They Knew.

They knew, or they were completely delusional.  

And in just this past week, we find four prime examples from prominent recently-former Republicans looking back past the "Danger!  Do Not Enter!" Forbidden Zone barrier of 2016 and noting just how long ago it should have been clear to anyone that they were building a Doomsday machine with no off switch.

Tim Miller knew.  And, looking back, it's clear now that Scarborough either knew it and won't admit it, or didn't know it because he's a fucking lump.  

And credit to Miller for cutting Squint off at the "McCain wuz a maverick" pass.  Yeah, sure, but he tapped Sarah Palin as his VP, because Palin was the one that got the base to stand up and salute.  

From NJ.com, October 4, 2008:

Palin: The Lowest Common Denominator

... Here's what Rich Lowry had to say: "Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, 'Hey, I think she just winked at me.' And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it." 

Post-debate, Hannity gushed about how attractive Palin was. At Palin rallies, you can buy buttons about how "hot" their VP is, etc. And yet they called Biden sexist for saying Palin was more attractive than he was? They called Campbell Brown sexist for wanting an example of Sarah Palin's foreign policy experience. 

Palin employed sex appeal in the debate in a display unbecoming of a 44-year-old mother of 5 and a candidate for one of the highest offices in the land. As a woman, I was embarrassed and sickened. And that is why republicans think she "won" the debate--because she employed cutesiness, recited all her rehearsed lines, and didn't answer any questions she did not want to ask. Often, she just out-and-out lied... 

And let's be clear: McCain knew exactly what he was doing when he took on Palin.  It was political Viagra for a limp campaign, and came from the same, clear-eyed, ruthless understanding of exactly who the GOP base really was, that his visit to Liberty University to kiss Jerry Falwell's poxy ass came from.   The same Jerry Falwell that McCain had publicly slammed as an "agent of intolerance" who represented the "outer reaches of American politics" just eight years earlier.  

You will also remember that reliable Conservative stalactite Kathleen Parker, had her bump-it blown back by the response from her loyal readers to her column suggest that Palin wasn't up to snuff.  From the long-gone Firedoglake:

Kathleen Parker Shocked To Find Her Party’s Full Of “Vicious”, “Threatening”, Delusional Wingnuts

By: Blue Texan Wednesday October 1, 2008

Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.
...
"After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

And she knows vicious. Here's Parker in 2003, on the Democratic presidential candidates:

Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot."

Suck it up, Kathleen. You've been tossing red meat to a caged rabid animal for two decades. No sympathy when it finally bites you.
Now, she whines:

...when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.

I'm truly speechless.

You will also remember The Most Ubiquitous Conservative Writer in the Solar System, wiping his brow in relief, because now that Palin was fading like a bad dream, everything was looking great for the future of David Brooks' Republican party.  This was mere months before Donald Trump oozed down the escalator.  And you all know what happened next.  

Next up we have Stuart Steven saying straight out that he was wrong, wrong, wrong about the Republican party.  That all the terrible things that "people" [he means "Liberals" but still can't say it] said about the GOP turned out to be true.  

Then we have Stevens' fellow Lincoln Square colleague, Rick Wilson, (get better colleagues, Stuart) who was flown to England and feted by the UK's Quiet Riot podcast so that he could drink their mead, eat their bully beef and lie about his origin story.  From the podcast:

I've done this longer than any other Republican leader.  I did this starting in 2015. I was the founder of the never Trump movement. Yeah. I've run the Lincoln Project now. Over 10 years now. 

Like hell  he was.  The "Never Trump" name and concept were just a hashtag on Twitter in early 2016 that cropped up during the Republican presidential primaries.  Then, thanks to glowing, round-the-clock coverage by MSNBC, goofs like Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol became the public face of a tiny number of Republicans who were freaked out that Wingnut Judgement Day might finally be just around the corner.

And what Wilson is trying to pass off as founding "Never Trump" in 2015 was just him doing normal, well-paid, campaign dirty work for a candidate.  He worked for the Rubio campaign until Rubio flamed out, then hired himself out to the Cruz campaign.  Which is no more the "founding" of anything than working for Santorum in 2012 was founding a "Never Romney" movement.  

Also, fun fact, the Lincoln Project was actually founded in December of 2019 when Conservative grifters figured out that credulous Liberals would throw huge bags of money at any former Republican who would produce slick "Trump is an asshole" ads that never budged a single vote but was political PornHub to those credulous Liberals.  Founded by George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, Rick Wilson, Jennifer Horn, Ron Steslow, Reed Galen, and Mike Madrid, and two years later had all but collapsed due to sexual and financial scandal.  

Inside the Lincoln Project’s ‘toxic’ workplace

Interviews with nearly two dozen people with knowledge of the group’s workings reveal a culture of infighting, sexist language and disparate treatment.

But inside Wilson's shameful flim-flamming of our British friends, we find a grain of truth.  

After a lengthy disquisition in which Wilson shows that he knew perfectly well that going into the 2016 election, a huge percentage of the Republican base was motivated by an unhinged, racist hatred of Barack Obama, one of the Brits say, well yeah, but hadn't this sort of thing been going on for decades?

What about Nixon's Southern Strategy?  And that 30% who hate Obama isn't enough, is it? They have to be amped up.  That hatred has to be used by someone.  

Great point.   Wilson replies...

Wilson: Listen, the old theory of the Republican party was we knew that 25% of the base, if I may put it as bluntly as it used to be said in the room, were cousin fucking weirdos.  

Big laugh

Wilson: And you brought them out of the closet every four years. You hosed them off and you sent them off to vote.

We did not want to talk about those people. We did not particularly like those people. I come from... you can call it the RINOS or the country club Republicans or whatever you want to call it, but we were the guys who could win races and the weirdos could not win races, but that coalition, they were a part of it. Now they're in the government. 

You may have noticed two different flavors of lies here.

First, it was never 25%.  As Stuart Stevens now effectively admits, it was much higher than that.  Probably closer to 70% or 80%.

Second, "everyone in the room" means that everyone in Republican leadership knew damn well what kind of dangerous nutcases these people were.

And third, as to this "we were the guys who could win races" claptrap?  A lie by omission. The only way your country club Republicans clients could win anything was by flattering and pandering to "cousin fuckers".  By ratcheting up their hatred every election cycle, and using Fox News and Hate Radio to keep them at a full boil in between.  Without the "cousin fuckers" you'd never have won fucking thing and eventually they figured it out.

And do you know who was jumping up and down, shouting warnings about Frankenstein, and the Golem and the Sorcerer's apprentice while Rick Wilson was getting rich whipping the cousin fuckers into a frenzy?  From me in 2005 in a "Both Sides Do It" column by (who else?) David Brooks -- 

 ...I’ll name 15 leaders of your party who are intolerant, hate-mongering theocrats. Superstition-touting extremists. Your opinion leaders. The ones who get out the vote for your candidates and without which you cocksucking Cocktail Party Republicans would never win anything.

-- which is a sentiment I've repeated in dozens-- probably hundreds -- of posts ever since.

