Al Gore Goes Driftglass

Which is nice.  (h/t Sam)

Pot Calls Kettle Hack

Former George W. Bush speechmonger and professional Conservative media barnacle David Frum has a big, hot sad over the fact that other people who still ride business class on the wingnut welfare gravy train from which Mr. Frum was thrown continue to make a fine living running the old IOKIYAR scam:

James Taranto, Heckler? by David Frum Jan 31, 2013 8:31 AM EST

James Taranto writes the "Best of the Web" column on the Wall Street Journalwebsite.

Two-plus years ago, Taranto and I had an exchange over Andrew Breitbart's promotion of a falsified video. The video had been doctored to present a black official in the Department of Agriculture, Shirley Sherrod, as an anti-white bigot. In fact, Sherrod was telling a story about overcoming racial animus - her own and other people's.

Back then, Taranto defended the post-truth methods of Andrew Breitbart's journalism.

Breitbart set a trap for the NAACP, and the NAACP walked right into it. He was able to do so because he correctly identified the organization's moral weakness.

Confronted by a video showing apparent racism at an NAACP function, its leaders appear to have panicked and made a snap decision to denounce one of their own so as to pre-empt the charge of employing a double standard.

It was a very effective bit of Alinskyite political theater, and in a way more so for Breitbart's having gotten the story wrong.

Taranto called me "silly" for objecting to this way of looking at things.

Two-plus years later, Taranto has returned to the debate. This time, he has abruptly reversed sides, or seemingly so, with a vituperative denunciation of perceived media bias and misinformation in the coverage of Neil Heslin. I'm a particular target of Taranto's name-calling, and not for the first time.

I am a strong believer in the "better late than never" principle. A commitment to more accurate information is always welcome. It's especially welcome at theJournal. I worked at the Journal from 1989 until 1992, and I've been distressed in the years since by the Journal's willingness to distort facts and figures in service of its editorial agenda. If an editor at the paper will speak up for journalistic ethics, hurrah.

But in this case, unfortunately, Taranto is not calling for more truth. Quite the opposite.

The topic nominally under debate is whether the word "heckling" is the right word to describe the behavior of gun advocates during the testimony of grieving Newtown dad Neil Heslin? Or might some other term be more exact? "Shouted retort" might work, or possibly "angry outburst." Whatever the term they used, few who watched the video would dispute that the gun advocates behaved in a way that was both shocking and cruel. James Taranto functions as the Journal's approximation of an in-house comedian, but if you want a real laugh, imagine how he'd react to a protester who shouted "Allah is great!" during a pause in the testimony of a 9/11 victim 30 days after that atrocity.

...

Poor David Frum.  He seems to have somehow completely forgotten that IOKYAR (It's OK If You're A Republican)  is the brick and mortar out of which the great shield wall which protects Conservatism from reality is made.  

IOKYAR is universally applicable in all circumstances.

IOKYAR bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Having forgotten this first article of Conservative Faith, I can only assume that in between fits of pique at the asshattery of the Conservative media which handed him his entire career, Mr. Frum also devotes a few contemplative moments each day carefully smashing the mirrors in his gigantic glass house.

Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling, Liberal kids!

Since Andrew "Dice" Sullivan's most recent very successful business model (expropriating Liberal critiques of the Right by the job-lot, decanting them into old Jovan Musk for Men bottles, relabeling them as "True Conservatism" and selling them off the back of his truck for $20 a pop while never, ever acknowledging that the Left was right all along) depends entirely on the Big Centrist "Both Sides Do It" Lie, every so often he has to chase the nosy ideological revenuers away by publishing unalloyed bullshit like this with a completely straight face (h/t Balloon Juice):

Let me first second Kirsten Powers’ loathing for Media Matters’ campaign to shame and target individuals for appearing on Fox News. But the memo she cites is from a year ago. And I have to say that even if it means agreeing with David Brock, I’m afraid I have to confess that I do not regard Fox News as a legitimate news organization. It’s a propaganda channel for the far right, and not much worse than MSNBC’s leftist partisan smugbursts. And an administration, in my view, should be open to all at regular press conferences (okay, not heckling by the Daily Caller) … but does not have to legitimize propaganda machines by appearing on them. I’d keep off MSNBC and Fox if I were in any administration. They both poison our discourse. Let these propaganda channels put talk radio on TV all day if they want. You don’t have to enable them.

