Dear Republicans: Help Is Not On The Way

Sure, the mighty Bush-Off Machine is still parked in the GOP garage, but the question is, can it be retrofitted for the Age of Trump fast enough to get tens of million Republican idiots off the hook yet again?

I doubt it. 

Because in case you hadn't noticed. it has taken the Trumpshirts less than 40 days to be force from their exalted 2004 Bush re-election settings ("We won!  You lost!  Bush is a genius!  Suck it Libtards!") ...

... to the seething, defensive crouch of their 2005 Bush Iraq/Katrina/Terri Schiavo settings ("Everything on non-Fox teevee is fake! It's all lies by the terrible Murrica-hating Libtard media conspiracy!")

Which means that the moment when they start trying to make with the tricorn hats and little Gadsden flags again and pretend that they were innocent "independents" who have never even heard of Don the Con can't be far away.  

Because as I have said before, I've never gone wrong betting on the racism and arrogant ignorance of the Right: I've only erred occasionally on the point spread.  And predicting Conservative behavior is dead-easy because traditionally they only have four basic settings:

• Arrogant triumphalism: The aforementioned "We won!  You lost!  Bush is a genius!  Suck it Libtards!"
• All-out denialism: The aforementioned "Everything I see on non-Fox teevee is fake! Terrible lies by the terrible Murrica-hating Libtard media conspiracy!"
• Bargaining: It doesn't matter whether or not I'm a brain-washed moron...because Both Sides!"
• Running Away: As I pointed out back during the first Great Skedaddle back in 2009, because Conservatives are by nature abject moral cowards, their last "out" is doing like German soldiers did after the fall of Berlin: stop running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

The big difference this time around is that the implosion of the Failed Trump Administration is coming on so much faster and more spectacularly than the implosion of the Failed Bush Administration, that we now need to include a fifth basic setting for Conservatives:  Pleading Ignorance.

Of course Conservatives are ignorant -- deeply and malignantly ignorant.  This comes from letting lying demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity take a dump in their skulls for the last 20 years.  But since the GOP OnStar only permits turns in one direction, traditionally the only way Conservatives have been permitted to be "wrong" about anything was that they were "not Conservative enough!".  From Crain's, October, 2015:

Why Paul Ryan isn't hard core enough for the right

After which there is usually a show-trial, followed by the offender crawling back to Limbaugh an giving him a big, wet one right on his gargantuan ass.  From Politico, March, 2009:

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 this time the Pig People's Retreat from Moscow on the Potomac is being forced down their throats over a matter of weeks not years...

From PBS: 

Keystone pipeline won't use US steel despite Trump pledge. 

And -- surprise! --  a whole lot of that steel has come from...Russia! 

From Vox:   

Republicans Are Hiding Their Healthcare Plan in a Basement Because Everyone Hates It

The Party of Personal Responsibility had seven years to work on this.  They loudly and proudly voted on it 62 times but now they're hiding their plan in a shoe-box in Paul Ryan's locker.   Because there is no plan.  Because there never was a plan.  Because they're liars who got lazy in their lies because, let's face it, the average Conservative is a moron who will believe anything, so why not piss in their ear and call it Evian.  Because that's how you win with the Pig People.  

From Vox again:

Mike Pence used private email as governor, and it got hacked

It was everything Clinton's critics alleged.

Lock him up! Lock him up!

And there's the rub.

If the current trend continues, there is simply not enough time to burn all the MAGA hats and there is no decontamination shower powerful enough to hose off the stink of their vote in such a hurry.  So as giant slabs of Trump bullshit burst into flames and fall into their personal lives, expect to see more and more Trumpkins reduced to flapping their arms and pleading that they wuz just plain flim-flammed by Orange Julius Caesar.

From The LA Times:

She voted for Trump. Now she fears losing the Obamacare plan that saved her life.

After struggling for years without insurance, the 55-year-old former small-business owner — who has battled diabetes, high blood pressure and two cancers —  credits Obamacare with saving her life.

Watson also voted for Donald Trump, believing the businessman would bring change. She dismissed his campaign pledges to scrap the Affordable Care Act as bluster.

Now, as she watches the new president push to kill the law that provided her with a critical lifeline, Watson finds herself among many Trump supporters who must reconcile their votes with worries about the future of their healthcare.

