Why oh why must certain Liberals, certain Democrats, be so willful?  So obstreperous?  So disobedient?

Why can't they see that our democracy is hanging by a thread?  And that our Awesome Democracy Coalition is the only hope of saving it?  

And why can't they see that the only hope of keeping our Awesome Democracy Coalition together is if we all play from from the same playbook?  And that playbook is the one written by [checks notes] a tiny group of former Republicans and former Weekly Standard employees who got run out of our own party by the monster they help create...and have since been allowed to colonize the media to the point where Liberal voices might as well not even exist!

And that playbook clearly states that various topics are off-limits -- especially topics that involve talking about the past.  It also clearly states that Neoconservatism was secretly awesome, that the Extremes on Both Sides are the real problem, and, now that we control the Awesome Democracy Coalition narrative, certain Liberals, certain Democrats, need to keep their heterodox thoughts to themselves and keep their whiny yappers shut.  

Part 1.  Glorious Neoconservatism!

And, no, I'm not just talking about the godawful David Brooks' column --

The Neocons Were Right

Not about Iraq. But the moral tenor of their political writings could be an antidote to Trumpism.

-- which The Atlantic paid him to write.

Instead, --surprise! -- your "allies" at The Bulwark had a merry old time doing that Never Trump thing where they pretend Republicanism and Neoconservatism are not what they manifestly were and are, but instead were what they wish they had been.  

I mean, pointing at the Republican party -- which nominated Donald Trump for president three times in a row, overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in the last three elections, and managed to elect him twice -- and declaring that this is not what being a Republican is all about is not just patently ridiculous, it's insulting.  It's gaslighting.

And yet, there was The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell doing exactly that.  Doing exactly what Blue Gal warned they would be doing all the way back in August of 2016. 

Don't You Dare Call It 'Trump-ism'

The Media is attempting to separate the Republican Party from Donald Trump. Who voted for him again?

Have you noticed a number of media outlets calling the Republican campaign for President, "Trumpism"?

It isn't Trumpism. It's the Republican Party. And it has been for far longer than Donald Trump has been running for President.

The video above is from a year ago (July 2015). Alisyn Camerota asks a focus group of Trump and leaning toward Trump voters why they like him. Those of you who have watched any of these "average Trump voter" interviews know their trademarks:

"He speaks his mind, and says what I am already thinking."

"Illegal immigration is the number one issue on my mind."

"He'll make America great again."

The reason the news media interviewed these particular people is, they are registered Republican Primary voters.

They didn't just register to vote this year or fall off a truck into the Republican Party. They voted for Bush, twice. They voted for McCain/Palin. They voted for Romney. And they're tired of losing and being embarrassed by their votes, so embarrassed that they fell for a "Tea Party" rebranding just so they would not have to associate themselves with Bush.

And then the establishment had the nerve to suggest they vote for Bush's brother.

Donald Trump lies about a lot of things, but he is not lying when he says he received more Republican Primary votes than any other candidate in US history. That statistic is skewed by how many Republicans voted "Not Trump," but the fact that the race boiled down to Trump versus not-Trump is not helpful to the "Trumpism" argument. Republican voters selected Trump as their candidate, in state after state after state.

The beltway news media is terrified that the Republican Party will be forever tarnished by this Trump candidacy. Why? Because Trump-as-Republican busts open their "both sides" myth, that "both sides" of the political spectrum are equally bad, equally wrong and right, equally to be blamed for the "mess" in Washington...

Then, after insisting that what 99.3% of Republicans think being a "Republican" means is wrong...Ms. Longwell went on to do the same with "Neoconservatism"  

Longwell:  ...people just say that things are  Republican or conservative, and what they mean is they're Trump. they're Trump and Trump adjacent and whatever.  Neoconservatism is very similar.

She then gives her own definition of what she wishes Neoconservatism had been.  Then moves on to what Trump is doing in Venezuela

Longwell: That is not neoconservatism, guys. This is just it is the "Trumpro doctrine" or whatever.

...Anyway, so my point is... is like this is not neoconservatism by in any of the ways that we've ever thought about it and that neo neoconservatism itself has kind of lost meaning because people view it as like just what Afghan... uh Afghanistan and Iraq what they were.   Um that was not that's not what neoconservatism was at its roots.  Like, we have lost the sense of what it is. 

Then a little jokey joke about how we're not going to talk about Iraq and neoconservatism on this show, and that's that.  Done and dusted.

Before we ascend to the giddy heights of the Mountain of the Stupidest Fucking Things Anyone Has Ever Said (Non-Donald Trump Category) to carve the words "Afghanistan and Iraq Was Not What Neoconservatism Was at Its Roots" up near the peak for all the world to see forever and ever, some thoughts.

First, to quote Batman Begins, 

"It's not who you are underneath. It's what you do that defines you."

It doesn't matter what your dorm room fantasy of Neocons was.  What matters is what the Neocons did.  