And just for sport, there is also this from me in 2011:

The sad truth is that Hate is the Right's Ring of Power. They're never going to give it up, because they know the minute they do -- the minute they're no longer allowed to pretend that Liberals are evil, freedom-hating fifth-columnist monsters who are dragging America into a Marxist abyss on the secret orders of our Kenyan Usurper Overlord -- their whole ideology would implode...

...they would never win another election...

...and tens of thousands of powerful, well-remunerated insiders from Rush Limbaugh to David Gregory who depend on that hate for their daily bread would suddenly have to go out and find honest work.

To be clear, it wasn't just me.  I was one voice in a great chorus of Liberal writers and bloggers who were all sounding the alarm.  That to stay in power, the leaders of the GOP were now explicitly bending the knee to Hate Radio and Fox News because their dependence on Conservative media to get out the vote and drum up contributions was now complete.  

To anyone paying attention with honest eyes, this was all clear as day when, in 2009, the head of the RNC had to go groveling to Rush Limbaugh to beg forgiveness for saying [checks notes] true things about that despicable scumbag.

Steele to Rush: I'm sorry

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

But the louder we Liberals sounded the alarm, the louder we were denounced as alarmist crackpots.  And this went on and on right up until Trump showed up and it had become all far too late to stop what was about to happen.   

What happened next? 

First, media corporations -- which were overstuffed with savvy pundits who had assured the public that the GOP was fine and healthy and this sort of thing could never happen -- began scrambling for talking heads who could explain the inexplicable.  

And, second, they wanted nothing to do with all those Liberal alarmist crackpots who, as it turned out, had been right all along.  Because those Liberal alarmist crackpots tended to arrive with receipts.  And those receipts made their vastly overpaid savvy pundits look like idiots.  Because we can't have that.

The much better alternative was to platform the shit out of a handful of now-unemployed Republican comms people who you all already knew, and who were only too happy to spin the story of the Rise of Trump in a much more savvy pundit-friendly way.  That this was some kinda Black Swan event.  A fever that was sure to break sooner or later.  A glitch in the Matrix that no one could have seen coming and for which certainly none of them were responsible.

But you know, come to think of it, you know who might be kinda responsible for a big chunk of the horrors that were now raining down on their heads?   Those damn Liberals.  Because, just maybe, it was them saying the Republican party was a racist party... made so many Republican voters mad that, well, they went ahead and started doing racism just to say "Fuck you!" to the Liberals.

Which was a theory floated by Charlie Sykes and a number of his guests when he was the public voice of The Bulwark... as the Bulwark was being relentlessly promoted by CNN and MSNBC the New York Times and the Washington Post.  Because for hardwired right-wing goons like Sykes, regardless of the circumstances, somehow, some way, the Left will always turn out to have been the villains.  

They either knew they were playing with something dangerous and radioactive, or they were willfully blind to it.  And as the toxicity of the GOP base spiked higher and higher year after year, the more they were either willing to go along with it for the money and the influence, or the tighter they had to squeeze their eyes shut to what was happening all around them.  

And once it all fell apart, then came the mad scramble for...believe it or not...credit.   Listen to any Never Trump podcast and within minutes you'll hear them boasting about how they were warning Republicans about Trump in 2016 or 2017 or 2018 and woe betide the fools who did not listen.  You will hear them rolling their eyes at how all those morons called them [checks notes] alarmist crackpots back in 2018 or 2019 or 2020.  And now look at 'em!  

Their whole marketing campaign is based on the single premise that they saw this coming when no one else did, which is why you should send them money and heed their warning that the Democratic party needs to become more Centrist.  And buy their book!

Now that they have successfully colonized what little was left of the "Liberal media" it's safe for them to mention, often in passing, that, sure, they knew the base was nuts.  That when your job is to get Republican elected, and bigots, imbeciles and Fundies are all what you have to work with, then that's what you work with.   

Too bad.  So sad.  Also buy my book. 

No wonder they hate Liberal bloggers and podcasters.  No wonder they continue to pretend we never existed.  We fuck up their entire business model.  

So, while we know we'll never be invited to cross the pond and feted by the Brits, as we eat their prime joints of venison and partridge and drink their Taylor Fladgate port and tell the true tale of what really happened, today I felt compelled to set the "Who, What, When" record straight once again.

Burn The Lifeboats

Can't Stop Won't Stop

This was a lead story in The New York Times today.

The short answer, which is actually rather long, is "No".

This is roughly the 12,258th "think piece" on progressive outsiders winning a few Democratic primaries.  It's nearing the "But Her Emails" saturation point. And these articles tend to come either in one of two flavors.  

First, Dire!Warnings! cursing Democrats for risking dooming us all by not becoming GOP Lite in order to chase the votes of disaffected Republicans.  These articles tend to come from (small wonder) recently-former Republicans whose "advice" to Democrats has always been -- rain or shine -- to keep moving rightward, ever-rightward -- in pursuit of an imaginary Center which is always, somehow, slipping over the horizon.  

Second, there are the breathless articles touting how a few members of the Democratic majority (do the math) are fighting back hard against a small number of progressives with whom they have no intention of sharing even a small corner of the Democrat's Big Tent.  Mind you, they had no fucking problem when it came to sharing our Big Tent with ghouls like Liz Cheney who spent their entire career slandering Democrats in the most monstrous language imaginable...but us New Deal Democrats get nothing but the stink-eye and a boot in the ass from the gatekeepers who own the velvet ropes. 

From The New York  Times, August 6, 2026:

Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left

One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.

The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful defeat of the year.

Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism. 

It will not shock you to learn that Third Way gets its money from Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech as well as outfits such as ExxonMobil and various health insurance companies.  All the usual suspects who would rather see a MAGA flag flying over this country forever than share the Democratic Party with actual progressives.

Now, it is rumored that this “Better Dead than Al-Sayed” gang of Regressives is led by a shadowy figure known only as “David Fucking Brooks”.  And two Fridays ago Mr. Brooks left his Bethesda Maryland compound just long enough to appear on the PBS News Hour where, practically in tears, he said this.

Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.

That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which the party is moving further and further away from the center, and therefore…

At which point, Brooks co-panelist, Jonathan Capehart, reached his limit of politely tolerating this old fraud's endless bullshit and interrupted him with:

I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket argument that the Democratic Party is running far left. 

That was the signal for the host – Amna Nawaz – to do the PBS thing of quickly moving on to the next topic at the slightest sign of conflict.

However, since I do not abide by PBS rules, I will just add that it is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at this moment".  

It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.

And of course Third Way is not a solo act. They have plenty of fellow travelers who are horrified that a few Democratic candidates have won their primaries in ways that Third Way, LLC does not approve of.  

From The Washington Post, June 3rd, 2026:

Centrist Democrats launch new pledge: ‘We are capitalist, not socialist’

Two Democrats in Congress who flipped Republican-held seats in 2024 are launching a pledge for their party’s candidates they hope will act as a rallying cry for centrists, calling for a “politics of persuasion over purity” and declaring that “we are capitalist, not socialist.”

