The King of the Teabaggers

Reveals the full scope of his plan.

Because Reality makes Baby Jebus cry.

A Brief History of Conservatism

Chapter 78: Fiscal Conservatism

• The Entire Reagan/Bush I Era: Deficits? Wheeeeeee! Who gives a shit about deficits? We won! Reaganomics rool! Tax cuts rool! It's morning in Murrica!


• The day Clinton was inaugurated: Deficits? Holy Mother of God! In the middle of the night while no one was looking a horde of mooching welfare queens snuck in here and nearly destroyed Murrica with deficits! Everyone knows deficits are worse than Hitler! We need to cut everything -- welfare, Medicaid, Social Security, school lunches, everything! -- in the next 60 seconds or we're all dooooomed!

... On the five-hour trip back to Washington, Greenspan tried to assess what he had observed. Clinton was what Greenspan termed an "intellectual pragmatist." The term also applied to Greenspan himself. Clinton's campaign promises included tax increases on the wealthy, a violation of Republican orthodoxy. But increasing taxes reduced the federal deficit -- and those deficits, Greenspan thought, were such a threat to the future of the economy that it might just be worth it to support Clinton's proposal.




One of the paradoxes, Greenspan realized, was that by running up the federal budget deficits, Reagan had effectively borrowed from the period that was now going to be the Clinton era. Clinton would have to pay it back by paying down the deficit in some way. The irony was that Clinton probably wouldn't have been elected if Reagan hadn't created the deficits. ...   

-- Bob Woodward, "Behind the Boom"



• The Entire Bush II Era: Holy Mother of God, where did all of these terrible budget surpluses come from?!? Jesus, we need to get rid of them immediately. Surpluses are worse than Hitler! Can you believe those CRAZY Libtards are actually worried about deficits? Wheeee! Who gives a shit about deficits? We won!

"You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due."

 -- Richard Bruce Cheney 

LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of excellence that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime. 

Last week the Congressional Budget Office came out with a budget forecast. The report immediately got submerged in a chatterstorm about whether Congress or the White House would dip into something called the Social Security trust fund, but the essential facts are these: The CBO economists estimated that the federal government will run a surplus of about $150 billion in 2001. That’s a lower surplus than the CBO estimated a few months ago, before the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge. But even in these adverse circumstances, the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006.

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund." 

-- David Brooks, 2001



• The day Obama was inaugurated: Deficits! OhMyGodOhMyGodOhMyGod! Deficits! In the middle of the night while no one was looking a horde* of mooching welfare queens and their Kenyan Usurper messiah snuck in the back door and nearly destroyed Murrica with deficits! Everyone knows deficits are are worse than nine Hitlers! We need to cut everything -- welfare, Medicaid, Social Security, school lunches, everything! -- in the next 60 seconds or we're all dooooomed!

Not saying that deficits aren't a problem.

Am saying that Conservatives who have been both deafeningly silent and volubly "OMG!  we're dooooomed!" on this issue depending on which Party occupies the White House need to be sealed in an oil drum and stored in a tool shed for the next 20 years.


*Thanks for the catch :-)

The Jon Swift Memorial "Best Of" Compilation Exists

Because each year Batocchio of Vagabond Scholar wills it into existence.

The 2012 list is up and ready.

Your mission?

1. Go over and tell Bat "Thank You" for his exertions, without which you would not be able to...

2. Fend off the winter's cold and dark with this terrific collection of the finest Liberal writing of 2012.

Bon appetit!

Roberto Rodriguez 's 10 Minute Cooking School

Puerco Pibil

Professional Left Podcast #160

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

-- T. S. Eliot

Links:

• Dick Armey invades Freedomworks
• Joan Walsh gets it:  Armey is a grifter.  
• The National Review Online Cruise!
• EVEN Tom Friedman says it’s the Republicans!  /snark 

Da' money goes here:

Go, Lemmings, Go!

Hilarious Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

Since the Feast of the Epiphany is right around the corner, it seemed like a good time to haul this graphic out of the cellar

...

