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

Our Dangerous Shave and a Haircut Politics.

If you are unfamiliar with the immortal William Shakespeare's "The Tragedie of Roger Rabbit and the Framing Thereof" then you might as well move along. But if you are hip to the tale of the Rabbit, then attend! Attend!

It all begins with a well-known, know-it-all Never Trumper lecturing us po' dumb Democrats on how Real Grown-Up Politics works.

A consistent mistake (imo) that Democrats have made for *decades* is not understanding the thermostatic nature of politics: "I don't like this party being extreme" means "I want moderation," not *the other extreme* /2x

— Tom Nichols (@radiofreetom.bsky.social) July 23, 2026 at 2:49 PM

Now, this is the sort of thing that sounds very wise if you start from the assumption that both parties are basically interchangeable institutions that occasionally wander too far from the golden mean.

By the way, this is the same well-known, know-it-all Never Trumper who ignored all the dire warnings by some of us po' dumb Democrats that his Republican party was becoming a fascist shithole until it was far too late. Then, when caught flat-footed by the aforementioned Republican party becoming a fascist shithole, reacted with the cheap, dishonest, and automatic bothsiderist reflex which is every Never Trumpers' last line of defense against self-reflection.  This Tweet has since mysteriously disappeared from X/Twitter but lives on in a plain-text form on this here blog of mine:

You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 14, 2019

Notice what is missing here: not an admission that the Republican Party created the conditions for Trump, but a quick escape hatch in which everyone gets a share of the blame.

Then, as is also endemic among Never Trumpers, Tom went on to present himself as one of the few Never Trump voices who saw all of this coming, which is why Trump Republicans resent them so.  Which is why, the Bulwark, MSNOW and The Atlantic all looked at his concatenation of arrogant certainty that proved catastrophically wrong, followed by reflexive, defensive false equivalence, followed by sheer puffery about his predictive abilities and all said, we gotta get this guy on staff!

You wanna bring someone on to opine about the threats and probable future trajectory of the Soviet Union during the 1980s?  Tom is your guy.  But given his record, why anyone would seek this Cold War relic's counsel about American politics of the recent past and the here and now is, well, to be honest, bog standards legacy media stuff.  He tells the tale they want told.

So, back to Roger Rabbit and lecturing us po' dumb Dems.

First, let us breeze past ol' Tom's obvious false equivalence which was immediately and effectively booed off the stage by Blue Sky commenters, one small sample of which is here:

Second, if you want to read a much longer (Two Parts!) discussion of how modern politics really works, links are here and here.  The shorter version is this...

As all true Roger Rabbit fans know, there is a certain sequence and cadence of words which all Toons find irresistible.  And when the phrase is left uncompleted they feel an uncontrollable compulsion to finish it, even when doing so will put them in life-threatening peril.

Psychologists have a name because of course they do.  It's called the Ovsiankina Effect, named after  Russian-German-American psychologist Maria Arsenjevna Rickers-Ovsiankina.  In psychology, this effect describes an innate human urge to finish unfinished tasks.  Our brains like order and clear endings. When things are left open or undone -- "Shave and a Hair Cut..." -- this creates stress.  When you finish whatever-it-is -- "...Two Bits!!!" -- our brains reward us with a quick dopamine hit, making you want to cross things off a list. 

(Bonus Info!  Because apparently even psychological concepts need their own spin-off franchise, Ovsiankina Effect should not be confused with the closely-related Zeigarnik Effect, named after Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, and which is more about the tendency of people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.)

Because what is politics, if not a giant collection of unfinished mental patterns competing for closure?

Which brings us to the particular unfinished phrase our national brain has been trained to complete. For a long time now -- decades -- our politics has been overtaken by a very specific form of Ovsiankina Effect.  And you clever dogs already know what it is, because you've read about on this blog thousands of times already.

What the legacy media has pulled off -- in plain view and with the consent of way too many of our fellow citizens -- one of the most successful propaganda campaign in American history.  One that dwarfs the Right Wing's Fox News/Hate Radio "Liberals are Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving, commie baby killers" propaganda campaign and, in the long run, has been far more destructive.  

From The Washington Post, before it went completely to shit:

“The Politico model of insider coverage and savvy style of analysis is premised on conditions in politics that became less true over time, which then undermined the model,” said New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. “Conditions like two roughly similar parties obeying democratic norms, with similar establishments in both parties and competing for swing voters.”

