...losing his shit and storming off the CNN set back in 2005.
The Dubya Administration was just beginning to come apart at the seams.
It was becoming clearer by the day that claims of Iraqi WMD were flat out
lies, and the air was hot and redolent with names like "Judith Miller", "Jeff
Gannon", "Scooter Libby" and "Valerie Plame".
No one ever figured out exactly what set Novakula off, although as a 100%
in-the-tank bombastic stooge for the Bush White House, there were any number
of reasons why it was probably a bad idea for the infamously thin-skinned
Novak to be anywhere near a camera while James Carville needled him and
challenging his "toughness".
CNN suspends Robert Novak after he swears, walks off set
NEW YORK (AP) - Robert Novak, whose revelation of a CIA officer's name in a 2003 column has sparked a federal probe, was suspended by CNN after he swore and walked off the set during a live telecast of "Inside Politics."
CNN correspondent Ed Henry said afterward that he had been about to ask Novak about his role in the investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame's identity, which Novak has repeatedly refused to comment on aside from some references in his column...
A contretemps which I'm sure would never be allowed under CNN''s new, rightwing management.
And while no one ever figured the exact why and wherefore for the eruption,
but many novel theories were advanced, including my own, which you can still
find here ("Carville Discovers Novak’s Launch Codes".) Although it is a sign of the times and the age of the Liberal
Blogosphere and the transience of all things that the links for every single
graphic I linked to in the post (as was the custom of the time) are now dead.
Today we do things in the proper order: First the set-up, then the
punch-line.
The setup: Which MAGA rally was this recorded at and who said it?
The folks who are getting the free stuff, don't like the folks
who are paying for the free stuff, Because the folks who are paying
for the free stuff, Can no longer afford to pay for both the free
stuff and their own stuff, And, The folks who are paying for the
free stuff, Want the free stuff to stop.
and the folks who are getting the free stuff, Want even more free
stuff on top of the free stuff they are already getting!
Now...The people who are forcing the people who Pay for the free stuff,
Have told the people who are RECEIVING the free stuff,
That the people who are PAYING for the free stuff, Are being mean,
prejudiced, and racist.
So...
the people who are GETTING the free stuff, Have been convinced they
need to hate the people who are paying for the free stuff, By the
people who are forcing some people to pay for their free stuff, And
giving them the free stuff in the first place.
We have let the free stuff giving go on for so long that there are Now
more people getting free stuff than paying for the free stuff.
Now understand this. All great democracies have committed financial
suicide somewhere between 200 and 250 years after being founded.
The reason?
The voters figured out they could vote themselves money from the
treasury by electing people who promised to give them money from the
treasury in exchange for electing them. The United States
officially became a Republic in 1776, 231 years ago. The number of
people now getting free stuff outnumbers the people paying for the free
stuff.
We have one chance to change that in XXXX.
Failure to change that spells the end of the United States as we know
it.
ELECTION XXXX IS COMING
A Nation of Sheep Breeds a Government of Wolves!
Borders: Closed!
Language: English only
Culture: Constitution, and the Bill of Rights!
Drug Free: Mandatory Drug Screening before Welfare!
NO freebies to: Non-Citizens!
We the people are coming
The punch-line: This was not recorded at a MAGA rally.
In fact this came over my transom before MAGA existed. Before Trump was
a glimmer in Steve Bannon's eye. This
comes from my archives
from September of 2012, and refers to the upcoming 2012 elections. A full decade ago, during
what most recently-former Republicans in the media still rhapsodize as the
Good Old Days. And yet except for a "Where We Go Dumb, We Go All"
tag-line and creepy theme music, it is indistinguishable from the deranged
venom vomiting out of the mouth of the average Republican voter in 2022.
If you're like me (and why wouldn't you be), on any given day you get a
whole clutch of THIS IS IMPORTANT FOLKS! (It's always "folks") forwarded to
you from Crazy Uncle Liberty.
