Ayn Rand *

To 

The

Rescue!

* In response to inquiries, each one of these has been subtly Photoshopped. If you click them to see the larger version you should be able to the alterations more clearly.

Diamond Dogs

That Halloween Jack is a real cool cat 
And he lives on top of Manhattan Chase

Happy Halloween.

Those Cold Equations

Since I recently reached into my podcast/science fiction ditty bag and came up with "The Cold Equations" (Aside: while I did indeed get one of the plot details about this story wrong in my last podcast, I don't think I previously conflated this story with  Heinlein's 'Sky Lift' since I have no memory of ever reading 'Sky Lift'.  It's possible, though) I thought maybe it was time to go down to the storage bay and re-read the post from very early in my blogging career (June, 2005) where I first start to use the tropes of classic science fiction (and that story specifically) as a means of explicating the real world of here and now.

The Iraq War may no longer rage on and the GOP may have airbrushed the Bush Regime out of existence, but the rest -- the Big Lie of Centrism, the complete collapse of the Party of Lincoln into a maggoty shithole of segregationists and fundies, the epic FAIL that is Tom Friedman -- remains tragically true:

What this Liberal Sees… 

..when he looks at Iraq.

Tom Friedman has well and truly surpassed himself.

Just when you think Captain Obvious could not possibly crawl any further up into his own puffy little butt, he manages to scramble up those last, few inches and burst through into an entirely new, “Being John Malkovich” kind of alternate Friedman-iverse, populated exclusively by LSD-scalded dolts stagger in tiny circle, jabbering incessantly about how amazing their hands look, and how amazing the air is, and have you ever noticed how amazing my shoes look as they go flippy-flop, flippy-flop ‘round and ‘round and ‘round.?

You meet these kinds of blown-out stoners wandering in the parks sometimes, or cadging transfers in the cool, dank stairwells of CTA stops. Pupils as big as manhole covers. Hair that’s become a free-range ecosystem for lice and roaches and ringworms.

What I usually do is give them some change and steer way the hell around them.

What I do not do is let them write for the New York Fucking Times.

Friedman has already been righteously and rightfully beaten down as the leading-edge of the execrable Apologist Wedge by Atrios, Gilliard, and god knows who all else, so I will keep this short. Ok, short-ish.

Here’s a tiny sip of the rancid stew:

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: June 15, 2005

Ever since Iraq's remarkable election, the country has been descending deeper and deeper into violence. But no one in Washington wants to talk about it. Conservatives don't want to talk about it because, with a few exceptions, they think their job is just to applaud whatever the Bush team does. Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed. As a result, Iraq is drifting sideways and the whole burden is being carried by our military. The rest of the country has gone shopping, which seems to suit Karl Rove just fine.

First, Captain Obvious has again renewed his wretched subscription to the despicable and now, really, outright treasonable world-view that:

A) No one is talking about Iraq. Which is such an nakedly demented lie that one must wonder if Tommy-boy has, at last, just lost his mind. As I sat at Wrigley field last week, in a park packed to capacity with highly-focused and well-informed Cubs and BoSox fans, at no point did I ever feel compelled to lean over to my fiends and remark -- shouting over the noise – that it was sure a pity the no one wanted to talk about baseball. 

Had I done so, my friends (being my friends) would have, have cut off my beer, gotten me out of the hot sun and into an ER immediately. We’ll immediate…after the ninth inning, but they would have been very concerned.
What they wouldn’t have done is give me a column in the New York Fucking Times.  

B) The Universe is carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.

It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.

It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.

It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.

However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happened to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong.

And then stamp his chubby little feet and whine that No One Is Listening to Him!

What a lazy pint of watery poo he is, and if that were all he is, that would be bad enough, but with his second absurd “indictment -- "Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed.” – he definitively crosses the line into outright treachery.

So you want to know how this Liberal views Iraq?

Take a look at the sickening image that came roaring out of our collective unconscious and onto our televisions on 9/11: a human being confronted with two choices too terrible to contemplate -- leap into oblivion or be roasted alive.