The pledge is a direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt as democratic socialists such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) capture the party’s energy and activism.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Adam Gray (D-California) said they will unveil the pledge Wednesday afternoon at the center-left conference WelcomeFest, and hope to get candidates up and down the ballot to join them in signing it. 

From Common Dreams, February 9th, 2026:

‘One More Billionaire Front Group’: Centrist Dems Mocked Over New Initiative Led by Corporate Lobbyist

In fact, establishment panic over even mildly social-democratic ideas predates the current cycle by years.

From In These Times, seven years ago,  February 7, 2019:

Why Is the Political Establishment So Afraid of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal?

So, the short answer is "No".

The longer answer -- the reason why the answer is "No" -- is uglier and deeply embarrassing to the legacy media, which is why you will never hear them speak of it.  Because it has to do with what the "Tea Party" actually was.

For several years I bored you all silly with post after post after post about how the Tea Party was not some new, insurgent outsider group who were storming the barricades of the moribund Republican party.  That they were the Republican party: the same ignorant, racist, shoutycrackers Republican base they'd always been, but now that the Bush administration had shit the bed hard enough to crack the Earth's mantle, they needed their own, incredibly inconvenient past to go away so they could get on with the important work of having a full-on, eight-year-long, screaming mental breakdown over the election of a Black man as president.

And they accomplished this by A) Putting on stupid hats, waving Gadsden flags, and swearing that they'd never even heard of George W. Bush and, B) Getting the legacy media to go along with this massive fraud, which the legacy media was only too eager to do, given their own despicable complicity with the various crimes and treasons of the Bush administration.

And it worked.  And, as is our eternal fate, the only people willing to straight-up call bullshit on the whole scam were us dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

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 could not say that because that would violate the 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 had been moved by the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.

And to this very day, that lie continues to be one of those "Zombie lies", which everyone sorta knows is nonsense -- like Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves -- but has so completely passed into the realm of myth that the legacy media keeps right on pretending that it was actually true.  

In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth was so secure that by 2016 Joe Scarborough could finally 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 there would be consequences (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

And that's the longer answer.  The Democrats are not facing their own "Tea Party" moment because There. Was. No. Tea. Party.  There was just the Bush-Off Machine goin' like 60 to rebrand the Republican base.  

What corporate Democrats are facing are ... New Deal Democrats.  People who revere FDR as the man who crushed fascism, and whose programs built the Middle Class, strengthened the union movement and helped insure that old age and poverty weren't a death sentence.   

People who remember that FDR was called a commie by the Republican party and the Republican media every inch of the way.

People who look at the mess the establishment has made of this country and think the Middle Class could used some help, the aged, infirm and poor could use some help, that good health care should be affordable, that unions are a good thing, that robber barons and Republican looters are bleeding us dry and, most importantly, for any of that to happen, fascism in America must be discredited and destroyed, root and branch.  

I Am The Liberal Media!

The Republican Party's Two Sets of Books

As most of you know, on this blog, on our podcast, and on stage and screen, I have long maintained a particular theory about how the Republican Party got itself into this mess. 

They kept two sets of books. 

The first set of books was for the rubes, the bigots and the chucklefucks, who make up the Republican base. And those books were full of absolute nonsense.

Liberals are baby killing, gun-grabbing Commie demons. Trans people are coming for your children. Immigrants are rapists. Tax cuts pay for themselves. The government is always the problem. Whatever scary story or conspiracy theory would keep people angry, frightened, and voting Republican -- that was what went into the first set of books.

And there is no bottom to it. No limit. The Republican base will believe whatever they were told, because the Republican Party spent decades training them to believe it.  But the point of those lies was never really governing. The point was power.

The racism, the conspiracy theories, the fear, the culture-war panic -- those were the keys that unlocked the public treasury. The Republican Party could use Fox News, talk radio, and an entire conservative media ecosystem to push those buttons whenever they needed votes. Then, once they were in power, they could do what they actually wanted to do: deregulate everything, cut taxes for wealthy people, and serve their donors.

That was the first set of books.

Ah, but to keep the country from complete collapse, Republican leadership had to keep a second set of books.  This one contained reality.

That was the book with the spreadsheets and the data and the boring stuff: how economies work, how wars work, how logistics work, how science works, how diseases work. It was the book you actually need if you are trying to run a country.

And for decades, the Republican Party had a strange arrangement. They would loudly scream about all the imaginary horrors from the first set of books to get the base furious enough to elect them, then quietly operate from the second set of books once they were in office.

They would tell their voters that they were going to deport everyone they hated, crush their enemies, restore some imaginary golden age, and punish all the people they had been taught to fear.

Then they would get into office and discover that reality existed. They never delivered the fantasy. They never actually purged the country of all the people they demonized. They never delivered the revenge fantasy they sold their voters.  OMG, they even -- gasp! -- cut deals with those baby killing, gun-grabbing Commie demon Dems!   

And as long as the Republican elites and donors controlled the party, the arrangement sorta worked.

Then along came Trump, and the important thing Trump changed was not the Republican Party's nature. It was that he simply burned the second set of books. Trump decided he didn't need the reality-based ledger anymore. He operated entirely from the first set of books.

He told the base: Yes. I really am going to give you everything you dreamed of. I will punish the people you hate. I will hurt the people you fear. I will break the rules for you. And in exchange, you will let me loot the place.

That was the deal.  And it still is.

The Republican Party had always used fantasy as a political weapon. Trump simply stopped pretending that reality existed at all.  He looked at the spreadsheets, the facts, the experts, the institutions, and basically said: screw it. We don't need any of that.

It was the same kind of thinking that led people throughout history into disasters: don't worry about the details, don't worry about logistics, don't worry about reality.  We can definitely invade the Soviet Union and conquer it in two, three months tops because we're awesome!  We always win because we are awesome!

A triumph of the will, if you will.  And when the Dear Leader lives in that mindspace, facts are no longer an issue.

This was from me in September of 2016 -- years before anything called "Never Trump", and decades before Never Trumpers sloooooly and grudgingly began to accept that the real problem with the Republican party is that it's full of Republicans. 

Once you start to notice that a depressingly large number of our fellow citizens have become reprogrammable Orwellian meat-puppets, the rise of Trump is not hard to understand at all.

And this was the citation from Orwell I was using:

"Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those 19th century ideas about the laws of Nature.  We make the laws of Nature."  -- O'Brien, 1984 

And this is how Republicans operate all the time now.  Everywhere.  Except there are still places where reality has a way of forcing itself back into the room.

The courtroom is one of those places.

Outside the courtroom, operating from the first set of books, Republicans can and do say anything. They can invent stories about reflecting pools, election fraud, conspiracies, whatever. They can feed the base whatever toxic slop they want because nobody is forcing them to prove it.

But eventually somebody crosses the border between fantasy and reality.

That's what happened to Jeanine Pirro.

When she is on television, playing to the audience, she can live in the first set of books. She can repeat whatever bullshit the audience wants to hear.

But when she walks into a courtroom, she has crossed into domain of the second set of books.