They are long on BIG FONT and short of "facts", these emails are, and
judging by the embedding they have passed through the sweaty hands of many
PATRIOTIC AMERICANS who READ THE CONSTITUTION before they reach my in-box,
and if you can squint your way past the festoonage of American flags and
giant, angry eagles holding assault rifles without laughing, you will be
vouchsafed a privileged position from which to observe the screaming,
batshit abyss of the wingnut soul (here is one of the tamer examples from my
archives)...
Google a chunk of any of these missives and you will invariably
find them all over the wingnut blogosphere like diaper rash, cropping up
regularly on reliably crazy Conservative bilge-spigots with names like
"Red State", "Free Republic", "Patriot Rising", "Barrons" and "The Wall
Street Journal". Then take two minutes to debunk any of these
missives and you will get back grumbly complaints about factcheckers all
being on the Soros payroll, or the boilerplate Centrist reply of
"Libruls are just as bad or worse!" (here is another of the least
racist/sweary samples from my archives)...
The point being, these were not the Good Old Days of the GOP
that recently-former Republicans pine for. The base was just as hateful,
just as bugfuck and just as racist as the are now, but recently-former
Republicans and the compliant mainstream media were more successful at lying
about it. The only thing that changed was that Donald Trump didn't
outsource the job of activating the GOP base to professional mercenaries like
Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, Instead Trump spoke to them directly in
the language they had already been groomed to respond to.
And they loved him for it.
You say you want more? Well sure. Because my archives are loaded
with this stuff. From the same
September, 2012 post:
DIVORCE AGREEMENT
THIS IS SO INCREDIBLY WELL PUT AND I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE IT'S BY A YOUNG
PERSON, A STUDENT!!! WHATEVER HE RUNS FOR, I'LL VOTE FOR HIM.
Dear American liberals, leftists, social progressives, socialists,
Marxists and Obama supporters, et al:
We have stuck together since the late 1950's for the sake of the kids,
but the whole of this latest election process has made me realize that I
want a divorce. I know we tolerated each other for many years for the sake
of future generations, but sadly, this relationship has clearly run its
course.
Our two ideological sides of America cannot and will not ever agree on
what is right for us all, so let's just end it on friendly terms. We can
smile and chalk it up to irreconcilable differences and go our own way.
Here is a model separation agreement:
--Our two groups can equitably divide up the country by landmass each
taking a similar portion. That will be the difficult part, but I am sure
our two sides can come to a friendly agreement. After that, it should be
relatively easy! Our respective representatives can effortlessly divide
other assets since both sides have such distinct and disparate tastes.
--We don't like redistributive taxes so you can keep them.
--You are welcome to the liberal judges and the ACLU.
--Since you hate guns and war, we'll take our firearms, the cops, the NRA
and the military.
--We'll take the nasty, smelly oil industry and you can go with wind,
solar and biodiesel.
--You can keep Oprah , Michael Moore and Rosie
O'Donnell . You are, however, responsible for finding a bio-diesel
vehicle big enough to move all three of them.
--You can have your beloved lifelong welfare dwellers, food stamps,
homeless, homeboys, hippies, druggies and illegal aliens.
--We'll keep the hot Alaskan hockey moms, greedy CEO's and rednecks.
--We'll keep the Bibles and give you NBC and Hollywood .
--You can make nice with Iran and Palestine and we'll retain
the right to invade and hammer places that threaten us.
--You can have the peaceniks and war protesters. When our allies or our
way of life are under assault, we'll help provide them security.
--We'll keep our Judeo-Christian values.
--You are welcome to Islam, Scientology, Humanism, political correctness
and Shirley McClain . You can also have the U.N. but we will no longer be
paying the bill.
--We'll keep the SUV's, pickup trucks and oversized luxury cars. You can
take every Subaru station wagon you can find.
--You can give everyone healthcare if you can find any practicing
doctors.
--We'll continue to believe healthcare is a luxury and not a right.
--We'll keep "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "The National
Anthem."
--I'm sure you'll be happy to substitute "Imagine", "I'd Like to Teach
the World to Sing", " Kum Ba Ya" or "We Are the World".
--We'll practice trickle down economics and you can continue to give
trickle up poverty your best shot.
--Since it often so offends you, we'll keep our history, our name and our
flag.