*David Brooks Reveals Plans to Build a "Super Awesome Tree Fort" -- UPDATE

First and bestest, it won't have all that stupid, crappy stuff going on all the time with those mean kids from down the block like the old tree fort had:

But, so far, there have been more calls for change than actual evidence of change. In his speech, for example, Jindal spanked his party for its stale clichés but then repeated the same Republican themes that have earned his party its 33 percent approval ratings: Government bad. Entrepreneurs good. 

In this reinvention process, Republicans seem to have spent no time talking to people who didn’t already vote for them.

... 

While losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, the flaws of this mentality have become apparent. 

Those jerks will not be invited, because the awesome new tree fort'll be in David Brooks' own back yard!  

It’s probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It’s smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast. It’s smarter to build a new division that is different the way the Westin is different than the Sheraton.

He already has a buncha boards and nails and stuff.  He even has juice boxes! 

Americans are still skeptical of Washington. If you shove a big government program down their throats they will recoil. But many of their immediate problems flow from globalization, the turmoil of technological change and social decay, and they’re looking for a bit of help. Moreover, given all the antigovernment rhetoric, they will never trust these Republicans to reform cherished programs like Social Security and Medicare. You can’t be for entitlement reform and today’s G.O.P., because politically the two will never go together.

And a ladder!

The second G.O.P. wouldn’t be based on the Encroachment Story. It would be based on the idea that America is being hit simultaneously by two crises...

And really cool passwords!

...which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles Murray crisis. 

And even though it will look exactly like the Democratic Party, it won't be because...it'll be even cooler!

The second G.O.P. ... would be filled with people who recoiled at President Obama’s second Inaugural Address because of its excessive faith in centralized power, but who don’t share the absolute antigovernment story of the current G.O.P.

And to join, all you have to do is swear on the graves of your ancestors that you will never, ever mention the many, many, many columns David Brooks has written over the years pretending that Republican bigotry and lunacy was trivial or non-existent...mocking Liberal concerns over the fallout from catastrophic Republican policies as stupid, shallow or disloyal...extolling the brilliant job that George W. Bush and John McCain were doing reforming the GOP...and repeatedly predicting a long, glorious Republican renaissance of competent leadership, budget surpluses and juice boxes for all!

BooMan weighs in:

David Brooks: Stupid as a Boiled Ham
by BooMan
Tue Jan 29th, 2013 at 09:42:45 AM EST

You knew that at one point David Brooks would suffer enough cognitive dissonance to lead him to make a permanent break with the Republican Party. That day has not yet come. Instead, because his paycheck depends on his willingness to ignore all cognitive dissonance, Brooks has today decided to advocate the creation of a second Republican Party. This party won't be based in the South or the Mormon Mountain West. It won't be completely paranoid about the ever-growing encroachment of the Nanny State. Possibly, it won't be bug-eyed nuts about Sharia Law and Latinos who behead white people in the Arizona desert...

Shakes sticks a fork in it:

The GOP isn't even honest about who they are when they're navel-gazing. Americans expect politicians to lie to us, but we expect them at least not to lie to themselves.

UPDATE:

To absolutely no one's surprise, former George W. Bush speechwriter and very last kid picked for GOP dodgeball every time, David Frum, has offered to stock Mr. Brooks' awesome new tree fort with pizza rolls and porn that all look amazingly like every Liberal critique of the Right for the last 40 years:

...

What have the immoderate Republicans of the Tea Party era accomplished? Bupkus.

What went wrong? Many things, but start with this: Tea Party Republicans terrified the country. In 2011, they came within inches of forcing an entirely unnecessary government default. In 2012, they campaigned on a platform of ending the Medicare guarantee for younger people (while preserving every nickel of it for the Republican-voting constituencies over age 55) in order to finance a big tax cut for the richest Americans. Through the whole period 2009-2012, senior Republicans engaged in strident rhetoric of a kind simply not used by major party figures since the demise of Burton K. Wheeler and Alben Barkley. “Death panels” and “Ground Zero mosques”; Michele Bachman, Herman Cain and Donald Trump taking turns as the Republican front-runner; speakers of state legislatures praying for the death of the president and a former speaker of the House denouncing the president as a Kenyan anti-colonial alien to the American experience—we could fill this page with examples of important Republicans currying favor with their voting base by behaving in ways that the non-base would regard as reckless, racist, or just plain repellent.

I concur with Voegeli and Hayward about the need to restrain the growth of government. A preference for leaner, more efficient government is the concern that unites all Republicans. But it is more than a coincidence that the more ferociously and apocalyptically Republicans talk about government, the less Republicans actually do about it.

