Jan. 6 and the self-rejuvenating conservative

One clever Twitter user assembled a list of the right’s various reasons for why it remains blameless for the Jan. 6 Trump Insurrection:

In the Trump cult, naturally, sins against Dear Leader cannot be forgiven. More generally, the Six Excuses recall what I wrote 15 years ago about the “self-rejuvenating conservative.” That is, “conservative America has shown it will defend almost any behavior perpetrated in the cause, however it’s defined.”

Readers of Florence King (“Southern Ladies and Gentlemen“) will hear echoes of the Self-Rejuvenating Virgin, the modus vivendi by which a proper Southern woman might still present herself as unsoiled on her wedding night. For a region that spent centuries justifying slavery as God’s will, King wrote, a Southern woman explaining how she had not really lost her virginity was child’s play:

To recycle her pearl beyond price, certain ground rules had to be established. First, premeditation was forbidden. The self-rejuvenating virgin never planned ahead, she was always “swept off her feet.” If she could not make herself believe this, she engineered bizarre sexual encounters that were never quite the real thing, so the next morning she could tell herself, “It didn’t really happen because . . . “

1.   I was drunk.
2.   We didn’t take all our clothes off.
3.   We didn’t do it in a bed.
4.   He didn’t put it all the way inside me.
5.   He didn’t come inside me.
6.   I didn’t come.
7.   . . . Well, not really.

Thus do Capitol Police beaten, blodied and killed, and ruined doors and windows, ransacked offices, and terrorized lawmakers threatened with hanging become for the self-rejuvenating conservative a “normal tourist visit.” Mob members — and Republican lawmakers who egged them on — were just swept off their feet. As was D.C. Metropolitan police officer Mike Fanone. By the mob.

It is not lost on me that Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R) represents Georgia.