Second, Sarah, have you ever met a guy named Bill Kristol?  Y'know, Mr. Neocon?  The guy who was so cocksure of a quick, cakewalk victory in Iraq that he used his monthly Neocon journal, The Weekly Standard, to make sure that "Neoconservatism" and "Iraq" became inseparable.  The guy who was advocating the decapitation of basically every Islamic/Muslim/Arab regime in the Middle East back when you were fresh out of Kenyon College and working for the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute?  One of the two or three most omnipresent Neocon warmongers on the Sunday Shows for more than a decade?  Son of Neocon founding father Irving Kristol?

Ringing any bells?

Y'know, the co-founder of the place you work now.

 

Part 2.  Will no one rid me of these turbulent Liberals!

Here's a riddle that's fun for the whole family.  

Q:  Thanks in no small part to our successful campaign to make anyone trying to slip a "Both Sides Do It" cold deck into the conversation, how can you tell when one of your "allies" is about to do exactly that?

A:  Here is The Bulwark's Tim Miller doing exactly that:

Miller:  Um I want to uh I'm going to tie two items together that are in the news. And I just want to say very clearly upfront, I'm not creating an equivalence between these two people. I just want to talk about two news items in the context of identity politics and and the dangers of identity politics.

It beggars belief that Mr. Miller really not understand what it means to "tie two items together".  

Anyway, he then goes on to talk about some of the straight-up Nazi shit that Elon Musk is saying.  It's horrifying.  Genocidally racist.  And right there out in the open, coming from the richest man on Earth, Donald Trump's largest donor, and, via DOGE, the man who will probably go down in history as being directly responsible for the deaths of more human beings than anyone else in Trumpworld.  

Then, this.

Miller: ...there's also a scandal going around one of Zoran staffer[s] much... much less prominent person but... but I just want to use this story as kind of a way to talk about something I have concerns about.

See, the  Daily Mail and the New York Post had dug through the Twitter account this Mamdani staffer, who is white, and found some old Tweets of her excoriating white supremacy and white privilege and property rights.  

Tim recited all of it.  

And then...

Miller:  I'm not saying that it's Cea Weaver's fault that Donald Trump's top donor and adviser is a white supremacist. I'm not. But I... I... I think that we have... get into a very... we live in... we get into a very dangerous spot. I think sometimes with folks on the Left who get very comfortable in the identity politics space and then start just throwing around pejoratives about white people all the time. 

A week ago this story didn't exist.

Then the Daily Mail and the New York Post went digging.

Then came the "Mounting criticism...." and Ms. Weaver crying in public.

Then came the right wing pile on.  Anything to not talk about Venezuela or the Epstein files, right?  

The same day Renee Good was murdered by an ICE thug in Minneapolis, this is what Megyn Kelly and her pal Mark Halperin decided to talk about.

And once it'd been elevated to the status of Important News by the Right's gargantuan media megaphone, Tim Miller had another hippy to punch.  

Because in case you hadn't noticed, nary a single Bulwark podcast ever goes by without one of your new, former-Republican "allies" making a point of finding something or someone somewhere -- real or imagined -- which can be used as a prop to scold "folks on the Left" for our naughtybad ways.  

Because in case you hadn't noticed, this Awesome Democracy Coalition is all about making Republicans feel comfortable.  And to do that, they need to be constantly reassured that they need not give up a lifetime of loathing Liberals that has defined their political identity, no matter how objectively delusional and frankly fucked-in-the-head that loathing may be.  And to do that, The Bulwark needs to constantly reassure them that, see! see! you can trust us because we think Liberals are awful too!

So, to stress test this theory that the Awesome Democracy Coalition is all about making Republicans comfortable no matter what horrid shit they believe, while telling mouthy Liberals to shut up and sit down, let's put that shoe on the other foot.

Instead of a lefty saying mean things about white people and property rights and capitalism  on Twitter years ago, let's posit a Republican saying genuinely awful things about Democrats.

And not some mayoral staffer that you'd never heard of two weeks ago, but a very prominent Republican.  

In fact, let's make it a Republican from one of the most famous Republican families in modern history.  

A Republican who had been in the national spotlight for decades.  A Republican who was one of the most powerful people in Republican leadership.  

Let us further posit that the horrendous things this prominent Republican was saying weren't potshots on Twitter, but were stated publicly, on camera, as the official position of the Republican party. 

Let us further posit that the horrendous things this very prominent Republican was saying were bold-face lies: lies that imputed to Democrats the very worst things human beings can do.  And that these lies weren't just a one-off, but something this very prominent Republican repeated on a number of occasions.  And that this particular horrid thing was just the cherry on top of an entire political career built on slandering people us in the foulest ways possible.  

And rather than retracting and apologizing for what they said, as Cea Weaver has done  -- even bursting into tears over it, as Cea Weaver did -- let us further posit that this very prominent Republican never shed a tear or retracted or apologized for any of it.  

