This Was Beyond Embarrassing

I realize, now that MSNBC has gone all in on the Former Republican Reputation Rehab business, that every day from now until the crack of doom a big, comfy chair will be pulled out for one or more of the goofs who helped create the GOP monster factory that is the reason our democracy is now hanging by its fingernails.

And I realize that, because MSNBC has gone all in on the Former Republican Reputation Rehab business, none of these goof will ever be asked any substantive questions about their responsibility for the deep shit we are all in.  Instead they will simply appear as Athena leaping from the forehead of Zeus,  fully-formed, with no inconvenient past and speaking of the GOP using exactly the same language, cadence and inflection that, for 40 years, Liberal have been mocked, slandered and ignored for using.   

And while the reaction here at Castle Driftglass to the appearance of one of these goofs on our teevee machines is to quickly shut it off or change the channel, like iocaine powder -- 

-- over the past several years I've built up an immunity to Former Republicans having their crusty, bloody pasts whitewashed on "liberal" teevee, but (he hastened to add) only at the dosage level that MSNBC usually administers.

What I was not prepared for was Lawrence O'Donnell deciding for some inexplicable reason that it was time to deliver a video tongue bath to MSNBC's entire stable of these goofs.  It was so cringy and craven that it swamped my immunity to such things and momentary stunned me into immobility.  It has taken me this long to collect my meager wits and resume normal human activities like eating, sleeping and blogging about what utter shite the media has become.  

Mr. O'Donnell begins innocently enough:

O'DONNELL:   Around the early 1990s, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing fanatics decided to change the name of the Democratic Party; they changed it to 'the Democrat Party.' They thought that was really smart, "the Democrat Party". 

And then leaps us ahead 30 years with no mention of the events or actors of the intervening decades.  It was just Rush Limbaugh one minute, and the next...

O'DONNELL:   Republicans are no longer quite so fetishistic about their attachment to democracy. Instead of expressing their belief in democracy, Republicans now express their belief in stolen elections. 

Which is true, but, where is this headed? 

It's heading up the awkward on-ramp to where Mr. O'Donnell wants to take us:

O'DONNELL:   The Republican Party has always presented itself as the defender of traditional American values against an assault on those values by liberal Democrats. 

And Alphonse Capone always presented himself as a legitimate businessman.  So what?

O'DONNELL:  Michael Gerson may have been the single best Republican practitioner of that art of expressing American values as a speechwriter. Michael Gerson is an evangelical Christian who was the chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and the words that he gave to President Bush, who sometimes mangled those words, were among the most eloquent expressions of traditional American values. 

Well fuck me. Not only is this arrant horseshit, but it conspicuously ignores the substance of what Gerson spent decades defending and attacking.  I know this because I wrote a long, thoroughgoing post about it which got me blocked in some in the tonier precincts of the Beltway media, an "attaboy" from Brother Charlie Pierce and which was pretty much ignored by everyone else (except you lovely people.)  

And by "a long post" I mean it clocked in at just over 16,600 words.  Comprehensively long.  

So at this point it probably goes without saying that Mr. O'Donnell's opinions of the merits and morality of Michael Gerson diverge widely from my own.  Well, you're heard Mr. O'Donnell's, so here, from a small snippet from that 2019 post, are mine.

The Bonfire of the Sanities 

...Mr. Gerson has written this same stupid column many times before and has been roasted to a fare-thee-well by the internet every time, and nothing whatsoever has changed, and nothing whatsoever will change until Yahweh blows Fred Hiatt out of his saddle on the road to Damascus.

So really, why waste the pixels?

Instead, this time around, I found it much more personally interesting to use Mr. Gerson's saccharine droppings as a jumping off point to trace the Pecksniffian arc of his intellectual and moral bankruptcy.  Perhaps to get at the larger issue of why in the hell our media consistently fails our democracy so badly.

Our story begins with our nation struggling to dig out from the wreckage that the Dubya Administration left behind.  A failed and despicable administration -- the worst in American history until the rise of Donald Trump -- in which Michael Gerson, a deeply Conservative Catholic, served with unswerving loyalty, and to which he owes his position in the Can-Never-Be-Fired-No-Matter-How-Fucking-Wrong-They-Are Pundit Guild.

And from the very beginning, Mr. Gerson clearly loathed and resented Barack Obama and did not hesitate to use his Washington Post column to say so.  Which is no surprise.  Gerson is first, last, and always a Republican -- a Republican who, in 2008, stood in front of the dumpster fire that was the Dubya Administration doing what all Republicans were doing at the time: trying frantically to change the subject by lobbing anything they could at the Democrats who were running for the honor of cleaning up their fucking mess.

So Mr. Smoking Gun/Mushroom Cloud had no compunction about attacking the character of candidate Obama. According to Gerson,  Barack Obama was so "rootless, reactive and panicky" that he picked Joe Fucking Biden as his running mate.  I mean, how foolish was that, right?

And now, back to Mr. O'Donnell:

O'DONNELL:  Today in his column in the Washington Post Michael Gerson writes, "the GOP is a garbage scow of the corrupt, the seditious, and their enablers". 