The coverage of the 2016 campaign in particular was abysmal. The focus on Hillary Clinton’s emails stemmed from the media’s reflexive both sides-ism, and an obsession with feuds among Donald Trump's staffers reflected an insider-focused approach to politics gone too far. More deeply, the press went out of its way to suggest that the people supporting a candidate who campaigned on banning Muslims from the country and building a wall between the United States and Mexico were expressing “economic anxiety” or a desire for an outsider politician. 

The Guardian, September 6, 2024:

The media is still pursuing the appearance of fairness by treating true and false, normal and outrageous, as equally valid

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”

Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.

From PressWatch, July 31, 2020

In a seminal tweet early this summer, during the battle over a particularly abhorrent op-ed, journalist Wesley Lowery set down a marker:

American view-from-nowhere, “objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment. We need to fundamentally reset the norms of our field. The old way must go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity

— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) June 4, 2020

Some have depicted this view as radical, demanding some sort of uniform view on all issues. But what Lowery and others (including myself) are arguing for is not moral conformity, just clarity.

From Breaking the News,  October 23, 2022:

Margaret Sullivan has some proposals in her book. So do scores of other organizations and people all scrambling to create a different news ecosystem to replace what seems unchangeable in our current one. So will I, upcoming, in this space.

Significantly, nearly all of these ideas involve less of what Margaret Sullivan has being doing in her columns, and what I have done over the decades, and what many others have emphasized as well: pointing out what is not working in the current media models.

-That seems less and less worth it.

-If critiques were going to stop “both-sides-ism,” that would already have occurred.

And this next bit takes us where we're going next.  From News Literacy Matters, October 21, 2022 

What’s wrong with bothsidesism?

...a knee-jerk response to include both sides in a story can lead to what is now known as bothsidesism. This misguided pursuit of balance sets up a false equivalence, a form of specious reasoning in which two sides are treated as the same when they are not.

Part of the problem is that the public both expects and wants bothsidesism, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Three-quarters of people surveyed say journalists should always strive to give all sides equal coverage, while more than half of all journalists think the opposite.

And there -- right there -- is why our politics is no longer reliably thermostatic.  Because for decades the general public has been enveloped in a media bubble where comforting Both Siderist false equivalences are delivered every hour of every day on the house by Savvy Media Experts from America's most prominent and influential media corporations.   

And because of this relentless conditioning from trusted sources, the public has developed a reflexive Ovsiankinan response to every Republican act of depravity and treason.   To get rid of their nearly subliminal sense of disquiet and anxiety, and to get that nice little bump of Dopamine, when confronted with any news of Republican perfidy, they will automatically balance out an equation which their nagging  subconscious is telling them is unbalanced with "...but the Democrats" or ...and the Democrats" or "Sure, but, y'know, Both Sides".

This legacy media propaganda is so much more insidious and toxic than Fox News/Hate Radio propaganda because in comes disguised as "fairness" and "impartiality" which, in different country along a different timeline, would be admirable traits.  But here and now, it's just propaganda which both prevents the general public from actually fairly adjudicating the vast moral and policy differences between the two sides, and provides an all-purpose, every-occasion alibi for Republicans who are sick of Trump and MAGA but could never in a million years bring themselves to vote for an Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving, commie baby killers.

Of course, that's just my two-bits worth.  You are free to leave your support, or rebuttal in the comment section.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1003: Science Fiction University - Trust

“History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.”  -- John W. Campbell Jr. 

• 
  

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

Stupid Is The Fire In Which We Burn

Lest you think Trump's manifold acts of corruption, extortion, treason and unhinged racist lunacy are penetrating the MAGA groundwater, let me disabuse you of that notion right now.  

And to do that, I need us to take a little walk down memory lane.  Specifically, to 14 years ago, before Trump slouched out of the Republican id to swallow the GOP whole.  It was a time during which all your favorite future Never Trumpers were swearing up and down that everything was fine, that the Party of Lincoln had never shone so brightly,  and anyone who suggested otherwise was openly mocked as a crackpot.

While they were busy ignoring what was going on with the base of their own party, this is what your 'umble crackpot scrivener was writing about the state of the Right:

The entire Conservative enterprise is built on delusion and old dynamite, which is why every clock much forever remain stopped at one minute after Reagan's inauguration, every fact must be smothered under the stasis field of Rush Limbaugh roaring, rage-drunk bluster.  It is the sarcophagus of a dead ideology where the walls are now so densely postered and palimpsested with the detritus of Conservatism's lurid, lying history that its denizens cannot find the exit anymore, and its floors are so sticky and pitted with the grue of its savage, tribal, beat-in rituals that no one bothers to even look for the door.

