Not This Time Boys

Not this time.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 948: Here Come The Lifeboats!

"My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.” --  John Dominic Crossan, theologian

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More Thrilling Tales of Both Sides Do It: Somehow David Brooks Returned

The Faith and Humility Reporter for the Acela Daily Pantograph has returned with a startling proposition.  David Brooks -- who discovered Christianity five minutes ago and very evidently doesn't understand it at all -- claims he has the cure for Christian Nationalism.

Think I'm kidding?  Here's the headline:

How to Replace Christian Nationalism

Well, if nothing else, I'm sure Brooks will succeed in catching the attention of the Tiki torch, "Jews will not replace us", Nazis-in-Dockers mob.

As your humble scrivener wrote on this very blog not so long ago, whenever he publicly belly-flops into the empty swimming pool of his own boundless ignorance about how America lives and works and thinks and feels in the Land Beyond The Hudson, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times frequently retreats to the one safe place where he can pontificate in galactically-sweeping language and no one will dare gainsay him.

The pulpit.

In the pulpit, Mr. Brooks is free to sermonize on the State of The Human Soul to his heart's content on the Sulzberger family's dime.  Which is nice work if you can get it.

This time, Mr. Brooks affects an understanding of the chaotic parade of American humanity so deep and so wise that he can not only diagnose how to undo Christian Nationalism, but explain exactly how and why the MAGA morons came to power here in the Land of the Free.

Well, more or less.

Here is the exact quote:

Somehow MAGA has swept in and made us a frightened nation, stagnant, callous and backward.

"Somehow"?!

Jesus, Mary, and Erwin Schrödinger, it would take a better mind than mine to calculate exactly how much of the inconvenient past Brooks casually obliterated with that word.  Acres?  Oceans?  

How many decades of Conservative propaganda -- to which Brooks eagerly contributed -- and how many decades of legacy media complicity -- to which Brooks still eagerly contributes -- did he just negate?  

How many elections did Brooks just annul? 

How much of America's long history of racism did Brooks just wish away with one, little word?

If you've followed Brooks' long career of getting everything wrong, you would understand why he has to seal the long and well documented trajectory of the GOP that led to Trump and MAGA in an oil drum and sink it deep, deep into the River Lethe.  Because the inconvenient history of his Republican Party and his Conservative movement are incompatible with the toxic scam Brooks has been successfully running for 30 years.  

As I have mentioned once or twice, while it is clear that the House of Sulzberger is going to go right on letting Brooks get away with murder on the op-ed page of The New York Times until he chooses to retire, for his brutal and ongoing mutilation of the past, at the very least the University of Chicago should revoke his B.A. in History.

Remember, this is the very same, willfully blind hack who casually dismissed racism as a motive for the Right's rabid, hysterical opposition to Barack Obama.   Who decided that there was no racism in the Fake Tea Party movement based literally on ... jogging past a small Tea Party rally once.  Who assured everyone in 2014 that his Republican Party had fully and finally "detoxified" itself and was looking ahead to a bright future, and assured everyone in 2016 that his party would obviously never nominate someone like Trump: that it was definitely gonna be Rubio!

And then there was Brooks' brief nonconfessional-confession tour, launched during the 2016 campaign, when his job was clearly on the chopping block because he had fucked up so consistently and so very, very publicly on the pages of The New York Times.  Here is a particularly illuminating snippet from Brooks on the still-defunct Charlie Rose Show in 2016:

Rose:  So you think you were wrong?  That you had somehow been on the Acela too much and had not done what?

Brooks:  As I say, I'm out in the country ... every week I'm somewhere ... but somehow I didn't see it coming.  I'm...I'm...I'm...I was not alone in that. A lot of us didn't see it coming.

Rose:  Oh I don't know anybody that saw it coming.

Brooks (smirking):  Yeah, I'm sure now there are people claiming they did but...um...

And right there you could see the  Beltway Common Wisdom being set in concrete.  Since no one saw this coming, everyone failed equally so no one is guilty.  No one is to blame.  And as long as we all agree to pretend that all the lowliest Liberal bloggers -- who had been warning about these conditions within the GOP for decades -- simply do not exist ... and so as long as Brooks promised to do a little painless penance -- to sojourn into the heart of American darkness and compare notes on Edmund Burke with shit-shovelers in Nebraska and pawn brokers in Kansas -- everything would be cool.  