Would you agree to this? If so, please pass it along to other
like-minded liberal and conservative patriots and if you do not agree,
just hit delete. In the spirit of friendly parting, I'll bet you answer
which one of us will need whose help in 15 years.
Sincerely,
John J. Wall
Law Student and an American
P.S. Also, please take Ted Turner , Sean Penn , Martin Sheen
, Barbara Streisand , & Jane Fonda with you.
P.S.S. And you won't have to press 1 for English when you call our
country.
Forward This Every Time You Get It ! Let's Keep This Going, Maybe
Some Of It Will Start Sinking In.
This is why I titled the original post
"Three Cheers for Crazy Uncle Liberty".
Because Crazy Uncle Liberty was finally forcing the Party of Lincoln to
run the bilious crazy they all secretly worship all the way to the top of
flagpole, and then demanding that Willard Romney step into the public square
and salute it.
Which is why, if you really want to know what the GOP was like
during the Before Time and what led to the rise of Trump, don't ask a Never
Trumper.
Because Never Trumpers knew.
They knew and they let it happen.
If you really want to know what the GOP was like during the Before Time and what led to the rise of Trump, ask the people who have been right about the Right all along and spoke about it openly back when warning that the GOP was rocketing down this road was career suicide.
If you really want to know, ask a Liberal
who was there.
These days, playing the Both Sides Do It card is no longer the automatic win
it was just a few years ago. Yes, it's still with us like the chronic
ideological disease it has always been, but the unalloyed deference to anyone
who invokes it is not so omnipresent.
To save what's left of his career, Matthew Dowd, the undisputed King of Both
Siderism during the 2016 presidential campaign, has gone so far as to nuke his
entire, damning Twitter archive full of gloating, pissy Both Siderism and
automatically block anyone who brings up his very inconvenient past.
Pundits who, make no mistake, are still members of the High and Holy Church of
Both Sides Do It, now routinely couch their Both Siderism by prefacing their
lie with
"This is not one of those both sides do it things".
And even recently-former Republicans regularly roll their eyes at Both
Sides-ism.
Don't get me wrong. It's still out there and it's still virulent,
especially at the local level where fools, cowards, simpletons and Republicans
still hide their foolishness or stupidity or cowardice or the rank evil of
their party by aping the ersatz savviness of the pundits and waving off any
Republican atrocity with, well, y'know, Both Sides
But the Pig People would be nothing but a minor nuisance -- a
boil on the ass of democracy -- without their Centrists who keep
the "Both Sides Do It" spider hole well-furnished and open for business.
Pound for pound, Centrism is the biggest and most debilitating lie in American
politics bar none. It is the Big Lie that makes all the little lies possible,
which is why I focus so hard on those who traffic in it. They are the ones most vulnerable to and terrified of being called out in
public. They are the ones we must run out of the media on a rail.
-- was the darkest of heresies. Merely whispering your doubts about Both
Siderism, questioning whether it was a toxin that had poisoned our politics,
was considered shameful and transgressive.
So just imagine the fate of those of us who shouted this heresy out loud.
Over and over again.
Decade after decade.
All of the following is from a two-week period, a decade ago, in September of
2012.
On this blog, I have made the point thousands of times over the last seven years that Fake Centrism is our most dire and dangerous political problem.
Without a Fake Centrist narrative, Conservatives have no place to
hide their lies, slander and depravity. With a Fake Centrist
narrative, there is no Conservative fraud or treason so large that the
media will not* bury it under an avalanche of reflexive, "Both
sides do it"-ism.
Fake Centrism is the retrovirus that is killing our democracy's
capacity to defend itself from its internal enemies: it is the
immune-system-destroying disease which allows every other kind of
Hate Radio/Fox News opportunistic political malignancy to
run wild through our body politic. And man, once you start to
notice how automatically every water-cooler Cicero and
two-bit Tom Friedman uses Fake Centrism to prop up
their lazy arguments, it's really creepy.
