Regarding Michael Brendan Dougherty, who can, on occasion, strongly resemble a three-armed gorilla

What can you say about a man who can both beat his own chest and pat himself on the back at the same time? Michael Brendan Dougherty, or Mickey B, as I sometimes call him, manages this display of anthropoid dexterity in a recent column warning us never-Trumpers that “We’re Becoming Like Him”, taking the old “stare into the abyss” shtick for another walk around the block.

Michael thoughtfully reminds us of how prescient he was one year ago: “I feared that American society at large, and the political class that felt insulted by his election, would begin to find their inner Donald. Maybe even a worse one than the one we have.” As an example of “our” descent into the abyss, he remarks on the following:

“We’ve begun playing fast and loose with conspiracy theories, the way Trump has in the past. When BuzzFeed published the infamous Steele dossier — the document that made many allegations against Trump, including that he hired hookers to urinate on a bed he believed Obama had slept in — it did so with great chest-beating¹ about its “ferocious reporting.” This brag came right alongside an admission they “have been investigating various alleged facts in the dossier but have not verified or falsified them.” In fact some of the claims turned out to be easy to falsify, a fact that should have colored any release.”

First of all, what does saying that “some of the claims turned out to be easy to falsify” mean? Does Mike mean “easy to make up” or “easy to disprove”? If the former, so what? Lots of things that are “easy to make up” are still true. If the latter (or the former), why doesn’t Mike deign to give us a few examples, or even a link?²

Secondly, what about the most salacious claim, Trump’s supposed interest in observing, though not participating in, a golden shower? Here’s the Donald on his Studio 54 days:

“I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed, on a bench in the middle of the room.

“There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy.”

This is a guy who likes to watch.³

Yes, some of the mainstream press has been a bit overeager to bring down the tyrant, but what has the mainstream media done to Trump that can compare with what the right-wing media did to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama for the entirety of both men’s administrations? Perhaps Dougherty is too young to remember the unending outpouring of filth that burst from the right practically from the day the Clintons set foot in the White House, but I remember it well—endless allegations of drug dealing and murder, a prime example being the 1994 video The Clinton Chronicles, promoted by Jesus huggin’ Jerry Falwell to expose a long list of Clinton “crimes”, lies endlessly repeated by everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter. “Just putting it out there, folks.”

More recently, the right ran furiously with another Clinton “murder”, the death of National Democratic Committee staffer Seth Rich, which was hyped with particular fury by Fox windbag Sean Hannity. Can anyone imagine that a “Clinton dossier” or an “Obama dossier” would not be immediately leaked by such leading authorities in smut like the Drudge Report?

On a smaller scale, recall, if you can, the earnest indignation that poured from the high-brow right—Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, and Dougherty’s own National Review—over both Clinton’s and Obama’s wasted hours on the links.⁴ If these publications wrote as much about Trump’s addiction, they wouldn’t have space for anything else.

Dougherty’s piece is yet another in the unending annals of “evenhandedness"—“neither side is perfect”. To say that the Democratic Party is imperfect is to say that the sea is wet. Ninety-five percent of Democratic “policy” is spending more money on everything. But the Democrats have confidence in their ideas—strong welfare state, aggressive environmental policy, international cooperation—and confidence that a majority of the American people support these ideas. Republicans have no such confidence.

Republicans believe that they must cheat to win. They have believed this ever since the election of Bill Clinton. Newt Gingrich was the first apostle of “the worse the better, ruin, then rule” mythos. The Tea Party was simply Newt writ large, and Donald Trump is the Tea Party’s apotheosis, a leader chosen for his explicit lack of scruple, a man who proudly tells that he is not a man but rather an animal. Two legs bad, four legs good!
I know it gets boring writing about how terrible Trump is, but he’s the goddamn elephant in the goddamn room, and pretending he isn’t is the biggest lie of all.

Afterwords
Since I’m, well, pissing on Mike, honor compels me to remark that he wrote a pretty good column, “Was It For This?”, pointing out that Trump had delivered on precisely none of his “populist” objectives, though I hasten to add that most of his populist objectives stink. But in yet another column, on the Hawaiian missile scare, (he does knock them out, doesn’t he?), Mike goes off on another unattractive tangent, moaning about the so-called “holiday from history” of the Clinton era and claiming that, thanks to North Korea, we’re living under the gun just as much as we were back in the fifties.

Except that we’re not. I guess it’s rude to point out that the Clinton administration had worked out a “no nukes” agreement with North Korea that was deliberately sabotaged by the Republican Congress and explicitly repudiated by the Bush Administration, resulting in the resumption of the North Korean program, a boon, really, to the right, which wants to “prove” that international agreements never work and that only overwhelming military superiority can provide security, even though, as it seems, our military superiority can never be overwhelming enough. And so we are oblige to be terrified (or, more likely, pretend to be terrified) of “insane” leaders who might attack us at any time, when in fact they only wish to ensure that we never attack them. And so, supposedly in the interests of peace, we continually threaten them with “regime change”—because, as we all know, people will do anything you want as long as you just threaten them enough.