Of course we don't have to put on our Imagination Hats to posit any of this, because this is exactly what happened with Liz Cheney.  And the lies good ol' Liz calmly told about Democrats over and over again -- that Democrats murder live babies, that we are the "face of pure evil" --  were orders of magnitude worse than anything some mayoral staffer ever said on Twitter.

And we don't have to guess what Tim Miller's reaction to these horrific lies would be, because he and everyone else at The Bulwark rolled their eyes and dismissed them as some minor disagreement over abortion policy that those loony Liberals were obsessed over for no explicable reason.

In fact, knowing that sooner or later we would arrive here, your humble scrivener took the trouble to transcribe one such conversation between Charlie Sykes and Tim Miller back in 2022.  Here's the intro to that post:

Tim Miller has a new book all about how awful the Republican party is and his part in making it so.  

I haven't read it, but have read *about* it, and the reviews are mostly positive.

So when then Tim Miller showed up for his regular spot on The Bulwark podcast, I expected it to go roughly the same as it has gone everywhere else he has shown up promoting his book.  Scathing stories.  Regret.  Anxiety about the future.  And so forth.  A Bay-area, Gen X hipster version of Stuart Stevens' It Was All a Lie.

And there was some of that...until Charlie Sykes' steered the conversation right into the one subject he always steers every such conversation into:  his seething contempt for the Left and the "Progressive media".

That's you and me, kid.

So, after 20 minutes of talking about Tim Miller's book and what a shit Mick Mulvaney is and how, unless you read Tim Miller's book, you will always be caught by surprise by how awfully the GOP base and leadership behave...

Sykes:  If you don't have this template, a lot of what's going to happen will feel incomprehensible.

... Sykes performs the inevitable hard pivot over to what really obsesses and infuriates him: Why aren't we filthy, ungrateful  Progressive peasants building statues to Liz Cheney?

Sykes:  Let's flip the card a little bit though.  How do you explain the psychology of -- and you... you... you... alluded to this -- the psychology Progressives activists including people like Don Winslow, who's a filmmaker, y'know, and, like, anti-Trump Progressive novelist and everything.  Y'know, big Twitter guy who is obsessively -- I mean obsessively -- attacking, right now, Liz Cheney.  It's like this is the moment when Democrats are facing a wipeout in the midterms... 

And then they we're off to the races.  

Because the only way The Bulwark's Awesome Democracy Coalition Awesome Media Corporation can continue to prosper is if Republicans are be made to feel as at-home, shoes-off, lemme-get-you-a-beer cozy there as possible no matter how objectively awfully they may have behaved, while at the same time making it clear that certain Liberals, certain Democrats, had damn well better keep our heterodox thoughts and memories to ourselves, and keep our whiny yappers shut.  

This could either be a very long post or a very short post, depending on my energy level.  I'm still fighting the crud, so my energy level is pretty low, but it would be ungallant of me and give you wonderful readers short shrift if, after all your decades of support and encouragement, I just wrote "I fucking told you so" over and over again several hundred times before taking to my bed once again to sleep and dream of better timelines.

So here goes.

Some of you may remember just after the end of the Before Time when your humble scrivener made many of my Liberal allies cranky by suggesting that, just perhaps, we should be a bit more selective about the terms under which lifelong Republican operatives and arsonists who had spent their professional lives making a living hating us and convincing voters that we were the Devil incarnate ... were welcomed into the fold.

After all, as was true with the Iraq War after it became clear that it was going to be the worst foreign policy catastrophe in modern American history, the moment Trump began running away with the GOP nomination in 2015/2016 was a moment when the Left held clear and unassailable title to the moral and political high ground.  Because the Left had been right about the Right all along, and now, tragically, the evidence of this was irrefutable.  

At this point can I just stipulate, for the court, that I wrote many, many posts about how this was the time for Liberals to leverage the collective power of our moral and political high ground to start bending the sclerotic media in our direction.  To tell the story, accurately and in detail, of how the Republican party had come to be the whelping box of monsters it had become.  It was the time to bring the full might of our righteous rhetoric to bear.  For example.  

What happened? A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Trump used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division...

Pretty fierce, eh?  Except, sadly, I didn't find that on the blog of some disreputable Liberal, and the subject wasn't Trump.  That was written by James Carville's wife, Mary Matalin, in the pages of The National Review in 2012.  And the subject was Barack Obama.

What happened? A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Obama used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division...

And for her sins was she hectored by David Brooks and Tom Nichols for her wildly over-the-top, inflammatory language?  Banished to the outer darkness by the legacy media?

Of course not.  Because, kids, this is how even the "respectable" Right talked about Obama and Democrats and Liberal all the time, every day.  For her sins Matalin founded and served as Editor-in-Chief for Threshold Editions, a conservative publishing imprint at Simon & Schuster.   She was a frequent guest on the Sunday Shows until, I presume, she became so unbearable to look at that she risked turning the audience to stone.  She and hubby run quite the cottage industry of opinion-having, pimping for various corporate interests, etc.  