Here, there are rules. Here, tangible evidence matters.  In fact, it's pretty much all that matters.   In here there are questions that can't be dodged, wriggled out of, or dismissed with a demeaning insult.  And most importantly, in here there are now consequences for lying.

And once you've crossed the membrane between the domain where Boxwine Pirro spends most of her time, where Doug Burgam and Donald Trump can lie all they want to because, as long as they keep feeding the bigots and imbeciles the lies they want to hear, they are rewarded for lying...

...and the domain of the courtroom, suddenly all the things that worked outside the courtroom don't work anymore.

In here lawyers and judges get to demand that you show actual evidence.   Where are the photographs? Where are the witnesses? Where is the chain of proof ?  In here, Trump regime's lies and bluster  evaporate like fairy gold once the enchantment has been broken.

This stupid Reflecting Pool fuck-up is the Decline and Fall of the Republican Party in microcosm, because reality is the wall Republicans keep slamming into. They have spent decades building a political machine fueled entirely by bullshit from a fantasy universe where nothing has to be proven.  Because the base doesn't want facts.  They hate facts.  They demand the story they were promised -- the toxic slop they now crave like crack, which is why the people who feed them that slop keep getting elected.

But science doesn't work that way.  The law doesn't work that way. Reality doesn't work that way.

We saw it with COVID. The refusal to respect facts and science had real consequences. People died because this administration and its allies chose political fantasy over reality.  And now we see the same pattern in something as small and ridiculous as the reflecting pool fiasco.

Trump made a bet that he could hire one of his mobbed up stooges to slap some paint, declare victory, and everyone would accept the story.  Which is pretty much his same "strategy" in Iran.  When reality pushed back, the response was exactly what it has always been.  Find a scapegoat. Find a boogeyman. Blame somebody else.

For example, from MSNOW:

On questions about depleted munitions, Team Trump struggles to keep its story straight

To recap, the depleted stockpiles aren’t depleted, though they could be better, and everyone should blame Joe Biden.

But eventually you run into the problem that every authoritarian movement runs into.  There are still places where facts matter.  There are still institutions where you cannot simply scream louder than everyone else and reality goes away.

Which is why they keep losing.  The more you force them into arenas where they have to answer questions, produce evidence, and defend their claims, the more exposed they become.

Because their alternative to reality is always the same thing: Scream louder. Blame immigrants. Blame Muslims. Blame liberals. Blame trans kids.  Blame anyone except themselves and their catastrophic decisions and failure.  And the louder they scream, the clearer it becomes that they have nothing else.

Look at the Republican campaign ads flooding the country right now. They have money. They have the machinery. But what do they have to run on?  Trump has wrecked the economy. He has driven up prices. His tariffs have hurt consumers. His foreign policy disasters are piling up.

So what is left?

The first set of books.  Fear. Rage. Racism. Resentment.

Because that is all they have.

It cracks me up with I see headlines from anonymous sources about Republicans getting nervous about Trump hurting their chances in the midterms.  Hey dum-dums, what it is about ""Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" that you do not understand?  Because that, sure as shit, is what you signed up for.  

Trump is the Republican Party.  Trump is the movement.  You no longer have an independent identity separate from him. You are not partners, or pals, or peers.  You are a tool he can use and discard. You are mere cells in the body of Trumpism.

This is the bargain you accepted when you handed your party over to someone who never cared about the second set of books.  Someone who never cared about reality.  Someone who only cared about the first set of books — the one where every lie is true as long as enough people want to believe it.

 But eventually, reality always comes looking for payback.

And payback is a bitch.  

Temu Reagan

Some days it's hard to understand what put the "Never" in "Never Trump".  Or, rather, why their slogan was not, is not, and never will be "Never Republican".  

Because Temu Reagan actually delivered on their dearest wishes.  And he did so by diligently pursuing the path to political success laid down by St. Ronald Reagan.

First, political strategy.

Pandering to bigots to win elections?  Check.  

From The Washington Post, June 19, 2020:

Ronald Reagan in Philadelphia, Miss., to Donald Trump in Tulsa, a pattern of racially divisive politics.

Welcome the Evangelical Right to the inner circle of Republican power brokers?  Check.

Also from The Washington Post, March 22, 2021:

Reagan tied Republicans to White Christians and now the party is trapped

Republicans have a passionate base that is out of touch with the rest of America.

...Reagan’s first-term record was a mixed bag, as far as cultural conservatives were concerned. Even so, four years into his presidency, Reagan saw an opportunity to use religion to forge a political realignment in the South. Addressing a crowd of 10,000 religious leaders at an “Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast” during the 1984 Republican Convention, the president delivered a rousing speech. Reagan willfully blurred the line between church and state. “Religion needs defenders against those who care only for the interests of the state. The truth is, politics and morality are inseparable — and as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related.” He concluded: “If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”

Not surprisingly, the Republican platform that year reflected the agenda of White evangelicals. It called for a constitutional ban on abortion with no exceptions and the appointment of federal judges who opposed abortion. It supported voluntary school prayer, ignored the Equal Rights Amendment (which Republicans had supported in every platform from 1940 to 1976 with only two exceptions: 1964 and 1968) and rejected equal pay for women. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, closed the 1984 Republican convention by triumphantly calling the incumbent ticket “God’s instruments in rebuilding America.”

 

Second, tangible deliverables.

Gargantuan increase in military spending?  Check.

From AFSCME Defense Spending Resolution #1, June 18-22, 1984:

The Reagan Administration is seeking an unprecedented peacetime military buildup. The Reagan Administration’s Fiscal Year 1985 budget request for national defense spending is greater, even when adjusted for inflation, than defense spending in any other year since World War II, including the years of the Korean and Vietnam wars. If the Reagan Administration has its way, defense spending would climb an additional 25 percent, in inflation adjusted dollars, between 1985 and 1989. By 1989, Department of Defense spending would be 29% higher (after adjustment for inflation) than during the peak of Vietnam when 50,000 American troops were engaged in combat overseas...

From House.gov, June 24, 2026

Republicans Advance Largest Pentagon Budget in History while Cutting Billions from Domestic Investments

The $1,072,210,299,000 military budget is the most expensive ever, while the Trump administration requests even more funding

Massive tax cuts?  Check.

WTTW, February 25, 2020:

‘Arguing with Zombies’: Paul Krugman on Economic Ideas That Won’t Die

In his new book “Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future,” Krugman calls a number of economic policies “zombie theories” because they have been proved false, refuse to die and keep coming back. 

Another example he cites is that “tax cuts pay for themselves.”

“We both tried tax cuts and tax increases and it’s never happened. The Reagan tax cut led to big deficits. George W. Bush’s tax cut led to big deficits. Trump’s tax cut led to big deficits,” Krugman said. “Bill Clinton raised taxes and, you know, Republicans predicted disaster. It goes on and on.” 

“This is a theory that has – nothing has been tested as often as this one. And yet, when the Trump tax that was passed just about every Republican in Congress said, ‘Oh, I’m sure this will pay for itself,’” he said.

