The Pundits who cried wolf

Jonah Goldberg notices something.  Among hardcore liberals and those who hate conservatism and the GOP more than anything else, the answer to the Trump phenomenon is simple.  Trump is the GOP’s fault.  Stop.  That’s it.  Nothing else.  Not the growing disdain for Washington.  Not the press pouring tons of manure on our problems in the hopes that a golden age of Obama will grow.  Not the fact that Trump received more press coverage than any candidate in the history of primaries.  Nothing.  It’s the GOP’s fault because the GOP is peopled with bigots, racists, homophobes, sexists, and any other label you can muster.

Outside of that circle of non-conservative punditry, however, is a nation that more or less has been there, done that.  As Goldberg points out, you could take the sentence ‘Trump is a racist’, erase Trump and replace it with Bush, Reagan, McCain,  or Romney without missing a beat.  This isn’t the thing that used to be conservatism, or the sad death of the noble party of Lincoln.  This is the party that has always been peopled by racists, bigots, homophobes, sexist, xenophobes, antisemites clinging to their guns, God, and greed since 1980.  Mr. Goldberg suggests the trend goes back beyond Reagan.  I’ve personally watched that boilerplate cross my eyes since middle school. Only this time it could be true.  This time, we might have someone who embodies all of the worst warnings of the Left.  And yet this time it seems that a shocking number of people don’t care.  Or maybe, in our fast paced, overwhelmed world, they just don’t have time to pay attention to those pundits who insist that now they’re serious, this time he really is a racist and on and on and on.

Isn’t that how the boy who cried wolf ended?  Not the fuzzy happy version I saw on PBS  a couple years ago.  In that version, the boy was using his imagination and the adults were the bad guys for not listening.  But in the original version, the one I’m thinking about, the boy repeatedly yelled wolf when there was none, until the adults no longer believed him.  When the wolf finally showed up, the boy yelled in vain for help, only to be devoured by the wolf. Attention liberal pundits.  Your wolf is howling, and he’s on in five.