Everyone could safely return to their default setting and no one would lose their job just because events had shown they never had the slightest fucking idea what they were talking about.  

So, back here in the Year of Our Lord, let's all gather 'round to bask in Brooks' next bit of Beltway folk wisdom.

I don’t think this alien cultural implant can last forever. 

The "alien culture implant[s]" Brooks is referring to here are MAGA and its Christian Nationalist core proving once again, that Brooks has no qualms about dismissing centuries of inconvenient history when that history conflicts with the fairy tales he is still selling to his readers.  In this case, the fairy tale is one of inevitable American spiritual progress that has only been momentarily sidetracked, but will resume once Real Murrica shrugs off these alien cultural implants. 

I don’t think this alien cultural implant can last forever. Eventually Americans, restless as any people on earth, will want to replace threat with hope and resume our national pilgrimage. When that cultural and spiritual shift occurs, a lot will change in our religious and political life.

So, according to Brooks, how exactly are we Americans supposed to Replace Christian Nationalism?

Well, since this is David Brooks' own idea, first he must run the entire, sprawling, messy canvas of American religious, spiritual and political life through -- no kidding -- his big, dumb, Both Sides Do It meatgrinder.  To fit inside Brooks' fairy tale, all of us in our millions must be reduced to two and only two sides, each equally flawed and misguided.

You think I'm kidding? 

Once you put people into categorical boxes, you are inviting them to see history as a zero-sum conflict between this group and that one. And sure enough, today we live in a political, cultural and religious war between two impoverished armies.

On the one side are the Christian nationalists, who practice a debauched form of their faith. Christian nationalism is particular rather than universal. It is about protecting “us” against “them” — the native versus the immigrant. It is about power more than love. It is about threat more than hope. It is rigid and pharisaical rather than personal and merciful.

On the other side are the exhausted remains of secular humanism. That humanism started out trying to liberate people from dogma, but it has produced societies in which people feel alienated, naked and alone. It has failed to formulate a shared moral order that might help people find meaning and solidarity in their lives. It is so enfeebled that it is being replaced by the religion of the phone — by shallow, technological modes of living.

As near as I can tell, David Brooks is actually contending that, somehow, bad polling questions (?!) have shunted all of us into one of these "two impoverished armies." 

This is followed by a hilariously awkward pivot from Brooks' ludicrously reductive assessment of the entire population of the United States ... to an unverifiable, anecdotal laundry list of what Brooks believes other people really, truly believe way down deep where only he can see.  And it's all based on this sentence here:

In my experience most believers...

This really is a museum-quality sample of everything wrong about Brooks.

His entire career has been a series of sweeping observations and predictions about politics, faith and culture virtually all of which have turned out to be laughable wrong...and which Brooks validated with his own, personal experiences and insider information, which have also turned out to be hilariously and unerringly wrong.  

 In fact, Brooks has been so consistently wrong about everything in exactly the same way over and over again, that I've often thought that descriptors like "hack", "goof" or "Sulzberger family houseplant" are insufficient.  So I've been fiddling with alternations .  None of them are entirely satisfactory, so I welcome any suggestions.

The Lay-Scholastic Pretension:   An intense episode of Aquinas-level bravado, typically triggered by reading a paragraph in a secondary commentary which under looming print deadline and immediately assuming one has unlocked the entire metaphysical universe.

The Ecclesial Overreach Principle: The belief that one’s private interpretation implicitly carries ecumenical authority, despite having no synod, council, bishop, or even small committee concurring.

The Magisterium of Me:  A potent affliction where a single individual speaks as though they are a church council, despite their only conciliar experience being an encounter with overpriced airport whiskey.

Burn The Lifeboats

More Thrilling Tales of Both Sides Do It: One Hell of an Epitaph.

As you all know by now, the Both Sides Do It lie has been the legacy media's default setting for so long, and is now, for millions of Americans, so automatic that it has become what psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton called a “thought-terminating cliché".   Or what Orwell termed "crimestop":  the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.

When the conversation veers anywhere near holding Republicans solely responsible for the evil that they do, these crimestop conditioned citizens have been trained to immediately chuck a "Both Sides Do It" flashbang into the mix and then scurry away to safety. 

