However, what remains a taboo subject everywhere except out here in
disreputable wilds of whatever is left of the Liberal blogosphere is
how exactly the Republican base came to be such a aggregation of
unsalvageable garbage people that they would nominate this degenerate monster
for president three times and elect him twice.
How is it that no one but us dirty hippies noticed or cared about the monstrous cancer that was growing in plain sight at the heart of the GOP until it was far too late to stop it?
You probably didn't notice, but last week was the 12th anniversary of the
creation of the Fake Tea Party. And the reason you may not have noticed is
because almost no one did. There was no wall-to-wall coverage on Fox like that
which attended its birth. No news reports. No breathless retrospectives. No
"Where are they now?" docudramas. Beyond
Bill Scher doing yeoman's work
to warn that the forces that powered the Fake Tea Party were are still very much
with us --
The Tea Party Began 12 Years Ago. What’s Changed—and What Hasn’t.
CNBC’s Rick Santelli started it all by attacking Obama and a rescue plan that
he called a subsidy for “losers.” Biden should be ready for the next Santelli.
-- the Fake Tea Party is just another weed-choked political grave in the
Potter's Field of forgotten Republican scams.
Well, mostly.
Over at the Never Trump Revisionism Factory we find Matt Lewis using the
corpse of the Fake Tea Party to retcon himself into the now-lucrative pantheon
of Republicans who "have long argued" yadda yadda and something something
warned years ago...
It’s the Tea Party Anniversary. Here’s Why I’m Not Celebrating.
The famous “Santelli rant” happened 12 years ago last week. I mark it out
of sadness. It led us straight to MAGA-land.
...
While many of my Never Trump conservative brethren still see this
movement as a largely positive phenomenon,
I have long argued that there was a straight line from the Tea Party
to MAGA. For sane conservatives, this was the beginning of the end...
Which may have been the impetus for Charlie Sykes to inviting him onto The
Bulwark podcast where they could commiserate over various things.
Like how there was a time, as recently as 2016, when CPAC might have been a
little goofy, but was still a place where decent, God-fearin' folk could walk
unmolested in the streets.
And how there was a time when Matt Schlapp was a mensch.
And how there was a time when Rush Limbaugh was fun and irreverent and a Man
of Ideas.
Charlie Sykes: The other thing that happened was the way
the grifters settled in. And this is something else on the Right, uh,
because...
Because you and every other Conservative Hate Radio goober spent decades
corralling and hand-feeding claptrap to millions of Republican bigots and
imbeciles? Building an army of chumps who would be easy pickings for
every thimble-rigger, flim-flammer and Trump on the Right?
Nope.
Sykes: ...because I remember very early on um, when, y'know,
pre-Trump I kept asking the question, "Who exactly is the Tea Party? Who's
speaking for the Tea Party?" Because I have all these groups popping
up the claim that "We are the Tea Party" or "We are the Tea Party"
and, um, y'know who... who basically gave you the the franchise and many
of them were extremely strange. And then of course you just had the
people who were just raising money off of it -- using the outrage machine
to raise as much money as possible. So there's, y'know part of the
story of... of the Right has just been the way that so much of these
things have been taken over by... by the grifters and the people who are
looking for the clicks and the contributions.
It either never dawns on Charlie or he is sunk too deeply in denial to admit
that the reason the Right is riddled with
"grifters and the people who are looking for the clicks and the
contributions"
is because manufacturing malleable chumps is what the entire Conservative enterprise has
been all about all along -- one very long, very well-funded
project aimed at dumbing down and angrying up the Republican base enough so
that they would consistently vote against their own interests and instead make
common cause with the plutocrats who bankrolled the whole thing and the
carnival barkers they hire to lure the rubes into the tent.
And once men like Charlie had labored long and hard to build a machine
designed to crank out credulous idiots, as sure flies find shit and rotten
meat, grifters followed their nose straight to it.
