, of course, all deeply embarrassing to the sentient members of our species, and immediately debunked by [checks notes again] everyone who has ever taken high school biology.  

From everyone is entitled to my own opinion: 

“eight million dollars for making mice transgender. this is real.”

no, no, no, no. nobody is spending government money to make mice transgender. you low-wattage dolt. the word is transgenic.

let’s say you’re a cancer researcher, and you implant some human genetic material into mice, in order to better study how cells mutate. boom! — you’ve just created transgenic mice.

nobody is doing sex-change operations on mice and setting them loose in Nancy Mace’s bathroom.

reading comprehension, how does it work? how clownfuckingly illiterate do you have to be to screw that up? and how hot do you have to be to demonize people that every time you see trans at the beginning of a word, your brain goes fuckity-bye and visions of entire teams of boy mice playing against girl mice in mouse schools across the nation dance in your head?

Not that this will make one iota of difference, but those of us still living in the Real World do appreciate the effort.

Now take it away, The Irish Rovers:

Burn The Lifeboats

Once Upon a Time in America...

 ...there were Republicans who would stand up to a criminal president even if he was the leader of their own party.   Even if they had agreed with him and campaigned with him and perhaps even owed their seat in Congress to him.  Even if it pissed off their constituents.  Even if their mommy told them not to.  That is was their duty to loyally stand by their man!

I know, I know.  That's crazy talk.  Bigfoot talk.   Or a bedtime story for very small children who still believe in Santa Claus and The New York Times.  But it's true I tellz ya!  I was there! I saw it on my teevee, in living color.    

This is a bit of the speech by congressman Larry Hogan, Sr. of Maryland's 5th Congressional District, who was moved nearly to tears by Nixon's lies and betrayal. He was the first and only Republican to vote for all three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon:

This is a key moment from this speech.  Hogan is angry.  Bereft:

The President didn’t, in righteous indignation, rise up and say, ‘Get out of here. You are in the office of the President of the United States. How can you talk about blackmail and bribery and keeping witnesses silent?’ . . . And then throw them out of his office and pick up the phone and call the Department of Justice and tell them there is obstruction of justice going on. But my President didn’t do that. He sat there, and he worked and worked to try to cover this thing up so it wouldn’t come to light.

And this was Hogan at a press conference:

The evidence convinces me that my President has lied repeatedly, deceiving public officials and the American people. Instead of cooperating with prosecutors and investigators, as he said publicly, he concealed and covered up evidence, and coached witnesses so that their testimony would show things that really were not true… he praised and rewarded those who he knew had committed perjury. He actively participated in an extended and extensive conspiracy to obstruct justice.

And there was Republican Congressman M. Caldwell Butler, who was a loyal Nixon man, but who did not hesitate to use the "S"-word -- shame -- when describing Nixon and Watergate. 

  

The Alert Listener will notice that when Representative Butler called Watergate "our shame", he was not referring to "Both Sides" or "politicians in Washington" or "congress" or any of the other lazy, cowardly elisions the legacy media and Independent/Centrist goofballs always uses to pretend that some colossal Republican atrocity is somehow everybody's fault.

Nope.

Representative Butler is explicitly referring to the "Republican in the White House", and anyone affiliated with the Republican party.

Nixon was a petty, paranoid, vindictive man who Americans thought, in more innocent times, had tested the upper limits of how much corruption, criminality and treason an American president could indulge in beneath the cloak of executive power and secrecy before the free press and the co-equal branches of government yanked him off his pedestal and drove him from office.

But compared to what Trump has been doing, openly and with the thunderous approval of the entire Republican party, Nixon was a piker.  Nixon was a saint.  Nixon would have been Diogenes' last stop when he took up his lamp and went walking the Earth looking for one honest man.  

And compared to the grovelers, fascists, imbeciles and lunatics that make up the Republican congressional majorities of today, the median 1974 Republican congressional knuckle dragger is Franklin Roosevelt.  Is John Lewis.  Is Eugene Fucking Debs.  

 In other words, they are exactly who we told you they were.  

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode #785: Special Post-SOTU Edition

“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth."  -- A. Lincoln

Links:  

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The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

We Are The Goon Squad And We're Coming To Town...Beep, Beep.

 

The Chaos Queen of Arizona lacked one accessory that would have completed her "LookAtMe! LookAtMe! LookAtMe! GodDamnItLookAtMe!" ensemble.