And once in the air, whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs this poor bastard might have had became irrelevant. Flapping their arms didn’t matter. Prayer didn’t matter.

Once in the air, the Cold Equations were all that mattered. Once in the air, my fellow human being became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much.

That, you despicable little stooge, is EXACTLY how Iraq looks to me.

On the heels of our greatest modern national trauma, the President and his minions shrieked and bellowed, roared and raged that there was a conflagration at our backs. That we were all in immediate, lethal danger from a massive, murderous attack by Saddam Hussein and that if we didn't act right now we were fucked.

Mushroom-cloud fucked.

And that the ONLY alternative was to jump. He was advised by wise men of the costs of jumping, of the dangers, of the number of troops necessary, of the extremely complex situation into which he would be dropping. He was warned that beating Iraq militarily would be easy…but that securing the Peace would be hard.

He told us that the fall would be simple. That we would alight in a land where we would be greeted as Liberators. The costs would be negligible. The gains would be high. Virtually painless.

But MOST of all, that the fire was nipping at our heels. It was so urgent, so imperative. that if we didn’t want to see our children perish, we had to jump right now.

So we did.

Convinced by Bush that it was the only option left to us -- and that he had planned carefully for the consequences -- we leaped out of window and into the sky.

We jumped, because we were told we had to.

And in jumping, we committed our troops, our nation and our good name to the brutal calculus of war; to factors beyond our control, and now we are plunging down and down and down into tragedy.

And as we fall we find that the building was not on fire at all.

That the people that pushed us into space had lied to us.

That the parachute of carefully planning that they were supposed to have prepared to save us from ruin had been packed with nothing but empty slogans and ideology-drunk fantasies.

Now we are falling, out of control.

And pointing out that we are falling because of the lies and delusions of the Administration has nothing to do with whether or not I "want the Bush team to succeed” you contemptible little weed. We are watching the country we passionately love plummet into darkness along the exact trajectory we warned you about, and you think that there is any joy in being right? Any pleasure in seeing your beloved wasted and playing in traffic?

Sorry, Friedman, but no.

Now whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs we might have had have become irrelevant. Flapping our arms doesn’t matter. Prayer doesn’t matter.

Once in the air, the Cold Equations are all that matter.

Once in the air, my nation became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much.

And if you had bothered to pull your head out of your ass long enough to actually look, you would see that these are what the faces of Liberals look like…

…as we are forced to watch the fall, and as we are forced to listen to preening rodents hector us for not paying the right kind of attention.

This is the world we will plunge back into under a President Romney: a world where the neocons eagerly roar back into power with their Global Conquest bucket lists in their grubby, little paws, where batshit old Robert Bork decides which of his Christopath acolytes will get to sit on the Supreme Court and tell you what you can and can't so with your vaginae for the next 40 years, and where the likes of Tom Friedman and David Brooks once again observe the wreckage from orbit and tsk-tsk those naughty Liberals for not being more reasonable and cooperative.  

David Brooks Promises Peace in Our Times

In Mr. Brooks' Universe, the Democrats are always to blame for radical Republicans obstructionism, pathological Republican lying and premeditated Republican economic terrorism because in Mr. Brooks' solution the only acceptable solution is complete capitulation.

Always.

And since this is Mr. Brooks' core, existential axiom, if the radical Republicans obstructionism, pathological Republican lying and premeditated Republican economic terrorism has not stopped yet, it is must be because Democrats have not been sufficiently capitulative.

QED!

At the Big City Newspaper, Mr. Brooks speculates an Obama victory next week would turn out:

... 

Then Obama would go to the House. He’d ask Eric Cantor, the majority leader, if there were votes for such a deal. The answer would probably be no. Republican House members still have more to fear from a primary challenge from the right than from a general election challenge from the left. Obama is tremendously unpopular in their districts. By running such a negative presidential campaign, Obama has won no mandate for a Grand Bargain. Obama himself is not going to suddenly turn into a master legislative craftsman on the order of Lyndon Johnson.

