Friday, December 16, 2016

Professional Left Podcast #366


"I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble."
-- Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon


Links:



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My Response To Charlie Sykes' "Where the Right Went Wrong"

UNITY


The title of this post is a lie.

This is not a "response" to Mr. Sykes' article in The New York Times in which he expresses his deep regret that for the last 25 years her has been a disease vector for the rampant racism, paranoia and madness that ate the Party of Lincoln.  Yes, now that he can parlay his remorse into columns in respectable papers and guest appearances on teevee and the inevitable books deal ["Charles J. Sykes (@SykesCharlie), a talk-show host in Wisconsin, is working on a book titled “How the Right Lost Its Mind.”] Mr. Charlie Sykes would like you to know that he's real sorry and all.
...
One staple of every radio talk show was, of course, the bias of the mainstream media. This was, indeed, a target-rich environment. But as we learned this year, we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.

 That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims. Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed or at least ignored.

 We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.

 This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong.

 I’m only glad I’m not going to be a part of it anymore.
Damn betcha, America! Now that all the checks have cleared and the damage has been irrevocably done Mr. Charlie Sykes is definitely "not going to be a part of it anymore."

But rather than simply reprint every fucking thing every Liberal has written for the last 20 years to illustrate my point, let me just note for the record that there is nothing -- not a single goddamn thing -- coming out of the nib of Mr. Charlie Sykes' pen today that has not been flowing like a mighty river from the writing implements of every Liberals I know for decades.

And the response from both the Right and the Mainstream media has been absolutely consistent:  Slander. Scorn.  Mockery.  Penury,  Professional exile.

But now that another card-carrying, professional member of the Wingnut Republican Guard has broken ranks and spoken as we dirty hippies have been speaking since earliest days of Limbaugh and Gingrich?











Once again, nothing further to add.

Just hoping to remind the authors of some future edition of the "History of the Crazy Years" that one of the deeply perverse side-effects of the Mainstream Media's heroic efforts to pretend that Liberals never existed was that, somehow, it became possible for someone like Mr. Charlie Sykes to make a buck ripping off the words and ideas of the very same Dirty Fucking Hippies that he once mocked and derided for a living...without anyone saying a word.
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My Response To Timothy Egan's "The Narcotic of Trump"


The title of this post is a lie.

This is not a "response" to Mr. Egan's article in The New York Times today framing the mindless and unreasoning relationship between the Republican base and their President as a dangerously co-dependent form of addiction.

Instead it is an opportunity to shameless reprint of my own post from 2008 in which I explain that the reason the GOP base cannot be reached by reason is because of a mindless and dangerously co-dependent form of addiction between them and their depraved leaders.

From Mr. Egan:
The Narcotic of Trump

Timothy Egan DEC. 16, 2016

...
For Trump, the debasement of Romney was just another hit of dopamine — the neurotransmitter once called the Kim Kardashian of molecules. He needs a jolt several times a day. But in turn, he gives it back to you, the millions in his personality cult, and certainly the click-bait web and cable press, who need it just as much.

Earlier this month, Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, took to the floor of the House to plead for one thing from the incoming leader of the free world: “Stop tweeting, Mr. President-elect.” Not a chance. His tiny fingers can launch 140 predawn characters from the fortress of his gilded tower and mighty Boeing will lose more than a billion dollars in stock value a few hours later.

At the other end, his 17.3 million followers wake up every day eager for a shot of unfiltered Trump. It’s a dangerous codependency. “Saturday Night Live”? “Unwatchable!” Vanity Fair, after a scathing review of a Trump restaurant? “Dead!” The slaughter of civilians in the ancient city of Aleppo? Nothing. The real-world consequences of weaponized hatred are no concern for a man with a shameful incuriosity and a profound lack of empathy.

...
Pay no attention — it’s back on the road with the thank you tour. This traveling gloat-fest is an excuse for more of the Trump narcotic. He is having trouble getting A-list musicians to perform at his inauguration. The sound of an angry mob is music enough. The rallies are a contact high for both sides and — as in Wisconsin the other day — a chance for one more chant of “Lock her up!”...
From me in 2008:
Junkie logic.

The last lie a junkie tells himself isn't "I’m not an addict."

The last lie a junkie tells himself is "My being a addict doesn't matter."

And in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull.

Listen to any aging wingnut sighing and jerking sadly off to a tattered photo of Saint Ronnie -- despite the fact that the catastrophes we are now reaping were sown by his ruinous ideology -- and you can hear every addict who ever lived pining for that first Perfect High. The one they spend the rest of their days chasing, regardless of the size of the debts they run up or the ruined lives they leave in their wake.

