Coming Soon...

...to a shithole country near you.   Just you wait and see.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 992: Both Sides Don't Have A Budget Surplus

"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him"  --  Leo Tolstoy.

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 991: Underbabied?

"Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty."  --  George Eliot

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When God Closes a "Fuck Yeah Iraq!" Joe Lieberman...

...he opens a "Fuck Yeah Iran!" Josh Gottheimer.  

For more on The New York Fucking Times' obsession with slagging Democratic, today's Left Jabs is pretty good.

I Am The Liberal Media

After Consulting Doctor Google, Professor Bing and Adjunct Faculty Yahoo...

...I have found a remarkable thing.

During a public career spent clawing her way to the top of the GOP dungheap by relentlessly lying about people like me (then abruptly tumbling down from the commanding heights of that same dungheap when she crossed the Dear Leader) Liz Cheney has only ever apologized for anything twice.  

You will recall that Liz Cheney was so horny for a U.S. senate seat back in 2013 ... 

 

... that to appease atavistic Republican voters of Wyoming, she threw her own sister under the bus without batting an eye.  

From The Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2013:

Liz Cheney sells out gay sister for shot at U.S. Senate seat

What kind of woman sells out her sister for a shot at a U.S. Senate seat?

How do you tell your sister how happy you are she is marrying her longtime girlfriend, embrace her wife as a member of the family, their children as your niece and nephew, then turn around and tell the nation you oppose gay marriage?

For this alone, Liz Cheney, who is running for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Wyoming against a longtime conservative incumbent, deserves to lose.

Though the Cheney daughters have been sparring in public for months about gay marriage, their disagreement heated up again Sunday when Liz appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and noted, again, that despite what her opponent claims, she opposes gay marriage.

This did not sit well with her sister-in-law, Heather Poe, who took to Facebook to protest:  “I was watching my sister-in-law on Fox News Sunday (yes Liz, in fifteen states and the District of Columbia you are my sister-in-law) and was very disappointed to hear her say “I do believe in the traditional definition of marriage.

“Liz has been a guest in our home, has spent time and shared holidays with our children, and when Mary and I got married in 2012 - she didn’t hesitate to tell us how happy she was for us.

“To have her now say she doesn’t support our right to marry is offensive to say the least.

“I can’t help but wonder how Liz would feel if as she moved from state to state, she discovered that her family was protected in one but not the other.

“I always thought freedom meant freedom for EVERYONE.”

A short time later, Mary Cheney re-posted Poe’s note on her own Facebook page, adding: “Couldn’t have said it better myself. Liz--this isn’t just an issue on which we disagree--you’re just wrong--and on the wrong side of history.”

Liz Cheney, a 47-year-old heterosexual mother of five, trying to thread the needle on gay rights has instead stabbed her sister.

You will also recall that Cheney went on to win Wyoming's sole House seat in 2016, where she quickly ascended to the upper ranks of Republican leadership.  

But five years later, having been run out of GOP leadership for objecting to Trump's insurrection and headed for an historic defeat at the hands of Cheney family friend Harriet Hageman, Cheney's only hope was to go scrounging for Democratic votes.  That was when she suddenly flipped and, through gritted teeth, threw this last-minute, Hail (Gay) Marry pass.

The Christian Post:

Liz Cheney apologizes for previous opposition to same-sex marriage: 'I was wrong'

Outspoken Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., has apologized for her previous opposition to same-sex marriage as she continues to fight for her political career.

The 55-year-old lawmaker apologized for her previous opposition to gay marriage in an interview with CBS' Lesley Stahl, which aired on "60 Minutes" Saturday.

Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and sister of the openly lesbian Mary Cheney, was pressed by Stahl about her "long-held opposition to same-sex marriage."

Noting that her opposition to same-sex marriage "prompted a bitter falling out with her sister, Mary," who is in a same-sex marriage with children, Stahl asked Cheney, "how do you defend what you did?" Cheney responded by apologizing: "I was wrong."

"I was wrong. I love my sister very much. I love her family very much ... and I was wrong," she said."It's a very personal issue, very personal for my family."

