Non Sequitur of the Month Award

Coming in just under the wire this month is this out-of-nowhere ad for the Joys of Fracking and how it suffers at the hands of Dirty Fucking Hippies from Our Mr. Brooks:

David: But the bigger problem is that Democrats may lose the spirit of enterprise. University town voters tend to be put off by the policies favored by the aspiring entrepreneurial classes. They side with the environmentalists over the people who like pipelines and shale gas, for example.

For those of you wondering, well, where the fuck did that come from, this 11/04/11 paean to the keen insightfulness and independence of Our Mr. Brooks from Exxon Mobile's VP of public and government affairs should clear things up a little:

A Must Read: David Brooks on Shale Gas
November 4, 2011 | Posted by Ken Cohen

For those who are following the debate in this country on shale gas development, as I am, today’s column by David Brooks in the New York Times is a must read.

In balanced terms, Brooks summarizes the future energy and economic potential of America’s enormous shale gas endowment – and the current debate surrounding its safe and responsible production. The benefits of shale gas development in terms of economic growth, job creation and energy security are without question, as he points out. The only question is whether our political leaders will permit these benefits to be realized.

Brooks is an independent thinker and keen observer of the American political landscape, so his words carry weight. His column makes a valuable contribution to the important debate on U.S. shale gas development.
...

This is presented by way of a very real-world example of why the size and reach of the platform from which one is able to lob one's opinions actually matters enormously, and why simply ignoring people like Mr. Brooks doesn't work.

But before arriving at this moment of naked pimpery, (How are your Exxon stocks doing, David?) Our Mr. Brooks stopped briefly to explain that the GOP is not the Party of the rich:

David: Besides your favorite episode, he has a class problem. Many Democrats believe that the Republican Party is the party of the privileged. That’s wrong.

And to wipe his feet on the Dixiecrats who have given David Brooks' Party its margin of victory in every election it has won since 1968:

David: Some liberals imagine that there will be a proletarian revolution. They’re right. We’re in the middle of one and the proletarians have decided to back Gingrich, Bachmann, Cain and the rest. Romney does fine with college educated Republicans, but so far he hasn’t won over the working class.

After which ExxonMobile gets its free ad, and then we round it all out with this bloodless cybprg sermonette on the perils of doing either one thing or another:

David: The economically vulnerable naturally enough prefer policies that foster security, rather than policies that foster risk-taking. A party that builds its majority around these groups will eventually lose touch with the forces of disruption and vulgar ambition. It will end up placid and dispirited.

This was all brought to you via the New York Times painfully unpleasant weekly "Conversation" which one long-forgotten wag once characterized as a...

..nails-scratching-on-the-chalkboard-of-life exercise, [in which] New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins gamely plays the role of the genteel, matronly hostess whose schtick is to nervously laugh off the fact that, between bouts of butt scooting its bleeding sphincter all over her lovely duvets, a very large mad dog is running amok at her soiree and tearing the throats out of her other guests.

More canapes?

Across the table at the excruciatarium sits Our Mr. Brooks -- the mad dog's owner who (sort-of-but-not-really-see-it's-very-complicated-and-involves-Niehbur) disowned the dog once it dragged the third mutilated corpse into the conversation area (where he was incorrectly explaining something about The 60s), and tossed it at Mr. Brook's feet -- joking weakly that cleaning up after house pets can sometimes be a nuisance, and Tom Friedman told him once that lemon juice and a little seltzer can get all kinds of household stains out of one's duvets, and have you ever noticed how Liberals are generally very naughty.

My, aren't we having a lot of weather this year?

This all peppered with Lockhorns-grade unfunny jokes about big, wide, slow-moving targets like, say, Ron Paul.

The result comes across as feverishly hollow and forced as a family that has made a pact never to speak of The Bad Thing That Happens When Daddy Drinks, trying to navigate across the mine-laden surface of another morning-after of splintered furniture and angry bruises.

Advice from One Weblog Award Winner to Another

Today's Lesson: When a crutch becomes so transparent it calls attention to the weakness of the writing instead of the scope of the topic.

Subject: The profligate abuse of the "OMG can you believe...?" indignant question.

Example:

"And can we therefore put to rest any notion that Gingrich is a conservative in any meaningful way He's one of the most radical of radicals to ever seek the office as the nominee of a major party."

Analysis: This crutch shows up so frequently in your writing, Andrew, the sheer weight of it's overuse begs an entirely different question: "To whom are you addressing these questions?"

• To the air?


• To your fellow Apostates who all seem to have their "Come to Jesus" epiphanies regarding the true, monstrous nature of the loathsome cause they have served so loyally for so long about five minutes after the wingnut welfare checks stop flowing?


• The larger Conservative community who know this all perfectly well but don't give a shit because they made their pact with the Devil before you were in long pants?


• Or the Vile Liberals who are shown, once again, to have been maddeningly right all along?

Yours in Christ,

driftglass

Revisionism Never Sleeps

It can't.

Because relentless revisionism -- being the Right's main ideological bilge pump -- cannot be shut down for an instant.

Because the minute it stops is the minute they sink.

And this applies to virtually everyone on the Right, from outright, barking loons like Sarah Palin or Rick Santorum to media-respectable apostates like Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks: the minute they stop obsessively working their revisionism rosaries is the minute the reeking septic tank of actual, factual history backs right up into their lives and sweeps their careers away.

The Big Conservative Ctrl+Alt+Del this time is, once again, the fantasy that the devolution of the Conservative Movement into a cult of bigots, witch doctor, oligarchs and snake oil vendors is a phenomenon of extremely recent vintage.

That is just sort of popped out of nowhere like a Berserker Jack-in-the-Box.

This is, of course, a whopping great lie about which I have written many times, such as here in "Strategic Forgettery" and here in "A Diet of Worms".

This particular whopping great lie is the creaking iron hinge on which turns disgruntled former wingnut employee David Frum's latest, self-absolving "tua culpa" broadside against the people who, until very recently paid his salary (highlights and tints added by me for that fresh-from-the-beach look):

...
Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are opportunistic and cynical. It’s true that cynicism is never entirely absent from politics: I won’t soon forget the lupine smile that played about the lips of the leader of one prominent conservative institution as he told me, “Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.” Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose.
...

And it has been Andrew Sullivan's constant, constant, constant refrain since forever ...

The silver lining is surely that a Gingrich candidacy would put out there in clear and uncompromising terms the reality of today's Jacobin GOP. If a Gingrich candidacy were to give us an Obama landslide re-election, it would underline the death-throes of a "conservatism" reeling since the collapse of the Rove project under Bush and Cheney. It would kill off conservatism as it has been and allow for some kind of reformist brand to put down roots.

(Sure. Just like the silver lining of Katrina was going to be a radical transformation in American views of poverty, race, social justice and malignant neglect.)

It's a little like watching an huge, ugly meth lab going up in the middle of town. Everyone who bothers to stop and look can very clearly see what they are doing. Can watch the excavation. Can watch the frame going up and the wiring going in. Can watch the bullshit being stacked floor by floor.

And, finally, you can watch the tenants who were kicked out of the wingnut meth lab down the block queuing up to get in so they can set up shop and start selling their own brand of Conservative Meth-Lite.

Still, you cant spell "Revisionism" without "vision", and however ineptly designed and sloppily constructed the finished product may be

this setting up of cheap Conservative halfway houses for the excommunicated and the apostate is becoming a very lucrative business, and as Conservatism's death spiral picks up speed, more and more of its lackeys and lickspittles (and their Centrist enablers) who get flicked off of the crazy train by the sheer centrifugal force of its insanity are going to be looking for their next flop.

Preferably in a nice neighborhood where you already know everybody so no one will be asking too many nosy questions about how far up your ass your head had to be to remain a Conservatives for the last 40 years.

So contact Mr. Ken Very Big Liar to reserve your unit today!


They're going like hotcakes and all you have to do to reserve yours is flash the Secret Handshake and agree that everything bad about Conservatism happened as a result of aberrant behavior on the part of Karl Rove during the latter half of the Age of Bush.

Thus collectively coffer-dammed by the mutual nonaggression pact of Revisionism, the exiles and apostates are freed from any need to explain away their otherwise staggering intellectual dishonesty and pulverizing hypocrisy. Free to purloin as much longstanding Liberal critique of the Modern Conservative Movement as they can carry without ever acknowledging that the stinky Hippies were right all along, and that they have been dead wrong about virtually everything all along:

I fear it's just a sign of pathological partisanship and pseudoconservative paranoia about the media - or an opportunity for Limbaugh, Coulter et al. to refresh their media brands. But, hideously, it has gone further than that. The very public attempt by the Cain camp to slime and smear these women, to drag them through a grueling process of public examination and to tell potential other victims that they should "think twice" before coming forward is so neanderthal and vile it belongs to another era.

But this is a fascinating moment. Because it is where denial meets reality, a very dangerous spot for the current GOP. I once believed that the cult of Palin could bring this conflict to a head - her cult vs the reality of her bizarre, disturbed life. But it turns out that Cain could be that catalyst. ...

The current GOP is a circus tent.

...

Free to fearlessly lob as many Molotovs as they can throw over their shiny, new Revisionist Firewall without any fear of the kind of concerted, multimedia, "Hang the Traitors" blowback that has always been visited on Liberals who have been saying exactly the same things for decades:

Republican Intellectual Rigor Mortis

"When the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote Two Cheers for Capitalism, he intentionally held back from giving it a resounding three cheers. He knew there were downsides, and that conservatives had to be honest about these in order to address them adequately. But the conservative message about capitalism today glosses over these facts, proposes no principles of justice, and fails to engage—let alone persuade—our fellow citizens who worry about our economic order. Conservatives writing in defense of democratic capitalism need to spend less energy fighting off communism, and more energy developing a conservative vision of social justice, painting a picture of what a better capitalism could look like. If conservatives don’t, the only alternatives will be coming from the Left. And that would be an injustice," - Ryan T. Anderson, The Witherspoon Institute, in a highly critical review of Pete Wehner's and Arthur Brooks' Democratic Capitalism.

Reading the original, I am struck again in particular by Arthur Brooks' insulation from the actual dilemmas we are now facing: the question of whether one sector, the financial one, has become essentially part of a rentier class with a recklessness problem; the reality of such accelerating economic inequality that the political system itself, rested on a strong middle class and representative (not bought and paid-for) democracy, is at risk; the impact of globalization on the Western countries, and how it too has both relatively impoverished the working classes while heaping massive rewards on the few. I'm not saying the left has the answer on these questions. I am saying these questions are what we need to be grappling with. And the conservative movement has close to nothing to say on them.

In many ways, I regard this contemptible circus of a GOP primary campaign as a reflection of this deeper intellectual collapse. When you are reduced to writing entire books on why capitalism is better than communism - in 2011, for Pete's sake - and believe you are somehow contributing to a debate, rather than reinforcing an irrelevant orthodoxy, you are so deeply part of the problem, you have no way to fix it. Same, I believe, with a GOP front-runner dedicated to increasing "defense" spending regardless of the external threats.

Someone needs to tell these people that it is no longer 1983.

Free to say the wild, stupid things like this:

The lesson here is that today's GOP thinks that resurrecting George Wallace is the key to winning in 2012.

-- without being forced to acknowledge that "today's GOP" thinks that "resurrecting George Wallace is the key to winning in 2012" because resurrecting George Wallace has been the very successful key to GOP electoral victory for the last 40 years or so.

Free to muffle the loud, rattly skeletons of one's embarrassing flirtations with racist pseudoscience under the soft cotton batting of Tina Brown's money (via Gawker with a h/t to Ballon Juice commenter Arundel)

A Reader’s Guide to Andrew Sullivan’s Defense of Race Science

...
A million years ago, when the internet was just a gleam in Tina Brown's eye, Andrew Sullivan edited The New Republic, which was a Serious Magazine that had no time for your Liberal P.C. Dogma, such as "Race Is an Arbitrary and Unscientific Concept" or "Intelligence Is a Difficult Thing to Define, Let Alone Measure." As such, Sullivan gave a cover story to The Bell Curve, a horrendous piece of shoddy sociology about how blacks are not as smart as whites, and neither are as smart as The Chinaman; besides the general philosophical problems with writing a book-length study of the intersection between two variable, difficult-to-define, and scientifically problematic concepts, it was methodologically unsound and its data cherry-picked from a variety of unsavory sources.

It's looked back upon by most people as a profoundly embarrassing episode, even for The New Republic, which thrives on saying silly shit, and yet, Sullivan, who writes as though literally nothing has been written on the subject since, continues to insist on defending not just The Bell Curve but a general investigation into "intelligence." Weirdly, "intelligence," int his case, always seems to mean "the ways that black people are stupid," but I'm sure that's just a coincidence? He's spent the last week telling anyone who will listen that he is totally not a racist, but, look, he's just saying, scientifically, black people are stupider.

...

Setting up a Witless Relocation Program for the Apostate Right where they are guaranteed to be treated as credible sages instead of the used-up Useful Idiots of a movement that no longer wants them and where no one will rudely rub their noses in their own incredibly inconvenient pasts is turning out to be a very profitable enterprise. Which is why the last 20 feet of this New Conservatism have, of course, been heavily soundproofed (from "Only Nixon Can Go To Nixonland"):

...

Conservatives built this monster.

It didn’t just wander out of the woods one day, or land here from another planet. The Wingnut Base -- whatever teabagger, Colonial Williamsburg camouflage they’re sporting this week, and however hard the media tries to pretend they aren't who we know they are -- was manufactured by the Conservative Movement to win elections. Made right here in the U S of A out of spare parts left over from the Segregationist South, Right-wing fundamentalism, Bircher paranoia and general Archie Bunker pig-ignorance.

Conservatives built the unholy thing, programmed it, wounded it up and sent it out to do their bidding.

And everyone knows it. David Brooks knows it. David Gregory. Tom Friedman. David Frum. The goofs at the "No Labels" freakshow. The entire GOP Brain Caste.

Everybody.

25 Years Ago

If you had to pick a point along time-line of the modern United States and say "There! Right there is when it should have been clear to anyone with a brain that something deep and spinal has ruptured inside the American Experiment!" the moment when our political and media elites decided to let the Reagan Administration get away with treason would be an excellent candidate.

This bundle of high crimes, cartoon characters and lies to the American people about matters of life and death came to be known as Iran-Contra, and Charlie Pierce does an excellent job of summarizing the whole, sordid Beltway trainwreck of it.

Here's a snip:

...
The George H.W. Bush administration might never have happened, for all that would have meant to George W. Bush's eventual career. Criminalizing the constitutional crimes that are the inevitable result of the theory of the "unitary executive" might have encouraged the nation to ignore the ravings of an authoritarian lycanthrope like Richard Cheney.

I can remember what happened instead. Washington decided, quite on its own, that "the country" didn't need another "failed presidency," so what is now known as The Village circled the wagons to rescue Reagan from his crimes. There was the customary gathering of Wise Men — The Tower Commission — which buried the true scandal in Beltway off-English and the passive voice. There was a joint congressional investigation that served only to furnish people like Oliver North with legal loopholes that prevented their incarceration. There was poor Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor, whom everybody wished would simply go away, but who pressed on, making a case that ultimately forced President Poppy Bush to pardon everyone except Shoeless Joe Jackson on his way out the door in 1992.
...

In addition to all of its other tragic and melodramatic elements, Iran-Contra came with at least two additiona features that deserve to be underscored.

First, few remember that Iran-Contra led to a suicide attempt by a high ranking government official:

The Iran-Contra Affair came to light in November 1986, and a political scandal ensued. Disheartened, feeling abused by his former colleagues, and in depression over the embarrassment for the President that his actions had contributed to, McFarlane attempted suicide with an overdose of valium on February 9, 1987, saying he had failed his country.

In 1988, he pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress as part of the Iran-Contra cover-up. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and a $20,000 fine but was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992 along with the other key players in the scandal, during the lame duck period of Bush's presidency.

Second, Iran-Contra is one more metric ton of irrefutable evidence to shove down the gullets of certain Conservative death-bed converts who persist in insisting that the GOP just suddenly and inexplicably lost its mind last Tuesday, but before that everything was Jake.

800 Words

by Gravid Crooks

My friend and fellow Conservative, David Frum, has written an important column about the state of our political discourse which appeared in the New York Magazine and which has been praised for its nuanced seriousness and perspicacity in certain quarters, and derided as false Conservatism in others.

When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

By David Frum Published Nov 20, 2011

...

Some liberals suspect that the conservative changes of mind since 2008 are opportunistic and cynical. It’s true that cynicism is never entirely absent from politics: I won’t soon forget the lupine smile that played about the lips of the leader of one prominent conservative institution as he told me, “Our donors truly think the apocalypse has arrived.” Yet conscious cynicism is much rarer than you might suppose. Few of us have the self-knowledge and emotional discipline to say one thing while meaning another. If we say something often enough, we come to believe it. We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

...

Of course, some of Mr. Frum’s points are a little “out there” (such as when he suggests that the Right began going off the rails in 2008 when most noted theologians and small business groups knows that it was late 2007) but his criticism deserves serious consideration by serious people if only because, as every serious thinker understands, when one simultaneously engenders the opprobrium of the two extremes of Left and Right that are conspiring to drown out America’s great Sensible Centrist majority, you are probably on to something that is both serious and important.

Many well-respected economists and international meta-thinkers believe that while the Right has much to offer to the country, its methods have become too poisoned by the “Anything goes” mentality of the radical 60s Leftist movements. And so, just like the Penn State Child Rape Cult, robbed of their solid moral foundations by Birkenstock-shod Noam Chomsky-types, these basically good Americans fell into bad habits.

Powerful D.C. politicians and political insiders tell me every day that they yearn to do the right thing for America. They feel ever more constrained by the extremes on both sides, both in the “streets” and in the media, where every day radical shouters on Fox and MSNBC prove that the loudest and most unreasonable voices will always win the shouting war, leaving patient and serious thinkers like David Frum on the verge quitting. Over and over again:

If Mitt Romney emerges as the ultimate nominee, I’ll place my hope that the Romney who enters the Oval Office will be the innovative, solutions-oriented Romney 1.0 — and not the placate-every-GOP-interest-group Romney 3.0 we’ve seen on the 2011 campaign trail.

Any other nominee would gravely test my commitment to the political party I’ve supported since I entered the United States as a college student in the fall of 1978.

Or as renowned 20th century behavioral psychologist Dr. Hugo Hackenbush noted:

Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

David Frum joins a growing, elite consensus who recognize in Mitt Romney a kindred spirit in a predicament very similar to their own: a serious person who is forced by a fluke of history to contend in a ridiculous game with ridiculous rules and loutish fellow competitors.

And because they can see in Romney a reflection of their own situation – constantly beset by ambitious yahoos as they try to hang on to their spot among the cultural elite – they have very sensibly decided to put aside their objections to the imperfections of Mitt Romney the Candidate and focus aspirationally on the what a Romney Administration would look like.

They are taking soundings of all the important questions:

• Where will he take the country?
• How deep will his tax cuts be?
• Will he be hiring speechwriters?
• Will he be granting privileged access to journalists who get on-board early?

And so far they like what they see.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Leftovers again?!" edition.

This weekend at the Mouse Circus, elite political flapdoodle was ably defended along every front.

It is an odd thing, our national Sunday political rituals: everyone who pays attention and knows the facts knows it's a fraud, while everyone who does their citizenship fastfastfast at the political drive-thru window, grabbing whatever is on-offer by white guys in suits, takes these frauds seriously.

And so we find John Meacham on "Meet the Press" living up to the scurrilous rumor that every day he sends his valet back to the closet in search of something even more gray. The bland, gray Meacham predictably divides the the fault for the failure of our political system equally between the GOP -- for their implacable opposition to anything and everything -- and Barack Obama -- for failing* to "establish and emotional connection" to the Murrican people.

Across the table, aging historians alternately rhapsodized about their favorite dead presidents (Teddy Roosevelt would never have put up with this shit!) and played the irrelevant historical comparison game (You know, Franklin Pierce had unusually large feet too!)

Michael Eric Dyson picked up an easy nickle as MTP's "designated Leftie" and dared to use the word "racism" in the same sentence as a critique of the Shining Path Conservatives...

...while Rich Lowry (his oozing poison sacs lightly corked for grownup teevee and his soda-straw lizard tongue and nictitating membranes flicking and twitching in what could only be described as a very lonely little boy's imitation of St. William Buckley as secretly practiced a thousand times in front of Mom's makeup mirror) nodded like a Drinking Bird in a barbershop window and argued for the millionth time that the "Tea Party" is some brand-new political entity which arose in spontaneous and righteous reaction to the horrors of the Kenyan Usurper (and to some unspecified excesses of the Bad, Old Republicans that we somehow never heard a fucking word about back when those Bad, Old Republicans were in power) and that the mere existence of Herman Cain is an invincible Patronus spell against all charges that even a single drop of racism exists within the sanctified body of the Church of Reagan.

Dyson's incoherent. non sequitur "rebuttal" -- something about Obama, Rodney King and the "politics of chill" delivered in his hobo-tired blank-verse Jesse Jackson-lite singsong cadence and hobo-tired Benihana-chef-cutting-up-veggies-at-your-table gestures -- was distinctly unhelpful to the cause.

But he was on teevee and you weren't and that is all that matters.