Of course, some of us on the Left would have been only too happy to explain to
Mr. Sykes that the Tea Party was a fraud -- a rebranding scam to get
Republicans off the hook for all the heinous shit they said and did during the
Bush administration. Some of us we're, in fact, using our tiny blogs and
podasts to get the word out about the Fake Tea Party since the earliest days
when Republicans began disappearing into the weeds and then and popped back
onto the mainstream media's radar as "Independents"
From me in 2009:
The "Independent" Granfalloon
...
And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group
of late-blooming independents?
Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in
modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started
gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George
W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every
fucking day, that's who.
Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans
who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still
desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are
completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have
gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult
lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of
women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for
the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their
lives and futures.
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running
away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their
uniforms.
But they fool no one.
Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.
But men like Charlie Sykes were much too busy tone policing Liberal Hate Talker to notice our warnings.
And well before Matt Lewis found himself basking in the glowing blurbs from
the likes of Rick Perry, Ken Blackwell, S.E. Cupp, Andrew Breitbart, Erick
Erickson and Tucker Carlson --
If you learned everything you knew about American politics from Matt
Lewis, you'd be in pretty good shape. I should know, since I practically
do.
-- Tucker Carlson
for his paean to Sarah Palin and all that she stood for,
"The Quotable Rogue: The Ideals of Sarah Palin in Her Own Words",
we Liberal Hate Talkers busied ourselves writing post after post after post
about the Fake Tea Party which were dutifully ignored by everyone.
For example, here is one of my own hundreds of contributions to the genre from
2010 with which some of you may already be familiar :-)
Now, The Bush-Belly Sneetches
But two years later, Conservatives with huge media platforms were still swearing that the Fake Tea Party was the salvation of the GOP
"The tea party helped save the Republican Party..." -
@JoeNBC on
MoJoe
-- was something that Sykes went on and on and on about.
Who knows, Charlie? Maybe one big reason the IRS took an interest in the Fake Tea Party was because, as one high-profile MSNBC contributor put it, it was fraught with "grifters and the people who are looking for the clicks and the contributions."
Everywhere they turn these days, Dry Drunk Republicans like Lewis and Sykes find the same, terrible fact staring back at them. That the Left has been right about the Right all along.
Which is why Dry Drunk Republicans work so hard at erasing us from history and rewriting the past to valorize themselves.
...millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done for the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat of 1,000 suns. In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.
But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.
But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.
By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically NOT a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam...
But here's the thing. There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
So here we are, a decade later.
And now that everything we dirty, disreputable Liberals had long since warned about has long since come to pass, what story do I find running away with social media morning? (From the WaPo)
“It turns out a lot of them were not in favor of limiting the size of government, they were just opposed to the president at the time,” said [Justin] Amash, who helped found the tea party-aligned House Freedom Caucus. “The tea party is largely gone. It was replaced with nationalism and protectionism and the general philosophy of the party now under Trump.”
Yet another Republican being elevated to the rank of Patriot Hero First Class by bravely noticing that his Republican party was full of Republicans all along.
So my question is, how the hell can I get myself graded on that curve?
Having learned from the Great Tea Party Hoax of 2009 that the Beltway media will let Conservatives get away with literally anything as long as they get to go along for the ride and take a cut of the spoils, what you are witnessing right now is a vast and poorly orchestrated effort at splunging the hell out of Don the Con by the blame-the-man-not-the-movement and the support-but-not-endorse-through-clenched-teeth-and-clucking-tongues coalitions.
And because we have all been to this shitty movie more than once, I can confidently predict the following.
That right around the time Sidney Blumenthal, Jeremiah Wright and the ghost of Saul Ailinky are gathered around the Yule log this winter helping Hillary Clinton put the finishing touches on Barack Obama's Third Inaugural Address...
Try our New and Improved Conservatism: It's Toasted!
Before then, the best hope for the republic is for every one of these people (and media parasites who enable them) to be metaphorically stripped bare and driven into the sea while their grip on power is still weak and uncertain.
So get on that.
And before you rebuke me for violating the First Jinxing Rule of Electoral Politics, rest assured that just after I wrote "the incoming Clinton Administration" I went outside, turned around three times and spit and cursed.