And all the way back in 2012, Brother Charlie Pierce was asking all the right questions:

Before we examine matters in detail, however, we should ask ourselves the most fundamental question of all?

Why?

Why does any television network put Mary Matalin on the air any more? (The same, it should be noted, can be said about her husband, but at least he had a book to shill earlier this year.) She is not entertaining. She is not funny. She is not particularly bright. She certainly isn't in any way informative. She's just a nasty, bitter old piece of work who spent eight years supplying fresh earth for the coffin in which Dick Cheney sleeps during the daylight hours, Ann Coulter without the cocktail dress and the lunatic's performance skills. (Of course, some select people just love Matalin's act. Some people also believe Play-Doh is a food group. Put The Gateway Pundit — aka The Dumbest Man on the Internet — in front of a computer for 30 minutes and you get a guy sticking pencils in his ears for 30 minutes.) So, she gets on there and insinuates that Paul Krugman is a liar, and the whole panel erupts, not over that, but because Krugman intimated that the elite press corps had failed to call out Willard Romney for the truly remarkable liar he's become. After everybody agreed that Krugman was just wrong, wrong, wrong, about all those nice people with whom everybody has dinner in D.C., we really got down to it over the issue of zombie-eyed granny-starving and the Republican ticket..

And getting back to the present, we have the general answer to the specific question of "Why"?  And the answer is because the legacy media is a racket.  A money making racket that wears a journalism mask because that makes doing the business of the racket easier.  

Which, in turn, finally puts paid to the idea that there was ever any hope of leveraging the Left's moment of collective moral and political superiority into forcing a real reckoning for what has happened to our American political system and the legacy media.  Because to do so, the legacy media would have had to put the metaphorical shotgun in its own mouth and emptied both barrels.  Admit that they were deeply complicit in the rise of the fascist Right and that the actively suppressed honest criticism from the Left.  That they put proven liars, frauds and grifters on teevee and let them get away with murder decade after decade because it was profitable and good for ratings.  That to truly bring to book the malefactors who brought us to where we are today, they would have had to implicate every major network, every national newspaper, and the entire Republican party from the very top all the way to the grass roots.

And that was never going to happen.  

But even knowing that, we should have tried harder.    Instead of flinging themselves like drunk prom dates and every kinda-sorta former Republican who called Trump a shithead, the Left should have demanded much, much more from the handful of refugees from the GOP who showed up at our door.  Should have insisted on confession, repentance, contrition and atonement.  Then and only then can come absolution.

But way too many of my fellow Liberals were way too horny to get to the "forgive and the forget" part so they let Never Trumper skip all that.  The granted them what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called, in a different context and a different time, "cheap grace".  

I went on to speculate about our future "when the Trump regime is decapitated" which you may mock me for, or chalk it up to my youthful naivete.  I underestimated the utter depravity of the GOP's fascist heart by about 10%, and overestimated the median intelligence of the average voter by about the same. 

Sorry about that.

But that part about the relocation of the Sensible Center?  While some of the details were exaggerated for effect/screenplay sale (sad.  never happened.) now that the New Bible of the Very Serious People is a 60-page election postmortem report  titled “Deciding to Win" I feel quite justified in saying, yep, the Centrist Shadows ability to return to Z'ha'Dum was a direct and predictable (and predicted!) result of letting Never Trumpers own the public media space that rightfully should have been ours.  

The Signs and Portents were all there for anyone to read.

And the result?  

From The American Prospect:

Voters Did Not Understand the Stakes in 2024

Now, the buyer’s remorse for last year’s election is clear.

Since Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump last year, various Democratic elected officials, think tanks, and strategists have been frantically attempting to find some magic political formula that will allow the party to beat Republicans once more.

The latest version comes from a new big donor–backed strategist group called Welcome, and it’s titled “Deciding to Win.” The advice, surprise surprise, is that Democrats should punch the left—abandon progressive policy like Medicare for All, stop talking about LGBTQ people and climate change, and focus on milquetoast kitchen-table issues. It’s the same thing we’ve already seen a hundred times this year.

But I happen to have some other polling, provided exclusively to the Prospect by Data for Progress, that sheds a different light on what Democrats should have done. To sum up, a large majority of American voters are greatly dissatisfied with the state of things, most especially the economy. It turns out that median voters were catastrophically misled about the stakes of the election last year. Addressing that problem is a prerequisite for any messaging to break through, regardless of content...

