One more thing for Democrats to fix: the Republican Party
At some point, Republicans will be in charge. That is why we must do
everything we can to ensure a more moderate, saner version of the GOP is in
place when that happens.
By Neal Urwitz
Remember kids, not a single Republican anywhere -- from the gas-sippin',
mouth-breathin', Confederate-flag flyin' double-wide denizens of Sisterfuck
Arkansas, to Republican congressmen and senators, to the decrepit orange
traitor and pedo-protector in the White House -- none of them
have any agency at all.
Not a one of them has the capacity to control their actions or behave like
civilized humans.
Therefor it will always fall to Democrats to be responsible for everything.
How Dems Fight Back: Treat Trump Like a Potty-Training Toddler
Children respond best to praise and rewards. The Resistance should adopt
the same strategy with the president-elect.
My wife and I have spent the last week potty training our son. Anyone who
has been through this knows what’s involved: reading and rereading “Elmo
Learns to Use the Potty,” effusive praise for successful trips to the
toilet and lots of M&Ms as a reward.
As every parent knows, the most effective strategy to train a toddler is
to cajole them to do the right thing and heap on the praise; it’s
prettied-up manipulation.
We need to praise him effusively every time he even approximates doing
the right thing. We need to laud him for every mainstream, reasonably
competent appointment he makes, for every bipartisan bill he supports, and
for any time he refrains from outrageous or unlawful actions and
negotiates with Congress instead...
The goal for Democrats should be to prevent worst-case scenarios by
coaxing Trump to behave like an adult. If we are not disciplined enough to
lead with praise for good behavior, we risk accelerating his democratic
backsliding, his most draconian policies and the irreparable damage he
could do to our economy and our society.
Have I mentioned that, apparently, not a single Republican anywhere -- from the gas-sippin', mouth-breathin', Confederate-flag flyin' double-wide denizens of Sisterfuck Arkansas, to Republican congressmen and senators, to the decrepit orange traitor and pedo-protector in the White House -- is capable of controlling their
moral or constitutional bowels?
That uncontrollably shitting out lies and treason and ludicrous conspiracy
theories and outright fascism is just who they are, and it is unreasonable to
expect them to behave like civilized humans?
That it therefor follows that Democrats are to not only to be held responsible
for everything every Democrat says and does (even garbage that Fox News just
makes up), but everything Republicans do as well?
Have I mentioned that? Because it feels like I might have mentioned that
once or twice over the past 20 years.
A moment of silence for tech billionaire Elon Musk’s political party, which
lasted—check notes—just six weeks.
According to
The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with Musk’s plans, the Tesla CEO is hitting the
brakes on his “America Party,” telling allies he wants to focus on his
struggling companies
and is wary of launching a third party that could siphon off GOP voters. Musk,
naturally, gives himself too much credit: His so-called coalition
barely registers
with pollsters, and
surveys suggest
the party would have been dead on arrival.
The explosion of a huge SpaceX rocket above South Florida led to massive
headaches for air travelers who were forced to endure unexpected delays
due to the company's latest mishap on Thursday.
The FAA had to halt air traffic around Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm
Beach and Orlando in fear of "space launch debris,” following the SpaceX
failure.
"After all my years of traveling, this is a first," wrote a Facebook user
who identified himself as pharmaceutical executive Ray Peck after his
flight to South America was forced to land in Miami.
"Americans already understood Trump to be corrupt, and proved themselves
willing to tolerate that," Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr. argue.
"But now they are coming to believe that he is inept. In American politics,
that is an unforgivable sin".
The Atlantic headline:
Trump’s Unforgivable Sin
"Voters have proved willing to tolerate corruption, but there’s one thing
they won’t ignore." -- By Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr.
The Corrections:
"AmericansRepublicans already understood
Trump to be corrupt, and proved themselves willing to tolerate that they were cool with that because it made Libtards cry," Peter
Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr. argue. "But now they are coming to believe
that he is inept. In American Republican politics, that is an unforgivable sin".
...
Trump’s Unforgivable Sin
"VotersRepublicans have proved willing to
tolerate corruption, but there’s one thing they won’t ignore." -- By Peter
Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr.
