Shorter Tom Nichols: Driftglass Was Right All Along

As longtime readers are aware, the chorus of hundreds of Liberal voices which, for decades, provided ample evidence and brutally accurate warnings that the Eisenhower cheese was sliding off the Republican party's cracker and into the fascist abyss was, by, turns, scornfully, mockingly, angrily and then airily dismissed for years by Mr. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic.  

Ol' Tom held those critiques to be ludicrous on their face.  Or, at best, wild over-reactions by alarmist, Liberal cranks.  

Then some time passed and, ok, something has clearly come undone inside the party of Reagan, but it is asinine to suggest that the rise of Trump has its roots deep in the Republican party.  Gotta be something mechanical and fixable like a spun bearing or a cracked dilithium crystal, not structural.  And whatever is going on, calling it "fascist" is waaaay out of line.  At best, Trump was a black swan event.  A fluke.

[brief driftglass aside:  No Tom.  It wasn't something mechanical and fixable.  It wasn't a spun ideological bearing.  It was your party's Pretty Hate Machine with a fatal leaking coolant...

...which I was writing about in detail 20 fucking years ago.: end brief driftglass aside.  We now return to the cartography of ol' Tom's long, winding, through-gritted-teeth journey to where the Left has been all along.]  

Or, ok, so, Trump's not going away.  The fever is not breaking.  But -- and I want to make this 100% clear -- as a child of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!), there is no way I personally could have known what was happening with the Republican party in faraway lands like Georgia and Mississippi.  Despite the fact that knowing what's happening with the Republican party is my job.

And anyway, ol' Tom's got nothing to feel guilty about because the Left's hands are plenty dirty here!  (From a since deleted Tom Nichols Tweet barking at brother Charlie Pierce who had the temerity to point out that Tom was full of shit.)

You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 14, 2019

And now, at last, in February of 2026 -- decades too late -- we arrive here.  

Call Them What They Are
The Republican Party has become a haven for Nazi sympathizers.
By Tom Nichols

And this is the front-page teaser or "refer" for that story:

The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem
How did the GOP become a haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich?

Great question! Which we will definitely get to in a minute.

But at least as important as what ol' Tom says in this article is where the article was published.    It's in The Atlantic.  

And knowing that, you may ask yourself this question:  how exactly does ol' Tom  -- who has been wrong, tardy and dismissive all along -- rate a column in The Atlantic, while the folks who have been right all along -- folks who ol' Tom routinely derided, ridiculed and blocked from his perch at The Atlantic -- are still legacy media pariahs?

Again, great question.  And I would suggest that it's the same reason so many other recently-former Republicans and Neocons have found a home at The Atlantic.  Because in that pundit world, the fact that you have been wrong all along matters so very much less than the fact that you were wrong in all the right ways.  Ways that flattered the average legacy media reader or viewer.  A writer of things that are declarative, but cautious.  Timid.  And always, always riding that Both Sides Do It lane right down the middle, so that however harsh your Trump critique of the day may be, you make sure to take snide shots at the Left every step of the way.

Which is why this guy --

You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 14, 2019

-- was such a perfect fit for The Atlantic.  

Four-fifths of this thing reads like an utterly anodyne, Wikipedia-style history of the modern Republican Party.  Just another 9th grade book report recitation of the familiar facts and milestones of the modern Republican party with which, I'm sure, most of you are not only drearily familiar, but have been shouting from the rooftops since forever.  Of course, St. Reagan’s image is carefully guarded and burnished, but from Nixon to Gingrich to Trump, there’s nothing here we haven’t known, discussed, dissected, blogged about, podcasted about, and thoroughly masticated for decades.

And the striking thing is, it doesn’t sound like Tom Nichols at all.  None of the snark and bile he routinely unlimbers in the cause of belittling and tone policing any Liberal who disagrees with him.  Instead it reads like a second cousin to Jay Rosen's "View from Nowhere".

The only time it even begins to sound like Nichols is when he dips into a wide-eyed, golly-how-did-this-happen voice -- as if he’s a child just discovered that Santa Claus isn’t real. What? When did this happen? How did this happen? 