But the GOP appears incapable of acting for the public good. They cannot operate responsibly within the constitutional framework of this country. Their absolutism even in the face of stinging electoral defeat and hefty public opposition is a function of their existing in a hermetically-sealed ideological universe where the only thing they care about is not being primaried by someone even further to their right. That's right: the only thing. Not the country; not the debt; not the global economy; not the voters; not the American economy. They are vandals, not representatives, a rogue threat not just to this country but to the wider economic system in the world. They have already been prepared to abuse the debt ceiling and the filibuster in their adolescent anarchism...

We have a constitutional crisis: an opposition party so ideological and so bent on its own power at the expense of everything else, that the system cannot work. Only public opinion has a chance of swaying them. But when you're as fanatical as these zealots, public opinion is about as relevant as the thought that they should actually exercise basic responsibility.

--  Andrew Sullivan, December 20, 2012

Dear Future Generations, 

You want to know what life was like for Liberals in America during my lifetime?

First they ignored you.
Then they laughed at you.
Then they fought you.
Then they got gigs in national magazines repeating as breathless epiphany things you had been saying for thirty years.

R.I.P. Jack Klugman

A hell of an actor.

Twas The Night Before Fitzmas

From my blog back in 2005, note how much has been all but lost to history and how much abides.

Merry Christmas, kids.  Be excellent to each other.

The clock ticks down towards High Noon

and The Man approacheth.

My antique laptop just started showing me a PAGE_FAULT_IN_A_NON_PAGE_AREA (rampant against a striking blue background) and began denying me access to Safe Mode, which means it's almost certainly time to start digging a PC hole, and rather a lot of work has probably gone to digital heaven.

Which, if I were better rested, would be freaking me out no little bit right now, and which is why I had to unship the borrowed-and-hadn't-yet-returned-Mac (And thank's be to you-know-who-you-are.)

But frankly I'd be in a lot less of a jolly mood if I hadn't stopped around Steve Gilliard's for a nightcap and found that Commentor Randy McGowan had penned this terrific parody

Thanks Randy; laughs are just a mite short-stocked around here these days, and this is some For Sure Grinnin' Funny sausage you're packin'.

So, let me step aside and just let you read on...

Twas the nite before Fitzmas and through the White House

Not a neocon stirred, even Cheney, that louse

The documents were shredded and all burned with care

Even Judy was smart enough not to be there

The liberals were snuggled all warm in their beds

Convinced that George Bush would no longer be led

With Laura in her burkah and George in his cap

He thought to himself, can I beat this wrap?

Then from the news there arose such a clatter

George ran to his office "what the hell is the matter!?!"

He grabbed Rove and said "what is the excitement?"

And there stood Fitzgerald, hands full of indictments

Karl’s bald head then started to glow

Like George Bush’s nose, in the days he did blow

When what to his bloodshot eyes should appear

But cops and attorneys and all coming near

Fitzgerald was thorough, if not very quick

And George now realized he wasn’t that slick

More rapid than eagles Fitz’s charges they came

And he whistled and shouted and called them by name

"Now, grab all those docs and seize that computer!

Arrest Cheney! And Rove! And Rumsfeld and Scooter!

To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall!

Now, lock away, lock away! Lock away all!"

With a wink of his eye and a twist of his head

Fitz let George know he had plenty to dread

He leaked not a word, but went straight to his work

arrested them all and said “Bush you’re a jerk”

And poking his finger in George Bush’s nose

Said time for a speech in the garden of rose

He sprang to his car to his team gave a shout

And away they dragged Rove who started to pout

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight:

F*** You Dick Cheney, and your friends on the right!

Breaking...

Hidden camera video of POTUS pantsing John Boehner.

David Brooks has Reasons That Reason Cannot Know

The word processing macro that extrudes David Brook's "New York Times" column twice a week has once again scanned Google News for ("Find; Republican; Clusterfuck; "Recent") and pasted a sampling of the results into the same column-template it always uses. 

The result? 

One more Very Serious and Sensible assay of the political system of a completely fictional America where the GOP is not a raving dung-heap of plutocrats, bigots, paranoid imbeciles, Randites and fundamentalists.

Yesterday's crime against journalism begins 

Strangers in the Night  

If the two parties just knew a little more about each other we might have a deal on the “fiscal cliff” already...

which is why there is no reason to deconstruct it as a column-qua-column in any depth at all. 