Jesus, Mary and Marty Baron, are they so god damn skint at
The Atlantic that they can't afford to hire even one decent editor?
For starters today we're looking at the first 2/3rds of a genuinely
heartbreaking story from Virginia, about the exhausting struggles that so many
of us are going through.
Why only the first 2/3rds?
That shall become clear in the fullness of time.
Why am I leading off this post with a picture of a much younger me decked out
in the reddest sports jacket ever created (hand-made for me by my late
mother), with my clip-on bow-tie and Kmart shirt, standing in front of our
trusty VW Fastback, probably on my way to a freshman debate tournament?
Again, all shall be revealed in the fullness of time.
Commentary: Living in the Shadow of the American Dream
A father’s reflections on the quiet, unseen struggles of working families today.
I live in Shenandoah County, Virginia. I’m a factory worker. A farmer. A
father of two girls, one still in diapers. I get up before the sun,
and most days I don’t sit down until after it’s gone.
My partner Hannah and I raise our girls on a small farm in the
Valley. She works full-time too-though nobody calls it that. She’s a
caregiver, a homemaker, a livestock handler, and a mother. She
doesn’t get a paycheck. She doesn’t get a break. She doesn’t get
counted.
We’ve relied on a cistern for water for over three years. I’m
trying to save up to dig a well before it runs dry. We heat with
firewood I cut myself. We raise animals for milk, eggs, and meat
because the grocery bill outpaces my paycheck.
We’ve stayed unmarried—not because we don’t love each other, but
because getting married would kick my partner and our daughters off
the Medicaid that keeps them healthy.
My employer offers insurance, sure—but only if I pay nearly as much
as our mortgage. I can’t, so we stay as we are; in love but locked
out.
I’m not ashamed of our life. It’s honest work, and it’s full of
love. However, I am ashamed that in a country as wealthy as ours, people
like us are left out in the cold.
When the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” passed, it was marketed as
a win for working Americans. From where I stand, it looks like the
opposite. Cuts to Medicaid, reduced support for struggling families, and a
ballooning deficit that somehow still leaves us more exposed than
before.
You can dress it up however you want, but if it leaves working families
behind, it’s not serving the people. This bill, like so many before it,
rewards the already powerful while punishing the people who hold up the
economy in invisible ways. It gives to those who lobby and takes from
those who labor. It reinforces a message I’ve felt in my bones for years:
You’re on your own...
Genuine. Heartfelt. Tragic. So what kind of heartless
asshole would side-eye this honest man's real suffering?
Again, in the fullness of time...
But now, a little history.
From the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere I've tried to keep this blog (mostly)
focused on larger political and media issues that span multiple election
cycles. I don't have a staff of 30, and have never been set up to
deliver a new hit of Fresh! ALL! CAPS! Outrage! Every! 90!
Minutes!
Nor would I want to, even though I understand that there's fame and fortune to
be found in delivering INDIGNATION! on an industrial scale.
Needless to say I am indignant and outraged about what is happening to
our country, and have been since long before I started blogging. In the
intervening decades, like you, I've read thousands of
"OMG! Can you believe Republicans are doing this very bad thing?!?!" posts.
And the obvious answer to each of those outrages is, well, of course I can believe it, because for decades they have not
only been doing very bad things, but they have been getting exponentially
worse.
And the worse Republicans get, the more
"OMG! Can you believe Republicans are doing this very bad thing!!" Substacks and podcasts spring into existence, using ever more strident
language to reflect your perfectly appropriate indignation and outrage back to
you.
But while indignation and outrage may be appropriate reactions to the sad
and scary condition our country is in, they are very poor diagnostic tools. They
don't get us to the source of the problem, and how can you fix a problem if you
can't figure out what's causing it? Which is why, over these last 20
years, I've tried to look at the sad, scary, and exponentially worsening state
of our country through an appropriately long lens. To track its
trajectory like an interstellar object hurtling our way: where
did it come from, where is it going, and does it pose a threat to life on
Earth?