Then he ambles back over to Wikipedia, looks up the history of the Republican Party during his entire adult life, and says, "Oh, so that’s what happened."

However, to give Nichols his due, there is at least one sentence that had to cost him dearly to see published in a national magazine, and here it is:

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

Then Nichols asks the next obvious question:

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party?

And here was my reaction:

Now you and I both know that, in this life Tom Nichols  -- Mr. "Expertise" -- is never gonna call on a dirty, disreputable hippie to explain [checks notes] his own political party to him.  However, he did the next best thing.  

To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump. I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

In Nichols' view, it was Reagan's personal charisma that kept the various Republican factions -- gun nuts, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, bigots, imbeciles, paranoid conspiracy junkies, millionaires, Conservative evangelicals, Bill Kristol, George Will and Charles Krauthammer -- in line and pulling in the same direction.  But once Reagan died...

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs.

Allow me to repeat that which I have already said a dozen times on this blog and on The Professional Left podcast:  it's not a "hijacking" when they throw you the keys and beg you to drive.  

And given that the base of the party threw the keys to Trump three times in 10 years...? Sure as shit doesn't sound like a hijacking.  Sounds like the fascist Meathead Messiah had arrived and the bigots and imbeciles were and are ecstatic about it.    

But the best -- the very best -- use of the view from nowhere comes in the form of a very familiar dodge.  A dodge I hadn't heard deployed so brazenly since Matthew Dowd was making the rounds with it. 

Nichols, who has a long and well-documented history of dismissing or swatting away criticism of Republicans from the left, suddenly transported himself up, up, up to David Brooks' "view from nowhere" orbital punditing platform where he can safely opine about the deplorable Both Siderism of "Conservatives..." and "People on the right..." -- 

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

-- without having to add the damning modifier,  "Conservatives like me..." and "People on the right like me..." 

Moral grandstanding with a big bump of selective amnesia is a helluva drug.  Because what Nichols was up to during all the years he was averting his eyes from what his party was doing was busying himself telling liberals to calm down. Informing Democrats what they should and shouldn’t say. Tone-policing anyone who challenged his perspective -- a perspective now definitively disproven. 

What’s striking isn’t simply that he’s arrived at this realization.  After all, the world is full of slow learners and thumb-suckers who need to be told, over and over again, in the immortal words of Wade Garrett, "Don't Eat The Big White Mint."

What's striking is that Nichols is my age and he is only now, grudgingly, arriving at this revelation.  

What's striking is that, instead of being some waterhead propping up a wall at a dive bar, Nichols' whole deal is Expertise.  Right from jump he'll let you know that, in his expert opinion, he is always the smartest guy in the room.

What's striking is that he holds a column at The Atlantic based on his alleged expertise in this very subject. One he appears to have been in denial about until roughly ten minutes ago.

And so to wrap this up, we circle back to these questions.  Why does The Atlantic staff itself with people like this? Why are the people who were right about the Right all along still treated as pariahs? Why are they not only unwelcome in the circles where Tom Nichols, David Brooks, David Frum, and the rest circulate, but are treated as if they do not exist at all?

Because The Atlantic is in the business of telling its audience what it is prepared to hear. Its readers are ready to hear that Donald Trump is as bad as he appears, that the people around him are terrible. But they are not prepared to hear that the Left was right. They cannot bear the thought that the highly paid columnists of legacy media were wrong -- and that their readers were misled along with them -- while the so-called dirty hippies were right all along.

That possibility is unbearable. It’s unthinkable.

I Am The Liberal Media

Shorter Trump Presser

In case you missed Piggy's post-SCOTUS rebuke of his tariff regime...here's the short version.

The six justices who voted against the tariffs are fools, lapdogs, a disgrace and have betrayed ’Murrica. 

The Democrats on the Court did it because Dems want to destroy ’Murrica. The Republicans on the Court who overturned Trump’s tariff regime — including the two muppets he himself appointed — are actually RINO stooges under the influence of foreign powers.

But it doesn’t matter, because what the decision really said was that I have vastly more power to tariff, embargo, and destroy other countries than ever. I can destroy anyone. Any country. I tried to be nice before. I was a good boy. But now? Forget it.