There’d probably be a barrage of recriminations from all sides. The left and right would be consumed with ire and accusations. Legislators would work out some set of fudges and gimmicks to kick the fiscal can down the road. 

...

Mind you, this the same person who found  Republican economic terrorism so sickening that he pronounced the party "not fit to govern" just last year:

Over the past few years, [the Republican Party] has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative. The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. … The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. … The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. … The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name. … If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern. And they will be right.

But like his brief flirtation with honesty after Katrina, this condition lasted but a moment.  Mr. Brooks quickly remembered (or was reminded) that he has really no marketable skill set in this world other than ass-kissing, bootlicking and administering lavish public blowjobs to Conservative power-brokers and so he almost immediately came bellycrawling back to the Right, obediently resuming his extremely well-paid position as Party of God's Tokyo Rose.  

Its Baghdad Bob.  

Because Mr. Brooks is a Beltway Conservative, his entire career is built on groveling before Republican power, in a relationship based on lying, cowardice and doglike obedience.   In David Brooks' Universe, the way to deal with fascists is to be the one who bows the deepest and grovels the best, and for being absolutely consistent in this cravenness and dishonesty year-in year-out, Mr.  Brooks has been rewarded with the highest honors the Beltway can bestow. Which is why, in the face of  radical Republicans obstructionism, pathological Republican lying and premeditated Republican economic terrorism, Mr. Brooks' can suggest the following with a straight face:

The bottom line is this: If Obama wins, we’ll probably get small-bore stasis; if Romney wins, we’re more likely to get bipartisan reform. Romney is more of a flexible flip-flopper than Obama. He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans. He’s more likely to get big stuff done.

UPDATE:  

Dag Blog points out that, based on his own logic of coping with monstrous behavior by immediately appeasing it, Mr. Brooks may well be the world's worst parent.

Over at "The New Republic" Timothy Noah notes:

...until now, I thought conservatives were reluctant to acknowledge that the GOP was, in effect, running a protection racket. But in his column today ("The Upside of Opportunism"), David Brooks more or less says so.

Annual Birthday Fundraiser Postponed*

Until after the East Coast of the United States sorts itself out.

Link to American Red Cross hurricane relief here.

* 52, for those who asked.  Finally playing with a full deck, you might say :-)

Sunday Morning Comin' Down II: Comin' Downier

While the most talked-about and irritating exchange at the Mouse Circus was Andrew Sullivan's most recent Sudden!Discovery! of something Liberals have been saying all along (link here) the creepiest exchange took place a little earlier on the same craptacular show between Mr. Sullivan and Bush Regime Dead-Ender Nichole Wallace:

SULLIVAN: And, of course, the big elephant in the room is that the Mitt Romney that showed up on October 3rd was like an alien that ripped off his mask and said, "I'm brand new now."

WALLACE: But we liked him. But we liked him.

WALLACE: Isn't that the point? You know, we liked him better.

As every Liberal I know has known since the beginning and as I wrote here back in June, Willard Romney's electoral strategy has always been brutally simple and straightforward:

Always. Be. Lying.

A-B-L.

A-always, B-be, L-lying.

Always be lying!

 Always! Be! Lying!

Romney is vulture capitalist enough to know his customers well.

Romney is smart enough to know that the typical GOP base voter from swamps of darkest Jebusland is no longer functionally human in some very important ways:  they have been trained not to notice or care if their leaders cripple the economy, trash the planet or shit directly in their faces every single day as long as they promise to make uppity, smart-ass Libruls suffer and to dispatch the Scary Black Man back to the depths of their most terrifying racial-inferiority nightmares.

Romney is also smart enough to know that the Beltway media -- who tell America's quivering, cowering Centrist minority what to think -- will let him skate on his lies because the Beltway media is a wholly corrupt institution devoted to defending elite establishment privilege and power and, as such, does not dare start calling out men like Romney no matter what they say or do.

Finally, Romney is smart enough to know that if he can pull in a big enough chunk of the willfully ignorant Center and all of the irredeemably depraved Right, he comes awfully close to the number of votes he needs to win the White House.