Clinton? Objectively, Clinton qualifies as the greatest Center/Right President in history, and with balanced budgets, GATT, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, record surpluses, foreign and domestic terrorists brought to book, and an actual military victory, he arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else.

And they hated him for it.

Why?

Because Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.

And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.

So what is the last lie a Conservative tells himself? The last lie that the junkies and their suppliers both fight like hell to keep alive and twitching?

That, whether or not their ideology is depraved or deluded, it doesn’t matter because:
“Both side are always equally wrong about everything all the time.”
Doesn’t matter the who or what. The when or how. Doesn’t matter who was driving the bus towards the cliff and who was waving the red flags, throwing their bodies in front of it, trying to make it stop. Doesn’t matter who was trying to douse the conflagration with hoses shredded by 20 year of Reaganism, and who was lobbing milk cartons full of jellied gasoline onto the bonfire.


It is the lie that David Fucking Brooks pushes in the pages of the New York Times.

It is the lie that made David Broder the “Dean” of the Villagers; the lie on which the quarterly profits of the entire Murdoch media empire now rests.

Because these people and thousands more like them are not journalists or “pundits” or expert who offer facts or interpretation or a philosophical framework for illuminating and contextualizing the events of the world.

They are pushers, selling that last, nihilistic lie to the junkies on the Right who will pay any price and cut any throat to escape the fact that they are personally and specifically responsible for the destruction of the country they claimed to love in the name of a God they claim to believe in.

Which is why November 4th is so much more than an election.

November 4th is an Intervention, because the junkie-pusher spiral of the Republican rank-and-file and their leaders has finally hit bottom: we need to heal this country or lose it, and arguing -- "reasoning" -- with wingnuts and their enabling shills and hacks is as pointless as trying to reason with addicts and dealers.

The only way this country is going to be saved is by taking it away from them, school board by school board, city council by city council, congressional district by congressional district, state by state, election by election until they are driven back into the political sewers from whence they came.
+  +  +  +  +  +  

And in 2008, we did take the needle away from them.  For a little while.  But we did not take away their school boards or city councils of control over the statehouses. We did not drive Fox out of business or pauperize Rush Limbaugh and all his hundreds of imitators. And so, in 2016, the same mindless wingnut junkies came crawling back over broken glass to sacrificed their country and the lives of their children and mine to get their needle back.

Just substitute the word "Trump" for the word "Dubya" and it reads exactly the same.

And what the hell, while I'm shamelessly reposting narco-analysis stuff, here's me again, from 2011:
Shattered Like a Glass Reagan 
This ten-gallon jug of dollar-store, popskull Teabagger Lethe is actually a perfect externalized representation of how Conservatives have trained their memories to function:
  1. Invent a completely fictional Reagan. A Cartoon Reagan who never raised taxes, never blew up the deficit, never grew government, never traded weapons to terrorists for hostages, never funded an illegal war with the profits of the sales of weapons to terrorists, never presided over a massive financial collapse caused by radical deregulatory policies, never...never ...never ...never

  2. Get all droolly and tumescent and idolatrous over your Cartoon Reagan. Pour into his empty, CGI-ed suit every dram of white entitlement fury and every maudlin ounce of knee-walking-nostalgia-blitzed longing for a Better America that their own, awful ideology has crippled almost beyond recognition.

  3. Entomb any remaining memories of the last 30 years of catastrophic Conservative failures beneath a vast, lobotomizing sarcophagus so they can get on with the business of pretending none of it ever happened.

  4. Invent a completely fictional Obama and offload onto the backs of the sinister Imaginary Liberals and their Scary Cartoon Negro Leader all of their rage and racism and ferociously intractable ignorance about what has really gone wrong with America, and who is really to blame for it.

  5. Stick Cartoon Reagan and Cartoon Obama in a boxing ring so the Right can watch their Great White Trope kick the Swarthy Kenyan Usurper's Commie ass while they jerk off to "America, Fuck Yeah!"

Reagan was the opening coda of a long, wretched orgy of pure, barbaric, fuck-it-all that has roared along on adrenaline and borrowed money for more than 30 years now.