From The New Republic:

...This is the seemingly immutable advantage that Trump and the Republicans have over Democrats. It’s not that they have a better grasp of the values of some mythical heartland America. (They really don’t. This is the party that routinely attacks Disney and football. There is no cultural rake that they do not habitually step on.) Their advantage is that they spent decades building their own constellation of conservative propaganda outlets, and then they went out and purchased most of the mainstream outlets as well. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the LA Times. Larry Ellison’s son owns CBS, and is preparing a bid to purchase CNN. Ellison will also soon own a major share of TikTok. Elon Musk turned Twitter into X and filled it with rightwing propaganda.

In reality, Democratic politicians and Kamala Harris specifically talked little if at all about climate change and trans rights in 2024—and spoke constantly about “kitchen table issues.” WelcomePAC’s formula for success is precisely what Democrats tried. It failed. WelcomePAC’s only answer is “well try it some more.”

The problem isn’t that “Deciding to Win” lacks data: The authors present plenty of data showing how voters’ perceptions of the two parties has changed since 2012. For example, in 2013, 51 percent of voters said the Democratic Party is “out of touch.” Today, that number has risen to 70 percent. Voters, when surveyed, list the economy as their top issue, and tell pollsters that the Democratic Party prioritizes other issues. But the authors don’t adequately probe what might be driving the data. It’s not that Democratic Party leadership has become too substantively radical, that’s for sure. And meanwhile the authors insist that the Republican Party has moderated on issues like abortion rights since 2012, which is plainly false. What happened was Republicans stopped talking so loudly about their proposals for a national abortion ban after they overturned Roe v Wade and it became a looming possibility. That’s not policy moderation; It’s measurement error. 

I cannot help but imagine what the media and political landscape would look like today if, at crucial moments, wealthy Liberals, Democratic donors and media corporations lavished just a fraction of the promotion, limelight and resources on Liberals who had been right about the Right all along as they did on recently-former Republican who still really can't stand us and have a huge financial and professional stake in keeping any discussion of the Before Times the hell off the table.

Might not have changed a thing.  On the other hand, I could  easily imagine a scenario where that the authors of “Deciding to Win" felt compelled to allow for a minority report addendum authored by, say, Digby Parton or Bob Cesca or David Corn or my wife, instead of passing the entire thing off as the indisputable consensus of the only people who are worth hearing from.  

A few days ago, MSNBC regulars/Bulwark mainstays gathered to talk about... stuff.  As with most of the beats I've appointed myself to cover, I scan this stuff quickly or I listen with half and ear and if I detect anything of general interest, I bring it back to you all.

The topic was the "O morels, o tempura" "O tempora, o mores!" reaction to the 2,900 Shitler Youth texts that has been widely bruited about in the past several days.  Much of it was so far out into the weeds of acidic Young Republican ("YR") goss that I could barely make out the tops of their heads bobbing through the thick wingnut insider undergrowth.  But everyone agreed that it was all so bad and sordid.  

And then they did that Bulwark thing where, of course, they must hang onto their Centrist and barely-former Republican subscribers by wagging a warning finger at us irresponsible Liberals because it is incumbent on both sides to "police their own".

TIM MILLER:  And and it is incumbent on people to self-police their own side to prevent this from happening or any or can spiral out of control. There's nothing like inherently beautiful about believing in big government versus small government that makes you less susceptible to being attracted to tribal violent thinking.

And I think that some people on the Left think that there is.

And you've seen very violent political movements, as JVL wrote I think very well earlier this week, coming from basically every ideology imaginable. So like it is incumbent among people to ... to resist it with [inaudible]

Then, having perfunctorily performed the "Burn a candle at the altar of Both Siderism" ritual to mollify  their Centrists and barely-former Republicans, Miller immediately negated what he had just said so as not to piss off the Bulwark's center-left subscribers too badly.

MILLER:  I'm... I was not accusing.  I know... you're ... I know you agree with me on this Sarah. 

But there just wasn't near enough meat on the bones of this loose, "J'accuse...!  Just kidding!  Maybe not!" meandering to make for a post...

...until Tim began thumbing his suspenders and talking about, "Well, y'know, back in my day..."

That's when my ears perked up, because once again Miller had to ride that fine line between not alienating Liberal subscribers who damn well knew something was askew in the Republican heart long before Trump showed up, and his elderly Conservative subscribers who wanna hear more Mona Charen and more Charlie Sykes and who get their Edmund Burke panties in bunch and pitch  "David Brooks circa November 2007, 'History and Calumny'"- level fits of indignant indignations at the scurrilous suggestion that there was even a hints of a wisp of a whiff of racism going on inside the GOP before Donald Trump showed up and ensorcelled the entire base of the party. 

So, to keep both sides of his subscriber base mollified, Miller again split the difference.  Sure, there was some racism, and we all knew it, but it was all behind our facade of respectability so, y'know, uh...where was I going with this?  

Also, pro-tip:  You can tell when millennial Never Trumper's know they're dancing through a minefield of bullshit by the sudden spike in the use of the word "like".  For example

MILLER:  Like, again it wasn't as if there weren't racist jokes in young Republican groups in 1996 or 1976. Like, there were. Obviously. Like there there's an element of this always. But, like, the culture of, like, encouraging it and and almost, like, if you don't participate that means you're the bad one. It's a sign of weakness, right? 