For the record, the only other time history records Cheney ever shaping her mouth to say the word "apologize" was when she apologized for the despicable behavior of her loathsome Republican colleagues when they accused General Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, of 'dereliction of duty' and asked him to resign during a hearing on Afghanistan.

That's it.

That's all.  

No apologies for all her lies and slander.  No regrets about all her energetic work building the Republican monster machine that eventually spit her out.  Nothing recanted or even acknowledged.  Which is very much the way of all Republicans, especially the Cheney clan, the patriarch of which swore he never had the slightest doubt about his most comprehensive catastrophe.  

Time magazine, June 25, 2014:

Dick Cheney Says Iraq War Was 'the Right Thing'

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday stood by the Bush Administration’s decision to wage war in Iraq, saying he has never second-guessed the decision even with Iraq once again descending into chaos.

“I was a strong advocate of going into Iraq,” Cheney told PBS in an interview, a week after launching a new political group designed to boost his foreign policy and national-security policies. “I think that was the right decision then, and I still believe that today.”

We teach our children early on that when you've done wrong -- when you've hurt someone -- you own what you did and say you're sorry.  This isn't just a fundamental of good parenting, it's a pillar of every major religion.

And yet when GOP finally dropped the veil and bared its full fascist fangs at the world, and a handful of their elite comms people, magazine editors, pundits and elected officials -- who had spent decades advancing their careers by shitting on us and lying about us -- came knocking on our door asking for sanctuary, all we asked of them was this basic thing that they should have learned as children or at temple or at church: acknowledge your part in what has happened and apologize to the people that you hurt for what you did.

And yet the reaction from them and their sponsors and benefactors in the "liberal" media was as if we were demanding that Satan take a holy water enema to get his next book deal or a regular gig on MSNOW    How dare we ask such a thing!   Who the fuck were we to even presume to ask such a thing?!?!

Outrageous!  

Scandalous!  

Preposterous!  

Fools!  Shut up and sit down!  Didn't we realize that democracy itself was at stake!  

These were the insults and charges they threw in the faces of Liberals who had already been warning about the threat the GOP posed to democracy for decades.  Warning about it since back in the days when they were making attack ads for Saxby Chambliss, slandering triple-amputee Vietnam veteran Max Cleland by linking him to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, or proudly standing in front of an American flag and, from their official position in Republican party leadership, calling us baby murdering scum.

This is why there's a big ol' sign "No Fair Remembering Stuff" sign nailed up over the past. 

Because in our present circumstances there is nothing more subversive and disruptive than accurately remembering and contextualizing the past.

I Am The Liberal Media

Quantum Entanglement Politics Part 2: An Issue of Scale.

Where were we?

Oh yeah!  I promised we'd talk about propaganda and "scale" and then wandered off into a side-quest about the collapse of thermostatic politics and the rise of quantum politics caused by the long-term toxic effects of the legacy media's Both Sides Do It fetish.  

And then I figured this would make for a very on-topic theme for the Professional Left podcast, which it now is.  

So if you're a regular podcast listener, much of this will sound familiar.  

If not, I'll remind you that our point of departure on the last post was midway through a chat among the Pod Save lads about why the Democratic party sucks.  Yadda yadda.  Joe Biden.  And so forth.  And now that we're all caught up, onward!  

Back to the lads, and for your convenience I've highlighted the phrases that are doing a backbreaking amount of heavy lifting.  

Jon Favreau:  But I do think that there is just a... a... a severe lack of trust in the Democratic party, um, and the Democratic brand that comes from, I mean, come ... comes from decades, but it also comes, like. specifically from everything that happened in... in... at the end of the Biden administration. Joe Biden running is part of it.

Um, you know, Lakshya [Jain] points out uh the Democratic position on crime, uh, is a big part of it ... or at least what the perception of the Democratic position on crime is.  Which was unfortunately, um, hurt by the defund the police discussion. Um which of course, you know, [inaudible] you didn't have Democratic candidates saying defund the police, but enough activists were that the perception became that Democrats want to wanted to defund the police. 

Lovett:  Most Democrats didn't, but a few did.  

Favreau:   A few did... few did.  And those were the voices that were elevated by some often by the other side...