Here it seems to me is the core problem: the big winners under the American fiscal system are the elderly, the rural, and the affluent—Republican constituencies. It’s not easy to balance the budget or shrink government spending to any significant degree in ways that don’t pinch Republican voters much harder than they pinch Democratic voters.

To escape that reality, some conservative thought leaders have constructed an alternative reality. In this alternative reality, “welfare” not Medicare is the number one social spending cost.

In this alternative reality, government employment has not fallen by more than 500,000 since 2008.

In this alternative reality, half the country is deemed not to pay any tax—because this alternative reality refuses to count payroll taxes, excise taxes, and state and local taxes as taxes.

In this alternative reality, Medicare is counted as a program that is “paid for” by its beneficiaries contributions while unemployment insurance is not—even though the latter statement would be much closer to true.

...

Longtime readers are already hip to the fact this is not exactly a trailblazingly new tactic for Messers Brooks and Frum:

Both Mr. Frum and Mr. Brooks are sticking to the most tried-and-true method of Beltway Insider lying -- namely, heroically disavowing any knowledge whatsoever of their own previous and well-documented actions...

* Because "David Brooks calls for a 'Windows 95' that will be just like the Mac except slower, crashier and "'more epistemologically modest.'" was too long to pack into a title (and h/t to Lars Olsson for the spot-on video):

Andrew "Dice" Sullivan

Hickory dickory dock
My past is starting to squawk

Longtime readers know that I am alternately alarmed and amused by the way in which Conservative Public Person Andrew Sullivan has created a very profitable little media empire for himself by first spending years and years slashing and slandering Liberals, and then, as Conservatism shed its Cher wig and fake nose to reveal itself to be every bit the raving, neofascist freakshow those slashed and slandered Liberals had been warning about all along, by quietly expropriating Liberal intellectual property by the job-lot and reselling it at a considerable markup as "True Conservatism".

Because, as one long-forgotten wag once put it:

...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?

Well praise be to Allah (and h/t to Alert Reader "mh" for bringing it to my attention) that the enterprising Eric Alterman of The Nation has taken it upon himself to flesh the public record out even further with a trip down memory lane to those thrilling days of yesteryear when Mr. Sullivan was the young, Conservative editor of The New Republic:

His five-year reign was characterized by so many disastrous decisions, it would take every word in this magazine, and then some, simply to enumerate them. But here’s a partial list: under Sullivan’s guidance, TNR championed, among others, Ruth Shalit, Stephen Glass, Steven Emerson, Charles Murray and Elizabeth McCaughey. It’s no easy matter to determine which of these charlatans did the most damage to the magazine’s reputation. (Indeed, it’s a measure of just how abysmally TNR’s editorial filter functioned under Sullivan that Camille Paglia calling the then–first lady “Hillary the man-woman and bitch goddess” doesn’t even make the top five.) This was a period of casual plagiarism, fabulism, racist pseudoscience, and deliberate lies aimed at the heart of liberal principle in general and the Clinton administration in particular by what was still considered liberalism’s flagship publication.

Mr. Alterman notes that since Mr. Sullivan does virtually no actual reporting, the only remaining metric left to measure his performance is the quality of his judgement, which has been rather spectacularly bad:

The fact that few individuals can be shown to have demonstrated worse judgment over the course of the past two decades, and risen higher as a result, is yet another example of the changes that Sullivan-style “journalism” has helped to bring about.

And notes that Mr, Sullivan has coped with being horribly wrong about everything by:

...slowly revers[ing] himself to the point where he now embraces many of the positions he once termed treasonous. Sorry to be personal about this, but, again, I once wrote a column pointing out that most pundits were far more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinians. Sullivan compared it to, I kid you not, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not so long afterward, however, Sullivan switched sides and became an extremely caustic critic not only of Israel, but also of its neoconservative supporters (like his former self). 

And how does Mr. Sullivan reconcile his terrible track record, bad ideas and myriad reversals? 

Easy. 

 He was just being provocative!

...if one reads the breathless coverage of his decision to launch an independent blog—to say nothing of the promotional copy from the publications that have hired him over the past two decades—one will find precious little discussion of the accuracy of the information in which he traffics. In this sense, Sullivan resembles his fellow British performance artist and celebrity scribe, Christopher Hitchens. Though a far more stylish writer than Sullivan, Hitchens, too, repudiated the balance of his life’s work without ever admitting having done so, much less explaining how he had come to be one of the people he’d spent a career eviscerating. Both of these charming British imports put their talent in the service of a journalism of “provocation,” as Sullivan terms it, untethered to traditional conceptions of evidence or even honesty.

