Why Does The New York Times Keep Handing Columns To Conservative Nitwits: S.E. Cupp Edition

America's Newspaper of Record gave pride of place today to Ms. S.E. Cupp who you may remember from her meteoric rise to Conservative Fox News pundit middle-management because she wore smart girl glasses and presented other attributes which would not be readily apparent if you had only

been listening 

to her 

on the 

radio.

But  her act got old, and Fox News was already wildly overstocked with the kind "pundit" that quickens the pulse and delights the eye of the septuagenarian bigots who are their core demographic, and so Ms. Cupp found herself relegated to the wingnut pundit limbo of the HLN network where she regularly expresses her indignation at Both Sides because that's what the paying customers want to hear these days.

Well she obviously she still knows somebody because as she tries to claw her way back into the top tier of fourth-rate Conservative pundits, somebody (looking at you Bari Weiss) at America's Newspaper of Record decided to give her the paper's most valuable Sunday real estate to make the provocative claim that:

No, Not All Women Are Democrats

Well, I'm hella glad we got that all cleared up.  Great reporting there, Sippy!

And if she had just stuck to those six words  of self-evident, biological fact she probably would have been fine.  But feeling the need to pad her column out by a few hundred more words and live up to the promise her "smart girl" glasses imply, Ms. Cupp decided to ignore the time-tested advice about it being better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt, and go ahead and add more words to her banal headline.

And not even her own words!

Instead, Ms. Cupp decided to recycle the thin cultural porridge of the "chronicler of the salt of the earth for those people for whom Hillbilly Elegy is too heavy a lift", Ms. Salina Zito in order to build the central pillar of her argument:

If Democrats want to know why women voted for Mr. Trump — or more important, why they didn’t vote for Mrs. Clinton — they should stop presuming that their gender decides what lever they pull.

Salena Zito, co-author of the new book “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics,” recently surveyed 2,000 Trump voters in the rust belt. They are the kind of voters, she says, that experts overlooked in 2016 and still don’t get today.

One of them is Amy Maurer, a 43-year-old well-educated suburban mom in Kenosha, Wis. The Clinton campaign aimed ads at women like Ms. Maurer, keying in on Mr. Trump’s misogynistic remarks.

“It’s not my favorite thing,” she said when I asked her about the way Mr. Trump has talked about women. “It’s kind of like what I told my mother-in-law when she complained that her heart surgeon wasn’t very friendly: If he’s good at what he does, who cares? He’s not there to be your best friend.”

Mr. Trump wasn’t Ms. Maurer’s first choice. But he was good on the issues that mattered most to her. “I always find it funny when I hear the term ‘women’s issues’ because that term equates to birth control and abortion,” she said. “As a small-business owner, taxes and the economy are usually my primary concern when making a choice.” 

...

That more women are getting involved in politics — either by running for office, managing campaigns or voting — is a great thing. But the belief that female intensity in 2018 guarantees a blue wave is unlikely to bear out as decisively as some think. Especially not if women like Amy Maurer are any indication.

When I asked her if she regretted her vote for Mr. Trump, she replied: “Are you kidding? Business is booming, profit-sharing is up, we can give raises this year while also reinvesting in our business by purchasing some large machinery. The economy is doing great. We’re definitely headed in the right direction.”...

Except there is one, little problem:  Ms. Mauer is not, in fact, a persuadable swing voter who might be susceptible to the charms of the Democratic party if only Democrats weren't such  condescending coastal elite Hollywood Kenyan abortion-on-demand, flag-hating social justice warriors.

Or whatever.

Ms. Mauer is, in fact,  a Republican activist and party official, which Alert Tweeter Tom Scocca discovered by spending 15 seconds on the Google machine.  A labor which apparentlyexceeded the abilities of Ms. Zito and Ms. Cupp and The New York Times editorial staff.

And here's this representative Midwestern woman voter who the Democrats just couldn't craft the right message to win over, posing with her fellow members of the executive board of the Republican Party of Kenosha County pic.twitter.com/2jZPisidGY

— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) June 17, 2018

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this circle jerk of Conservative bullshit and ineptitude being lent the imprimatur of The New York Times.

