Wilson starts off with:
Steve Bannon is a spent force in American politics, but he still has enough evil juicing through his veins to try to keep making himself relevant…. Bannon’s going to keep trying to slither back into the national political spotlight
You know who that description also fits? Rick Wilson. As the host says:
The position that you’ve held within the Republican Party … you’ve saved a lot of Republican skins, let’s put it that way. You’ve played a lot of Republican games.
And what were those games? Telling the Republican base that they were right to absolutely revile Democrats. That you HAD to vote Republican or else Democrats would destroy the country:
Rick's own role in that is never even touched upon. And speaking of people who rely on "constant historical revisionism". Case in point:
Look at the last three presidents: George HW Bush Came into office with the collapse of the Cold War, a very risky time for the world; Bill Clinton came in with the dot.com bubble having burst and the economy in trouble; […] George W Bush in his first two years had to face 9/11; Barack Obama had to face the housing and market crisis of 2008, so all these presidents were tested by these crises.
We will lightly note that Rick lists
four presidents, not three. But let's get into the meat:
GHWB did
not come into office with the collapse of the Cold War. It happened -- slowly and in stages --during a period that coincided with the entirety of his presidency (January 1989-January 1993). He was already president when the the series of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall took place. Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist General Secretary of the CPSU, became Presidency of the Soviet Union in 1990. That same year, former Soviet Client Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Bush sidelined the Soviets completely. That contributed to the attempted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, whose failure accelerated the total dissolution of the Soviet Union in December of that year. Bush
exited his presidency with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the one who really had to deal with its aftermath was the one elected in 1992, Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton did
not come into office with the dot-com bubble bursting, he came into office with it
starting. In January 1993, when he came into office, there were 50 web servers across the entire world. Legislative initiatives headed by Al Gore helped move the technology into the private sphere (not the military/research institutions it had been previously), creating the bubble which lasted roughly from 1995 to 2000. Clinton's crises were the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Reagan/Bush deficits. And the rise of non-state terrorists, which brings us to the next guy...
Dubya brought the PNAC Gallery into office, people who jeered at Clinton for paying attention to non-state actors like Osama Bin Laden and who had spent Clinton's presidency hankering to finally get rid of Saddam. He brushed off warnings about a potential threat. After the attack, they highjacked the will to defend against those who attacked us (Saudis and Egyptians) to pursue their pet projects in the Middle East, starting with ousting Saddam. Oh, and there was the whole promotion of "the ownership society" which was just fine with the bad actors of the housing market, because they thought homeowners tend to be more conservative, which would win them votes.
Obama did have to face the aftermath of the crisis Bush's actions helped initiate and exacerbate, but his greatest challenge was a Republican congress that saw that normal relief efforts would create a bounce-back in time for the 2012 election (which always helps the incumbent), so they avowed a strategy of full and complete non-cooperation. Including all the fine people Rick Wilson helped get elected.
I'm not inclined to let Rick get away with his Soviet-grade rewrite of history.
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