"Both of our political parties have become openly uncivil toward
each other and toward anyone or anything that disagrees with their
programs. The televised debates focus on which candidate can hurt or
dishonor the others the most. The winners are usually the most
dishonest, unscrupulous and immoral of the lot and who have the most
money to wage the most comprehensive “hate” campaigns."
How this has fuck-all to do with creativity, I have no
idea.
The author uses the list to whine about what big meanie heads our
politicians have become
Of all the places to come across centrist bullshit. They could at least
have the decency to confine it to the news sites.
Once you start listening for it, you cannot help but notice how the Big
Lie of Centrism has seeped into everything and now shows up everywhere.
And on. The Big Lie of Centrism -- Like
Strontium-90 In The Milk, Continued.
And on: The Big Lie of Centrism -- Like Strontium-90 In
The Milk, Continued Again
A million posts have been written by a thousand bloggers debunking the
Fake Centrist equivalence using every instrument in our orchestra,
from methodical deconstruction to operatic swearing.
None of it works, because aging Villager clowns like Ted Koppel will
never put themselves across the table from people who will press the one
question for which there is no rebuttal:
And what if you're wrong?
What if the actual history of the rise of Hate Radio and Fox News and
Regnery Press and on and on exactly parallels the craven, capitulating,
Broderite fail, fail, fail of your Mainstream Media?
What if the simple, sad truth of the matter is that your "objective"
corporate media was simply, hideously unfit to cope with
an aggressive, coordinated and sustained siege from a mob of
well-funded demagogues and liars (Hunter Thompson from The Atlantic, 1997):
MH: How will history remember Bill Clinton?
HST:I don't know about history. I don't get any satisfaction out of the
old traditional journalist's view -- "I just covered the story.
I just gave it a balanced view." Objective journalism is one of the
main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for
so long. You can't be objective about Nixon. How can you be
objective about Clinton?
MH:
Objective journalism is why politics have been corrupt for so
long?
HST:If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too
many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not
objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective.
Mark Twain was not objective. I don't quite understand this worship
of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different
from being subjective.
MH:If you found yourself teaching a journalism
course -- Dr. Thompson's Journalism 101 -- what would you
tell students who were looking to go about covering stories?
HST:You offering me a job? Shit. Well, I wouldn't do it, I guess. It's
not important to me that I teach journalism classes.
MH: But if you did, what would your reading list be?
HST:Oh, I'd start off with Henry Fielding. I would read writers. You
know, I would read Conrad, Hemingway, people who use words. That's
really what it's about. It's about using words to achieve an end.
And the Book of Revelation. I still read the Book of Revelation when
I need to get cranked up about language. I would teach Harrison
Salisbury of The New York Times. All the journalists who
are known, really, have been that way because they were
subjective.
I think the trick is that you have to use words well enough so that
these nickel-and-dimers who come around bitching about being objective or the
advertisers don't like it are rendered helpless by the fact that
it's good. That's the way people have triumphed over conventional
wisdom in journalism.
It was the relentless fail, fail, fail of your Mainstream Media, Mr. Koppel, more than any other factor, which left our democracy
staked out like a goat at a watering hole, wide open to the predations
of monsters like Rove and Limbaugh, DeLay and Coulter, Cheney and
Hannity...
And Trump.
And on:The Big Lie of Centrism -- Like Strontium-90 In
The Milk, Contd Yet Again.
They've been both relentlessly courted and politically sidelines for
years. But two new books show how voters who reject both Democrats and
Republicans can become a force.
In the final stretch of this play-to-the-base presidential election,
it is strange to say that the 40 percent of Americans who identify as
independent are currently close to an afterthought. With so few
undecided voters left, even most independents have chosen sides by
now.
But some day this election is going to end, and if the next president
and the next Congress hope to break through the hyperpartisan
stalemate, they are going to have to find ways to appeal to the
largest and fastest-growing segment of the American electorate.
Edwards details prescriptions for each of these problems: primarily
election reform, including open primaries and redistricting reform and
congressional reform, including filibuster reform. (Some of these
proposals dovetail with suggestions made in the “Making Congress
Work” plan developed by No Labels, a group Edwards
and I helped cofound with fellow Daily Beast columnist Mark McKinnon and Nancy Jacobson)...