Reagan was the first mountain of coke the Right piled onto the national coffee table; the first, chilly bottles of champagne bought with stolen credit cards being popped. Reagan was the promise that the peak moment of frenzied, stomping, tribal, rage-drunk Wingnut Worldfuck -- the moment when everything was beautiful, and everyone was gonna get laid -- could be made to last forever and ever if they all just clap-clap-clapped loud enough, hated hard enough, and all agreed to never under any circumstances look back at the ruin they were leaving in their wake.
... 
Reagan -- that perfect, luminous Cartoon Reagan of their Limbaugh-addled minds -- is the greatest high the Right ever had: the one they have been chasing down the rathole of Conservatism ever since. He represents a genuine, revolutionary moment in American history: the moment when the Base came to believe --really, viscerally believe -- that they were now the Masters of All Things. When their eyes began to sparkle with a special, crazy light of certainty that they had finally found the Christian Warrior who would sweep aside the whiny, nagging, shabby carpenter-God of caution and consequence and compassion for the least of these...and place on that righteous throne a New, Muscular, Almighty Yahweh of unlimited consumption, White American Privilege, and kicking the motherfucking shit of anyone who said otherwise.

Fuck solar power.

Fuck turning the fucking thermometer down.

Fuck fuel efficiency.

Fuck sweaters.

And while we're at it, fuck pushy women and uppity Negroes too!

Those things and all the others were for fags and tree-huggers and the French, and we were Americans God Damn It. And as Americans, Reagan told us that we had a divine right to an unlimited supply of everything we ever wanted.

Supersized.

Forever.

Reagan promised the Right that those scary rules about of cause and effect and action and consequences they always been taught were primal and immutable were really just fictions invented by smarty-pants Nanny-state Liberals. That their souls were troubled and lives were being slowly pulverized not because they were being slow-roasted by Ronnie's corporate friends and backers, but because Imaginary Lefty Elites had been holding them back all these years.
... 
In manic pursuit of that first, ecstatic, Reagan Rush, the Right has at long last lost everything.

Including its mind.

+  +  +  +  +  +  

Once again, nothing further to add and no point to make.

Just trying to coat-tail my way into the footnotes of some future edition of the "History of the Crazy Years".
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Tom Waits Friday


All your crying don't do no good
Come on up to the house
Come down off the cross, we can use the wood
You gotta come on up to the house

The magic of the blues is it's sad music that makes you feel better.

And I believe in such magic.
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Thursday, December 15, 2016

My Response To Ta-Nehisi Coates' "My President Was Black"


The title of this post is a lie.

This is not a "response" to Ta-Nehisi Coates' intimate, detailed and beautifully-written meditation on the end of the Age of Obama which locates Barack Obama's upbringing and political coming-of-age as both the source of the unique gifts that won him the presidency but also proved to be a fatal blind spot that may cost him -- and the rest of us -- much of his legacy at the hands of his enemies.

Instead it is a shameless reprint of my own much, much shorter and less eloquent post from six years ago after the Democrats got shellacked by the Fake Tea Party in which I locate Barack Obama's upbringing and political coming-of-age as both the source of the unique gifts that won him the presidency but also warned that if he did not overcome the limits of those very gifts it may prove to be a fatal flaw for which he -- and the rest of us -- could pay a terrible price at hands of his enemies.

From the estimable Mr. Coates:
Obama’s greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition’s resolve to destroy him. In some sense an Obama presidency could never have succeeded along the normal presidential lines; he needed a partner, or partners, in Congress who could put governance above party. But he struggled to win over even some of his own allies. Ben Nelson, the Democratic senator from Nebraska whom Obama helped elect, became an obstacle to health-care reform. Joe Lieberman, whom Obama saved from retribution at the hands of Senate Democrats after Lieberman campaigned for Obama’s 2008 opponent, John McCain, similarly obstructed Obamacare. Among Republicans, senators who had seemed amenable to Obama’s agenda—Chuck Grassley, Susan Collins, Richard Lugar, Olympia Snowe—rebuffed him repeatedly.

The obstruction grew out of narrow political incentives. “If Republicans didn’t cooperate,” Obama told me, “and there was not a portrait of bipartisan cooperation and a functional federal government, then the party in power would pay the price and they could win back the Senate and/or the House. That wasn’t an inaccurate political calculation.”
...

