Jeez, even I tend to try to not get too over the top in my “Trump is the worst thing that ever happened to the United States” and “Trump is nothing but Republican evolution’s natural result” articles. I suppose it is because nothing sounds worse to my ears than a self-satisfied liberal looking down upon everyone not smart enough to see the world as “we” do. Maybe that’s why the best “Trump makes me want to drink anti-freeze” articles come from conservative republicans, because we need not worry about our ancillary liberal arrogance seeping through the spaces between paragraphs. To that end, I think I found the Trump takedown article for the ages, one that will make every article to come later sound either mundane or plagiarized.
In an article entitled How the Media Dodged the “Everything Trump Touches Dies” Curse, GOP Analyst Rick Wilson takes everything Trump – especially Trump’s supporters, both in and out of office, to the blow torch.
That’s no excuse for the coverage of the 2016 Republican presidential campaigns or of this presidency, where coverage was driven by Infowars and Breitbart. Trump fans aren’t looking for up-the-middle coverage; they’re looking for partners in the fake news explosion that helped Trump win the election. If being a Republican means buying into stories so obviously, barkingly insane that they sound like Roger Stone’s conspiracy rantings after a three-day meth bender, then we don’t have a political party; we have an inpatient mental health facility. To remind you once again, a meaningful fraction of Republicans believed that Hillary Clinton was running a global child sex and cannibalism ring from the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant.
If conservative media is to mean something outside the narrowest confines of the base, it needs to be honest, direct, and critical of our failings. Conservatives who legitimize the creepy authoritarianism, unalloyed racism, and apocalyptic religious and cultural war fantasies on the pages of Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, and the dog’s breakfast of other Trump fan “news,” they’re not building conservatism. They’re creating a filter bubble as wrongheaded and as dysfunctional as the one they imagine exists at The New York Times or MSNBC.
Because Snyder is a Republican, he couldn’t resist some cheap shots at the media coverage of Obama’s 2008 campaign. It is likely due to some jealousy. He blames the fawning media coverage Obama received on an over the top liberal media bias and refuses to even contemplate that perhaps some of that fawning coverage was earned by a fantastic candidate, speaker, and man. We can forgive this, if nothing else, it just goes to prove that Snyder really is, still, a Republican.
He’s a Republican who will tell it like it is:
However, as a justification for every one of Trump’s failings, reveling in their misery falls wildly short of the mark. A movement that once took pride in its intellectual rigor and was graced by the ideas of Burke, Hayek, Weaver, Friedman, Kirk, and Buckley today views the feces-flinging by Breitbart and in a constellation of kook-right conspiracy sites that would make Lyndon LaRouche blush as highbrow conservative commentary.
As refreshing as it is to hear some unvarnished truth, it is always healthy to keep in mind that these straight-shooters from the right were enthusiastic Republicans during the “Swiftboating” of John Kerry, and to only now complain about the lack of intellectual rigor or sheer mendacity of the Republican establishment can fall under the “way too little, way too late” category, if not outright hypocrisy. But still …damn, it’s just so delicious to hear Republicans who are awake to the horrors unleashed upon the country by fellow conservatives.
Twitter @MiciakZoom