Elsewhere, Chris Matthews mentioned that Rush Limbaugh is a racist who is very successful because he does his little, goosestep fan dance for a large, angry racist audience and Andrew Sullivan thinks the GOP's hatred of women, gays, Latinos and blacks will doom them.

Which would be sorta edgy...if this were 1986.

On "This Week...", Colin Powell played it 100% safe by moaning how our politics is now hostage to the "extremes" of both the Left and the Right. Christiane Amanpour actually pointed out that it was, in fact, one group -- the Teabaggers -- inside of one political party -- the GOP -- who had turned compromise a political death-sentence. Former Secretary of State Powell -- looking like he was trying unsuccessfully to poop out a medium-sized cactus -- allowed as how that sentiment ain't how you win Presidential elections.

(For the benefit of future historians, the whole idea that in 2011 everyone was still playing the "Winning Presidential election" game was a strange, antebellum fantasy which our Elite Overlords could not admit -- even as one GOP crackpot-candidate-of-the-week rose and vanished before their eyes like Dengue fever dreams -- had been stomped to bits by a mob of bigots, carnival barkers and oligarchs who were not remotely interested in the tedious business of governance.)

This Centrist poison is everywhere: as pervasive and pernicious as the "We're winning in Iraq!" treason was seven years ago -- and mouthed by most of the same craven hogs feeding at the same establishmentarian trough -- "Both Sides Do It" is our elite media's Loyalty Oath. Without it, virtually no critique of our gutshot democracy is permitted anywhere inside their moldering empire (From the NYT with emphasis added):

Craven Political Crudités
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: November 26, 2011

...
Buckle up, folks. This presidential race is shaping up to be an especially mean and mendacious ride, and not just because the two Republicans currently in the lead, Romney and Newt Gingrich, have demonstrated a formidable talent for improvisation, starting with thorough revisions of their own positions on health care, climate change and such. They’re a limber duo, primed to teach classes on political yoga. Gingrich’s wife probably gave him a Tiffany-bejeweled mat.

But their specific contortions and distortions are no more worrisome than the backdrop against which this campaign unfolds, one of toxic partisanship and breathless hyperbole.

Romney has been on the receiving as well as the giving end of this: last month, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee...

"Both Sides Do It" is also the quicklime they shovel by the ton onto a mass grave of big, ugly truths to cover the stink of their empire rotting away beneath their feet.

All of which proved once again that "[Getting] Up with Chris Hayes [before the farm reports]" -- in the grand tradition of best of the Liberal blogosphere -- is still plying his trade on an entirely plane of existence and setting a bar for funny, intelligent Sunday political salon so far above everything else that no one at the Mouse Circus dares to even acknowledge it.

* Thanks, Mike K.

Professional Left Podcast #103

"Prosperity is the best protector of principle."

-- Mark Twain

Da' money goes here:

...In Which We Find Thomas L. Friedman

Passed out face-first in his own Centrist vomit.

Mumbling.

Again.

Some of the chunkier bits...

"If [Barack Obama] spends his energy defining his Republican opponent, there is a chance the president will win with 50.00001 percent of the vote and no mandate to do what needs doing. If he spends his time defining the future in a credible way and offering a hard, tough, realistic pathway to get there, he will not only win, but he will have a mandate to take the country where we need to go."

There is no evidence for this.

At. All.

Barack Obama had just such a mandate.

In 2008.

And the Republican Party decided that, instead of honoring the will of the voters and help to bind up the nation's many wounds, their best move was stand on the overpass of history and lob cinder-blocks into traffic.

And to the astonishment and anger of those Liberals who had given him that mandate, Barack Obama decided it was his best move to clothesline those very same Liberals and spend a staggering amount of his political capital trying to appease those very same Republicans.

"Obama aides argue that so many G.O.P. lawmakers are committed to making his presidency fail, or have signed pledges to an antitax cult, that they would never buy into any grand bargain. I think that is true for a lot of Republicans in Congress. But I have some questions: Why are the Republicans getting away with this? Why are so many independents and even Democrats who voted for Obama sitting on their hands?"

Because "Independents" tend to be cowards or dopes who can't bear the existential weight of having to make up their fucking minds, and so gravitate to hucksters like Friedman who make up ever more elaborate fairy tales about how awful both sides are.

"I think America’s broad center understands very clearly that the country is in trouble and that the Republican Party has gone nuts. But when they look at Obama on the deficit, they feel something is missing."

There is no "broad center". Seriously, Tom, give us the coordinates of the planet from which you are reporting and we will send help.

What would it look like if the president was offering such leadership? First, he’d be proposing a deficit-cutting plan that matches the scale of our problem — one with substantial tax reform and revenue increases, a gasoline tax, deep defense cuts and cutbacks to both Social Security and Medicare.

So now that the GOP has finally dropped all pretense of civility in favor of its blood-oath to kneecap any initiative (no matter how modest) proposed by any Democratic administration (no matter how accommodating) by any means necessary (no matter how ruinous)...Barack Obama's best possible move is to should mimic the same strategy as pioneered President Mondale.

My gut says that if the president lays out such a plan — one that begins with him taking all the political risks on himself and then demanding the G.O.P. and his own party follow — he will be both defining himself and the future in a way that would earn him so much centrist support and respect that it would leave every possible Republican opponent in the dust, no matter how obstructionist they are or want to be.

Of course, Tom Friedman's "gut" has been notoriously and spectacularly wrong about virtually everything important for as long as anyone can remember, so I guess its a good thing he's as rich as Croesus. And that his rich pals let him use their media empires as his personal ideological bidet where it never matters how many times Friedman's bullshits gets debunked, disproven and generally, humiliating slammed to atoms.

Because if he had to make it on the merits, the clueless fuck would be dancing for nickels on Michigan Avenue.

Ramesh Ponnuru's Wingnut Purity Creds -- UPDATE II

Tracking the prediction I made here: "Ramesh Ponnuru's Wingnut Purity Creds to Expire"

Step One: Has moved from "In Progress" to "Completed":

Andrew Sullivan:

"An Intellectual And Political Dead End"

Ramesh Ponnuru chides the GOP for indulging in reverse class warfare, pitting the 53 percent against the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay federal income taxes. He debunks the "freeloader myth".

...

Frum Forum:

Signs of Hope, Part 3

Continuing on the theme of identifying conservative intellectuals who are making arguments that show hope for the future of the movement, I’d like to turn the spotlight onto two recent pieces from Ramesh Ponnuru.
...

Step Two: Remains "In Progress"


Step Three: Remains "In Progress"

"For years, when liberals would accuse conservatives..."

"That last point is one that liberals typically make when..."

"The other thing liberals typically say is..."

"...a kind of mirror image of egalitarian liberalism."

Because as you know, "Liberals" are a monolith who all "typically" think, speak and act in exactly the same way. And who knows them better than this odd little creature who has spent much of his professional career as a tinier, more highly-pitched "me too" sort of wingnut? An excitable political teacup poodle that you could imaging a hagged out, Hellmouth like Ann Coulter dragging around in her purse to mid-scale bars for the amusement of her friends -- something that lives most of its life tucked down among Conservatism's petrified Kleenex, urinal-cake-sized blocks of speed and ancient condoms that have long since oxidized to eraser crumbs like a space shuttle O-ring in the dead of winter.