Sigh.
I frankly cannot see the other side of this river of offal. It runs
as deep and wide as the mighty Mississippi and carries so much freight for awful, lazy and cowardly people that I can't imagine the
corporations who own our media will allow it to be dredged without a
fight.
But what else can we do?
What immortal hand or eye/
Can reframe this fearful symmetry?
Not a Liberal hand, certainly.
Not a Liberal eye.
Because as long as Liberals are not permitted to exist anywhere within
our national political conversation except as strawmen and cartoon
characters, there will never be a spare nickel in the system for anyone
who stands athwart this nonsense and shouts "bullshit".
As the Hunter Thompson interview reminds us, the plague of Both Siderism in
American political reportage has spanned the millenia. It's the engine
that drives a mighty, multi-billion dollar machine that smooshes anything that
would stand against it. Which made it all the more dispiriting trying to
pound home the same point that no one wanted to hear over and over again on a
platform so tiny that maybe no one listening it at all.
In fact, a few of you might recall that, just to relieve the mind-numbing barrage of Both Siderism which rained down on us every day from every direction, 12 years ago I very briefly spun off a parody blog called "The Driftington Post" --
-- in the voice of the endless parade of Both Siderist opportunists and scuttlefish over the decades who have all but destroyed our ability to speak honestly about our national problems.
[Fun Fact: The Driftington post above links of a now-dead-and-gone article from The American Conservative that was entitled, "Can The Tea Party Deliver?"]
Now flash forward 12 years and you can, perhaps, imagine my reaction to the most recent
crew of Both Siderist grifters launching, with great fanfare and national
media coverage. this latest political scam which is literally nothing but a
big ol' slab of moldy Both Siderism --
-- served up like Elmer Gantry selling salvation to the rubes.
On the other hand. looking back at where we were 10 years ago in this
long, uphill slog, it's fair to say that you and I have made some actual progress.
Now that the temporal embargo on talking about anything beyond the last five
or six years has been temporarily lifted, we here at the Driftglass Blog
have launched an occasional and soon-to-be award winning feature called
Snarkeology 101, which will reach back into the past and bring forward some long-buried home truths about the GOP that were in
evidence long before these last five or six years
but which had been declared Forbidden Knowledge by the recently-former
Republican Defenders of the Faith and Guardians of the Terrible Secret.
Today we tackle Mittens Romney: The Man Who Might Well Coulda Saved Us All
From Donald Trump If The Left Hadn't Savaged Him So Ruthlessly.
Bad Liberals! Naughty bad Liberals!
You see, since Donald Trump has robbed recently-former Republicans of their
ability to tell great big whoppers about how awesome the GOP is today,
they've had to resort to telling great big whoppers about how awesome the GOP
was during the Before Time. Tarting their recently-former party up as as
something mighty and heroic that was so brutally undone by those sneaky,
scheming Liberals that they may well have been responsible for driving the GOP
to the DayGlo orange fascist bosom of Donald John Trump.
And so, thanks to Vox, here is a couple of samples of the whoppers that
recently-former Republicans tell about Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign for
president:
[Mitt Romney's] actions displayed the moral decency and leadership that
have rarely been seen from Republican officials in the Trump era. Romney’s
actions caused one prominent political writer to advance an argument that
many conservatives have embraced
in the Trump era — that Democratic attacks on Romney during the 2012
presidential campaign are to blame for the GOP’s radicalization and the
emergence of Trump.
“It was the left’s (and the media’s) treatment of Romney that numbed the
electorate to real, valid concerns about ‘character’ four years later,”
writes
Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent. “The mistreatment
of this man, the demonization of him on a personal level by opponents in
both parties, will be studied for decades to come.”
On this view, Democrats smeared the kind and decent Romney so brutally —
attacking him as a heartless “vulture capitalist” who hated minorities —
that Republicans became inured to this kind of argument and convinced
there was no advantage to playing nice anymore. Call it the “look what you
made me do” theory of How We Got Trump.
