In 1997, a California neurologist named Stanley Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of prions and the role that prions play in a number of severe neurological ailments, including “mad cow” disease and kuru, a disease found among the tribes of New Guinea that is spread by cannibalism. Prions are infectious proteins and, at the time Prusiner first announced his findings, much of the scientific community expressed doubts that simple proteins could be infectious agents. A lot of very smart people scoffed at the notion of a prion disease.
It has long been a contention at this shebeen that the Republican Party—and the conservative movement, which is its only animating life force—acquired a prion disease when Ronald Reagan first fed it the monkeybrains of supply-side economics and Protestant splinter theology back in the early 1980s. Prion diseases, like kuru, are progressive. The early symptoms can be as inconspicuous as a patient’s halting gate, or a citizen’s voting against his interests. The disease progresses and the high functions are eaten away until the patient is paralyzed and dies. I think, with the election of the president*, the Republicans may have drifted into the terminal stage.
The other day, I was watching MSNBC and host Nicolle Wallace compared the Trump campaign unfavorably with “the 2004 Bush campaign that Steve [Schmidt, one of her current MSNBC colleagues] and I worked on.” On the electric Twitter machine, I reminded everyone that the 2004 campaign on which Wallace looked back so fondly happened to be the one in which the Republican parties "gay-baited" the issue of marriage equality with referenda in several critical states, and the one in which John Kerry’s authentic wartime heroism was repeatedly slandered. For this, other folks on the electric Twitter machine took exception to what I said, arguing, not unreasonably, that Wallace and Schmidt are valuable allies now in the resistance to the doings down at Camp Runamuck.
Then, on Wednesday, my man Chuck Todd hosted on his panel another former Bush aide named Sara Taylor Fagen. That name rang a bell and, after consulting with Dr. P. Henry Google, the shebeen’s director of research, I was reminded that she had played a central role in one of the Bush administration’s most odious episodes: the complete politicization of the Department of Justice, and the firing of seven U.S. Attorneys because they wouldn’t gin up fake voter-fraud crimes on behalf of the White House political operation. In fact, she was rather central to the whole thing.
From ThinkProgress:
In the first exchange, Taylor writes to Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales’ former chief of staff, and suggests retribution against Cummins for speaking out about the reason for his firing: I normally don’t like attacking our friends, but since Bud Cummins is talking to everyone — why don’t we tell the deal on him? In another set of emails from Feb. 16, Taylor again writes Sampson, complaining about how Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and the Justice Department put Griffin in a “horrible position…hung to dry” by admitting that Cummins was pushed out specifically to make room for an ally of Rove. “[T]his is not good for [Griffin’s] long-term career,” Taylor writes.
And, in recent days, we have seen the release of David Frum’s new book, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, and also that of Charlie Sykes, How The Right Lost Its Mind. And, on Thursday, tout les Toobz was buzzing about an interview given by Butcher Bill Kristol to John Harwood of CNBC, in which Kristol pulls the full Louis Renaud on the racism and wingnuttiness that he’s suddenly discovered at the Fox News Channel.
I was on Fox for 10 years really, 2002 to 2012. I think it was pretty good. It was a little tilted right? Sure. Now Fox is sort of — 75 percent of it seems to be birther-like coverage of different issues. That's been, I think, bad. And you put that together with the social media and the segmentation of everyone into bubbles, and I think there's some truth to that criticism.
I am unsettled by this phenomenon for two reasons. First, it would be a severe crime against history to allow the catastrophic Trump presidency* to wash from our memory the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush. Not 20 years ago, Frum was writing books with geopolitical goon Richard Perle (An End To Evil), and on his own with titles like, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush. (I’m certain that people in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans were surprised to learn that Bush was president, having seen little evidence of that when they needed to see it.) Kristol was sitting with Ted Koppel and assuring the country that:
One would always prefer to have more allies rather than fewer. And I think we actually will have lots of help in the reconstruction and democratization, actually, of Iraq. But, look, I think what we've learned over the last ten years is that America has to lead. Other countries won't act. They will follow us, but they won't do it on their own. And in this case, I think we'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq.
(Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, Charlie Sykes was on the radio, laying the groundwork for the rise of people like Scott Walker and Paul Ryan.)
But my most serious reservation is that the dynamic being engaged by these wandering spirits tends to make the inevitable an anomaly. The prion disease has been at work for decades and Trump is just one of its most egregious symptoms. Earlier ones include the strangulation of the nomination of Merrick Garland, the nomination of Sarah Palin, the disinformation regarding Iraq, the U.S. Attorney scandal, the Great Penis Hunt of 1998, TravelGate, FileGate, Whitewater, Iran-Contra, supply-side economics, and the ensemble encroaching on the institutions of government by organized plutocracy and organized theocracy. All of these things, large and small, led inexorably to the presidency* of someone like Donald Trump.
That presidency*, believe it or not, one day will end, and, when it does, the country cannot be allowed to go back to the status quo ante. The damage done by this presidency* can’t be swept out of the national memory the way the damage done by the last Republican president has been. The Republican Party has to be purged of the prion disease, all of it. Because the prion disease has sickened the entire nation now. The progress of the disease is now so advanced that the Republican powers within the national legislature are unable to check the powers of a president* that a good portion of the country believes shouldn’t be within 200 miles of the White House, a form of ideological enfeeblement that may be the final stages of the disease. That there are people who were involved in the disease’s earlier stages who are unnerved now seems to me to be yet another manifestation of it. At least, with kuru, the cannibalism comes at the beginning.
