More adventures in creating other new realities

Yesterday I found an article that could have been written about Sen. Flake.

One of the most amazing things about Trump pulling away the paper-thin veneer of respectability hiding the rot of American conservatism is watching the frantic desperation of right wing pundits trying to cover it back up. From George Will to Jennifer Rubin to Charlie Sykes to Joe Scarborough to Erick Erickson, the same people that made Trump possible are now screaming at the top of their lungs that their creation is an abomination that has absolutely nothing to do with their conservative movement.

It’s like reading a history textbook and watching it be rewritten on the fly.

However, it was posted a few hours before Flake announced he would take a bold stance against losing an election.

The article was prompted by a bleat about the Raging Orange’s assault on The Truth, by Michael Gerson. A man who was known to treat truth like a bit of Silly Putty and wrote speeches for another rich, smirking, dimwit drug-addled jackass who became president.

When there is no objective source of truth — no commonly agreed upon set of facts and rules of argument — political persuasion becomes impossible. There is no reasoned method to choose between one view and another. The only way to settle political disputes is power — determined by screaming mobs or because “I’m president and you’re not.” Politics becomes an endless battle of true believers, conditioned to distrust and dismiss every bit of evidence that does not confirm their preexisting views.

Arsonist’s assistant has no idea why the once vibrant city is now a collection of charred timbers and crumbling walls.

The alternative to reasoned discourse is the will to power. This is the frightening direction of Trumpism. It is the corruption that good men such as White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly are enabling. And it is a source of enduring shame for many conservatives.

To paraphrase another member of W’s team: Anyone who says they don’t think that anybody could have predicted that the party that produced a disaster like George W. Bush would produce a disaster like Donald J. Trump, is overflowing with top grade excrement, well stamped down.

As an aside, good men don’t enable Dump. Or W.

In order to write that with a straight face, I can only assume Michael Gerson was, in fact, frozen in a block of ice for the past 20 years or so and only thawed out this past January.

If only.

It’s the only way he could actually believe that conservatism has any but the most tenuous link to reality.

Fittingly, the article’s author quotes one of Gerson’s most infamous former coworkers.

The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.

What Gerson — and Flake and Rubin and every other conservative sniveling about that bad old Twump — really hates is the fact that tRump makes it hard to maintain the lie that the GOP is anything but the political party by and for beady-eyed, grabby-handed, ignorant, selfish, sadistic wastes of carbon and water who lie as easily as fish swim.

Fox News, AM Hate Radio, Breitbart and Drudge, and the Republican Party itself simply decided, decades ago, that they could lie with impunity and they were right. The “liberal” press rewarded them handsomely for being phenomenally dishonest by blaming “both sides” whenever possible. Chris Cillizza alone has spilled an ocean of digital ink letting Republicans off the hook by creating Democratic “scandals” out of whole cloth. Thus freed from having to be even a little honest, the GOP and its followers live in an entirely fact-free alternate reality where white Christian heterosexual males are oppressed, Schrodinger’s immigrants are both lazy welfare cheats and stealing all of the jobs, Jesus wants the rich to have all the money, and compromising with the Democrats is a sin against God and country.

To be clear, conservatives aren’t bothered by the fact that tRump is a lying sexual predator and dumber than a pork rind. They’re bothered by his style, or lack thereof. He’s just too gross to defend.

Must his lies be so transparent? they sigh, after he lies, lies about the first lie and then tells a third lie that contradicts the first two lies, and the lies his staff have been telling to support the first lie. AKA 7:00-8:00 am on any day ending with Y.

Pas devant les domestiques, they whimper when he flies into another tantrum online or stumblebums his way through an interview.

However, this will pass because they’re nothing if not accommodating. Or cowardly. Eventually they’ll either accept Malevolent Mango as one of their own, or pretend he doesn’t exist.

And once he’s out of office, they’ll pretend he was a Democrat.