Step Four: Unknown but likely is now "In Progress"

Step Five: Is now definitely "In Progress". From "US News and World Report".

Ramesh Ponnuru has a brave and well-considered piece in the current print edition of National Review that demolishes what he calls the "Freeloader Myth."

bark

bark bark

I Have So Much

To be thankful for.

Per User Request

I usually don't take requests, but what the hell :-)

Steve Benen goes "Full Driftglass"*

In response to Our Mr. Brooks 12,857th column lamenting the exactly equal and mirror opposite failings of Both Sides, this from the "Washington Monthly"*

The ‘third force’ Brooks has been waiting for

By Steve Benen

David Brooks seems discouraged by the era of political “stagnation,” but I have good news for him.

Each party is too weak to push its own agenda and too encased by its own cocoon to agree to a hybrid. The supercommittee failed for this reason. Members of the supercommittee actually took some brave steps outside party orthodoxy (Republicans embraced progressive tax increases, Democrats flirted with spending cuts), but these were baby steps, insufficient to change the alignment.

In normal circumstances, minority parties suffer a series of electoral defeats and then they modernize. But in the era of the two moons, the parties enjoy periodic election victories they don’t deserve, which only re-enforce their worst habits.

So it’s hard to see how we get out of this, unless some third force emerges, which wedges itself into one of the two parties, or unless we have a devastating fiscal crisis — a brutal cleansing flood, after which the sun will shine again.

Brooks gets one part of this horribly wrong. Dems on the super-committee did more than “flirt with spending cuts” — they were prepared to offer massive spending cuts, including major changes to Medicare and Social Security, in order to reach a bipartisan agreement. This is exactly what Brooks wanted them to do, and for him to ignore these details misleads his readers in a rather fundamental way.

For that matter, Brooks lauds GOP members for having “embraced progressive tax increases,” but in reality, Republicans were willing to accept some new revenue so long as taxes weren’t increased on anyone, and the offer was conditional on Democrats accepting massive tax breaks that Republicans wouldn’t even try to pay for.

Is Brooks not aware of these details? If he is, why is his description so incomplete? If not, why not?
...

Because he is a liar.

A well-paid, professional liar who is completely insulated from ever facing the consequences of his lies or even any uncomfortable questions about his lies by his New York Times title, and coterie of friends and co-conspirators in the Beltway Media.

A liar.

Always has been.

Always will be.

Welcome to the club, Steve, and allow me to reiterate what I wrote one post back. That all of the ridiculously transparent "Both Sides" fairy tales spun by Conservative Apostates come from the one, basic American truth that they dare not acknowledge: that the Dirty Fucking Hippies were right about the Right all along, and that every single grudging step the Obama Administration has made in the direction of good politics and good policy has been a step away from the bullshit "Both sides do it!" Centrist cult of David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, David Gregory, David Frum, Tom Friedman and virtually the entire Beltway Media...

...and towards the Liberals.

*(h/t reader I.R. for sending this along.)

*(Thanks, Tild. As a hangover from my last post, I'm sure I had "Stephen Vincent Benet" in my head as my fingers were doing their thing :-)

lynx

Liberals are the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World

"Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world"

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

So Andrew Sullivan has very dramatically quit the Party of God (from yesterday.)

It was never my party, but it was one to which I could once accord regular agreement and respect. No more.

Again (from 2009.)

It seems to me that now is a critical time for more people whose principles lie broadly on the center-right to do so - against the conservative degeneracy in front of us. Those who have taken such a stand - to one degree or other - demand respect. And this blog, while maintaining its resistance to cliquishness, has been glad to link to writers as varied as Bruce Bartlett or David Frum or David Brooks or Steve Chapman or Kathleen Parker or Conor Friedersdorf or Jim Manzi or Jeffrey Hart or Daniel Larison who have broken ranks in some way or other.

After his 2009 resignation came a very dramatic laundry list of "I cannot support..."'s which looked remarkably similar to the basic critiques which Liberals have been leveling at Modern Conservatism for most of my life, and which nearly ecliped his very dramatic quittery of 1996

(Video available but not embeddable.)

So what I'm understanding here - correct me, if I'm wrong - is that you're not givin' me... any money... so now I'm left basically with nothin', I'm... left with ZERO, in which, in which, what can I do with zero, you know? What can I... I can't do anythin' with it! I need to, this is my LIFE here we're talking about! We're not just talkin' about, you know, somethin' else, were talking about MY life, you know? And it's forcing me to do somethin' I don't wanna do. To leave. To, to go out and just leave and go home and say, make a clean cut here and say "no way, Corky, you're not puttin' up with these people!" And I'll tell you why I can't put up with you people: because you're bastard people! That's what you are! You're just bastard people! And I'm goin' home and I'm gonna... I'm gonna bite my pillow, is what I'm gonna do!

One more resignation and I believe he gets a free Dr. Pepper with his next Subway purchase.

(For the calendar-conscious, you may have noticed that among Apostate Conservative, the answer to the question the question David Frum used to frame his New York Magazine article -- "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality" -- seems to consistently be, "Immediately after they kicked my ass out of the club." Weird how their former BFFs suddenly transform into depraved monsters...two minutes after the depraved monsters serve them with divorce papers :-)

And yet as entertaining as Mr. Sullivan's bi-monthly bouts of righteous Tory revisionist quitting-in-a-huff may be, if taken to their logically obvious conclusion -- that Liberals were dead right about every failed nook and cranny of Mr. Sullivan's Conservatism all along -- it does seem that the Greatest Blogger in the World and his friends risk finding themselves up the professional creek without a gravy boat.

After all, except as bad example footnotes in yet-to-be-written history books, what possible use are Conservative public intellectuals, columnists and paid pundits if Conservatism is a world-killing, blood-soaked, bigot-powered fraud?

Which is why, with absolutely metronomic predictably, virtually all such dark tea-times of the Conservative soul arrive, sooner or later, back again at the single largest political consrtuction projects in America: the building of the Elite Centrist Bullshit Cathedral out of the rubble and rags of Conservatism's many orphaned True Believers, will-o-the-wisp "Independents" and various sad little Neocons who couldn't hang on tight enough to Bill Kristol's balls once their ideology went completely and grotesquely tits-up in front of the entire planet.

Thus we find once again that, once we pop the hood on another scathing indictment of Conservatism by another an exiled Conservative, we find (once again) little more than another high-profile rip-off the standard-issue Liberal critique tricked out in another coat of high-gloss Reagan whitewash:

The constant American exceptionalism point - taken to an absurd degree - is a function of neurosis not patriotism. It comes out n the weirdest ways - in the Christanist roundtable last weekend, Gingrich actually said that America was the only country in the world where people saw soldiers as sons, daughters, fathers and mothers. Yes, other nations are full of emotionless robots. But it is not a solution to America being way down the list on a number of variables to insist that we're Number One! always and everywhere. And no amount of this insistence that "conservatives" are the only truly American participants in democracy will help when you have no idea how to cope with the uninsured, with fiscal balance outside a Randian fantasy, with soaring healthcare costs, or debt-crippled demand...

