The Glory Days of Very Serious Republicans: A Look Back in Incredulity

 By Spy History Editor Aula Minerva

Former Republican shill and Iraq War monger, now doing business as one of our 37 beloved Republican Allies, Tom Nichols, has a piece in The Atlantic seeking to contrast the insanity and dementia of President VD Amin to the sobriety and probity of supposedly more illustrious Republican predecessors:

Tom remembers when Republicans were serious.

Once upon a time, America was governed by serious people. No longer.

His piece is an unexceptionable critique of President Tiny Toadstool's ridiculously weak supposed threat of repositioning two nuclear submarines closer to Russia.  In fact, they are always lurking in international waters close to Russia.  The whole point of submarines is, as any horny teenager who invites his date to watch the submarine races knows, that you don't know where they are.

But we tripped over the reference to very serious people.  In part, that's because ol' Tom was one of the Very Serious Republican people who shilled for the Iraq War, which, until the reign of the current Republican President, had been the worst foreign policy catastrophe for the United States since the Vietnam War (also brought to us by Very Serious People, to be fair not all of whom were Republicans).

Let's take a quick look back at some great Republican Very Serious People of the past and how they advanced the cause of world peace.

We were going to say the last competent  Republican President was Dwight Eisenhower, but that overlooks some of the Very Serious People he had working for him, like former I.G. Farben mouthpiece and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

Dulles, who had no patience for Dean Acheson and his College of Cowardly Communist Containment, refused to shake the hand of Chinese Vice Premier Chou En-Lai in 1954, thus perpetuating the insane narrative of the Chinese threat that led us into Vietnam, until it was unraveled by the next generation of Very Serious Republicans.

Speaking of Dulles, he and his buddies ensured the Vietnam War by walking away from the elections contemplated by the 1954 Vietnam peace treaty, on the grounds that their boy would lose.  He sounds like a Texas Republican.

Very Serious John also engineered the overthrows of democratic governments in Iran and Guatemala, thereby insuring those countries would never bother us again.

During the Democratic Presidencies that followed, another generation of Very Serious Democratic People like Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy, led us into the bloody quagmire of Vietnam.  The definitive book about the arrogant bumbling ineptitude of these men was written by David Halberstam.  It was called The Best and the Brightest.

Doesn't get more very serious than this

Fortunately, these Democrats were succeeded by Very Serious Republicans like Dick Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Henry “the Mad Bomber” Kissinger.  They needlessly prolonged the war for four bloody years to no end while secretly expanding it to Cambodia and Laos whilst lying about it.  All this was done to permit Tricky Dick to grease his re-election by accepting a cease-fire deal that left North Vietnamese troops entrenched in the South, a deal he could have had in 1969.   

Since then the Republicans have offered us Very Serious People like Ronald Reagan, who sent 241 brave U.S. troops to their deaths in a botched pointless occupation of Lebanon, and the gang who brought us the debacle of Iraq: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and their assorted stooges and shills.  It's hard to imagine a more serious or less competent gang than them.

Which brings us back to our new allies like Tom Nichols and Billy Kristol.  Their contention that somehow the flaming insane clown car of Republican rule under President VD Amin represents a radical and inexplicable discontinuity from the decades of wise, prudent, and serious Republican leadership that preceded it cannot stand up to the historical record, which we've just sketched out.

We suspect that the reasons that our new allies are so eager to promote this yarn are to whitewash the past shame of Republican misrule (which they either supported or participated in) and to set the stage for its recrudescence.

Should we survive the current tyranny and emerge able to rebuild our constitutional order we fear that our new allies will once again advocate for the return of Republican ideas that exploded so spectacularly over the past half century.

We've focused on the foreign policy misadventures of Very Serious Republicans, but their domestic record is if anything more appalling: white racism, subjugation of women (including arrogating to themselves the right to stick their arms into the reproductive systems of American women, like staunchly pro-life Billy), destruction of the environment, tax cuts for the rich, and packing our Supreme Court with bent extremists, including two sex pests. 

This is the very serious world that our Republican allies would seek to recreate if given the chance.  We don't think they deserve the mulligan.

This is why we occasionally point out their sordid pasts, which sometimes generates feedback like this:

This is a fair point deserving of a serious response.  Tom Nichols is right now, but as we've just argued his effort to rewrite the history of the Republican Party is both wrong and dangerous.  It's nice that Tom and Billy and Jen and Nicolle have come into the light, but they should be doing so as a matter of intellectual honesty and moral integrity, not because they hope we will now invite them to our ragers.  You can invite them to yours; it's your party.  

Know your allies

As a practical matter, we'd also submit that the apostasy of 37 former Republican shills and apologists has had exactly zero effect on the larger Republican Party, which remains in the thrall of white racists and plutocracy.

They seem to have had a greater effect on progressives, who welcomed them to our cause with the same misplaced ardor that Republicans once reserved for Communist defectors like Herbert Philbrick and Whittaker Chambers.

For us, though, we can't get over the suffering of those whose lives were destroyed by decades of neocon nonsense and pandering to the stupidest and vilest impulses of their Republican bosses (like Potatoe Quayle) and funders (like Rupert Murdoch).   

That's what makes us so unwilling to give them the voice they think they deserve in planning the future, if any, of the American polity.  And we have no intention of either rewriting or forgetting history to satisfy their vanity.

Generations of Very Serious Republicans like Henry Kissinger, Jesse Helms, Bill Rehnquist, Oliver North, Strom Thurmond, Phyllis Schafly, and Leonard Leo deserve to be remembered in all of their bent glory.

For-f**king-ever.