A Monstrous Fairy Tale

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Nellie Bly in Washington

Lucky readers of The New York Times were treated today to a fantastic revelation, courtesy of retired columnist and brother of Kevin, Maureen Dowd.  Are you ready to have your mind blown?

Here it comes:

 No s***, Sherlock.

What has led this savvy dispenser of conventional wisdom to this conclusion, other than it embodies today's Washington conventional wisdom (we'll get back to that)?

Maureen has a revelation!

The House Jan. 6 committee’s prime-time hearing was not about Trump as a bloviating buffoon who stumbled into the presidency. It was about Trump as a callous monster, and many will come away convinced that he should be criminally charged and put in jail. Lock him up!

The hearing drove home the fact that Trump was deadly serious about overthrowing the government. If his onetime lap dog Mike Pence was strung up on the gallows outside the Capitol for refusing to help Trump hold onto his office illegitimately, Trump said, so be it. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” he remarked that day, chillingly, noting that his vice president “deserves it.”

Was this really the same guy that Maureen was having flirty interviews with throughout 2015 and 2016? The same guy that she found hardly less odious than his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who was so political and wouldn't dump her horndog husband? The same guy her brother “Kevin” defended with a platoon of hate-filled lies in numerous Dowd columns? 

It's hard to argue with the proposition that the Tangerine-Faced Seditionist is a monster, as he has proven every single day of his wretched life.

(It would be easier to argue with Maureen's leading competitor for the coveted title of Times Columnist Mailing It In: Former Harvard Salient editor Ross Douthat.  Today, he's blaming Republican obstruction and subversion on – you guessed it! – liberals who are shirking their duty to remedy the prevailing “gyre of polarization” in America for which they are responsible.

Actually, we found a liberal intern who can help Ross.  She pointed out that a gyre, being a circular current usually of water but possibly of any fluid, has no sides by definition, and if you polarized it you'd destroy it, so problem solved.  Just not the problem of the Times giving eighth-rate polemicists miles of column inches to propagate gibberish in what it likes to think is America's leading news outlet.)

But there's a deeper problem with Ms. Dowd's diagnosis of the Bronzed Rapist as a monster.  While it's correct, it doesn't fully encompass the nature of the gyre in which our democracy is trapped.

Her column echoes this week's prevailing wisdom in the light of the brilliantly-crafted January 6 Committee Hearing, which was devoted in large part to building an unassailable case that the Former Loser Grifter criminally conspired to obstruct and pervert the course of American democracy in multiple ways, leading up to inciting a lynch mob to track down and kill Mike Pence on January 6, 2021.

All true and important. But it was a conspiracy; to understand it we have to track down all the conspirators. Here's a hint from loyal Republican and torture fan Liz Cheney:

WASHINGTON — Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming...paused to address the members of her own party who she said were “defending the indefensible.”

Pointing out shortcomings is a Republican tradition

“There will come a day when President Trump is gone,” Ms. Cheney said. “But your dishonor will remain.” ...

She has been unrepentant in continuing to blame Mr. Trump for stoking the attack, and her Republican colleagues for following his lead by spreading the lie of a stolen presidential election. That stance has left her marginalized by her party, with her colleagues ousting her from her leadership position and seeking to purge her from the House by boosting a MAGA-styled primary challenger to her at home in Wyoming.

Even a Republican as stone-hearted and reality-challenged as Liz Cheney is forced to admit that the seditious conspiracy encompasses virtually every Republican, not to mention their enablers, like Rupert Murdoch and his always-erupting bulls*** volcano.

But the never-FLG Republicans, after 40 years of dutiful flacking and apologizing for Republican insanity, are all too eager to dump it all on one grotesquely fat crook.

Here's ol' Axis-of-Evil David Frum, who came down from Toronto to polish lies for the Bush Administration but now believes that the Twice-Impeached Monster is The Problem:

The recently defeated president of the United States tried to overturn the Constitution rather than accept the outcome of an election. Brave and patriotic people stood up and stopped him at the time. Brave and patriotic people are seeking to hold him to account now. Be one of them. 

Oh we will, Dave, we will! But what about the 99% of elected Republicans who still back the Treasonous Yam and even worse his evil ideas? How about them?

And let's not forget that Bill “the Institutionalist” Barr, before pointing out on national television that the narrative of a stolen election was, in his word, “bullshit,” nonetheless told an interviewer 

 

He couldn't have revealed the future of the Republican Party any more clearly: radical reactionary white supremacy and Christian dominionism, just without the Orange-Faced Betrayer of the Constitution he corruptly defended until December 2021.

So the FLG-as-monster trope, correct as far as it goes, is misleading, because the conspiracy will survive the defenestration of the Combover Monster as long as the Republican Party remains the unreconstructed movement of white supremacy and anti-democratic subversion.

We note this because the next generation of loathsome Republicans have gained prominence by aping the ideas propagated by the Adderall-Crazed Perv.  To be fair, as the ACP never had an original, or indeed any, thought in his life, those ideas were the lifeblood of the post-1964 Republican Party.  The appalling bit, not mentioned by Maureen and others who enjoy hanging out with Republicans willing to tell her “privately” that of course they don't approve of the Thrice-Bankrupt Ravager's antics, is that such ideas, or more properly attitudes, are the Republican Party.  There's nothing else there.

To take one grotesque example among many, the excrementitious Governor of Florida, Ron DeathSantis, having sacrificed tens of thousands of Floridians to his crowd-pleasing science-free ignore-COVID policies, has now moved aggressively to undermine what's left of democracy in Florida, by using his rubber-stamp legislature to punish those who dare to oppose his appeals to hate and intolerance, like Disney and the Tampa Ray (soon to be Las Vegas) Rays. 

When does Maureen call him out?  Or can we expect a bunch of jolly columns on-the-one-handing DeathSantis and other-handing the too political too bossy Kamala Harris?  

The narrative that it's all the fault of the Former Loser Grifter is far too convenient for Republicans, eager to promote T***ism without T****.

Will they get away with it, in which case our democracy will be flushed down the gyre of misdirection and bothersiderism?  If you want to find out, we know the worst place to look: the opinion pages of The New York Times.