Regular readers are already familiar with my firm belief that Mr. Brooks long ago gave up on producing anything resembling traditional opinion-editorials such as your mom or grandpa might have recognized. Instead, for reasons that remain carefully hidden from we smelly rabble, the "New York Times" pays Mr. Brooks enormous sums of money to use his word processing macro to generate individual, 800-word chapters of a serialized Alt History/SF novel disguised as op-ed pieces ("The Whig Fan Fiction of David Brooks".)

This novel-in-progress tediously recounts the events taking place within a fictional modern America in which the GOP never had a Southern Strategy, Reagan never got elected by running deliberately racist campaigns, Jerry Falwell never existed and Rush Limbaugh is merely a minor, fringe kook who no one ever listens to.

In fact, the most implacable antagonist to be found in Mr. Brooks' magnum crapus is not anywhere on the Right at all, but instead takes the malefic form of the Dirty Hippie Ghost of Woodstock.  The  Dirty Hippie Ghost of Woodstock is forever busy corrupting Real America with its welfare programs, contempt for rural values and bad sexy sex stuff.  Time and again Mr, Brooks slips on his CSI togs, carefully scrutinize scenes of obvious depravity or indifference by the rich and powerful only to come away convinced that he had found the true perpetrator in the phantom footprint of a Dirty Hippie Birkenstock or the imaginary whiff of Dirty Hippie patchouli.

In addition to being both ubiquitous and sly to the point of invisibility, the Dirty Hippie Ghost of Woodstock is also immensely powerful, routinely terrifying the Democratic Party into refusing to do what Democrats in Mr. Brooks' America are supposed to do: capitulate gratefully to Republican demands.  So vast is the reach of the Dirty Hippie Ghost of Woodstock that, time and again, otherwise Reasonable and Serious Democrats miss the opportunity to obey Republican directives for fear of offending it

Finally, in Mr. Brooks' fake history of American, you will find hovering above grubby fray a humble professor of Humility and hero of Reasonable Centrism named "David Brooks": a character whose most salient feature is never having said or written any of the things our David Brooks has said and written.

For example, here is Mr. Brooks today citing the Weekly Standard on how debilitating a "generation of debt politics" has been:

In other words, even if Obama gets a fiscal-cliff deal, he still needs to shake loose some money — either from the entitlement programs or from a new revenue stream — to pay for his programs. He is still caught in the remorseless vice that Christopher DeMuth describes in, “The Real Cliff,” a brilliant piece in The Weekly Standard. A generation of debt politics has left our leaders with no room to maneuver.

And here is the very same Mr. Brooks back when he worked at the very same Weekly Standard, mocking "Stupid Party" Democrats for their deep concern that Bush tax cuts would destroy the Clinton surplus and laughing at the idea that profligate Republican fiscal policies could ever plunge the country back into the "remorseless vice" of Republican-created deficits:

The New Stupid Party

  

LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of excellence that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime. 

Last week the Congressional Budget Office came out with a budget forecast. The report immediately got submerged in a chatterstorm about whether Congress or the White House would dip into something called the Social Security trust fund, but the essential facts are these: The CBO economists estimated that the federal government will run a surplus of about $150 billion in 2001. That’s a lower surplus than the CBO estimated a few months ago, before the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge. But even in these adverse circumstances, the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006.

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund."

...

Multiply this lie by a dozen dozen others at Mr. Brooks' career stands as one of the most remarkable acts of sustained, public fraud I have ever seen, and one which is kept from collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity entirely by money and by the willingness of Mr. Brooks' Beltway colleagues to go along with the scam. 

It is also clearly part of Mr. Brooks' long-term project to gradually use the immense influence he wields to gradually eradicate the real modern history (a process about which I have written before ["Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and You"] because, as longtime readers know, I am a fucking pedant on the subject.)

And so, in lieu of another fisking of another lump of horrid Brooksian claptrap, instead -- for a little taste of how long my little one-man war on Mr. Brooks' Centrist bullshit has been going on -- here is a re-print of a post of mine from the pre-Photoshop days of my misspent blogger youth:

+ + + + + + + + 

BoBo pleads for “compromise”. Again.

 

Just hold still and we’ll skin you with a better knife.

