“It is extraordinary that anyone would have the nerve to declare such failure victory; to declare such depravity virtue; to declare such lying truthful; and to declare such treachery patriotic.”
----Steve Schmidt
Steve Schmidt is, famously, John McCain's former presidential campaign manager, notable for elevating Sarah Palin to national political prominence and for placing the call to Senator Barack Obama in order for McCain to concede the 2008 election. Schmidt is one of several prominent Republicans driven by the stench of Caesar Disgustus into the arms of a welcoming and broadening Democratic coalition now including such notables as former Republican Florida Congressman Jollie, former political operative Rick Wilson, columnists George Will and Bill Kristol, and former chairman of the Republican National Committee Rick Steele. This leaves the Democratic Party as the only major political organization defending this republic. This is the consequence of what happens when the world is stood upon its head.
Schmidt as Wilson are founding members of The Lincoln Project, a notorious anti-tRUMP effort organized to defeat Disgustus and his minions; an effort that has met with some success. This is a group of hardened political operatives who have wasted their talents and their youth on building a movement that, to their dismay, has now reached its logical and inevitable maturity. It was always hell-bent on fascism, for wealth and defense of wealth as an organizing political principle is always anti-democratic and, if allowed to metastasize. will in due course become, as it now has, a threat to the republic.
"Get big or get out" former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz admonished farmers during the Ford administration. This will lead, by degrees and inevitably, to concentrations of wealth and power which, by degrees and inevitably leads to oligarchy, the very conditions that the ancient Athenians found intolerable and created Democracy itself in order to ameliorate.
That's right, Democracy, the power of the people, was created in the first place in order to address the maldistribution of wealth which had imposed itself upon the polity. These are lessons not taught in our public or private schools; we have passed down to us the form but not the substance; the institutions and the process but not their purpose. We have been taught to venerate the institutions of democratic and, later, republican governance, but not the reasons for their being called into existence in the first place.
This lack of proper grounding is further compounded by our schoolmarms proclivity to press upon impressionable youth the wretched pulp fictions of Henry David Thoreau and Ayn Rand, both self-absorbed third-rate writers who are passed down to us as political philosophers. Is it any wonder that confusion becomes complete in the laments expressed so eloquently by Mr. Schmidt this morning on his podcast? Note the sense of bewilderment, the sense of betrayal, the serial violations of revealed innocence. Think about it. Ayn Rand boldly declared greed a virtue. If one blindly accepts this pretzel logic how can one be surprised when, in due course, depravity also becomes virtue, lying morphs into truth and treachery patriotism.
It is heartening to witness Steve Schmidt emerge from the thickets. One marvels, given his pronounced intelligence, what took him so long.
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1. Schmidt, Steve. “Chris Christie Rejects Donald Trump; Ron DeSantis' Fascistic Rhetoric”, “The Warning” podcast June 30, 2023.
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