Watson, a proud, salty woman who was uninsurable a few years ago, isn’t ready to renounce Trump. But she’s increasingly frustrated by his vague promises to replace Obamacare with something better.

“I’ve been through enough,” Watson said recently, sitting on the patio outside her mobile home, down a sandy road in a rural corner of northern Florida. “I don’t want to go back.”

...

We went through everything we had,” Watson said, including selling off her retirement accounts and mortgaging their home. Friends helped her navigate hospitals where one noted that Watson often was treated like a “second-class citizen” because she lacked insurance. Watson’s aging parents helped with many medical bills.

For a short time, Watson thought she’d found relief when an insurance company agreed to provide coverage. But when she tried to use the plan, she discovered it didn’t cover major medical costs, a trap many consumers fell into when insurers were subject to less oversight. Insurers now must cover a basic set of benefits, though GOP leaders are calling for such mandates to be scaled back.

Watson estimates she and her husband ultimately ran up more than $100,000 in medical debt.

...

Passage of the Affordable Care Act finally offered some relief, thanks to a small temporary program created in 2011 for people like Watson who had been denied coverage.

She was able to get on a plan that ultimately cost $363 a month and is now cancer free...

Ten years ago, the Right had the time and money and (most importantly) the Beltway media complicity necessary to build two different-but-interrelated Bush Era Accountability Escape Modules. For Beltway hacks and other public persons who had accumulated long and ineradicable records of cheer-leading for Team Cheney, they erected the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism.
And, boy howdy, the pews have been packed and the collection plates overflowing ever since!

And for the Great Unwashed party base they created the Fabulous, Tea-Baggulous Bush-Off Machine.  Where...

For the price of their souls and a couple of bucks

The Bush-Bellies could now buy some nips and some tucks.

But now there is no time or money for such craftsmanship.  Now, there is just an urgent need on the part of Beltway elite to get as far away from the Trumpocalypse as fast as possible, which is why "respectable" Conservatives and Both Siderists in the media are now frantically trying to pretend that, somehow, Trump is not a Republican. and that "Trumpism" is some bizarre anomaly which no one could possibly have seen coming, and not the logical and obvious apotheosis of a Party and Movement which they have spent the last 30 years building.

David Brooks NYT, January 31, 2017:

In the first place, the Trump administration is not a Republican administration...

This time, because of the breakneck speed at which The Bastard President is losing his mind in public, there is no time to build a great, spacious ark with Both Siderists in the first-class cabins and the Pig People down in Tea Party steerage capable of carrying the whole, miserable mob of them to safety.

This time the Beltway is throwing together a lifeboat out of whatever they can lay their hands on:  a lifeboat just big enough for themselves and their pals.  So unless Pence and Ryan and McConnell conjure a way to get Don the Con removed from office very soon and then stage a massive "He Fooled Us All!" parade down 5th Avenue, there is no one coming with a magic machine to absolve the party base of their malignant idiocy anytime soon.

And that should make the next several months very interesting indeed.  

Sunday Morning Party Line

(h/t Andrew Isbell)

On “Meet the Press”...

Gotta admit, I don't care what Lil Marco has to say about anything.  Not one, tiny damn.  

I'm sure Schumer delivered the Democratic party line adequately by slow freight.

Tom Friedman can go pound sand up David Brooks' ass, and no one from the American Enterprise Institute or the Wall Street Journal should be allowed to appear in public unless they are under oath ans strapped to a lie detector.

So boy howdy, were the evangelist of the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism out in force:

DANIELLE PLETKA (AEI):   Thank you very much, Donald. But I mean honestly speaking, the problem with this is it is partisanship. If we could have a--

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL (Wall Street Journal):  Right.

Oh great.  The fucking Landru Sisters.

CORNELL BELCHER:  Take partisanship away from it.

DANIELLE PLETKA:  You can't do that.

CORNELL BELCHER:  Put it into a special prosecutor, then.

DANIELLE PLETKA:  No, no.

CORNELL BELCHER:   You've got to put it into a special prosecutor. Take politics out of it.

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL:  But a special prosecutor doesn't fix it, either. Look, the problem we have at the moment is that, if you did what Trump said, and he put it all out there, there'd still be half of the country that didn't believe it was true. We have no faith in our public institutions at the moment.