So to her goes second place.

The winner was Madge's experiment in turning Mae West's castoffs from Goin' to Town

into MAGA Hate Couture:

Finally, as through a glass and darkly, I caught a small glimpse of next year's SOTU, and kids

it's gonna be lit!

I Am The Liberal Media

My Write-Up of the SOTU

-- you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

...

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

-- Ulysses, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I Am The Liberal Media

He's Told Us Not To Blow It...

...'Cause he knows it's all worthwhile

                                 -- David Bowie, Star Man

Last night, President Obama gave one of the most thoughtful and consequential State of the Union addresses in living memory.  So it should come as no surprise that it was instantly panned and reflexively hated by all the same tin-pot demagogues --

The State Of The Union speech was one of the most boring, rambling and non-substantive I have heard in a long time. New leadership fast!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2016

-- seditious myrmidons, rambling bigots and unhinged wretches who have panned everything this President has said and done since he put his hand on the Bible seven years ago and began the hard work of trying to clean up the wreckage left behind by the worst President in history.

Arnold Toynebee once said that history is "just once damn thing after another". History doesn't slow down or take a day off for drought or meteors or the fall of kings.  It just keeps on going, and I find comfort in the knowledge that while President Obama will go down in history as one of our great presidents, the loud and bitter claques of scheming wingnuts and squabbling Beltway twats with which we are currently afflicted will either be paved over by history entirely or remembered only as Obama's Rufus Griswolds -- a pack of petty hacks and malformed losers who made their sordid wages and reputations by trying to take a bite out of their betters.

But the judgments of history are slow in coming, and in the here-and-now the braying of America's bitter squabbling Beltway twats is still loud and continuous as they try to push back their inexorable march into irrelevance and oblivion. For example, in the here-and-now you can watch in amazement as post-SOTU Ron "Severe Dementia" Fournier correctly identifies (from quite a long way away) the toxic disease that has killed his party:

Haley Faces Conservative Backlash After GOP Response to Obama https://t.co/eum3RPmIXr

— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) January 13, 2016

These people seemed determined to divide and destroy the party. I think they will succeed. https://t.co/DjsCoqsSkL

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) January 13, 2016

And then pivot immediately to the important business of allocating responsibility for the genesis and virulence of that toxic disease.  Take a wild guess where the Blame Stick lands in 3...2...1...

Who's at fault for the mess in DC -- Obama or GOP? He failed. They failed. We failed. https://t.co/vDSINEZNLJ

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) January 13, 2016

In his shitty column in the National Review, Mr. Fournier goes on to declare that President Obama has "No Hope for Greatness" because of his unforgivable failure to break the back of the mob of bigots and lunatics that was once known as the Republican Party. Or, as Mr. Fournier puts it:

In a rare em­brace of fail­ure and hu­mil­ity, Barack Obama said Tues­day night that “one of the few re­grets of my pres­id­ency” is the fact that par­tis­an ran­cor has worsened un­der his watch. The pres­id­ent seems to fi­nally real­ize that break­ing the found­ing prom­ise of his polit­ic­al ca­reer will hurt him in the eyes of his­tory. 

In his fi­nal State of the Uni­on ad­dress, Obama called for “a bet­ter polit­ics,” say­ing the na­tion’s large and linger­ing prob­lems can only be solved if Amer­ic­ans “can have ra­tion­al, con­struct­ive de­bates.”

Had it been de­livered by a pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate, the speech would have been tre­mend­ous. But in the hands of a time-worn lead­er sev­en years in­to a pres­id­ency that began with such prom­ise, Obama’s sen­ti­ments were sadly fa­mil­i­ar, almost hol­low: well-writ­ten and well-in­ten­tioned but, like the bal­ance of his pres­id­ency, a dis­ap­point­ment...

It is a fact that the Republican party passed from lingering coma into death long ago.  

It is also a fact that the GOP has been replaced by a loose confederacy of oligarchs, mollusks and stink bugs who are so far gone that they won't even applaud American enterprise or digging out from the Great Recession for fear of getting Kenyan Kooties and being primaried from the Right in the next election by the reanimated corpse of Curtis LeMay.  