Short Brooks is Same-As-It-Ever-Was Brooks: Let’s cooperate. You bend over a trifle further and we’ll screw you a bit less brutally.

This from today’s NYT where, owing to forces that I find incomprehensible, David Brooks still draws a paycheck for tasks completely unrelated to filling the vending machines up with fresh cookies and HoHo’s at night. And, yes, I add in a word or two.

"Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it."

No you tube worm – the Senate is threatened by your party. By your extremists. By your lunatics. Every Party has its nutjobs, Brooksie, but not every Party hands them the keys to the vehicle and then points a webbed finger at the Other Party and shouts “J'Accuse!” you truckling little pecksniff.

Maybe you didn’t get the message, or maybe you think hawking the same, old GOP Thalidomide in a world populated by the offspring it helped cripple is still a successful marketing plan, so let me say this reeeeal slooow so that there’s no misunderstanding: Mixing carbolic acid and lemonade and selling it to children as a “compromise” is not a compromise: it’s settling for poisoning children at a slightly slower pace that you had hoped for.

Go peddle “capitulation to lunatics as a square deal” on eBay, ‘cause we ain’t buying any.

"When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate."

“The centrist majority?” Just like slavery was settled amicably by the Missouri Compromises II, III and IV?

Or was the Jim Crow Apartheid that rotted away in the Red States for a hundred years after the Civil War whisked away by a “series of state-by-state compromises” and I just didn’t notice? Segregation? The ban on interracial marriage? And the ban on teaching Evolution?

Transpose any other basic civil rights issue onto the template BoBo proposes as the reasonable alternative to Kwazy Judicial Activism and the texture and density of the shit that he is packed with jumps right out at you.

I dunno which is more amusing: the thought that BoBo actually believes the diarrhea the comes bubbling out of his pie-hole, or that he thinks people just don’t notice the Giant Fundy Dildo rammed so ballistically up his nether regions that its chubby head actually pops right out of his pie-hole like a Jack-Chick-in-the-Box and says "Howdy Cowboy".

A dildo – by the way – it would actually be illegal for BoBo to purchase in the fine state of Alabama. Thanks to their level-headed “ centrist majority.”

"Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation."

No they articulated a right to privacy (do you ever get a single thing right?) which is as implicit in every other right mentioned in the Constitution as is the right to breathe, which the Founders also did not specify, because I guess they never anticipated the existence of the New York Times, or that it would one day decide that a myopic Sugar Glider should have its own column.

Then there’s more Peevish White Noise strung together to form sentences. Phrases like “right and left” and “pro-life or pro-choice” and “tit-for-tat”: the “Tyranny of False Bisection.” Both sides -- the barking mad and the reasonable -- somehow both equally wrong. Idiot.

…

Every few years another civilizing custom is breached. Over the past four years Democrats have resorted to the filibuster again and again to prevent votes on judicial nominees they oppose. Up until now, minorities have generally not used the filibuster to defeat nominees that have majority support. They have allowed nominees to have an up or down vote. But this tradition has been washed away.

In response, Republicans now threaten to change the Senate rules and end the filibuster on judicial nominees. That they have a right to do this is certain. That doing this would destroy the culture of the Senate and damage the cause of limited government is also certain.

..."

And again, BoBo fills up his incredibly pricey column inches with a lot of empty puling and cavorting and zero-sum-game masturbating on the glories to compromise and centrism…before he gets to the razor he has tried to hide in the candy bar.

BoBo, do you know what Centrism actually looks like? It looks remarkably like the Democratic Party with Bill Clinton in the White House. Center-right, to be accurate and y’all even got NAFTA, GAT, Welfare Reform and a bunch of other goodies from the Eternal Republican Wish List thrown in to the deal.

And as a big “Thank You”, you blocked 35% of his judicial nominees (a little statistic that Mr. Fair ‘n Balanced very conspicuously omitted because it made his whole thesis look like the puddle of damp excreta that it actually is), and are now raving that Dems blocking 4% is somehow an unprecedented breaching of “another civilizing custom”.

"The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better. "

“Fact is” you wormy little Quisling, the Dems spent the 90’s compromising their fool asses off – precisely like it says right here on the prescription that Dr. BoBo wrote out for us.

For their troubles they got Newt Gingrich and his GOPAC Little Red Hatespeech Book launching a carefully planned, deliberately executed verbal blitzkrieg again the Democratic Party. A coordinated national campaign of that came with a detailed list of words (Free In Every Box of Cracka’ Jacks!) to be used to demonization and humiliate Democrats at every opportunity.

For their troubles we get Tom DeLay rising like the Asshole Kraken from the absolute depths of bigoted-ignorant-demagogue-politics to become a proud leader of your party. And trailing behind him like the smelly brown tail of a feculent comet, all the rest of the escapees from “The Island of Doctor Moreau” that own and operate the GOP.

For their troubles they got the Democratic President of the United States hunted like a wild animal for seven years – for sport – by Republicans riding along on a rhetorical tsumani of Absolute Ethical Standards. Virtually shutting the country down to impeach him for a b-l-o-w-j-o-b, not because you wanted to -- Heavens No! -- but because any hint of impropriety on the part of any president need to be ferreted out, no matter the cost.

Well the per-capita number of Ferrets in your party has certainly skyrocketed since then, so where are all the investigations of the possible High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the administration of George Walker Bush? Where are the Select Committees? The Special Prosecutors with unlimited lines of credit? Has Cheney been excoriated and rebuked for secretly rigging up a new energy policy? Has GW been subpoenaed yet? Has Rice? Perle?

Of course not, BoBo, because your party is infested top to bottom with CHUDS and poltroons, liars and hypocrites, Elmer Gantrys and Jeff Gannons. You already own the Executive and Legislative branches and the only thing standing between them and the Jesusland, Inc. fantasy that you all cream over is the courts…

…so let’s expend a Brooksie columns beating up on judges by cowardly proxy. Hey, how about Liberal Supreme Court Judges? Who are dead? And how about we try to throw the dogs off the scent by waving the word “Abortion” around and seeing if that’ll confuse them.

Face it, BoBo in the sharp illumination of your party’s own words and deeds, you sound idiotic, but hey, if you really want to disarm and play nice, fine. And since we spent a decade trying to find compromise with the "Napalm a Progressive for Christ" wing of your party (now better known now simple as The Republicans) and got our skulls bashed in with big, old GOP crowbars for our trouble, how about you going first, and we’ll meet you at the half-way point.

The REAL halfway point, which at the rate your party has being sprinting into the doughy arms of the Fundamentalists, is now about nine billion miles to your left.

The Real Santa Claus

Is the person whose kindness exceeds their original design specifications.

See also "Widow's Mite, The"

In Case You Missed The NRA Presser Today...

Professional Left Podcast #159

The NRA is a cult that worships a terrible and bloodthirsty god.  That god has given them dominion over one of America's two major political parties. Today, Wayne LaPierre delivered that cult's Sermon on the Mount.

-- driftglass

Da' money goes here:

Fundraiser Continues: Self-Destroying Machines

This is sculpture Jean Tinguely posing in front of "Homage to New York".

 "Homage" was a kinetic sculpture designed to come roaring loudly to life, run violently and clankingly for awhile, and then publicly tear itself apart.

This House Speaker John Boehner posing in front of the House Republicans...

...which is a machine built and refined over the last 40 years by fascist schemers, crackpot wingnut billionaires and hate radio assholes to do exactly the same thing.

At 1:27 this afternoon...

National Review Online

Boehner’s Ultimatum
By Robert Costa
December 20, 2012 1:27 P.M.

Speaker John Boehner is confident that “Plan B,” his fiscal-cliff plan, will pass the House, and that its passage will pressure the Senate to bring it to the floor.

“I’m not convinced at all that when it passes, it’ll die in the Senate,” Boehner told reporters. “I did my part, they’ve done nothing.”

“They will have to act,” he added. “If they refuse to act, they will be responsible for the largest tax hike in American history.”

...

 8 hours later...

Talking Points Memo

Republicans Crush Boehner’s Plan B

BRIAN BEUTLER DECEMBER 20, 2012, 9:16 PM

Plan B was supposed to have been John Boehner’s masterstroke — and the only legislative tactic protecting him from an embarrassing defeat in fiscal cliff negotiations with President Obama.

But late Thursday, after a brief but contentious meeting with his conference, he announced he’d gambled and lost.

“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass,” Boehner official statement read.

...

Coming In At #4...

Over the years, I have been asked many (many. many) times "Why the hell do you bother with the Sunday Gasbag Parade?"  

I mean, seriously, who watches that shit anyway?

I have answered many (many) times, but the best summary-answer I have found in awhile comes courtesy of Alex Pareen's 2012 Hack List in which the Sunday Mouse Circus crosses the disreputable finish line a respectable fourth place:

Every Sunday morning, the big four broadcast networks all air their FCC-mandated “public affairs” programming, which consists of a host (a white guy) interviewing the same dozen lawmakers, journalists and pundits in a rotating order. The lawmakers are usually not the most powerful members of Congress — often they’re somewhat marginal figures in terms of influence, in fact — and the pundits and journalists all generally share the same, or very similar, worldviews. The only people I actually know who watch these things do so out of professional obligation.

But people watch these shows. Millions of people. More people watch “Meet the Press” than “The Daily Show.” Most of those people are quite old, but it’s still the case that a significant portion of the American people are learning the contours of the great public debates of our time from David Gregory interviewing Lindsey Graham.

FAIR is the organization that has most recently sorted and tallied the Sunday show guests, and yet again, the shows skew white and conservative. FAIR looked at the guest lists for ABC’s “This Week,” NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CBS’ “Face the Nation, and “Fox News Sunday” from June 2011 through February 2012. They found:

Of one-on-one interviews, 70 percent of partisan-affiliated guests were Republican. Those guests were overwhelmingly male (86 percent) and white (92 percent).

The broader roundtable segments weren’t much more diverse: 62 percent of partisan-affiliated guests were Republican. More broadly, guests classified as either Republican or conservative far outnumbered Democrats or progressives, 282 to 164. The roundtables were 71 percent male and 85 percent white.

U.S. government sources — current officials, former lawmakers, political candidates, party-affiliated political operatives and campaign advisers — dominated the Sunday shows overall (47 percent of appearances). Following closely behind were journalists (43 percent), most of whom were middle-of-the-road Beltway political reporters.

Media Matters tallied the guest lists in 2005 and 2006 and came up with very similar results.There are never labor leaders, scientists, academics, activists or public policy experts on these shows, ever. There are scarcely any women or people of color. The Sunday shows are broadcast live from the cocoon.

To merely note that they’re right-leaning, though, doesn’t quite do them justice. They embrace an ideological spectrum that goes from Mary Matalin to James Carville, but the panels are dominated by David Brookses and Tom Friedmans and Bob Woodwards, all spouting the same faux-”moderate” Beltway consensus bullshit. They lean right because the elite Washington consensus is that America leans right. But they worship moderation, baby-splitting, and shallow displays of bipartisanship above all else. Imagine David Gergen and Peggy Noonan agreeing with each other about Simpson-Bowles, forever...

There is simply too much establishment money and power and prestige riding on keeping the American electorate dumb enough to buy the poison that the "David Brookses and Tom Friedmans and Bob Woodwards" for them to permit it to be otherwise.

The Sunday Mouse Circus is the primary vehicle by which their poison is delivered.

 Fake Centrism is the brick on the accelerator.

Fundraising Continues: Astonishingly Clueless Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

The thing about people who never remember, never take responsibility, and never accept accountability is that they can make the exact same arguments that were shown to be deeply misguided only a few years ago - without even a flicker of recognition. 

-- Andrew Sullivan, December 20. 2012.

For the second time in three days, I am rendered temporarily speechless by the sheer magnitude of yet another professional Conservative public intellectual's capacity for unfettered narcissism and self-delusion.

Fundraiser Continued: Contemptible Shit David Brooks Says, Ctd.

"...since the shootings in Newtown, Conn., the debate has gone off on two tracks, the gun control track favored mostly by liberals and the mental health track favored mostly by conservatives. If you don’t buy my distinction, just compare the editorials and op-eds that have appeared respectively on our own fine pages and the comparable pages of The Wall Street Journal.

"I have to say that being a healer of the breach I think we need to go down both tracks — let’s tighten gun control rules and address some of the ways people with mental health issue can slip through the cracks."