Which is why Mitt Romney will go on lying -- baldly, every day, about all kinds of shit -- right up until lying loses its marginal electoral utility.

The reason the back-and-forth between Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Wallace chilled me when I saw it (which is not conveyed by the mere words they swapped) was Ms. Wallace's literal giggling delight over the fact that her Party's strategy of just lying all the time was turning out perfectly (this captures the essence of her "Fuck you!" brio pretty well):

She was fucking thrilled that lying lying lying lying lying lying lying lying lying lying lying lying lying lying was working so beautifully. To Ms. Wallace, it simply does not matter what species of soulless vulture capitalist Cylon may be lurking beneath Willard Romney's chassis of lies, because 

WALLACE: ... whatever it is, is better than Obama.

In that sentence, I am once again reminded of the giddy, reptilian soul of Conservatism that Hunter Thompson captured here when he wrote about the 2000 election:

There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying — and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense… Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory… Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV. The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth...

In 2000, during the recounts, on the Democratic side Warren Christopher spoke of honor, democracy, the world stage and there being "no shame in putting country ahead of Party."

In 2000, during the recounts, on the Republican side, James Baker III took exactly the opposite view, telling his people that this was "a street fight for the Presidency of the United States."

The unforgivable error Mr. Sullivan commits over and over and over again is refusing to believe the evidence of his senses. Refusing the accept that such out-and-proud mendacity cannot be dissuaded by appeals to reason or conscience...because it rejects reason and conscience as impediments to power. That it will not be deterred by facts or history of the certainty of disaster if they are allowed back into power...because facts and history are for pussies and if we just believe hard enough in George W. Bush Willard Romney, everything will turn out great in the end.

Mr. Sullivan simply cannot get it through his head that a stake through their heart (in this case, humiliating them on camera would have been an adequate substitute) is the only thing that will get the job done.

Which is sorta hilarious when you considering that Mr. Sullivan spent most of his adult life helping to building this monster which now baffles and terrifies him so.

Over at his large site 'neath the sheltering bower of "Esquire" magazine, Mr. Charles P. Pierce covers some of the remaining denizens of this shitty waterfront, from the Leader (possibly) of the Civilizing Forces-- 

Almost nothing Gingrich said there is remotely true — "Virtually every Catholic" agrees with Mourdock about rape and abortion? That isn't true even for virtually every Virtual Catholic, like Gingrich — and, of course, the little shot at Cutter comes from long practice as a sick-wife-dumping misogynist. The Clinton Guy failed to point out any of this. I swear, there are moments when I think that, in terms of obvious cognitive abilities, the difference between The Clinton Guy and the Butter Cow is not vast.

-- to the obsessively asymmetriphobic David Brooks:

Brooksie is very disappointed in both men because they took him out once and failed to call.

Well, you know, I think — well, I first think it has been the worst campaign I've ever covered. And I think they're both ending on the same note they started. Obama's doing a negative campaign. He's got an ad out which is called "Rember," which is about Obama — which is about Romney, the plutocrat. It's about the flip-flop what we've just heard on the stump. So it's almost pure negativity. Romney is finishing, trying to appeal to moderates, trying to appeal to — to women, which is a bipartisan ad which is saying, you know, I don't care if it's a republican idea or democratic idea, I'm going to be for that. And, you know, so he has shape shift. That's not who he is. That's not who his policies are. So I regard this is an ad — as a campaign that has answered none of our fundamental issues about both these guys, how they would govern for next four years. And they are finishing as badly as they started.

One party is insane and has forced its candidate to act like the lead act in a $50 donkey contortionist show in a Tijuana brothel. The other candidate is forced to point this out. So it's everybody's fault. I feel for David Brooks, and for the gentle fairy-folk of the land in which he lives.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

There were all the usual kinds of depressingly indefatigable madness on display at the Mouse Circus today, but from "The Blaze" to "News Busters" to "The Daily Caller" to the zombie remnants of the Brietbart slug farm, nothing caused more intertoob inflammation than Andrew Sullivan's suggestion that -- OMG!OMG!OMG! -- there is nearly a 100% overlap between the Confederacy and the Red States:

SULLIVAN: If Virginia and Florida go back to the Republicans, it's the confederacy, entirely. You put the map of the Civil War over this electoral map, you've got the Civil War. 