And then we sail right over the cliff, with emphasis to mark the spot where I momentarily lost consciousness 

O'DONNELL: This is unprecedented in American political history, but by now we've grown used to it, that the most eloquent and lacerating and accurate descriptions of the Republican Party now come from the former leading lights of the Republican Party, intellectuals like George Will, speechwriters like Michael Gerson and Bill Kristol, presidential campaign strategists like Stuart Stevens and Steve Schmidt, and the list goes on and on...

So a couple of things.

First, the Alert Reader will note that every name on Mr. O'Donnell's Roll of Glory is either a fellow MSNBC employee, or has a guest and/or contributor contract with MSNBC. 

And second, what the actual fuck Lawrence.  The most eloquent and lacerating and accurate descriptions of the Republican Party have been coming from the Left for decades now -- eloquent and lacerating and accurate descriptions of the Republican Party which have earned those Liberals nothing but the mockery and contempt from the Very Serious People of the Beltway media and people like [checks notes] George Will, Michael Gerson Bill Kristol, Stuart Stevens and Steve Schmidt, and the list goes on and on.  People who built an entire industry out of lying to the world about the state of their party and their movement -- swearing that the GOP was doing just fine and anyone who said otherwise was a crackpot alarmist.  People who, once it all blew up in their well-fed faces and it turned out the Left had been right about the Right all along, have contributed nothing original or meaningful to the national political conversation beyond plagiarizing the eloquent and lacerating and accurate observations and critiques of the same Liberals they had been dismissing as crackpot alarmists five minutes ago.

So you can fawn over the 1992 Cuban Olympic basketball team of MSNBC Green Room Conservative  pundits all you want, Lawrence, but deep down in your heart you fucking well know that if they were ever forced to go toe-to-toe, adjective-to-adjective with the Liberal Dream team they would get blown out in the first round 136-57.

Which is exactly MSNBC why will never allow any, actual eloquent and lacerating and accurate Liberal havers-of-opinions square off against any of their Green Room Conservative pundits.  Because it would be a slaughter.

O'DONNELL: ...including our first guest tonight Jennifer Rubin who writes...

Yep.  That's it.  I'm done.

O'DONNELL:  Leading off our discussion tonight, our Eddie Glaude, chair of the African-American Studies department at Princeton University, and Jennifer Rubin, a conservative opinion writer at "The Washington Post," and author of "Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump." Both are MSNBC contributors.

Done.  Done.  Done.

Burn The Lifeboats

The Genre of "Republicans Shocked That The Republican Party is Full of Republicans" Continues To Pay Very Well

It's also, by any standard, a market that's terribly oversaturated with Dry Drunk Republicans jostling for premium seating on the lifeboats by trying to outdo each other writing about how bloody awful the Republican Party became ... overnight ... miraculously ... with no warning whatsoever ... after they had left.  

Consider the case of reliable Beltway stalactite Michael Gerson, whose columns would make perfect sense if he were, say, a Dutch-American villager who had sneaked off to the mountains to escape his nagging wife and happened upon a group of silent, well-dressed men with Rutherford B. Hayes beards playing nine-pins.  Whereupon Gerson got drunk with the men, passed out, and woke to find that he now sported a scraggly three-foot-long beard of his own with birds nesting in it.  Hurrying back down the mountain, he arrives at CPAC just in time for the last day where, to his astonishment, some guy named Donald Trump was the keynote speaker and not Ronald Reagan.  

OMFG!

But of course, Mr. Gerson is not character from a Washington Irving fable who slept innocently through he last 40 years of American political history.  Mr. Gerson was George W. Bush's chief speechwriter and a senior Republican policy adviser who scuttled quietly away from that clusterfuck of a presidency and, like most Bush regime dead-enders, was gifted a job-for-life in the mainstream press where he spent the entire Obama administration relentlessly slagging President Obama and us hopelessly unAmerican Libtards while conspicuously ignoring what was happening in plain sight to his Republican Party.

A past which, like virtually all Dry Drunk Republicans, Mr. Gerson dare not face with clear eyes.

And so, instead of an honest reckoning, week after week we get this sort of thing: 

Opinion: The GOP is now just the party of white grievance

"Now" is the foundation stone on which all Dry Drunk Republicans are building their church.  

One of the poisonous legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency has been to expand the boundaries of expressible prejudice.

Translation: Republicans are saying the quiet part loud now.

Through the explicit practice of White-identity politics, Trump has obviated the need for code words and dog whistles...

Code words for racism and dog whistles to racists have been the sinews holding Mr. Gerson's Republican Party together since Mr. Gerson was in short pants.

Many in the crowd surely didn’t consider themselves racists, but they were perfectly willing to make common cause with racists. In social effect, it is a distinction without a difference...

Mr. Gerson has accidentally describes the modern history of his Republican Party as it has existed since Mr. Gerson was in short pants.

All this should create a tremendous philosophic tension within the GOP. 

This sentence might make sense in an alternate universe where Republicans had a "philosophy" beyond harnessing the electoral power of bigots and imbeciles in order to ram through corporate deregulation and massive tax cuts for the wealthy.  But in our reality this just sounds stupid.

The party has been swiftly repositioned as an instrument of white grievance. 

Well sure, if you're willing to pretend that "the last 40 years" = "swiftly".

It refuses to condemn racists within its congressional ranks.