I do know that the Times is never, ever going to stop handing guest columns tp Conservative nitwits,

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Everybody Goes To Brooks

"To hold a pen is to be at war."  -- Voltaire

These days the easiest opinion-having profession in these United States is the job of holding forth about what a lying, racist shit-gibbon Donald John Trump is.   It is, in fact, such an easy beat that the laziest, most trifling pundits in universe -- America's Serious Conservatives -- all wearing the corners off their thesauri finding new adjectives with which to earnestly agree with each other on camera and in print that, yes, Trump sure is a lying shit-gibbon and isn't it weird how their entire Republican Party turned into fascist cartoon characters the minute their back was turned?

It is the perfect gig for the laziest, sloppiest pundits in universe:  they can just rerun the same gaping, indignation over and over again based on a hot take on American politics that is available, for free, on any street corners and around any water cooler in this Land of the Free.

But what happens next at our nation's water coolers and street corners and sweet shoppes and strip clubs is a much harder to write about, which is why almost no one does it at all, and fewer still do it consistently and well.

What happens -- with the best of intentions and with the same "Here, kiddo, maybe this'll make you feel a little better" vibe your uncle used to have when he tucked three bucks in your pocket after your parents had another knock-down-drag-out -- is they press a David Brooks column into your hand.  A Brooks column and a knowing nod because every office park Socrates knows that Mr. David Brooks is a fooking genius and so very humble and his columns go down smooth and reassuring, like little sermons a pastor would give if your pastor was the room temperature tapioca love child of Leo Buscaglia and David Broder.

I mean Lord have mercy, why can't we all agree that every side of every issue is equally rich and valid and invalid and complex --

One of the lessons of a life in journalism is that people are always way more complicated than you think. We talk in shorthand about “Trump voters” or “social justice warriors,” but when you actually meet people they defy categories. Someone might be a Latina lesbian who loves the N.R.A. or a socialist Mormon cowboy from Arizona...

-- and forget "labeling" people and just hug it out, man!

Personalism: The Philosophy We Need

A philosophy to celebrate the infinite worth inherent in every human being.

First, whatever it is that Mr. Brooks has been doing with his life, it has nothing to do with "journalism".

Second, having read and critiqued Mr. Brooks over quite a long stretch of time, I can certify that when it comes to "lessons", Mr. Brooks has learned virtually nothing.  Well, nothing except how to make a grand living by getting the Sulzberger family to pay him a fortune to repeat the same cloying fairy tale over and over again, twice a week, for 15 years.  

At that, Mr. Brooks really is a fooking genius.

And this is why working the Brooks beat will never win friends or influence (many) people.  Because while trashing Trump in the media is now a license to print money (by expropriating the Liberal critique of the Right wholesale while continuing to pretend that Liberals do not exist) by the very people who made Trump possible, talking smack about Mr. Brooks means giving your well-intentioned uncle who just wants all the shouting to stop his three bucks back, looking him square in the eye and telling him that he is wrong.  

As wrong as he can possibly be.  As dangerously wrong as any Trumpkin.  

Telling him that before we can all be free to get nekkid and hot tub together in the warm bath of Mr. Brooks' pontifical argle-bargle --

Personalists believe that people are “open wholes.” They find their perfection in communion with other whole persons. The crucial questions in life are not “what” questions — what do I do? They are “who” questions — who do I follow, who do I serve, who do I love?

-- the lunatics on the Right who are currently, gleefully smashing every notion of comity and good government to bits have got to put the fucking ax down.

But this is not a message that most people are ready to hear, because the ethical and civic obligations that would be laid at their feet once they are forced to face this terrible truth (from Paul Krugman) --

...
On one side, tax cuts for the rich have become the overriding priority for the modern GOP, and Trump is giving them that.

On the other side, the party’s base really does love Trump, not for his policies, but for the performative cruelty he exhibits toward racial minorities and the way he sticks his thumb in the eyes of “elites.” So any Republican politician who takes a stand on behalf of what we used to think were fundamental American values is at high risk of losing his or her next primary. And as far as we can tell, there is not a single elected Republican willing to take that risk.

What all this tells us is that the problem facing America runs much deeper than Trump’s personal awfulness. One of our two major parties appears to be hopelessly, irredeemably corrupt. And unless that party not only loses this year’s election but begins losing on a regular basis, America as we know it is finished.

-- is more than their tender, sheltered sensibilities can stand.

So they flock to the pleasant moral asphyxiation of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It and coo about the sagacity of anyone who will stand in the pulpit and tell them comforting fairy tales while a for-real civil war comes to a boil all around them.

My grandmother cut out a David Brooks column and gave it to me for my birthday. Idk why she thinks I would be a fan of David Brooks. pic.twitter.com/I2zrUeud76

— Max (@soi_disantra) June 16, 2018

”The reason for life, Jacques Maritain wrote, is “self-mastery for the purpose of self-giving.” It’s to give yourself as a gift to people and causes you love and to receive such gifts for others.” David Brooks #NYTimes https://t.co/qybw8IQgbS

— Alan Kearns (@CareerJoy) June 16, 2018

DAVID BROOKS: Personalism: The philosophy we need - https://t.co/wZBMJsetWj https://t.co/LMiryCdQFa

— Philosophy Share (@PhilosophyShare) June 16, 2018

https://t.co/vwjDUtFUvY
A good, popular summary of personalism by David Brooks. And, he is correct. We need a revolution of personalism. A rare occasion when I like anything in the New York Times.

— Keith Fournier (@KeithFournier7) June 16, 2018

A powerful, timely piece from David Brooks. "Every human encounter is a meeting of equals. Doing community service isn't about saving the poor; it's a meeting of absolute equals as both seek to change and grow." #leadership #ethics @IGsolidarityNET #nonprofits #socialsector https://t.co/hEQzVoaGFq

— Ann Gregg Skeet (@leaderethics) June 15, 2018

This is an incredible editorial by the #nytimes #DavidBrooks. Personalism: The Philosophy We Need https://t.co/C72gt6MXHz

— Chris Allison (@ChrisAllisonPgh) June 15, 2018

These days, writing about the travesty of the Trump Administration is a layup on an empty basketball court:  such child's play that even the most jejune creative typist on the Right can knock together a book on the subject over a long weekend and redeem it for cash, prizes and media credibility.

On the other hand, standing out on the weedy fringes of respectability and taking up one's pen to take on the high priests of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It is a mug's game because it means taking up arms against a bewitching lie that is beloved by tens of millions of Americans.

A  seductive and profitable lie that props up the entire Beltway media establishment. 

But then again, being a Liberal has always been a job for tilters at windmills :-)

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Professional Left Podcast #445

"I don't mind if you don't like my manners, I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings."

-- Philip Marlowe, The Big Sleep

Don't forget to visit our new website -- http://www.proleftpod.com -- for all of the sweet bells and whistles:  there are links to donate to our podcast work at that site, as well as links to our swingin' Zazzle merch store,  our respective blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Kittehs! and much more. Many thanks once again to @theologop for building it all for us!


Links:

• What's Left of the Right?

The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

A Feature, Not A Bug

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Lindsey Graham, Face Down, Ass Up.

Happy Birthday, Mr. President!

You’re keeping your promise to make America safer and more prosperous.

And unfortunately for me, you’re doing all this without losing a step in your golf game!@realDonaldTrump #TrumpBirthday pic.twitter.com/PJRa54FVAP

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) June 14, 2018

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The Republican Party Cannot Save Itself: Part I

“Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.” 

-- Isaac Asimov, Foundation

If you watch nothing more of the profile of Rush Limbaugh above, at least note the part where Republicans themselves state quite clearly that Rush Limbaugh and his mob of swinish dittoheads was the reason they rose to power in 1994 (2:28).  You also might get a kick out of taking a look at the praise for Limbaugh oozing from a young GOP strategist named William Kristol, (2:57) which is immediately followed by a clip of Limbaugh urging his goons to "keep some Liberals alive" so we can be put on display to warn future generations about the dirty America-hating, Commie menace that once was the American Left.

This is the same Rush Limbaugh, who used to do "caller abortions" (loud vacuum sounds accompanied by high pitched screams) to drown out callers who displeased him. 

The same Rush Limbaugh, who believed that gays deserved to die of AIDS.

Point being, if you had been paying any fucking attention to Conservative politics at all, it was alarmingly clear decades ago that this sort of relentless, demagogic, bile-puking bullshit had become the mother tongue of the Republican party base.  Which is why this bit of video from Charlie Sykes is, to my mind, some truly high comedy (skip to the :50 mark if you want to get right to it):

For the joke to work, you have to understand that for decades, Mr. Sykes was the "Rush Limbaugh of Wisconsin".  He bought his house, and his boat, and put his kids through college trafficking in exactly the same sort of smirking, treacherous slander against the Left that brought fame and fortune and real political power to Limbaugh and all of his hundreds of degenerate imitators across the country.

Then, about 10 minutes ago, Donald Trump ripped the public mask off of Mr. Sykes' GOP and showed the world exactly what a shitpile of bigotry, misogyny, pig-ignorance and paranoia the modern Republican party has always been. 

The true Republican party 

The real Republican party.

The Republican party we on the Left have made ourselves into pariahs shouting about decade after decade.

The Republican party the American media has, for the most part, categorically refused to believe even exists -- a practice which has allowed real GOP to not only hide in plain sight, but metastasize into something so monstrous that it that can no longer be saved.

And that is the joke.  Charlie Sykes, who spent his entire fucking career until about 10 minutes ago profiting by slandering Liberals and wallowing in Limbaugh-style hate-mongering has the yams to mock Bob Corker's meandering, mush-mouthed, whatever-the-hell-that-was --

We're in a strange place.  I mean its almost...uh...uh...y'know...been a... it's becoming a...cultish thing isn't it?  Uh.   Um.  And...uh (long pause) it's...uh...uh... it's not a good place for any party to... to end up...with a cult-like situation...as it relates to ...uh...to...to...to...a president that, uh, happens to be of, purportedly of...of the same party.

-- by rolling his eyes and snarking:

Sykes:  Yeah, but, y'know, if only he'd been warned about all of this. 

Mr. Sykes went on to pontificate about how it sure would have been nice if Corker had spoken out earlier: 

Sykes: You know,  Bob Corker...[Nicolle Wallace giggling]  I'm glad he's speaking out, but, y'know, it would have been nice if he would have spoken out earlier and more consistently instead of flip-flopping back and forth.  Y'know but, y'know here we're at the...y'know...it...at a moment where every week or so, the Trumpists...the president...takes somebody out and hangs them from a lamp post and says, "OK, who wants to be the next critic?"

Now I want to go on record right here and now as agreeing with Mr. Sykes on this one point:  the act of targeting a specific critic and bringing the full weight of an entire political apparatus down on them to destroy their careers -- of "hang[ing] them from a lamp post" -- is a pretty horrible thing for a president and his goons to do to a person.

And if Mr. Sykes had not blocked me on Twitter long ago for asking inconvenient questions, I would ask him (in the same, pious, moralizing tone he used to cavil Bob Corker) where in the wide world of country music does he thinks these "Trumpists" ever got the contemptible idea that it was OK to do something like that!  

3...2...1...

Sadly, we are long are past the point at which the prion disease (as Brother Charlie Pierce calls it) or the Rovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (which I call it because I got there first and I'm stubborn that way :-) has corroded the brains of the American Right to the point where collapse is is inevitable.

From the aforementioned Mr. Pierce:

Trumpism Is Just an Offshoot of the Real Cult: Modern Conservatism

Need proof? Take a gander at Iowa's Steve King..

We have, in fact, been past that point for decades ("In The Beginning...")

These days the Right no longer has even a rudimentary moral exoskeleton capable of holding it upright against the gravitational pull of its own depravity   And the Both Siderist crutch the media has been using for 20 years to prop up the corpse of the GOP into a grotesque caricature of relative respectability is steadily disintegrating.   

The Fall of the Right has arrived. 

And as they fall, they are trying to drag as much of the rest of the world down with them, which means we are now fully within the interregnum, and the only thing that remains to be decided --  the only thing that remains within our power to change -- is how long with this period of Conservative barbarism will last and how catastrophic it will be?

From The Lion in Winter:

Prince Geoffrey: My you chivalric fool... as if the way one fell down mattered. 

Prince Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

End Part I.

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Meet The New Flak

Same as the old flak.

From CBS:

Sarah Sanders, Raj Shah planning to depart the White House

However much they splay Musical Mouthpiece on the deck of the Andrea Doria around, in the end, everybody in the White House works for Vlad the Elector.

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Guys, David Brooks Is So Much More Than David Brooks

You would not know it from reading any of the +1,300 columns that Mr. David Brooks he has written for The New York Time over the past 15 years (which are, for the most part, +1,300 slight variations of the same column) but Mr. David Brooks is so much more than just a man who has gotten wealthy repeating the same bullshit over and over again long past the point where it stopped being funny and started being a cult.

Mr. Brooks is, in fact, a fascinating social experiment:  a social experiment that has gone drastically wrong.  Specifically, an experiment in just how far the Sulzberger family is willing to go and how much they are willing to spend to prop up a mediocrity whose only job is to repeat the same stupefying fairy tale, twice a week, every week, forever.

It should have lasted a year.  Like when the Times hired Mr. Brooks' former boss, Bloody Bill Kristol, to immunize themselves against the angry emails and blog posts of berserk, pro-Bush chicken-hawks.  And then cashiered Kristol after a year because he was a shitty writer and wrong about everything

A year, it should have lasted.  Maybe two, for a goof, or to settle some weird, rich-guy bet.

But 15 years and many editors and mass layoffs later, it is too late to pretend that Mr. Brooks is anything but the true voice of The New York Times.  Its institutional soul.  Which got me wondering how exactly Mr. Brooks landed the easiest job in all of American journalism?  What was it about his initial offerings -- his first efforts as a guest columnist -- that so completely wowed the Sulzberger family that they took stock of this senior editor and Liberal-hit-piece hack from The Weekly Standard and said, "Hell, I like you!  You can come over to my house and fuck my sister!"

Well that is a question we will answer right now because here, kiddies, are a few snips from Mr. Brooks second outing as a New York Times guest columnist.  His inaugural piece from January of 1999 was on the topic of Clinton/Lewinsky thing, and so he was invited back three months later to lend his keen insight into...

...the Clinton/Lewinsky thing.

If you are not inclined to read it, let me summarize:  basically, Mr. Brooks believed that Monica Lewinski was a trollop who was getting what was coming to her, but none of it matters because of our "trash culture".    Which, for some reason, had something to do with organic vegetables and hiking boots.

Prime-Time Monica 

By DAVID BROOKS
MARCH 5, 1999

Didn't Monica Lewinsky glow the other night? Didn't she look oddly happy during her interview on ABC? And no wonder. Here is a young woman who's been consuming glossy culture all her life: following the soaps, reading the women's magazines, watching Barbara Walters ask the celebrities how they feeeeel.

And then it's her turn! Barbara Walters is asking her how she feels. This is the grand moment! No wonder she was such a fabulous performer. This is her milieu. And it's striking how seamlessly she blends into the prime-time publicity machine.

On Wednesday night with Ms. Walters she started talking about her undergarments, and in a few minutes, ABC broke for a Victoria's Secret commercial showing a bunch of women hanging around a castle in tiny underwear...

So Monica Lewinsky isn't some challenge to the moral order, or the amoral temptress some have made her out to be. She's a figure altogether more familiar to our age, a media-savvy victim. Bill Clinton didn't love her, but the camera does...

And along with her fine qualities -- her intelligence and vivacity -- she's also something else that's quintessentially of our age. She's almost beyond shame and embarrassment...

So of course she told her posse of friends all the intimate details. Of course she told Mr. Clinton she was bedding another man over at the Pentagon....

And in keeping with the glossy culture that is her home, everything in this world has to be overhyped. Everything has to be inflated into something grander than it is...

Later, Ms. Lewinsky described Bill Clinton as her sensual soulmate. She used the word sensual constantly and proudly Wednesday night. I counted eight uses of the word in a five-minute span. But it is hard to fathom what was sensual about their hallway and telephone trysts...

But in using the word soulmate, Ms. Lewinsky again displays her ear for the argot of the media age. These days you can scarcely turn around in a bookstore without stumbling across a book with the word soul in the title, and everything from organic vegetables to hiking boots comes enveloped in the thick fog of market-savvy pseudo-spirituality.

...Everybody else in our trash culture appropriates profound concepts for shallow ends. Why should Monica Lewinsky be any different?

The Lewinsky affair and the whole mountain of media output it has produced leave us in this bewildering lukewarm world...

A couple of times on Wednesday night Ms. Walters tried to get Ms. Lewinsky to talk about the morality of her behavior. But asking her to reflect on right and wrong was like asking her to use the language of another universe...

The world we've been peering into is somehow beyond good and evil. It's a world of sentimentality, of makeovers, of people who tear up just before the commercial breaks...

...The Greeks got terrifying and grand tragedies. We're more forgiving, more comfortable and more bourgeois. And so we get, in the perils of Monica Lewinsky, a night of pretty engaging television, which we'll probably all have forgotten by next week.

This year marks Mr. Brooks' 15th year as The New York Times' senior conservative brain wizard and America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual.

So maybe he wasn't so wrong about our "trash culture" after all.

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I Am Amazed That Anyone Is Still Pretending To Be Amazed By This

Soledad O'Brien calls this "So, so bad"

And now, exactly 31 years later, @realDonaldTrump is making history as well. https://t.co/yDMd6rd3KT

— GOP (@GOP) June 12, 2018

And David Frum asks, "How low can [the GOP] go? This low."

I, on the other hand, pariah Libtard that I am, feel compelled to ask, how in the hell is anyone surprised by this?

And by way of elaboration, here for is a post of mine from 2010...long before Donald J. Trump slithered down the Elevator of Doom and into the hearts of Republican voters everywhere.

"...My Name is Ozymandias
king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. 

However much the various factions and splinter groups on the Right may bite each other's ankles in rage and shock at each other's alleged heresies against the True Faith, the blunt truth is that they're all the same species of drunk drinking from the same bottle, all bombed out of their minds and hanging from the same rail in the same stinkhole bar: The House of Reagan.

From the bitterest Expats to the hardest-core Palinite Cultist, their internecine pissing matches are always over who the "real" inheritors of Ronald Reagan's legacy really are. And the truth is, they are all Reagan's ugly babies.

So when [Andrew] Sullivan calls out Andrew Brietbart's race-baiting as an --

"...old and disgusting canard devised by the Becks and Hannitys and Limbaughs in the tradition of Wallace and Atwater and McCarthy."

-- notice how carefully and gingerly he skips right one over the disgusting race-baiting of two of his Conservative Heroes (Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder) who both waved the Confederate Flag and worked the racist dog-whistle with exactly the same, cold Brietbartian premeditation, and for exactly the same reason: because every Conservative knows deep in their heart that sucking Confederate and Fundamentalist dick is the only way they ever gain power, prestige, profit and victory.

And so they do it, knowing that people like Sullivan and David Brooks will forgive them.

And excuse them.

And forget...

...forget...

...forget.

And that specific, mutagenic strain of "Wingnut Doublethink" -- the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.

