The GOP? Screw Them

Thirty Years ago, ok 28, we picked up a copy of P.J. O'Rourke's Give War a Chance, a collection of his mid 80's to early 90's writing. O'Rourke began an essay called Second Thoughts about the 1960s thusly, What I believed in the Sixties. There follows a long and hilarious explanation of how he got from hippie to Reagan Republican. O'Rourke starts the middle of the piece with, What I Believe Now, 'Nothing. Well nothing much.'

Indeed, as the Never Trump shyster Jonah Goldberg likes to begin every other paragraph.

We wrote yesterday and previously how we've lived through two conservative revolutions and came away like a college kid looking for sex and only getting a hand-job. We started in '94 with Newt, the Contract with America and the 104th Congress. We held a collection of domestic policy Neo-con beliefs about the size of government, marginal tax rates, entitlement reform and the like.  We clung to these through the Tea Party Revolution, even through Paul Ryan's Speakership. Naively so. So naively so.   

That 104th Congress accomplished...not very much. Newt's ideas were abstract and difficult to explain. There really isn't a good response to Save Medicare and Newt wasn't the man to deliver it anyway. Ditto the Tea Party. Ditto Ryan. We assume that blue eyed pretty boy is running for Wisconsin Governor in 2022. We'll gladly donate to Ryan's Dem opponent. Not kidding. Given how political gravity works, Ryan will probably win, one of the real tragedy of Biden's 'victory'.

After 25 years it's controversial to say only women menstruate, the debt is bigger than ever, we have troops in places no one cares about, and the leviathan government is bigger than we could have possibly imagined in 1995 and totally isolated from the public. Wanna know how bad that last bit's gotten? When we arrived in DC it was a misrun crap-hole with a crackhead mayor that took a week to clear the snow. Now DC is the richest city in the nation. Areas like Dupont Circle, once a notorious hangout for heroin addicts and transvestite hookers, is gentrified and trendy. 

So it was all a sham, all of it. The GOP stormed Rome and...became fat and decadent like the Romans.  All those southern conservative young guns who went for drinks at Heads, the Dubliner and Bullfeathers where they bragged about burning the place down became middle-aged lobbyists and Capitol Hill career hacks - a job we once wanted ourselves. I was there.

What I believe now. Nothing, well nothing much.