 Ah, perception.  That's always the question, isn't it?  To quote Aldous Huxley from "The Doors of Perception":

I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

What does that have to do with where we're headed?  Not a lot, but it's always fun to quote people like Huxley, if for no other reason than to remind the Very Serious People that it is possible to be a "normal person" and still savor big concepts and deep reading.  

Anyway, since "perception" is hauling the Pod Save lads whole thesis here, it seem nuts to shrug the concept off as just, y'know, a thing that happened.  Like an unfortunate weather event, that was often elevated "by the other side"...

So instead of that, let’s do some arithmetic in the specific subject of "Defund the Police".

In early June of 2020, right after the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that followed, the phrase “Defund the Police” begins to show up on Fox News. Within days, it’s everywhere in their ecosystem. By summer, it’s not just a phrase -- it’s a frame. By fall, it’s a weapon.

And then never leaves.

According to data aggregated from the GDELT project and cited by RealClearPolitics, by March of 2021 -- less than a year in -- Fox News alone had aired the phrase 4,116 times.

That’s one network.

Not Fox Business. Not Newsmax. Not OAN. Not talk radio. Not podcasts. Not YouTube. Not the Daily Wire or Breitbart or the email blast industrial complex.

Just Fox.

Now, let's scale that out conservatively.

Across the entire conservative media ecosystem between 2020 and 2022, a reasonable estimate lands somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 uses of the phrase “Defund the Police.” Call it 200,000 as a midpoint.

And that’s just utterances. That’s not counting amplification -- the chyrons, the viral clips, the retweets, the repetition across platforms, the algorithmic juicing. If you count exposures, you’re easily into the millions.

Now hold that number in your head -- 200,000 -- while we look at the other side of the ledger.

How many Democrats actually ran for office during those same cycles?

Back of the envelop figuring puts federal, state, local -- that'd be the House, the Senate, state legislatures, mayors, city councils, school boards, judges, water reclamation districts, mosquito abatement districts, etc. -- you’re probably looking at something on the order of 50,000 to 150,000 Democratic candidates across 2020 and 2022.

That’s the statistical universe.

Now: how many of those candidates explicitly ran on a “Defund the Police” platform?

Not “police reform" or “reallocating some funding.” or "rethink public safety.”

The actual slogan. The actual Fox chyron.

Maybe, what?  A dozen of two dozen at most?.

Out of tens of thousands.

That’s not 10%.
That’s not 5%.
That’s not even 1%.

That’s somewhere in the .01-something percent range.  In terms of probability, you had about as much chance of stumbling across a Democrat in the wild running on "Defund the Police" as you would of drawing a royal flush in poker on your first hand while being hit by lightening.  

Which means 99%+ of Democratic candidates did not run on “Defund the Police.”

Now let’s put the two numbers together.

Around 200,000 uses of the phrase across conservative media
Let's say 24 candidates actually running on it for some office somewhere.  

That gives you a ratio of about 8,300-to-1.  

Eight thousand three hundred repetitions of the phrase for every one human being actually advocating it on a ballot, and once you see the ratio, the game gives itself away.  No sane person or fair-and-balanced media outlet could possibly believe that “Defund the Police” was a reasonable and fair description of the position of the Democratic party.   It was propaganda.  Slander.  An exploding dye pack, used to stain every Democrat everywhere with the same color, regardless of what they actually said, did, or ran on.

Did your local Democratic candidate for county board run on fixing stormwater drainage and keeping the library open on weekends? Doesn’t matter. Defund the Police.

Did the moderate Democrat in a swing district explicitly oppose the slogan? Doesn’t matter. Defund the Police.

Did the Democratic mayor increase the police budget? Doesn’t matter. Defund the Police.

Because the point wasn’t accuracy. The point was saturation.   And while Fox and it's imitators yelling into the conservative media bubble 200,000 times is powerful, it’s not sufficient. It needs help.  And that's where the legacy media leaps into action, because what makes propaganda saturation decisive is when the rest of the media ecosystem treats the frame as legitimate.

And they did.

They “both-sided” it.
They hosted panels about it.
They asked every Democrat from dogcatcher to president, “Do you support defunding the police?” as if it were a party plank instead of a niche activist slogan.

They turned it into a litmus test.

Which is how you launder propaganda into “the conversation.”