-- Yale Professor of Humility, David Brooks, December 19, 2012

Name for me please the Liberals who oppose increased funding for mental health.

I'll wait.

Name for me please the Liberals who have been ferociously fighting -- decade after decade -- against any effort to improve the American mental health system.

Name for me please the well-funded Liberal anti-mental health lobbying organizations which have dominated American politics to the point where they can hold Democratic candidates hostage to their lunatic agenda.

Name for me please the Liberals who have been following leaders who swear they will give up on gutting the American mental health system only after you pry their antipathy out of their cold, dead hands.

Name for me please the 31 Liberals senators who are so embarrassed to be in the thrall of the anti-mental health care lobby that they refuse open invitations to go on the Sunday Gasbag Parade to defend their idiocy. 

Name for me please the Liberals who festoon their pickup trucks with bumper stickers repeating some variation on the theme that the only thing standing between them and tyranny is the fact that the American mental health system is grossly underfunded.

Name for me please the Liberals who waddle around in t-shirts saying "My Wife? Yes.  My Dog? Maybe.  My Underfunded Mental Health System? Never!"

Name for me please the Liberals who empower organizations with their votes and their dollars that are run by paranoid, blood-soaked anti-mental health thugs who swear that any effort to increase mental health funding by one fucking dime is part a massive secret plot

to do a jackbooted tarantella all over the America's freedom.

Name for me please the Liberals who show up in mobs in public parks to scream their support for eliminating funding for the mental health system while waving signs saying that the Tree of Liberty Needs to be Refreshed with the Blood of Tyrants.

Sigh.

For the record, let me repeat the same critique I have made over 600 times since I began this blog in 2005: David Brooks is a Conservative who is pathologically unable to admit the simple fact that, very often, on very important issues, Liberals are simply right and Conservatives are simply, lethally wrong. 

And because Mr. Brooks is pathologically  unable to face the simple facts of his ideology's repeated and catastrophic failure, he lies a lot.  Mostly his lies take the form of making up wholly fake Liberal positions on issues which he then counterpoises against very real and usually very dangerous, stupid, bigoted or crazy Conservative positions so that he can continue hawking the Beltway's most profitable snake oil: 

"Both Sides Do It"

Making a career out of repeating this Big Lie with absolutely single-minded persistence has made Mr, Brooks an incredibly wealthy and influential man.

Name for me please the Liberal who have achieved a fraction of Mr. Brooks' power and influence by speaking simple truths about the real world.

This is The Cathedral in Which Your Cowardice Has Been Enshrined

The silence of the pulpit is the silence we heard when you did not answer cries for help. In the eaves of this place are the festooned remnants of the friends you did not come to assist. In the darkened rooms of rotted staircases are the tattered faces of lovers you betrayed- here your mother, there your father, both gone now and neither with any degree of calm or joy. Here is the sanctuary of your lost chances. There is no pastor, no choir, no stewards, no supplicants. It is a congregation of one. You will worship here all the remaining days of your life and at night your spirit will kneel on broken glass in the pews.

-- Harlan Ellison, "The Silence"

Fraud and Man at Yale

I have no words.

I assume this will be held just down the hall from Paul Wolfowitz's advanced class on 21st Century military strategy.

And it Shall be Known as "The McArdle Method"

Media Matters reports on what would have been the odds-on favorite to dominate either the "Genius Libertarian Breakthrough Thinking" category at "The Sammies" if "The Sammies" still existed...

...or the "Stupidest Fucking Idea of the Year" category at any award ceremony but "The Sammies":

...

McArdle's essay on how to prevent mass shootings in the wake of the tragedy in Newton, Connecticut, begins with a libertarian defense of congressional inaction on gun issues, even sneering that it is "easy and satisfying to be for 'gun control' in the abstract, but we cannot pass gun control, in the abstract." You might well have seen most of this essay after any mass shooting in recent decades.

McArdle is so resigned to any gun laws failing to prevent gun violence that she concludes that people should be encouraged to "gang rush" shooters rather than hide: 

I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.  Would it work?  Would people do it?  I have no idea; all I can say is that both these things would be more effective than banning rifles with pistol grips.

This is what a zombie ideology looks like just before it keels over from starvation and begins gnawing the dirt..