Even when the stakes are life-and-death, and even when the irrefutable proof of who is right and who is wrong is literally at every citizen's fingertips, for far too many Americans the thought of allocating blame where it belongs is so terrifying that these stubbornly sleepy citizens would rather dream reassuringly about "politicians in Washington" or "both sides of the aisle" than wake to find that the Republican party is a mob of violent bigots and imbeciles, fueled by lurid, home-grown fascist propaganda masquerading as news, and ruled by monsters and demagogues. 

And even at the cost of our democracy, the legacy media would rather go right on feeding them the narcotic lie that keeps them docile and somnolent than risk the wrath of the MAGA mob and the loss of revenue that would surely accompany telling the masses the simple, ugly truth.

Which brings us to this excerpt from a November 14, 2025 Vox article entitled "Meet the newly uninsured --  Millions of Americans will soon go without insurance. We spoke with some of them."

It's the story of "Steve", a retiree. who had insurance through his wife's job.  But then the company shut down her division, so she decided to retire, and off they went to the exchange to shop for new coverage.

The story itself is appalling, and is being felt, with minor variations, by millions of American families including ours.

But when you hit that last sentence, remember that "Steve" is saying this in the Fall of 2025, living in the rubble of a full decade of felonies, conspiracy mongering, corruption, lying, bigotry, treason, insurrection, fascism and assorted other catastrophes that a Trump-led Republican party has left in its wake.  

Up until last year, his family of three was covered by his wife’s insurance, provided by the large corporation for which she worked. It was $500 a month with a low deductible. But then, the company shut down her division, she decided to retire, and the couple and their son enrolled in the same plan on the state’s ACA marketplaces.

They couldn’t get such a great deal, but they found something usable: about $1,000 per month — pricey, but they were able to keep all of their doctors, who were in network. Their deductible was about $4,600.

But next year, their current plan would cost $2,700 every month to keep, and their deductible would be higher — up to $5,300. They could consider dropping their college-aged son off the plan, but he would struggle to afford health insurance on his own, and it would only save his parents $300 a month.

Steven says he feels trapped. Given their age, he and his wife don’t feel they can afford to go without insurance. But they’re now going to have to pull money out of their retirement accounts to cover the cost of their health plan.

“We cannot wing it and not have health insurance,” Steven said. “I’m spending a lot of money that I really do not have on health care.”

He’s done the math. If he kept his same plan, paid all of the premiums, and paid the maximum out-of-pocket costs, he could spend $50,000 on health care out of pocket — even with a health insurance plan.

“It kinda seems like the two political parties want to be right and not care about people,” he told me.

To put this in medical terms that maybe "Steve" can understand, his Both Siderism is symptomatic of a media-made pandemic which has become a chronic, long-term public health crisis and which may ultimately prove to be fatal.   

And if there is any hope for "Steve" to learn the truth about his condition, he'll need to seek out experts who are  way, way "out of network".

Burn The Lifeboats

Thrilling Tales of Both Sides Do It: Post-Trump Beltway Duolingo Courses Now Accepting New Students

Great day in the morning, Madge has finally learned the Magic Words.

What are the Magic Words, you ask?  Are they, as your mother taught you, "please" and "thank you"?

C'mon, get with it grandpa.  Those days are dead and gone.  And since you haven't been paying attention since the days of Romper Rooms and Captain Kangaroo, let me hip you to the fact that the "new" magic words are at least 30 years old.  

Here's a excerpt from Marjorie Taylor Green's Friday night Tweet.  See if you can spot the real Magic Words:

I never thought that fighting to release the Epstein files, defending women who were victims of rape, and fighting to expose the web of rich powerful elites would have caused this, but here we are.

And it truly speaks for itself.

There needs to be a new way forward.

The toxic political industrial complex thrives on ripping us all apart but never delivers anything good for the American people, whom I love.

The PIC tells us to hate each other, fundraises off why we have to hate each other, and pits Americans against each other to the point of violence and nearing civil war.

This is all so wrong.

We can have our own differences and differing opinions but we can still love and respect one another.

We have far more in common than we have apart.

I believe in the American people more than I believe in any leader or political party and the American people deserve so much better than how they have been treated by both sides of the aisle...

7.1 million views as of this morning.  Hundreds howler MAGA howler monkeys shrieking various versions of ,"Nobody cares about the Epstein files!  How dare you question the Dear Leader! Burn in Hell bad lady!"  