The clock struck two
And with a magic "UnDo" 
I now resell Liberal stock

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

While autopsying this week's Mouse Circus, there are many things we could be focusing on.

For example, it might be useful to discuss subtle nuances of the gentle, hot oil and eucalyptus massage David Gregory administered to lapsed-human Paul Ryan today on the most watched public affairs show in America.

Paul Ryan: We would have fixed our fiscal mess under Bill Clinton

Posted by Sean Sullivan on January 27, 2013 at 11:54 am

The nation’s most pressing fiscal issues would likely have been solved if Bill Clinton were president, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Sunday in a swipe at President Obama

“Look, if we had [a] Clinton presidency, if we had Erskine Bowles, chief of staff of the White House or president of the United States, I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now. That’s not the kind of presidency we’re dealing with right now,” Ryan said on NBC News’s “Meet The Press.”

Ryan also said he feels that Obama hasn’t signaled a desire to compromise. ”All of the statements and all of the comments lead me to believe that he’s thinking more of a political conquest than political compromise,” said Ryan.
...

It might also be instructive to take a close look at why Jim DeMint is $till allowed on the mo$t watched public affair$ $how in America de$pite giving up hiS "Mo$t Indi$putably Bat$hit In$ane Member of the United $tate$ $enate" title in favor of a much better paying gig a$ the head of one of the mo$t indi$putable bat$hit in$ane Conservative  crack houses "think tank$" in America.  Equally interesting would be a healthy discussion of why the aforementioned Mr. Gregory reflexively treats the very real, howling Conservative dementia on public display right in front of him as something icky to be skirted gingerly around



on the way to his next bout of imaginary hippie punching (from Crooks and Liars):

...

NAACP president Ben Jealous, however, argued that Republicans would be better off "if they're willing to give up on the gasoline that's been the old Dixiecrat rhetoric they've indulged in for the last 40 years."

"They need to stop," Jealous explained. "They need to say, 'We have an old brand as the Grand Old Party, the party of Lincoln, the party of Kemp, the party of people who united this country again and again. Let's be that and let's stop trying to be these Dixiecrats because it just doesn't work for anybody anymore.'"

Pressing DeMint, Gregory asked if he regretted "some of the comments about abortion in this last cycle, about rape, about, again, what Colin Powell thought were veiled racist comments from the party?" The former South Carolina senator ignored the reference to "racist comments," instead responding with a rant about fetal personhood.

"The fact that we are losing over 3,000 unborn children a day is an important issue," DeMint opined. "But Republicans or conservatives should not engage in a wish list about exceptions for abortion when the other side will not even agree that we have real people, real human beings. And we need to fight the battle where it should be fought. Life is important. We know from all the new technology and improved sonograms that we do have a baby."

"Instead of just offering my opinion on some hypothetical debate about exceptions for abortions, we need to move it back and particularly work with the states that are fighting just for the personhood of the child. And if we can start there, I think America will move with us."

"Little different than the question about rhetoric and how it reaches voters," Gregory noted as he moved on to the next topic.

Because Mr. Gregory is a positive wizard at moving on.

Or we could add one more exciting installment to America's teevee's longest running mystery serial, "What in the Name of Holy Fucking Fuck Cakes is Newton Leroy Gingrich Still Doing on TeeVee?", because that is a perennial and simple enough to write, provided you give yourself enough time to refill your outraged incredulity ink-well.

We could talk about Secretary of State Clinton sawing off Senator Ron Johnson's ass and serving it up on the Spode china in front of an international teevee audience.  We could talk about why Harry Reid doesn't give a fuck about what we think.  We could talk about the eight hours of whip-smart smart, funny, rambunctiousness fare served up by Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris-Perry every weekend that comes into our homes like manna from the Better Universe, or about the Scintilla from Wasilla's sudden exile from Roger Ailes' good graces.

Hell, given what a knee-walking, self-nut-punching case of the public stupids the GOP has come down with, we could even spend a fruitful hour riffing on James Carville's maxim (via the late Steve Gilliard) about anvils and drowning:

Jim Carville once said that when your opponent was losing, toss him an anvil, yet some Democrats persist in refusing to see the basic logic in that.

But if I had a spare dollar to plunk down at the pari-mutuel betting parlor, I would wager that none of this is what will dominate the coverage of what came out of the Sunday shows because, instead if throwing the bad guys anvils, the very bright and very capable Ms. Harris-Perry tossed them a rope:





Melissa Harris-Perry:

"...U.S. military, despised as an engine of war by many progressives..."

