“Everyone Has Their Reasons.” -- Jean Renoir.

While we are not exactly seeing the Twilight of the Self-Righteous, Liberal-Scolding Centrists, it is interesting to note that, having seen their "Fly more flags, chant 'USA!' louder, snuggle up with Liz Cheney harder" prescription for what ails the Dems come to nothing, some of the Riders of the High Horse are heading for the exits.

From CNN:

Veteran Fox News anchor and Trump target Neil Cavuto signs off after 3 decades at network

I had one encounter with Cavuto back in 2006 at the international Biotech Conference in Chicago.  He was one of the keynote speakers and was a nasty, vicious little piece of work.  

Couldn't read the room for shit.  

As I recall, he told the pharma execs in the room (big room, seated hundreds of us for dinner) that Liberals/Democrats were not just insufficiently appreciative of them, but that Liberals/Democrats were pissing in their hair and that they should withhold medication from Liberals/Democrats to teach us a lesson.

There was a little scattered applause, and a general sense of "Who the fuck invited this turd to our punchbowl?"  Cavuto apparently thought he was talking to room full of Fox News yahoos and not an international audience of venture capitalists looking to invest in stuff, tech firms looking for investors, and, generally, a crowd that was clearly confused by and hostile to the Bush administration's Conservative fundamentalist, anti-science, anti-stem cell agenda. 

From Axios:

David Axelrod ends "The Axe Files" podcast

I wanted this podcast to be one small antidote to the coarse nature of today's politics and social media culture that so often reduces people to negative caricatures and robs us of our common humanity," said Axelrod, a CNN senior political commentator, and founder of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

"I step away for now because I need to make more time for the next chapter of my own story — for my great and blessedly growing family, for friends and new adventures. But, trust me, I'll miss these conversations and I'll miss you.  And I'm sure we'll meet again... But even without the Axe Files, let us continue to be seekers of each other's stories and penetrate the godawful silos that drive us apart."

Sure, David.  That's the real problem.  It's the "silos".  Those terrible, terrible "silos".

From The Bulwark:

The Final Beg to Differ

Mona [Charen] and the gang [Damon Linker, William Galston, and Linda Chavez] bid farewell to this format, discuss what will replace it, and offer a glimpse of future plans.

Before they turned mother's picture to the wall and got outta town, the consensus opinion among these fossils was that:

1. The Democratic Party needs a top-to-bottom gut rehab but,
2. No one is really sure what that should be. Except, 
3. It should involve Democrats getting a lot more "centristy"

Now they belong to the ages.

Matthew Dowd now apparently spends his days posting the birthdays and death days of various notable individuals on BlueSky.  I'm not kidding.  I'm also not sure if you can call this "quiet quitting" from a reputation rehab job at MSNBC that had devolved into a periodic drive-by slot in which he agrees with Nicole Wallace about whatever.  But now that Mr. Dowd is about to get an more massive dose of the "Disrupt the K'rupt Duopoly!" disruption which he so earnestly and aggressively worked for back in 2016, he seems to be looking to become part of the digital wallpaper.  At least until he and his feather-light "principles" can figure out which way and how hard the wind is blowing.

Bret "Bug" Stephens of The New York Times isn't quiet quitting.  Instead, being a thin-skinned, wrong-about-everything asshole and congenital coward, he is using his media real estate to loudly denounce his former Never Trumper brothers-in-arms.

Without ever having to suffer the slightest physical or professional inconvenient -- and certainly without being dragged down to Room 101 -- Stephens has reached the Orwellian “Do it to Julia! Not me!” stage of his conversion.   

Soon you will find him down in the NYT cafeteria, almost unconsciously tracing "2+2=5" with his finger in his butterscotch pudding.  Then it'll only be one more step until he tearfully realizes that everything is all right.  

His struggle is finished.  

He will have won the victory over himself. 

He will love Big Orange Brother.

As 2024 winds down and the country girds itself as best it can for a headlong tumble into the fascist abyss of a confederacy of dunces, it seems the Pod Save lads and the Bulwark lads are trying to form some sort of bro-lliance of privileged, white, out-of-power millennial MSNBC-adjacent coastal podcasters.   

