‘How Could Conservative Media Figures Not Have Felt — Felt in Their Hearts and Bones — the God-Awful Ickiness of It?’
Michael Gerson today is a Washington Post opinion writer, but from 2001 to 2006 he was President George W. Bush‘s chief speechwriter and senior policy advisor. If that’s not sufficiently conservative for naysayers, before that he was a senior policy advisor for the uber-conservative Heritage Foundation. Still not convinced he’s a conservative? In 2005 TIME magazine listed him as one of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America.” He came in at number nine.
Gerson’s Washington Post column today is titled, “The conservative mind has become diseased.”
“To many observers on the left, the initial embrace of Seth Rich conspiracy theories by conservative media figures was merely a confirmation of the right’s deformed soul,” Gerson begins, referring to the disgusting conspiracy theory that denigrates the memory of a 27-year old DNC staffer murdered in a robbery gone bad. “But for those of us who remember that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity were once relatively mainstream Reaganites, their extended vacation in the fever swamps is even more disturbing. If once you knew better, the indictment is deeper.”
And here it comes.
“The Hannity right, without evidence, accused Rich rather than the Russians of leaking damaging DNC emails. In doing so, it has proved its willingness to credit anything — no matter how obviously deceptive or toxic — to defend President Trump and harm his opponents. Even if it means becoming a megaphone for Russian influence,” Gerson charges, correctly.
The basic, human questions are simple. How could conservative media figures not have felt — felt in their hearts and bones — the God-awful ickiness of it? How did the genes of generosity and simple humanity get turned off? Is this insensibility the risk of prolonged exposure to our radioactive political culture? If so, all of us should stand back a moment and tend to the health of our revulsion.
Gerson goes on to call it a “failure of decency,” and goes on to pin the tail on Donald Trump, and right wing support for the current White House occupant, “a concrete example of the mainstreaming of destructive craziness.”
Trump, Gerson says, “is changing the party’s most basic moral and political orientations. He is shaping conservatism in his image and ensuring an eventual defeat more complete, and an eventual exile more prolonged, than Democrats could have dreamed.”
He concludes, “In Trump’s political world, this project of dehumanization is far along. The future of conservatism now depends on its capacity for revulsion. And it is not at all clear whether this capacity still exists.”
There’s a good deal more, and the column is well-worth the few minutes it will take to read.
Gerson is the second Republican to attack his own party today. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough this morning blasted Capitol Hill Republicans and Trump Budget Director Mick Mulvaney for lying “every day.”
That’s two.
Given the inability of Republican elected officials, and of conservatives pundits and even voters to denounce a vile act of violence – an attack on a reporters and the First Amendment – by a GOP candidate for the House of Representatives, will no one else on the right step up to denounce today’s “conservative” movement?
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