Thomas Frank on Hillary

wv wrote:

I forget if this has been posted, but Matt Taibbi is damn funny.

This avalanche of verbose disgust on the part of conservative intellectuals toward the Trump voter, who until very recently was the Republican voter, tells us everything we need to know about what actually happened in 2016.
There never was any real connection between the George Wills, Andrew Sullivans and David Brookses and the gun-toting, Jesus-loving ex-middle-class voters they claimed to embrace. All those intellectuals ever did for Middle America was cook up a sales pitch designed to get them to vote for politicians who would instantly betray them to business interests eager to ship their jobs off to China and India. The most successful trick was linking the corporate mantra of profit without responsibility to the concept of individual liberty.
Into the heartland were sent wave after wave of politicians, each more strident and freedom-y than the last. They arrived draped in the flag, spewed patriotic bromides about God, guns and small-town values, and pledged to give the liberals hell and bring the pride back.
Then they went off to Washington and year after year did absolutely squat for their constituents. They were excellent at securing corporate tax holidays and tax cuts for the rich, but they almost never returned to voter country with jobs in hand. Instead, they brought an ever-increasing list of villains responsible for the lack of work: communists, bra-burning feminists, black “race hustlers,” climate-change activists, Muslims, Hollywood, horned owls…
By the Tea Party era, their candidates were forced to point fingers at their own political establishment for votes, since after so many years of bitter economic decline, that was the only story they could still believably sell.

Matt Taibbi is the very best.

Coupla bits I liked:

If this isn’t the end for the Republican Party, it’ll be a shame. They dominated American political life for 50 years and were never anything but monsters. They bred in their voters the incredible attitude that Republicans were the only people within our borders who raised children, loved their country, died in battle or paid taxes. They even sullied the word “American” by insisting they were the only real ones. They preferred Lubbock to Paris, and their idea of an intellectual was Newt Gingrich. Their leaders, from Ralph Reed to Bill Frist to Tom DeLay to Rick Santorum to Romney and Ryan, were an interminable assembly line of shrieking, witch-hunting celibates, all with the same haircut – the kind of people who thought Iran-Contra was nothing, but would grind the affairs of state to a halt over a blow job or Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube.

And this:

This avalanche of verbose disgust on the part of conservative intellectuals toward the Trump voter, who until very recently was the Republican voter, tells us everything we need to know about what actually happened in 2016.

I agree with Taibbi that the key to the Trump revolt is the fact that Republicans have been promising that they care about Main Street and its values for 40 years, and when elected, they do nothing to fulfill those promises. It isn’t just the heartland, though. It’s the 80 million evangelicals who have gone to the effort of putting planks on anti-abortion and gay “rehabilitation” into the platform. No way in hell are they ever going to have those promises delivered on by the Republican establishment that has been promising all that forever.

And I sure do love it whenever anyone mocks George Will and/or Andrew Sullivan. I can never get enough of that.

bnw wrote:

Bill Frist is or was a republican leader? What a joke.

Your evident dislike of Frist doesn’t alter reality. He was Senate Majority Leader of the Republicans which kind of makes him fall under the category of Republican leader.

I’ve been a fan of both writers for years.

But you don’t see them very much on the boob-tube. There you will find the same useless talking heads week after week.