I don’t know a hell of a lot about Robert Tracinski. According to the to all accounts pretty gosh darn Trumpy Federalist, to which Bob used to contribute, “Robert studied philosophy at the University of Chicago and for more than 20 years has written about politics, markets, and foreign policy. He has been published in dozens of newspapers, from the Chicago Tribune to the San Francisco Chronicle, and been featured on many radio and television shows, from Rush Limbaugh to The O’Reilly Factor.”
But I guess that was then, because Bob now writes for the aggressively non-Trumpy Bulwark, and he has a rather testy piece up with the Bulwark folks bearing the aggressively non-Trumpy title “Dear Republicans, Is This the Idol to Whom You Have Sold Your Souls?”. But in his Trump and Republican battering piece, Bob rather betrays a bit of the cloven hoof himself:
If you want to see the process by which a soul is corrupted, consider the case of Rush Limbaugh, the talk show host who became an icon of small-government conservatism—back before he decided that spending and deficits don’t matter.
Most of us listened to Rush at some point or another, because he sometimes had a genuine capacity to address big issues in a thoughtful and interesting way. But he always had a thumb on the intellectual scales, and that came out in the open in 2006, when Republicans lost the House of Representatives and Limbaugh expressed relief that he would no longer have to carry water for the unworthy.
Let’s sit back and chuckle just a bit over the sentence “Most of us listened to Rush at some point or another, because he sometimes had a genuine capacity to address big issues in a thoughtful and interesting way,” even ignoring the fact that Bob didn’t bother to mention that he’d actually been on Rush’s show. Because Rush did (and does) have “a genuine capacity to address big issues in a thoughtful and interesting way” if by “a genuine capacity to address big issues in a thoughtful and interesting way” you mean an endless compulsion to pour an endless stream of false and vicious sexist, racist invective over every topic of the day—“there’s a rumor going round that Chelsea Clinton had a three-way with a couple of NBA players. Only a rumor, folks, just putting it out there. But it would explain why she’s been smiling so much these days.”
Yeah, good old Rush. He was such a useful monster for keeping the useful idiots of the Republican Party—the low-income flyover folks who wouldn’t know a stock option if it bit them on the ass—voting for the Wall Street agenda of ever-lower taxes for the rich and ever-lower entitlements for everyone else, from which they never benefited, and the neo-con interventionist foreign policy, even though their sons and daughters were the only ones getting killed. But now, goddamnit, Rush is saying that we shouldn’t cut entitlements and that foreign involvements are bad! It’s like we’re living in a Bizarro world!1
The notion that the Republican Party sold its soul to Donald Trump is one that I’ve pushed myself. But the notion that the Republican Party had very little soul to begin with is one I’ve pushed as well. And Bob has just confirmed that notion pretty thoroughly.
1. “Bizarro world”, where everything is wacky, seems to be well-established slang (though Word can’t spell “Bizarro”) even though I think relatively few people ever read a Superman comic featuring a “Bizarro” story. My wild guess is that Jerry Seinfeld’s devotion to Superman has led to its acceptance and use.
