Tuesday, April 08, 2025

"I Should Have Seen This Coming": Another David Fucking Brooks Adventure

As you might have noticed, recently I've been talking up the fact that I've been at this keyboard now for 20 years, and thank you all for indulging me and the kind words and the Tip Jar contributions that some of you sent which is deeply appreciated, and for which I have not yet made the time to write individual  "Thank-Yous".  

Bad blogger!  Bad!

So I figured it was time to close that little bit of endzone gavotting and move on with current events, and maybe bring it up again at 25 year mark, at which time I assume all contributions will be in the form of either DOGE bitcoin (should Musk's vaporware currency become the mandatory Mark of the Beast), rubles (should Trump finally just sign the country over to his paymaster in the Kremlin), or promises of real eggs and Victory gin (should Trump's curb-stomping of the economy continue apace.)  

But come-what-may, it would be a matter to be taken up in 2030.  But here-and-now it's time to get back to the goings in the here-and-now.

Then I picked up my crisp, new copy of The Atlantic...

OK, that's not even remotely true.  Instead, my inbox was flooded with screenshots and quotes from the headline story in The Atlantic, urging my attention.  


Oh my sweet and fluffy Lord, why do you do this to me?

OK.

Fine.  

To quote the most consequential line in American literature, "All right, then, I'll go to hell!”

But to get there, be forewarned that I'm going to ride this hobby horse around the block and back again.  However, I also promise that I will keep quotes from this abomination to a minimum.

Let's start with the second paragraph:
Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on this faith in my country’s goodness—on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause. Since January 20, as I have watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.
The Alert Reader will notice that Mr. Brooks' mental spellchecker remains broken beyond repair; still automatically swapping in the word "Americans" when the word he is hiding from is "Republicans".

Brooks continues:

George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing. He understood that it is possible for people to seek power without having any vision of the good. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” an apparatchik says in 1984.

Hey, here's a fun fact! According to my temporal panopticon machine, the last time David Brooks cited George Orwell at length was April of 2003.  

Golly, that's almost exactly 22 years ago!

It was in a column entitled "The Collapse of the Dream Palaces" which Brooks wrote when he was the managing editor of Bloody Bill Kristol's now-defunct The Weekly Standard, and in which Mr. Brooks cheered on Bush's totally awesome conquest of Iraq ("Now that the war in Iraq is over...")  and danced his neocon happy dance on the graves of everyone who had ever doubted the inerrant wisdom and military genius of George W. Bush.

GEORGE ORWELL was a genuinely modest man. But he knew he had a talent for facing unpleasant facts. That doesn’t seem at first glance like much of a gift. But when one looks around the world, one quickly sees how rare it is. Most people nurture the facts that confirm their worldview and ignore or marginalize the ones that don’t, unable to achieve enough emotional detachment from their own political passions to see the world as it really is. Now that the war in Iraq is over, we’ll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts.

In the article, Brooks took special pleasure sticking it to those he deemed the worst of the worst.  That would be us Murrica-hating, terrorist-luvin' Liberals.

Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.

Of course, within a matter of a few years it turned out all those terrible things the Bush haters believed were true.  Worse than true, actually: the perfidy and incompetence of the Bush administration set the stage for the rise of a monster like Trump, and the Both Siderist poison Brooks and his imitators kept pumping into the America body politic decade after decade lowered the bar sufficiently for Trump to clear it.

In fact, within seven years everything about Bush's Iraqi Clusterfuck that Brooks had ballyhooed so loud and hard in this article and in a number of others had collapsed so utterly that, when publicly confronted with his own words from this very article, Brooks would deny writing any such thing.  I know this because I was there when he did it and I filmed him doing it.  If you're interested, click here for the whole story -- "All The Lies That Are His Life".

Anyhoo, five months later, in September of 2003, while Bush's Iraq war was still wildly popular with Conservatives, and the complicit legacy media was attempting to further ingratiate themselves to the Bush regime by hiring every pro-war neocon in sight, Brooks  parlayed his support for the Iraq war, his support for Bush's massive tax cuts, and his seething contempt for the Left into a job for life at The New York Times.

Where, like a finely tuned clockwork mechanism that always runs backwards and predictably farts, then poops, then explodes in your hand every couple of days, he has been pretty spectacularly wrong about almost everything ever since.   