Yeah but half  the country thinks a florescent orange pussy-grabbing racist lunatic is the Risen Christ. And that same half of the country would cannonball into a live volcano and curse the Dirty Libtards with their dying breath if Sean Hannity told them to because that half of the country has let twaddlemongers like Kimberly Strassel turn their brains into prune yogurt.

...

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL:   But special prosecutor, not a good idea. And here's why. Because special prosecutors, their goal is to get someone in the end. And they will follow any rabbit hole that they can go until they're not even investigating the thing that they began with.

So suddenly witch-hunts are a bad thing and "Ken Starr" is he-who-cannot-be-named?

Jesus Christ in a leisure suit, it is so hard to keep up with ideological fashion trends among the young fascisti these days,

Just a few months ago Ms. Strassel was positively frantic to summon the tumbrels for Hillary Clinton based on innocuous nothingburgers Vlad the Elector was leaking to the press on behalf of Ms. Strassel's candidate (from the Wall Street Journal, pay-walled, emphasis added)...

Grifters-in-Chief

The Clintons don’t draw lines between their ‘charity’ and personal enrichment.

By Kimberley A. Strassel

Oct. 27, 2016

...

The obvious question is where are the prosecutors? (For that matter, where is Lois Lerner when you need her?) Any nonprofit lawyer in America knows the ironclad rule of keeping private enrichment away from tax-exempt activity, for the simple reason that mixing the two involves ripping off taxpayers. Every election lawyer in the country lives in fear of stepping over the lines governing fundraising and election vehicles. The Clintons recognize no lines.

Here’s the lasting takeaway: The Clintons spent their White House years explaining endless sleazy financial deals, and even capping their exit with a scandal over whether Bill was paid to pardon financier Marc Rich. They know the risks. And yet they geared up the foundation and these seedy practices even as Mrs. Clinton was making her first bid for the presidency. They continued them as she sat as secretary of state. They continue them still, as she nears the White House.

This is how the Clintons operate. They don’t change. Any one who pulls the lever for Mrs. Clinton takes responsibility for setting up the nation for all the blatant corruption that will follow.

But now that her Slanderer-in-Chief and all of Vlad's little helpers who staff his maladministration are losing their shit in public less than two fucking months on the job?  Well let's not go crazy people! After all, the real problem here is the partisanship not the, y'know, blatant treason.

And then Chuck Todd made a funny:

CHUCK TODD:  Can I bring up something? John Podhoretz, I thought, wrote a very good column here, that gets almost at this column. He says this, just in general about the Democratic Party, "Because Democrats and liberals have opposed every appointment and every policy and every word emanating from the Trump administration, they have damaged their effectiveness as a political force against it. They are in danger of limiting their ability to bring the soft Trump voters they need to grow disillusioned with him to their side." Do you buy that?

DANIELLE PLETKA:  Absolutely. I think the Democrats are doing themselves real damage by constantly calling on everybody to resign. They go to DEFCON five or is it DEFCON one--

CHUCK TODD:  Well, House Republicans did it all the time with Eric Holder--

CORNELL BELCHER:  I was going to say.

CHUCK TODD:  And it was ridiculous then. Right?

DANIELLE PLETKA:  It is ridiculous on the part of all of them.

Sure.  Yeah.  All of them.

Both Sides are the problem because Both Sides are always the problem.

And here's a funny thing.  Danielle Pletka's bio lists her as another Bush administration torture apologist and the Last Defender of Ahmed Chalabi.  So, Beltway wingnut welfare job-for-life for Ms.  Pletka.   It also mentions that she is "the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)" and yet she doesn't know how the DEFCON thingy works.

Which may be part of the fucking problem.

On “State of the Union”...

I still don't care what Lil Marco has to say about anything.

I'm sure Pelosi delivered the Democratic party line adequately by slow freight.

And show that give a platform to Dana Loesch should be wiped from the memory of man.

“Fox News Sunday” featured the pickin' and the grinnin' and the lyin' of Senator Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Gov. Eric Greitens, R-Mo. so I took a pass even though I hear Laura Ingraham was going to give Dana Perino a makeover Live!On!Teevee!  "See Dana, this is how you can make your voice sound like a truck load of dentist drills hitting a truck load of incontinent cats."