So why does that theory persist? And did Republicans really believe it would pay for itself? 

Krugman has a blunt answer.

“With politicians, do they actually believe in anything?” he quipped. ”The answer is, look at the people whose taxes are cut. A lot of zombie ideas, not all of them, but a lot of zombie ideas are basically kept shambling along eating people’s brains by billionaires.”

Center for American Progress, November 20, 2025:

7 Ways the Big Beautiful Bill Cuts Taxes for the Rich

Overall, the Big Beautiful Bill will harm poor Americans and raise the incomes of rich Americans—driving gains for the rich through cuts to marginal tax rates and the estate tax, along with tax breaks for businesses, business owners, and investors

Over the next decade, the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) will cut taxes for the richest 10 percent of Americans by more than $14,700 per year per household and cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans by more than $50,000 per year, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). Despite this, there has been comparatively little coverage of the specific mechanisms by which the BBB funnels money to the ultrarich. Meanwhile, tiny tax cuts for the working class have received disproportionate media attention, even as the BBB will reduce the incomes of the poorest Americans.

Overall, the BBB cuts taxes by $4.5 trillion over the next decade, primarily with $2.3 trillion of provisions that deliver most of their benefits to the richest 10 percent of Americans by income, according to new analysis of JCT data by the Center for American Progress. Within that, the BBB delivers $1 trillion in tax cuts to the top 1 percent while cutting more than $1.1 trillion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and other health programs used by the poorest Americans. 

Slashing the social safety net?  Check.

From The Washington Post, August 20, 1981:

Reagan Budget Means Drastic Cuts In Medicare and Medicaid Programs

Fifth of Nation Is Affected Reagan Budget Means Drastic Surgery for Medicare, Medicaid

The budget bill just signed by President Reagan will, as finally drawn, cut federal medical aid to more than a fifth of the American population.

NBC News, April 2, 2026:

Trump says it's 'not possible' for the U.S. to pay for Medicaid, Medicare and day care: 'We’re fighting wars'

Trump urged states to fund benefits programs instead because "we have to take care of one thing: military protection."

He went on to say that he told Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought: “Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. You got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it too.”

Then add to the mix all the culture war bullshit -- the "Guns, God and Gays" bullshit -- that holds the coalition of Republican bigots and imbeciles together so the donor class can get what they're paying for.

Ronald Reagan was the first sitting U.S. president to actively champion overturning Roe v. Wade and making opposing the 1973 Supreme Court decision a core platform of the national Republican Party.

Ronald Reagan also accelerated the decades-long political and legal push to reshape the federal judiciary with conservative judges who opposed Roe v. Wade, helping create the conditions under which organizations like The Federalist Society would become enormously influential and raise up crop after crop of lawyers and judges who were Right Wing True Believers.

And Reagan -- along with two Conservative federal judges named Bork and Scalia -- gutted the Fairness Doctrine and unleashed a tidal wave of Conservative propaganda outlets that no longer had to worry about facts or fairness.

What Reagan delivered with a smile and hair dyed unnaturally brown, Trump delivers with a scowl and  hair dyed an the color of a Dreamsicle.   How can any fair-minded human look at the last 50 years of Republican politics and not see that Reagan was the overture and Trump is the finale of one, long, catastrophic Conservative revolution?

Or, to borrow a lightly edit quote from Holy Writ of the Oligarch Class.

You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins; it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection.

You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and Donald Trump is the man who has granted you your wish.

Update:  For more on these exciting developments we join Charlie Pierce already in progress...

Wait, Did the Republican Party Only Just Realize That It Hired a Bunch of Yahoos and Morons, and That’s Why It’s Falling Apart?

I’ve seen this coming ever since Reagan opened the Gates of Mordor back in 1980.

I Am The Liberal Media

A Unified Theory of Never Trumpism

As MSNOW, and the former staff of The Weekly Standard (The Bulwark) and Barack Obama's former joke writers (the Pod Save lads) continue to amalgamate into a single, Centrist/Center-Right media keiretsu, their third-rate/too-late epiphanies keep coming fast and furious.

This one in particular kept me chuckling all the way through the three-and-a-half hours Blue Gal and I spent at a local cinema watching half an hour of coming attractions (90% horror flicks) and three hours of Christopher Nolan's substantially revised version of The Odyssey.  I had no fear that my soft chuckles might disturb our fellow cinema patrons  because HOLY FUCK IT WAS LOUD.  And not ordinary, Nolan-loud.  I have no objection to ordinary, Nolan-loud.  This was loud -- like a jet engine and a fire alarm simultaneously going off six inches from your ear loud. "Trying to drive Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican Embassy in Panama City and force him to surrender." loud.  "My God, why didn't I bring a pot of wax to seal my ears?" loud.   

Repeatedly.  For minutes on end.

Anyhoo, I kept right on chortling because this time their third-rate/too-late epiphany came in the form of a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, the problem with the Republican Party stems from the fact that it's full of Republicans and a brief lament that no one else has thought to entertain this possibility.

Sad!

Jon Lovett (Pod Save lads): There's the quote going around uh it's something to the effect of more Americans are fascist than we realize.  And one day we're going to find out. And so I I want to I want to this is actually where I wanted to go next because um I think this is an old Hemingway.... But the gist of it I think does apply. A point you've made repeatedly which I think there's very little equity to in politics is... uh... you can blame Trump, you can blame misinformation, you can blame  Republicans, but and this is a a paraphrase of something you've written.  77 million Americans who voted for Trump are some combination of unserious, decadent, or weak. Now it it's a lot cheaper in politics to blame the powers that be. That's true on the left, that's true on the right. There's not a lot of discussion about the culpability of the actual voters and their agency in this. So, can you just as somebody that has been an observer uh of conservatism from the inside for a long time, uh what have you learned about um the voters themselves through this period?

Jonathan V. Last (Bulwark):  Well, so I mean I can tell you my impressions. I can't tell you that they are like facts that I've learned. Um, what I have seen suggests to me though that you to avoid ... to avoid...uh, coming to the conclusion that voters wanted what they chose, you got to start creating a whole bunch of  Rube Goldberg contraptions. And the minute you push on any of these constructs even a little bit, they start wobbling and so you have to build another one, right? 

And h/t to Alert Listener Walt for pointing this out.

My Unified Theory of Never Trumpism?  

That they will always be on the verge of catching up with where Liberals were 20 years ago.  

They always present their epiphanies as if they just discovered an elusive, and previously unknown element lurking between Fluorine and Nitrogen on the periodic table.

Their new element?

It's called 'oxygen' fellas." 

Congratulations.  You 'discovered' oxygen.  

I Am The Liberal Media

The Dogmas of the Quiet Past

I was pleased and proud to have this man as my president.  Pleased and proud to have his family as our First Family.  I was proud to vote for him for senator once and for president twice.  I was proud to have been one of the panelists who vetted him when he was still a relatively obscure state senator during his ultimately failed primary bid for the U.S. House of Representatives against incumbent Bobby Rush. In fact, I still have my ticket stub from his "Barack the Vote" fundraiser.  