This is from me in 2012. I wrote it
on the occasion of my 7th blogiversary and I chose it today from among many, many other candidates largely because of the picture I used as
the lead graphic (as seen above.)
Here's the quote:
The Centrism of "Both Sides Do It!" is the spider hole into which the Pig
People scuttle every time another tenet of their loathsome ideology
blows up in their face.
Of course, if you are still a Conservative
in the Year of Our Lord 2012, I expect nothing better. You're a cultural
dead-loss and beyond redemption, and while the rest of us may be required to
share a country with you, we are under no obligation to treat you with
anything other than contempt.
But the Pig People would be nothing
but a minor nuisance -- a boil on the ass of democracy -- without
the Centrists who keep the "Both Sides Do It" spider hole well-furnished and
open for business. Pound for pound, Centrism is the biggest and most debilitating lie in American politics
bar none. It is the Big Lie that makes all the little lies possible, which is
why I focus so hard on those who traffic in it. They are the
ones most vulnerable to and terrified of being called out in public.
They are the ones we must run out of the media on a rail...
I know this all sounds drearily familiar. Over the decades I have
ransacked my Big Bag O' Metaphors looking for just the right turn of a phrase that might
break through the media miasma and take down the Cult of Both Sides Do It. In those efforts, I likened the Both Sides Do It lie to everything from
Strontium-90 in the milk, to an
insidious retrovirus:
Fake Centrism is the retrovirus that is killing our democracy's capacity to
defend itself from its internal enemies: it is the immune-system-destroying
disease which allows every other kind of Hate Radio/Fox News opportunistic
political malignancy to run wild through our body politic. And man, once
you start to notice how automatically every water-cooler Cicero and two-bit
Tom Friedman uses Fake Centrism to prop up their lazy arguments,
it's really creepy.
Obviously I failed. Nothing worked, and the disease still rolls merrily
along. All that remains (as we used to say in the olden days of blogging) is to document the atrocities. To show how far and wide and deep the
Both Sides Do It plague has spread.
Yesterday I brought you the story of the $67M Newsmax was forced to pay to settle a defamation lawsuit from the
Dominion voting machine company over baseless, slanderous claims that the 2020
presidential election was rigged.
And how did the Newsmax spokesnazi spin the settlement? How do you
think.
In a statement, Newsmax said it “believed it was critically important for
the American people to hear both sides of the election disputes that
arose in 2020.”
Both Sides Do It: the Scoundrel's Shield.
And now back to the gentleman from Virginia to finish his story.
This is where we left off:
You can dress [the so-called Big Beautiful Bill]
up however you want, but if it leaves working families behind, it’s
not serving the people. This bill, like so many before it, rewards
the already powerful while punishing the people who hold up the economy
in invisible ways. It gives to those who lobby and takes from those who
labor. It reinforces a message I’ve felt in my bones for years: You’re
on your own...
And this, as Paul Harvey used to say, is the rest of the story:
I’m not writing this as a Democrat or a Republican. I’m writing
this as a man watching families like mine wear themselves thin;
working hard, doing the right things, and still falling behind.
This isn’t about Red or Blue. It’s about the fact that we’re being
divided against each other while both sides forget that
real Americans bleed the same when the cost of insulin triples or
the cost of groceries goes up again.
And
I don’t want handouts. I want fairness.
I don’t want politics. I want policy that works.
I'm not gonna deconstruct everything that's wrong with this, from the reason
the price of insulin has tripled to his dividing the country up between
"both sides" and "real Americans". You are all plenty smart enough to do that all by yourselves.
I will just say that these two different things can be true at the same time.
First, that the struggles his family is going through are real and
tragic. And shared by millions, including by me and my family.
Second, that the writer of this column lives in Virginia's 6th congressional
district. Virginia's 6th congressional district is an R+12
district. According to Wikipedia, the 6th district
was one of the first areas of Virginia to turn Republican.
Many of the old Byrd Democrats in the area began splitting their tickets and
voting Republican at the national level as early as the 1930s. It was also
one of the first areas of Virginia where Republicans were able to break the
long Democratic dominance at the state and local level. The district itself
was in Republican hands from 1953 to 1983. Democrat Jim Olin then won the
seat in 1982, and held it for a decade before Goodlatte won it.