First, let me be clear that while I choose my words carefully, I don't temper them based on how some hypothetical future reader may choose to interpret them and I would never advise anyone else to do so.

Second, I do not disagree with the characterization of the military as an "engine of war". In fact, just the opposite:  describing a  military as an engine of war is a tautology; a simple, functional definition.

As for hating war generally, you know who hates it more than almost anyone?  The people we ask to do the fighting for us:

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in. 

-- George McGovern

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.   

-- Ernest Hemingway 

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

-- General Douglas MacArthur

In fact, I don't know anyone outside of armchair heroes and Neocon Yellow Elephants who doesn't think the dogs of war invariably demand such a terrible sacrifice of blood and treasure that they should only be unleashed as the very last resort.

All that being said, over here in the Reality-Based Community we just spent the better part of a decade being bludgeoned by the massed media and political might of the 101st Chairborne douchebags -- by the people who lied us into war and then fucked that war up -- for being delusional, fifth columnist, freedom-hating Commies who hate this country and the people who volunteer to defend it.

And while it is terribly unfair to snip a 30 second byte out of a longer, nuanced argument,
it is also terribly predictable:

These people are outrage camels who can survive for months on nothing more than a sip of Kenyan Koolaid and can spin a single lie about Benghazi into enough wingnut taffeta to clothe millions.

That is all

Plus ça Change

Plus c'est la même chose.

Situated in the latitudes somewhere between a call for Brit Hume's resignation following his on-air lies about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a post about the GOP's attempts to gut Social Security, I hauled this March, 2005 gem from the "Seeing the Forest" blog up from Memory Hole oblivion for your reading pleasure.

Just in time for Groundhog Day, and just in case you were wondering just how fucking tired we Liberals sometimes get at having to make the same god damn points over and over and over again:

...

I really dread the next four years. I expect the worst from Bush -- specifically, war fever plus McCarthyism. There have been a number of positive changes in the Democratic party, but Democrats as a group still don't seem prepared for what's going to happen, and it may be too little, too late.

At the beginning of my blogging career I was happy just to vent, but over the last year or so I've tried to figure out a way to make something of my political writing. That really hasn't happened -- I still seem to be speaking to the same small audience of people who basically already agree with me, without really getting my message out the generic Democrats or the big-time bloggers -- much less the party leadership.

I will always be angry about the crappy 2004 campaign, the overpaid consultants, and the unresponsive and bureaucratic Democratic Party (and Kerry campaign) -- and especially, the New Dems who are only now finally realizing that perhaps their destruction of the left wing of the Democratic party left them vulnerable to attack. Lieberman's hot wet kiss with Bush at the State of the Union speech was just the killing blow.

I noticed that Martin Peretz has just offered the Democrats some helpful advice. The man who gave us Michael Kelly, Charles Krauthammer, Mickey Kaus, and Andrew Sullivan. The neocon who stayed behind to fight a rear-guard battle against the enemy and subvert him -- i.e., us. The fifth columnist.

The media is hopeless, and we need something completely new -- a new national newspaper, new national TV and cable networks, and a new national radio network. Radio is only halfway there, and the others don't exist at all. It would all cost about half a billion, and while people tell me that the money is out there, I don't see much happening.

Right now there is no career track for openly liberal, openly Democratic media people. You can sit back and watch all of them fudging, refusing to burn bridges, and primping their moderation cred -- hoping for that invitation to go on TV, or maybe even to write for the Times eventually, like the liberal Kristoff.

I might also mention that there's a considerable pool of talented bloggers out here who've been self-financing all along while the dud consultants have been pulling down six-figure incomes for losing over and over again. After awhile, that kind of thing gets old, and I know of at least two well-respected bloggers who are just plain flat broke. Republican bloggers seem to get support, although they don't necessarily tell anyone about it.

I think that the academic and administrative roots of most Democratic leaders disable them for the hoodlum politics of today. They're used to describing reality as it is at a given moment, "managing" things, keeping the lid on, and judging people by their credentials. They're cool and civil and don't know how to respond to deliberate provocation, or to people whose goal is to shake things up and change things.

The Republicans, by contrast, hire semi-criminal entrepreneurs and give them a chance to show what they can do. And the Republicans win.

The whole "reality-based" slogan is utter crap. Democrats deal with the world as it is, and Republicans deal with the world as it can be made to be. That's why the Democrats are always blindsided, and why the Republicans always win. The Democrats are yesterday, and the Republicans are tomorrow. "The point is not to understand the world, but to change it".