However, as pleased and proud as I was to have Barack Obama as my president, it is also worth remembering the environment in which Obama governed, including taking a moment to remember much furious shit we Obama supporters took from our "allies" on the left.  In case you'd forgotten, here's a sample from a now-deadlinked post on Common Dreams from May, 2013.  I have an archive full of this stuff: 

When Obama finally declares martial law and announces the new Fascist States of American, O-bots like Maddow will eagerly put on their Nazi armbands -- cute little pastel hope & change swastikas, of course -- and join the goose-stepping parade. She's nothing but a propagandist and has absolutely no scruples whatsoever, just like the corporation that pays her, just like the "commander-in-chief" she props up with her lies and half-truths...

That kind of rhetoric was not unusual at the time: over-the-top rage from the whole Conservative media machine and from the dirtbag Left.  And in that environment, the Obama administration constituted a grand social experiment in offering the Republican party base -- which had been trained by Republican leadership and Conservative media to automatically loathe Democrats with an almost unhinged ferocity -- a different option.  Offering them compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect, as well as policies that materially benefited them.

And that grand social experiment failed spectacularly.  Which is why it is worth our time and attention to diagnose why that experiment failed.  But to do that we'd have to journey into the past further back than 2016, which is something that pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" almost all categorically refuse to do. 

That is because to examine the state of our union prior to 2016 makes the pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" either look like arrogant idiots whose opinions should never be trusted again...or ambitious fools who were complicit in creating the ideal conditions for a monster like Trump to emerge...or both.  And since pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" now dominate any media conversation about politics, that once again leaves it to dirty, disreputable outsiders like us to do the work of explaining why everything went to hell.  

To start with, President Barack Obama might as well have been built in a Centrist/Moderate/Both Siderist lab by the New York Times editorial board. He was everything the pundits and the consultant class said would be the "solve" for what was dividing America. 

This is from me 16 years ago, in 2010:

For his entire adult life, Barack Obama has succeeded by offering himself as the perfect midpoint between others. As a mathematical function, not a leader. As an averaging equation, not a true believer.

Since he showed up on the political radar, he has marketed himself relentlessly as

Half black and half white...
Half American urbanite, half world-citizen...
Half wonk, half preacher...
Half Harvard Yard, half Back o' the Yards...
Half red and half blue...

And this bone-deep reflex -- plus his formidable intellect and ability to rise to the rhetorical occasion -- would have prepared him perfectly for the Presidency...if this were 1960.

But it is not 1960 -- nor is he dealing with Harvard Conservatives pals or Springfield Republican pols -- and being a results-agnostic "process guy" when the process is utterly broken no longer works.

Instead, the ideologically-lockstepping Right led by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have found in Obama their perfect patsy: the Democrat who seems constitutionally incapable of counter-punching, who can only feel comfortable while suspended between two opposing positions and who will, therefore, find a compromise between opposites even when he has to invent wholly fictional opposing views to which he can cede half the playing field.

In order to avoid wasting his presidency, squandering the opportunity we have given him, and letting the country spiral into a permanent corporate feudal pest-hole, Barack Obama must do the hardest thing of all: he must exceed his design specifications. This is not unprecedented, but like Franklin Roosevelt the capitalist-turned-social-Democrat or Abraham Lincoln the compromiser-turned-Emancipator, Obama must let go of a central pillar of his identity and embrace the brutal fact that our modern house divided against itself cannot stand.

That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

That we will become all one thing, or all the other.

And that this is your fight, President Obama.

This burden has fallen to you: it cannot be shirked and cannot be delegated.

If you take up this challenge, millions of us will have your back, Mr. President.

But if you cannot summon the inner strength to evolve past your reflexive need to compromise with people who want to destroy you, then we are all well and truly fucked.

Because in 2008, Democrats took a chance on an outsider conjured out of their best hopes, but by 2010 it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that the Republican party and Conservative media were too far gone to be saved.  That by now there was too much power and too much profit trafficking in racism and conspiracy mongering and hatred for them to change.  That they viewed compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect as weakness, and Obama as a patsy for continuing to offer calm, civility and concessions over and over again.  

That what the nation needed in that moment was a president who took to the bully pulpit every day to beat the shit out of GOP in the Truman style:

“I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.” 

And to go after the working men and women who voted against their own interests in the same manner:

But that never happened.  And the reaction from Republicans to this decent, honorable, thoughtful man who begged them to work with him solve our common problems was an eight-year-long, racist primal scream and the to nominate and elect the personification of their most dangerously ignorant, racist fears. 

The King of the Birthers. 

Then they renominated him again in 2020.

Then, when he lost, they attempted a coup to overthrow the government, and spent the next four years screaming that the election had been stolen.

Then they renominated him yet again in 2024, re-elected him, and here we are.  And by now it should be plain enough for even the punditocracy to see that the problem was never Trump.  The problem has always been the bigots and imbeciles of the Republican base who manifested Trump, and the Conservative media which continues to belt-feed the most lurid red-meat lies to that base, which eagerly gobbles it up and asks for seconds.   

So, to quote another president from Illinois whose presidential library and museum are also here, 

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it...

 And to repeat what I shamelessly stole from Lincoln 16 years ago and modified to fit our times:

That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

That we will become all one thing, or all the other.

 

Burn The Lifeboats

Alt History

All the way back during the closing days of the Before Time, as the GOP was loping eagerly at speed towards the monstrous abyss into which they have now dragged us, I began documenting a rapidly spreading Republican condition, which I called Republican Detachment Disorder.  

From me in January of 2016:

Now that Donald Barnum Trump, Failgunner Ted Cruz and the caravan of benighted shoutycracker GOP candidate wannabes that follow them around have removed any lingering doubt that nothing short of the Bến Tre Option --

'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it'

-- will ever "fix" what is actually wrong with the GOP, the Republican establishment's most obedient and reliable public avatars have all suddenly come down with the same, tragic affliction: Republican Detachment Disorder.

Symptoms include adopting the basic Liberal critique of the Right chapter-and-verse while forgetting to acknowledge that "Liberals" as such even exist, and pretending that "the Republican establishment" is some mysterious directorate that you barely know which meets in a secret lair far, far away instead of a club which you have been a card-carrying member of for your entire adult life.

Today's spotlight Republican Detachment Disorder sufferer: David Frum.

Maybe the Republican Establishment Can’t Have It All

Given their failure to take down Donald Trump, is it time for GOP elites to let go of some cherished inward-facing policy priorities? 

...

Maybe it’s time for the party’s elites to let go of some of their cherished inward-facing policy priorities.

Notice how RDD particularly affects the speech centers of the brain. "[T]he Republican Establishment" instead of "we". "Given their failure" instead of "Given our failure." "[T]he party's elite" instead of "Me and David Brooks and Michael Gerson and Ross Douthat and the rich fuckers we work for".

Sad, really.

But there is hope!

With your generous support, blogs like this can continue working tirelessly towards the goal of eliminating RDD in our lifetime...