From their forever home in the eight circle of Hell, gales of laughter were heard from Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms.

Its main national legislative agenda seems to be the suppression of minority voting. 

"Seems".  How fucking adorable.

Trumpism is defined by the belief that real Americans are beset by internal threats from migrants, Muslims, multiculturalists, Black Lives Matter activists, antifa militants and various thugs, gangbangers and whiners.

How did Mr. Gerson hang onto his chief speechwriting gig when he can't spell a simple word like "Republicanism"?

The whole Trump movement, and now most of the Republican Party, is premised on the social sanctification of pre-cognitive fears and disgust.

A common feature among Dry Drunk Republicans is their absolute refusal to understand the difference between Cause and Effect.  The decades that men like Mr. Gerson spent working to turn the GOP into a monster factory is the Cause.  That monster factory begetting someone like Trump is the Effect.

Yet the largest single group within the new GOP coalition is comprised of people who claim to be evangelical Christians. And the view of human beings implied by Trumpism is a direct negation of Christian teaching...

I would refer you to one my earliest posts --"Little Red State Fundy" -- written 16 years ago, back when Mr. Gerson was putting words into Dubya's mouth, during what Mr. Gerson would have his readers believe was the Golden Age of his Republican Party.

Mr. Gerson then gives his readers a little sermonette on What It Means To Be a Christian. and concludes:

No one could possibly accuse White evangelicals of consistently defending this view of humanity in the Republican coalition. There have been only scattered peeps of protest as an agenda of dehumanization has advanced. The complete lack of a debate on these matters is an indictment. At some point, the issue ceases to be hypocrisy, because hypocrisy requires the existence of a standard.

"At some point".  How fucking adorable.

Go back to sleep, Mr. Gerson.  You're not needed here.  You're not wanted here.  

Go back up the mountain, find your drinking buddies and pass out for another 40 years while we cynical, bitter, uncivil, conspiracy-mongering, Christian-hating, shameless, failed, polarizing, desperate, destructive, delusional, betraying, toxic, scandal-plagued Liberal snobs (all terms and sentiments Mr. Gerson rained like hellfire on the Left during the Obama years) will once again break out the mop and bucket to clean up the rubble and ruin that yet another Republican president has left behind.

Burn The Lifeboats

It's Not Trumpism, It's Republicanism: Part 12,091-- The Gersoning

In which reliable Republican Beltway stalactite Michael Gerson rolls over and freaks out after catching a glimpse of the monster he's been laying with (in the Biblio-political sense) his entire adult life.

“This is a reality that I have resisted naming. The 45th president and a significant portion of his supporters have embraced American fascism.” https://t.co/CzGaoQ1uKd

— Michael Gerson (@MJGerson) February 1, 2021

FYI, before reading this article. I'm playing a little five-finger-exercise writing game with myself.  A game I play when I'm bored with how much sanctimonious, overpaid Conservative stupid there is in the world.  

It's a game in which I don't read the article immediately.  Instead, because I am keenly aware of massive moral  failures and character flaws of the author, I try to deduce the only way he could write such a thing. 

First, consider that the Republican Party's stank is wired into Gerson's political DNA.

Second, consider that Gerson is pathetically unwilling to recognizing the true faces of own tribe when they take their masks off and leer at him with blood on their teeth.

Third, consider that Gerson is pathologically incapable of acknowledging even for a second that the hated, hated Left has been right about the Right along. Because, to misquote one of Trumps two favorite Corinthians, if the Left was right and the GOP has been this way all along, then Gerson's preaching is in vain, and his faith also is in vain.

Recognizing how catastrophically wrong all along (and how right his nemeses had been right) would destroy Gerson, spiritually, psychologically and professionally.  And since there is no way he's going to risk that, he is left with only the narrowest and more tortured aperture through which to squeeze out this column. 

A column in which he must...

First, hang onto the fairy tale that his GOP was a noble institution until Trump came along and fucked it all up.

Second,  hang onto the fairy tale the leering monsters dancing around in St. Reagan's winding cloth are not Republicans.

Third, tell us Libtards that we'd damn well better shut the fuck up with all of that "remembering" shit that we do or we may just ruin everything!

Let's see how I scored shall we, starting with the headline:

Trumpism is American fascism

Nope.  There is no "Trumpism".  There is just Republicanism.

Donald Trump’s promise of American strength has involved the betrayal of American identity.

Nope.  Donald Trump’s promise of American strength has involved the apotheosis of the Republican project.

One of the most important strands of our founding ideology is civic republicanism.

What type of citizen has Trump — and his supportive partisan media — produced? 

Well, Trump is a Republican.  And his "supportive partisan media" are the house organs of the Republican Party.  So what kind of citizens have Republicans produced?  

Republican citizens of course. 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) still holds her job in Congress because she is representative of ascendant MAGA radicalism. Those who reflect her overt racism, her unhinged conspiracy thinking and her endorsement of violence against public figures are now treated as a serious political constituency within the Republican Party.

Those who supported the overt racism and unhinged conspiracy thinking of Birtherism and the endorsement of "Second Amendment solutions" to politicians who stood in their way were called Republicans, Mr. Gerson.  Republicans.   

Call this civic barbarism. 

No, call it Republicanism.