Some counties in the district have not supported a Democrat for president
since Franklin D. Roosevelt. For instance, Highland and Shenandoah counties
last voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1932, and Augusta and
Roanoke counties have not supported a Democrat since 1944. The district as a
whole has not supported a Democrat for president since Lyndon B. Johnson in
1964.
In 2024, Virginia's 6th congressman, Republican incumbent Benjamin Lee Cline,
easily won re-election with 63.1% of the vote.
Congressman Cline was one of the 218 Republicans who voted to
take Medicaid away from this gentleman's family. The bill went on
to a 50-50 vote in the Senate with all but three Republicans voting in favor of taking Medicaid away from this
gentleman's family. And it was Republican Vice
President J.D. Vance who cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of taking
Medicaid away from this gentleman's family.
On July 4, 2025, the bill taking Medicaid away from this gentleman's family
was signed into law by Republican President Donald Trump
The bill was passed over
universal Democratic opposition in both houses.
Which is why, in addition to being the Scoundrel's Impenetrable Shield,
Both Sides Do It also remains the Sucker's All-Occasion Lament.
However, what remains a taboo subject everywhere except out here in
disreputable wilds of whatever is left of the Liberal blogosphere is
how exactly the Republican base came to be such a aggregation of
unsalvageable garbage people that they would nominate this degenerate monster
for president three times and elect him twice.
How is it that no one but us dirty hippies noticed or cared about the monstrous cancer that was growing in plain sight at the heart of the GOP until it was far too late to stop it?
Newsmax to pay $67M to settle defamation lawsuit from voting machine
company The settlement averts what promised to be a high-profile trial.
The conservative cable news channel Newsmax will pay $67 million to
settle a defamation lawsuit brought by the voting machine company
Dominion over baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was
rigged, according to a new regulatory filing.
The settlement averts what promised to be a high-profile trial.
Newsmax and Dominion Voting Systems agreed to the settlement on Friday,
according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The payments
will be made in three installments by January 2027, the filing
said.
“We are pleased to have settled this matter,” a Dominion spokesperson
said in response to a request for comment...
Who knows? Employees might even be facing unpaid furlough days in
their future, just like we in management had to take when I worked for the
City of Chicago and times got lean.
So, is that the end of the story?
Of course not.
Watch as the Newsmax spokesnazi predictably invokes the Magic Conjure Words
which the legacy media itself created long ago and invested with the power absolve themselves of their own crimes against truth and
journalism. With emphasis added just for kicks.
In a statement, Newsmax said it “believed it was critically important
for the American people to hear both sides of the election
disputes that arose in 2020.”
“We stand by our coverage as fair, balanced, and conducted within
professional standards of journalism,” the company added in part.
Where did this wretched hive of scum and villainy learn to invoke the
legacy media's own "Expelliarmus!" to disarm and deflect?
From, among others, the good, gray pages of The New York Times.
Will this break Newsmax and show them the error of their ways?
Of course not.
Newsmax deals in lies, conspiracies, racism and rage the
way a meth dealer deals in, well, meth. It is an extremely profitable
enterprise staffed and run by the kind sociopaths who have no qualms about
wrecking the country as long as they make a buck.
But just maybe it'll make 'em just the tiniest bit gun-shy next time, and
these days I'm taking my wins where I find them.
Don't bother looking for the video on the MSNBC website. It has outlived its usefulness.
In case you were wondering what Greta The Great is up to now, no surprise that she's gainfully employed by Newsmax, and out there hyping Trump just as hard as Rachel Maddow once hyped her.
I know a sales pitch when I hear one. Lord knows, across the span of my checkered past I've made dozens of
them myself. So I realize that, in the end, what I'm watching (below) is
a long pitch for the Lincoln Project, where the tactical use of "we" during the
pitch is meant to make you think that the Lincoln lads had anything to do with
Trump losing in 2020.
