As I may have mentioned once or twice or 2,243 times over the last 11 years:
...the single defining characteristic that binds all Conservatives together -- the Reagan wig and Confederate flag clown pants big enough fit both Andrew Sullivan and Sarah Palin -- is their truly otherworldly ability to implacably ignore objective reality when it conflicts with whatever silly-ass nonsense they are lying about this week.
As I may have also mentioned once or twice or 3,114 times over the last 11 years:
...once our political, social and media institutions decided to preserve their status and fiscal well-being by playing make-believe with ugly truths about themselves and their own behavior, they become hostage to the habit. And once it became clear that media personalities and politicians could openly and repeatedly lie to the public without swift and brutal consequences -- once they gave themselves permission to flush their own incompetence, cowardice and complicity down the memory hole with impunity – we were well and truly screwed.
Because after all, from what position of factual, experiential or moral superiority would people who lie more-or-less continuously about the last 30 years of American political and cultural history pass judgment on people who lie about where the President was born? Or Death Panels? Or…anything?
Once you take that Faustian bargain, it doesn’t matter how fine your suit is or how surgically superior your tits may be; you’re just another grifter, straining a different grade of ethical sludge for krill.
And so we find ourselves drowning in a vast conspiracy of forgetting.
...
Heck, I even coined an annoying little term for this phenomenon, which I have used once or twice or 778 times over the past 11 years:
Republican Strategic Forgettery
Never stops.
Over at "New York Magazine". Jonathan Chait notices how Willard Romney's entire campaign strategy has devolved into nothing more than completely rewriting his own immediate past, over and over again, in real-time.
...
Regular readers of this blog know that massive, ongoing Conservative historical revisionism is not is not a bug in our political process.
It is Conservatism's main feature, reclaimed-virginity metaphor and all... ("Like a Virgin" from 09/11/09.)
And so comes now former Bush speechwriter and teevee's emergency-backup-David-Brooks, Michael Gerson, who is just a'fussin' and a'frettin' over the future of his Platonic Burkean Ideal Republican Party should Donald J. Trump somehow end up as its standard-bearer:
Trump’s nomination would rip the heart out of the Republican Party
...the worst outcome for the party would be the nomination of Donald Trump. It is impossible to predict where the political contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton would end up. Clinton has manifestly poor political skills, and Trump possesses a serious talent for the low blow. But Trump’s nomination would not be the temporary victory of one of the GOP’s ideological factions. It would involve the replacement of the humane ideal at the center of the party and its history. If Trump were the nominee, the GOP would cease to be.
And why would a Trump nomination be a disaster for the GOP?
Wait for it.
Wait...for...it...
Because, sez Mikey Gerson, Donald J. Trump is not!not!not! a real Republican, no matter what those filthy Liberals would have you believe!
Liberals who claim that Trumpism is the natural outgrowth, or logical conclusion, of conservatism or Republicanism are simply wrong. Edmund Burke is not the grandfather of Nigel Farage. Lincoln is not even the distant relative of Trump.
What more can I say that I have not already said?
As we have seen over and over again, Conservatives are addict-loyal to anyone or anything which promises to protect them from ever facing their own, humiliating past and that is the simple, irresistible compact Trump offers them: you overlook all the shit he as done up until now, and he will never remind you that you not only voted for Bush twice but you cheered him on as he fucked you over again and again. Vote for Trump and he will build you a big, beautiful wall to shield you from annihilating self-knowledge that you are just a grubby little fascist halfwit.
For a very long time, running dog Conservatives like Gerson have gotten away with playing fussy little Burkean mad lib parlor games in the penthouses of the Republican Party because far below in the bowels of the American Fascist Party, hundreds of others like Lee Atwater, Rush "Majority Maker" Limbaugh and Karl Rove did the dirty work of whipping up those grubby little fascist halfwits and pointing them at the ballot box. And now that the mob which helped made Gerson a wealthy man has finally lumbered up the stairs and is pounding on his door, he wants nothing to do with them. Instead, like Lot in the Bible --
Look, I have two virgin daughters. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do with them as you wish.
-- all Gerson can do is offer up Lincoln and Liberals to the mob and beg them to go away and leave him alone.
Well it is absurdly long past time that parasites like Gerson were (to borrow a phrase) ripped from their decadent nests and cast out into the world, which is precisely why real Liberals are not allowed anywhere near them on radio or teevee.
Because the veneer that covers their bullshit has gotten so brittle and thin that all it would take to punch it to dust would be a few solid blows landed by someone who knows how to fight.
And that cannot be allowed to happen.
Crossposted from driftglass' blog