Biden was incompetent. 

This country was dead a year and a half ago. Dead. Now we’re the hottest country in the world.  Barely legal but tits out to *here*!  And that ass!  

Every president but me was stupid for not using tariffs to make us all rich.

I’m very good at reading!

Brett Kavanaugh is a good lil’ stooge who’s gonna get two scoops. His dissent is genius, and you have to be a radical left lunatic to disagree.

I won. In a landslide. There was so much cheating, but I still won.

Yadda yadda yadda. All the usual demented rambling claptrap intermixed with the usual lies from a degenerate old criminal whose brain is turning to prune dip before our eyes. I’m sure I missed some of the finer points, since after a few minutes of this maniac slurring and stumbling us onto the ash heap of history, it all sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher — if that teacher were George Wallace, drunk and brain-damaged.

And if this makes your blood boil, don’t forget to thank your Republican neighbors, co-workers, and fellow churchgoers for putting this depraved, bigoted monster back in the Oval Office.

No Half Measures

Two Never Trumpers Walk Into a Podcast…

Like a some Conservative version of the Casimir Effect*, I believe I can prove, to a scientific certainty, that when two old-school neocon Never Trumpers are put in close proximity to one another, eventually at least two of the most odious and deeply held core tenets of their ideological faith will always manifest themselves out of the air.

First element to emerge will be sanctimonious Both Siderism.  An above-it-all certainty that because Both Sides are pretty terrible they are now "politically homeless".

The second element to emerge will be condescension.  The airy dismissal of any prior criticism from the Left of their now-former party, which, in actual fact, will turn out to be just blatant Straw Man bullshit.  We know this because such derision never involves interviewing any actual Liberals or citing anything that anyone on the Left has ever actually written. Instead, the entire constellation of thoughtful, detailed and brutally accurate analysis of the long, ugly trajectory of the Republican party -- decades of labor by hundreds of smart, savvy lefties -- is sneered at and waved off as, "Well, you know how those people are."  

And thanks to whoever it was that had the bright idea of putting old-school Neocon Never Trumper Mona Charen and  old-school Neocon Never Trumper David Frum together on Frum's podcast, we now had a perfect opportunity to either confirm or disprove my hypothesis by experiment and observation!

Let's see what happened.

First test: Emergent Both Siderism:

Frum: What Trump is doing to poison the social conversation here at home, to allow in these voices, to really mainstream people like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, that is deeply frightening. That’s where we live. (Laughs.) And it is opening the door to the kind of—there’s a lot of left-wing anti-Semitism, but frankly, the right-wing variety still scares me a little more because it is truly Nazi-like in its ferocity against Jews.

There is quite a bit of that.  Sure, the right is awful, but they only scare Frum "a little more" than the left.

Also Frum:  On the other hand, assuming there is an election and J. D. Vance is the Republican nominee, he will be running against a nominee from a party that just vetoed the most plausible-looking running mate for Kamala Harris because he was Jewish and because he wouldn’t renounce his support for Israel and wouldn’t hedge his condemnation of anti-Semitic outbursts on American college campuses, and where important voices in that party are saying that the test, their most important test for their support in 2028 is Holocaust inversion...

Charen:  As you say, J. D. Vance is very close to Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens is a huge influencer, and all of that. On the left, it is, for now, the precinct of the hard-left progressives. It’s untested as to whether that will become the dominant strain in the Democratic Party. We’ll see. That would be very, very worrisome. 

So, Both Siderism?  Check.

On to the second test:  The Straw Man.

Frum:  ...I think there’s something important that we [Never Trump Republicans] bring, and that is a sense of that this is a group that has a unique sense of the uniqueness of what is happening now. And I’m sure you’ve seen often in the comments you get from readers or viewers or listeners, they’ll say something [like], Aha, we warned you that the moment Dwight Eisenhower beat Adlai Stevenson, Trump was the inevitable outcome—

Charen: Absolutely. All the time.

Really?  You've heard Liberals blaming Ike for Trump?  "All the time"?  