And for those who don't understand it yet, "character" means, among other things, macho. The can-do hands-on do-what-you-gotta-do thing. The academic habit of discussing everything to death is not what you're looking for in the man in charge. (Macho -- Margaret Thatcher had it, Indira Gandhi had it, Golda Meir had it. It's not just a guy thing.)

The United States has been taken over by a cult -- the hardcore 30% who think that that nuclear war is a fun idea, that France is an enemy nation, that the Confederacy was perfectly wonderful, that Armageddon is coming soon and is something to pray for, and that the federal government should be starved to death. They're the bad guys, but the ones who you really have to blame are the ones who don't bother and don't care: the cynics, the apathetic, the non-voters, the game-players, the media careerists, and the self-described "moderates". By the time those guys get the idea, it will probably be too late.

The American people have spoken, and sometimes you end up feeling that the problem is really them.

P.S. I meant to say this the first time -- the absence of a liberal Democratic media career track also pulls Democratic political pros, and even Democratic politicians, to the right. They always have to think about what they do afterwards, so they don't want to burn any bridges either. Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, Susan Estrich and George Stephanopolous are the worst examples I can think of, but there are tons of them.

Change comes, but Jesus does it take it's sweet time.

Your Word for Today is "Gelid"

gel·id  (jld)

adj.

Very cold; icy: gelid ocean waters. See Synonyms at cold.

---

[Latin gelidus, from gel, frost; see gel- in Indo-European roots.]

---

ge·lidi·ty (j-ld-t), gelid·ness n.

gelid·ly adv

Pitiful Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

Marxism in its classic sense cannot come back. It was proven wrong. Collectivism, however, always has a future. In my view, it is at worst a necessary evil from time to time (defensive war, a social safety net against the hazards of life), and at best a vital resource for liberal democracy in crisis (see FDR and Obama). But it is much more avoidable if real conservatives do their duty all the time, and attend to corruption in capitalism diligently, regulate lightly but firmly and without favors, fight the military-industrial complex and keep the lid on domestic spending.

But in America, the Republicans haven't done this for decades. They've forgotten entirely what their reformist tradition requires of them. Now.

-- Andrew Sullivan, 01/25/13 

Conservatism in Mr. Sullivan's abstract, affinity purified, solvent extracted, academic sense cannot come back. 

Because it never existed.

What has existed in America during all the "decades" that Mr. Sullivan has been lending it his academic, intellectual and gay-friendly credentials has been American Conservatism: a deeply authoritarian, massively well-funded movement to "conserve" the social and religious ideals of the Confederacy States of America.

Liberals have gotten this right since the beginning.

People like Mr. Sullivan have gotten this terribly, terribly wrong since the beginning.

Elsewhere, Mr. Sullivan describes the act of forgiving those who have wronged him as being integral to his Christian faith:

For Christians, forgiveness is integral to our faith - and letting go of resentment is the crucial part. For the sinner in public life in a public capacity - a history of vile slurs against minorities, physical and emotional abuse of the mother of his child, etc. - I do think some level of sincere public apology is a reasonable civic request. I asked it of George W. Bush, as a fellow Christian, with respect to torture. No apology came. I did my duty as a civic voice; as a Christian, my imperative is to forgive regardless.

Too bad he cannot find it in him to forgive his betters for being right :-)

Professional Left Podcast #164

"I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided."

-- Abraham Lincoln, being all mean and partisan.

Links:

• Pat Buchanan shows what a dying political species sounds like
• Hillary Clinton saws teabag Senator Ron Johnson's ass off and serves it to him on the good china.
• Lawrence O'Donnell goes full Driftglass
• New Mexico legislator Rep. Cathrynn Brown being an idiot.

Da' money goes here:

Harry Reid Shows Once Again

Why the Senate should be sold for scrap and its members hauled off to the Smithsonian as the museum pieces that they are.

He promised, promised, promised, promised, promised, promised, promised, promised that the modern Senate filibuster -- the pipe-bomb that the crackpot minority party has duct-taped to the throat of our democracy -- would be substantially reformed.

So, of course, once the power to enact his promise was put in his hands, Harry Reid weaseled out.

Because that is Harry Reid's nature.

How Has Your Fourth Estate Failed You Today?

In all the usual ways.