“All those stereotypes Democrats fabricated to assail Mitt Romney helped
inoculate Trump against similar charges,” Noah Rothman writes in
Commentary. “In this sense, the Obamans themselves helped clear the way for
Trump.”.
The evidence for these claims is vanishingly thin...
Now let's you and I light a couple of lanterns and walk down the narrow stairs
down and down to my bloggy archives from September 2012. Exactly a full
decade ago. The week that
Even David Brooks
finally bailed on Romney's doomed, incompetent campaign, triggering an
avalanche of "Even David Brooks" follow-ons from pundits across the spectrum
from The Maddow Blog and Joan Walsh to Joe Scarborough and Scott Brown.
And among these letters there is always one that asks why I waste my
time biting the ankles of the mighty and indestructible David
Brooks.
After all, who reads that asshole, right?
Well for anyone who has been following the amazing spectacle of Willard
Romney's radioactive plutocrat core breaching it's bland, well-coiffed
containment unit and melting right straight through the Earth's mantle,
you may have noticed that an amazing number of analysts and pundits have
breaded and deep-fried their own observations with some variation of the
words "Even David Brooks..."
From the Twitter Machine...
By my count, every single segment on MSNBC that touched
on this story either lead with or included an "Even David Brooks..."
piece. Predictably, Andrew Sullivan is delirious, sporting massive and completely unwarranted Reasonable Conservative wood at the whiff of David Brooks (and David Frum
and Ramesh Ponnuru) finally being forced at gunpoint to write
some words that any Liberal could have written in their sleep at any point
over the last 30 years:
The Sane Right
Just a word to say that David Brooks' column is simply superb and to
emphasize that both David Frum and Ramesh Ponnuru have made important
points about why Romney is disgusting and wrong, respectively...
If you're of a mind to, you can read the whole thing here, including all the
Twitter catches.
But I believe the point has been made.
The thing that killed the Romney campaign was Mitt Romney. Please
proceed governor.
And the Republican base embraced Donald Trump because that's what decades of
Limbaugh/Gingrich-style Conservative media and Republican politics had groomed
them to do.
Recently our public discourse has been graced with a number of books that
claim to show conclusive evidence that history began prior to
2016.
Shocking, I know.
For decades, any Liberal showing up in the public square warning about the
alarming trajectory the GOP was on was treated by America's
recently-former-Republican (before they were former Republicans) as Dr. Zaius
treated Taylor in Planet of the Apes.
Angrily indignant. Arrogantly dismissive.
To borrow a little prose from Rod Serling's Planet scripts, we
terrified them from the first, and we still do. They're afraid of us and
they hate us.
Why?
Because they were the Defenders of the Faith and Guardians of the Terrible
Secret. Because they have always known the truth -- the terrible
and dangerous truth -- about their own party. And so all their lives
they have dreaded the moment that terrible truth might break out into the
open. Dreaded it, like death itself.
And then one bright summer day, down the escalator came Donald John Trump, who
was everything they feared. And off he went, shambling from rally to
rally, speaking out loud the Terrible Secret beneath the prissy, bow-tied,
Burke-quoting veneer of the GOP.
Of course they hated him. Of course they feared him.
But for reasons that were diametrically opposed to the reasons Liberal hated
and feared the rise of Trump.
All the GOP Defenders of the Faith had ever needed to do to make the grotesque
truth about their party vanish was to use their various media platforms to
pretend that whatever happened...never happened. Or, hey, look over
there! Some crazy Liberal about to do some crazy thing I'll
betcha! To bulldoze it down the memory hole. To burn their
Bush/Cheney bumper stickers, put on stupid hats, swear they'd never heard of
George W. Bush, and start calling themselves Tea Partiers or Constitutional
Conservatives or Independents or whatever.
And then rely on a meek and compliant media to roll right over.
Like Dr. Zaius, to save the Big Lie on which their faith was founded, all they
ever had to to was plant some Both Sides Do It charges, dynamite the cave with
the evidence in it, cast out the heretics, and order would be
restored.
But Trump could not be muzzled or bulldozed because he spoke, loudly and
without shame, to the racist, delusional base of the GOP in the language that
they knew. The language of Limbaugh. The language of
Gingrich. The language of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly. The
language of George Wallace and Lee Atwater.