Spoiler: They did not. What they did was sop up tens of millions
of dollars from credulous Liberals which they used to hire themselves
and their friends to crank out very slick ads which one low-born wag referred
to (repeatedly) as political Pornhub for credulous Liberals. It
tickled Liberal pleasure centers and got the Lincoln Lads lots of free
publicity on MSNBC (which came back to bite them when various sexual and
financial scandalscame to
light), but there is no evidence that any of that moved the electoral needle one
iota.
However, when you subtract the product pitch that Stuart Stevens is
making here from the story he is telling, I think you end up with one of the clearest
and most honest personal, political inventories of anyone in the Never Trumper
universe. I have always respected his candor, and his book --
"It Was All a Lie" -- sits proudly on our bookshelf at
home.
The story he tells is miles and miles away from Tom Nichols' brittle, angry,
and ultimately pathetic Jake Blues-like string of excuses and deflections:
His
"None of what happened had anything to do with me/ No one could have seen
this coming/ Whatabout Abbie Hoffman? Huh! Huh! Smartass!
Liberals aren't blameless here!" reaction every time anyone manages sneak a little GOP history into his
timeline (which is immediately followed by being blocked.)
Which is why, I think, media appearances by Stuart Stevens are so much rarer
than virtually any other Never Trumper in the media, and when he is brought in
it's usually to talk about what a monster Trump is (true) and strategies for
going forward. Not to expound on how the his former party
came to be what it is now, and definitely not to debate any
other recently-former Republican on that issue.
Because Stevens' unexpurgated history of the moral collapse of the Republican
party exactly matches -- beat for beat and milestone for
milestone -- the longstanding Liberal critiques/warnings about the trajectory of
the Republican party (about which
a lot more here.) The inconvenient truth that Trump did not hijack the GOP, he exposed it
for what it had been all along. The Republican base was not suckered into supporting Trump, the base manifested Trump.
And all of that is diametrically opposed to the story that legacy media and
the Never Trump media wants to tell. In their tale, the base of the party
were like unto the innocent child Maria in James Whale's 1938 masterpiece Frankenstein. The base just read Edmund Burke, sang little peasant songs and and toss flowers into
the water. And in their fictionalized history of the GOP, Trump is the destroyer. Trump is the
despoiler. Trump is the lumbering monster, built in a lab by a mad
scientist, who Maria foolishly trusts and who Trump ends up drowning.
And, to carry the analogy a little further, the Never Trumpers are Ludwig, shocked and saddened, bearing Maria's
corpse through the town, believing that such an unbearable outrage will rouse
the party leadership and the good people of the town to action.
However, despite the fact that this "history" is the lie
which the legacy media and the Never Trumpers have all agreed on, I am morally
obliged to be the buzzkill guy who points out that isn't what happened at all.
Maria isn't the base of the Republican party. Maria is the legacy
media's and the Never Trumper's comforting delusion of what the Republican party was. However, to
quote Stuart Stevens, it was all a lie.
The base didn't fear Trump as a destroyer. They greeted him as a
liberator. He didn't have a bad brain. He had an
awesome brain! Because his brain is just like their brain!
It turns out that real base of the party -- the peasants of
the town -- had always hated Maria and Ludwig and their whole sanctimonious
family. They're glad that bitch is dead! They danced on her grave
singing Hallelujah! It turns out, they were jubilantly pro-monster, so
fuck that weepy old Ludwig, and fuck Jeb! and, while we're at it, Hang Mike
Pence!
And, being politicians with their damp fingers forever testing the direction
of the prevailing wind, the town's leading citizens, the mayor and the
burghers (Republican elected officials), all figured this out real
quick. A few of them raised a few objections, but they were quickly
chased out of town by peasants with pitchforks and torches. And now,
with the party base and the party leadership united in reverence of the
monster, they made it their king and gave it the power of life and death over
everything in the kingdom.
And the terrible secret that dare not speak its name and that Never Trumpers carry in their hearts is that the monster wasn't built by some mad
scientist in a faraway lab at all. The truth is they built it. It was Ludwig
all along. It was all of them. A group effort carried out by
elite Conservatives, Republican leaders, Conservative media and the legacy
media. They created the monster, but in their hubris they thought they
could control it. And as long as they controlled it, no one
objected to it.