IFILL: I don't know. 

STEPHANOPOULOS: You're rolling your eyes, George [Will]. 

SULLIVAN: Am I wrong?

Which would have been much more impressive if the Liberal blogosphere hadn't already been all over this fact eight years ago.  

From "Sensory Overload",  November 4, 2004:

Free States vs. Slave States ~

Oh How Far We've Come...

My friend Q-T sent this to me ~ sadly, these two maps need no explanation, yet they raise more questions than they answer  (scroll down to see both maps):

In case it's hard to read, on the Pre-Civil War Map, the red areas were slave states and the brown areas were territories open to slavery, while the green areas were free states and territories.  These distinctions eerily correspond to the red states vs. blue states on the 2004 Election Map ~~ i.e., the blue (Kerry) states correspond to the pre-civil-war free states and territories, while the red (Bush) states correspond to what were the slave states and territories.  As one of my co-workers said to me, this might be the most "devastatingly accurate explanation I've seen for what happened on Tuesday."  There's a little more discussion about all this, here. 

... 

So why is this a big deal today, when exactly the same observation was roundly ignored eight years ago when it was common currency in the Liberal world?

Because eight years ago it was Liberals saying it, and Liberals are not merely right most of the time, but are inconveniently right about all the things our corporate owners very much do not want to talk about.  So instead of being invited to share our insights with the wider world via the teevee machine, Liberals instead look forward to lives of pauperized pariah-hood spent pouring words like these into the cold abyss --

The Big Lie

...

And for twenty years – while the mass purveyors of carefully calibrated hate and rage and xenophobia on the Right gathered more and more power and got more and more vulgar and vicious in their rhetoric – what did the Left try to do?

We tried to find common ground. To meet our opponents half-way.

To compromise…with people who sneered at the very idea of working together and said quite openly that compromise was “political date rape”.

While the Emperor of Weaponized Bile, Newt Gingrich, took over the House with a campaign explicitly based on calling Democrats “traitors” at every opportunity, and Limbaugh was being honored as the “Majority Maker” by those House Republicans, we on the Left were still trying to do and be all the nicey-nicey things that Alan Simpson is now all weepy and wistful for.

And it didn’t work. And while we played by Marquis of Queensbury, the orcs laughed in our faces, overran the joint, and bequeathed to us as its apotheosis the worst, most despicable, most incompetent, most Constitution-loathing Administration in American history.

Al Franken and Air America did not arise in a vacuum. The came into being as a desperate, eleventh-hour attempt to fight back against a twenty year multimedia blitz of unremitting, unrebutted Conservative lies and bigotry.

They arose because no one in the Mainstream Media had the guts to take on the GOP Propaganda Machine head-on. Instead, the MSM collaborated, because collaborating in the Big Lie was a much better, safer career move.

Progressive Radio arose because politicians like Alan Simpson were, for twenty years, perfectly content with looking the other way and harvesting the electoral fruits of the poison tree that their Conservative/Christopath/Racist Hate Radio, Hate TeeVee, Hate Satellite, Hate Cable and Hate Publishing so lavishly watered and fertilized.

Because the GOP was never concerned with the destruction of political comity…as long as it was working to their advantage.

As long as all of the screeching Orwellian hellfire was coming from the Right, they never said a fucking word.

But now, finally, after twenty years of unilateral disarmament, now that the Left has at last decided to fight back hard, suddenly old Republican loons like Simpson get all gooey for the glory days of cellulose collars, nickel candy bars, whale-bone corsets, heroic cavalry charges and a politics of gentle, ruffled fisticuffs followed by brandy, cigars and top-shelf hookers.

Suddenly it is “zealots on both sides” that have torn his beloved Temple down.

Well fuck you, Alan Simpson. Fuck you sideways for your bogus hand-wringing and crocodile tears.

