Because I inadvertently left the television on all Thursday night, I awoke to find Squint and the Meat Puppet regaling the empty chairs in my den on Friday morning. Nick Confessore of The New York Times was trying to explain to the two celebrity haircuts that the prion disease within the Republican Party that produced the hallucination that is the campaign of Donald Trump for President is not going to go away when (and if) El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago goes down in a historic defeat, and that, therefore, all this loose talk about the election being rigged is dangerous in both the short and the longterm.

Neither Squint nor the Meat Puppet were having any of this youngster's guff. Squint was a particular fountain of condescending stupidity, arguing that because every losing candidate tends to fade from the public eye when the election is over, the same thing will happen not only to Trump, but to the forces he unleashed on the country. Squint's livelihood—indeed, his entire broadcasting raison d'etre—is to convince Americans that the Republican Party is still sane and the conservative movement is what keeps it that way. Get used to that argument, because you're going to hear it a lot starting on November 9.

The Republican effort to rebuild itself from the looming catastrophe that is its 2016 presidential nominee is already underway. There will be no serious introspection, no thoughtful critique that 30 years of voodoo economics and Bible-banging authoritarianism, combined with hundreds of thousands of hours of unbridled lunacy on the radio, produced a Republican electorate with a jones for snake-oil stronger than Joe McCarthy's was for cheap whiskey.

Just today, for example, Squint's own mothership network produced a poll that fairly well refuted his argument. From NBC News:

This sentiment was stronger among Republicans, suggesting that Trump's message is getting through to a sizable number of his party's constituents. Among Republican and Republican-leaning likely voters, 45 percent said they might not accept the election as legitimate if their candidate doesn't win, including 18 percent who said they would definitely not accept the outcome. A majority of Republicans—53 percent—said they would accept the results of the election if their candidate loses.

This is not "partisanship." This is not an indicator of our "divided nation." This is not a problem that "both sides" need to fix. This is the end result on a democracy of one political party deliberately cultivating paranoia and ignorance to gain the political advantage. It's nothing new. It's a political strategy as old as democracy itself.

Plato wrote, "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by fools." Mr. Madison, who read Plato and understood the hell out of what he read, famously wrote, "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both." God knows we've seen the farce. The object now is to avert the tragedy, and the one way to do that is not to wave off the Trump phenomenon as a one-off trick of political nature—a freak May snowstorm that came upon the lovely garden of the Republican intellect. It has been a steady blizzard of nonsense for going on four decades.

This is the end result on a democracy of one political party deliberately cultivating paranoia and ignorance to gain the political advantage.

Nevertheless, just looking around at what is reported now that all hands have decided the election is pretty much over, you see a lot of the elite political press being fed great gobbets of hooey about how the Republican Party can "recover" from the failed 2016 vaudeville act that it allowed to unfold. Reasonable (if dim) senators like Jeff Flake of Arizona and Ben Sasse of Nebraska are being touted as antidotes to the mania, as is Tom Cotton, the bobble-throated slapdick from Arkansas who's already giving speeches in Iowa. Per Dave Weigel in The Washington Post:

Once again, the low-key, insistent Cotton had taken a position parallel to that of Trump. He had done so without Trump's table-banging, expressing it as if any one presented with the world of 2017 would make the same conclusions. His big speech in Bettendorf, with a friendlier audience, had hit the same notes. "I, for one, do not accept failure," Cotton said. "And I will never use political correctness to cover it up."

No, the prion disease cannot be stopped nor, increasingly, can its symptoms be ameliorated. Watch carefully, because by next January, they will be telling you that the biggest damage to the Trump campaign was wrought by Access Hollywood, and not the half-understood Heritage Society nostrums the Trump campaign embraced because its candidate didn't know any better. Exhibit B can be found in Friday's New York Times, in which we find deep sympathy for Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, as he wanders through his own personal ideological Gethsemane:

Mr. Ryan heard the persistent—at times desperate—appeals of Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee and a fellow Wisconsinite, and the angry calls from his rank and file, and neither could move him closer to Mr. Trump.

Don't cry for me, Janesville and Kenosha.

Now, Mr. Ryan finds himself in a singular abyss, desperate to maintain the voter enthusiasm needed to preserve Republican control of Congress, yet unable to defend his party's presidential nominee. If Mr. Trump is defeated on Nov. 8—as Mr. Ryan has all but conceded—but Republicans maintain their House majority, it will fall largely to Mr. Ryan to piece the rubble of his party back together. There is, of course, the question of whether House members would let him do so. The Republicans' crisis would have an early reckoning with the House decision on whether the speaker should be Mr. Ryan—whose beliefs in free trade, tolerance toward immigration, changes to entitlement programs and conservative governance have long been Republican orthodoxy—or a new brand of leader who embodies Trumpism.