Somewhere out there this Sunday, Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review had a microphone.  And so did Newt Gingrich.  And so did Katrina Pierson.  And so did.

But Both Sides are the problem.

Because Both Sides are always the problem.

BTW, this is Patient Zero of Il Douche's latest, unhinged, Nixon-on-crack id-spew.  From Crooks & Liars:

Mark Levin Admits He Has No Proof Obama Ordered Wiretaps: 'I'm Not Nostradamus Here'

...

On his radio show and in a column for Breitbart, Levin called for an investigation into Obama's so-called "silent coup" against the new president. Without presenting any proof, Levin alleged that Obama personally ordered wiretaps of Trump associates.

"The evidence is overwhelming," Levin told Fox News host Pete Hegseth on Sunday. "This is about the Obama administration's spying."

Levin repeating the list of "sources" offered in his Brietbart column as proof that Obama allegedly ordered the wiretapping of Trump's team. A careful reading of those reports, however, do not back up Levin's conspiracy theory.

"Donald Trump is being attacked for [the accusations] he tweeted," Levin said. "Donald Trump is the victim, his campaign is the victim, his transition team is the victim, his surrogates are the victim. These are police state tactics."

When pressed for details on President Obama's personal involvement, Levin replied, "I'm not Nostradamus here."... 

And that's the one true thing that Levin said.  He is not Nostradamus.

Michel de Nostredame died in 1566 and is remembered (and mis-remembered) 450 years later.

And a month after Levin goes into the ground, no one will remember him as anything other than one more Conservative abscess on the ass of democracy with a voice that sounded like a truck load of dentist drills hitting a truck load of incontinent cats.

Update:  Many people are making great sport over the fact that Huckabee the Lesser got her ass handed on "This Week..." by trying to defend the indefensible Il Douche without ever actually talking to him of being in possession of any actual, whatchacall, facts.  And that is a fine thing.

But please remember Sarah Huckabee Sanders was on the same show doing exactly the same thing last week and apparently her complete lack of knowledge about what Il Douche was thinking or saying did not bother the show's bookers enough to get her dis-invited this week.

Which may be part of the fucking problem.  

Well This Makes Perfect Sense...

Mr. Andrew Sullivan -- who is definitely not blogging -- has nonetheless conned someone at New York Magazine to pay him genuine money to put together rambly sentences about Murrica and such and publish them in e-lect-tronic form on The Internets.

So for legal and contractual purposes, not blogging, but, y'know, blogging-adjacent.

Anyway, many and many years ago I began to notice that for a man who has some very definite certainties and divination about the politics, media and culture of the United States, Mr. Sullivan seemed to know fuck-all about our actual country and our actual history from, say, 1710 until last Wednesday.   Very much a Mycroft Holmes-type, but without the intellect or observational and deductive skills: a man who sits comfortably in his own version of the Diogenese Club and judges American by what passes by under his window

Sherlock Holmes from "The Greek Interpreter":

“If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an arm-chair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solution, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right.”

Which is why, from time to time, I would uncharitably mention that I think "Mr. Sullivan is an aging fop living in an ivory tower who does not understand the first damn thing about his adopted country" and would suggest that his muse would be better served if he got off his ass and actually toured the nation about which he has been opinion ferociously his whole adult life.  Come for a visit.  Go for a stroll through any of the tens of thousands of unique, American places which are not Sullivan-friendly college campuses and not White House state dinners.  See what we see and hear what we hear out here in Flyover country.

And so this bit of underdone potato in the middle of Mr. Sullivan's weekly perambulation through the America of his imagination did not surprise me at all:

I’ve always been unusually attached to places. It’s one reason I still call myself a conservative. Travel doesn’t attract me. I’ve now lived in the same loft in D.C. since I bought it, in 1991 (apart from an ill-fated year and a half in New York City); I’ve spent 20 consecutive summers in the same little town at the end of Cape Cod, and have no desire to go anyplace else. Even when I go home to England, I tend to spend around half my time near where I grew up. 

The reason the Andrew Sullivan's of the world are given enormous megaphones has never to make it easier for them to tell the straight truth about this country to a wider audience, because they haven't the first damn clue about this country.