Because I am one of a whole army of Liberals who've spent decades warning you fuckers of the dangerous trajectory your party was on and I have never heard anyone say this. Not a single serious historian.  Not a single political theorist.  Not a single potty-mouth blogger. There is no record whatsoever of anyone arguing that the moment Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson in 1952, the eventual rise of Donald Trump became “inevitable.”

Of course what Frum and Charen are desperate to do here is avoid talking about things like Goldwater and the seismic ideological shift he represented in 1964 as the GOP began devolving through various stages, towards Trump-era populism.  

They don't want to talk about Nixon's Southern Strategy.  Or the Powell Memo.  Or the red carpet the party rolled out for southern white conservative Evangelical segregationists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.  

They'd like you to forget Paul Weyrich too, and Lee Atwater, and Karl Rove.  

They'd really appreciate it if you'd also forget about Newt Gingrich.  And Tom DeLay.  

They're also praying that no one mentions the profound, malignant influence of the Right's most popular bigot, Rush Limbaugh, or his hundreds of imitators, or the fact that George H. W. Bush was so thirsty for Limbaugh's support that he invited him to the White House for a Lincoln Bedroom sleepover and carried in Limbaugh's baggage personally.  

In fact, they'd be eternally grateful if you'd agree to forget the rise of the entire Conservative media ecosystem -- talk radio, cable news, online platforms, church pulpits, direct mailing lists -- emerging from the 1980s onward.

Instead, Frum rolls out one of the stupidest Straw Men I've ever heard of, and he and Charen deal with their barely sublimated guilt and shame by taking turns punching it.  

Frum: No, he’s not the inevitable outcome of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and George W. He’s different. And we’re here to tell you that as people who liked all those people. He’s different. And because we liked all those people, we can tell you how and why he’s different in a way that the typical commenter who’s blaming Dwight Eisenhower for being the start of Donald Trump can’t tell you.

Charen: Well, yeah, the people who are kind of—and I’ll say this—I think they’re kind of smug, and they say, This was always conservatism, and this is just the full flowering of all the things that conservatism always was. I say that is absolutely not the case...

So,  Straw Man?  Check.

Cowards?  Check.

Experiment complete.

Theory confirmed by observation.

Submitted for peer review this day, February 20, 2026, by your pal driftglass.

*The Casimir effect is a weird little consequence of quantum physics that says even “empty” space isn’t really empty. Imagine putting two perfectly smooth metal plates extremely close together in a vacuum. You’d think nothing would happen — but tiny quantum fluctuations are constantly flickering in and out of existence everywhere. Between the plates, only certain fluctuations can fit, while outside them, more kinds can pop up. That imbalance creates a tiny pressure pushing the plates together. So the Casimir effect is basically proof that empty space has a kind of restless energy, and if you confine it just right, it can produce a measurable force.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 971: The Resistance Comes To Suburbia

"We can beat them, just for one day / 

We can be heroes just for one day." 

 -- David Bowie.

• 
  

These Days, Any $10 Cassandra Can Predict With Astonishing Accuracy...

...what advice Team Legacy Media and Team Never Trump will always insist Democrats must follow if they don't want to lose everything.

So, no surprise that, over at The Bulwark, Mark Leibovich's "advice" to Democrats was centered entirely around picking fights with other Democrats.

From Leibovich's Atlantic article, which is why Tim Miller invited him over for a bitch sesh:

The squabble underscored how the Democrats can’t help but keep playing to a stubborn stereotype—a soft and pampered bunch, unwilling to make the gritty sacrifices (such as getting dressed) necessary to prevail in their “existential” campaign to save democracy.

“The Democrats treat their fucking people like kindergartners,” Sarah Longwell, a former Republican consultant who quit the party over Donald Trump, told me. Longwell can get exasperated by her new allies on the left. When I mentioned the DNC’s in-person-work kerfuffle, it set her off.

“Republicans are over here being straight-up mercenaries,” Longwell said. “Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work-life balance.” She apologized for yelling into the phone. Democrats “are not built for when the fascists come,” she concluded... 