Which is why  no deviation can be permitted, no error can be admitted and no apologies can be allowed.

As I wrote last year, this catastrophe all began as a headlong dive into the best fucking high the Right would ever have ...

Now the bender is over.

Outside, Reality's beating sun is stationed in the treetops, so bright and close to the Earth that it vaporizes shadows inside of pockets and purses, and through the sodden walls of their fragile fastness Conservatives they can feel its slippery photons circling their ideological clubhouse, sniffing the hinges and lintels like wolves, looking for a way in.

This time, there is no trick-or-treat scamper to safety for them in the kindly, Tea Party gloaming: no way to scuttle off to the next wingnut spider hole in a tri-corner hat and tights pretending they'd never even heard of George W. Bush. No, the rotting hulk of the Party of Lincoln has become their crypt, and inside of it there is nothing left for them but to sink forever deeper into the shadows until they become one with the darkness.

And from deep inside their narrow house, you can hear the terrified squeals of Conservatism's pasty, self-righteous, rigidly ignorant, sexually-terrified wingnut child-men trying frantically to spackle up the little holes through which modernity, complexity and reality continue to leak...

The point of pulling this out of the archives is threefold.

First, labor-saving.  Since I've been on this beat for a good long while and since Republican bigotry and depravity are an endless cycle of repetition and escalation, why not borrow from my younger and less emotionally exhausted self?

Second, to show why, for all their professed interest in talking with people whose viewpoints are different than their own, no way no how does any Never Trumper want to talk about which crew was actually right about the Right all along, and which team of esteemed paid professionals absolutely blew it.  

Third, and of more importance, is to put the cast-iron obstinance and denialism of the GOP base in its proper context.  They didn't suddenly get this way yesterday.  They've been this way for decades and, year after year, they've only gotten louder, stupider and more intransigent. They can no longer metabolize reality.  It's poison to them, so, marching under Trump's banner, they make war on it, and only get more berserk with fury the more Reality leaks into their lives.  

So, while irrefutable evidence of Trump's madness and venom rage all around us like a hurricane, and we're shouting at these idiots as loud as we can, "Can you see it now?   Can you see how bad it is now!" -- inside the shuddering hovel of their media bubble, they're busy grabbing anything they can to nail up over the windows to keep the storm at bay.

Two local examples.

First, there is the case of the Illinois Democratic legislator who, this last January, proposed giving local municipalities the authority to charge people a $5 permitting fee in unincorporated areas if they want to have an "open burn", and the flexibility of levy stiff fines if anyone conducts an "open burn" without a permit.  Important fact: this legislation -- which, I'll remind you, was proposed by one lone state congressperson in January and has gone nowhere since -- would in no way affect barbequing in your back yard, or having a cozy little marshmallow-toasting fire in a firepit in your back yard.  

State Rep. Briel: New bill is not targeting your campfire

The local MAGA meatheads went absolutely ballistic.  Jackbooted this and overreach that and the gummit telling you it's gonna slap you with a $100,000 fine if you have a weenie roast with the kids in the yard.  And of course the fact that this legislation would do none of those things was irrelevant to the ginned up firestorm (pun intended) that was whipped up on the Right.  Because all they fucking care about is having something scary and Liberal to shriek about to drown out all the actual catastrophes their Dear Leader is inflicting on this country in their name.

How bad is it?

It's worse than ballroom!

This is the pattern: a minor, local policy proposal becomes, through media amplification, a nationwide moral panic completely detached from reality.  

And remember kids, by the commutative law of MAGA meathead media, what one Democrat does, all Democrats are responsible for.  And if all Democrats everywhere don't stop what they're doing and unanimously denounce whatever ginned up claptrap Fox News is troweling out today, then all Democrats everywhere are guilty!guilty!guilty!

And when you tar the entire party with the slander-brush, don't forget to cram as many magic conjure words into the headline as possible.  For example, this from Murdoch's New York Post checks just about every box.  

Behind today’s radical, Jew-hating Democratic Party is a monster created by Barack Obama

Yes, they forgot to squeeze in Hillary's emails and Benghaaaazi, but I'm pretty sure that's a headline page-limit thing and not some swine of an editor having a mild attack of conscience and thinking, "Nah.  We dare not go that far."

Speaking of playing the hits is a desperate attempt to distract from how comprehensively Trump is fucking them over and what utter, drooling idiots this makes all of them look like, MAGA mouthbreakers are even dragging the already-infinitely-debunked "Clinton Kill List" out of cold storage.  