And fuck you, George Mitchell, for sitting there with your thumb up your ass and allowing your good, Republican friend to spread this Big Lie unchallenged right under your nose.

-- for having the have the inexcusably bad taste to be right about all the wrong things.

And watching the same guy who was making a living 10 years ago calling Liberals "Fifth Columnists" now burnishing his Serious Pundit resume by going on the teevee machine and reciting recycled Liberal ideas?

Well that's just icing on the fucking cake.

Silly Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

From Mr. Sullivan:

What Moderation Means For David Brooks 

Just substitute the word 'conservative' for moderate, and you've basically got my politics. Which is why I believe that Barack Obama has been the best conservative president since Bill Clinton.

Mr. Sullivan's Conservatism is identical to Mr. Brooks' Moderation in that their respective ideological systems amount to little more than what is convenient and enjoyable for each man to believe at any given moment. 

If Mr. Sullivan suddenly developed a taste for pineapple ice cream, within a week he would be penning columns about how "Liking Pineapple Ice Cream" is a cardinal Conservative value because of something something Edmund Burke.  If he got sick on bad Thai food, we would suddenly see a spate of columns discussing bad Thai food and how it is something that only extreme Christianists or Left Liberal would ever put in their mouths.

He is, at best, a flighty dilettante with a wealth patron and does not have the slightest fucking clue about how his adopted country works.

Likewise the Moderate Mr. Brooks adds or subtracts from his lexicon of virtues based almost entirely on how best to hide out from whichever one of his until-recently-held principled positions has gone hideously wrong. 

Not long ago, Mr. Brooks was a vocal champion of the worst of the Bush Era policies. Mr. Brooks made his bones excoriating those of us who doubted the Dear Leader's infinite wisdom. Mr. Brooks used to mock post-partisan centrism-types as dolts and fools. Mr. Brooks even went so far as to write an entire column about how (now that Dubya is triumphant in Iraq!) us hateful, bile-drunk, Liberals (who are incapable of ever admitting when we're wrong) will just sink deeper and deeper into denial, inventing new reasons why their wrong ideas we were really right and revising our own history to pretend they never said and did what they said and did (links for every bit of what I just summarized in this here exhaustive compendium):

...

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

Of course, as regular readers know, almost since the day Mr. Brooks' cashed in his Very Immoderate Liberal-bashing and Bush worship for a job-for-life at "The New York Times", not only has virtually every one of Mr. Brooks' cocksure assertions and predictions gone to shit, but Mr. Brooks has barricaded himself inside precisely the same bullshit bunker of denial, revision and falsification that he once confidently told his readers would be the final, hateful bastion of all the Dirty Fucking Hippies he despises so acidly.

Mr. Brooks does not merely commit every sin he once righteously accused the Dirty Fucking Hippies of being on the verge committing, he now positively luxuriates in them.  He has made an industry out of them, and now lies about the present and shamelessly revises the past quite proudly, publicly and repeatedly, just like the rest of the Conservative Movement always has and will continue to do until they are destroyed (from me earlier this year):

The entire Conservative enterprise is built on delusion and old dynamite, which is why every clock much forever remain stopped at one minute after Reagan's inauguration, every fact must be smothered under the stasis field of Rush Limbaugh roaring, rage-drunk bluster.  It is the sarcophagus of a dead ideology where the walls are now so densely postered and palimpsested with the detritus of Conservatism's lurid, lying history that its denizens cannot find the exit anymore, and its floors are so sticky and pitted with the grue of its savage, tribal, beat-in rituals that no one bothers to even look for the door.

He gets away with this because very, very, very rich assholes are willing to pay enormous amounts of money to keep shoveling this shit, and to exercise their considerable influence ot keep any and all contrary opinions the Hell off your teevee.

And for their sins, tomorrow both Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Brooks will be on the Sunday morning gasbag parade sharing their keen insights with tens of millions of your fellow citizens.

I'm going to go be sick in a bag now.

