Once again, it is breathtaking but not at all surprising to see former Republicans, who were already deeply wired into the legacy media, building a massive media conglomerate by just copy/pasting what Liberal bloggers were writing about the Right more than 20 years ago.
Everyone out here in what's left of the Liberal blogosphere knew who they were, and not one of us were letting anyone off the hook. If the Bulwark crew want's to get a good look at who was letting them off the hook back when they might have been stopped, I'd suggest at their next staff meeting they should take a good, hard look around the table because the culprits are in your house.
All of this would sting a little less if it weren't for the fact that those Liberal voices who were, in fact, right all along, are the same Liberal voices they mocked and castigated as crackpot alarmists back when they worked for Team Evil.
And it would sting a lot less if they stopped using their new media conglomerate to continue pretending those Liberal voices never existed.
Not just because it's an old story, but because, since form follows function, it's always the same old story: one we've heard from dozens of grifters dozens of times. The words and pauses as well-worn by repetition
as Mark Antony's funeral oration.
Tucker Carlson says he'll no longer support the Republican Party
Longtime conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said on a podcast that
“there's no chance I would support the Republican Party" ahead of the
November midterm elections, dismissing the political affiliation he's
defended as a pundit for decades, including as one of Fox News Channel's
most popular hosts.
“Not gonna support the Democratic Party,” Carlson was quick to add,
speaking late last week on the show “Can't Be Censored.” “I don't know
what I'm going to do.”
Carlson, who has amassed a large following on his own podcast since being
fired from Fox News in 2023, has more recently diverged from the party, a
disillusionment supercharged by President Donald Trump's decision to go to
war with Iran in February.
Carlson supported Trump in 2024. After the war began, he apologized for
supporting the then-presidential candidate and “misleading people," saying
it wasn't intentional.
He’s repeatedly criticized the war as being at the behest of Israel at
the expense of Americans, and attacked the party for failing to represent
its own voters, citizens and nation.
“They are making decisions on the basis of other criteria, what’s best
for this company, what’s best for Israel, what’s best for our donors,” he
said. “That’s not just, like, they are off in the wrong direction, like,
that is unacceptable, that’s treasonous, it’s immoral, it can’t
continue."
“I’ve been a consistent defender for 35 years of the Republican Party, I
mean very consistent defender, but there’s no defending this," he said.
“So no, I’m out. And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are
out.”
It wasn't my fault.
I was misled.
I was bamboozled.
Sorry!
But Dems suck too so...
Hey, look who's angling for a spot in Tucker Carlson's future freakshow!
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Monday joined another
prominent ex-supporter of President Trump in pulling back their support
for the Republican Party.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said he “would not support” the GOP
following his split with the Trump administration over the U.S. military
operations against Iran.
“Tucker is not the only one who is done supporting the Republican Party,”
Greene wrote in a social media post.
“There is A LOT of us that are absolutely fed up and will not support a
party that betrays its voters and country,” she continued. “That does not
mean we are turning into Democrats either. But we are DONE with the
America LAST Republican Party.”
To bookend this little puppet show, you might remember this entry from the 'Same Tune, Different Decade' file." Its from way back in 2016 when this racist scuttlefish leaped off what
he believed to be Trump's sinking ship back.
Glenn Beck: Opposing Trump is ‘moral’ choice — even if Clinton is
elected
Conservative political commentator and media personality Glenn Beck said
opposing Donald Trump is a “moral, ethical” choice — even if that results in
Hillary Clinton becoming the next president.
The outspoken
opponent of the GOP’s presidential nominee wrote on Facebook over the
weekend that every voter had to decide for themselves what constitutes “a
bridge too far,” after the release of footage last week in which Trump can
be heard making lewd and sexually aggressive comments about women.
“It
is not acceptable to ask a moral, dignified man to cast his vote to help
elect an immoral man who is absent decency or dignity,” Beck wrote on
Facebook in reference to Trump. “If the consequence of standing against
Trump and for principles is indeed the election of Hillary Clinton, so be
it. At least it is a moral, ethical choice.”
You might also remember that everybody covered it as if it were actual
news instead of a con man trying to fold his tent and skip town ahead of John
Law.
You may also remember this same cockroach scuttling right back onto the deck
of the USS Trump once it turned out that there were, in fact, just enough
bigots and imbeciles in just enough of the right states to elect Donald
Trump.
It stops being tortured-conscience fence-straddling once you've torn down the
fence and installed a turnstile so you can change sides any time it's
convenient.