The culture of drawing people into this based on that, right?  Like that they're ... like that that the thing that they're leading with on the front of the pamphlet is, like, we hate Mexicans and we're going to make nasty cruel racist jokes and, like, we y'know believe in America first and and white Christian nationalism or whatever.  Like, that being the first page of the pamphlet versus you know, like, the first page of the pamphlet being free markets and free people and, like, we also have some people here that write in the letters to the editor that's... write that stuff like that's not good either, like, you know what I mean but,  like, it's difference. It is a it is a huge difference.

Professional media communicator, ladies and gentlemen.  

But I, like, digress :-)

This is where the Never Trumper narrative/origin story always falls apart. Or, rather, would fall apart if they were ever cage-matched with anyone who wasn't a fanboy, which is never going to happen.  

First, Tim, have you ever asked yourself why, if there were was obvious racism going on in the Republican party as far back as 1976 or 1996 -- if it was so god damned persistent and ongoing and everyone knew it  -- why no one in your party was "policing" it?  Who was supposed to be in charge of that?  Lee Atwater?  Karl Rove?  Tom DeLay?  

Why was no one policing senator Jesse Helms?  

Or senator Strom Thurmond?  

Answer:  Because "policing" racism in the modern GOP was never a "This is not who we are!" rebuke, but merely a "We'd rather you not wave your Confederate flags where the public can see." political tactic.  How else could Trent Lott have made it all the way to the office of Senate Majority Leader and not known how heaping public praise on America's most famous segregationist would trigger such a public gag reflex that it effectively ended his political career?  From The New York Times:

Lott's Praise for Thurmond Echoed His Words of 1980 

Trent Lott, the Republican Senate leader who faces mounting criticism for his comment last week that the nation would have been better off had Strom Thurmond been elected president in 1948, expressed a nearly identical sentiment two decades ago.

After a fiery speech by Mr. Thurmond at a campaign rally in Mississippi for Ronald Reagan in November 1980, Mr. Lott, then a congressman, told a crowd in Jackson, ''You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today.''

Last week, in remarks he later characterized as spontaneous and a poor choice of words, Mr. Lott repeated his opinion about Mr. Thurmond, who ran for president on a Dixiecrat platform opposing ''social intermingling of the races.''

At the party for Mr. Thurmond's 100th birthday, Mr. Lott said: ''I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.''...

The problem with racism in the Republican party was never a few young Republicans working in the National Review mailroom telling racist jokes.  

The problem with racism in the Republican party was Richard Nixon and his henchmen starting an active campaign of recruiting Southern white bigots into the GOP.  

The problem with racism in the Republican party was Ronald Reagan running for president promising to bring "welfare queens" and "young bucks" to book for stealing the tax dollars of hard working white voters, and inviting prominent Southern white bigots like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to the party's inner circle of influencers.  At which point, the party's road to Hell and Donald Trump had become pretty well paved and marked.

This was the point at which any "policing" Republican bigotry, homophobia, xenophobia and misogyny became impossible, because the party had now become dependent on the largess of a loud, racist scumbag who Never Trumpers would very much appreciate you and I never mentioning again.  

From The New York Time in December of 1994, when Tim Miller was just 13 years old.

Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh

...To all the advice for the new Republicans coming to Congress, add this from Rush Limbaugh: A hostile press corps lurks inside the Beltway.

"You will never ever be their friends," the talk-show host warned most of the 73 Republican freshmen at a dinner here tonight. "They don't want to be your friends. Some female reporter will come up to one of you and start batting her eyes and ask you to go to lunch. And you'll think, 'Wow! I'm only a freshman. Cokie Roberts wants to take me to lunch. I've really made it!' " The audience laughed.

"Seriously," he added. "Don't fall for this. This is not the time to get moderate. This is not the time to start trying to be liked."

The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November...

Barbara Cubin, an incoming freshman from Wyoming, told Mr. Limbaugh that because 74 percent of the nation's newspapers had endorsed Democrats, "talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide." On behalf of the women in the class, she gave him a plaque that said, "Rush Was Right." He also received a pin like the ones the freshmen wore, saying, "Majority Maker."

"Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those are the people who elected the new Congress," he said...

This is where the fairy tales Never Trumpers spin about the history of their Republican party falls apart, because during the adult lives and careers of every Never Trumper you know, all of their party's electoral successes have been dependent on the votes of angry, paranoid bigots and imbeciles, and every one of them damn well knows it.  