Martin himself has a knack for reinforcing these caricatures. Just as I was starting this project, he presided over the DNC’s summer meeting in Minneapolis to begin the urgent work of rebuilding the Democratic coalition and making the party palatable to American voters again. Soon after calling the assembly of more than 400 party officials to order, Martin relinquished his mic to a representative of the Saginaw Ojibwe Nation for the DNC’s “land acknowledgment” ritual. Switching between English and her tribal language, the Indigenous woman affirmed that Minneapolis had been stolen from its native Dakota Oyate Tribe (“the original stewards of the lands and waters”). 

The interlude took only a minute or two but received outsize attention—and ridicule—as an example of how Democrats remain overly concerned with performative pandering to various small identity groups. “It is difficult to imagine more than a handful of people looking out over the current hellscape of U.S. policy and thinking to themselves: You know what we need to be sure to address today? The Dakota War of 1862,” Andrew Egger wrote in The Bulwark.

So let's take a look at how minor HR dispute and two minutes of harmless comments at a summer DNC meeting in 2025 got turned into a five-alarm, OMG DEMOCRATS ARE THE WORST! fire in 2026 at The Bulwark.

To start with, I found it interesting that Leibovich didn't feel the need to include the next couple of sentences of Egger's Bulwark column which are as follows (emphasis added):

Right-wing media gleefully ping-ponged the clip around social media: Wake up, babe, they’re still doing land acknowledgments!

Democrats may believe, sincerely, that there is no harm (and, indeed, some good) in these displays. But many more people instinctively recoil against this sort of thing...

Two things.  One for later and one for now.  The later thing is, who exactly are the "many more people" who "instinctively recoil against this sort of thing" and how in the world do these "many more people" know the first god damn thing about the 2025 DNC summer meeting?

Could these "many more people" tell me anything at all about the other 99.9% of that meeting?  Do they have strong opinions about the Rules and Bylaws Committee evaluating the early voting state lineup for the 2028 presidential election?  

Or the Resolutions Committee debate over proposals regarding the Israel-Hamas war, including potential calls for a ceasefire and changes to military aid?  

How about the "Organizing Summer" Initiative to build volunteer networks, register voters, and engage in non-political spaces to prepare for 2025/2026 elections?  Any thoughts on those?

Let's put a pin in that for a minute, and get on to the second thing.  In the portion of the column that Leibovich left out, Egger explains how this tiny moment became a "story" at all.  The right-wing media was doing what the right-wing media always does: latching on to some incredibly trivial moment that would have otherwise passed unnoticed,.. or taking some remark wildly out of context ... or just making shit up and using their gargantuan fascist echo chamber to hype the shit out of it.

Fox News headline, August 25, 2025:

DNC opens summer meeting with land acknowledgement ...

The second Fox News headline, August 25, 2025:

Lindy Sowmick, a Minnesota Democrat and self-described 'Indigenous queer woman,' recited the acknowledgement Monday...

The National Desk, August 26, 2025:

DNC faces ridicule over land acknowledgment

Ridicule?  Really?  From whom, I wonder?  Is it from...the fascists?!

The Colorado Springs Gazette:

Byron York blasts DNC land acknowledgement...

Really?  York at the Colorado Springs Gazette?  Oh how the mighty fops of yesteryear have fallen.

Megyn Kelly on Facebook:  

The Democratic party learned NOTHING as they start summer meeting with "land acknowledgement..."

Megyn Kelly on YouTube:  

The Democratic party learned NOTHING as they start summer meeting with "land acknowledgement...

Megyn Kelly on YouTube Shorts:  

Megyn Kelly reacts to the ridiculously long "land acknowledgement" at DNC summer meeting.

The Blaze:  

The Democrats have gone insane

So at this point this is just another "OMG!  Obama wore a tan suit!"/ "OMG!  Obama likes fancy mustard!"/"OMG!  That crazy communist Kenyan Obama thinks inflating your tires correctly will solve all our energy problems!" bit of catnip for the bigots and imbeciles who think Fox News is "news" and who jerk off to Megyn Kelly's hate-porn.

For the fascists to boost bullshit like this out of the Fox News terrarium and into the wider world they're gonna need help.   

They need their manufactured indignation at least appear to be "bipartisan".  

The need some cranky, octogenarian Democrat who is 20 years past his sell-by date to pop off about how awful this insignificant little moment was.

