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You might not have heard of Sykes, a radio host, that, to be honest, I had forgotten about him. Outside of knowing he had gone anti-Trump, and in some cases anti-common sense. Sykes story is an all too common one. The Other McCain tells us about Charlie and his sad tale of becoming irrelevant of taking the Trump Derangement Express to complete irrelevance. Go read it
And it was just around that time, in the fall of 2015, that Charlie Sykes shoved all-in on #NeverTrump. Like most of his comrades in that project, Sykes has ended up a de facto liberal Democrat. Trump Derangement Syndrome is incurable like that: Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.
Ace of Spades long ago took to mocking Sykes as “Charlie Three Wives,” and when you become an object of Ace’s ridicule, your credibility as a conservative is pretty much over. Like most of the #NeverTrump crowd, Sykes cannot accept responsibility for his own choices — it’s Trump’s fault he committed career suicide, you see. Now 68, Sykes is apparently determined to spend his dotage in the role of Grandpa Simpson.
Maybe politics eventually just drives some folks cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Seems lots of folks just become consumed with inflexibility, or with self-promotion. I, for example was decidedly against Trump, but, voted for him because I knew Hillary would be a disaster. And, Trump then began to govern, and he did put America first. Over time, my opinion of Trump grew. His performance, to me mattered, not his words or temperament. I was wrong in my initial feelings about Trump, that is not a shameful thing. I grew ideologically, some folks, as McCain talks about here, never outgrew their hatred for Trump, and showed themselves to be fools and, in many cases nothing but grifters.
It didn’t have to be this way. All of these people who let themselves be sucked into the vortex of Trump Derangement Syndrome could have resisted that temptation. There is plenty of viable political terrain between being a True Believer in the Cult of Personality, on the one hand, and being Charlie Sykes, on the other. Byron York, for example, has maintained both his sanity and his integrity during the past several years when many of his former colleagues went over the deep end with the #NeverTrump crowd. But if you listen to Charlie Sykes (or David French, or Bill Kristol, or Rick Wilson) they never stop insisting that their core principles as True Conservatives™ required them to die on that particular hill, and they are such absolute fanatics as to make the Khmer Rouge seem moderate by comparison. Is there a lesson here, a “moral to the story,” so to speak? I dunno. Politics is a team sport, and some of these guys seem to be like superstar NFL players who sign a big contract and then start acting like divas (e.g., Antonio Brown). They think they can throw a tantrum and walk off the field in the middle of a game, without damaging their own prospects. I’m reminded of an old Persian proverb, “The dogs may bark, but the caravan keeps rolling.”
YEP! Go read it all
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