Because however much one may agree with some of the Conservative Expat crowd over specific issues such as same sex marriage and marijuana legalization, as long as they cling to their own, obsessive Strategic Forgettery, they will always be fools and clowns and chumps. Because as long as they depend on their own Big Conservative Lie to tuck them in at night and tell them that they're good little Reaganites, they cede any pretense of occupying any moral high ground from which to render judgment on the Palinites and the Beckians.

The homunculi who are left inside the Big Tent Batshit Thunderdome are either stupid, evil or nuts...or some cocktail of all three. And if the trend lines of the last 30 years have proven anything, it's that Conservatives are such willing collaborators in their own brainwashing that neither the Expats or the Palnites and their Elite Enablers are capable of retaining any political inconvenient fact longer than 13 seconds (or, in the case of the Palinites, reacting to anything other than what Rupert and Rush tell them to be angry about this time.)

There is absolutely nothing left sifting around inside their mushy, angry skulls except that sparkly aluminum sand that good people at Ohio Arts use to make the Etch-a-Sketch.

Shake-shake-shake...and Ronald Reagan never sold weapons to terrorists, funded an illegal war, raised taxes four times, or left behind the largest deficit in American history up until that time.

Shake-shake-shake...and Bush the Elder never hired Lee Atwater.

Shake-shake-shake...and what Southern Strategy?

Shake-shake-shake...and George W. Bush is the Greatest President Ever, you filthy, Liberal traitors!

Shake-shake-shake...and where did you ever get the idea that anyone in the Conservative Movement supported that "Progressive" George W. Bush?

Shake-shake-shake...George Bush who?

Shake-shake-shake...Sarah Palin never supported the bailout!

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits don't matter.

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits are worse than six Hitlers!

Shake-shake-shake...the Kenyan Usurper's deficits are destroying America.

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Republican"? I'm a Conservative!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Conservative"? I'm an Independent!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Independent"? I'm a Independent/Conservo/Libertarian!

To win elections, crush the New Deal and sell the United States into perpetual corporate serfdom, it was Ronald Reagan and the rest of the Conservative Elites who spent years and years and literally billions of dollars to create the infinitely reprogrammable army of imbeciles from which many of those same Conservative Elites now flee in horror.

And however hard they try, will never let them forget it.

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Today In Both Sides Do It: Bloody Bill Kristol is Not Your Friend

Remember kids, unless they say the Magic Words -- "The Left was right about the Right all along", or even "I was wrong" -- you cannot trust a Never Trump Republican or Joe Scarborough-brand "Independent".  Since they have no principles or ideology but self-preservation, their short-term plan is to make enough "We're All In This Together Now!" noise to ride our Blue Wave momentum right past the present crisis and position themselves in exactly the same place they were in 2007: funders intact, media cronies on-board and their Both Siderist narrative ready to go"

It turns out many of today's intellectuals on the Right are like prior generations of intellectuals on the Left: Behind all the high-flown rhetoric is a worship of power when exercised by a leader on their side, a worship more intense the more thuggish the manner of exercise.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) June 10, 2018

Obama: We're leading from behind.
Trump: We're America, bitch!
America: We can do a lot better than either of these.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) June 11, 2018

And I am telling you right now, if yet another cabal of unprincipled Republican goofs are let off the hook for their part in building the Republican monster machine, we will live to regret it once again. Because before our celebratory "Dump Trump!" champagne has gone flat they will have already used their funders and their media cronies to bulldoze their own narrative right in the heart of the mainstream media. A fairy tale that, no matter how terrible "Trumpism"may have been, the Resistance was just as rotten. Hell, they're work-shopping that Big Lie right now.

And as we are once again are forced to fight another stupid war on three fronts -- against the mainstream media, against the Right, and against the Steiniacs and Spleenwaldians who will happily throw in with anyone who promises to crash the system in the name of Destroying The K'rupt Duopoly -- the Never Trumpers (who will have gone back to calling themselves "Republicans") will have their next batch of publicly-passable Conservative neofascist hobgoblins all lined up and ready to go as the Sensible Centrist alternative to The Extremes on Both Sides.

(h/t Alert Reader LeighAnn for pointing out the first Kristol tweet)

Behold, a Tip Jar!