But the most potent incentives for this warped fairy tale have been the whitewashing of recent U.S. history, the maintenance of American Exceptionalism, and most of all the reputational and career rehabilitative value it bestowed on all those pre-Trump officials, apparatchiks and myth-disseminating journalists who committed great evils and left a raft of violence, lawlessness, destruction and death in their wake but now get to claim, and have others believe, that, no matter their sins, at least they weren’t authoritarian white supremacist neo-Nazi pathological-lying fascist dictators like Trump and therefore deserve to be embraced by (and gainfully employed in) the Family of Decent Society.
That’s the deceitful framework that has led to two of the most mendacious and amoral War on Terror neocons, David Frum and Bill Kristol, being elevated to their new status as among the most beloved-by-liberals Trump-era pundits with a new massive social media platform and frequent MSNBC appearances; the actual chief propagandist of the Bush/Cheney 2004 campaign and Bush/Cheney White House, Nicolle Wallace, becoming one of the most adored-by-liberals MSNBC hosts; the litany of War on Terror killers, including former Bush/Cheney CIA and NSA chief Gen. Michael Hayden, becoming a #Resistance star; and the most savage disciples of Rovian politics becoming the undisputed champions of political grifting while marching under the tickling-the-liberal-g-spot banner called the Lincoln Project.
Flamboyantly denouncing Trump as an Unprecedented Evil became a cheap, instant and easy ticket to absolution, redemption and profit no matter how barbaric and monstrous one’s pre-Trump resume had been. That’s why it seems normal, reasonable, and credible that the very same people now demanding that lists of Trump supporters be compiled so as to ensure permanent ostracization themselves justified, advocated for, implemented and presided over crimes far worse than the Trump administration got close to committing.
In the green rooms of CNN and MSNBC, on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and in the hearts and minds (and bank accounts) of American liberals, one now finds the worst and most amoral architects and enablers of the invasion and destruction of Iraq, the worldwide torture regime, the global program of official kidnapping (“rendition”), Article II theories of a lawless and omnipotent President, the drowning of New Orleans, the slaughter of innocents by the thousands at the hands of fighter jets and drones, the targeting of U.S. citizens for assassination-by-drone, vital support for the world’s most barbaric tyrants, the saving of Wall Street at the expense of ordinary homeowners and communities of workers, and the seamless and rapid re-imaginging of the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union as a country of Endless War.
How can people with this much blood on their hands, this much admiration of tyranny, this much support for lawlessness and corruption, and with a record of so many lies to obscure and justify it all, possibly find career success and public adoration again? We see the answer in its stark efficacy: they manufacture a never-before-seen monster who poses unprecedented dangers and embraces incomparably evil beliefs, and then they position themselves as the necessary and uniquely suited vanquishers of this New Nazi Evil. At first begrudgingly, then enthusiastically, their former critics and adversaries fall into line behind them, cheer them, support them, fund them, hire them, and buy their books en masse. Some will undoubtedly be rewarded with plum jobs or lucrative influence in the new administration.
-- Glenn Greenwald, "No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump." (SUBSTACK).