Chuck Todd Submits His Manuscript To The Driftglass Blog For Consideration

Dear Mr. Todd,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript --  "It’s Time for the Press to Stop Complaining -- And to Start Fighting Back" -- to the driftglass blog for consideration.  Unfortunately we will not be able to publish your piece at this time.

We believe that with a lot of editorial work and the services of a better Beltway-to-English translator, this meandering piece might have been either tightened up into a salable short story or, conversely, expanded into a confessional "True Crime"-style novella. However, length and word choice are not your submission's most serious problem.

There is no delicate way to put this, so we will just say it straight out.  While we at the driftglass blog may only be a tiny shoestring publication operating at the outer exurbs of respectability, plagiarism, Mr. Todd, is an absolute no-go for us.  As it should be for any legitimate publisher, of any size in any market.

We may be one of America's last and least reputable vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers of the Left, but by God and Eugene Debs, Mr. Todd, we still have standards!

Of course, tt is our fondest hope that you choose to take this rejection letter as a "teachable moment", and in that spirit, be advised that if you opt to re-work and resubmit your manuscript while continuing to "borrow" extensively from the decades-old Liberal critiques of the media (taken directly from your manuscript, Mr. Todd)  --

Some of the wealthiest members of the media are not reporters from mainstream outlets. Figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and the trio of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham have attained wealth and power by exploiting the fears of older white people. They are thriving financially by exploiting the very same free-press umbrella they seem determined to undermine.

-- and repackage those critiques --

Much of the current hand-wringing about this rise in press bashing and delegitimization has been focused on the president, who—as every reporter in America sadly knows—has declared the press the “enemy of the people.” But, like much else in the Trump era, Donald Trump didn’t start this fire; he’s only spread it to a potentially more dangerous place.

-- as startling, newly unearthed "revelations" --

Instead, Ailes created an organization that focuses on attacking the “liberal media” whose “liberal bias” was ruining America. Almost any big story that was potentially devastating to a conservative was “balanced” with some form of whataboutism. The Ailes construction has been so effective that these days, I often get mail from viewers who say: Now that you’ve focused on all of President Trump’s misdeeds, you are biased if you don’t dedicate the same amount of time to Hillary Clinton’s misdeeds. It seems completely lost on this segment of the population that one person is the leader of the free world, and the other is a retiree living in the suburbs of New York City.
...
He played up cultural fears, creating the mythology of a biased press.

-- at the very least, we will require that you make two substantive changes to your manuscript.

First, we would require that you re-title your submission to indicate that you are at least peripherally aware of the deep and rich Liberal source material from which you are obviously "borrowing" to build your article.  Something along the lines of  "The Left Was Right About The Right All Along" would be acceptable.

Second, and much more important, to avoid being tainted as a publication which knowingly bylines  plagiarists, we must insist that, at a minimum, you properly attribute your "revelations" about the debased state of your profession to those Liberals who have been shouting them at men like you as loud as our tiny microphones would allow for decades.

Liberals who you have very pointedly and publicly mocked and ignored.

We would immodestly suggest taking this snip from a very early work of our own which, by a happy coincidence, will be marking the 12th anniversary of its publication this very month!

From "Reactionary":

...
The Liquid Bobo Koolant

The Koolant system that keeps it all from blowing apart at the seams and melting itself back into the masturbatory fever dreams of every wannabe Jefferson Davis circulates a viscous Koolaid-based composite goo made up of 43% David Brooks, 27% Tom Friedman, 23% Tim Russert, 12% Joe Klein and 10% David Broder.

You say that’s 115%? Well fuck you and your fancy, liberal, Jebus-hating elitist “arithmetic” anyway.

If you press your ear to the containment shell you can hear in murmuring through the pipes:

“There are no crazies here.”

“The Southern Strategy is a myth.”

“Ignore Falwell, Dobson, and Reed. They’re Men of Faith.”

“Ignore Schlafly, Limbaugh and Hannity. They’re just firm”

“Ignore Robertson, Perle and Nordquist. They’re just amusingly provocative.”

“Gingrich isn’t a fascist; he’s just ‘controversial’.”

“Coulter isn’t really serious, even though she is the keynote speaker and commands top dollar at national Republican events, Republican media outlets and sold-out Wingnut Christian rallies.”

“That carcinoma spreading across your face. It looks just the Jesus, so you know it can’t be bad for you!”

“The Moderates really run the party.”

“The Center is where all right thinking people should be, despite the fact that in the last 30 years the Right has dragged the Center a million miles into Crazyville.”

“No matter how completely the GOP rapes American values, without a sliver of evidence to support this assertion you should still somehow believe that Liberals are either just as bad or worse.”

“The GOP cares about idiots like you.”

“There is no core in this reactor.”