I don't have the time or the will to summarize the literally thousand of posts I have written over the decades detailing all the myriad ways in which Brooks has either been just wildly wrong, or has invented or exaggerated some Liberal sins so that he could trowel out yet another slab of Both Sides Do It offal, or has held himself willfully ignorant of the state of his Republican party so that he could use his position at the Times to spin of fairy tales about an imminent recovery of the GOP which never happens, or the any-minute-now renaissance of the Conservative movement which never arrives.

But he is why, despite my best intentions, I must once again flog the fact that I have been blogging for 20 years now, because it was 20 years ago this week -- April 9, 2005 -- when I penned my first column vivisecting the work of Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times.

Longtime readers will not be surprised to learn that Brooks' column 20 years ago was all about his claim to a slowly dawning realization that maybe his party was going just a little funny in the head.  


Here are a few snips from my post from April 9, 2005 deconstructing Brooks;

David Brooks from the 04.09.05 NYT in which BoBo looks incrementally past his grotty navel and notices he has a couple of stinky little feet at the end of his legs. Article has been trimmed a bit, and helpful translations have been added for You The Customer.
The Republican Party is running into a problem: the conservatism of the American people. Over the past decade, the Republicans have set themselves up as the transformational party...

[But the American people] have a taste for order and a distrust of those who want too much change on too many fronts too quickly... 
Translation: They are scared shitless that the Crazier’n a Shithouse Rat Theocrats that the Evil Liberals have always warned them about might actually exist and have the keys to the car. Oh and all the Mapquest Route Planners they left behind as clues have a place called “Armageddonville” circled in big, red Crayon.
It's become increasingly clear that the Republicans are bumping into some limits...
Translation: limits like...gravity, evolution, arithmetic, international law, economics. Why does reality hate Republicans?
Being conservative, most Americans believe that decisions should be made at the local level, where people understand the texture of the case. Even many evangelicals, who otherwise embrace the culture of life, grow queasy when politicians in Washington start imposing solutions from afar, based on abstract principles rather than concrete particulars.
Translation: Even in the middle of my faux critique of my own Overlords ...must ...regurgitate ... ”culture of life” meme...every...six...minutes. Hope no one notices what a trained seal I have become.
Then there is Social Security reform. Republicans set forth with a plan to give people some control over their own retirement accounts. Here, too, Republicans have been surprised by the tepid public support. Americans understand that there is a big problem, but right now most oppose personal accounts invested in the markets. According to a Wall Street Journal poll this week, a third of Republicans currently oppose them.
Translation: We were all shocked when the public didn’t think letting Thurston Howell’s idiot son bulldoze Mom’s retirement money onto the craps table was a spiffy notion. We were stunned when our Soviet Style “spontaneous” crowds of carefully screened zombies came across like a Pravda Puppet Show.

For the uninitiated, you should know that Brooks writes one of these "What is it Lassie?  The GOP stumbled a little?  But it'll all work out OK?  Cool!" columns every few months, and has been doing so for the past 23 years.  It's one of the three or four variations of tepid horseshit columns he cranks out that are so nearly-identical to one another, they may as well have been written by algorithm.  

So, indulge me a little here.  I wanna try an experiment.  

Let us say, for the sake of argument, in response to Brooks' column today I wrote the following:
So today David Brooks wrote a very special column.

It was not a column explaining that the Republican party  -- his Republican party, his Conservative movement -- really is just a festering cesspit of paranoia and bigotry and fury, because he has already written himself into an inescapable corner by writing so many columns over so many years swearing that this was not so.

And it certainly was not a column saying the simplest, and most obvious truth of all -- that the Left was right about the Right all along -- because on that day the small clutch of wealthy men who have subsidized his Whig Fan Fiction Factory for years would cast him down from his high  place and leave him unprotected to the predations of the job market.  Were that to happen, Mr. Brooks would not last a week.

Instead, Mr., Brooks has written a letter of supplication to that small clutch of wealthy men, begging them to let him keep his job as the Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual in Murrica.  Promising to do better next time.

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.
And, for the sake of further argument, if I told you that, buried 1,000 words deep in Mr. Brooks' column today entitled "I Should Have Seen This Coming" you would find these  paragraphs --

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

I messed up big time in not knowing Trump was coming.  And so when something like that happens  you take a look at yourself and you think "What did I miss about America?"  And...I'm...too much in the Acela corridor.  I've gotta get out.  That's one thing.  