No, they provide a very different service.

They spin the comforting fairy tales about an Imaginary America that their fellow bubble-dwellers want to hear.  And for which they are willing to pay handsomely.

Matthew Dowd Remains a Hilariously Ridiculous Person

Turns out Deception ain't just an island in the Antarctic.

@matthewjdowd Enablers are part of the solution for the addict. Need to work with both.

— Gisela Delgadillo (@gdel_gisela) March 4, 2017

It is genuinely laugh-from-the-gut funny that ABC's chief political analyst does not have the slightest fucking clue that he is talking about himself.  

That the single greatest enabler of the madness, sedition and malignant ignorance of the GOP is the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It on which Mr. Dowd has built his entire post-Dubya career.  

And that -- like every other junkie in pathological denial of their addiction -- Mr. Dowd would rather chew his own arm off than admit this simple fact that stares him in the face every god damn day.

Because Suckerville ain't just a town in Maine.

*Having just been told about Mr. Dowd's family history, I am deeply sorry for his losses.  Addiction* runs in my family as well and and I have nothing but sympathy for those whose lives have been fractured by it.  That said, the willful blindness and denialism of people like Mr. Dowd is the crutch which props up everything in politics they claim to deplore.  

*Thanks for the catch!

Professional Left Podcast #378

"The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion."  

--  Molly Ivins, writer

Links:

• Rauner sold out ‘grand bargain’ by injecting himself (Chicago Sun-Times)

The Professional Left is "sponsored" by...

...and, of course, listeners like you!

Ron Fournier Remains a Fundamentally Ridiculous Person

And so does Matthew Dowd.

@ron_fournier totally agree Ron.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) March 3, 2017

The High and Hold Church of Both Siderism remains indestructible.

Welcome to Pundit Hell

David Brooks and Gretchen Carlson...

...sharing a TED Talk...

...about America's poor, misunderstood, bitter White nougat center...

...and how Both Sides need to listen more dammit!

But that's impossible, right?  I mean, the fabric of spacetime would Ouroboros itself into nonexistence rather than allow such an event to occur, right?

Sadly, no.

From the TED Blog

Can we heal the fractured political conversation? A talk with Gretchen Carlson and David Brooks

OMG, make it stop!

Sorry.

Trump voters were angry and felt like Washington wasn’t listening to them. A native of Minnesota, Carlson has seen the anger in middle America firsthand, and it started long before 2016. “A huge swath of the population feels like Washington never listens to them,” she says. Brooks also traveled around the country during the elections, through what pundits have called “flyover country” — a term, he says, that he heard nearly every hour during the election cycle. It speaks to an impression of middle Americans as less important than people who live on the coasts, namely California and New York.

For many people in middle America, economic mobility is stunted and jobs have disappeared, Brooks says. “In this country, we only have one success story: you go to college, you get a degree and a white-collar job, and that’s success,” he says. “If you’re not rich or famous, you feel invisible.”

Seriously, stop.  Let me off this ride.

Not quite yet.

Political correctness has soured conservatives. The conservative media has pounded this issue for the past ten years: Political correctness keeps people from saying what they think, Carlson says. “There’s been a narrowing of what’s permissible to say,” Brooks adds, pointing to his experiences on elite campuses. So it’s refreshing to Trump voters that he says what he thinks, regardless of who he may offend. “There are a lot of people who agree with Steve Bannon but won’t say so publicly,” Carlson says. “Voting for Trump was a way for them to do it silently.”

That's it.  One more of these and I swear by Gugalanna the Bull of Heaven that I will shart everything  I've eaten since the second grade straight onto your fucking sweater!

Oh, c'mon.  Just one more.  With emphasis added so pay attention to the emphasis.

Be a little more self-suspicious. “You need to come out of the bubble if you’re ever going to have a conversation,” Carlson says. Brooks adds that we need to be wary of censorship and not hearing from people we disagree with, citing and commending the example of the University of Chicago’s rejection of safe spaces on campus. “If you get your feelings hurt, welcome to education,” he says.

Engage with media you usually disagree with. Carlson recommends occasionally watching a news show or reading an article from an outlet you normally wouldn’t. “We have to be accepting of all points of view — that’s how we start to bridge this massive divide.”