* From Charles P. Pierce:

If I thought there was an ounce of shame left in the little fiefdom carved out by Fred Hiatt at The Washington Post, the once-great newspaper now d/b/a, a subsidiary of the educational-testing industry, I would suggest that he unload Jennifer Rubin, who is unaccountably still an employee after being wrong about everything that happened in the year 2012. Having gotten over the shock she undoubtedly received on Monday when Willard Romney was not sworn in as president, Rubin has gone back to work at her usual corner. Today's Lunch Special — anonymous innuendo about Chuck Hagel, the president's nominee for Secretary of Defense, who has gotten himself crosswise with Rubin because she is a Likud propagandist in neocon drag, and because she is wrong about everything, and because Fred Hiatt is a hack who doesn't realize the damage she's done to his brand over the past year.

In this deeply sucky economy  there sure are a lot of people still gainfully employed in very lucrative and influential positions who have been laughably and publicly wrong about everything for a long time.

And there sure are a lot of people who devote a lot of effort to make sure no one who would ever be so rude as to ask why this is so ever gets with shouting distance of a hot mic.  

It's almost as if there is some sort of exclusive, secret, twatwaffle mutual aid society hard at work behind the scenes every day working to fuck everything up.

Some sort of confederacy of the shrill, the loutish and the incompetent being kept safe from the consequence from their marauding nincompoopery behind a massive shield of money and influence.

Some sort of

...club.

And you are not in it.

*UPDATE:  Link fixed and thanks to Mr. Stephens for the catch.

Lawrence O'Donnell Goes Full Driftglass -- UPDATE

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It was a sight to see. 

And thanks to embeddable video -- one of the myriad casual miracles of modern life -- you can see it too.

UPDATE:

Quite apart from the sheer exuberant pleasure that comes from watching an artfully executed demolition, Mr. O'Donnell has also explained fully and clearly and for the first time on teevee in living memory exactly why both Moderates/Centrists and Conservatives are terrified of the past.  Why they will not, under any circumstances, set one foot outside of the unholy fortresses of their own frauds and fabulisms and debate the true nature and history of American Conservatism in any arena that is not rigged in their favor.

I admit, I am tickled by the thought that what we dirty fucking hippies have been saying for years to a few hundred readers -- 

...

From Sarah Palin to Andrew Sullivan, it is the lamentation of every Conservative with a megaphone and financial stake in the Right: that all those other clowns out there who keep pretending to be Conservatives are all wrong. 

For example, Dubya was a Conservative, re-elected and celebrated ...right up until the consequences of his stupid, criminal, treasonous policies started cutting into the profits of the carnival barkers of the Right.  Then, almost overnight, all mention of George W. Bush -- the Greatest Fucking Hero in History -- ceased and Dubya became just another UnConservative to be denounced by Republican Party base voters from behind illiterate signs and beneath sassy, tri-corner hats. 

It was mass political self-lobotomy on a scale that was genuinely shocking to find anywhere outside of "1984", and would have failed instantly and been laughed into the ash heap of marketing history had it not been abetted every step of the way by the greatest act of mass-journalistic malpractice since the Iraq war. 

This is, at its core, the most damning critique of the Reasonable Conservative or the Centrist Neoconservative or Gay Tory Catholic Conservative or whatever other group has recently been perp-walked to the door of American Conservatism: that despite the overwhelming evidence that they have been wrong for most of their adult lives, they continue to maintain that this is all just a merry mix-up, and once the real Conservatives take over and start running the show, everything will sort itself out.

But the Real American Conservatives are already here, Mr. Sullivan, and always have been.  They were here long before you were born -- before your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were born.  They were here before you chose to make a living by lending your time and talent to their depraved cause.  They were here before it began to dimly dawn on you that American Right is run by scumbags and monsters (a fact that Liberals have been trying to get through your thick head for 30 years.) They were here when their madness finally bucked you off their gravy train and onto the next gravy train.  They were here when you took up your new career -- whining that they had gotten Conservatism all wrong.

And they will be here long after you and I shuffle off our respective mortal coils. 

So since it is painfully obvious that Mr. Sullivan does not understand American Conservatism at all, I will explain his movement to him slowly and clearly -- as one would do with a small child -- by momentarily setting aside transient, "shiny object" issues and distractors (like contraception or Barack Obama's birth certificate) and instead simply focusing on the basic definition of what the word "conservatism" actually means.

From Wikipedia:

Conservatism (Latin: conservare, "to preserve")[1] is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports at the most, minimal and gradual change in society.

So any discussion about "Whither Conservatism?" or debate about real Conservatives vs. fake Conservatives is meaningless without first addressing this question:  What exactly are the "traditional institutions" and ways of life its adherents trying to maintain and defend?