But personal animus is just one manifestation of racism; arguably the more profound animosity occurs at the level of interests. The most recent Congress boasted 138 members from the states that comprised the old Confederacy. Of the 101 Republicans in that group, 96 are white and one is black. Of the 37 Democrats, 18 are black and 15 are white. There are no white congressional Democrats in the Deep South. Exit polls in Mississippi in 2008 found that 96 percent of voters who described themselves as Republicans were white. The Republican Party is not simply the party of whites, but the preferred party of whites who identify their interest as defending the historical privileges of whiteness. The researchers Josh Pasek, Jon A. Krosnick, and Trevor Tompson found that in 2012, 32 percent of Democrats held antiblack views, while 79 percent of Republicans did. These attitudes could even spill over to white Democratic politicians, because they are seen as representing the party of blacks. Studying the 2016 election, the political scientist Philip Klinkner found that the most predictive question for understanding whether a voter favored Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump was “Is Barack Obama a Muslim?”
From me in 2010:
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Left 

For his entire adult life, Barack Obama has succeeded by offering himself as the perfect midpoint between others. As a mathematical function, not a leader. As an averaging equation, not a true believer.

Since he showed up on the political radar, he has marketed himself relentlessly as
Half black and half white...
Half American urbanite, half world-citizen...
Half wonk, half preacher...
Half Harvard Yard, half Back o' the Yards...
Half red and half blue...
And this bone-deep reflex -- plus his formidable intellect and ability to rise to the rhetorical occasion -- would have prepared him perfectly for the Presidency...if this were 1960.

But it is not 1960 -- nor is he dealing with Harvard Conservatives pals or Springfield Republican pols -- and being a results-agnostic "process guy" when the process is utterly broken no longer works.

Instead, the ideologically-lockstepping Right led by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have found in Obama their perfect patsy: the Democrat who seems constitutionally incapable of counter-punching, who can only feel comfortable while suspended between two opposing positions and who will, therefor, find a compromise between opposites even when he has to invent wholly fictional opposing views to which he can cede half the playing field.

Lacking All Conviction

Mark Thoma directs us to an appalling story — apparently Obama held a meeting after the midterm to debate whether our unemployment problem is cyclical or structural.

What I want to know is, who was arguing for structural? I find it hard to think of anyone I know in the administration’s economic team who would make that case, who would deny that the bulk of the rise in unemployment since 2007 is cyclical. And as I and others have been trying to point out, none of the signatures of structural unemployment are visible: there are no large groups of workers with rising wages, there are no large parts of the labor force at full employment, there are no full-employment states aside from Nebraska and the Dakotas, inflation is falling, not rising.

More generally, I can’t think of any Democratic-leaning economists who think the problem is largely structural.
...
In order to avoid wasting his presidency, squandering the opportunity we have given him, and letting the country spiral into a permanent corporate feudal pest-hole, Barack Obama must do the hardest thing of all: he must exceed his design specifications. This is not unprecedented, but like Franklin Roosevelt the capitalist-turned-social-Democrat or Abraham Lincoln the compromiser-turned-Emancipator, Obama must let go of a central pillar of his identity and embrace the brutal fact that our modern house divided against itself cannot stand.

That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

That we will become all one thing, or all the other.

And that this is your fight, President Obama.

This burden has fallen to you: it cannot be shirked and cannot be delegated.

If you take up this challenge, millions of us will have your back, Mr. President.

But if you cannot summon the inner strength to evolve past your reflexive need to compromise with people who want to destroy you, then we are all well and truly fucked.



Nothing further to add and no point to make.

Just trying to coat-tail my way into the footnotes of some future edition of the "History of the Crazy Years".
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At The Trumpeachment Hearings...



...Graydon Carter will get a front-row seat, where he will do this, hour after hour after hour...


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Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Unregulated Capitalism Gone Wild Revisited



Many of our country's most prominent bi-line Americans are noticing-with-alarm the dead hand of Ayn Rand steering the Republican Killdozer.

Here is Jonathan Chait at the New Yorker today.
How Ayn Rand’s Theories Destroyed ‘Never Trump’ Conservatism
Here is the redoubtable Digby at Salon today.
Fountainhead of bad ideas: Ayn Rand’s fanboys take the reins of power

No, Donald Trump hasn't really read "Atlas Shrugged." Sad! But he's surrounding himself with Ayn Rand superfans
Here is The Washington Post yesterday:
The Daily 202: Ayn Rand-acolyte Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow objectivists

So I thought, just for goofs, I'd hop in the wayback machine for a jaunt back to the Year of Our Lord 2011 to revisit the stridently not-ready-for-the-grownup-table comments one of the Midwest's least prominent, non-bi-line Americans:
Unregulated Capitalism Gone Wild 

Destroyed the work economy and eviscerated public service union pensions.