By the time CNN and the rest got bored and moved on -- as the data shows they largely did by late 2020 -- the damage was done. Fox kept hammering. Talk radio kept hammering. The clips kept circulating.

And the frame stuck, which is how modern propaganda works.

Not by persuading you of a specific policy, but by creating a feeling that something is broadly true, even when it is numerically absurd.

It’s what we refer to at The Professional Left as Velveeta Media.  Engineered. Shelf-stable. Smooth. Consistent. Melts the same way every time.  It doesn’t matter that it isn’t cheese. What matters is that it behaves like cheese under the right conditions.

“Defund the Police” was treated like a Democratic platform plank because it was processed, packaged, and reheated until it achieved the right consistency.

If you take nothing else away from this, remember that somewhere north of 99% of Democratic candidates had nothing to do with “Defund the Police.”  Compare that to the majority of Republicans running for or holding office -- 

A majority of GOP nominees deny or question the 2020 election results

Experts say their dominance in the party poses a threat to the country’s democratic principles and jeopardizes the integrity of future votes

-- and an even larger majority Republican voters  -- 

Trump's election fraud claims spread distrust before midterms, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds 

...Some 46% of respondents said they agreed with the statement that there are large numbers of fraudulent ballots cast by non-citizens in U.S. elections, with 82% of Republicans agreeing compared with 18% of Democrats and 38% of independents.

About 53% of respondents said ​they were worried about fraudulent mail‑in or absentee ballots, compared with 43% who said they were not, with partisan division again apparent: 83% of Republicans expressed concern, versus ​33% of Democrats.

Taken together, the responses indicate that years of messaging by Trump and his allies casting doubt on voting have resonated strongly with ⁠Republicans, particularly around claims that non‑citizens vote in significant numbers and that mail‑in ballots are unreliable, despite repeated audits and academic research finding fraud in either case to be exceedingly rare.

-- who would still swear on the lives of their children that they believe the outrageous lie that the 2020 election was stolen

And yet it was "Defund the Police" which was blasted across the conservative media ecosystem hundreds of thousands of times, amplified into millions of impressions, and laundered into mainstream discourse.   At a ratio of roughly 8,300-to-1.

Talk about straining at gnats and swallowing camels (Matthew 23:24).

That’s not politics.  That’s industrial-scale message warfare.

And it works.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 990: Straining Gnats, Swallowing Camels

"You tithe mint and dill and cumin, but you have neglected the weightier matters of the law: Justice, Mercy and Faith."  -- Matthew 23:24

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Quantum Entanglement Politics Part 1.

Today we're going to take a break from the daily barrage of life-and-death lies pushed by fascists and talk about the importance of scale.

Not vibes. Not anecdotes. Scale.

Because one of the things the last decade has taught us—over and over and over again—is that if you don’t understand scale, you don’t understand propaganda. And if you don’t understand propaganda, you’re already losing.

The subject of scale -- or, rather, the conspicuous avoidance of the subject of scale -- glided quietly past during one of the Pod Save lads’ daily recitations of the “Why Democrats Suck” rosary—Kamala was a bad candidate, Joe Biden is history’s greatest villain, etc.

Anyway, then there was this (with emphasis added)

Jon Favreau:  Yeah. I mean to the ... to the broader question of that Lakshya [Jain] raises in that in that Argument piece about like why Democrats aren't gaining on the generic ballot by as much as Trump's approval is falling. I do think there's a probably a number of reasons. 

Jon Lovett:  Oh, definitely. 

Before we move on, a quick side quest into a subject these people never discuss in depth... and which I have been writing about on this blog since these gentlemen were fresh outta college, Kerry campaign volunteers.  

Both Siderism.

Let's start with how most people have traditionally understood politics for a long time.  The idea that politics behaves like a thermostat.   From Good Authority:

Good to Know: The public is a thermostat

Why there is a never-ending cycle of governments doing something and the public wanting the opposite.

...one of the most enduring puzzles of democracy [is that] governments, no matter what they do, often seem unable to satisfy voters. When governments take action, the public often seems to want the opposite. Push policies left, and opinions shift right. Increase spending, and people want cuts. 

This phenomenon – where public preferences shift in the opposite direction of government action – is known as thermostatic politics.