Because at this stage only a great fool would risk tempting the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing.
"Conservatism repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."
-- K. Marx (slightly abused)
For this, I have to take you on a trip through time. Just a little jaunt, back almost exactly seven years to April of 2009. Barack Obama had been sworn in just a few weeks earlier and the Right -- which had cheered on every Bush Administration debacle and laughed off every Bush Administration crime -- suddenly and completely lost their shit and declared the end of civilization as we know it.
It apparently all began with something called, "Potato Day"...
The story is about those first, early days of the massive Republican Base re-branding scam called the "Tea Party".
You see, back in 2009, millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done for the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat of 1,000 suns. In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.
But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.
But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.
By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically NOT a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam. Ed Kilgore wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and E.J. Dionne. There was also this July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:
The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.
But here's the thing. There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
No, no, no! Definitely cannot say that because that would violate the new, post-Dubya Generally Accepted Beltway Narrative that all problem are caused by "the extremes on Both Sides" and in the middle there is a"vital Center" full of millions of political virgins who have been moved by the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.
Which brings us right up to the present time, where this continues to be the only story the Village is interested in hearing and telling. Those who obediently sing from the approved hymnal are rewarded, those to stray from the Party line are punished, and once again the possibility of finally bringing the Right to book for its open, suppurating lunacy is buried unto another mountain of Beltway fraud and fairy tales.
In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth is now so secure that, just yesterday, Joe Scarborough could come right out and say of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all knew it and know with perfect certainty that MSNBC management will not dock his pay one dollar or his camera time one minute and that none of his "Liberal" colleagues will so much as breathe a word of it on the air (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)
Because there is a Club.
And you will never be in it.
As his lawyers appealed dismissal of his election lawsuit to the state Supreme Court on Friday, Chris McDaniel referenced Nazism on his Facebook page.
"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil," McDaniel, who was reportedly out of state, posted Friday, quoting Deitrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran reverend and anti-Nazi dissident in World War II Germany. "God will not hold us guiltless … Not to act is to act."
Specially appointed Judge Hollis McGehee last week dismissed McDaniel's challenge of his June 24 primary runoff loss to incumbent GOP Sen. Thad Cochran, saying McDaniel waited too late to file his lawsuit.
An appeal of the lower court ruling in an election challenge by law goes to the state Supreme Court.
McGehee agreed with Cochran attorneys that a 1959 state Supreme Court decision is "still good law," and imposes a deadline of 20 days after the election for filing a challenge, first with the state Republican Party. McDaniel filed his challenge with the state party 41 days after he lost the runoff to Cochran by 7,667 votes.
McDaniel attorneys argued that election laws had been changed since 1959, particularly with a 1986 overhaul, and the 1959 "Kellum" ruling was moot. The judge disagreed, saying the laws on challenging primary elections were substantially the same as at the time of the ruling.
McDaniel lead attorney Mitch Tyner on Friday said: "We continue to be confident that when Senator McDaniel's challenge is heard on the merits it will change the results of the Republican primary. Republicans should be allowed to choose their nominee without influence or raiding by Democrats."
...
There is something about a whiny Teabagger.
From Mississippi.
Bitching about the Nazis and the fairness of election laws.
Longtime readers of know that while we here at the driftglass blog strive to maintain a levels of technical, graphic and authorial quality which meets or exceeds those of other sites with budgets 100,000 times larger than ours, sometimes we have to cut corners. For example, you might not know that in order to provide our readers with as close to cutting-edge Ramesh Ponnuru coverage as we can afford, we have had to outsource that beat to an itty-bitty, off-shore division staffed with drunks and layabouts so that we can bring you an irregular feature called "Ramesh Ponnuru's Wingnut Purity Creds to Expire". Unfortunately, this has often amounted me having to yell at them to off their their lazy asses every now and then and check the meat thermometer on Mr. Ponnuru's stealthy, deliberate transition from "the smirky little weasel who wrote 'The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life'" to a Very Serious Conservative Thinker who Thinks Very Serious Conservative Thoughts.