Because while their soft lizard brains are incapable of processing facts they don't like, they all have fond memories of the lies that made them feel smart.  Of the glory days of beating up on Hillary Clinton.     

Which is why we must...

Burn The Lifeboats

Old School/New School

Today we're making a quick stop at the Before Time to visit the early days of the Liberal blogosphere.

 In and out, nobody gets hurt, OK? 

To begin, it's critical to understand that, as cutting and as harsh as our prose might have been, all in all, the Liberal blogosphere was and is a fundamentally optimistic enterprise.  A belief that we were not doomed.  That the future could be better, and that it was worth fighting for.

First and foremost, it was about creating community with a "You're not crazy, I see it too" ethos.  Back in the depths of the Bush regime, it felt as if a political apocalypse had happened right in our back yard:  something so bad and so surreal that words frequently failed.  And we were the ones slowly scanning the short wave radio bands in search of other survivors.  At the time this was only possible through the blogs because, then as now, the Beltway media was dedicated to the proposition that we were crazy, that there was nothing to see here, so let's move along shall we.   

But the hoped-for secondary effect of the blogs was a stubborn, Quixotic faith in something fundamental about the American people.  

Or at least most of the American people.  

Or at least a bare  majority of the American people.  Something that would be enough to beat the howling, brain-rotted Fox News zombie horde, if...

If people were presented with the facts of the case.  If they could be shown, unequivocally, that  Republican policies had fucked them over but good.  That whatever opinion they had of the Democrats, Dems were, by every metric, vastly better for the public than the GOP.  

It was towards those complacent, habitually fence-straddling Mopes in the Middle that much of our energies were directed.  And there was a moment as the Bush regime was collapsing when we had the momentum of events and history at our backs.  The Liberal blogosphere of the Before Time felt a little like the energy Hunter Thompson describe in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. 

This, but angrier.  

The feeling that, just maybe, together, we could outshout the narcotizing effect of the "Both Sides Do It" Beltway press and Sunday Shows had on the Mopes in the Middle.   If we could pry their eyes open for just a moment -- force them to see what was really happening to their country in their name...

But it was a vain hope.  

Perhaps, with 1000 times the media reach and firepower that the Liberal blogosphere had at its peak, we might have been able to pull it off.  But by then the Republican base was hopelessly addicted to its own rage and racism and the lies Fox News and Hate Radio fed them every day.

And the Mopes in the Middle vastly preferred lolling in a tepid pool of Both Sides Do It goo to a cold shower of facts.  Then as now, they don't know.  They don't wanna know.  And they get very angry if you try to make them know.    

All available evidence shows that the only force that can pry them out of their False Equivalence Goo Spa and spur them in the general direction of productive (if fleeting) civic engagement is having the metaphorical red-hot poker of Republican corruption and catastrophe shoved straight up their metaphorical collective asses.  

Or, to put it a little less graphically,  the only time they can be moved to action is when economic and social pain affects them personally and profoundly.  Then and only then can they be moved to lumber out of their comforting goo bath to go stumbling into the world looking for scapegoats.  

Which, in itself, can be either good news for democracy, or bad news.  Because once they are roused to action, the Mopes in the Middle are none too picky about who they blame for what has happened to them: they're as likely to hold trans people, Mexicans and Democrats responsible for their reduced circumstances as they are fascists, Republican looters and degenerates, and evil billionaires.    

And any grifter running against "the system" or "the duopoly" or "politicians in Washington" will always have the inside track with these idiots.

We of what is left of the Liberal blogosphere will go right on writing.  Some of us also podcast now or are frequent podcast/radio guests, so we'll go on with that as well because trying to make sense of the world and sharing it with others is why we do what we do.  And there is intrinsic value in that.  Every "I never thought of it from that perspective" or "Once you put it that way it started to make sense" or "I thought I was the only one" we get from readers or listeners is worth its weight in gold.  

Of course, we'll gratefully take the gold too, but you get what I'm saying.  

However, for the time being, I think many of us have lost much of our faith in both the utility of persuasion and in most of the American people.  It is a loss that many of us are grieving.  

From the Stay Human - Shape Tomorrow Substack

There’s a grief I don’t see named anywhere. It belongs specifically to people who are older, who have fought long and hard, who still care deeply — and who are now watching the possibility of a better future slip away at the exact moment their own capacity is slowing down. And not just a better future for themselves, but for the younger generations they love so dearly. Mad and sad at the same time. Carrying decades of investment in institutions and movements and people, and watching all of it under threat and being torn down.

No Half Measures

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!