So if, for some perverse reason, you happened to be in the market for a podcast where where a Pod Save lad and a Bulwark lad spend 10 minutes obsessing over the heath insurance CEO killing and warning us weak-minded Liberals that violence never resolves anything...

[Really? Never?]  

[Are we 100% sure about that?]

...followed by 15 minutes of slagging Joe Biden, boy howdy do have a podcast for you.

At the other end of the spectrum, one would never mistake Stephen's NYT colleague, Paul "The Shrill One" Krugman, for a bootless grifter or pissy Centrist scold.  But based on his output on SubStack, and reading between the lines of this farewell column in The New York Times, it seems clear that he had seen the future and it no longer involved trying to write while continuing to wear the Gray Lady's mildewed straightjacket.

The Chaos Monkeys Have Already Taken Over the Zoo 

The peddlers of misinformation are high on their own supply

Meanwhile, amid all the flux and uncertainty...

I Am The Liberal Media

David Brooks, When The Shrooms Hit

 

This week, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has shuttled fully back to his self-appointed role as the Acela Corridor Pantograph's Faith and Humility reporter.

And this week he'd like to talk to you about the Lord.

So if you would like to read all +4,000 words (no kidding) of Mr. Brooks' exegesis on poorly understood theology and his "faith journey", well, this is a free country for awhile longer, so suit yourself.  

If you want the shorter version, 

Since faith is an inherently internal experience, judging the validity of someone else's faith is a fool's errand.  

However, as America's leading Brooksologist, I would be failing in my duties if I didn't mention two things.  

First, over the past 20 years or so, whenever events have shown David Brooks to have been drastically, catastrophically wrong about big, important things (which is always) as sure as night follows day, Mr. Brooks will find something else to write about.  Something other than the rubble of his failure that is staring him in the face.  Sometimes it's flat out denial.  Sometimes it's wishcasting about the future: spinning fairy tales about how awesome everything will be sometimes in the near future when the present unpleasantness disappears.  Frequently Mr. Brooks manufactures an imaginary Liberal villain so that he can lash out at Both Sides and put what is very clearly a Republican catastrophe into the Both Sides Do It rear view mirror. 

Or, as one cynical wag put it back in 2019:

Whenever he publicly belly-flops into the empty swimming pool of his own boundless ignorance of how America lives and works and thinks and feels in the Land Beyond The Hudson (as he did last week), Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times frequently retreats to the one safe place where he can pontificate in galactically-sweeping language and no one will dare gainsay him. 

The pulpit...

Second, I cannot help but notice that, according to Mr. Brooks' own timetable...

In 2013, I experienced an acceleration of those moments. This time they were not mere spooky experiences, but illuminations — events that tell us about the meaning of life and change the way we see the world. One morning in April, I was in a crowded subway car underneath 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue in New York (truly one of the ugliest spots on this good green earth). I looked around the car, and I had this shimmering awareness that all the people in it had souls. Each of them had some piece of themselves that had no size, color, weight or shape, but that gave them infinite value. The souls around me that day seemed not inert but yearning — some soaring, some suffering or sleeping; some were downtrodden and crying out.

....he was having his long, warm hot tub of the soul at exactly the same moment he was dumping his wife and taking up with his much younger research assistant.  From Slate:

David Brooks’ Scant Self-Awareness

This morning, David Brooks published an enigmatic column titled “The Thought Leader” that basically offers a satirical recounting of the life and times of a member of America’s opinion elite. The column set off a lot of intra-office debate, in part over the question of how self-aware Brooks was while writing the piece. Something I learned in the discussion is that Brooks and his longtime wife, Sarah, were getting divorced as of last month. That’s an awful experience, and it’s hard not to feel sad for anyone going through it.

At the same time, I really do think it puts the question of self-awareness squarely on the table. Brooks’ columns have frequently worried about the “dangerous level of family breakdown” in America, and have specifically put this crisis of family stability at the center of class politics. You’ll never see a Lorenz curve plotting the drastically inegalitarian distribution of capital in the United States in a David Brooks column. Instead you’ll hear about how that kind of thing is a distraction from the real issue of the lower orders’ own misbehavior...