Again, the answer for American Conservatives is both incredibly obvious and well-documented, and so painfully embarrassing to its elite defenders that they lie constantly to avoid accidentally mentioning it:

• American Conservatism is dedicated to the preservation of the absolute hegemony of straight, white fundamentalist Christian men within a social hierarchy based on the supremacy of the white race.
• This social hierarchy is ordained by Almighty God and therefor beyond debate.
• Every problem American society faces is caused by some deviation from this divine social hierarchy and can only be corrected by the restoration of this divine social hierarchy.

To preserve these "traditional institutions" and ways of life, American Conservatism's adherents have waged one hot war against the government of the United States and several cold ones.  They have attempted to seceded from the country.  They have closed down school systems.  They have fled cities.  They have embraced domestic terrorism.  They have murdered and legislated and prayed with equal fervor and righteousness.  They have formed new political parties and taken over old ones. They have spent centuries -- centuries! -- doing the the most basic work of Conservatism:  fighting the encroachment of change with every ounce of their strength.

...

-- Mr. O'Donnell is now saying to a few hundred thousand viewers.

Right Perp, Wrong Question

I generally enjoy the work Alex Pareene does in "Salon": he goes after most of the worst offenders on my personal "Least Wanted" pundidiot list, and his ink usually has the right pH balance between healthy skepticism and eschatology.

Today, however, while Mr. Pareene's targeting software remains as acute as ever

As David Brooks taught us last week, Barack Obama’s cunning plan to sabotage and undermine the Republican Party is to repeatedly force them to act as extremist and irresponsible as possible by proposing popular and sensible things that they refuse to support. By advocating gun control and immigration reform, two things Obama supports because he and most liberals believe them to be morally and politically necessary, Obama is tricking Republicans into revealing that they are dysfunctional, leaderless, and increasingly divided into two camps: the all-out crazies and the merely corrupt. This saddens David Brooks, naturally, because most things seem to sadden David Brooks, America’s Foremost Humility Expert.

he has let himself be lured onto a gently-sloping goat-path

What do the Beltway moderates actually want? 

Centrist thinkers keep begging Barack Obama to pursue "bipartisan" goals he already supports

...

But as the president begins his second term, I thought it’d be useful to try to figure out what “moderate Republican” columnists and “pox on both houses” centrists actually want the president to be doing. 

How would we go about identifying the sorts of policies that would qualify as bipartisan, uncontroversial and capable of uniting America around a common goal again? Well, there are Brooks’ suggestions, which are mostly things Barack Obama has already repeatedly announced his support for. As Jonathan Chait pointed out, these suggestions are either things that have already been done or things that Republicans would just not support if Obama proposed them again.

that traces exactly the same route as the stairways 

and waterfalls 

of Mr. Maurits Cornelis Escher.

Around and around and nowhere.

(I know, I know.  You, being clever, have noticed that I've already used up the two most common English words that begin with "esch..."  and you're asking yourself, "Will he get around to 'escharotic' or 'eschalot' [or "Will he burn a shallot?" as they might well say in the professional word biz]? Only time will tell, citizen. Onward!)

The terrible, open secret is that Beltway moderates don't want anything in particular, because inside the Beltway, "moderation" long ago stopped being either an ideal or a ideology.

Remember that political failure Michael Steele only has a career because he was willing to willing to be the black front man who made the Beast with Two Political Backs with the Party of Jefferson Davis.  The only way he can keep from hanging himself in an MSNBC Men's Rooms stall is by calling himself a moderate.

Remember that the David Brooks who made his bones mocking Democrats as stupid and demagogic back when they were sounding the alarm about George Bush incinerating the Clinton surpluses and plunging us back into another era of crippling Republican deficits...

...is the same David Brooks who spends every other column these days rending his garments and hand-wringing over Liberal refusal to cut those never-gonna-happen deficits by screwing over the poor, the sick and the elderly.

Remember that the David Brooks who bilked the New York Times into giving him a job-for-life by writing columns about how loser, Bush Deranged Liberals were probably going to fabricate some flattering, fake Liberal history for themselves now that Dubya have prevailed in Iraq...

...is the same David Brooks who, having gotten everything horribly, horribly wrong has spent the last 10 years fabricating a vast, fake history of Conservatism for himself.

As I wrote 8 years ago about Tom "Captain Obvious" Friedman, "Moderation" is now simply an empty brand, pimped by hustlers.  A Potemkin construct.  A

...Universe...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!

For Beltway grifters like David Brooks and Michael Steele, "moderation" is just a racket.

And a damn profitable one.