President Trump says the peeling blue coating and algae blooms that mar
his $16.4 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are
the fault of vandals working with “knives” in the “dark of night.”
But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that
while National Park Service workers found two cuts in sections of foam
between the pool’s expansion joints, those were not directly related to
the “American flag blue” coating that is now peeling, or to the algae that
has turned the pool a bright shade of green.
Even as the documents show workers were attempting to address
deteriorating conditions, Trump administration officials were insisting
publicly that the pool was pristine.
The pool had been drained, resealed and then refilled by June 5.
Four days later, Park Service workers discovered holes, cracks and peeling
caulking in parts of the pool, along with cuts in sections of the foam,
according to the documents.
The cause of the cuts was unclear. While a June 9 report by the
U.S. Park Police described the cuts as “razor blade slashes” made along a
20-foot-long stretch of the foam, the administration has yet to present
evidence supporting that assertion. The documents reviewed by The Times
described them as two 171-foot blade cuts but did not address how they
were made.
By June 16, workers had noticed that chunks of blue sealant that
covered the pool’s bottom were peeling and floating to the surface, the
documents show. That sealant was separate from the foam in the pool’s
expansion joints, which allow its concrete slabs to expand and
contract.
The workers had also discovered that some devices installed to kill
algae were not working as intended, according to the documents. And
enormous algae blooms had turned portions of the pool bright green instead
of dark blue.
But on June 15, Mr. Trump was still declaring the renovation a
success, telling reporters that “I’m very good at building things and
constructing things.”
...On Tuesday, the president said on social media that six people
had been arrested, and seven others had been cited, for slashing the
pool’s sealant with a “sharp knife or razors.”
“It was purposefully and criminally done, and somebody had to work
very hard, probably in the dark of night,” he wrote.
Mr. Trump also told reporters on Monday, without offering evidence,
that vandals had poured fertilizer into the pool to feed the algae.
Neither the Interior Department nor the White House would provide
charging documents, citations or the names of anyone arrested. They did
share the Park Police incident report, which said any suspect or suspects
were unknown. The report also did not mention any damage to the pool’s
blue sealant, nor did it describe any vandals dumping fertilizer.
...
The administration is setting up fencing around the site before the
July 4 fireworks display for safety reasons, Ms. Martin said. But it’s
going up earlier than originally planned because of what she called an
“increase in vandalism by leftist activists.”
The Trump administration awarded two no-bid contracts for the
Reflecting Pool renovations, bypassing the legally required process of
seeking competitive bids because of what it called an urgent need to
complete the project for events around the nation’s 250th birthday.
Even as this smelly, old bigot's brain rots in his skull, he still
retains that one characteristic which unites all Republicans: the
categorical refusal to take responsibility for their own fuck ups at which
they keep getting caught red-handed over and over again.
I was pleased and proud to have this man as my president. Pleased and
proud to have his family as our First Family. I was proud to vote for
him for senator once and for president twice. I was proud to have been
one of the panelists who vetted him when he was still a relatively obscure
state senator during his ultimately failed primary bid for the U.S. House of
Representatives against incumbent Bobby Rush. In fact, I still have my ticket
stub from his "Barack the Vote" fundraiser.
However, as pleased and proud as I was to have Barack Obama as my president, it is also worth remembering the environment in which Obama governed, including taking a moment to remember much furious shit we Obama supporters took from our "allies" on the
left. In case you'd forgotten, here's a sample from a now-deadlinked post
on Common Dreams from May, 2013. I have an archive full of this stuff:
When Obama finally declares martial law and announces the new Fascist
States of American, O-bots like Maddow will eagerly put on their Nazi
armbands -- cute little pastel hope & change swastikas, of course --
and join the goose-stepping parade. She's nothing but a propagandist and
has absolutely no scruples whatsoever, just like the corporation that
pays her, just like the "commander-in-chief" she props up with her lies
and half-truths...
That kind of rhetoric was not unusual at the time: over-the-top rage from the whole Conservative media machine and from the dirtbag Left. And in that environment, the Obama administration constituted a grand social experiment in
offering the Republican party base -- which had been trained by Republican
leadership and Conservative media to automatically loathe Democrats with an
almost unhinged ferocity -- a different option. Offering them
compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect, as well as policies that
materially benefited them.