Period. Full-stop.

The Republican Capitalism-Gone-Wild Solution?

Double-down and keep kicking working people in the gut until they spit up blood, agree to throw away their children's future and beg to work for sub-minimum wage.
...

For anyone who cares to look, moldering away in the yellowing pages of Ayn Rand's lesser works the entire ideological infrastructure of the Modern Right is laid bare.

Of course, unlike Heaven's Gate or Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple (which disappeared once the madness of their founders was fully unfurled), by appealing to rich sociopaths and rich-sociopath-wannabees, the Randite Cult is specifically engineered to be a for-profit enterprise and so it goes on and on (Believe me, if the Branch Davidians had had the foresight to make their insanity capitalist-friendly, today, instead of being vaguely remembered as "that nut who set himself and his followers on fire", David Koresh would have his own show on Fox.)
Wow.  Very shrill.  Very rude.

And this mysterious-yet-strangely-charming bastard also had the fucking nerve to underscore his sorehead bitching with actual quotes from the actual dead Ayn Rand and her actual acolytes:
...
And how long has this Kult of the Kochsuckers been lighting votive candles at the altar of Unregulated Capitalism-Gone-Wild?

A long...
"Regulation -- which is based on force and fear -- undermines the moral base of business."
-- Alan Greenspan, "The Objectivist Newsletter", 1963
...Long...
"In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen."
-- Ayn Rand, 1961 Ford Hall Forum lecture
...Long...
"One of the most widespread delusions of our age is the belief that the American worker owes his high standard of living to unions and to "humanitarian" labor legislation."
-- Nathanial Branden, "Common Fallacies About Capitalism", 1962*
* ("..former student and one-time romantic partner of novelist Ayn Rand, Branden had a prominent role in promoting Rand's philosophy, Objectivism.)
...Long...
"If you want to gauge collectivist's theory's distance from reality, ask yourself: by what inconceivable standard can it be claimed that the broadcast airwaves are the property of some illiterate sharecropper who will never be able to grasp the concept of electronics, or some hillbilly whose engineering capacity is not quite sufficient to cope with a corn liquor still -- and that broadcasting, the product of an incalculable amount of scientific genius, is to be ruled by such owners?
...

"There is only one solution to this problem and it has to start at its base: nothing less will do. The airways should be turned over to private ownership. The only way to do it now is to sell radio and television frequencies over to the highest bidders...-- and thus put an end to the gruesome fiction of 'public property'."
Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist Newsletter", April 1964
...Long...
"In a mixed economy, every government action is a direct threat to some men and an indirect threat to all. Every government interference in the economy consists of giving unearned benefits, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others. By what criterion of justice is a consensus-government guided? By the size of its gang."
-- Ayn Rand, 1961 Ford Hall Forum lecture

...Time.
"Should citizens have their wealth expropriated to support an educational system which they may or may not sanction, and to pay for the education of children who are not their own? To anyone who understands and is consistently committed to the principles of individual rights, the answer is clearly: No."
-- Nathanial Branden, 1963
Then this unnamed poopyhead had the sheer brass to insult one of the greatest half-term American quitters who ever quit everything like a boss:
Then dumb the whole mess down about 70% and stick it into a pair of fuck-me pumps and you have Sarah Palin.
Sadly we only had enough pocket change for one quick trip in the wayback machine, so we must now return now to the bitter dregs of 2016 where exactly the same, unholy mess been dumbed down an additional 12.5%.  Where -- thanks to the Kremlin, the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism and the head of the FBI really putting their collective backs into it -- we now have President-elect Trump.

Oops!  I had another dime in my pocket!  Just enough for one more short wayback moment from the same snippy crier-of-wolf, this time from the Year of our Lords 2008.  It seemed somehow appropriate to the occasion:



As we stare the latest Conservative catastrophe in the face, it is helpful to remember that, in practical, WYSIWYG terms, the key difference between Liberals and Conservatives is actually very simple:
The further Liberals stray from their core values – inclusive/democratic, social justice, fair trade, decent wages, excellent public education, religious tolerance, national health care, respectful diplomacy-first foreign policy, clean, sustainable energy, free and aggressive press, and caring for the environment -- the worse things get.

The closer Conservatives adhere to their core values – hierarchical/authoritarian, corporate feudalism, welfare for plutocrats, religious intolerance, drill-baby-drill, propaganda-as-news, imperial foreign policy, and fuck the future -- the worse things get.
Based on any objective calculus, the GOP should have been being flogged into the political wilderness for the next generation years ago.