For Money.
Of course carry out his bold plan to sidle on over to the David Brooks side of the S.S. Conservative Obtusitania, from time to time Young Ramesh has to...well..."steal" is a harsh word, so let's just say it has been rumored that from time to time he wire-drops into Liberal Central Command
in order to "liberate" some of our time-honored observations about Conservatism without leaving any finger-prints.
(Needless to say, Liberals realize when they have, once again, been jacked without so much as a 'Thank you' or by-your-leave, but who the fuck pays attention to those losers anyway? As one of their more disreputable members observed long ago,
...
Finally, at no point during this latest reshuffling of America's Conservative media courtiers will anyone be gauche enough to mention that the Filthy Liberals were, once again, absolutely right all along.
Still, over here in the cultural ghetto of Liberal Central Command, we will all laugh and drink our chardonnay and laugh some more.)
And speaking of Young Ramesh and our media's gentlemen's agreement to never notice when Liberals are once again shown to have been absolutely right all along...here's a lovely little bit of awesome from a few weeks ago which my surly, drunken, good-for-nothing staff did not call to my attention until now:
The Tea Party Never Existed
MAY 21, 2014 4:34 PM EDT
By Ramesh Ponnuru
Much of journalism consists, G.K. Chesterton wrote, of "saying Lord Jones is dead to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive." Much of political journalism this week consists of people who have not understood the Tea Party since its birth saying that it's now dead.
The loosely organized movement arose as a reaction to the reigning liberalism of 2009 and 2010, just as previous liberal moments in the mid-1960s, late 1970s and early 1990s brought about conservative backlashes. It was also, in part, a retrospective reaction by conservatives to compromises they had made during George W. Bush's years in the White House. This, too, is a fairly normal feature of political life: Purification is always easier when your side is out of power.
And just as the intra-Democratic conflicts of the Bush years -- think of the 2006 Ned Lamont-Joe Lieberman Senate primary in Connecticut, for example, itself a retrospective reaction to the party's moderation during Bill Clinton's administration -- didn't lead to lasting schism, so the Republican factionalism of recent years seems to be fading away.
This was predictable and, for that matter, predicted. In early 2010, Kate O'Beirne and I looked at detailed polling of Tea Party attitudes for the National Review. We argued that unifying the Republican Party would be easier than it was when Christian conservatives or supporters of Ross Perot joined the coalition: Unlike those earlier groups, Tea Party advocates already believed the same things that regular Republicans did. They basically were regular Republicans, just, if you will, more so.
The differences between the Tea Party and "establishment Republicans" have largely concerned style and attitude rather than program and ideology, and these are easily finessed -- especially because moods change.
...
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader whom self-proclaimed spokesmen for the Tea Party have loudly denounced, almost certainly won most Kentucky Republicans who consider themselves Tea Partiers in his re-election primary this week. Some of the denouncers are warning that McConnell will lose in November unless he gets his challenger's Tea Party supporters to turn his way. Some of those supporters tell pollsters they're so disgusted with McConnell that they'll back his Democratic opponent. They won't.
That's not because the Tea Party movement is dead. It's because the movement the pundits imagined -- a bitter enemy of the existing, pretty conservative Republican Party -- was never truly alive.
If you are masochistic enough to take a trip down that most despised thoroughfare in American politics -- Memory Lane -- all the way to origins of the "Tea Party" myth, you will fine no one but Filthy Liberals, yelling impotently at the Mainstream Media Behemoth that this was obviously another Republican lie:
...based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?
Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.
Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
But they fool no one.
Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.
Nothing but a cheap a gimmick by and for Republicans frantically trying to escape accountability for the catastrophe piled atop catastrophe that they had just spent eight unleashing on the country.
...
And then out of the West came their own gin-soaked Moses
Who swore all their shame could be turned into roses.
The thing is, I don't especially begrudge these Four Heist Men of the Teapocalypse their ludicrous little charade; Hell, if I'd spent the last decade happily sucking the dicks of the people who destroyed my country, I'd guess I'd be dressing up in pantyhose and jaunty little hats and pretending I'd been asleep since the Ford Administration too.
