One way to look at this is to realize as you gaze across the constellations of right-wing fuckwits, morons, jackasses, and boneheads, is that virtually all of them are either engaged in a con, or eagerly being conned and loving every minute of it.

To further expound upon this: in the early days of the conservative resurgence, the Reagan years, conservatives rallied around a worn-out TV pitchman and former actor pretending to be President, a con artist really. Reagan’s movement signaled the end of reality-based politics and a dizzying cannonball dive into a pool of crazy, stupid, loosey-goosey thinking and shoddy reasoning, where all that was required for an idea to be correct was for it to be popular. The Era of the Big Con, in other words.

As the inevitable consequences of leading your party with a fraudulent man caught up with the GOP, they found that at almost every level con-artists in Reagan’s mold, people who could believably articulate the most utter horseshit that would have otherwise gotten them laughed out of the public square, were taking over. By 2000, the GOP’s standards had been lowered by Reagan’s shenanigans enough that a stumbling middle-aged drunk without a single credible accomplishment to his name other than the part-time job of Governor of Texas was eagerly whisked into the White House, where he performed well below the already-low expectations I had for him.

The entire affair is a bunch of scrummy little middlemen and grifters now, not one bit of it is sincere or coherent. And I like to think that we can really hang that stanky albatross around Reagan’s neck. He invited these assholes into our government. Now we can’t get rid of them, and they’re everywhere with their stupid bullshit lies.