Silly Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd

From Mr. Sullivan:

Peggy Noonan, Busted 

A reader writes:

You overlooked a notable attendee of Obama's January 2009 conservative dinner:

"Obama Tuesday night trekked to the Chevy Chase, Md., home of conservative columnist George F. Will to talk politics and get to know some of his fiercest intellectual adversaries: Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Larry Kudlow, David Brooks, Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Michael Barone, and Paul Gigot."

This is the same Peggy Noonan who wrote today:

Obama misread his Republican opponents from day one. If he had been large-spirited and conciliatory he would have effectively undercut them, and kept them from uniting.

A woman who personally experienced Obama's early outreach to the right now insists he did nothing of the kind. Romnesia? Or just another massive fucking lie?

It doesn't matter how much or how often she or her fellow Conservative travelers lie, Andrew.

For reasons that no one in your business will reveal to us peons and pea-pickers, these liars and frauds  all have jobs-for-life at the apex of American political media.

They shape our national narrative, declare "true" and "Serious" whatever momentarily pleases them and "false" and "shrill" and "irrelevant" whatever embarrasses or inconveniences them and there currently exists no effective means for stopping them or calling them out.

Along with the existence of tens of millions of fanatical bigots and dolts who hate us Liberals and our black Socialist Kenyan President so hard they'd vote to burn the country to the ground if they thought it would make us cry, this debased media fraud-mill that panders to them is no accident.

This is the American Conservative Movement triumphant.

Congratulations.

But what really makes me positively whoop whoop whoop with laughter?

From Mr. Sullivan (emphasis added):

...

There was plenty of compromise by Obama from the beginning, both symbolically and substantively. But a Republican decision was made that, even in the worst recession since the 1930s (whose impact on unemployment was devastating) not a single Republican House vote would go for the stimulus. 

It shocked me at the time, coming so soon after such a big election. 

I was naive enough to think that an emergency action... 

I naively believed that just as a group of Democrats had supported Ronald Reagan's massive tax...

Instead, they set out from Day One to destroy him, because they knew that if his moderation and modern cultural identity succeeded, their reactionary radicalism would be sidelined for good. 

...

From a hut-dwelling eremite or elderly shut-in or burger flipper working at Sisterfuck, Arkansas' second-best Denny's, such infantile naivete might be excusable.  Even charming.

But for Tina Brown's pet public Conservative intellectual to refuse to notice the real nature of that Movement until 10 minutes ago?   For Chris Matthews' favorite "Genus!  No!  Really! Andrew, you're just a genius about this stuff!" to miss it?  For someone who has been loudly and publicly active up to his chin-whiskers in the Conservative Movement since the days Ronald Reagan strode the Earth to completely fail to understand the woof and warp of the American Conservative movement?  To miss it and then try to plea bargain this stunningly disqualifying blindness down to a simple charge of shock and naivete?

For his sins, a judge has sentenced Mr. Sullivan to perform 30 minutes of community service: this Sunday he will be forced to join such intellectual Titans as George Will and Newt Fucking Gingrich on "This Week" to impart his mighty shocked, naive wisdom to an America he clearly does not (to quote Newt) Fundamentally, Basically understand.

And so it goes.

Professional Left Podcast #151

"We did not say what we just said and anyone who says we did is a dirty Commie."

-- Every Republican in America

Links:

• Jonathan Chait on how the GOP destroyed it's Moderates and the deluded, lying rump battalion of professionally Reasonable Conservatives who make their living pretending it never happened.
• The Cold Equations (from Wikipedia): "The story takes place entirely aboard an Emergency Dispatch Ship (EDS) headed for the frontier planet Woden with a load of desperately needed medical supplies. The pilot, Barton, discovers a stowaway: an eighteen-year-old girl. By law, all EDS stowaways are to be jettisoned because EDS vessels carry no more fuel than is absolutely necessary to land safely at their destination. The girl, Marilyn, merely wants to see her brother, Gerry, and is not aware of the law."

Da' money goes here:

Merchandise By The Dashboard Lights

From the WaPo:

Meat Loaf endorses Romney in Ohio
Posted by Philip Rucker on October 25, 2012 at 10:24 pm

DEFIANCE, Ohio – Meat Loaf bestowed a meandering endorsement upon Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney here Thursday night, making what the hard rock icon said was his first move on the political stage.