Believe me, I travel every week, but I'm at a college here...so I'm always within the bubble.  And so I've gotta get out.  But then the other thing is, like, I've achieved way more career success than I ever thought I would, so it's time to take some chances on the spiritual realm, on the personal -- the emotional realm, and I've...got nothing to lose...

-- there would be no reason not to believe me, right?

After all, I've got a more-or-less honest face, in all the time we've known each other I've never steered you wrong about Brooks, and those sorts of sentiments would seem to track for a column entitled "I Should Have Seen This Coming", right?

But...nope.

That bit about "So today David Brooks wrote a very special column"?  That was me from the last time David Brooks claims he suddenly woke up to discover that there was something amiss inside his GOP.  

That was me from "David Brooks: The Sword and The Shield" written March 16, 2016.  If you're doing the math, yes, that was nearly a decade ago. 

And while those other three paragraphs are indeed from David Brooks, they are also all from nearly a decade ago.  The first one is from the Times in March of 2016, and the second two from his appearance on the now-defunct Charlie Rose Show the same week. 

I know because at the time I wrote about it here, "The David Brooks Touching Indians Tour Has Been Suspended Indefinitely"

20 years ago I made a wager with myself.  To keep up-to-date on which lies and delusions were the new hotness among the Beltway pundits and elite Centrist politicians, I needed to keep an eye on Brooks and document what I saw.  Because out of all the Sensible Conservative frauds who had insinuated them into the institutional media and were methodically destroying it from within, I saw clearly that this balding, bespectacled little nebbish was and is that ecosystem's apex predator.  

He was the worst.   Using his ubiquity and influence to shield the GOP from serious scrutiny behind a scrim of lies, deflections and Both Siderism.   And while the horror that was spawning itself inside the GOP like a fast-moving cancer was right there, clear as crystal, black and white for anyone to see who chose to look...



...over and over again Brooks chose not to look.   

In point of fact, he chose to lie to his readers over and over and over again.  Just as Fox News and Hate Radio grew wealthy and powerful telling the reprogrammable meatbags of the Republican base the lies they wished to believe, so too did Brooks make himself wealthy and influential telling New York Times readers, and NPR listeners, and PBS and Meet the Press viewers the lies they very much wanted to believe. 

When looked at over the span of decades as I have done, Brooks' columns present the unmistakable stink of routinized institutionalized duplicity.  A ritual of dishonest and deluded mantras repeated over and over again, especially when it comes to the state of the GOP.  His readership, which includes U.S. presidents, university presidents, senators, CEOs and captains of industry -- movers and shakers who all desperately want to believe him -- have been fed, over and over again, the pundit equivalent of one of Zeno's Paradoxes.  Specifically, the Dichotomy Paradox:

Since any distance can be divided in half, the arrow has to take an infinite number of steps to reach its goal. Since you are adding an infinite number of steps together, it would take an infinite amount of time to reach the goal. This means the arrow will never reach the target.

For decades, however catastrophically awful the GOP became -- however unbearable the reek from the rotting corpse of the Party of Lincoln became -- Brooks' columns held out the promise to his readers that the end-state could never arrive.  That nation may stumble, but it could never fall, and the stumbles, however bad they were, were always reversable.  

This was Brooks sounding the "All Clear" on November 5, 2014, mere months before Donald Trump slithered down the escalator 
The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase. 

And when all that sweet-sweet talk of detoxing came to absolutely nothing, in April of 2016 Brooks decided to tell his readers a different fiction.  From me, back then:

...And on this, the last day of 11th blogiversary fundraiser,  the blogging gods have once again visited Mr. David Brooks in the night and "inspired" him to write what may be the most spectacularly ridiculous piece of Whig fan fiction in his long and profitable career of cranking out ridiculous pieces of Whig fan fiction.
The blogging gods are often cruel, but they are always entertaining.  

Today, Mr. Brooks imagineers out of thin air an entire army of public-spirited Reasonable Republicans who will infiltrate the Republican convention in July cleverly disguised as party hacks but then -- surprise! -- cast off their fake George Wallace noses and Pat Buchanan wigs just in time to rise as one! A veritable League of Extraordinary Whig Gentlemen! ("The Lincoln Caucus"):
Or they could choose the collective path.

This is the path that recognizes that the situation we’re in now is more like a parliamentary process than a presidential process. Even very small groups can have an amazing influence over big candidates who are trying to build a majority coalition. Think of the way small Israeli religious parties extract concessions from the much larger Israeli parties.