Once again, only the Usual Suspects will be allowed to play in Mr. Sullivan's reindeer games:

The one thing I noticed in my continental run-around this past week is just how mad liberals are at Obama. I remain as baffled by this anger as I am by Republican contempt for the guy. New York magazine has two superb essays that sum up my own feelings on both sides pretty perfectly - by Jon Chait and David Frum...

And once again, the painfully obvious fact that all of the brave, edgy insights in which Mr. Sullivan now traffics have been purloined straight out of the Liberal Book of Common Prayer will be wiped away with a cheap swipe at the imaginary excesses of imaginary Liberals.

From Mr. Sullivan's dramatic 2009 resignation:

Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.

To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me.

From Mr. Sullivan's dramatic November, 2011 resignation:

If I hear one more gripe about single payer from someone in their fifties with a ponytail, I'll scream.

And from the Dramatic Exeunt of 1996:


Bullshit Centrism is where the money is, kids. A spacious and well-furnished last refuge for cowards and scoundrels and parasites once they have sucked all the marrow out of whatever they were touting as their core conviction was last week.

But Liberalism abides. And Mr. Sullivan sneers at Liberal anger precisely because it comes from the one, basic American truth that Mr. Sullivan dare not acknowledge: that the Dirty Fucking Hippies were right about the Right all along, and that every single grudging step the Obama Administration has made in the direction of good politics and good policy has been a step away from the bullshit "Both sides do it!" Centrist cult of David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, David Gregory, David Frum, Tom Friedman and virtually the entire Beltway Media...

...and towards the Liberals.

And so every time Mr. Sullivan "screams" another Liberal "in their fifties with a ponytail", this whiny ivory-tower Apostate Tory Conservative who made his professional bones writhing in the Reagasmic dung with reactionary traitors, Birchers, bigots and assorted Christopath witch doctors can expect at least one, lone blogger to remind his readers that much of Mr. Sullivan's knee-jerk loathing of his Liberal intellectual betters seems to come from a deeper and more profoundly mercenary place.

Me, from "Here is a Revised List" in 2009:

...

In fact there is virtually nothing in the whole, Lutheranesque list of grievances digitally spiked into the front door of the Party of God (May it forever be Holy, Reagan and Apostolic, amen!) that Liberals haven't been warning people like Mr. Sullivan about -- in ever-more urgent tones -- for the last 30 years.

Perhaps a small illustration would make things clearer (some of Mr. Sullivan’s comments on the Right; my helpful interlineal notes on the Left.)

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe
in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic
and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal,
extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced
by the system to return to the rule of law.

Are you referring to Nixon’s Watergate?
Or Reagan/Bush’s Iran/Contra?

I cannot support a movement that exploded
spending and borrowing and blames its
successor for the debt.

You forgot to add
“…unless Reagan does it.”

I cannot support a movement that so abandoned
government's minimal and vital role to police
markets and address natural disasters that
it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.

The radical, mass-deregulation
of everything regardless of consequences
was built right into the DNA of the
Conservative movement from the
moment of its birth.

And you damn well know it.

I cannot support a movement that holds
that purely religious doctrine should govern
civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness
of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

Perhaps you should take it up
with Jerry Falwell’s ghost.
Or Pat Robertson?
Or Phyllis Schafly?
Or Ralph Reed?
Do I need to go on?

I cannot support a movement that is deeply
homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals
to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that
its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

You forgot to add,
“…unless Reagan does it.”
Again.

I cannot support a movement which has
no real respect for the institutions of government
and is prepared to use any tactic and any means
to fight political warfare rather than conduct
a political conversation.

Like, say,
impeaching Bill Clinton?

...

I cannot support a movement that
criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.

Does the name “Reagan” ring a bell?

I cannot support a movement that would back
a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified
and duplicitous because of identity politics
and electoral cynicism.

Andrew Sullivan,
meet
Mr. J. Danforth Quayle.

I cannot support a movement that regards
gay people as threats to their own families.

“Reagan”?

I cannot support a movement
that does not accept evolution as a fact.

“Reagan”?
Any bell at all?

I cannot support a movement that sees
climate change as a hoax and offers
domestic oil exploration as the core plank
of an energy policy.

And…right…here
is where I got fucking fed up
with repeating myself.

I cannot support a movement that refuses
ever to raise taxes, while proposing no
meaningful reductions in government spending.

Read. My. Lips.

I cannot support a movement that refuses
to distance itself from a demagogue like
Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

The 1994 Republican Congress
gave Limbaugh
credit for their victory.
Gave him a fucking plaque.
That's 15 years ago.
Not 15 minutes.

So it turns out that virtually all of Mr. Sullivan's hard-won epiphanies amount to little more than the well-thumbed history and plainsong lore of our Fucked Up Modern Age as it has been long understood and passed down among those awful Liberals. And so when I see statements like this -- "Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not." -- what I see is a man who might want to distance himself from the appalling actions and despicable outcomes of his former allies, but still wants to continue honoring their idiotic parameters and debased vocabulary.

Yes, Mr. Sullivan, your objections emphatically do make you a "radical leftist", because in the hands of the shitkicker demagogues of the Right like Malkin, phrases like "radical leftist" have long since lost any meaning. They are just the pejorative-du-jour, pulled from a random grab-bag of Limbaugh-words -- socialist, elitist, feminist, Marxist, anti-American, compassionate, cut-and-run, surrender, Liberal, extremist, collectivist, queer, Communist, fascist, atheist, humanist, "New York", "San Francisco", “Chicago”, French, European -- that each used to have discrete and very different meanings, but are now bleated interchangeably by the Pig People and their overlords at anyone with a softer heart than Curtis LeMay and less imperial ambitions than Genghis Khan.

But then again, if Mr. Sullivan simply outed himself as a Liberal, he would instantly lose his place in the food-chain, wouldn’t he? Because like that microscopic number of self-loathing black Conservatives who make their daily bread by serving the interests of the Southern Bigot Party, more than any other single factor, it was always the sheer gawking, oddballness of the brazen self-delusion inherent in being the gay champion of the Christopath Homophobe Party that put Mr. Sullivan in the spotlight.

That was what gave him his unique and lucrative cache.

After all, Liberal gay political writers are a dime a dozen, and so in a strange way we find Andrew Sullivan locked in the same kind of mortal combat over labels -- and for exactly the same reasons -- as Roy Cohn's character in "Angels In America" as he adamantly insisted -- even as he was dying of AIDS -- that he was not a "ho-mo-sex-shall".


(Not Safe For Work)

Because, Cohn reasoned, homosexuals were nobodies; losers who had zero clout and “in 15 years cannot pass a pissant anti-discrimination bill from City Council.” And since Roy Cohn could get the President of the United States (or his wife) on the phone -- could take the man he was fucking to the White House and make Ronald Reagan smile at him and shakes his hand -- it therefore followed that Roy Cohn could not possibly be a homosexual.

That unlike every other person in his position on Earth, Roy Cohn was a heterosexual man, who fucked around with guys.

Likewise, even though Mr. Sullivan now, belatedly comes to believe much of what Liberals believe and finally deigns to notice a horde of grotesque truths about his Conservative Movement about which Liberals have been sounding the alarm for 30 years, Andrew Sullivan nonetheless looks us all straight in that eye and argues that he could not possibly be some mere Liberal.

Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.

Mr. Sullivan regularly receives such largess, therefore he must not be a Liberal.