And that grand social experiment failed spectacularly. Which is why it is worth our time and attention to diagnose why that experiment
failed. But to do that we'd have to journey into the past further back
than 2016, which is something that pundits, the consulting class and our Never
Trump "allies" almost all categorically refuse to do.
That is because to examine the state of our union prior to 2016 makes the
pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" either look like
arrogant idiots whose opinions should never be trusted again...or ambitious
fools who were complicit in creating the ideal conditions for a monster like
Trump to emerge...or both. And since pundits, the consulting class and
our Never Trump "allies" now dominate any media conversation about politics,
that once again leaves it to dirty, disreputable outsiders like us to do the
work of explaining why everything went to hell.
To start with, President Barack Obama might as well
have been built in a Centrist/Moderate/Both Siderist lab by the New York Times
editorial board. He was everything the pundits and the consultant class said
would be the "solve" for what was dividing America.
This is from me 16 years ago, in 2010:
For his entire adult life, Barack Obama has succeeded by offering himself as
the perfect midpoint between others. As a mathematical function, not a
leader. As an averaging equation, not a true believer.
Since he
showed up on the political radar, he has marketed himself relentlessly as
Half black and half white... Half American urbanite, half
world-citizen... Half wonk, half preacher... Half Harvard Yard,
half
Back o' the Yards... Half red and half blue...
And this bone-deep reflex -- plus his formidable intellect and ability to
rise to the rhetorical occasion -- would have prepared him perfectly for the
Presidency...if this were 1960.
But it is not 1960 -- nor is he
dealing with Harvard Conservatives pals or Springfield Republican pols --
and being a results-agnostic "process guy" when the process is utterly
broken no longer works.
Instead, the ideologically-lockstepping
Right led by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have found in Obama their
perfect patsy: the Democrat who seems constitutionally incapable of
counter-punching, who can only feel comfortable while suspended between two
opposing positions and who will, therefore, find a compromise between
opposites
even when he has to invent wholly fictional opposing views to which he can
cede half the playing field.
In order to avoid wasting his presidency, squandering the opportunity we
have given him, and letting the country spiral into a permanent corporate
feudal pest-hole, Barack Obama must do the hardest thing of all: he must
exceed his design specifications. This is not unprecedented, but like
Franklin Roosevelt the capitalist-turned-social-Democrat or Abraham Lincoln
the compromiser-turned-Emancipator, Obama must let go of a central pillar of
his identity and embrace the brutal fact that our modern
house divided against itself cannot stand.
That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.
That
we will become all one thing, or all the other.
And that this is
your fight,
President Obama.
This burden has fallen to you: it cannot be
shirked and cannot be delegated.
If you take up this challenge,
millions of us will have your back, Mr. President.
But if you
cannot summon the inner strength to evolve past your reflexive need to
compromise with people who want to destroy you, then we are all well and
truly fucked.
Because in 2008, Democrats took a chance on an outsider conjured out of their
best hopes, but by 2010 it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that the
Republican party and Conservative media were too far gone to be saved.
That by now there was too much power and too much profit trafficking in racism
and conspiracy mongering and hatred for them to change. That they viewed
compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect as weakness, and Obama as a
patsy for continuing to offer calm, civility and concessions over and over
again.
That what the nation needed in that moment was a president who took to the
bully pulpit every day to beat the shit out of GOP in the Truman style:
“I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was
hell.”
And to go after the working men and women who voted against their own
interests in the same manner:
But that never happened. And the reaction from Republicans to this
decent, honorable, thoughtful man who begged them to work with him solve our
common problems was an eight-year-long, racist primal scream and the to nominate
and elect the personification of their most dangerously ignorant, racist
fears.
The King of the Birthers.
Then they renominated him again in 2020.
Then, when he lost, they attempted a coup to overthrow the government, and
spent the next four years screaming that the election had been stolen.
Then they renominated him yet again in 2024, re-elected him, and here we are. And by now it should be plain enough for even the punditocracy to
see that the problem was never Trump. The problem has always been the
bigots and imbeciles of the Republican base who manifested Trump, and the
Conservative media which continues to belt-feed the most lurid red-meat lies
to that base, which eagerly gobbles it up and asks for seconds.
So, to quote another president from Illinois whose presidential library and
museum are also here,
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The
occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.
As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall
ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow-citizens, we can not
escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be
remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance
can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will
light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are
for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to
save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it...
And to repeat what I shamelessly stole from Lincoln 16 years ago and
modified to fit our times:
That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.
That we
will become all one thing, or all the other.