The reason they haven't -- that "solid ring of diamond-hard stupid" that firewalls them against the getting what they deserve good and hard -- is their Base, which they understand to down to their constituent atoms. They know them street-by-street, district-by-district, and know exactly which buttons to push and nightmares to invoke to make them sit up and bark like trained seals. And they know we know. And we know they know we know. (h/t “Lion in Winter”)...

OK the ride is over and the park in closing, so if you're looking for me I'll be out on the porch, whittling, sipping corn liquor and trying my damnedest to look like a Rust Belt Working Class American Male so maybe David Brooks will drive by and ask me why I'm so pissed off.   
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Tuesday, December 13, 2016

The Most Dangerous People In America


One of the leitmotifs of my little blog at the edge of respectability is the subject of memory. Specifically, how the modern Republican Party would simply cease to exist without a massive, ongoing and lavishly well-funded campaign of warping and mutilating the memories of the Pig People.

As every professional sporting lady has known since the beginning of time, success in that oldest of professions depends on figuring out what your client wants to hear and then pouring it on.  The weakling wants to hear what a stud he is and the dolt wants to believe he's brilliant.


And Trumpkins, being a horde of cowards, imbeciles and bigots, are willing to pay any price to hear someone pretty or smart-looking say that they are brave, brilliant patriots.  In fact, they'll hand the country over to monsters over and over again as long as those monsters promise to keep their heroic delusions comfortably upholstered.

But there's a catch: when you make prattling delusion your master, you make memory your the enemy.  And whether it's David Brooks selling smooth, top-shelf Both Siderism to Upper East Side plutocrat shut-ins, or Hate Radio schlock merchants slinging Birtherism and Benghaaazi alley juice to the meatheads of Sisterfuck, Arkansas, the game remains the same:  keep up the fantasy at all costs and make unremitting war on anyone or anything that threatens to monkey-wrench the scam.

Which is why, for the whole wingnut syndicate, the past itself has become the boogie-man; the terrible beast that lives under their bed.  It's why there is a Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks in the first place, and why all of them -- from Brooks and Limbaugh to Jeff Zucker and Roger Ailes -- really hate Liberals.

Because we go around all day remembering shit!  And saying it out loud!  Willfully and with premeditation!

Almost ten years years ago when I wrote of the Right's mental affliction as the "...inability to form any new political memories after 1997" I wasn't kidding.

And seven years ago when I borrowed from 2 Maccabees to explain that the Right had become a lunatic machine designed to blot out it's own past by sheer force of rage and decibels, I wasn't kidding, nor was I kidding when I said that "where yesterday has been exiled, memory is rebellion". Because by my back-of-the-envelope estimation, the process of Conservative self-delusion had become self-sustaining right around 2005.  Back when the wheels really started to come off the Bush Administration and both the lapdog Beltway Media and the base of the Republican party were so desperate to duck out on righteous judgement of history that they would seize on any fairy tale no matter how patently ludicrous if it could be used to cast blame away from themselves.

The Beltway media hurriedly erected the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism -- a Safe Space in which everyone agrees that everyone is always equally to blame for everything, and so no one (and certainly not them) is ever specifically to blame for anything.

The Right flung itself into the arms of Freedom Works, Dick Armey and their Fabulous, Tea-Baggulous Bush-Off Machine which magically zapped their entire inconvenient Bush Administration record out of existence leaving them free and unencumbered to get on with the important business of hating Barack Obama for shit they were making up out of whole cloth every day.

And once you take that Faustian bargain, it doesn’t matter how fine your suit is or how surgically superior your tits may be; you’re just another grifter, straining a different grade of ethical sludge for krill and helping to drown your own country in a vast conspiracy of forgetting.  And that road only leads down and down and down...

...which brings us to Fox News lunatic Judge Jeanine Pirro and the Blue Gal challenge (h/t Crooks & Liars.)

You see, in order to sell the legitimacy of Il Douche and his entourage of madmen, Russian dupes and plutocrats, it has now become necessary for the American Fascist Party to pivot 180 degrees, completely unremember the last eight years, and roll out a new and wholly false narrative about the Obama Administration.  And that project begins with Fox News meatbags like Pirro announcing to the Pig People what the New Party Line is damn well gonna be.

And Blue Gal double double dog dares you to make it past the first minute of this video without shutting it off in disgust.