If they had ever been genuinely serious about "policing" their own, they would have grabbed Limbaugh and his hundreds of imitators (including Charlie Sykes) and Fox News and all the rest by the metaphorical collar and belt and thrown them out of the party.  But since that would be electoral suicide, that never happened.  Instead, the GOP leadership contented itself with outsourcing the work of angrying up the bigots and imbeciles and getting them to the polls to Conservative media ... and then colluding with the legacy media to pretend that the base deeply cared about deficits and marginal tax rates and "free markets and free people", and Limbaugh and his hundreds of imitators and Fox News and all the rest were really marginal, irrelevant players.  

Pay no attention to the demagogues behind the curtain!

Except both the party elite and their wink-and-a-nod propagandists like Charlie Sykes all made the same catastrophically delusional blunder over and over again until it was too late.   They came to believe their own bullshit.  

They went right on believing that they were the party and that, however rage and conspiracy drunk the base became, the base could always and forever be relied on to do what they were told.  That the base would willingly go right on being merely a means to the one end the party elite actually cared about: tax cuts for the wealthy.  And that while the Conservative media kept the base on side by feeding them the most violent, hateful, deranged nonsense about Democrats decade after decade, the party elite could still cut deals and talking about bipartisanship because everyone knew it was all kabuki.   

But a party -- any party -- is nothing more than its membership, and its members believed the crazy.  Craved the crazy.  Demanded ever heavier doses of the crazy.  Which is how, very quickly, Limbaugh and his hundreds of imitators and Fox News and all the rest became bigger than the party.  Big enough and powerful enough to dictate terms.  Which is why the last public attempt by anyone in party leadership to "police" the madness running wild inside the party came to this humiliating end.

From Politico,  March 2, 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.”...

On Monday night, DNC Chairman Tim Kaine called on Republicans to “stop following divisive figures” like Limbaugh.

“I was briefly encouraged by the courageous comments made my counterpart in the Republican Party over the weekend challenging Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican Party and referring to his show as ‘incendiary’ and ‘ugly,’” Kaine said in a statement. “However, Chairman Steele’s reversal this evening and his apology to Limbaugh proves the unfortunate point that Limbaugh is the leading force behind the Republican Party, its politics and its obstruction of President Obama’s agenda in Washington.”

In the interview with Politico, Steele called Limbaugh “a very valuable conservative voice for our party.”...

By the time Trump showed up, the respectable, public face of the party had long since become brittle, paper-thin "respectable" chrysalis inside of which a huge, fascist-ready monster was just waiting for someone to come along and set it free.  A Potemkin facade which Very Serious legacy media pundits and elite Conservatives defended as the "real" Republican party until it was way past too late.

And once it all blew up in their face, as we Liberals had been warning them for decades it would, a handful of them got run out of the party and became the Never Trumpers who are now employed by some of those very same legacy media outlets to hector Democrats about how we don't understand politics and how we're doing it all wrong.   

I don't know about you, but I don't take motoring advice from self-proclaimed "driver's ed instructors" whose sole qualification is that they drove drunk and reckless for decades, smashing into things I cared about over and over again, until, at last, they finally wrapped their own car around a tree and are now insisting on using mine.  

Burn The Lifeboats

...that this all started spontaneously in 2016.

That no one could have seen it coming.

And that, before Trump, the GOP was some sort of garden of comity, civility, and tolerance.

They're lying.  And they know they're lying.  And it is madness to trust people who not only start right-off-the-bat lying to your face, but insulting your intelligence by telling you such patently stupid lies.

...for warning Murrica about the dangers of Donald Trump in 2016, and how they were told they were nuts...

Nichols:  The second thing that occurs to me, Charlie, as you were talking about truths in the streets and the elections, you know, when ... when you and I and many other people became never Trumpers back in 2016 we ... we were warning people about scenarios that weren't even close to this bad and we were told that we were nuts. 

Sykes:  I know.

Nichols:  So, I think it is time to say this stuff now more than ever and to remind people when they say, "Well, you're just being alarmist." Hey, a lot of you said we were being alarmist in 2016, and we weren't even we weren't saying things that were even close to what's happening now.

...I will keep banging on about how, long before 2016, when Liberals were warning people about the dangerous trajectory the GOP was on -- the trajectory that led directly to the rise of Trump -- men like Charlie Sykes and Tom Nichols routinely mocked us, dismissed us and said we were nuts.

And the thing is, they not only still do, they block anyone who brings the subject up.  

So -- for all my "All hands on deck... / The enemy of my enemy... / We're all on the same side now" readers -- let me ask, a simple question.

Why?

If being an early warner about the direction the GOP was headed is an act of derring-do worthy of mention and merit, why are men like Nichols and Sykes so grimly dug in on pretending we never existed?  That we who have been right about the Right all along, must still dismissed through gritted teeth as flaky, soft-headed children who not only don't deserve a spot at the adult's table, but maybe, sorta, kinda, if you squint real hard... are somehow complicit in the rise of the Donald Trump?

Why?

And the only answer I can come up with that fits the facts are commerce and arrogance.  