After which there followed, what seemed to these tired, old eyes, an endless number of thinly-veiled  Sad Bastard Lashing Out At His Ex columns, which no one at The New York Times saw fit to rein in.  

And eventually, like so many pilgrims and seekers before him, Brooks' path to enlightenment led him to an airport bar in Newark where he peered deeply into his second or third glass of overpriced scotch and discerned therein the reasons "Americans think the economy is terrible."

"Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the illimitable domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination." -- Swami Sivananda

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 864: President Musk ...and More Royko

"It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway', but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies." -- Mike Royko

Links:  

• 
  

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

And He'll Huff And He'll Puff...

 

...and the whole rest of that story.

Except, in the real world, Republican weaklings and cowards keep scampering to weaker and weaker shelters.

From The Washington Post:

Republicans reject spending bill, under pressure from Trump and Musk

Unless Congress acts, a government shutdown deadline looms just past midnight Saturday.

Republicans rejected House Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan plan to avert a government shutdown, as President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk joined a broad swath of the House GOP on Wednesday to condemn a compromise bill full of Democratic policy priorities.

The rebuke, which built steadily through the day and culminated with a long written statement from Trump in the late afternoon, has forced Johnson back to the drawing board on a plan to prevent a Christmastime shutdown — and maintain the support of his chaotic conference to be reelected as speaker early next year.

“Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead,” Musk boasted on X, the social media site he owns, after he spent the day blasting the legislation. “The voice of the people has triumphed!”

Johnson has not outlined a backup plan, and multiple people familiar with the real-time conversations said the next step remains unclear, as leaders would need significant support from both parties — and Trump — to pass a funding extension. If Congress doesn’t extend the deadline, most federal operations would shut down at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, though the effects of a shutdown wouldn’t fully kick in until Monday...

Wow, so there really is a War on Christmas.  And its the Republicans who are trying to blow old St. Nick out of the sky.

Well Feliz Navidad, kids, and a Happy FAFO New Year to all the meatbags who voted for this clusterfuck.  

Burn The Lifeboats

Gods Die.

 

"And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered." -- Neil Gaiman

Slowly, grindingly the hydraulic pressure of reality drive Never Trumpers -- who still openly despise Liberals -- to adopt the Liberal critiques of the party and movement to which the dedicated their entire adult lives and which, in the end, drove them out.  

No wonder they still despise us.

Burn The Lifeboats

I Am Spartacus

From The Guardian:

“We want retribution and we’re going to get retribution. You have to. It’s not personal, it’s not personal,” Bannon said to the raucous room. “They need to learn what populist, nationalist power is on the receiving end.

“I need investigations, trials and then incarceration. And I’m just talking about the media. Should the media be included in the vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump? Should Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC and Rachel Maddow and all of them?

“We want all your emails, all your text messages, everything you did. You colluded in a conspiracy with Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi, Lisa Monaco and Jack Smith,” Bannon said, name-checking the attorney general, former Democratic House speaker, the deputy attorney general and the Trump special counsel.

The threatening rhetoric, and especially the concept of using a criminal conspiracy statute against Trump’s political enemies, has been permeating through Bannon’s orbit for some time since the election. But Sunday night’s gala was the first time it was floated outside of the Maga ecosystem...

I am Jack Smith.

I am Andrew Weissmann.

I am Lisa Monaco.

How about you?

I Am The Liberal Media

They Say Imitation is the Sincerest From of Flattery

Well then, consider that this, from the podcast Keith Olbermann posted this morning at 5:00 AM EST...

Next [Trump] will be suing people for voting for Nikki Haley, or for moving out of a Trump building, or for thinking bad thoughts about him like in that Twilight Zone episode...

And this was posted by me last night at 10:40 PM CST:

But It’s Good That You’re Appointing Lunatics, Traitors and Criminals, Donald...

So, I guess, consider me .... "flattered"?

Also,  "Money is the sincerest of all flattery. Women love to be flattered. So do men." -- Robert A. Heinlein.

I Am The Liberal Media

But It’s Good That You’re Appointing Lunatics, Traitors and Criminals, Donald.

It's real good. 

And tomorrow - tomorrow's going to be a real good day!

IYKYK.

Burn The Lifeboats