They need...

Carville slams DNC over land acknowledgment.

There we go!

Yep.  That was the Fox News headline, August 28, 2025.

And this was the Fox News headline, August 29, 2025:

Carville rebukes DNC over woke 'land acknowledgment' ...

And this was the headline in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post,  August 29, 2025:

Carville erupts over DNC's woke land acknowledgment ...

Yay!  It's out there in the world now!  People are talking!  People like Dan "Turncoat" Turrentine talking to [checks notes] Laura Fucking Ingraham.  

So helpful!

From The Daily Caller, August 26, 2025:

‘It’s Maddening’: Ex-Dem Strategist Slams Party After Day 1 Of DNC Summer Meeting

Former Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine condemned his party on Monday following the first day of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) summer meeting.

One of the first items on the DNC meeting agenda was a “land acknowledgement,” based on the premise that the Minnesota land they were on was improperly taken from indigenous people. Turrentine said on “The Ingraham Angle” that the Democratic Party was repeating its past mistakes that led it to its current diminished state. 

“Laura, you said it: it’s the definition of insanity: you just keep doing the same thing over and over again. And as a Democrat, it’s maddening that we’re still not serious,” Turrentine told host Laura Ingraham.

And this is where Cokie's Law kicks in.

Are you familiar with Cokie's Law?  If not, let the coiner of the term, OG Liberal blogger and my Bradcast radio partner, Heather "Digby" Parton, explain.  From Salon, August 24, 2015:

Many years ago when political blogging was in its infancy, I coined the phrase “Cokie’s Law,” which referred to a specific comment by pundit Cokie Roberts about the Lewinsky scandal that illustrated the precise way the beltway media excused their propensity for cheap gossip and scandalmongering. In discussing whether or not Hillary Clinton had actually blamed her husband’s childhood for his philandering, Roberts said:

“At this point it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

Cokie’s Law is the axiom that says the press can  pass judgement about anything once it’s “out there” regardless of whether or not what’s “out there” is true. This allows them to skip doing boring rebuttals of the facts at hand and instead hold forth at length about how it bears on the subject’s “judgement” and the “appearance” of wrongdoing without ever proving that what they did was wrong.

Once Carville had popped off, and Egger had written his bitchy paragraph and worried about those  "many more people" who "instinctively recoil against this sort of thing",  the pervasive contempt for Democrats which is always roiling just below the surface at The Bulwark was free to ricochet around like a fistful of bottle rockets in a phonebooth.  

They were obsessed with this story, not because of anything inherent about the facts of the story, but because of what "people out there", "voters", "normal people" would think.  See!  See!  Democrats don't care about normal people stuff.  This is why Democrats lose!

No, this is why you can never trust a Never Trumper.  Because they've still got that Conservative media wiring in their heads.  Because whenever the Conservative media machine (which they loyally served for their entire adult lives) does shit like this, it never occurs to them to attack the machine itself for wildly exaggerating some bit of nothing into Civilization On The Brink Of Collapse.  

Instead they automatically react by beating up on Democrats for...what?  For letting someone talk for 90 seconds at a two day conference?  

This is why your humble scrivener warned y'all about the Never Trumpers colonizing the Liberal media and elbowing actual Liberals out of the way.  Because believe it or not, there is another way -- a different way -- to talk about these garbage stories which the right-wing media is constantly trying (and, as they did here, frequently succeeding) to stovepipe into the wider public conversation.

You hang a lantern on it.  Contextualize it.  Talk about how the whole Fox News business model is based on taking trivial nonsense and inflating into crises and expecting us to fall for it.  To be distracted from the Epstein Files by it. Good God how stupid do they think we are?

Also, I for one would like someone to explain to me how it came to be the received wisdom of the Legacy Media that low-information or disengaged or undecided voters can be people who have no idea what's happening in the country and couldn't tell you who their senators are or their representative is if you held a bazooka to their heads.. 