Commerce

The story of Trump which the legacy media wants to tell is one of a sudden, inexplicable phenomenon which no one could have seen coming.  Because the alternative -- that trajectory of the Republican Party was right there for anyone to see, and that the legacy media was not merely blind to what was happening inside the Republican Party, but pathologically wedded to the Both Sides Do It lie that enabled Trump’s rise -- is thoroughly damning and therefore completely unacceptable. 

Never Trumpers stick to the former story.  We disreputable hippies tell the latter.  Guess which one gets rewarded and sold and resold by the legacy media?

Arrogance

It is completely incomprehensible to the Conservative brain -- whether they fly the Never Trump banner now, or the Trump flag -- that we dirty fucking hippies could ever be right about anything.  Much less right about the Right.  And much, much less right about the Right during all the decades when they were arrogantly wrong about what was going on, in public, right in front of them, in their own party, every fucking day.  That cannot conceive of a universe in which every caricature of the Left they casually threw around -- fatally foolish, alarmist, blind, parochial, living in a dream world, obdurately head-in-the-sand, crackpot -- actually applies to them.  

They cannot conceive of a universe where the movement they devoted their adult lives to was directly responsible for Trump.

They cannot conceive it. They cannot admit it. And they cannot forgive anyone who points it out.

And once they successfully colonized the media (see "Commerce" above) they could use their very large megaphone to drown out the very inconvenient past.  I wrote a whole long thing about this in 2019.  In fact I wrote a whole lots of long things about it, and eventually got bored with being lectured about "All hands on deck... / The enemy of my enemy... / We're all on the same side now".   This is one small piece from "The Aristocrats":

...
By the time Donald Trump came slithering down the escalator to declare himself for office, the lords and ladies of the Beltway media had already become institutionally addicted to the depraved luxury of never being answerable for being horribly wrong all the time.  They came to believe that it was somehow in the natural order of things that they be paid to appear on national teevee or in national news publications to haughtily spout their insipid opinions about imaginary Responsible Conservatives, Noble Republicans, Sensible Centrists and those naughty Extremes on Both Sides who inhabited the fictional "Center/Right" country they had conjured into being.

And once it all blew up in their faces -- once it became obvious (yet again) that they never had the slightest idea what was really going on in their own country and that the Left had been right about the Right all along and -- the Never Trumpers reacted exactly you would expect entitled royalty to react.

Exactly like exiled Russian aristocracy after the revolution.

Aristocrats who had been run out of their country by the serfs they had exploited.

Aristocrats who suddenly found themselves financially dependent on the largess of people they detested.

Aristocrats who, with that special, asshole-arrogance that comes with an inbred sense of entitlement,  become indignant when their hosts don't snap to and do as they're told.

Aristocrats who still believe in their God-given right to command a national spotlight and who go right on airily insisting they know what the serfs really want...

And, OK, one more bit from years gone by.  From "Her Serene Highness,The Most Indignant Princess Mona Charen, Is Deeply Disappointed with the Liberal Servants Who Were Supposed to Attend to Her Every Wish and Whim": 

Spare a (very) little pity for Her Serene Highness, The Most Indignant Princess Mona Charen (from Politico):

How a Democrat Can Win Over a Never-Trumper  

And if you don’t think you need us, you should think twice. 

By Mona Charen July 09, 2019

Having built an entire career taking the lash to us stoopid Liberals over --

Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)  

-- and over --

Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First 

-- again, you would think by now we stoopid Liberals would know our place in the Great Conservative Hierarchy of All Things.

From Politico:

Democrats would be wise to embrace that sensibility, in the person of Biden or another, not just because it could win, but because it’s important for all of us, right and left, to turn our faces away from Caesarism—of the right or the left.

Because according Conservative aristocratic theology, in the same way God created the GOP base of infinitely reprogrammable bigots and imbeciles as a mighty instrument of Deregulation and Tax Cuts to be wielded by Republican nobility like Mona Charen, so too did God create Liberals in order to give Republican nobles like Mona Charen an easy way to make an excellent living.

You see, according to their faith, you and I exist solely to provide her and the rest of her caste with hippies to punch.  With scapegoats to blame.

And yet now that the reprogrammable meathead GOP base that she and the rest of Conservative nobility spent the 40 years cultivating have run the Conservative nobles out of their own party -- now that every Republican nightmare we stoopid Liberals have been warning against for decades has come to pass with a vengeance -- Princess Mona is stunned to find that we stoopid Liberals have gotten all uppity...

It is true dangers our nation now faces have grown exponentially worse.

But it is also true that, in the face of this grave and growing danger from the Right, to keep dismissing those on the Left who saw it coming before anyone else is madness.

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 scandals came 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.

Or, as one disreputable Liberal podcaster put it years ago, "We are not in the 3rd or 4th year of the Trump presidency.  We are in the 40th year of the Reagan Revolution."

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 other words, as I wrote all the way back in June of 2015:

 ...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.