Phil Ponce, on the other hand, is a different story. Letting these clowns use the the public airwaves to put across their underhanded, one-sided scam is unforgivable, and letting himself be used as their sweat rag in the process is beyond embarrassing.
If Royko were alive, he'd be dangling Ponce by his ankle from a fifth story window right about now, making him conjugate the verb "muckrake".
In Latin.
Backwards.
Else how's that boy ever gonna learn!
Sadly these observations from 2009 and 2010 were all written by a Liberal.
The stupidest poll you will read all month comes to you courtesy of (surprise!) the Washington Post:
Just 7 percent of journalists are Republicans. That’s far fewer than even a decade ago.
BY CHRIS CILLIZZA
May 6 at 12:52 pm
A majority of American journalists identify themselves as political independents although among those who choose a side Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, according to a new study of the media conducted by two Indiana University professors.
Write Lars Wilnat and David Weaver, professors of journalism at Indiana, of their findings:
Compared with 2002, the percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who claim to be Democrats has dropped 8 percentage points in 2013 to about 28 percent, moving this figure closer to the overall population percentage of 30 percent, according to a December 12-15, 2013, ABC News/Washington Post national poll of 1,005 adults. This is the lowest percentage of journalists saying they are Democrats since 1971. An even larger drop was observed among journalists who said they were Republicans in 2013 (7.1 percent) than in 2002 (18 percent), but the 2013 figure is still notably lower than the percentage of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican Party (24 percent according to the poll mentioned above).
...
Wow. Sounds terribly one-sided doesn't it? And how very lucky that it also just so happens to perfectly reinforce the longstanding Beltway fairy tale that the dang Librul Media bends our national narrative so far to the Left that its only fair to stack the deck in favor of the Party of Louis Gohmert whenever and wherever possible?
Because Fairness.
Also Balance.
And thus things will stand...until anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex pushes even lightly against the assumptions underlying these stats, at which point the most amazing things start to happen.
For example, you discover that, according to paid Republican liar Sean Hannity, Sean Hannity is not a Republican, as you would know if you had listened to this exchange between definitely-not-a-Republican Sean Hannity and Congressman Keith Ellison from 2013:
...
ELLISON: Quite frankly you are the worst excuse for a journalist I have ever seen.
HANNITY: I can’t hear you.
ELLISON: You heard me.
HANNITY: No, say it again.
ELLISON: I heard you — what you just displayed was not journalism, it was yellow journalism, it wasn’t anything close to try to tell the American people what’s really going on and I mean, it’s just shocking.
HANNITY: Yellow journalism, to play Obama in his own words is yellow journalism.
ELLISON: With the background music and the lead up before you let the president talk. Let me tell you, I was here. Everything the president said is absolutely true.
HANNITY: Yeah.
ELLISON: And for you to try to make the American people make you think it isn’t is deceptive on your part and is a breach of everything, every journalistic ethic I heard of was just violated by you. And the president was truthful. The president was honest. What the president said was dead on accurate and for you to say the president is to blame here is ridiculous. I was there August, 2011 when the Republicans, your party, which you shamelessly …
HANNITY: I am not a Republican
ELLISON: You are nothing but a Republican.
Shrieking wingnut welfare radio hack, Mark Levine?
...
Levin said when it's time to govern, Republican establishment politicians "jettison" their positions and promises made on the campaign trail.
He also blasted those in the chattering class who were once liberals, hated and did not support Ronald Reagan, and who mock constitutional conservatives, just like the liberal hippies and poets they are, choosing to work with Republican establishment operatives to trash conservatives.
Levin reminded his audience that in 2006, "George W. Bush and his right-hand political hack Karl Rove lost the House of Representatives and the United States Senate."
He said nothing good was happening within the Republican party until 2010 when the people "rose up through the grassroots" after they had enough of George W. Bush's policies and the direction Obama was taking the nation after the election.