 Which I simplified to this in March of 2016:

It's a huge shit sandwich and everybody but me is gonna have to take a bite.

Then I spent more time than I should have documenting one prominent Republican/Conservative after another deploying the same lies in the same order.  That the GOP had gone spontaneously mad.  That they had nothing to do with it.  That once they caught wind of it they'd righteously rebuked everyone involved, but before that moment there was nothing detectably wrong with the GOP. 

Every one of these lies was and is ludicrous on its face, and yet the promulgators of these lies were invited to spout them on the largest legacy media outlets in the country, while those on the Left who had been warning for decades about the dangerous trajectory of the GOP were given the stiff arm and the stink-eye by those same legacy media outlets.

Which led me to ask why?  

And the answer is pretty simple and twofold.

First, the creators of this new mythology already had deep, fraternal ties to major legacy media outlets.  They all knew each other professionally and socially, so once places like MSNBC went full-time into the Republican reputation rehab business, GOP spin doctors and comms people and ad merchants who had bet wrong on the rise of Trump and fallen from grace from the party were lining up three deep to get the Nicole Wallace treatment.  

And second, the gauzy, heroic bunkum these Never Trumpers were selling was much more congenial to the legacy media's self-image than the hard truths Lefty writers and podcasts were offering.  In the actual history of the era that Liberals were documenting, the legacy media was deeply complicit in the rise of a monster like Trump, spending decades ostentatiously ignoring what was really going on on the Right, or, when the stench of racism and crazy leaking out of GOP containment got too knock-the-flies-off-a-shitwagon strong to ignore, they'd "Both Sides Do It" handwave any concerns.

Obviously this is a story the legacy media wants no part of.  

But the fiction the Never Trumpers were selling?  That the entire Republican base just suddenly went nuts one day and no one coulda seen it coming?  That maybe a lot of it was actually justifiable backlash to all those terrible, imaginary excesses of the Left?  That was a story the Beltway was only too happy to metabolize, to repeat endlessly, and to promote to the front of the line any recently-former Republican who was willing to help them sell it.  

And over the course of the last decade you can actually track as this bullshit hardened into the foundation of Beltway-approved agreed-upon history of the era.  Then, once the foundation was laid, came all of the refinements and embellishments.  

So what we're going to do now is step back in time to 2016 and watch as Republican Detachment Disorder became the go-to alibi for Conservatives trying to run away from what they had helped do to their own party.  Then we're going to jump back to present day for a small taste of how that fiction has evolved.  For the stroll down Cursed Memory Lane, I'll mostly provide links only to Conservatives as they floated their own variation of RDD.  If you want to dive deeper, have at it.

January, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Tucker Carlson, Super Class Warrior Hero Guy.

January, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Boss Limbaugh.

In his article in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan's former protege -- Young Conor Friedersdorf -- makes the following case:

Rush Limbaugh Doesn't Know He's Part of the Establishment

A portrait of a man who is unaware of his role in the system that he savages...

February, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Frank Luntz.

February, 2016:  David Brooks' Life When It Is Written Will Read Better Than It Lived

David Brooks -- the world's most ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual, globe-trotting lecturer on character and humility and Patient Zero of Republican Detachment Disorder -- managed to write an entire fucking column about the madness which has killed his Republican Party...
...without mentioning the word "Republican" at all.
Instead...
They want “outsiders"
They delegitimize...
They’re willing to trample...
they don’t recognize other people...
They suffer from a form of political narcissism...
they don’t accept the legitimacy of...
They don’t recognize restraints.
They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.
The antipolitics people elect legislators who have no political skills or experience...
The antipolitics people don’t accept...
They make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations...
The antipolitics people refuse compromise...

February, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ron Fournier, The Sad Clown of Centrism

March, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Gerson

Themselves. Them. Not "me". Them. Thus begins the tsk-tsking cavil lecture of yet another Republican who stood proudly with a party that has been coasting along on the momentum of the Southern Strategy for his entire adult life.  Yet another Republican who stood proudly by an Administration which resorted without hesitation to the tried-and-true Republican electoral strategy of Fox News, Hate Radio, mass-slander and demonization to win re-election in 2004...

April, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Joe Scarborough

May, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Peggy Noonan Finds Her Magic Cab Driver

May, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Jennifer Rubin

Key Date.  From NPR, May 26, 2016: Donald Trump Clinches GOP Nomination

June, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ramesh Ponnuru

By June of 2016, Suddenly There Is No "I" In "Republican"  Note the time.  Almost exactly  decade ago, when all of these Conservative heavy-hitters and dozens of others had begun to change their political pronouns.

Key Date.  From CNN, July 19, 2016: It’s official: Trump is Republican nominee

July, 2016: Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Steele, Patient Zero

September, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: George Will

October 20, 2016:  Joe Scarborough and Bill Kristol -- Cannibals Fighting Over The Place Settings -- in which they traded "This wasn't my fault, this was your fault" finger-pointing.  

December, 2017:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder [Bret Stephens]

 December, 2017: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Charlie Sykes

They're all in on it.  All of them.  And 18 months to two years is officially the new, Beltway Approved Absolution Lifeboat.  And all of the Republican scumbags who reaped enormous rewards for decades paving the road down which Donald Trump shambled to the White House -- who are now frantically  rebranding themselves as "independent" 30 years too late once -- are scrambling on board.  From Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough yesterday:  "Republicans across the United States will now pay a heavy price for two years of moral indifference."

There are dozens more, and a lot of repeat customers:  the same elite Republican pundits and opinion-havers using the commanding media heights of the multiple platforms on which they are welcome, all hard-selling the same lie over and over and over again.

Now buckle up as we quantum leap from a decade ago to five days ago to observe how deeply rooted in the everyday political language of Never Trumpers this detachment disorder has become, and how every other political event has been warped to fit that narrative.

The occasion was The Bulwark's live thing in Los Angeles.  Big crowds.  Much merch.  Much call-and-response.  A delegation from the Pod Save Lads showed up.  And during the event, Bulwark owner and publisher, Sarah Longwell, regaled the audience with her version of history...

Sam Stein: What is the Bush line? Like what actually number is the Bush line? 

Sarah Longwell:  Uh this is a great question... It's 32%.  But that is that is the number that George W. Bush was at when he left office. Okay? And the reason again that this is important is if you think about the historical precedent when Bush left office, the Republican party never recovered from his unpopularity. 

This is so ridiculous I almost don't know where to begin.  In 2010, Longwell was working for conservative PR outfit in Washington D.C. and was recruited into the Log Cabin Republicans, where she eventually became chair  From that vantage point, surely she could not have missed the Giant Red Wave that deluged Washington in 2010 and completely reversed the political fortunes of Ms. Longwell's party.

I mean, I don't know exactly how Ms. Longwell would measure "recovered popularity", but it seems to me that taking back the House in 2010 with a net gain of 63 seats -- the largest turnover of seats by either party since 1948 -- constitutes a pretty good metric of resurgent popularity.  As does the net seven seat Republican pickup in the Senate, picking up six governorships, 680 state legislative seats, flipping control of 20 legislative chambers across the country, and having "independent" voters, who had largely voted for Democrats in 2006 and 2008, swinging overwhelmingly to the right.

