Go to hell!

A reader, commenting here as Reader, drew my attention to a Ross Douthat article today in the Journal of Mexican billionaires

The piece is a keening lament at the failure of Republican Party elders to quash the Trump candidacy at its spring crest. He views their capitulation to primary results as the fuel that is lighting the party’s self-immolation. That Republicans agreed to field the voters’ preference is something he regards as a stupendous mistake. Douthat deploys the term “compromise” multiple times in describing the party’s concession to its voters. And finding that description wan through overuse, he proceeds to brighten the sentiment by calling the acceptance of Trump’s nomination a “surrender.”

A surrender to whom, motherfucker?

It certainly wasn’t a surrender to Donald Trump. A candidate holds no power beyond the votes he has accumulated. I notice the party didn’t compromise with or surrender to Tom Tancredo in 2008. That they have now done so to Trump is not what is more favorably regarded as sacred democracy when blacks and the dead vote democrat but rather, by Douthat’s implication, a grim example of Republicans’ moral infirmity.

What a statement of cake-eating contempt.

The Republican party’s alleged ‘surrender’ was to its constituents. The people that party exists to serve. This being a relationship enduringly confused by those at the Acela end of it.

Politicians, lobbyists, pundits, and every one of you scavengers and parasites in the Republican ecosystem exist because its base of voters makes the party viable. Not you. A tick rides on the dog’s back for so long it eventually forgets who’s doing the walking.

You Paul Ryan, Ben Sasse, Rick Wilson, and John McCain are apparatchiks. Stewards. Showmen and functionaries. You only have value in the party to the extent you have value to its voters. They don’t serve at your pleasure, and they don’t require your approval of their choices. That choice was made clearly and unequivocally by tens of millions of people who do the actual work in this country that pays for your prostitutes and pomposity.

I understand if you disagree with the selection. Keep your goddamned mouth shut. Your fiduciary responsibility as a party hack is to lubricate the political machine. If unable to perform even that menial task, then you are merely worthless. Yet so many of you have aspired to be worse. You have actively sabotaged your constituents’ choice. The people who made that choice have every right to their candidate receiving a fair hearing in the general election. But with that possibility foreclosed by a uniformly corrupt media, they at least expect their own party apparatus to sulk when it will not help.

But that was asking too much. No, a phalanx of you leap on 11 year-old pretext to withdraw support and demand the nominee step down a month from the election. You could have observed the obvious: that far greater concerns are at issue in this election than antique machismo. Or you could have simply said “no comment.” Instead you unsheathed the knives.

But you didn’t stab Trump in the back. Just as it wasn’t him you originally surrendered to. It was millions of republican voters who took your blade. Win or lose, Donald will remain an aging playboy plutocrat fully-insulated from the malign globalism he was nominated to combat. Your constituents–unlike your donors and patrons–do not enjoy that felicitous buffer of 10-figure wealth. They are who you have betrayed, not him. It is their values you have defecated upon while sententiously droning about your own. And if God grants man memory beyond the end of his nose, I pray they never forget.

Some neocon pundits, politicians, and pilotfish have announced to the interest of absolutely no one that they can not share a party with Trump’s plurality base. I imagine more will follow. None of you will be missed.

Go to hell.