Levin, whose book Liberty and Tyranny sold a million copies without being reviewed by mainstream outlets and who was a precursor of the Tea Party movement, said the Tea Party tidal wave in 2010 was not fueled by lobbyists or establishment consultants. Instead, he called it a "spontaneous movement of patriotic Americans with conservative beliefs"--individuals who were fed up with the overreach of Democrats who controlled Congress.
"Did the Republican Party stop them? No. You stopped them," Levin thunderously declared...
And I am willing to wager that any one of you who still gets blast-emails from Republican friends or colleagues or relatives can attest to the fact that right around the time the serial catastrophes of the Bush Administration reached full bloom and the Kenyan Usurper was elected...
...suddenly...
... all of those Rush-loving, Liberal-hating, lifelong Republicans who had screamed for Clinton's impeachment over smoke and shadows for eight years and then spent the next eight years called you a cheese-eating, terrorist-loving surrender-monkey for not shutting the fuck up and blindly supporting George W. Cheney vanished!
Vanished utterly in a confetti-cloud of hastily shredded "Bush/Cheney '08" bumper stickers!
Vanished in the night in their tens of millions...and (thanks to the Magical Bush-Off Machine) been replaced by legions of "independents" and "independent constitutional conservatives" and "independent fiscal conservatives" who had never even heard of George W. Bush.
Even Paid Republican liar and "Majority Maker" Rush Limbaugh has confirmed what I have been saying since the joint Koch Brothers/GOP weasel-out-of-taking-responsibility-for-all-the-shit-we-wrecked rebranding scheme called the "Tea Party" was launched:
...
I guess they had some people with meters that were being used to register their reaction to what they were hearing, and I noted that the independent and Republican lines tracked identically. When there was a positive reaction to whatever was being said, the independents and Republicans were perfectly aligned. There was not a gap between them. When there was anger or disagreement with whatever was being said, the Republican and independent lines tracked identically, with very little space between them.
I think there's been a fundamental shift in who the independents are. I think the independents of today are, in many cases (and maybe a majority now), former Republicans who are fed up. They're actually conservatives, former Republicans who feel disconnected from the Republican Party as it's defined by the establishment. They have simply given up the party ID. They simply registered as independents.
...
If you're just joining us, I actually apologized to independents today for getting it wrong 'cause I think now what's happened, the vast majority of the independents are Republicans who have left the party in one way or another.
Of course, back in 2009 when I explained the surge of Fake Independents in an open letter to paid Republican liar David Brooks as follows (The "Independent" Granfalloon) I put a different spin on it --
...
And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?
Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.
Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
But they fool no one.
Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.
-- but the results are same.
Most of this county's newly-minted "independents" Republicans -- Republicans who spent eight years gleefully kicking the shit out of you for not getting on-board with their horrible ideas, and who went into a Beltway-Media-abetted witness-protection program once the Bush Regime went tits-up.
And any journalist who doesn't bother to mention that fact is selling something.
The movement toward independent status among reporters is in keeping with a similar move in the broader electorate as they find the two parties increasingly rigid and, therefore, less welcoming.
With Incumbents To Protect, The Tea Party Is Now Playing Defense
Four years after its emergence as a political force, the Tea Party is now coping with its adolescence.
Adolescence is never easy, especially for awkward outsiders still unsure of their place in the social hierarchy. Take the Tea Party. On the one hand, it’s under attack by an openly hostile Republican establishment, which blames the uncouth party crashers for ruining what should have been a glorious 2012 electoral rout. (Never mind that Karl Rove couldn’t buy a win for his establishment pets either.) More broadly, the movement’s sputtering public approval coupled with some high-profile losses—including key failures in this month’s Texas primaries—have much of the political world asking if the conservative insurrection is already over.
At the same time, Tea Partyers have enjoyed enough success (Matt Salmon, Justin Amash, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee…) that they now have concrete territory to defend. “Whereas before you were trying to get your guy elected, now you’ve got to start protecting them,” observes Adam Brandon, executive vice president of the Tea-Party aligned FreedomWorks, which this week endorsed its first batch of incumbents for the midterms...