And how did Sarah Longwell's party achieve this amazing feat?  They did it by throwing everything they had into the largest coordinated campaign of often openly racist slander, obstruction, sabotage, and fear-mongering in modern political history, all aimed at destroying Obama before he even got started.  If you're interested in the gory details, we did a whole podcast about that very subject last week:

Add to that the massive Republican "Tea Party" branding scam in which the legacy media abetted the lie that somehow the base of the party had just up and disappeared one day and had been replaced by a brand new "movement" -- heavily financed by the Kochs and promoted around the clock by Fox News.  These Teabaggers had two things in common: they swore they'd never heard of George W. Bush and they despised the black guy in the White House and eagerly rallied behind every racist lie about Death Panels and "government takeovers" and birth certificates and on and on.  They flooded town hall meetings, shrieking about Communists.  They suddenly cared about deficits.  

In Congress, Republicans did everything they could do to drag the Great Recession out as long as possible -- ferociously opposing the Obama plan for saving the economy, extorting concessions so that the final package was only half the size it should have been (and a third of that was tax cuts) and then voting against everything along party lines.  So by 2010, with the Republican base rage-drunk on Fox News racist propaganda, and hapless "independents" terrified by the legacy media repeating Conservative lies unchallenged, the GOP was able to grab hold of real levers of power at the national and state level and use them to further hobble Obama administration initiatives.  

Ms. Longwell resumes.  

Longwell:   He had a bad war and he had a bad economy.  That sounds familiar, right? And so when you have those things, what happened is then the Republicans went into the wilderness. They lost two national elections. They struggled with their political identity only to have Trump then come in and completely revamp the party. 

First, notice the pronouns?  The same sleight of hand as a decade earlier.  "the Republicans went...", "They lost...", "They struggled...", not "We lost..." or "We struggled..."  

Second, in the Republican voter's berserk reaction to Barack Obama -- their eight-year-long racist primal scream -- it's painfully obvious that their "political identity" was right there in plain sight for anyone to see who cared to.  Once a reality show douchebag and skeevy real-estate slimeball named Donald Trump latched onto the biggest and most overtly racist lie of that era and ran with it (from Politico, August 4, 2010) --

41% of GOP: Obama foreign-born

On President Barack Obama’s birthday, a new CNN/Opinion Research released Wednesday shows 41 percent of Republicans believe Obama was “probably” or “definitely” born in another country.

 -- it's very clear that a plurality of the party had no "political identity" problem at all.

Now, stack that Big Stupid Lie on top of all the other Big Stupid Lies Republicans believed.  For example:

From Politifact, December 18, 2009:

PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'Death panels'

Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.

"Death panels."

From KUNC Colorado, June 18, 2012:

As the Supreme Court is about to rule on the constitutionality of the health care law, one-third of Americans are worrying about a part of the legislation that isn’t there.

A Kaiser Family Foundation’s tracking poll [.pdf] found in March that 36 percent of respondents erroneously believe that the law “would allow a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.” Another 20 percent said they are not sure whether it does.

The foundation, a nonpartisan organization that provides health policy analysis, reports the “prevalence of these misconceptions is essentially the same it was at the end of 2010.”

From PolitiFact, December 17, 2010:

PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'A government takeover of health care'

In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to overhaul America's health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a "government takeover."

"Takeovers are like coups," Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. "They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom."

The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the "public option" concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.

But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn't let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.

From Pew, November 2, 2010:

Majority of Republicans No Longer See Evidence of Global Warming

A 53%-majority of Republicans say there is no solid evidence the earth is warming. Among Tea Party Republicans, fully 70% say there is no evidence. 

Add to these Big Stupid Lies all the dozens of Smaller Stupid Lies that were firehosing out of the Conservative media puke-funnel, hyped by Republican party leaders, and passed along uncritically by the legacy media, and even a low-born, nobody blogger from the middle of Middle America like me could see that this was not a party lost in "the political wilderness" in any way.

In fact, the "political identity" of the Republican party was never in question at all.  

They were and are the same mob of bigots and imbeciles we Liberals have been warning about for decades.  The "reprogrammable meatbags" which the GOP has spent decades and billions of dollars cultivating, and about which I've been writing on this here blog for +21 years.  

And yet back in the Before Time when it might have mattered, not a single Never Trump you can name had a problem with any of it.   They were perfectly willing to ride this rage-and-racism fueled rocket as long as it took them where they wanted to go.  As long as it got their guys elected.  Which is why Longwell's notion that "Trump [came] in and completely revamp[ed] the party" is not just laughable, but exactly backwards:  Trump didn't change the party, he revealed it.  The base wasn't bamboozled by Trump, the base manifested Trump as the avatar of their truest selves.   

And that's the shame Never Trumpers refuse to face.  That they built the Republican electoral meth lab, supplied the chemicals and created the distribution network.  All Trump ever did was use their own lab and their own chemicals to cook their own product better and purer than they did.  

Back to Ms. Longwell for her solution:  

Longwell:  But like the one way that [the Republican party might become something that is not a criminal enterprise, that is not like an authoritarian fascist enterprise] ... the one way that it would happen is for Donald Trump to leave office with America going that fucking sucked. Like we don't want to do that again. We want to discredit Trump and everybody in his administration, right? You want Rubio and JD Vance to wear Trump like an albatross around their necks.

Well best of luck with that.  I hope it works.  However, since I've been to this rodeo more than once already, I feel it is my duty to mention that, prior to Trump, the previous Worst President in Modern American History was George W. Bush.  After whom her "Bush line" is named.  And after he left office, there was a broad consensus that, god damn, that was awful.  And golly, we sure don't want to do that again!

And yet, in the blink of an eye, the Republican base had scuttled through the Bush-Off Machine and was reborn as blameless, patriotic Tea Baggers.  

Conservative hacks and henchmen in the media all kept their jobs or got promotions, and many of the Bush administration's loudest cheerleaders were rewarded with positions at The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The New York Times.  

Overnight, the entire Conservative media machine became the very loud, very racist, and very profitable Voice of the Resistance.  

Ann Coulter went right on making scads of cash writing garbage.   

Just before Obama took office 2008, Rush Limbaugh signed a $400 million, 8-year deal.

Bush's go-to torture apologist, John Yoo, was appointed the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at UC Berkeley Law.

Paul "Spitcomb" Wolfowitz was gifted the presidency of the World Bank.

Dick Cheney's mini-me spawn, Liz, was elected to the House and quickly rose to a leadership position by telling monstrous, toxic lies just like dear old dad.

And as far as I can tell, most of the rest of them ended up being re-elected to congress, as regular MSNBC contributors, or with their own shows on MSNBC.  

And I see no reason why the people with the megaphones wouldn't rerun the process of mass strategic forgettery and ouchless absolution post-Trump just as they did post-George W.    Because RDD is still as contagious as the flu and more persistent than herpes.  

I Am The Liberal Media!