"Tolerance toward immigration" has "long been Republican orthodoxy"? Not since 2009 it hasn't. This is a small-scale version of the argument that the Republican Party does not use racism as a political wedge because it is the Party of Lincoln. (Also, too: Robert Byrd!) And "changes to entitlement programs" is pretty rich. Ryan wants to change those programs, all right. He wants to change them into a pile of shattered splinters on Constitution Avenue.

This relentless fluff-o-rama of a guy who's nothing more than a run-of-the-mill conservative piñata full of bad ideas is going to really get rolling once the inconvenient nominee of his party—from whom brave Congressman Ryan has yet to withdraw his endorsement—is dispatched by the country next month. I have given up on trying to understand how Ryan has so many otherwise smart people mesmerized. But you're going to see a lot of them come out of the woodwork very soon.

In fact, right on cue, here's The Washington Post, pitching woo on Ryan's behalf to Hillary Rodham Clinton:

The relationship would hinge on how Clinton decides to begin her presidency. She could claim an electoral mandate and launch a pitched battle to pass the more progressive parts of her agenda. Or she could start with a relatively incremental push on a menu of domestic issues on which she and Ryan have shared interests, including infrastructure investment, criminal-justice issues and anti-poverty measures.

Good god, not this again. The last time a Democratic president reached out to Republicans on infrastructure investment, during the fight over a stimulus package in his first term, at a time when the country's economy was still tottering, the Republicans in Congress—including conspicuously, Paul Ryan—slapped him across the face with one hand while waving an alms bucket in the other. As Michael Grunwald details in his book, The New New Deal, the hypocrisy was garish and almost staggering:

The staunch conservative Mike Pence asked [Transportation Secretary Ray] Lahood to approve a TIGER grant for a "Cultural Trail" of bike and pedestrian pathways in Muncie, Indiana, while Republican budget hero Paul Ryan urged Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to fund a green jobs program in Wisconsin.

(You may recall that this particular hypocrisy occasioned one of the truly hilarious moments in the 2012 vice-presidential debate when Ryan was inveighing against the ineffective and pork-laden stimulus bill, and vice-president Joe Biden brought up a letter Ryan had sent, panhandling for stimulus money back in his district. This began the process of Biden's laughing Ryan off the stage.)

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"Criminal-justice issues?" Those are already dead in a Republican electorate that reformed itself into a defense committee for brutal cops; their untimely passing was noted by no less a star than Tom Cotton, to The Washington Times:

Asked why he thought the movement on the reform package is dead, Mr. Cotton said many lawmakers think releasing more people from prison will increase crime rates across the country. "It's deeply divisive within the Senate and the House as well, in part because there are a large number of senators and congressmen who do not think criminals are victims; they think criminals are criminals," the Arkansas Republican said. "Not many senators or congressmen want to be responsible for the murder or rape of innocent civilians out on the street." Noting that the prison population is already on the decline and recent 2016 crime data from major cities is pointing to an uptick in violent crime, Mr. Cotton said he worried that the country "may be at the leading edge of new crime wave." "The truth is you cannot decrease the severity and certainty of sentences without increasing crime," he said. "It's simply impossible. The bill's sponsors rarely speak of this trade-off."

It should be noted that the principal author of the bill that Cotton sang into its grave was Chuck Grassley, Republican from Iowa, the very man who invited Cotton to speak there last week. Who's the party going to listen to there?

And "anti-poverty" work? More block-grants so Pat McCrory down there in the newly insane state of North Carolina can use anti-poverty money to fund his idiotic lawsuits defending his idiotic public-facilities laws? Maybe Ryan's going to go out and wash some more clean pots and pans.

If Paul Ryan is going to be the person who puts the party back together, then the party's platform is going to be privatizing Social Security, voucherizing Medicare, a further investment in the ridiculous notion of supply-side economics, the deregulation on the federal level of just about everything from the stock market to canned tuna, the sell-off and pillage of public lands, the revival of block-grants so that the governors and state legislatures can have a feeding frenzy on the federal tab, and the continued refusal to do anything about the climate crisis.

But Paul Ryan has never advised anyone to grab someone by the pussy, so that makes him Pericles, I guess.

This post has been updated.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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