Instead of promoting the values of responsible citizenship, Trump and his media enablers are elevating and blessing the very worst among us. 

Trump is a Republican, nominated by the Republican Party, elected by Republicans, ten million more pf whom voted for him in 2020 after four years of rage and racism than voted for him in 2016.   And "his media enablers" are Republicans.

How can anyone view the trashing of our founding tradition as evidence of patriotism?

I am now required to remind some of you that Michael Gerson was a senior advisor to and wrote speeches for George W. Bush.  He is the man who concocted the phrase "smoking gun/mushroom cloud".  And he would very much like you to believe that he also somehow missed the entire Bush Administration.  

After the Bush Administration imploded under the pressure of its own corruption, criminal incompetence and incipient fascism Mr. Gerson was given the same parting gifts most Bush Regime dead-enders were given:  a job-for-life at a major American new publication and a big jug of Lethe Poteen to help him forget all the heinous shit he'd said and done over the previous eight years.  

Mr. Gerson immediately set to work using his new sinecure at The Washington Post to launch a relentless, eight years campaign of slagging Barack Obama and the Left, while siding unstintingly with the unhinged, racist Republicans who were freaking out over the Kenyan Usurper.  Apparently there was still a few swallows of that potent Lethe Poteen left over in his Bush Administration going-away gift basket, which Mr. Gerson quickly chugged down once Trump was nominated and elected, once again allowing him to promptly forget all the heinous shit he'd said and done over the previous eight years.  

But some of us didn't forget.  Any of it.  

Especially those of us who were on the business end of the Bible-wrapped wingnut vitriol and slander that came roaring out of Mr. Gerson's huge Washington Post megaphone year after year after year..  For my part I documented a very large representative sample of Mr. Gerson's years of bullshit here, about which Brother Charlie Pierce remarked:

If you're inclined to take Michael Gerson seriously, drink something cold, lie down, and read this.https://t.co/jKKzSmVO7O

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 11, 2019

Until I was kicked off Twitter forever I used to make it a point to bring this up every time another Never Trumper nominated Gerson for sainthood on Twitter.   In fact, making a nuisance of myself in exactly this way was probably one of the reasons I was kicked off Twitter forever.

Mr. Gerson continues:

But the influence of his treacherous ideology is still being spread by unprincipled people seeking influence and profit. 

That "treacherous ideology" is called Republicanism and those "unprincipled people" are called Republicans.

And now, at last. we get to the most important paragraph of all.  The marginalizing and vindictive Tone Policing of us stupid Libtards, and the valorizing of Michael Gerson:

The task of marginalization will also be more difficult if those on the left try to lump all conservatives into Trump’s camp — arguing that fascism is somehow the natural destination of Barry Goldwater’s nomination or Ronald Reagan’s presidency. This is utter rubbish. I was involved, for example, in the running ideological conflict between Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), whom I worked for, and Pat Buchanan, who previewed Trumpism. Kemp was the more authentically conservative voice. And there is a massive moral gap between the politics of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney on one side, and Trump’s civic barbarism.

Scoring myself on forecasting Mr. Gerson's column, I played 18 and shot 18.

I just can't seem to miss.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

The Bonfire of the Sanities

Warning:  This post is very long.  Much longer than anything else I have ever done on this blog, clocking in at just over 16,000 words.  It took me quite awhile to finish, but although I felt compelled to write it, you are not compelled to read it.  I'm also certain that if you do read it, you will find a typo or three that I missed since my Writer Brain has not yet had time too cool off and switch over to my Editor Brain.

Also if you would like to support work that I do here, please consider dropping something into my tip jar.

Thanks.  I'm going to sleep for a week now.

Your pal, driftglass

Behold, a Tip Jar!

So the Republican Party has finally reached the place towards which they have been marching with single-minded fervor for forty long and awful years, and everywhere the smoke from their Bonfire of the Sanities makes the day into a choking twilight, while the flames make the night a lurid hellscape as Trump and his wingnut mob put one civic institution to the torch after another.

The Liberal fire-brigade is out there too, as we have always been, passing buckets from hand-to-hand, frankly pissed off and exhausted from forty years of warning this day was coming and being slandered and ignored for our trouble.  Saying "Fuck these fucking fuckers!" as the wingnut mob capers from building to building, spreading the conflagration, while we try to focus on the immediate crisis -- saving what we can from the ravenous, racist malignancy of the Right -- and at the same time not lose sight of the long-term need to rebuild our civic institutions once the Trumpfire is brought under control.

And from the United States Constitution to the cemetery at Normandy to the steps of the Lincoln memorial, the leader of the mob -- the Arsonist-in-Chief -- goes right on lobbing incendiaries in every direction to the delight of the Republican Party.

The Trumpfire is even licking at the walled enclave of the American punditocracy.  There is no personal danger to any of the pundits therein, of course -- the ivory tower atop which their offices are located may be a little scorched and smoke damaged around the base, but it's a mile high and has been continuously upgraded with the latest fire-suppression technology -- but there is no longer any doubt that there really is a fire and it really does run from horizon to horizon.

Which brings us to the matter of Mr. Michael Gerson:  former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, senior Republican policy adviser and reliable Beltway Republican stalactite who now exists in a perpetual state of shock that his Republican Party is full of Republicans.  

Your Moment of Bush-Regime Dead-Ender Zen: Update

This by Pete Wehner in ⁦@TheAtlantic⁩ is something rare- a respectful examination of the role of faith in the life and thought of good man. David is earnest about life’s largest questions without a hint of arrogance. I am fortunate to know both men. https://t.co/XaOFLJpTQp

— Michael Gerson (@MJGerson) May 7, 2019

One middle-aged Bush Regime dead-ender with a permanent media sinecure at The Washington Post...

...praising the paean of another middle-aged Bush Regime dead-ender (with a permanent media sinecure at the Atlantic)...

...to a book that yet another middle-aged Bush Regime dead-ender (with a permanent media sinecure at The New York Times) has written about his midlife crisis.

Perfection.

Carl Chef Kiss GIF from Carl GIFs

Update:  I'm going to pull this comment by Andrew Johnston onto the main page because it is so on-point regarding how, even when they're trying to be gracious and uplifting, these people absolutely cannot stop themselves from rolling the same old, utterly gratuitous, Both Siderist bullshit into every single fucking thing they write:

My favorite part (emphasis added):

Certain orthodox Christians will be uneasy that Brooks voices doubt and is uncertain about the physical resurrection of Jesus. Certain people of the Jewish faith will be hurt because they believe he is leaving the Jewish fold. And certain progressives—particularly of the cynical and woke variety—won’t like the fact that he finds Jesus a more compelling figure than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

This is my favorite part about that afterglow that follows the release of anything by Brooks or his ilk. Even as they talk about how his teaching are lifting them to some higher plane, they still can't help but take cheap shots. You saw the same thing with The Road to Character with people using it as an excuse to sneer at those Kids These Days With Their Darn Smartphones, even as they claimed to be above such attacks.

The unspoken truth is that these folks only want to be the bigger man because the height makes it easier to shit on people.

It is just not in them to stop being assholes, no matter how hard they pretend.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

George W. Bush: The Amazing Disappearing President

Of all the Republicans who now flood the media swearing to be suffer from Traumatic Political Brain Injury and are thus completely unable to remember anything that happened between Reagan's Second Inaugural and Donald Trump descending the Escalator of Doom, Michael Gerson bids fair to be the most transparently ludicrous.

After all, before he began his current career as a reliable Beltway Republican stalactite, Mr. Gerson was George W. Bush's chief speechwriter and a senior Republican policy adviser.  

And yet, if one happened to be complete ignorant of recent American history and happened to read Mr. Gerson's op-ed in The Washington Post yesterday...

"So another norm of public decency falls, like a historical building demolished to make way for one of Donald Trump’s tasteless towers."

...one might mistakenly conclude...

"When the president of the United States goes after an American Muslim — in this case Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who came to the United States as a Somali refugee — using images of the 9/11 attacks, it is cruel, frightening and dangerous in new ways."

...that Donald Trump was the first Republican president...

"It is cruel because Trump essentially delivered his political rant while standing on desecrated graves. The images he employed not only included burning buildings but burning human beings, drafted into a sad and sordid political ploy. Is nothing sacred to Trump?"

...to ruthlessly hijack the nation's grief and rage over 9/11 for cold-blooded partisan gain.

But of course, he wasn't.

On fact, as I wrote back in 2009 during what is now apparently the Lost Histories of The United State of America, the first Republican president to ruthlessly hijack the nation's grief and rage over 9/11 for cold-blooded partisan gain was Mr. Gerson's former employer.

+ + + + +  

After conspiring to bring about two of the most destructive events in modern American history -- the impeachment of a US President over trivia, and the probable theft of the subsequent Presidential election -- to what God could Republicans possibly pray that their eight years of insanity, venom and violence "might be wholly blotted out?”

On 09/11/01, their dark miracle came winging its way out of a clear, blue sky.

Eight years ago, this is what we all saw.

All of us, all together across all political, cultural and religious spectra watched the worst thing many of us had ever seen.

Together.

But in what now seems like less time than it took to wipe away our tears, the same depraved thugs who sponsored eight years of "Clinton Murdered Vince Foster!" hysteria began hijacking of our pain and patriotism to serve their partisan interests right before our eyes.

The minute the Bush Administration began trying to stretch the war they got into an excuse for the war they wanted, 9/11 stopped being merely a national tragedy and started being the Bush Administration's bottomless political ATM machine.

The minute the Party of Personal Responsibility began using the mantra "9/11 changed everything" as the political equivalent of the Blood of Christ -- as a means to absolve themselves of their personal responsibility for eight years of malice and derangement -- for them September 11, 2001 stopped being a moment of shared, national anguish and started being a suit of cultural body-armor which magically deflected any criticism of their lies and their hypocrisy.

An impervious sniper's nest from which they could cynically escalate --

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

-- their war on the Left.

Or don't you remember the day the Right robbed the graves of all those who perished on 9/11 to turn this



into their all-purpose

"Get Out of the 90s Free" card?...

+ + + + + 

I wrote that a decade ago, and I still stand by every word.

How many Republicans can say that? 

How many Both Siderists?

About anything?

Behold, a Tip Jar!

This Week On "Tone Cop!": Michael Gerson

Once again, America's Truest True Conservative -- former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, senior Republican policy adviser and reliable Beltway Republican stalactite, Michael Gerson -- uses his subsidized media platform to hand out a blizzard of "Both Siderist" parking tickets to mouthy Liberals who make him feel uncomfortable.

Democrats are playing with fire

One measure of the effectiveness of a political movement is how it changes its opposition. And President Trump is in the process of driving portions of his Democratic opposition insane...

Which might just remind some of you longer-term readers of this quote from 16 years ago from Michael Gerson's spirit animal, David Fucking Brooks:

The Pelosi Democrats

Are they going to become the stupid party?

ARE THE DEMOCRATS about to go insane? Are they about to decide that the reason they lost the 2002 election is that they didn't say what they really believe? Are they about to go into Paul Krugman-land, lambasting tax cuts, savaging Bush as a tool of the corporate bosses? Are they about to go off on a jag that will ensure them permanent minority status in every state from North Carolina to Arizona?...

Because tone-policing has always been the weapon of choice of the Serious and Respected Beltway Republican goon whenever the Left starts to effectively punch back against the constant and ever-escalating barrage of seditious lunacy and racist bile from the Right.

Returning to the present, Mr. Gerson continues:

Hillary Clinton — whose warmth, integrity and down-to-earth style were the largest reasons for Trump’s election — has now publicly turned against civility. “You cannot be civil,” she explains, “with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.”

No, Hillary Clinton is recognizing -- just like Roosevelt or Reagan -- that America faces an enemy which regards civility -- and civilization -- as a weakness.  And -- just like Lincoln -- she is facing the grim fact that this enemy is within our borders and made up of our fellow citizens.

Gerson continues:

But is ethno-nationalist populism effectively fought with intemperate language, lame symbolism and pathetic nostalgia for the summer of ’68? Do Democrats really want to run Eugene McCarthy against Trump?

I'm sure this sounded clever in Mr. Gerson's head.  Just like the "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" lie he deployed to help George W. Bush lie us into the wrong war.  But honestly, here on the page, all it does is lead me to wonder how your super-awesome True Conservative action plan of spending 25 years social climbing, ass-kissing, bible-thumping, impotent finger-wagging and self-absolving hectoring about Both Side is working out for you?

Specifically, I'm wondering how the fuck it became the Democrats job to round up your fucking mad dogs like Limbaugh and Hannity and Ingraham and Gingrich and Ryan and McConnell and put them back in the box?  Why isn't policing the toxic Republican shitpile you created your fucking job? 

Gerson tosses a big slab of Both Siderism on the fire:

This may be fighting fire with fire, but it is also playing with fire. ...When both parties regard electoral losses as indications of electoral fraud and theft, our nation will enter a new stage of fragility. It will become easier to surrender to the irrational, to practice harassment and humiliation, and to turn to verbal and physical violence.

This right here should have gotten Mr. Gerson fired.  It won't because the WaPo doesn't really give a shit when its GOP op-ed goons lie, but it should.  Because even Michael Gerson damn well knows that Republican complaints about Democrats "electoral fraud and theft" are fairy tales invented to rile up the party's reprogrammable meathead base --

-- while even as I write this, Mr. Gerson's Republican Party is engaged in actual, real, verifiable, wide-spread voter suppression.

Gerson finally limps his leaky garbage scow into port:

Some rising Democrat needs to study up on President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and Gov. Bob Casey Sr. and Prime Minister Tony Blair. To eventually beat Trump, liberals must remaster the language of unity and hope.

Now, some rising Democrat should strap Mr. Gerson to a gurney and force him to listen to some of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's greatest hits:

"They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

"Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred."

Or maybe Mr. Gerson could just Shut Up and Sing:..

Hey, perhaps some rising Democrat could take it upon themselves to teach Mr. Gerson our Tone Cop! theme song?

The tone police
They live on cable teevee
The tone police
They're paid to shush and decree
The tone police
They're coming to denounce me
Oh no...

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More Thrilling Tales of True Conservatism!

Once again, former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, senior Republican policy adviser and reliable Beltway Republican stalactite, Michael Gerson, uses his subsidized media platform to express his utter shock that his Republican party is full of Republicans.

“Will conservatives so easily abandon conservatism for white identity politics? It is an approach to public life that will indelibly stain all who employ it — and all who excuse it.” https://t.co/EfpUeEDZMD

— Michael Gerson (@MJGerson) July 3, 2018

Join us again next time when we bring you more thrilling tales of...True Conservatism!

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Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Gerson

In which former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, senior Republican policy adviser and reliable Beltway Republican stalactite, Michael Gerson, once again takes up his pen and inkpot to proclaim that his Republican Party just all of the sudden became a racist shitpile a couple of years ago.

From Mr. Gerson today in the Washington Post.

The Trump era is a renaissance of half-witted intolerance 

...Yes, these are fringe figures. But they are fringe figures in a political atmosphere they correctly view as favorable. 

Sorry, Mr. Gerson but we must interrupt your adorable fairy tale about the history of your Republican party with this important, late-breaking news from 1988!

Do please go on, Mr. Gerson.  This is all so terribly interesting!

In the Republican Party, cranks and bigots are closer to legitimacy than at any time since William F. Buckley banished the John Birch Society.

I do apologize, Mr. Gerson but we must once again interrupt your hilarious Republican creation myth with this important, late-breaking news from 1990!

The Politics of Slash and Burn

Published: September 20, 1990

'Sick.'' ''Traitors.'' ''Bizarre.'' ''Self-serving.'' ''Shallow.'' ''Corrupt.'' ''Pathetic.'' ''Shame.'' The group that urged political candidates to use these epithets has since regretted suggesting the word ''traitors,'' in response to inquiries from the press. But the others were allowed to stand; they appear in a glossary that a conservative Republican group recently mailed to Republican state legislative candidates.

The group is Gopac, the G.O.P. Political Action Committee. Its general chairman is Representative Newt Gingrich. With the pamphlet, ''Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,'' comes a letter from Mr. Gingrich himself. Its message to candidates: Step up invective. Use words like these to describe opponents. These words work.

Mr. Gingrich's injunction represents the worst of American political discourse...

The Gopac glossary may herald a descent into even lower levels of discourse. It comes blessed by a politician of some influence - the Republican whip in the House - and it is intended for candidates on the state level, many of them presumably running for the first time. Even though Mr. Gingrich himself may not have seen the list before it was mailed, this is a disturbing document...

Please continue, Mr. Gerson.  You have my full attention!

For some of us, this was a concern from the beginning of President Trump’s rise -- not just the policies he would adopt but also the attitudes he would encourage and the passions he would provoke.

Gosh darn it, I am so sorry, Mr. Gerson but we must once again interrupt your spellbinding Republican superhero origin story with still more important, late-breaking news, this time from 1994!

Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh

BALTIMORE, Dec. 10 -- To all the advice for the new Republicans coming to Congress, add this from Rush Limbaugh: A hostile press corps lurks inside the Beltway.

"You will never ever be their friends," the talk-show host warned most of the 73 Republican freshmen at a dinner here tonight. "They don't want to be your friends. Some female reporter will come up to one of you and start batting her eyes and ask you to go to lunch. And you'll think, 'Wow! I'm only a freshman. Cokie Roberts wants to take me to lunch. I've really made it!' " The audience laughed.

"Seriously," he added. "Don't fall for this. This is not the time to get moderate. This is not the time to start trying to be liked."

The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November.

Mr. Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the class as its members tonight finished a three-day orientation here sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Empower America, two conservative Washington research organizations.

Barbara Cubin, an incoming freshman from Wyoming, told Mr. Limbaugh that because 74 percent of the nation's newspapers had endorsed Democrats, "talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide." On behalf of the women in the class, she gave him a plaque that said, "Rush Was Right." He also received a pin like the ones the freshmen wore, saying, "Majority Maker."

"Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those are the people who elected the new Congress," he said...

Seriously, Mr. Gerson, you are an incredibly well-paid and respected member of the elite Beltway punditocracy who is read my millions every day, while I am a disreputable Libtard blogger who ekes out a few bucks here and there thank to some of my dozens of readers hitting a tip jar when they can afford to.  And it is just unacceptably bad manners that your august personage should be so rudely interrupted while you are a guest in my house.  So I have barred the door and I have taken the phone off the hook.  

Now please, do continue with your fascinating saga!

Whatever else Trumpism may be, it is the systematic organization of resentment against outgroups. Trump’s record is rich in dehumanization...

This is more than a disturbing pattern; it is an organizing political principle. And it has resulted in a series of radiating consequences...

First, it has given permission for the public expression of shameful sentiments...

Excuse me, Mr. Gerson, but Jesus Christ on a UPS truck, you are not going to believe what happened!  

Funny story, actually.  

It seems that some Liberal asshole bundled together the record of your entire Republican party during the Obama Administration.  You know, long before Donald Trump ever oozed down the escalator and into the hearts of the reprogrammable meatbags who always have been the base of your party.  

Anyway, this person piled it all together.  Your party's conspiracy to sabotage and destroy all Obama initiatives -- a conspiracy they hatched the day President Obama was inaugurated.  Your party's theft of Merrick Garland's supreme court seat by the smirking ghoul who leads your party in the Senate.  

Every Fox News lie.  Every Breitbart hit-piece.  Every "respectable" bit of hate-mongering slander pushed out through The Weekly Standard and The National Review.  

The daily bile-geyser broadcast non-stop, coast-to-coast on Conservative Hate Radio.

Every shitty lump of Conservative prose by written by scumbags like Mark Levin, Ann Coulter and Jerome Corsi which the base of your party sops up with a biscuit. 

Every unhinged...

...racist...

...Republican Fake Tea Party screed.

And every Beltway Both Siderist asshole who enabled every bit of it by dealing every new Republican atrocity by demanding to know "Why won't Obama lead?!?!"

Bundled it all up.  

Tied it up with a ribbon.

Spray painted "It's Not 'Trumpism' And You Damn Well Know It You Shitheel!" on it and tossed the whole thing right through my front window.

Once again, Mr. Gerson, I am so very, very, very sorry for the all of these terribly shrill and impertinent interruptions.

Please do go on...

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Today In "Both Sides Do It": Mushroom Cloud Guy Bitches About America's Declining Rhetorical Standards

You may know Mr. Michael Gerson as George W. Bush's chief speechwriter and senior Republican policy adviser who put the lie of "a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud" into Dubya's mouth.  Or you may know Mr. Gerson as yet another Bush Regime Dead Ender who was bequeathed a wingnut welfare media sinecure for life after the Bush Administration collapsed around his ears.  Or you may know Mr. Gerson as America's emergency backup David Brooks -- a  reliable Beltway Republican stalactite who has spilled countless barrels of ink insisting that there exists some other, perfectly rational and humane Republican Party out there somewhere which he can clearly see, and which you can see too if you just stare directly into the sun long enough.

But however you have come to know Mr. Gerson, you know him to be a fop and a fraud who, at long last, has but one rusty tin drum remaining in his orchestra of bullshit.

That always-reliable Both Sides Do It drum.

And my oh my doesn't he pound it as if his life depended on it.

From the Washington Post (with emphasis added to amuse me):

The rhetoric of our era has reached its vile peak

In Washington — at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner — comedian Michelle Wolf...

In Washington, Mich., President Trump gave an 80-minute speech in a stream-of-semiconsciousness style that mixed narcissism, nativism, ignorance, mendacity and malice...

In both Washingtons, political discourse was dominated by the values and practices of reality television and social media...

Mr. Gerson suggests the source of this scourge, and its cure as follows:

[Trump's] degraded language results from a degraded politics. And the repair of our public life will eventually require a restoration of rhetoric.

Wow.  Sounds like a big job.  But as an unpaid, Liberal pariah blogger and master of all thing rhetorical, let me do my small part to get the ball rolling.

Fuck you, Michael Gerson.

Fuck you sideways.

With a steam hammer.

In the form of a mushroom cloud.

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Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Gerson

In which former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, senior Republican policy adviser and reliable Beltway Republican stalactite, Michael Gerson, demonstrates yet again that it is virtually impossible for a Republican to look Republican evil in the eye and call it by its true name.

The cowardice among Republicans is staggering

You say "staggering".  I say "utterly predictable". 

But do go on.

According to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the declassified Devin Nunes memo — alleging FBI misconduct in the Russia investigation — is “not an indictment of the FBI, of the Department of Justice.” According to President Trump, the memo shows how leaders at the FBI “politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats” and “totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe.”

Both men are deluded or deceptive...

No,  both men are evil.  They are both liars and they are both evil.

The existence of reckless partisans such as Nunes is hardly surprising. The nearly uniform cowardice among elected Republicans is staggering. 

No,  we've discussed this.  You can't say the performance of something is "staggering" when you have spent your entire adult life working to ensure that it will perform exactly as it is performing.  You stocked your GOP with bigots and imbeciles, con men and lunatics, gun nuts and oligarchs, fake Christians and real fascists.  You did it strategically, methodically, over the course of decades. 

How the fuck did you expect they would act like when their Il Douche finally arrived?

And what to make of Ryan (R-Wis.)? 

That he is an evil man.

I have been a consistent defender of his good intentions. 

Because you are an idiot and a terrible person.

But after the 17th time saying “He knows better,” it dawns that he may not. 

Because, as I just said, you are an idiot and a terrible person.

By his recent actions, the speaker has provided political cover for a weakening of the constitutional order. He has been used as a tool while loudly insisting he is not a tool. The way Ryan is headed, history offers two possible verdicts: Either he enabled an autocrat, or he was intimidated by a fool. 

No. There is a third verdict.  That he was an evil man, leading a party of monsters.

I believe Ryan to be a good person. 

But you believe because you must, not because it is true.  You believe it because to believe otherwise would mean that you are an idiot and a terrible person who has spent his adult life enabling a party of monsters. 

But the greatest source of cynicism is not the existence of corrupt people in politics; it is good people who lose their way.

Paul Ryan was never a good person who lost his way.  He is an evil man who found a hospitable ecosystem in which his evil could thrive in your party of monsters.

Why can’t Republican legislators see the personal damage this might cause? 

Because they are a party of monsters, led by evil men.

A generation of Republicans will end up writing memoirs of apology and regret.

No, they won't.  Y'all will just do what you did the last time your party of monsters collapsed under the weight of your own corruption and perfidy.  Republicans and their quisling enablers in the media will spend a shit-ton of money gassing up the Bush Off Machine and then taking it out for a  nationwide propaganda blitz.  Almost overnight millions of Trump-loving MAGA Republicans will disappear and be replaced with "Independents" who never even heard of Donald Trump.

But it is damage to the conscience that is hardest to repair. 

But Republicans don't have a conscience. 

They have a Hannity.

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Today In Both Sides Do It: Reliable Beltway Stalactite Michael Gerson

From the The Washington Post:

America is currently cursed, not only with tribal politics, but with tribal morality. Some liberals tend to minimize or excuse offenses against a few women in the broader cause of women’s rights. What is a politician’s wandering hand in comparison to maintaining legal abortion? Some conservatives tend to minimize or excuse offenses against women in the cause of conservative governance. What are a few old accusations compared to cementing a conservative Supreme Court or passing tax reform?

Both sides...

It has been said that too much Wingnut Welfare leads to slothful, crappy writing.

Which is not to say that to motivate Michael Gerson to write in a less shamelessly dishonest manner he should be pelted with dog poop whenever he shows his face in public.

Because that would be wrong.

So very wrong.

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