So I’m suggesting some number of delegates organize themselves into a caucus called the Lincoln Caucus. The Lincoln Caucus would not be an explicitly anti-Trump caucus or an anti-Cruz caucus. It would just be a caucus made up of delegates who are not happy with the choices currently before them...
Earth's mightiest imaginary Conservative heroes who will remake the GOP exactly as David Brooks wishes it to be:
The first thing the Lincoln Caucus would do is plant a flag for a different style of Republicanism. Members of the caucus would remind the country that there still are Republicans who believe in prudent globalism, reform conservative ideas to lift up the working class. There are still Republicans who believe in certain standards of polite behavior in public and pragmatic compromise.
And either save the party from ruin:
This process would bring the Trump and Cruz campaigns back toward the Republican mainstream. It would create a road toward party unity after one deal or another was reached. It might go some way toward heading off a general election debacle.

It would also create a democratic path toward a Republican nominee who is not Trump or Cruz...

Mostly, members of the Lincoln Caucus would stand up for the legitimate rights of the party. In our republican system, it is parties that choose nominees; not primary voters. Parties are lasting institutions that manage coalitions, preserve historical commitments, protect us from flash-in-the-pan demagogues and impose restraints on the excessively ambitious. The Lincoln Caucus would embody these legitimate institutional responsibilities.
Or, wait out the Trumpocalypse in David Brooks' Justice League World Headquarters and emerge from the rubble to lead the survivors towards a brighter, Whiggier tomorrow:
If the Republican ticket gets devastated in November, members of the Lincoln Caucus could say, “We stood for something different,” and they’d be in a good position to lead the rebuilding process.
Or, failing that, make their escape via Mr. Brooks' hot air balloon and settle on the Moon, which will be be very hospitable to their Whiggish ways once the King of the Moon is sufficiently placated: 

 End April, 2016 redux.

However, passing off delusional spit-balling as some kind of workable elite strategy could only ever take Brooks so far.  Same with his continuous whitewashing the GOP's depraved past: necessary but insufficient.  

To pull this all off, Brooks had one more enormous sledgehammer of a lie in his pundit kit.  A lie that he repeated with such robotic regularity in virtually every column for decades that, after a while, I got to where I could predict with unnerving accuracy how that lie would be deployed in each column -- predict it almost down to the paragraph in which Brooks would drop the "razor in the apple".

My wife will vouch for me :-)

This is, of course, the biggest lie of all.  The Big Lie that makes all the little lies possible.  The Both Sides Do It lie.  And kids, Mr. David Brooks is the motherfucking pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It.  And for the sake of my poor, tired typin' fangers, I will indulge myself once again by copy/pasting my own words from years gone by...
I will note once again that, for all the blather he has been selling suckers for $24.99 about his tortured midlife-crisis wanderings between the Torah and the Beatitudes in search of God and Meaning, anyone who isn't one of Mr. Brooks' acolytes or fellow-travelers and has actually read what Mr. Brooks has actually written over these past 15 years with an unjaundiced eye can easily identify his true faith.

Both Sides Do It

Both Sides Do It is his most fervent catechism.

Both Sides Do It is the mistress he will always return to no matter what lies he tells himself or his wife.

Both Sides Do It is his Song of Songs.
Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee..
And whatever upscale architectural tours he may take of other houses of worship, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times -- 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 -- Both Sides Do It will always be his true tabernacle.

The cathedral where he will always go to preach his sermons and collect his pay.

And I will note once again that the descent of Mr. Brooks' Republican party into fascism and madness and the concomitant rise of Republican monsters like Donald Trump would never have been possible without the relentless barrage of false equivalence punditry which has been the stock-in-trade of media quacks and parasites like Mr. David Brooks for decades.
However, having said all that (and so much more), what has been clear to me for a very long time now is that 20 years of deconstructing Mr. Brooks' lies -- no matter how plain or fancy my words are, no matter if I use humor, pathos, metaphor, or rhyme it all in iambic tetrameter -- none of that has had any  effect whatsoever on elite opinions about David Brooks.  

They still revere him, hang on his words and buy his books. 

Brooks as been so successful selling his top-shelf, Both Sides Do It snake oil to credulous elites that this was Senator Cory Booker's opinion of David Fucking Brooks as of February 16, 2025

I've had the honor of knowing David Brooks for years. I admire him and have been deeply moved, informed, inspired, and bettered by his books and talks. 

He was a Republican when I met him. I don't know his party affiliation now. What I do know is he has always been a man of virtue, objective reasoning, pragmatism, wisdom, and invaluable insights.

And this was was judge J. Michael Luttig's opinion of David Fucking Brooks today.  You might remember Luttig from his many, many guest appearances on MSNBC.  He was that life-long Republican and arch conservative judge, until January 6th, 2021.

From the great David Brooks of The New York Times, in the May volume of The Atlantic.  Everyone should read every word of this historic piece.  It's worth the price of a subscription to The Atlantic, without question the most courageous magazine in America today.

And yet I do not despair or consider my time wasted, because for every senator or judge or CEO or Meet the Press host who lavished Brooks with treacly praise, down here at the grassroots level where all things begin, there is a different story.  

For example, Alert Reader Walt has okayed me to reprint (in part) the email he sent to me this morning, provided I cite him as "Walt Auvil, flagrant violator of David Brooks copyright".

"The pathetic thing is that I didn’t see this coming even though I’ve been living around these people my whole adult life."

“I should have understood this much sooner, because the reactionaries had revealed their true character as far back as January 1986.”

“Owning the libs became a lucrative strategy.”

Could it be that the scales have fallen from his eyes?!? 

Of course not, the razor in the apple . . . .

“Of course, the left made it easy for them. The left really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power centers. The left really did valorize a “meritocratic” caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class. The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment. The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent. If you tell half the country that their voices don’t matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table.”
Walt understands the assignment.

And, once again, this has always been Brooks' go-to move: when cornered by the absolute moral bankruptcy of his recently former political party, the complete failure of his Conservative movement and the utter hollowness of his own life's work...quick!  Find some shit to fling at Liberals!  From me, less than a year ago ("David Brooks Has No Immediate Plans to Engage With the Real World in Any Way"): 

Donald Trump is more unhinged, openly fascist and dangerous than ever, and is once again cruising to an easy nomination by the GOP.  The Republican party and Conservative movement which Mr. David Brooks devoted his entire adult life to building has centrifuged out the last few stray non-lunatics and is nothing but a pure, deranged shitpile of bigots, imbeciles and grifters from top to bottom.  The Republican Supreme Court which Mr. Brooks has always aggressively defended, has dropped any pretense of legitimacy and now acts as the GOP's own private revolutionary tribunal  

And all of these horribles, acting in concern, are straining every political, judicial and financial sinew to shove this country into a totalitarian abyss from which it, and the world, may never recover.  

So, in the face of all that, what has captured the interest of the Most Ubiquitous Elite Media Conservative Pundit in Murrica on this 80th anniversary of the Allies storming the beaches at Normandy to put an end to the evil that the Republican party now embraces?

From Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times,  June 6, 2024:

The Sins of the Educated Class

Yes, in the face of the immediate and existential threat posed by his recently-former party and his recently-former movement, Mr. Brooks has scampered back to his Safe Space to carp about the behavior of a tiny number of students on a few elite campuses.

For Conservatives during these turbulent times, this ritual has been as basic as praying at the Stations of the Cross is for old-school Catholics, or performers rubbing the Tree of Hope stump at the Apollo.  This is just a small sampling...


However, thanks in no small part to you, dear readers, every day I see good people flying the "Both Sides Don't" banner across social media.  It's gotten to the point where pundits now feel the need to (badly) pre-buttal their stupid opinions with assurances that "this isn't one of those Both Sides things."  Which, of course, only calls attention to how very much a Both Sides thing it is.

So good on ya!

Also the amount of blunt and immediate pushback Brooks now gets when he runs his mouth?  Well, let's just say that it makes my old Liberal Grinchy heart swell in a delightfully non-life-threatening way.


Example: from  Kevin Kruse: 


Finally, if you can see your way clear to indulging this unemployable Liberal degenerate one more time, let us end on a point I raised several thousand posts ago:

...it is now painfully clear that Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political  economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

You see, Mr. Brooks' relationship with the actual here-and-now here in America has always been a lot like Mr. Brooks' first marriage:  a disaster from Mr. Brooks which has been trying to get as far away as humanly possible, because it is the graveyard of all his ridiculous postulating and pontificating about Man and God and Culture.  

This is why Mr. Brooks has always reserved some of his biggest, gassiest lies for long paeans on the subject of Conservatism's amazing imaginary past -- which is always juuust out of sight in the Republican rearview mirror -- and Conservatism's awesome imaginary future -- which is always juuust over the Republican horizon.

And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling Republican voters...



I Am The Liberal Media




Thursday, April 03, 2025

Professional Left Podcast Episode 889: Glib-eration Day


"Fun Fact: The word 'tariff' comes from an old Ottoman Turkish word which, loosely translated, means 'I can't believe these fucking meatheads keep falling for this grifter's bullshit'. "  -- driftglass


The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal

Ep 889: Glib-eration Day

April 03, 2025

In this week's episode, we break down Trump's chaotic new trade war and its immediate devastating impact on the markets. We draw parallels between this administration's trade "liberation" and the Bush-era Iraq War disaster, examining:

  • The fallout from Trump's sweeping tariff announcements that wiped $1.65 trillion from the US stock market in minutes
  • The mass layoffs hitting public health agencies, senior services, and cultural institutions
  • How Elon Musk's DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) is driving record job cuts across the country
  • Surprising Democratic victories in local elections across Wisconsin and Illinois despite Musk spending millions
  • The ongoing SignalGate scandal expanding as more security lapses are revealed
  • Laura Loomer's alarming influence over national security personnel decisions

Join us in the Cornfield Resistance for our trademark blend of political analysis, righteous anger, and sardonic humor as we document the latest chapter in Republican mismanagement. As we remind our listeners: "Never forget, it was our Republican neighbors, colleagues and family members who did this. This is what they voted for."

More at proleftpod.com.

We are scheduled to be on The Bob Cesca show on 4/9/2025.

Support the show at Patreon.com/proleftpod, or send a letter/contribution to 

The Professional Left Podcast

PO Box 9133

Springfield, IL 62791


Support the show

Links:  

The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!













Wednesday, April 02, 2025

In Case You Missed Trump's Tariff Bullshit...


No Half Measures

The Third Body Problem


If two's a disaster, three's a pan-dimensional clusterfuck.

From Politico
Musk said Wisconsin would decide the fate of Western civilization. 
Now he says he ‘expected to lose.’ The Musk-backed Brad Schimel got thumped Tuesday night.


No Half Measures

Tuesday, April 01, 2025

Professional Left Podcast Episode 888: Suffering No Fools At The Cornfield Resistance!


"I do what must be done. That is what I know how to do."  -- Kurt Muller, Watch on The Rhine.


The Professional Left Podcast with Driftglass and Blue Gal

Ep 888 Suffering No Fools At The Cornfield Resistance!

April 01, 2025

AKA There Is No Trump without Newt. 

In episode 888 of The Professional Left Podcast, hosts driftglass and Blue Gal dive into the political landscape of April 1st, 2025, where April Fools Day is effectively canceled at the Cornfield Resistance due to the real Fool occupying the Oval Office.

The hosts examine how Republicans have weaponized language over decades, tracing the destructive path from Newt Gingrich's slash-and-burn politics through Rush Limbaugh's hate radio to Trump's presidency. They contrast this with Democrats' constant pressure to be "civil" and "bipartisan," recalling Senator Durbin's tearful apology for his anti-Gitmo torture comments while Republicans never apologize for anything.

Also covered: Senator Cory Booker's filibuster against hate, the White House Correspondents' Association's capitulation by canceling comedian Amber Ruffin, Elon Musk's dangerous plan to replace the COBOL code running Social Security payments, and a news roundup featuring Trump's latest attacks on democracy—from Signal-gate to tariff impacts, DEI funding cuts, and threats to the Smithsonian.

Don't miss this sharp, unapologetic analysis of why "talking to the other side" isn't viable when the other side has abandoned democratic principles entirely.

More at proleftpod.com.

Driftglass will be on The BradCast with Digby on 4/2/2025.   We are scheduled to be on The Bob Cesca show on 4/9/2025.

Support the show at Patreon.com/proleftpod, or send a letter/contribution to 

The Professional Left Podcast

PO Box 9133

Springfield, IL 62791

Support the show

Links:  

The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!













Bogart Explains Republicans, Short and Sweet


No Half Measures

Sunday, March 30, 2025

It Was 20 Years Ago Today...

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." -- William Faulkner

In keeping with the tenor of our times, I'm not going to apologize in advance for what I am about to do. 

Apologies are so 2012.

Instead I'm going to focus on how perilous this post is about to become.  

Will it be as dangerous as the Triple Lindy?

Possibly.  Because today I'm going to try the rare 20th Anniversary Fundraiser Double Post, and feat which has driven men mad in the attempt.  Others have had to be hospitalized with severe leg cramps and loss of object permanence.  

But for you good people, I'mma give it a go.

First, some business.  This is part of my 20th blogiversary thing, so here's the tip jar if you feel so inclined.  


Burn The Lifeboats


With that out of the way, next up is this bit of prose.  If you're so inclined, let me know what you think of it down in the comments:

Every few years some new, soulless, ambitious goon clambers out of the moral sewer of the Party of Personal Responsibility to seize control of the vocabulary of Hate Radio and appoint himself the party's Demagogue-in-Chief for the moment, harvesting the ever-ripe-and-ready paranoia and rage of the GOP base and dragging us all a little further down the road the Hell.

Checks a lot of boxes, doesn't it?  The depravity of a party that just keeps spawning monsters.  Hate Radio vocab being the Mother Tongue of the party base.  The party's lust for an authorization strong man who would harvest the preexisting rage and paranoia the Republican voters.   

Pretty standard stuff these days, right?  Nothing you wouldn't hear on any given day in 2025 from any MSNBC Never Trumper, or in any essay at The Bulwark, or on any Lincoln Project podcast.  

Bold.  Edgy.  Truth-Telling.

Except its not from 2025.  And it's not from an MSNBC Never Trumper, or a Bulwark, or a Lincoln Project podcast.    In fact, it's from 2013.  That's two years before Trump even existed in the Republican firmament.  And it's from me.  And I can tell you that, back in 2013, such talk was not greeted as Bold, Edgy, Truth-Telling back by all those Republicans would later respawn and re-emerge as MSNBC Never Trumpers and Bulwark publishers and Lincoln Project advertising moguls. 

In fact, such talk was mockingly dismissed by such people as ... 

Liberal. Crackpot. Alarmism.  

In fact, many of those same people have blamed people like me for conjuring Trump into existence So you can maybe kinda see why actual Liberal voices are not welcome on the largest Liberal and/or Resistance media platforms.  Because we remember all the inconvenient things which those platforms are designed to erase of the memory of man.    

Back in 2013, the Republican thug de jure was a fella named Ted Cruz, and while he had been a darling of the moutbreathers and Khaki Klansmen who make up the base of the GOP, his doomed strategy of trying to filibuster and shutdown Barack Obama and Democrats into defunding Obama's signature health care reform flopped hard.  And almost overnight Republicans who had sworn fealty to Canadian-born Zodiac killer prime suspect, Raphael Edward Cruz began to bail:

Again, from 2013:

Now that Republicanism Personified Ted Cruz is starting to rot from the amygdala down, members of the still-batshit-crazy-but-not-quite-that-batshit-crazy sub-genus of the Stupid/Crazy Party are stumbling over each other to score their "I've Been Against Ted Cruz Since..." Red Badges of Political Courage.  For example, here is what confidence trickster Peter King -- a man who was perfectly happy tossing gobbets of red meat to the teabagger crocodile until it turned on him -- now has to say about his competition for the hearts and wallets of the rubes:
“I took a chance when Ted Cruz was the darling of the Republicans,” King added. “It was only two weeks ago, but he was the darling of Republicans. I was the only guy taking him on nationwide.” 

Brave, Brave, Brave, Brave Sir Robin...

But, as I warned back in 2013...

Of course, Cruz and King and all the rest of the Koch brothers' hired help are not the problems: they are merely the latest and most stomach-churning surface manifestations of the long, deep, Conservative rot that has been eating at the heart of the United States for generations:

...
Unfortunately, the calamity of a potential default has tempered neither judgment nor passion. On Saturday, Ted Cruz—the man who lit the match, won the Values Voters Straw Poll with 42 percent of the vote. Channeling her inner Glenn Beck, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) concluded that the President “committed impeachable offenses.” Bachmann also proclaimed that civil disobedience was a potential response to Obama’s “thuggery,” and compared the Obama presidency to Egypt’s deposed Muslim Brotherhood...

Yep.  Still more stuff which all of your favorite Never Trump teevee and podcasting celebrities dismissed at the time Liberal. Crackpot. Alarmism.  

In fact, you'll never guess what former Bulwark employee and frequent Bulwark returning guest Amanda Carpenter was doing for a living back in 2013 as I was writing this.  From Wikipedia:

In January 2013, Carpenter became senior communications advisor and speechwriter for Senator Ted Cruz

Wowsers.  

But hang on, because here comes the second part of the extremely difficult 20th Anniversary Fundraiser Double Post.  

Because that 2013 post warning about the rise of Republican demagogues and how Cruz very publicly screwing the pooch it was making life difficult (with the emphasis on "cult") for Republican quislings and collaborators who had gone along with Cruz, in turn referred back to a post I had written during my very first few days as a blogger.  

Back to April 1, 2005, to a post that had originated as a comment over at the late Steve Gilliard's News Blog as I believe was the impetus for Steve kicking me out and insisting that I start a blog of my own.  

Which, clearly, I did.  

From me, 20 years ago, back when the Republican thug de jure was a fella named Tom Delay:

Rep. DeLay Preps the Beds for the GOP's Big Sleep

(This particular bit started life as a comment in Gilliard's Shoppe but has been Repurposed to better serve You, The Customer :-)

The little-“p” politics of this is fascinating.  [The fact that] Over the long run that the GOP is demographically/electorally doomed to become the minority Thurston Howell Party again. Either when the Fundy Shining Path Rebels that make up their margin of victory make one too many batshit demands, or are are told “No” once too often.

(If you want to get a clear picture of how this will look, rent “Fatal Attraction” or “Play Misty For Me”. I’m not going to be ignored, George!)

So either they take their bat and ball and stomp disgustedly back to Mordor, or a handful of moderate Republicans get so freaked out by the Randall Terry Wing of the Party that they bolt or stay home.

But short run…Tom DeLay is now a Household Name. Been waiting 10 years for that to happen and always amazed that Republicans had no fucking clue who he was, even though you’d tell them five or a hundred times. Sheesh. All RAM and no Hard Drive with some people.

Every GOP Leader knows the Gingrich Lesson: No matter how much the membership owes you, they’ll go absolutely Lord of The Flies on your Piggy-ass the minute you becomes a measurable liability. Newt was so completely “I Am The Reich” that he would have been perfectly happy to go into the bunker and fight it out until the GOP was razed to rubble had he not been stopped by his own House Republicans.

And since the Suddenly Huge Liability named Tom DeLay is now just “Tell Tale Heart”--thundering away under the GOP floorboards, threatening to drown out everything else, the question is, will that same dynamic play twice?

Well DeLay ain’t Gingrich. He learned from that episode, and they don’t call him The Hammer for his shipwright skills. He spent a decade forcibly collecting GOP testicles and caching them in his private Crown Royal bag. At the slightest provocation he will to politically and personally destroy anyone who doesn’t bend a deep knee to His Gorgon Awfulness.

And both the Texas and National Republican parties have shown absolutely craven willingness to rewrite the Rules on the fly any time the Beast’s wet-bar needed to be restocked with virgin’s blood, or whenever a law or policy might make threaten to cinch-in the bottomless lust he and his stooges have for Power, Money, Trinkets and Perks, even a trifle.

So (hahah!) they’ve kinda disarmed themselves to accommodate him, and now they’re stuck very much up on that very windy gibbet with him. So if you were running in 2006 and playing How Do I Save My Pink Republican Skin while DeLay is holding your ass held hostage, what do you do?

Got to time it juuuust right. Jump away from Herr DeLay too soon and he’ll blow your head off. Jump too late, and your face will be morphed into Tom DeLay…into Randall Terry…into, I dunno, Osama Bin Laden? in every ad, every day, for the entire election cycle.

My simple suggestion for voters in 2006?

Shoot the hostage ;-)

I concluded my 2013 Ted Cruz post with this:

For the record, to my knowledge not a single Conservative politician, professional Both Sider or mainstream media creature who has ever even briefly awakened to the fact that the GOP is run by monsters has ever acknowledged that the Left was right all along.

And damn if it this isn't still 100% true.

Finally, a sincere "thank you"  for your readership, support and (mostly) kind words lo' these many years.

And if you missed the tip jar at the entrance, for your So convenience the staff has helpfully placed one nearby which you can see as you exit through the gift shop.  Sorta like ATMs at casinos: :-)

Write if you get work,

Your pal, 

driftglass


I Am The Liberal Media