...while at the same time these same low-information or disengaged or undecided voters are apparently so deeply enmeshed in the right-of-the-decimal-point organizational details of the Democratic party that they're going to give up on the Democrats and vote straight fascist party ticket because of 90 seconds at the 2025 DNC party meeting or some HR dispute that some anonymous, disgruntled staffer leaked to The New York Times (which is always only too happy to "report" on bitchy office gossip.)  

And our "allies" will never just use a Fox News talking point to bludgeon Democrats just once.  They recycle them, stacking one high dudgeon atop another until they have the highest dudgeon of all.  

Because it wasn't enough for our "ally" to wildly overreact in the pages of The Atlantic to what amounted to an HR dispute:

“The Democrats treat their fucking people like kindergartners,” Sarah Longwell, a former Republican consultant who quit the party over Donald Trump, told me. Longwell can get exasperated by her new allies on the left. When I mentioned the DNC’s in-person-work kerfuffle, it set her off.

“Republicans are over here being straight-up mercenaries,” Longwell said. “Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work-life balance.” She apologized for yelling into the phone. Democrats “are not built for when the fascists come,” she concluded...

Goodness no.  Leibovich just had to recycle the bullshit Fox News talking point from last year to make sure the knife went in all the way.  

You can watch this shit move through the system like a contrasting agent moving through a human body during a C/T scan.   From the Fox News Bombast Machine to Megyn Kelly's histrionics to a useful chump like James Carville shitting pine cones over it, then on to The Bulwark and cable news...

...then recycled and amplified in The Atlantic, then back to The Bulwark where any $10 Cassandra knows what comes next.  

A stern warning that if Democrats want to win, they need to start picking fights with other Democrats.

And picking fights with former Democratic presidents.  

Oh, and don't forget picking fights with "various groups that make up the party’s broad coalition".  

So yay!  More hippie punching. All of which is supposed to make Democrats more popular with "regular people."

And yet somehow going after Republicans -- y'know, the actual fascists who actually have a knife to the throat of American democracy -- isn't really on the menu.  

So, should Democrats follow this advice and start a circle of infighting, what exactly is it that "regular people" are supposed to suddenly notice?  That no Democrat likes the Democrats?  That every Democrat is running against their own party?  

In which case this $10 Cassandra predicts that, should any of that happen, we can all look forward to a chorus of Team Legacy Media and Team Never Trump voices decrying "Democrats in disarray."

One final note, by way of demonstrating that anyone can have all kinds of fun with Cokie's Law.  Can you believe Sarah Longwell losing her shit and yelling into the phone while she was on the record?

But, well, what'dya expect?  Chicks, amirite!  Way too emotional to be trusted with really important jobs.  

And, being a sane and decent person, you would probably bark at me.  How dare I!  And rightly demand that I take that misogynist shit back.  

But, see, under the shield of Cokie's Law I am protected.

Because under the shield of Cokie's Law it doesn't matter if it's true. 

All that matters is my assertion that some non-specific group of "people" are talking about it.

That it's "out there"  

That it's "in the air".

That it's what I'm hearing.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 970: Lifeboats And How To Burn Them

"The Nazi regime is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination."  --Winston Churchill, June 22, 1941.

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Happy F.A.T. Tuesday

 

That day each year when we gather together to perform the Defragging of the Hard Drive.

IYKYK

I Am The Liberal Media

For Your Friend Who Does Not Understand How Elections Work

Feel free to pass this along to any fellow travelers who were members in good standing of [Insert "You Must Be Fucking Kidding Me" Group Identity Label Here] For Trump" and ask them to pay special attention to Kaspar Gutman's warning: 

That's an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides. Because, as you know, sir, in the heat of action men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away.

Because boy howdy did they fuck around and boy howdy are they finding out...and boy howdy didn't their collectively follies end up dragging the rest of us (and the legacy of the Enlightenment) to hell with them.  

Reminder:  Primaries are where you pick your favorite candidate, preferably without heaping so much "I saw my opponent consorting with the Devil behind the barn" invective on your opponent(s) that, if they win, you've succeeded in damaged them so severely that you hand the election to the opposition.  This is called "Reaganing Ford".     

The general election, in the other hand, is where you vote out the fascists -- enthusiastically and without bitching -- even if your primary pony ran out of the money,

I Am The Liberal Media