No one could have predicted that once the Rapture didn't come the Black Usurper in the White House didn't toss the keys to the country to Ted Cruz and scurry back to Kenya, the Judean People's Tea Party would end up in a slap fight with the People's Tea Party of Judea:
Tea Party Eats Their Own
New GOP primary challengers are looking to serve their Tea Party challengers a scolding hot cuppa change. Their goal? To oppose!
They arrived in January of 2011, unfamiliar with the ways of Washington, and promising never to adapt. The Republican freshman of the 112th Congress had helped take back the House, riding a Tea Party-infused, throw-the-bums-out wave of conservative disgust with career politicians.
But after three years in office and an election season looming, a number of GOP Congressmen find themselves facing scrappy challengers who say that they are now the ones with a serious case of Potomac Fever.
“I didn’t expect Renee to go this route,” said Frank Roche, a conservative Internet talk show host, who is challenging Renee Ellmers in North Carolina’s Second Congressional District. “I am sad she did. Unfortunately she has chosen to go along with the establishment in Washington D. C.”
Ellmers was a nurse and a Tea Party favorite when she emerged out of a crowded field in 2010, and went on to eke out a win against the Democratic incumbent. Then, she harped on the building of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in New York in her campaign speeches, compared President Obama to Louis XIV and said that his administration is establishing a “socialistic form of government.”
Even in 2012, Roche counted himself as a supporter. But her backing of immigration reform convinced Roche to throw his own hat into the ring.
“I think that is a danger to our country.”
Plus, Roche added, since running as an outsider in 2010, Ellmers has cozied up to leadership.
That was a complaint heard again and again, from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Florida’s Gulf Coast to points in between: The one-time Outsiders had gone inside, and for evidence just look to a House Republican leadership that was embracing the one-time radicals.
...
First, as every reader of this blog knows, (say it with me now) There. Is. No. Tea. Party.
There has never been anything but the same, old, lumpen, pig-ignorant and often-bigoted Republican base. The same orc army that was dreamed up and assembled by Team Nixon, perfected by Team Reagan and behind whose vanguard every Republican victory has come for the last 40 years. The same infinitely reprogrammable Golem that made Rush Limbaugh and his imitators multi-millionaires, launched an entire, multi-billion dollar propaganda network, and turned Christianity into a Libertarian club for beating the shit out of the poor, the weak, the lame, the halt, dispossessed, the outsider, the justice-seekers and the peace-makers.
Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
But they fool no one.
Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.
To achieve electoral success, the Conservative Brain Caste bred a generation of adherents who are so completely unmoored from reality that the mere presence of facts that run contrary to the Wingnut Slogan of the Day automatically triggers a supercharged fight-or-flight reflex. So congratulations Republicans -- you succeeded beyond your wildest dreams!
Of course, once you gave up on actual governing and turned your Zombie Army of Wingnut Purity loose to wreck the country in the name of Rush Limbaugh's idea of ideological conformity, it was only a matter of time before they would begin picnicking on each other. Or, as one low-born, bootless blabbermouth once said about another Purity Cult:
He is a Professional Holder of Conservative Opinions.
No kidding. That's literally all he does: sit down at a keyboard twice a week and squeeze out two, sour, little, 800-word turds of Conservative POV.
For this he is paid enough to buy a multi-million dollar mansion.
For this, he is invited into the innermost circles of his fellow influential Professional Holders of Opinions where he basically reads aloud from his latest 800-word opinion turd.
One tiny flaw in Mr. Brooks' career plan is that, being Professional Holder of Conservative Opinions, Mr. Brooks' conjectures are almost uniformly awful and dumb and wrong, which means that, sooner or later, the real world comes a'knockin' to take a big, wet dump on them.
So, being a very, very well-paid Professional Holder of Conservative Opinions, Mr. Brooks had to figure out an ingenuous way to deal with being shivved by Reality again and again and again,
Here, in sum, is his grand strategy:
Just.
Walk.
Away.