Here is a bit of the transcript:
We have a new president elect…. His name is Donald J Trump. So move over Barack. Move over Hillary, Harry, Jill and all you namby-pamby pathetic losers still crying in your grande double shot skinny lattes...

There was a time in this country when we united behind the flag in celebration of America's new president, our new leader. We all did so in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected.

We had high hopes for a united country, irrespective of our politics.

And it’s time for the left, assuming they are capable, to show the same dignity and class to the 45th president-elect.
Operation Memory Hole is indeed now in full effect as Fox News once again finds itself at war with Eastasia because Fox News has always been at war with Eastasia.

That whole Caucus Room Conspiracy thing?  It never happened.


Neither did Potato Day...or any of the other unhinged wingnut freakouts captured in this vintage Daily Show montage from the first 10 week of the Obama Administration.


The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Baracknophobia - Obey
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		Political HumorHealth Care Reform



Nothing is a more terrifying threat to a political and media regime built on the shifting sands of ever-more-ridiculous lies than the simple act of remembering the past as it really happened and speaking that truth out loud.  

Which at the moment makes freaks like you and me the most dangerous people in America.
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Monday, December 12, 2016

The Return of the Night of the Long Knaves


Last year, while Donald Trump's Pussy Grabber Express was gearing up to destroy --
...the deepest bench [Republican] had in decades. Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, counts some 26 potential candidates: “John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Pete King, Mike Pence, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum, Joe Scarborough, Scott Walker, and Allen West … Dick Cheney, Tom Cotton, Mitch Daniels, Joni Ernst, Newt Gingrich, and Rudy Giuliani.”
-- and all the Beltway's Very Serious People were laughing up their sleeves the very idea of a Trump candidacy, certain Liberals internet dregs were noticing that Il Douche was successfully flummoxing the Beltway Big Brains by deploying exactly same deflection-by-ratings tactics Fox News used to get around the touchy subject of Bill O'Reilly being a lying sack of shit.

In case you weren't yet born, back in early '15 I think it was, Fox News was having a fine old time pounding the shit out of Brian Williams for telling a few lies.   They were relentless, taking that High Dudgeon-Vator all the way to the penthouse and dropping refrigerators on him, until, at last, the pressure they generated became untenable and Williams was forced to quit.

But there was a small hitch.

One of Roger Ailes' top earners -- a blotchy, Irish liar and rage-monster named Bill O'Reilly -- had also been caught red-handed telling several whoppers of his own, which certainly could have made Fox News look like towering hypocrites and gradually humiliated them into sacking Bill-O the Clown if anyone on the left were capable of the kind of single-minded, full-bore, take-no-prisoners siege that is Fox News' stock-in-trade.

Sadly, other than a few stabs at it by the Kindly Doctor Maddow and several more stabs at it by powerless internet nobodies, no such siege was ever mounted and, as such, Ailes knew all he had to do was dig in, give no quarter, and eventually it would all blow over and everyone would agree to forget it.  Here is what I wrote at the time:
But eventually Bill O'Reilly being a notorious liar and douchebag stopped being a thing.  And the sad part was, lots of us disreputable Liberals knew this fight was over before it had begun because Fox News has a very clearly established protocol for dealing with people who attack their on-air celebrities:
  1. Double down and insist that you are 100% blameless.
  2. Mercilessly attack the reporter(s) who raise the issue.
  3. I was joking!  Can't you pussies take a fucking joke?
  4. Double down again and demand that they owe you an apology.
  5. Brag about your ratings, because on teevee those are the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong.
And it worked, because of course it worked.  Because time and again Fox News has shown it will hunker down forever and never give an inch in defense of its on-air thugs and trollops (from CNN Money, February 2015) -- 
Bill O'Reilly has 'full support' from Fox News chief

With its biggest star facing damaging allegations, Fox News is putting up a united front.

A spokeswoman said network executives are in Bill O'Reilly's corner, in a statement to several media outlets.

"Fox News Chairman and C.E.O. Roger Ailes and all senior management are in full support of Bill O'Reilly," the spokeswoman said.

Fox News did not respond to CNNMoney's requests for comment.

O'Reilly, the top rated host in cable news, has been forced to defend himself since Thursday, when a report from Mother Jones cast doubt on claims he has made about his time covering the Falklands War for CBS News in 1982. At the time, O'Reilly and his CBS News colleagues were based in Buenos Aires -- far from the Falkland Islands, where most of the fighting took place.
...
-- while MSNBC has shown time and again is lacks both the guts and the strategic interest necessary to engage in siege warfare with the orcs.  Hell, MSNBC prexy Phil Griffin already cedes three hours a day, every day, to a Fox News Lite punk named Joe Scarborough, so why should anyone who works there believe for one second that Griffin will have their back if they go after the Ailes Borg Collective itself?