The thermostatic model, first formalized by political scientist Christopher Wlezien in 1995, describes the public’s reaction to government policies as akin to a thermostat adjusting a room’s temperature. Just as a thermostat signals when to cool down or warm up based on current conditions, public opinion signals to policymakers when to increase or decrease policy activity. 

A little like Newtonian physics, right? Push and pull.  Action, and equal and opposite reaction.

But that Newtonian model is broken.  Broken by 40+ years of Both Sides Do It bullshit from America's Very Serious pundits and professional opinion-havers.  Despite the fact that America's two major parties are almost exactly diametrically opposed on almost every issue, thanks to the daily barrage of media Both Siderism, for millions of voters, that Newtonian model of action and reaction has been replaced by a kind of Einstein/Schrödinger quantum politics, with the parties becoming "entangled" in the public mind regardless of how distant and different they are from each other.

By now you all know how this entanglement shows up in the everyday language of way too many American voters.  For example, a few months ago we talked "Steve" who was one of the subjects of a Vox article titled, "Meet the newly uninsured --  Millions of Americans will soon go without insurance. We spoke with some of them."

"Steve" is a retiree. who had insurance through his wife's job.  But then the company shut down her division, so she decided to retire, and off they went to the exchange to shop for new coverage.  His story is tragic and, with minor variations, is being experienced by millions of American families including ours.

But when you hit that last sentence, remember that "Steve" is saying this in the Fall of 2025, living in the rubble of a full decade of felonies, conspiracy mongering, corruption, lying, bigotry, treason, insurrection, fascism and assorted other catastrophes that a Trump-led Republican party has left in its wake.  

Up until last year, his family of three was covered by his wife’s insurance, provided by the large corporation for which she worked. It was $500 a month with a low deductible. But then, the company shut down her division, she decided to retire, and the couple and their son enrolled in the same plan on the state’s ACA marketplaces.

They couldn’t get such a great deal, but they found something usable: about $1,000 per month — pricey, but they were able to keep all of their doctors, who were in network. Their deductible was about $4,600.

But next year, their current plan would cost $2,700 every month to keep, and their deductible would be higher — up to $5,300. They could consider dropping their college-aged son off the plan, but he would struggle to afford health insurance on his own, and it would only save his parents $300 a month.

Steven says he feels trapped. Given their age, he and his wife don’t feel they can afford to go without insurance. But they’re now going to have to pull money out of their retirement accounts to cover the cost of their health plan.

“We cannot wing it and not have health insurance,” Steven said. “I’m spending a lot of money that I really do not have on health care.”

He’s done the math. If he kept his same plan, paid all of the premiums, and paid the maximum out-of-pocket costs, he could spend $50,000 on health care out of pocket — even with a health insurance plan.

“It kinda seems like the two political parties want to be right and not care about people,” he told me.

Even when the stakes are life and death -- and even when proof of who is right and wrong is at everyone’s fingertips -- allocating blame correctly feels literally unthinkable to tens of millions of citizens who have come to believe the “Both Sides Do It” lie as gospel.

So, when Republican corruption, lies and policies fuck them over, in order to make the quantum entanglement between the two parties balance out, somehow, in some mysterious way, these people hold as irrefutably true that Democrats must be equally to blame.  

Every time you hear another "undecided" or "independent" or "centrist" or "unhappy Trump voter" bitching about "Congress" or "politicians in Washington"  or "both sides of the aisle" in the the face of a Republican party which has devolved into a mob of violent bigots and imbeciles, fueled by lurid, home-grown fascist propaganda masquerading as news, and ruled by monsters and demagogues...you are seeing the effect of 40+ years of Both Sides Do It media curb-stomping thermostatic politics and replacing it with quantum entanglement politics.

And even at the cost of our democracy, the legacy media would rather go right on pumping that narcotic lie into our politics than risk the wrath of the MAGA mob and the loss of revenue that would surely accompany telling the masses the simple, ugly truth.

But this was just supposed to be a side-quest, wasn't it?

Damn.

Well, let's pick it up in Part 2, which I'll get to later today or tomorrow when we get back to the subject of "scale" in what I am sure will end up being a TL;DR post.

See you all in a bit.

I Am The Liberal Media