He instead must be the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur.

Because if he is not something spontaneously-generated and utterly sui generis, then he is just another Lefty-Come-Very-Lately, showing up at our door at 3:00 A.M., 20 years late and trailing toxic baggage behind him like a Halley Comet.

And who in the world would pay him to do his little dance then?

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Size Matters" edition.

This weekend at the Mouse Circus" "Meet the Press" tried to quantify just exactly how hopelessly stupid the average GOP voter is.

GOP stooge Ed "Ratzo" Gillespie opined

that the "The Uppity Negro Called White America 'Lazy' Lie" that Rick Perry is pouring money into isn't really a lie because the Uppity Negro actually used the word "lazy" in a sentence.

Meanwhile, slightly more moderate GOP sock puppet Mike Murphy was on to say that he while he could not defend this particular lie, when you pile all the lies into a big heap they magically transform into some kind of overall sensibility that makes Barack Obama looks like Jimmy "Malaise" Carter.

So while Newt Gingrich is a hateful "political sociopath" (h/t Dee Dee Myers) whose decades of lies form a trail as long and bright as the tail Halley's comet, his surge is perfectly predictable. After all, he does use big words, sneers constantly and calls the press "Liberals" and the president a Commie, and what more is required among the Pig People?

Later, David Gregory once again riffed on corrupt insiderism behind the fact that New Gingrich was hugely well-paid to shill for the housing industry...and once again failed to mention that his own wife was also a very well-paid executive in that industry at the same time (from Blue Gal at Crooks & Liars):

...

Thursday night on Last Word, David Gregory was invited on to promote his web-only show "Pass with David Gregory." I guess the "pass" is, "I'll pass on mentioning, in all my Freddie / Fannie investigations, that my wife, Beth Wilkinson, was one of the four top executives in Fannie Mae who resigned as the federal government took it into receivership in 2008."

I'm not accusing Beth Wilkinson of corruption or vice. She's clearly an accomplished attorney, and she joined Fannie as Dodd-Frank was being passed. I have no access to what she did or did not do as a Fannie Mae VP.

But then David Gregory comes on a television show and says (at the 2:22 mark)

The background's important: Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac are quasi-public/private agencies -- they survived, and they made a great deal of money, because they worked the Hill. But they went way beyond working the Hill -- they had the Hill by the throat. This is Republicans, this is Democrats, both sides of the aisle, made a lot of money through these companies! So, that's the backdrop...

Okay, David, but where in the "backdrop" is the fact that your wife was executive vice-president and general counsel of Fannie Mae when they stopped being "quasi-private" and got bailed out by the taxpayer?

The Georgetown cocktail circuit that lets this kind of no-transparency BS stand for watchdog media is, ahem,99 percent of the problem. They come from a world where David Gregory's wife's planned purchase of Jimmy Choo's for spring got splashed on the pages of Washingtonian Magazine, at exactly the same time that Newt collected 30K a month from Freddie Mac for history lessons. And the GE-owned "liberal network" doesn't see fit to mention it?

...

I'm so old, I actually remember when our Debauched Media Overlords could whip themselves into self-righteous frenzies using nothing but the words "even the appearance of impropriety" as their flail.

But of course that was long ago, when Presidential Penises walked the Earth.

But the slightly larger story was Paul Krugman's appearance on "This Week...". After breaking Villager rule Number One by once again savaging his New York Times colleagues in print (sans names, but if you can't figure out the players in Professor Krugman's roman-a-club, you're not really trying) the good people at ABC decided to even the odds by stacking three of their most reliable Conservative tacking dummies -- the sodden Peggy Noonan, the vinegary George Will and the cipherish ""Insert Conservative Here" Matthew Dowd -- up against him.

It still wasn't much of a contest.

Most memorable was probably the sight of Noonan using a paving truck to lay on of her long, incoherent nostalgia about America's longing for a 5 cent Clark bar or some such. She started droppin' her "g"s and usin' contractions ("gonna") to folksy it up, but she made both of the points she had been brough out of cold storage hired to make: Newt ain't such a bad guy, and the failure of the Congressional Supercommitte is all the fault of the leader of the Executive branch.

Matthew Dowd: Both sides do it! Both sides do it!

However, what really caught my attention was nature of the medium-sized firestorm Dr. Krugman kicked off, because what pushed him to the front of the conversation was not that he told the truth using clear language (which he does on a regular basis), but that he used his NYT Space-based Weapons Platform to fire on his own colleagues at the Times.

From Salon:

The New York Times columnist demolishes familiar arguments made by unnamed hacks

The New York Times opinion section, like the Senate, has this rule where you aren’t allowed to call out a colleague by name when you think he or she is full of shit. As in the Senate, this rule is silly and anachronistic and enforces a strained phony cordiality at the expense of honesty. It doesn’t ever stop Paul Krugman, though, who simply responds to his columnist peers’ dumb arguments without ever referring to them by name.

For example: David Brooks, whose most annoying schtick is to write something that sounds reasonable until you realize what he’s actually arguing (like, for example, “people often don’t intervene when they see something horrible happening” is a very interesting point, unless your real point is that this is because of hippies and the terrible ’60s), wrote earlier this month that American income equality is overstated, and that the real income gap worth examining is that between the college-educated upper middle class, who are doing well, and those with only a high school education, who have been left behind by our post-industrial economy. (In this case Brooks’ “actual” point is that “Blue inequality” is merely the resentment of educated liberals who hate success while “Red states” have the real authentic American inequality.)

Krugman, in a column published three days later, wrote:

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

Hah, I wonder who those “pundits” are, don’t you? He went on:

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.

Oh, those usual suspects!

...

Why is this important?

Because Dr. Krugman is telling the same unhappy truths about the same giant assholes that the Dirty Hippies have been writing about for years. And since I am very lazy and have easy access to my own archives, consider this blog as a test case.

Here was is a snip from the very first, full-length "David Brooks" column I ever wrote. It is regarding Mr. Brooks' 04.09.05 column in which:

...Bobo looks incrementally past his grotty navel and notices he has a couple of stinky little feet at the end of his legs. Article has been trimmed a bit, and helpful translations have been added for You The Customer.

The Republican Party is running into a problem: the conservatism of the American people. Over the past decade, the Republicans have set themselves up as the transformational party...

[But the American people] have a taste for order and a distrust of those who want too much change on too many fronts too quickly...

Translation: They are scared shitless that the Crazier’n a Shithouse Rat Theocrats that the Evil Liberals have always warned them about might actuall exist and have the keys to the car. Oh and all the Mapquest Route Planners they left behind as clues have a place called “Armageddonville” circled in big, red Crayon.

It's become increasingly clear that the Republicans are bumping into some limits...

Translation: limits like...gravity, evolution, arithmetic, international law, economics. Why does reality hate Republicans?

Being conservative, most Americans believe that decisions should be made at the local level, where people understand the texture of the case. Even many evangelicals, who otherwise embrace the culture of life, grow queasy when politicians in Washington start imposing solutions from afar, based on abstract principles rather than concrete particulars.

Translation: Even in the middle of my faux critique of my own Overlords ... must... regurgitate... ”culture of life” meme...every...six...minutes. Hope no one notices what a trained seal I have become.

