For Rick Wilson, The Republican Party Went To Hell -- In 2010

By driftglass — January 13, 2020

Rick Wilson is the Future of Liberal Media

Yes, kiddies, I haz seen The Future of cable teevee news! And it looks a lot like four life-long, highly-paid Republican goons and a couple of neutered Liberals, sitting in a drum circle promoting Rick Wilson's latest book and lamenting that, somehow, while no one was looking, their Republican Party filled up with...Republicans!

Oh Lordy! Why didn't someone warn them!

From Morning Joe this AM:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Since we have four former Republicans here, you will hear from our good friend Charlie Pierce that the party was always corrupt, it was always rotten, it was always racist. You are now reaping what you sow. There are times when I have been going, wait a second, were the liberals right? Were the liberals that said GOP was racist and -- all the things that I have been my entire life, Evangelical, Southern Baptist, a proud Southerner, you just go down the list, right now you look at it and, 95% of the people who voted for me when I was running a very different platform, they are all Trump supporters now.

RICK WILSON: I think that Trump catalyzed things that --

SCARBOROUGH: I used to mock the press for always going for the whacko early in the process. You do that because this reinforces what you believe about Republicans. They will never make it. I wrote a column called "Crazy Never Wins" in 2012. We usually got the Mitt Romney, Bob Dole.

WILSON: And George HW Bush. The moderating forces inside the party, the old three-legged stool of foreign policy conservatives, social conservatives, and fiscal conservatives, that's gone now. The entire party is dedicated to being...

SCARBOROUGH: When did it happen?

WILSON: I think we went off the rails in 2010. The 'owning the libs' portion of the Republican Party and 'let's be transgressive' -- Ted Cruz said I would rather have 35 real conservatives than the majority.

SCARBOROUGH: They're not real conservatives.

Of course, once Reality finally got her hands fully around the throats of the Never Trumpers (who were swearing by Reagan and Jesus Christ just a few years ago that there was nothing was wrong with their party) and throttled them out to the point where they would grudgingly admit that their party is rotten to the core, the Most Important Thing became controlling any discussion of the exact moment when their party lost its mind. Picking a date on the calendar that would both acknowledge the self-evident truth that the GOP is a shitepile of bigots and imbeciles...while more or less exonerating them personally of any responsibility for the problem.

All while pimping Rick Wilson's book.

So this morning, after gassing on and ruminating and drying each others tears, a panel of four Republicans eagerly allowed Rick Wilson to lie about the history of their Republican Party.

WILSON: I think we went off the rails in 2010. The 'owning the libs' portion of the Republican Party and 'let's be transgressive' -- ted Cruz said I would rather have 35 real conservatives than the majority.

Yeah, because Lee Atwater never existed.
And Willie Horton never happened.
And the Southern Strategy never happened.
Reagan's "young bucks" and "welfare queens" campaign never happened.

That this --

-- never happened.

That Gingrich never happened.
And Limbaugh/Hate Radio never happened.
And Fox News never happened.
And Tom Delay never happened.
And the entire Dubya administration never happened.
And Rick Wilson's own despicable contributions to the debasement of his party never happened:

Wilson has plenty of experience. In 2002, he made a commercial that criticized Democratic Senator Max Cleland, who had lost three limbs in Vietnam, while showing images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. In 2008, Wilson made ads attacking Barack Obama by showing the incendiary statements of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. “I wanted to scare the living shite out of white people in Pennsylvania and Ohio,” Wilson said. “Today, they would all be Trump voters, I’m sure.”

In fact, the entire history of the modern Republican Party never happened. Instead, someone threw a magic, invisible switch in 2010 that spontaneously converted Rick Wilson's party from a team of sober, Constitution-loving, Burke-quoting fiscal conservative normals into a raving shitepile of bigots and imbeciles.

Which must amuse the hell out of Stuart Stevens -- the "most successful Republican political operative of his generation" -- who says quite bluntly in his upcoming book that the GOP has been rotten to the core for decades.

And at the opposite end of the spectrum, this must also confuse the hell out of David Brooks who famously swore in 2014 that his Republican Party was completely over it's scary "Sarah Palin" phase and was back to being 100% awesome!

All of which is to say these fckers can't even get their lies straight among themselves.

But even if what Rick Wilson said were true, that means he went right on happily collecting blood money from a party he knew was a raving shitepile of racism and madness for six more years -- right up until Rubio and Cruz were crushed by Trump in the Republican primaries in 2016.

And now Rick Wilson making the rounds insisting that stoopid Liberals like us -- who have been right about the Right all along -- need to shut up, step aside let him tell us how to win presidential elections.

Well, when it comes to presidential elections, let's remember that Rick lost in 2008.

Lost bigly.

And lost again in 2012.

And lost again in 2016. I mean, if even half of Rick Wilson's claims of nearly omnipotent electoral wizardry are true, wouldn't President Rubio or President Cruz be sailing to a slam-dunk re-election with a comfortable 60% approval rating right about now?

More to the point, if even one-quarter of their claims of nearly omnipotent electoral wizardry are true, why the hell haven't Rick Wilson, Tom Nichols and the rest of the Twelve Angry Kibitzers decamped themselves to Massachusetts to pour all their energies into Bill Weld's campaign?

After all, Bill Weld doesn't need reverse-engineering. He already checks pretty much every one of the Never Trumper's ideological boxes. And he's a decent man. And he's running an actual campaign that could use all the help in can get. So if the Never Trumpers are really capable of divining the deepest desires of some vast-but-invisible-but-apparently-decisive army of "Real" Republicans, Sensible Centrists and Noble Independents, why aren't they putting their towering electoral genius to work drawing them into the Party of Lincoln and destroying Donald Trump before the GOP hands him the nomination again?

Jesus, just imagine the rewards and accolades that would shower down upon them for bringing down the Trump administration and sweeping Bill Weld to power! Just imagine how many helpings of steaming, hot crow Libtards like me would have to eat while we watch Bill Weld take the oath of office in January of 2021?

But of course, we all know the real reason: because the GOP that Rick Wilson and Tom Nichols and Elise Jordan and Joe Scarborough created really is nothing more than a raving shitepile of bigots and imbeciles. Because in Donald Trump, that raving shitepile of bigots and imbeciles found the perfect embodiment of the lies and bigotry and paranoia that a generation of relentless conditioning by Fox New and Hate Radio and paid goons like Rick Wilson have trained them to accept as gospel.

Which is also why advice from goons like Wilson is worse than useless. Because Wilson's magic tricks -- his style of politics -- only worked with the Republican Party because decades Gingrich/Limbaugh/Fox News lobotomizing had created a racist meathead voting base so ignorant, racist and drunk with rage that they were easy for someone like Wilson to exploit.

So then what is Rick Wilson's game?

Simple.

If Democrats take back the White House in 2020, Rick Wilson will make the rounds of cable teevee claiming that he nearly single-handedly dragged the feckless Democrats over the finish line.

If Democrats lose in 2020, Rick Wilson will make the rounds of cable teevee claiming that the feckless Democrats lost because they refused to take his advice.

It'll be win-win for Rick, while real Liberals who have actually been right about the Right all along will be nowhere to be found.

And for the record, this --