Consider that, just this very week, unreconstructed Conservative evangelical
and New York Times op-ed guy, David French, spent an entire column
explaining how Donald Trump bamboozled the otherwise noble and righteous
Conservative evangelical movement into abandoning their faith in Republican
Jesus, and investing it instead into an manifestly unchristian monster like
Trump.
French spends the first 13 paragraphs (ominous biblical number, that 13)
laying out the biography of one particularly odious Conservative evangelical
preacher named Douglas Wilson.
Then two paragraphs of #NotAllEvangelicals
In a religious movement as large and multifaceted as American
evangelicalism, you can — of course — find all kinds of people and
pastors, from the most compassionate and kind to the most self-righteous,
zealous and even violent.
To say that a pastor like Wilson exists no more condemns all of
evangelical Christianity (indeed, Wilson faces vigorous opposition in the
evangelical church) than to say that the existence of radical imams
condemns all of Islam. A better question is to ask whether a person this
cruel and extreme has real stature and influence — and whether his
influence is on the wane or on the rise.
And then:
There are many reasons for Wilson’s rise, but one of them is squarely
rooted in politics. When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, he
inherited a recent Republican tradition: The Republican president isn’t just
a political leader — he’s a de facto religious leader as well.
Yadda, yadda, yadda. Dubya Bush was awesome. Obviously no mention
of Iraq. Or Katrina. Or Teri Schiavo. Or running for
reelection on a gay-bashing platform of which David French fully
approved. Or any of it. Just Dubya Bush was awesome.
And then:
Bush is a devout Christian. Those words, to put it mildly, are not how
one would describe Trump.
And yet, each election cycle, Christians were told it was a spiritual
imperative to vote Republican, and that imperative did not change even
when the party’s positions — and its people — profoundly did.
But while the policies of the Republican party may have shifted around, the
basic themes -- the bones of the Reagan Revolution -- are still right there in
the Trump regime for anyone with honest eyes to see. From The Guardian:
Did Reagan pave the way for Trump? ‘You can trace the linkages,’ says biographer
...a critically praised biography of Reagan challenges these assumptions,
balancing recognition of Reagan’s strengths with a close examination of
his glaring weaknesses on inequality, race and the Aids pandemic. Its
introduction poses a provocative question: “Did Reaganism contain the
seeds of Trumpism?”
And the book comes not from a progressive Democrat but a former
foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential campaigns of John
McCain, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio. Max Boot is himself an immigrant: he
was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, gained US citizenship and is
now a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on
Foreign Relations thinktank. ...
“Even more fundamentally, Reagan’s policies truly favoured the wealthy
and increased income disparity in the United States. You can argue that
those policies, whether it was the tax cuts, lack of anti-trust,
anti-union activity, all the rest, by widening those income disparities
opened the way for populism in America, both from the left and the
rightwing populism that Trump exploits today.”
Ultimately, Boot
argues, Reagan paved the way for Trump. “He was addicted to faux facts. He
would often cite apocryphal quotes and anecdotes and statistics that
weren’t really true but would keep citing them anyway, even when it was
pointed out that he didn’t have any basis for doing so. You can argue that
acclimated the Republican party to the fire hose of falsehoods that you
see from Trump.
For the record, Boot does mention Reagan's chilling refusal to take the AIDS
epidemic seriously (maybe it was God's will?) but doesn't mention Reagan's
cynical use of racism to get himself elected.
In the end it comes down to this: Republican elites and donors believe
in tax cuts, period, full-stop. And all the culture war garbage -- from
hating gays to hating women, to hating brown people, to hating
Liberals, to hating science -- has been deployed tactically, election after election, as a means
to get enough pliant Republican meatheads elected to pass the massive tax
cuts, which is all the Republican elite ever cared about.
And it worked: that culture war garbage was the hook that brought white,
Conservative evangelicals squarely into the heart of the Republican
party. But right here -- where French says that both the "party’s positions — and its people" profoundly changed -- this is where he palms the card and
hopes you will not notice. Because while Republican policies may have changes,
the white, Conservative evangelicals at the dark heart of the GOP have not.