You lied!  That was two more, not one more.  That's it.  Here comes the Fun Cooker!

No, no, wait.  I teed this up to show you this one thing.  Just this one thing, and then I'm out. 

I promise.

From Crooks & Liars:

David Brooks Calls Internet Comments 'Too Psychologically Damaging' - Pays The Help To Read Them

Now I am done.

Guaranteed To Make You Smile

David Brooks: Time is a Flat Circle

"Why should I live in history? Fuck, I don’t want to know anything anymore. This is a world where nothing is solved."

It is rumored that this was part of the original draft of today's David Brooks column in The New York Times.

But after his interns carried him off to bed, after they leeched out all the self-pity and tequila, they produced a final draft which was much better calibrated to fit within Mr. Brooks' Great Project:

Longtime readers know of my crazy theory that Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times does not write editorial columns twice a week per se, but is instead engaged in a massive, long-range project to assemble an entire, fictional alternate history of Modern Conservationism, which is being created right before our eyes by the slow, steady accretion of one godawful Whig Fan Fiction column at at time.

And so, after a little wordsmithing, here is part of the final draft as it appeared in The New York Times this morning:

Donald Trump gave us Trumpism at its best on Tuesday night. And that was useful because it gave us a view of the political movement he represents, without the clownish behavior.

The first thing we learned was that Trumpism is an utter repudiation of modern conservatism...

This is, of  course, arrant piffle (sorry for the salty language kids.)

"Trumpism" is not the repudiation of Modern Conservatism, it is Modern Conservatism's apotheosis. Nothing more than "Republicanism" stripped of its veneer of Beltway respectability.  The raw, toxic core of Conservatism's Pretty Hate Machine (that certain disreputable hippies were writing about all the way back in 2006) with all the coolant boiled away...

The Liquid Bobo Koolant

The Koolant system that keeps it all from blowing apart at the seams and melting itself back into the masturbatory fever dreams of every wannabe Jefferson Davis circulate a viscous Koolaid-based composite goo made up of 43% David Brooks, 27% Tom Friedman, 23% Tim Russert, 12% Joe Klein and 10% David Broder.

You say that’s 115%? Well fuck you and your fancy, liberal, Jebus-hating elitist “arithmetic” anyway.

If you press your ear to the containment shell you can hear it murmuring through the pipes:

“There are no crazies here.”

“The Southern Strategy is a myth.”

“Ignore Falwell, Dobson, and Reed. They’re Men of Faith.”

“Ignore Schlafly, Limbaugh and Hannity. They’re just firm”

“Ignore Robertson, Perle and Nordquist. They’re just amusingly provocative.”

“Gingrich isn’t a fascist; he’s just ‘controversial’.”

“Coulter isn’t really serious, even though she is the keynote speaker and commands top dollar at national Republican events, Republican media outlets and sold-out Wingnut Christian rallies.”

“That carcinoma spreading across your face. It looks just the Jesus, so you know it can’t be bad for you!”

“The Moderates really run the party.”

“The Center is where all right thinking people should be, despite the fact that in the last 30 years the Right has dragged the Center a million miles into Crazyville.”

“No matter how completely the GOP rapes American values, without a sliver of evidence to support this assertion you should still somehow believe that Liberals are either just as bad or worse.”

“The GOP cares about idiots like you.”

“There is no core in this reactor.”

But of course America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual cannot -- dare not -- say any of this.  So for Mr. David Brooks, the timeline of Modern Conservatism has to be a Flat Circle.

"Everything Reagan's ever done, or will do, Reagan's gonna do over and over and over again." wept Brooks. "And again. And again. Forever."

This was obviously too weird and unsettling for a New York Times op-ed, so his interns quietly tweak it a little bit here and there.

For the last 40 years, the Republican Party has been a coalition of three tendencies...

There used to be Republican foreign policy hawks, people who believed that it was in America’s interest to serve as a global policeman, actively preserving a democratic world order...

There used to be social conservatives, who believed that the moral fabric of the country had been weakened by secularism and the breakdown of the family...

Finally, there used to be fiscal hawks who worried about the national debt...

Yeah but see, none of this is actually true.