Trump called to them in their Mother Tongue, and they flocked to him and
suddenly no amount of finger-pointing and Both Sidesing and whatabouting was
making the problem disappear. Trump was their very own
Rough Beast, its hour come round at last, slouching to
Cleveland
to be born.
And that's why the soon-to-be-recently-former-Republicans hated him and feared
him. Not because he was a liar and a degenerate and a racist with a very
visible fascist bent, but because
he was giving the game away. And once it had all gone too far and there was no way left for them to
pretend that the GOP was just going through a phase or running an unusual
fever that would surely break once Trump went too far, the
soon-to-be-recently-former-Republicans were forced to take last tool available
to them out of the denialist trick bag.
An embargo.
Specifically a temporal embargo in which the time-honored,
all-purpose alibi magic words "Both Sides Do It" were replaced with a new
alibi phrase:
"These last five or six years." or some
variation thereof.
Suddenly, "these last five or six years" was everywhere. On the lips of everyrecently-former-Republican in every venue. On their podcasts. On
cable news. In the op-ed pages of America's premier newspapers and
magazines ("The Five or Six Year Wager"). It was aa invocation every bit as magical as Both Sides Do
It.
For recently-former-Republicans it meant that, however awful things got with
the GOP, none of it had been their fault. In fact, they should be
honored as sages and prophets for seeing what was becoming of the GOP before
anyone else!
For a meek and compliant media it meant that they weren't utter failures at
the most basic job of journalism, because no one could have known or predicted
that the GOP would suddenly and inexplicably lose its mind. In
fact, they should be honored as heroes for bravely reporting ... on things
that were happening ... in plain sight.
And for Liberals, well they could just shut the fuck up. Since
everything wrong with the GOP had happened suddenly and without warning
over these last five or six years, all that crazy alarmist talk they had been engaged in for decades was
just...crazy alarmism. In fact, all of their decades of crazy talk about
the GOP becoming a deranged racist shithole
might have actually caused the the GOP to spontaneously become a
deranged racist shithole in 2016! Yes, that theory has been floated multiple times by several
recently-former-Republicans including Bulwark founder and
MSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes.
But now there is a new development in the tale of these last five or six years. Through some weird planetary alignment, there is suddenly a spate of
proper, respectable books by proper, respectable authors that break the
temporal embargo and dare to excavate artifacts from the pre-2016 Forbidden
Zone.
And, no, I don't mean The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America by insane garbage person David Horowitz.
I'm referring to books like American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party
Went Crazy
by David Corn and
The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican
Party
by Dana Milbank and
Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in
the 1990s
by Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer.
And more shocking than the existence of such heretofore heretical texts
appearing in the mainstream of American political discourse is the fact that,
at least a few of these authors have managed to wrangle invitations to talk
about their remarkable discoveries on podcasts run by
recently-former-Republicans.
And the results might most charitably be
described as ... detached. As if these authors are describing some historic
battle that took place long ago the far edge of these
recently-former-Republicans' property, beyond a stand of trees and over the
rise of a line of hills.
Sure, they were peripherally aware
that a battle was taking place, and occasionally
one of the field commanders would wander over to their house for a drink or a meal. But the details of who was fighting, on behalf of what, and what weapons they were using were all far away abstractions that didn't really involve them or
affect them in any significant way. And of course, no one could have
imagined that the battle would have world-changing consequences that would
lead to anything so bad that it couldn't be memory-holed with a sufficient
tonnage of Both Siderism.
So now that the temporal embargo has been temporarily lifted, I'm thinking that, just
maybe, revisiting some specific episodes from the Forbidden Past might
not by the exercise in absolutely futility that they were back when I wrote
'em.
And so today I'm starting an occasional and soon-to-be award winning feature
called Snarkeology 101, which will reach back into the past
bring forward once again some home truths about the GOP that were in
evidence long before these last five or six years.
Maybe we'll start with Mittens Romney and the Public (but now forgotten)
History of the Campaign that Failed.