Having lived through the same history as you and me, David French should fucking well know better. Which means, like so many other Never Trumpers, French is either lying outright about the history of the modern GOP to cover his own ass, or is so terminally delusional about the modern history of the GOP that his opinions are worthless.
We remember Ronald Reagan welcoming America's most hateful and bigoted white,
Conservative evangelicals into the Republican party, back when Donald Trump was just another sleazy New York real estate crook.
We even remember Falwell's slanderous attacks on Norman Lear all the way back
in the 1980s.
We lived through clinic bombings and "Tiller the Baby Killer" becoming Bill
O'Reilly's mantra on Fox News, until someone actually killed Dr. Tiller.
We remember Falwell and Robertson, in the hours after 9/11, blaming everyone
the Right hates for the attack. Because for white evangelical Christians
scumbags like Falwell and Robertson, every catastrophe was
ordered by God and therefor must be divine punishment for not hating women,
minorities and the ACLU hard enough.
And yet, Republican leadership didn't grab these scumbags collar and belt and
throw them out of the Party of Lincoln, because by then it was no longer the
Party of Lincoln. It was well on it's way to being the Party of
Jefferson Davis: hateful, bigoted, White, stupid, superstitious and drunk on
holy vengeance.
Which is why, by 2004, we saw Bush the "devout Christian" getting
out the Conservative evangelical vote by running an explicitly gay-bashing
campaign in order to get himself re-elected.
Which is why, by 2008, we saw John "Maverick" McCain publicly reverse his
scathing 2000 criticism of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as
"agents of intolerance" who represented the
"outer reaches of American politics" and head down to Liberty
University to kiss Falwell's ass.
Because McCain wanted to be president and he fucking well understood where the
power center of the Republican party was located.
And let's not forget that as late as 2019, Never Trump Resistance Hero #1, Liz Cheney, was out there blithely leveling the most grotesque lies against Democrats and calling people like you and me "the face of pure evil". Because slander like that has been the Mother Tongue of the GOP since David French was in short pants.
This is the bamboozle that David French is trying to run. The White
Conservative evangelical base of the GOP didn't vote for McCain or Romney
because they had
joy, joy, joy, joy down in their hearts over the idea of a McCain or Romney administration. They
settled for McCain and Romney because the alternative was a
Democrat, and they had been lectured -- over and over again by their pastors,
for decades and from the sanctity of the pulpit -- that Democrats are all
commie, baby-killing servants of Satan.
That anyone on the Right is better than everyone on the Left.
In 2016 we saw Donald Trump win them over by promising to deliver what both
Bushes had failed to deliver and what everyone knew neither Romney nor McCain would ever
have been able to.
These people firmly believe in a Heaven where they will live forever with
Republican Jesus, and a Hell, where you and me and most everyone else will
fry for eternity. The thought of this delights them, but to get there
they have to bring about the end of the world, which is why the elimination of
Roe was never going to be enough. Moving the American embassy to
Jerusalem would not be enough, nor would terrorizing trans people or rolling
back gay marriage, because as the Henry Drummond says in
Inherit the Wind, "Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy and needs
feeding."
These people are shooting for a Year Zero. The end of history. A
world cleansed of scum like us, and remade in the image of their radical
perversion of Christianity.
These are also people whose whole theology depends on dismissing objective
reality, believing in giant, global conspiracies being run by Satan and a
bone-deep certainty that they are a cruelly oppressed minority in an America which was designed to be an explicitly Christian country, but which has been stolen from
them by godless Liberals.
...in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better.
And because we Liberals believe in facts, and not bullshit, self-absolving
alibis, you are not obliged to just take my for any of this. There are
plenty of former evangelicals who have left the cult who will tell you the
same.
You could check out Tim Alberta's
"The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of
Extremism."
Or you could check in with Frank Schaeffer, the author of
"Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the
Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back"
Which is why, in a world of pious frauds like David French and grouchy charlatans like Tom Nichols, those of us on the side of the angels should cherish and celebrate the Stuart Stevenses and the Frank Schaeffers in this world.