The singer, who rose to fame in the 1970s with his power ballads, performed a short concert at a high school football stadium in Defiance to rally some 12,000 supporters before Romney came on stage to give a speech.

Meat Loaf performed a few songs familiar to his most devoted fans; his most famous hit, “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” didn’t make the cut. And then, with dramatic flair and wearing a sparkly black ensemble, explained why he was getting behind Romney’s candidacy.
...

Wingnut Base: Will you love me forever?

Mittens: Let me sleep on it.

Wingnut Base: Will you love me forever!!!!

Mittens: Let me sleep on it!!

I think we all remember how this ends...

I Was Beautiful While I Lasted

From "The Daily Beast":

...
But with another critical election two weeks away, politicians, political operatives, and even the bloggers themselves say the Netroots are a whisper of what they were only four years ago, a dial-up modem in a high-speed world, and that the brigade of laptop-wielding revolutionaries who stormed the convention castle four years ago have all but disappeared as a force within the Democratic Party.
...

[Susie] Madrak’s example is typical. She blogs, she says, more than ever, up to 20 times per day. But traffic is a third of what it was at its peak, and instead of being able to make a living through ad dollars, she is forced to seek donations intermittently on her site.

...
“The days when people could be very influential in the blogosphere aren’t here anymore,” she said.

...
“When we started we were deeply anti-Bush, and there was a unanimity of purpose in the early days that we needed to modernize the left,” said Bill Scher, who founded the site Liberal Oasis. “We thought we understood the modern media a lot better than the old guard, and way better than the elites in Washington. We were tired of watching our guys get beat up on the talk shows, and tired of the purity tests of the ‘Old Left.’”
...

His site, which at its peak received 6,000 to 7,000 visitors a day, is now updated once a week with Scher’s podcast.
...
“Since Obama, the cohesion has splintered,” he says. “The Netroots are now just a random collection of bloggers.”

...
The typing hordes have moved in another direction too. The pace of blogging was always punishing and nearly impossible for those who did it to keep another job. But being marginally employed loses its charm after a while, even if you are able to elect the Congress of your dreams.

“The downside to the growth of Daily Kos and the professionalization of our medium is that the small-time blogger is on the verge of extinction,” writes Moulitsas. “That chaotic cacophony of amateur online voices was beautiful while it lasted, though.”
...

I have read many peculiar things in my day, but I have never read my professional obituary so many times in such a short period.

Not that I have never seen my death notice before.  Hell, when I attended Netroots Nation in Chicago five years ago, the demise of the solo, single-shingle blogger was being openly posted like marriage banns: a clear, bright line was being drawn between them as has and them as not, and if you were on the wrong side of that velvet rope you were basically being consigned to obscurity and oblivion. Very sorry, old chap, but this revolution comes with a business model and you're not a shareholder.

And thus has arisen the semiannual tradition of reporting on the sad death of those sad little blogs which did not get picked for the football team (which means any blog that doesn't have steady ad revenues or an endowment from a university or think tank, or is some appendage of a larger media empire, or otherwise has the right contacts.) About twice a year, pennies are solemnly and ceremony jammed onto our eyes and under the earth we are hurriedly shoveled...

...accompanied by the sound of our lively swearing and our boot heels kicking the lids off of our coffins --

 

-- while HuffPo and a few like it gallop past on their way to another seminar on media synergistics very much not-covered-in-shit.

I am not a fool or a cynic: I understand the workplace and the compromises most people must make to earn a paycheck in the real world.  I am also all for prosperity, for skilled labor making a good living, for paying the effing writer and all of that.  But one of most frustrating spectacles to watch over the last five years since I first showed up in an obituary has been the abject failure of the big Progressive fish to the learn the hard, capitalist lesson that once they made our cause a business, they doomed themselves to become the hors d'œuvre of the bigger fish out in the deeper water.

Of course, there is an alternative, but Arianna ain't gonna like it: