There was nothing worth your time to see in Dallas last night.
Nothing at all.
It was all the usual lies.
Told to all the usual, goggle-eyed homunculi.
In a half-empty barn.
By a rapidly decomposing degenerate monster.
Nothing to see here.
The public was offered a $5,000-per-adult, Trump-branded bribe if Republicans
keep the congress. Wildly illegal and as nonexistent as your Trump DOGE check and your Trump tariff rebate.
Great new health care system will be up and running in a matter of weeks,
The last two years have, of course, been the greatest two years in the history
of creation.
Oh, and we're all still baby-killing Commies.
Also Fetterman showed up because there were cameras to prance in front of and it would piss off Democrats, and what else has he got.
Nothing to see here.
The same, old, tired lies about “We won the presidency three times.”
And the United States now has “the lowest drug prices in the world.”
And Iowa gasoline was “$1.85” before he launched the Iran war.
And “Food prices and almost every other item are rapidly going down.”
And “Over $20 trillion” has been invested in the United States during his
second term.
And, the topper, “Every single promise I made you as a candidate, I've
delivered on. I've delivered on everything.”
Nothing to see here but the loudmouth at the end of the bar, getting louder and
more grandiose as the clock counts down to closing time. And while a few
waterheads and barflies who he's been promising free drinks all night are
still hanging in there, listening attentively, the rest of the bar has mostly
cleared out.
If Mussolini had given a long, rambling speech in February of 1945 about his
amazing successes, awesome, single-handed victories and Italy's bright future,
the tone of it would have sounded a lot like this.
You might remember that eventually, Mussolini tried to flee disguised as a German soldier.
Didn't work out.
So we probably all should be keeping a weather eye out
for an orange slob, dressed in a "Free Mumia" tee-shirt and blond wig, trying
to sneak away in a catering truck with a sack full of cash and his FIFA "peace
prize".
If you don't know what "Harold...call me" signified in 2006, ask your older
sibling.
20 years ago, the Republican party was every bit as racist as they are
today. Leadership just hid it better and, with the assistance of the
legacy media, managed to get away with it. Along with all the other
poisonous tools in the GOP toolbox -- Conservative fundamentalism, xenophobia,
homophobia, anti-choice, anti-civil rights and so on -- racism won elections
for terrible people with terrible ideas. Or, to put it more clearly,
without all the hate and paranoia that Conservative media kept whipping up on
the Right, not only could Republicans never win another election, there was a
decent chance in some places they'd fall to third place behind a Green
candidate, or a Libertarian candidate, or an out-and-proud racist.
See, the Republican party was and is every bit a coalition party -- a "Big
Tent" party -- as the Democrats, but the Republican coalition is made up of
the worst people in America, held together by a common, generalized hatred of
the government (except when they run it), a whole assload of whiny grievances,
and anything that smacks of "the Left". And "the Left" is anyone Hate
Radio and Fox News tells them is "the Left" on any given day.
That mob of bigots and imbeciles is what Republicans seeking higher office
have to work with, which is why they spent huge amounts of cash hiring
scumbags like Rick Wilson. To do the filthy job of appealing to the mob
by proxy so as not to get their hands dirty. And the key to this shell
game was to keep the bigots and imbeciles corralled within the Fox News/Hate
Radio ecosystem (and never let them within a mile of the legacy media) while
trotting the candidate out on safe spaces like Meet the Press or
Face the Nation where they could mouth all the usual platitudes and
never get any push-back.
In 2006, the problems began when the streams got crossed, because back then it
was still possible for Democrats to run on calling out Republican racism and
corruption when it broke into the open --
-- and have that put the Republican candidate on the back foot for the rest of
the campaign.
That, and this... (VoteVets ad):
Democrats could run on being unabashedly in favor of medical science:
And the premier Hate Radio scumbag (and de facto leader of the Republican Party)
reacted exactly as you would expect:
In Purple-but-trending-Red-fast Montana, Democrat Jon Tester could squeak
out a narrow victory over incumbent Republican Senator Conrad Burns by a
margin of 0.87%, or 3,562 votes out of 406,505 cast. Tester ran as
"that neighbor you trust even if your politics are different" and was aided
by the wider "Blue Wave" trend across the country.
Then along came Barack Obama, and the bigots and imbeciles were no longer
content to sit in the cheap seats, hoping that whatever mug the party bosses
offered them would make good on all the promises that Hate Radio was
making.
They kicked down the doors and came storming out into the public square, and
the reaction from the legacy media was to squeeze their eyes shut even
harder and pretend that none of this was what it very much was.
First, they rolled out their oldest and most reliable deflection tactic:
Both Sides Do It. What follows are from the July 25, 2010 Meet the
Press transcript, interspersed with some remarks of my own made at the time.
DAVID BROOKS:
So we were trained in a certain way. A different sort of media, squabble
culture, has come up on the left and the right, which, which
decides their--they build audience by destroying other people. They don't
know anything about policy, they don't care about government, they just
want that squabble.
See! See! The Right AND the Left do it!
The Right AND the Left “don't know anything about policy". The Right AND the
Left
“don't care about government”.
Not one statistic.
Not one correlation.
Not one fact.
Not one blurry security camera video of what might have been the shadow cast
by a fact.
Not one artist's sketch of what some witnesses believe a fact might look
like.
Not one of fact's neighbors telling the evening news that "Fact was kind of
a loner who kept pretty much to himself."
Nothing.
To his credit, E.J. Dionne tried hard to push back:
DIONNE:
Look, there is a concerted conservative campaign on part of the movement,
a minority of the movement…to use race to split people. Glenn Beck says
Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." J. Christian Adams, a
Republican activist pushing this new Black Panthers story, says the Obama
Justice Department is motivated by a "lawless hostility toward equal
enforcement of the law." Now, there are people playing with this racial
politics out there. I am not saying, the NAACP certainly isn't saying that
this is the whole conservative movement…or most of the conservative
movement or most of the tea party. But it's a part of this strategy, and
people should condemn it.
Got that? Dionne shows up with actual, representative quotes from real
Conservative leaders with real media and electoral power.
So how will that clear, well-documented and devastating argument be rebutted
by America's Most Reasonable of Conservatives? He who took the trouble to
enunciate “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check it Out” as his Golden
Journalistic Rule just moments ago?
Exactly how you'd think:
BROOKS:
There are liberals who call conservatives racist as a matter of tactics,
too.
Really? Who? Name some. Quote some.
Nothing. Just...both sides.
Then comes deflector tactic number two: the anecdotal and
highly-suspect "eyewitness account".
BROOKS:
Listen, I was out jogging. You wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out
jogging in the mall. I was at a tea party rally, tea party rally. Also
there was a group called the back--Black Family Reunion, celebration of
African-American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle, sitting
at the same table, eating, watching concerts together. Among most of those
people there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on a, on a
warm Sunday afternoon.
Got that? David Fucking Brooks -- easily the most ubiquitous "Reasonable"
Conservative spokesman in America -- absolutely will not touch that question
[of racism in Republican politics] with a 10-foot Gallup Poll. Instead, he
airily asserts that, somehow, Glenn Beck and J. Christian Adams don’t
methodically play on the fear, racism and paranoia of millions of Pig People
for personal and partisan gain...because he saw some people getting along on
the Mall in D.C. once.
Thus ends our brief excursion to 2010 and the wild lengths the legacy media
was willing to go to to pretend the GOP was something which it very much was
not.
So what changed? Meet the Press is still garbage. Brooks and his
dozens of imitators are still overpaid hacks peddling Both Sides
claptrap. Hate Radio and Fox News are still what they always
were. So what changed?
What changed was the Republican party's approach to the concept of
"shame".
Conservatism was built on an ethos of never, ever apologizing for
anything. As I've mentioned many times on this blog, on the
Right, the only acceptable way to admit you were wrong is to cop to not
being conservative enough. Republican policies that go horrendously
awry are never the problem -- the problem is always that they weren't
implemented aggressively enough. Remember, Conservatism can never
fail, it can only be failed.
And inevitably, this Conservative culture of ignorant, belligerent certitude
ran smack into Republican policies and rhetoric for which any decent human
being should feel ashamed. So, faced with a choice between chucking
the policies and the hateful, racist rhetoric, or cauterizing their
conscience and killing any sense of shame...the base, in their millions,
chose the latter.
They had already been thoroughly humiliated when their fanatical allegiance
to George W. Bush very publicly blew up in their faces. Pile on top of
that the intolerable existence of a Black Democrat in the White House and
they were ready to follow any demagogue, no matter how shitty and corrupt he
may be, to the ends of the Earth as long as he promised them they would not
only never again have to be ashamed of the cowardly racist morons that they
were, but under his regime, their bigotry and stupidity would be celebrated
so hard that the Liberal tears would never end.
And that is how +70 million Americans came to finally, happily divest
themselves of the virtues that make for a decent human being.
And since that was their choice -- and we believe in personal choice -- in
doing so they have relieved us of any obligation to treat them as decent
human beings.
They have worked hard over the course of many decades to make themselves
contemptible.
The least we can do is honor their decision by treating them with
contempt.
We had the makings of just such an "independent media" decades
ago.
It was the Liberal blogosphere.
We saw through the legacy media's toxic addiction to the "Both Sides"
lie. We warned -- very clearly, every day -- exactly where the poisonous
combination of escalating conservative-media lies and racism, coupled with
obstinate legacy-media Both Siderist denialism, was going to lead.
And all of those warnings were routinely slandered and dismissed by the likes
of Longwell, Kristol and all the rest of them until it was far, far too
late. After all, we were just Dirty Fucking Hippies.
Funny thing about the term Dirty Fucking Hippies, which was coined, I believe
by Atrios/Duncan Black sometime during the early aughts. This would have
been during roughly the same period that Sarah Longwell was working for the
Conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and Bloody Bill Kristol was
pimping the shit out of Bush's Iraq Debacle, promising it would all be over in
a matter of weeks, and calling anyone who opposed it a clueless libtard
traitor.
Y'know, the Good Old Days.
The point of “Dirty Fucking Hippies” wasn't the profanity: it was the sarcasm.
It was how Beltway pundits and journalists portrayed the online left precisely
because bloggers could say things establishment media figures refused to say.
In fact, it could get you fired. From Sarah Boxer, in
The New York Review,
February 2008:
Bloggers give new, Web-inflected meanings to old words. A “troll” on the
Web is someone who posts provocative things just to cause an outcry.
“Astroturfing” is creating a fake grassroots movement. Bloggers also
sprinkle their blogs with expressions like WTF (translation: “What the
fuck?”), lol (laugh out loud), and meh (a verbal shrug). They willfully
misspell—like “teh” for “the.” They call the Internet “the internets,”
cutely following George W. Bush’s slip. If people wrote like this for
publication, they’d be fired.
And, indeed, there is a term for getting canned because of your blog:
“dooced,” named for the blogger Dooce, now a stay-at-home-mother (SAHM)
or, as she puts it, a “Shit Ass Ho Motherfucker,” who got fired for
blogging about her employer.
Bloggers challenged mainstream-media gatekeeping and the way the media had
become an insulated, self-satisfied cult of performative "objectivity".
It's Jay Rosen's "view from nowhere". And starting during the Bush years, Liberal bloggers treated
profanity as evidence that they were not performing objectivity for elite
approval.
Which sure sounds a fuck of a lot like the makings of an "independent media"
to me.
And of course, during all that time, Longwell, Kristol and all the rest of
them never objected to the corrosive Both Siderism of the legacy media,
because that corrosive Both Siderism always tilted the playing field heavily
in favor of the Right. It still does. And so only now, when the same
Both Siderism is no longer reliably serving their side, do Longwell, Kristol
and all the rest of them seem to have discovered that there's something
wrong.
But it's the word "inadvertently" that makes it art.
As you might know, The Bulwark runs live-read ads for
The New York Times, and were running live-read ads for
The Washington Post right up until pundits like Jennifer Rubin began
fleeing the place. Their rapid growth has depended almost entirely on
MSNBC (now MS NOW) promoting their business and their employees practically
every single day since it was founded in 2019, plus regular appearances on NPR
and that bastion of Both Siderism, the Sunday Shows. And, of
course, by maintaining at least a cordial relationship with the legacy
media. A small sample:
"Washington Post economics columnist moves to The Bulwark"
Which is no surprise given that the Trump origin myth that Never Trumpers have
been peddling since day one: that Trump came outta nowhere and somehow
hypnotized 77 million voters and virtually every elected Republican into
becoming fascists. Isn't that weird?
That story is ever so much more congenial to the Both Siderist bubble the
lords and ladies of the legacy media live in than the actual history of the
modern GOP that Liberals are always yapping about.
So why go out of your way to piss off institutions who you wish to speak
kindly of your business and your brand new book?