None of it matters.

Madge is a creature of low cunning and ruthless survival instincts, so if she is learning how to speak pidgin Beltway -- 

--, framing her slow motion egress from Il Douche's pandemonium bandwagon as an act of high principle, and showing up on places like The View to claim she was the victim, and coronate herself into the ranks of the media's Serious Women with Powerful Voices -- 

...“You’ve broken from the Republican Party on a number of issues, including, besides the shutdown, the war in Gaza, tariffs, Trump’s desire to expand AI, foreign aid,” Hostin said. “But you’ve also had the clips highlighting the public, very public spats that you’ve had with your colleagues, where your behavior, some say, is just unbecoming for a congresswoman. And you’re promoting conspiracy theories like QAnon in the past. But you seem to have grown past that…why the change? Why the evolution?”

“Maybe you should become a Democrat, Marjorie,” Joy Behar added, complimenting Greene’s comprehensible explanations for her positions, many of which earned her applause from the show’s anti-MAGA studio audience.

“You’re so right, it’s like you’re on the left now,” Hostin also told Green.

“I’m not on the left,” she told the View hosts, “I haven’t changed,” though she admitted of QAnon, “I was a victim, just like you were, of social media lies and stuff you read on social media.”

Greene cemented the friendly interview when she concluded, “I believe that people with powerful voices, like myself and like you, and especially women to women, we need to pave a new path.”...

-- you can bet she can practically smell the sheer cliff's edge off of which that bandwagon is about to plunge.  

Burn The Lifeboats

I Strongly Urge Every Republican To Bind Their Fates Even Tighter To The Fate of Donald Trump

Your Dear Leader needs your single-minded, unswerving fealty now more than ever, so do not listen to the scare stories in the Liberal Media.  America will never be great again without it's Greatest President fully unleashed and unencumbered by these Democrat hoaxes, so now, now, now, is the time to go full Trashcan Man.  

Trump hears your prayers and works night and day to make your dreams come true.  Show him you still believe in American Greatness by making a Fidelity Donation of $300, $500 or $1,000 via the link below

This has been a public service announcement from the 

White House Office of Opinion Management

The Totally True Story Of How The Professional Left Podcast Came To Be

So Blue Gal and I are parked at the Heartland, nursing cold coffee, spit-balling ideas for the Professional Left podcast. This must be fifteen, sixteen years back.

In staggers three frat-necks, last-call refugees.

One squints at us.  “Who the hell you two supposed to be?”

“We’re the Professional Left Podcast.”

“'Podcast'?” the other says. “The fuck is a 'podcast'?”

We give ’em the kindergarten version.

“So lemme get this straight,” he says. “You yap at each other about crap nobody cares about, play it back for nobody, and you call it professional?”

They lose it, fall all over themselves.

So I say, “Alright, heroes.  What’s your gig?   Professionally?”

Bald Tatts goes, “I get mopes to eat bugs, and get kicked in the nads.”

“This by you is a profession?”

“Pays great. Better’n your whatever-cast.”

(So was that Joe Rogan?

At this point, we don’t know.)

Next guy pipes up. Chest out.  “I don’t fart around on a mic. I get guys elected. Pro-fess-ionally. Just got hired by Mitt Romney. Ever heard of him?”

They cackle like hyenas.

(So was that Tim Miller?

At this point, we still don’t know.)

Then Bug Boy and Romney Boy shove the third forward.

“Tell ’em. Show these clowns what pro looks like.”

Third guy goes, “Damn right. I write jokes. For the President of the United States. Ever heard of him? That Biden-pizza-Indiana bit? That was mine.”

(So was that  Jon Favreau?

At this point, we're still not sure.)

Bug Boy says, “My crew’s goin’ places. President Hillary. President Romney. Whatever.”

Joke Guy goes, “And nobody’s ever gettin’ tired of bug-eatin’.”

Romney Boy adds, “And no way you'll ever catch us babblin’ into a mic beggin’ randos for beer money.”

They stagger away, laughing.

And that -- swear on a stack -- is how the Professional Left Podcast was born.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 947: All The Pieces Matter

"A lie ain’t a side of a story. It’s just a lie."  -- Terry Hanning, The Wire 

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