Since 2010 -- a year after millions of wingnuts first started frantically scraping off their Bush/Cheney '04 bumper stickers and showing up at Ramada Inns wearing tr-corner hats -- Mr. Brooks' has averred over and over again with Perfect Beltway Certainty that the "Tea Party" was definitely a Brand New Righteous Independent Thing. And not (as one disreputable and long-forgotten loser once put it)
...little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
Here is what Mr. Brooks wrote two months later, in January 2010, about this very same group of rompin', stompin', and inexplicably-well-funded angry old white people whose sudden, shoutycracker appearance on the American political media scene certainly seemed to coincide exactly with the inauguration of America's first African-American president:
...
The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.
The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.
The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.
A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.
The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.
The tea party movement is mostly famous for its flamboyant fringe. But it is now more popular than either major party. According to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 41 percent of Americans have a positive view of the tea party movement. Only 35 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Democrats and only 28 percent have a positive view of the Republican Party.
The movement is especially popular among independents. The Rasmussen organization asked independent voters whom they would support in a generic election between a Democrat, a Republican and a tea party candidate. The tea party candidate won, with 33 percent of independents. Undecided came in second with 30 percent. The Democrats came in third with 25 percent and the Republicans fourth with 12 percent.
Over the course of this year, the tea party movement will probably be transformed. Right now, it is an amateurish movement with mediocre leadership. But several bright and polished politicians, like Marco Rubio of Florida and Gary Johnson of New Mexico, are unofficially competing to become its de facto leader. If they succeed, their movement is likely to outgrow its crude beginnings and become a major force in American politics. After all, it represents arguments that are deeply rooted in American history...
A month later, in February of 2010, on the Charlie Rose show, Mr. Brooks was even more emphatic that the Tea Party (like David Brooks himself) was NOT just a rump battalion of the Republican Party's base desperately trying to rebrand itself the Hell away from its own, disastrous and very public support of the Worst President in American History, but was instead a total new and different thing: Neither Republican nor Democrat, but perfect, sui generis, Brooksian Independents, untainted and untouched by recent history and beamed in from some alternate reality where they were never involved politics at all (h/t Tengrain):
That same month, February of 2010, I wrote a long, angry, open-letter to the Chicago PBS affiliate that was peddling teabagger bilge as the Pure Quill. I explained to anchor Phil Ponce just how ridiculously easy it was for anyone who was not a complete Beltway media marionette to ferret out the real roots of this allegedly Brand!New!Movement!:
Mike Royko Leaps From Grave; Cockpunches Phil Ponce.
...
Look, Phil. I’m not a Highly Paid Chicago TeeVee News Host. I don’t have a research department. I don’t have staff.
Not one lone administrative assistant to chase round my desk do I have, nor have I a single intern to get me my fucking latte.
I’m just some poor, civilian goof who can recognize a plague when it's at his door, who is sick of watching paid teevee journalism die of spine-rot, and who does this in his spare time. And yet even I – with about 30 minutes of clicking a fucking mouse on my wheezing, old laptop – was able to find out all sorts of fascinating stuff about your skeevy guests and their mendacious claims that were, for some reason, utterly beyond the collective ability of the mighty WTTW to ferret out.
But first, let us pause for a moment to prefigure the results of my massive research project by coldly gloating over the fact some of us were warning you years ago that these douchbags were on their way. I myself had “2011” in the “George W. Who?” revisionist history pool when I wrote in 2006 ("Christopaths of Glory”) that…
...
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” as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.
Missed it by 12 months. Damn. Well, I guess with that kind of batting average I won't be getting that sweet, sweet column in the Washington Post again this year.
Since then, I have wasted my time writing Jesus God Alone knows how many futile posts that were either entitled or sub-referenced as --
"There. Is. No. Tea. Party"
-- including a now-almost-forgotten post on the real function of the "Tea Party" that I am rather proud of entitled "The Bush Belly Sneetches".
Then time passed.
Pages flew from the calendar.
And suddenly it was the Year of Our Lord 2014 -- far enough from the scene of the crime so that Mr. Brooks could quietly and safely admit what we on the Left have known and have said over and over again from the start:
