Sarah Palin Walked So Donald Trump Could Run

I suppose you could consider this a teaser or a trailer for the No Fair Remembering Stuff podcast we just did on the subject of Sarah Palin.  She was the Republican's party's beta-test version of Donald Trump, and the thing is, pretty much all of your recently-former Republican Never Trump heroes knew exactly why she was so appealing to the base.  

Long before Donald Trump, they knew that the center of gravity in their party had shifted from Buckley/Romney/Bush to Limbaugh/Hannity/Gingrich.  

Bill Kristol said as much in an October 27, 2009 Washington Post column.

A good time to be a conservative

Bien-pensant conservative elites and establishment-friendly Republican big shots yearn for a more moderate, temperate and sophisticated Republican Party. It's not likely to happen. And probably just as well...

Obviously, many Republicans and conservatives -- and lots of moderates and independents -- will be grateful to Mitch McConnell if he can stop ObamaCare, and to Jon Kyl if he can induce the president to embrace a stronger foreign policy. But it's unlikely that the minority party in Congress will be the source of bold new conservative leadership over the next three years. Even if Republicans pick up the House in 2010, the party's big ideas and themes for the 2012 presidential race will probably not emanate from Capitol Hill.

The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties. Some will lament this -- but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots...

The lesson activists around the country will take from this is that a vigorous, even if somewhat irritated, conservative/populist message seems to be more effective in revitalizing the Republican Party than an attempt to accommodate the wishes of liberal media elites.

So the GOP is likely, for the foreseeable future, to be of a conservative mind and in a populist mood. In American politics, there are worse things to be.

They knew.  

They fucking well knew which way things were going.  

And they had no ethical qualms about the lies, the racism, the batshit conspiracies or the rising tide of insanity inside their own party.  As long as Conservative media and their fellow travelers in the mainstream media could diffuse, deflect and "Both Sides" them out of responsibility for what their party was doing, they were fine with all of it.  As long as they could focus the rage of the mob they had made on to you and me and the Kenyan Usurper -- as long as they could prod the monster they had made into pulling their political plow where they wanted it to go -- they were perfectly content to let things keep getting worse and worse.  

Until the day when Donald Trump took their mob away from them by speaking directly to the mob in the mob's native language and promising to make good on all the promises that the Republican establishment had made to them to get their votes, and had reneged on over and over again.  Only then did all of these Never Trump Heroes pretend to suddenly  notice that something was terribly wrong with their Republican party.  Only then did they all suddenly become interested in democracy and fairness and facts.  

But in the interim. even after Sarah Palin pulled back the mask and showed the world the leering, lunatic mob that was the foundation of their party, as soon as McCain and Palin crashed and burned in 2008, party and media elites grabbed hold of that mask with both hands and, with all their collective might, yanked it back into place.  

Don't worry, Murrica!  You didn't see what you just saw!  You didn't hear what you just heard!  Everything is fine.  Just a little glitch.  Just a little turbulence.  But Sober, Sensible Professionals are on the job and everything will be smoothed out in a jiffy.  

Every party in opposition goes a little crazy. For Republicans in the early Obama era, insanity took the form of the Sarah Palin spasm. Veteran politicos took the former Alaska governor seriously as a national figure. Republican primary voters nominated the likes of Todd Akin, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. Glenn Beck seemed important enough to hold a big rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

Fortunately, serious parties eventually pull back from the fever swamps. That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party.  It has re-established itself as the nation’s dominant governing party...

During the primary season, groups like the Chamber of Commerce chased away or defeated renegade conservatives and opened the way for the triumph of this sort of institutional conservative...

The new Republican establishment is different from the old one. It is more conservative. It’s shaped more by the ideas of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the American Enterprise Institute than it is by the mores of the country club. But, at least judging by the postelection comments coming from all corners, it does believe in politics, in legislating, in compromise.

During the Palin spasm, Republicans seemed to detest the craft of governing. Hothouse flowers like Senator Ted Cruz preferred telegenic confrontation to compromise and legislation.

But current party leaders are talking about incremental progress, finding areas where they can get bipartisan support: on trade, corporate taxes, the XL oil pipeline, the medical devices tax, patent reform, maybe even tax reform generally.

Republicans are also talking about restoring the traditional practices of the House and Senate. Let individual members introduce bills. Let those bills work through the committee structure and get votes. Pass budgets on time and according to the rules.

If the party is to fully detoxify its image, something will have to pass next year. Midwestern Republican governors will have to develop a compelling governing model. And the volcanic effusions of the Palin era will have to look like 1970s neckties — inexplicable oddities from another age.

That was David Brooks, in a New York Times op-ed titled  "The Governing Party", from November 6, 2014.

For context, that David Brooks Remain Calm, All is Well! horseshit --

-- was written a full two and a half years after Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published their devastating analysis of the state of American politics and the Republican party.  Excerpted from Mann and Ornstein in the Washington Post, April 27, 2012:

Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges....

In the end, while the press can make certain political choices understandable, it is up to voters to decide. If they can punish ideological extremism at the polls and look skeptically upon candidates who profess to reject all dialogue and bargaining with opponents, then an insurgent outlier party will have some impetus to return to the center. Otherwise, our politics will get worse before it gets better. 

For further context, David Brooks' Remain Calm, All is Well! horseshit was written just seven months before Donald Trump – the King of the Birthers – announced that he was running for president.  

Because rather than making every effort to figure out what the hell had gone so drastically wrong inside the Republican party, all those Sober, Sensible Professionals who were gonna fix this little glitch spent all their time and energy making sure no such diagnostics were ever performed.  Because, as I've already mentioned, they fucking well knew what was going on and were instead singularly focused on making sure that no one else knew.  

But of course, lots of other people knew what was happening because it was happening out in public all over the country.  In fact, you'd have to twist yourself into a pandimensional pretzel to deny seeing what was going on inside the rapidly unhinging Republican madhouse, which is exactly what Conservative media and the Beltway media did.  And what they are still doing today.  

As to the people wo could see what was happening and wrote about it every day?  We were mocked and dismissed as crackpots and alarmists.  We made media pariahs.  And that, too, is still going on today.  

In 2008, pundits called what had gone wrong with the Republican Party “Palinism”, just as they had called the same disease “Trumpism” after Palin,  “Delayism” before Palin, and “Gingrichism” before Tom DeLay.

But the truth is, the problem with the modern Republican party has always been that it’s full of Republicans.

The problem with the modern Republican party is “Republicanism”.

If you want more on the subject of Sarah Palin and the trajectory of the Republican party, we did an hour on the subject available for free over at The Professional Left website.

For the record, this was the 797th episode of The Professional Left podcast since we launched 14 years ago.  Which, you must admit, is a lot of ad-free content.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode #797: No Fair Remembering Sarah Louise Palin

“This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars—they would think the country has gone insane.” -- Noam Chomsky

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Consulting Bill Kristol on Foreign Policy...

...is not the flex the Bulwarkians think it is.

I Am The Liberal Media

Nice Job Google!

Google AI Javert just flagged an +18 year old post of mine with a "Sensitive Content Warning".

Damn. 

Almost got away with it. 

I Am The Liberal Media

Shut Him Up or Shut Him Down

From Newsweek:

Donald Trump Tests Limits of Gag Order Once Again

Donald Trump posted an article containing an attack on the daughter of the judge overseeing his hush-money trial, once again testing the limits of the gag order imposed on him.

The former president shared a Newsmax article on his Truth Social platform on Saturday in which a former Trump lawyer called for Judge Juan Merchan to recuse himself from the trial "because of his daughter's political fundraising activities."

In the article, David Schoen, who represented Trump in his second impeachment trial when president, was quoted as saying: "We know that the judge and his daughter have a vested interest in making sure this case isn't dismissed and goes on."

In another post on the platform, Trump said his trial is being president over by "POSSIBLY THE MOST CONFLICTED JUDGE IN JUDICIAL HISTORY, WHO MUST BE REMOVED FROM THIS HOAX IMMEDIATELY."...

Rolling Stone notes the irony:

‘They’ve Taken Away My Right to Speak,’ Trump Says While Ranting to Reporters

The former president got very mad about his inability attack witnesses and jurors before reportedly dozing off in court again

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Professional Left Podcast Episode #796: The Great Republican Sell-Out

"It's easy to be a tough guy when no one's going to come knocking on your door" -- Pete Hamill, writer.

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The Conservative Road to Damascus is a Merry-Go-Round

It just goes around and around, over and over again, and always ends up in the same place.

If you have been paying attention you may have noticed this trend over at Conservative, Inc.

Every few months for the past eight years or so, some prominent Conservative out there who has cadged for  themselves a sweet media gig based on their Superior Knowledge of The Subject of Politics and Conservatism stumbles over the fact that something they believed to have been inviolable Conservative orthodoxy was bullshit all along.  

In fact, history has shown that, with the exception of Beltway pundits, no group has been more loudly, repeatedly and disastrously wrong about the true nature of the Republican party and the Conservative movement than [checks notes] elite Republicans and Conservatives.  

Yet somehow they all still have elite mainstream media jobs.

And you know who turns out to have been right about the Right all along?  

Yeah.  That's right.  Us America-hating, terrorist-loving, godless, commie, baby-killing Liberals.  Whose are all still treated like pariahs by the mainstream media.

Over and over again.  Around and around the Conservative Epiphany Merry-Go-Round goes.

This post started out as an examination of this New York Times op-ed last week by David French:

The Great Hypocrisy of the Pro-Life Movement

Maybe a blog post of tsk-tsking.  Maybe revisiting the hurry-up-quick way that French tidied up his extremely problematic professional history enough for the Sulzberger family -- who are always thirsty for yet another Conservative to bring under the Times' banner -- to put him on payroll.  

But I set all that aside over the busy travel/socializing weekend, which was  followed by time spent errand-running and podcast prepping and doing, and when I came back to the subject of David French, I wanted to widen the aperture a little.  

After all, French is in no way unique.  Not the only one who, after decades of living La Vida Falwell, "suddenly" noticed a glitch in the Republican Jebus Matrix at exactly the same moment that Donald Trump ripped the mask off the Republican party and showed the world who they had really been all along. 

Before he passed, I wrote dozens of posts about the late Michael Gerson's long, strange journey from Evangelical thug and key advisor and speechwriter for George W.Bush...to his gig at The Washington Post where he spent eight years relentlessly savaging President Obama in very unChristian terms...to his very slowly dawning realization that his Republican party really was going to nominate Donald Trump...to his very slowly dawning realization that his Conservative Evangelical movement was, in fact, 100% cool with Donald Trump.

It's been a well-trod path, this denial!denial!denial! decade after decade that anything was fundamentally wrong on the Right.   That to win elections, the Republican party had been filling itself up with garbage people for decades: bigots and imbeciles whose votes and viewer attention had been purchased by way of promises of all sorts of nonsense by party elites.  

And, just like the collapse of the housing market, it turns out that all the specialists and experts and journalists who were supposed to be keeping an eye on the basic soundness of the system were profiting from looking the other way.  

But rather that going along with the increasingly absurd reportage from the cloistered garden of the Beltway media about the state of American democracy, there were a few of us out here in the Real World telling a very different story about what we were seeing and hearing.  

And, just as happened with the collapse of the housing market, anyone who was out there contradicting the received wisdom of the Beltway media was dismissed as a crackpot and an alarmist, because all the Very Serious People just knew that foundations of American democracy were rock-solid.  That the two-party system was functioning as it should.  

It's gonna be Rubio!

And when it all fell down, how uncanny it was -- how deeply uncomfortable it made all those Very Serious People -- that the real Republican party turned out to be just as we America-hating, godless commie Liberals had been describing it all along.  A party of bigots and imbecile, grifters and demagogues, cynics, fascists, homophobes, oligarchs and collaborators which those professionals with Superior Knowledge of The Subject of Politics and Conservatism like Michael Gerson and David French had denied and denied and denied existed at all.

But Gerson was a real trooper, and even as the political and ideological movements to which he had devoted his entire adult life were shown to have been colossal frauds, he never retracted any of the slander he spent eight years heaping on Obama and Democrats, never stopped pretending that his Republican party had lost its mind suddenly and with no warning, never stopped trying to blame Both Sides, never stopped trying to Tone Police us dirty hippies, and, of course, never lost his gig at The Washington Post just because he had been horribly wrong about everything.  

Comes now David French, who, to his credit, actually gets a little further down the road than Gerson ever did when he acknowledges that "many of the critics of the pro-life movement were right all along":

I still believe there are many deeply sincere pro-life Americans. I see their anger in response to Trump’s statements, even when they’ve previously supported him. They are people who genuinely believe that all human life is precious and should be protected from conception until natural death.

But I also recognize that many of the critics of the pro-life movement were right all along. When push came to shove, the pro-life position was either secondary to other values or it genuinely was punitively tribal — enthusiastically aimed straight at the supposedly licentious left but ready to be abandoned the instant the commitment to unborn children might endanger the larger MAGA political project. Abortion is the poison pill that Trump doesn’t want to swallow.

And at no extra charge, Mr. French also got a little taste of the brand of Evangelical Christian love and forgiveness that his side had been handing out to us America-hating, terrorist-loving, dirty, commie hippies for as long as I can remember:

At its worst, the pro-life movement was also deeply cynical. Many of its members have spent the last eight years mocking and bullying pro-life conservatives who’ve refused to support Trump, even when we rightly said he was a terrible ambassador for a virtuous cause. I’ve been called a baby-killer or murderer or heretic more times than I can count.

Mr. French ends on this note:

The older I get, the more I’m convinced that we simply don’t know who we are — or what we truly believe — until our values carry a cost. For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has made the case that life begins at conception. Alabama’s Supreme Court agreed. Yet the Republican Party can’t live with its own philosophy...

But I choose to end on this one.  It's from Ayn Rand's crappy science fiction novel "Atlas Shrugged", but it seems too appropriate not to appropriate:

You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I-I am the man who has granted you your wish.

Bonus Content.  

This is from Time Magazine, February 07, 2005.  Nearly 20 years ago.  Same issue, in fact, in which Michael Gerson was named one of Time Magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals".

Give it a read and and see how the dangerous trajectory the Republican party was already on was clearly visible to any reasonable person who bothered to pay attention:

Does Bush Owe the Religious Right?

...

What do they think Bush owes them? His campaign barely had time to sweep up the confetti last Nov. 3 before the victorious President got a congratulatory bouquet of praise, threats, warnings and demands. "In your re-election, God has graciously granted America — though she doesn't deserve it — a reprieve from the agenda of paganism," wrote Bob Jones III, president of the namesake South Carolina university that his grandfather founded to foster "Christ-like" character. "Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing." But if Jones saw the victory as an opportunity to be seized, others were preaching the biblical virtues of patience and caution. "Can we handle success and increased influence with grace and prudence?" Watergate conspirator turned prison evangelist Chuck Colson wrote in a column. "Sad to say, the church has managed to shoot itself in the foot almost every time it has achieved power in society. So what we need right now is a bracing dose of humility."

Having helped wage a presidential campaign over big issues like a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, conservative Christians are not likely to be content winning skirmishes like the one that newly installed Education Secretary Margaret Spellings fought last week against the cartoon character Buster, famous for being Arthur's best friend. She objected to one episode that featured Buster visiting a real-life lesbian couple in Vermont. After her warning about the dangers of exposing young viewers to "the lifestyles portrayed in the episode," PBS decided not to distribute the show to its 350 publicly financed stations.

As Bush begins his last term in the White House, the voters who believe they did more than anyone else to put him there are asking themselves and him: What now? And when, if not now? "He's not the typical politician who 'understands' us," says Michael Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association. "He's one of us."

...

Evangelical activists, for their part, say that as Bush looks forward, he should also look back. They claim that what brought churchgoing Christians (including a record number of Hispanics) to the polls more than any other issue last year was gay marriage. Initiatives banning it were on the ballot in 11 states and passed in every one, overwhelmingly in almost every case. So religious groups were startled and angry when Bush, bowing to what he said were political realities, seemed to signal in a pre-Inaugural interview with the Washington Post that he would not press the Senate to pass the federal ban.

The reverberations came almost instantly. Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who sends a daily e-mail to 125,000 Christian activists, says his computer mailbox was jammed with hundreds of complaints, many lamenting, "I worked my heart out for this guy." The Arlington Group, a coalition of conservative religious organizations, quickly fired off to Bush political guru Karl Rove a private letter signed by such figures as Bauer, Don Wildmon of the American Family Association, Focus on the Family's James Dobson, conservative standard bearer Paul Weyrich and evangelist Jerry Falwell. They laid down a none-too-subtle threat that the Administration's "defeatist attitude" on gay marriage might make it "impossible for us to unite our movement on an issue such as Social Security privatization where there are already deep misgivings."

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode #795: No Fair Remembering Trump-Era Presidential Debates