It is also a fact that this American Fascist Party has no greater ally in the mainstream media that skulking Both Siderist parasites like Ron Fournier, whose entire career now consists of blunting and dismissing every criticism of overt, drooling Conservative madness with the same magic, never-fail conjure words over and over again -- "But the Democrats..."

And given those facts, I am not naive enough to believe that this witchbag of true-believing thugs and calculating opportunists have never and will never give President Obama fair shake.  After all, we have all seen these same goof and swindlers conspire to make the seven years of Clinton-era Republican show trials and witch-hunts and all the pious words about holding presidents to the highest possible standards just....vanish once Dubya was handed the White House by five of his daddy's friends.  They rebranded a bottom-feeding pervert like Newt Gingrich into a respectable sage, and a blood-drunk sociopath like Bill Kristol into a "brilliant thinker" fit for a seat at the head table. 

And for their greatest trick, they made the entire Bush Administration disappear right before our eyes, and transformed tens of millions of committed, preening Bush Regime dead enders into born-again political virgins, sporting adorable tri-corner hats and swearing on the lives of their children that they had never even heard of George Walker Bush or Richard Bruce Cheney.

In other words -- and not to sound too self-serving -- they did exactly what I predicted they would do a decade ago:

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

It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11”...

But however hard they may try to deface the record of the Obama Administration, it's never gonna happen.  President Obama was not cast out of office after one term and is not limping out of office after a series of witch-hunts and a large, self-inflicted scandal left him politically damaged.  He will still be a relatively young man when he closes out his eight years as our 44th president: a relatively young man with a great mind and a powerful voice who will also be the best possible spokesman for his own legacy.

Unlike Bush, Obama does not leave behind shattered cities, a collapsed economy, a broken army, a looted treasury and a record of incompetence, shame, belligerent failure and outright treason stretching endlessly in all directions.   Instead, President Obama will leave behind a solid record of real, institutional changes which have materially improved the lives of millions of our fellow citizens and which will be all but impossible to undo.  A solid record...which future historians will regard as fucking miraculous when they factor in the lockstep and fanatical opposition he faced from his first day in office until his last.

And what of that opposition?

In the short term, they will continue to remain defiantly ignorant (for freedom!), torching everything they can lay their sticky little paws on (because that's what Baby Jebus would do) and blaming imaginary hippies under the bed for the fact that they're as dumb as a bag of hammers and that their world is on fire.  And, of course, America's crackpot wingnut billionaires will continue to throw bales of money at  them because they're the only game in town.  But let's face it, any political party whose front-runners are Ted Cruz and Donald Trump?  Whose one Big Idea is stripping health care from millions of Americans?  Who needs round-the-clock support from ghouls like Ann Coulter and Beltway hacks like Ron Fournier just to prop it up, rouge its cheeks and give it some some semblance of animate life?

That has a Reince Priebus behind the wheel fer chrissake?

That's not a party in trouble.  That's a party which is as dead as Ronald Reagan.   Not a party at all, any more, but a tribe of moochers and con men who have stashed Reagan's corpse in the basement and who take his name and forge his signature because they want to continue sponging off of his pension.

And that tribe of moochers and con men no longer represent a force capable of summoning anything like the strength or discipline it would take to unmake the Obama Legacy.  Instead, as time inexorably drags them kicking and screaming from the stage, history will record them for what they were: a gang of parasites, bigots and demagogues who tried and failed to make America small enough and weak enough and dumb enough and scared enough for them to rule it.

Instead history will consign them to the same grave as Rufus Griswold -- a grave which  they have dug for themselves and which will entomb their reputations forever:

...Ann S. Stephens called him two-faced and "constitutionally incapable of speaking the truth".[76] Even his friends knew him as a consummate liar and had a saying: "Is that a Griswold or a fact?"[77] Another friend once called him "one of the most irritable and vindictive men I ever met".[76] Author Cornelius Mathews wrote in 1847 that Griswold fished for writers to exploit, warning "the poor little innocent fishes" to avoid his "Griswold Hook".[78] A review of one of Griswold's anthologies, published anonymously in the Philadelphia Saturday Museum on January 28, 1843, but believed to have been written by Poe,[79] asked: "What will be [Griswold's] fate? Forgotten, save only by those whom he has injured and insulted, he will sink into oblivion, without leaving a landmark to tell that he once existed; or if he is spoken of hereafter, he will be quoted as the unfaithful servant who abused his trust."[80]