...Then there is Social Security reform. Republicans set forth with a plan to give people some control over their own retirement accounts. Here, too, Republicans have been surprised by the tepid public support. Americans understand that there is a big problem, but right now most oppose personal accounts invested in the markets. According to a Wall Street Journal poll this week, a third of Republicans currently oppose them.

Translation: We were all shocked when the public didn’t think letting Thurston Howell’s idiot son bulldoze Mom’s retirement money onto the craps table was a spiffy notion. We were stunned when our Soviet Style “spontaneous” crowds of carefully screened zombies came across like a Pravda Puppet Show.
...

Why bring it up?

Because, to make my point it is necessary for me to immodestly point out that I have done close to 400 such columns on the subject of New York Times columnist over the last seven years.

On the subject of the obscene and abused farce that is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman?

Slightly over 170.

David Gregory?

Over 120.

On the topic of the Andrew Sullivan?

Around 150 columns. Here is a snip from an early 2006 effort:

...

This Sunday, for example, on the Chris Matthews Show, the Wall O’ Pundits flipped through one Republican corruption and treason after another like a deck flash cards in the service of a conversation mocking and sniping...at Democrats!

Scandal after Republican scandal. Failure after Republican failure. And buttlicking drivel like this from Andrew Sullivan -- “The only opposition is coming from the Conservatives. Democrats are nothing but whiners and spectators.” – went unrebutted and unquestioned.

Hey, cocknoggin'! Isn’t carving into the people that are actually destroying this country, actually lying to the public, actually bleeding our Democracy dry sorta Your Fucking Job?!

Oh, it was quite the gigglefest until Cynthia Tucker threw a sharp elbow into the throat of Matthews’ "Ain’t the Dems a buncha bumblefucks" party by letting the phrase "Southern Strategy" pass her lips. Then she actually fleshed out the ugly, racist-pandering history of the modern GOP; reminding the panel of the true face of who it is they actually serve as Matthew’s fum-fuhed around, trying to find the escape hatch.

Then…silence. Crickets. Nothing.

Instant right-handed circle-jerk buzzkill. Hit Sullivan so hard that it almost knocked Bush’s dick out of his mouth.

In the end, the simple truth that people like Sullivan fight almost hysterically to deny is that you have to choose -- and your choices will always be imperfect -- but when you intellectually geld yourself in a desperate attempt to pretend that the midpoint between the proud, upright magnificence of the Enlightenment and the slinking, slouching sponsors of a new Dark Ages is a reasonable place to stand…you choose to side with the Pat Robertsons of this world.

...

The Sunday Morning roundup? On that topic I'm getting up towards 350, or roughly one a week, 52 weeks a year for seven years. Give or take. And if I took another few hours, I'm quite sure I could easily compose such a list made up of the efforts of a dozen other excellent bloggers and groups, so my points are these.

1. Having Dr. Krugman on the side of the Dirty Fucking Angels is a good thing. Unreservedly.

2. Having a Space-based Weapons Platform makes a huge difference. Often it makes all the difference.

3. To be a Dirty Hippie is to be an outsider, fighting against long odd and constant disappointment. To be a Dirty Hippie Outsider means that you can clearly see exactly how weak and hollow and ridiculous the goons on the Right and their Centrist enablers have become. It means that you have probably been slogging it out for a good long time and logged enough experience to believe-- with damn good reason -- that if we just had a few more gallons of gasoline...

And so, to all the bloggers out there who sometimes get tied up in knots because something they have been cultivating for a long-ass time suddenly becomes a flavor-of-the-month in the big restaurant across town -- the one with the dress code, the Moroccan-leather-bound menus and the bouncer who never lets you in -- relax. Be true to your flag (as my wife reminds me when I get frustrated) and be of good cheer: the reason Dr. Krugman's shells fall with such satisfyingly devastating effect is because they have been forged in the Dirty Hippie armory and packed with Dirty Hippie vocabulary.

Congratulations, Dr. Krugman.

You did us proud.


Test ems

Professional Left Podcast #102

"Fuck it, we'll do it live!"

— Bill O'Reilly

Links for this episode:

• Occupy Cal floats tents over campus.
• Verizon Building in NYC gets its own 99%er Bat Signal
• David Brooks yearns for that old time religion?
• David Gregory's wife is a former Fannie Mae executive?

Da' money goes here:

Ramesh Ponnuru's Wingnut Purity Creds to Expire -- UPDATE

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

(Original Post from 11/15/11)


The reek of psychosis and doom coming off of the Party of God has apparently finally triggered the long-suppressed gag reflex of the smirky little weasel who wrote "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life":

Republicans Lose Way by Misreading Bush History: Ramesh Ponnuru
...

The view that Republicans must avoid accommodation at all costs -- that the principal obstacle to achieving conservative policy goals is a lack of spine and not, say, a lack of popular support -- made them lose at least two Senate races in 2010. In Colorado and Nevada, conservative primary voters rejected two electable, conventionally conservative candidates because they were considered part of a compromising establishment. If Republicans fall two votes short of repealing Obama’s health-care plan in 2013, the mythology they have created will be part of the reason why.

That mythology influences the Republican presidential primaries, too. It’s why they have, to an unusual extent, showcased unpopular ideas that have no chance of going anywhere, such as abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency. It is part of the reason for the resistance to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney: Conservatives fear he would be a big- government Republican, like Bush, and lead the party again to ruin.

Meanwhile, the real mistakes of the Bush years keep being made. Republicans had nothing to say about wage stagnation then and are saying nothing about it now. The real cost of Republicans’ fixation on ideological purity is that it distracts them from their real problems, and the nation’s.

What will happen next?

If history any guide:

1. Ponnuru will be loudly Frummed out of the inner circle of the Party of God with the usual round of ritual tantrums.


2. He will be welcomed with open arms and tangible perks into the Wingnut Expatriate community.


3. He will Frum along for awhile, fence-straddling nicely by precisely balanced out potshots at the increasingly drooling, unhinged Right with vague criticisms of the imaginary sins of fictional Liberal.


4. Ponnuru's agent will append the word "Reasonable" to his Conservative CV.


5. Someone with clout in the Mainstream Media will fall in love with him.
   


6. He will crank out another crappy book, carefully calibrated to flatter the Romneyites, flick boogers at the Palinites and shit all over those damned Liberals who are just the worst!
   


7. His crappy book will have the words "Lessons" and/or "Renaissance" in its very, very long title.


8. This time his crappy book will not be published by the ultra-right-wing, Bircher-inflected "Regnery Publishing" but will be released by Mary Matalin's slightly more upscale, ultra-right-wing, Cheney-inflected "Threshold Editions" imprint at Simon & Schuster.
   
   
9. Once David Brooks moves on to become David Broder 2.0 on a full-time basis
   
   Chunky Bobo will be elevated to the top Reasonable Conservative spot at the New York Times, after which Ponnuru will be brought in as second chair.

Finally, at no point during this latest reshuffling of America's Conservative media courtiers will anyone be gauche enough to mention that the Filthy Liberals were, once again, absolutely right all along.

Still, over here in the cultural ghetto of Liberal Central Command, we will all laugh and drink our chardonnay and laugh some more.

Then we will go back to being right.

All along.



UPDATE 11/18/11: As predicted...

Step One: Under construction.

Step Two: Under construction.