And so, right on schedule, the Billo-The-Liar story crawled under the porch and died.  leaving Mr. O'Reilly free to go on the Letterman show and declare himself fully vindicated and then get back to the important work of pandering to racists, slandering Planned Parenthood and encouraging the mentally unstable to murder abortion providers. 
I pointed out at the time that in the first Republican primary debate, Donald Trump was succeeding by deploying exactly the same tactics...
...because Donald Trump is not only a Fox News veteran but the living embodiment of the average Fox News viewer's id, he knows that there is a very clearly established protocol for dealing with people who attack highly-rated on-air celebrities:
  1. Double down and insist that you are 100% blameless.
  2. Mercilessly attack the reporter(s) who raise the issue.
  3. I was joking!  Can't you pussies take a fucking joke?
  4. Double down again and demand that they owe you an apology.
  5. Brag about your ratings, because on teevee those are the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong.
And it's working, because of course it's working.  Because Fox News has spent 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars training the Pig People to automatically rally to the defense of any bombastic Fox News asshole with high ratings who says he being unfairly attacked and invokes this protocol. 
Which brings us to Fox News Sunday this week, where this little gem caught my eye.

Once again, Donald Trump finds himself cornered by a very inconvenient truth:
CHRIS WALLACE:  According to The Washington Post, the CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in the election to help you win the presidency.  Your reaction?
Once again, he deflects by accusing his accusers:
DONALD TRUMP, R-PRESIDENT-ELECT:  I think it's ridiculous.  I think it's just another excuse.  I don't believe it.  I don't know why, and I think it's just -- you know, they talked about all sorts of things.  Every week, it's another excuse. ... 
And once again, he bellows about his awesome fucking numbers.
DONALD TRUMP, R-PRESIDENT-ELECT: ...We had a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College. I guess the final numbers are now at 306. She's down to a very low number.
And once again, the Pig People will sop it up with a biscuit and ask for seconds.

See, Fox News and Hate Radio have not revolutionized politics so much as they have debased the noble art of lying.  You see, like Mark Twain, I believe in...
...the Lie, as a Virtue, A Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this club remains. 
My complaint is that, by dumbing the Republican base down to the level of farm animals who are simply too stupid to realize when obvious and incompetent liars piss in their faces and razor out their pockets over and over again, Fox News and Hate Radio have debased this subtle and ancient art possibly beyond repair.  Twain again:
No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted.
Damn straight, Mark old friend.  

Damn straight.
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The Best $8 Million Of Your Money They Ever Spent


Having done exactly what it set out to do, the taxpayer-funded Republican SuperPAC known as the "Benghazi Select Committee" folded it's tents today.

House Benghazi committee files final report and shuts down

Mary Troyan , USA Today 6:07 p.m. EST December 12, 2016

WASHINGTON — The special congressional investigation into the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi is officially over now that the panel filed its final report the day before the House adjourned for the year.

The Select Committee on Benghazi initially released its findings in June but remained in place for months afterward trying to declassify supporting documents like emails and interview transcripts for public release.

The final report, not including dissenting views from committee Democrats, clocks in at more than 322,000 words. It was added to the official House record without fanfare on Dec. 7 by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the panel’s chairman.

The panel, which spent more than $7.8 million over two and a half years, disbanded at the end of the 114th Congress, before a new Congress begins in January.
...

The panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, said Monday that the final report was a “desperate rehash.”

“Republicans voted on this partisan report five months ago, but delayed filing it and completing the committee until after the election,” Cummings said. “Republicans promised a process that was fair and bipartisan, but the American people got exactly the opposite.”
Of course, traditionally the end of one Benghazi show-trial signals the beginning of the next Benghazi show-trial, but this time the trolls and traitors have packed up their red-white-and-blue Benghazi dunking stools for good because they have finally fulfilled the solemn promise they made to the Pig People years ago:  to stoke the tragic death of five Americans into a toasty Republican Reichstag Fire big enough and hot enough to cripple the candidacy of Hillary Clinton:


Because while they suck at almost everything else, nobody is better at perverting the levers of federal government power (and your tax dollars) to cynically exploit dead Americans for partisan gain than our own, home-grown American Fascist Party.
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