For example, the "Republican foreign policy hawks" who were only too happy to pile on Bill Clinton when he sent troops into battle in places like Kosovo (What?  You don't remember that?)...

Republican Statements When Clinton Went to War

"You can support the troops but not the president." --Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years." --Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?" --Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy." --Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)

"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy." --Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy." --Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W Bush

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area." --Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today." --Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." --Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

... were the same "Republican foreign policy hawks" who lined up to cheer on Dubya (and call the rest of us traitors) as he lied us into the wrong fucking war.

And then lined up to cheer on Dubya (and call the rest of us traitors) as he completely botched that war.

And the same is true of those alleged Republican "fiscal hawks" who have a long and well-documented history of only giving a shit about the national checkbook when a Democrat is in the White House. Then and only then do these "fiscal hawks" suddenly appear out of nowhere to flood the airwaves with demands that Democrats not only clean up the fiscal disasters that Republicans created through crackpot economic schemes and giant tax cuts for the rich, but that Democrats should not be allowed to raise taxes one thin dime to do it.  

You see, there is nothing more sacred on Earth or in Heaven to these "fiscal hawks" than tax cuts for the rich, which is why their first and only answer to any fiscal question is always "Slash programs for the poor and working class."

Ah, but when there is a Republican in the White House?  Spending the nation's treasury like Donald Trump on a real estate shopping spree with Vladimir Putin's credit card?  Well then the story is entirely different.

“Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter,”  

-- Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, 2002

"The Democrats cry that projections are notoriously inaccurate, that the tax cuts will blow a hole in the budget, and that the Bush administration's risky scheme (which sailed through the House last week) would cast us back into the days of piling debt...

"As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?" 

-- David Brooks, 2001

And as to the third element of Mr. Brooks' Imaginary Conservatism -- those noble "social conservatives" -- the less said about the Falwell/Robertson/Reed cabal of Bible-thumping perverts who helped gut the Party of Lincoln to advance their radical theocratic agenda the better.

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

-- Matthew 23:13

The terrible truth that no one can bring themselves to say out loud is that Modern Conservatism has been a scam from the start. A massive fraud, gathering speed and careening down a steep and terrifying road towards Trump for the last 30 years.  A corrupt cult that hired men like David Brooks for the same reason the mob hires pricey lawyers:  to rig up alibis for their despicable enterprise and explain away their loathsome behavior.

"It was all a dream," David Brooks moaned, barely coherent, curled up in his tub, hugging a nearly-empty bottle of Gran PatrĂłn Platinum. "A dream that we had inside a locked room, a dream about being a True Conservative."

"And like a lot of dreams, there's a monster at the end of it."

Well that wouldn't do.  Not one little bit  So after they got him into his Edmund Burke pj's and tucked him in, the dutiful interns of America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual went to work spending the rest of the night turning Mr. Brooks' incoherent babble into 800 Beltway-friendly words that would exonerate men like Mr. Brooks by pretending that the monster at the end of the dream of Conservatism just suddenly appeared, unbidden, from nowhere, as if by magic...

...instead of being built and animated, step-by-step, over the last 30 years by men like Mr. Brooks.

Here is what they finally settled on (emphasis added):

...For the last 40 years, the Republican Party has been a coalition of three tendencies. On Tuesday, Trump rejected or ignored all of them.

There used to be Republican foreign policy hawks, people who believed that it was in America’s interest to serve as a global policeman, actively preserving a democratic world order. Trump explicitly repudiated this worldview, drawing instead a sharp distinction between what’s good for America and what’s good for the rest of the world.

There used to be social conservatives, who believed that the moral fabric of the country had been weakened by secularism and the breakdown of the family. On Tuesday, Trump acted as if this group didn’t exist. He didn’t mention a single social issue — abortion, religious liberty, marriage, anything.

Finally, there used to be fiscal hawks who worried about the national debt. Trump demolished these people, too, vowing a long list of spending programs and preservation of entitlement programs.

The Republicans who applauded Trump on Tuesday were applauding their own repudiation. They did it because partisanship is stronger than philosophy, but also because Reagan conservatism no longer applies to current reality...

And thus does Mr. Brooks' Great Project grow another chapter.

Just Keep "Tweeting", Orange Julius

Just keep Tweeting. (h/t AdmiralJaneway)