That’s how it works. Simple, right?. And yet to build this electoral dynamo the Republican Party has had to completely sell out any vestige of principles or soul it once had for dominion over the divided and bitter land it has created. And because of that, there is no “Plan B” if you are a GOP candidate for national office.

Your Party Masters have burned your bridges and salted the Earth behind you, and now there is nothing left for you to do but desperately tunnel deeper into the Hell you have built for yourself.

Which is why John McCain now publicly grovels and kisses the poxy asses of the men who service and steered the Pretty Hate Machine diffidently past the bodies of the dead and dying of NOLA, and gleefully down the blood-tarred, bone-macadamed streets of Iraq. Men who went right after his family -- his wife and children -- and his honorable national service without a second thought when it suited their despicable purposes.

Because the Pretty Hate Machine does not come with a conscience, and it now casts its depraved shadow over their entire Party.

And over the entire nation that Party has seized.

And over the entire world that Party has polluted.

It has become all Means and no Ends but More Power, and as with all power, it comes with a steep price. 

Because despite periodic and frightening bouts with Mussolinitis, we are not a fascist people by inclination.

In fact, we are taught to abhor authoritarianism. Our whole government is an exercise in the division and dissipation of power and the creation of strong, interlocking safeguards to protect us against the rise of a One Party/Dear Leader State. We number among some of our proudest moments (the Emancipation Proclamation, the defeat of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese Empires, the enactment of landmark Civil Rights legislation, the collapse of the Soviet Union) those occasions when we slammed totalitarianism to the ground, both at home and abroad.

And because these are the very safeguards and traditions that the GOP is working assiduously to destroy, and because there is no majority present in the active electorate actually lusts after the annihilation of democracy in America, they have to do it sloooowly and under a variety of false fronts and pretenses.

Yes there are millions of them, and yes they are virtually packed into the same party...

Or, if that is too sweary and ancient for your authorial sensibilities, you are free to choose from, well, basically  my entire fucking archive dating back to when I was a commenter at the late Steve Gilliard's News Blog. 

/we will now take a short pause while I compose myself and recover my third-person voice/

We have an impressive selection of timeless "Ron Fournier: America's Sad Clown of Centrism" and "Matthew Dowd is a Fundamentally Ridiculous Person" classics from which to choose, as well as a well-preserved section of the "David Gregory Meet the Press Wall of Shame".

And, of course, we boast the world's largest collection of David Brooks crimes against culture and journalism:

David Brooks' High and Holy Church of Both Siderism

As I have pointed out literally hundreds of times over the past 12 years, New York Times columnist David Brooks would be an otherwise unremarkable and incompetent liar were it not for the fact that he has amassed a mountain of money and a formidable reputation by doing one thing, over and over again, regardless of facts or circumstances:  relentlessly selling the shit out of the Very Big Lie of "Both Sides Do It" that the mainstream media and a small clutch of deluded and terrified oligarchs cling to for dear life.  

Out of this single, toxic lie they have built themselves a mighty fortress of delusions -- a "dream palace", if you will -- bulwarked by nothing but the sheer gravitational force of their wealth and their suffocating stranglehold on the American corporate media.   They have made a high and holy Church of Both Siderism, and installed Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times as their pope ( Pope Bias the First, Bishop of the Acela Corridor, aka, Vicar of Both Sides, Successor of the Prince of the Kristols, Supreme Pontiff of the Washington Beltway, Primate of Fake Centrism, Archbishop and Metropolitan of Humility, Sovereign of True Conservatism's City State and Servant of the servants of the Church of Lyin'tology).

Pick any or all of it, from our own humble stock, or any of the other dozens of outcast Libtard bloggers who have been shouting these truths into the Beltway abyss for decades.

You are, of course, free to ignore all of our advice, keep your manuscript unchanged, and submit it elsewhere.  We may be tiny and marginal, but we are fully aware of the booming marketplace for these sorts of specious 30-years-too-late "Liberals?  Never heard of 'em!" exegeses and are quite sure you will have great success placing your work as-is at a less persnickety publication.

Like, say, The Atlantic.

Yours in Christ,

driftglass

PS.

Not for nothing, but enclosing letters of recommend from Chris Fucking Cillizza --

Most important thing in this @chucktodd piece is his correct assessment that the era of access journalism is deadhttps://t.co/Jnjgd1Usam

— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) September 4, 2018

-- and Brian "America's Most Credulous Stenographer" Stelter --

Top of the @ReliableSources newsletter: @ChuckTodd says "the idea that our work will speak for itself is hopelessly naive..." https://t.co/XqJgtZhFso

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) September 4, 2018

-- and Ron "America's Sad Clown of Centrism" Fournier --

Bravo, ⁦@chucktodd⁩!

“It means not allowing ourselves to be spun, and not giving guests or sources a platform to spin our readers and viewers, even if that angers them. Access isn’t journalism’s holy grail—facts are.” https://t.co/I2v37byzm4

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) September 4, 2018

-- did not help your case any.

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