Professional Left Podcast Episode 973: Miracles?

"They say miracles are past. Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/miracles-quotes_3" --  William Shakespeare Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/miracles-quotes_3

• 
  

Shut Up and Go Away

Most of you are no doubt familiar with Tom Friedman's infamous "Suck on this" moment on the now-defunct Charlie Rose Show in May of 2003.  

But but don't sleep on Rose leading Friedman off by confidently asserting, "Now that the war is over...":

At the time, this was the received wisdom of the Beltway Sages.  For example, here is David Brooks writing for Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard in 2003, practically endzone dancing with delight because now that Bush had been proven unequivocally right about everything, boy howdy were those dirty hippies gonna finally get what's coming to them.

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces 

Mass destruction of mistaken ideas. 

APR 28, 2003

... Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are... 

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.

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

The magic of this piece of persiflage -- and all such super-patriot Salacious B. Crumb caterwauling...

...by all your favorite Neocon pundits back in the day -- is not merely that it got everything wrong, but that it got everything perfectly backwards.  

It's the GOP base/Tea Party/MAGA meatheads that grew more vociferous.  Even President Obama trying to clean up the ruin they left in their wake, and asking nothing more than everyone help out and meet in the middle did not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of the Left (and all the usual fascist scapegoats) is all that is left of Right. 

And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their MAGA rallies, their podcasts, their Hate Radio and their Fox News garbage. They will still have a huge influence over the Republican party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to sane, normal humans who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

And there was never any  magic "Aha!" moment that brought their Neocon dream palaces down.  None of them ever missed a meal.  Most of the got promotions and book deals. No matter how far Democrats extend themselves and offer compromise after compromise to repair the damage the GOP has done to this country, no day will come when Republican politicians, pundits and the base of the party turn around and say, "We were wrong. The Left was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. 

Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The Right's lies and conspiracy theories will get progressively stupider, as the ghouls and grifters who spread them get progressively richer.  And they will backtrack, and reverse themselves again and again. 

They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact...

...they rejected...

...only days before...

2011 video of Trump is going viral after Iran attack:

"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective."pic.twitter.com/QR9v3h0hdo

— Joe Rogan Podcast News (@joeroganhq) February 28, 2026

No Half Meaures

Now Watch This Drive

From The Daily Beast:

Trump Brags to Golf Buddy About His War as Americans Die

No Half Meaures

Once Everyone is a "Centrist Independent"...

...will we all get along?  

Will all of our dreams will come true?

In what is the stupidest claptrap I've read so far this month, Mr. Gary Cosby Jr. in the Tuscaloosa News seems to think that's the direction things are heading in.  That can't make up their fucking minds if their life depended on it and former Republicans who don't want to take shit for it "independent" voters are the most powerful voting bloc of all .  Because, as you all know, all "independents" are all "independent" for the same reasons, right?

To be clear, Mr. Gary Cosby Jr. is not breaking new ground in being stupid.  No brave new worlds of stupid are being discovered here.   Instead, this Temu Tom Nichols has swept up every extant stupid cliche about "Independents" and the Extremes on Both Side, and heaped them into a big ol' pile of stupid that is impressive in its own right.  

It reads as an extended Onion parody.  But it's not.  It's real.   More than real.  Super-real.  As if every asinine New York Times editorial on the subject dating back to when the world was young had been compacted into a single mighty ziggurat of stupid that rises so high above the dribbling of workaday pundits that it pierces some hitherto unbreachable barrier and enters into some noumenal realm of stupidity perfected.

As you read this, keep in mind it was written in the 21st century, not the 20th.  In February of 2026, not February of 1996.  I have helpfully emphasized the bits to which you should pay special attention, and will follow it up with a callback to a thing I wrote during The Before Time.

Independent voters increase as party extremism rises 

President Donald Trump’s approval rating continues to fall with 60% of Americans now disapproving of him and only 39% approving, according to a story published by USA Today. While this spells trouble for Trump’s controversial agenda, both Republicans and Democrats are in trouble as both parties bleed voters. 

Roca News, an independent online source, reported that a record number of American voters are identifying themselves as independents. Gallup polling indicated that 45% of voters now classify themselves as independent. Twenty-four percent said they were Republican, and equally, 24% said they were Democrats. 

Roca said the trend was growing because many young voters refuse to register as either Democrats or Republicans as they seek to maintain political independence. This growing voter bloc, positioned in the political center, is now the most powerful group of voters in America. 

While the number of independents is impressive, the numbers I found most enlightening were the 24s. Both major parties only have 24% of registered voters each. This spells trouble with a capital “T” for both parties. 

Extremism in both traditional parties is driving away voters. I can tell you that, although I had always voted Republican before Donald Trump took over the party, I will not do so again, not as long as Trump and his philosophy dominate the party. 

I have little desire to vote Democrat, except for the purpose of ending what I see as a festering tyranny in the Republican Party.  Apparently, a growing number of voters feel as I do. This means that both parties must have independent voters swing their way to win elections. When so many voters are situated in the middle, astute political operatives will refocus their party to reach them, or someone will form a third party positioned in the political center. 

I never believed for a moment that a second Trump term could be this bad. I was wrong. It is far worse, far more extreme, than my darkest fears painted it. Maybe I am not alone. Maybe there is a huge number of Americans who feel as I do. Maybe, despite the Trump administration pressuring states to redraw their voting maps to favor Republicans, enough of us exist to, in the classic American political ideal, throw the bums out at the midterm elections. 

When Barack Obama was president, there were many issues on which I completely disagreed with him. There were some issues I found on which I did agree with him. That is pretty normal. It is rare for a president, or any political leader, to be so egregiously bad that I couldn’t find something to like or agree with him or her about. 

In Trump’s first term, I gave him full marks for having a good economy right up until the 2020 global pandemic shut down the entire world economy for months. Had the pandemic not hit, I believe Trump would have been easily reelected. As it happened, the pandemic exposed him as a truly ineffective leader and an incompetent crisis manager.

The problem for voters like me is obvious. The right has drifted too far to the extreme right, and the left has drifted too far to the extreme left. We have lost our ability to carry on civil discourse and, as a result, we have lost the ability to compromise for the common good. 

This big independent voting bloc gives me hope for a better political future for the nation. If this group of voters finds a unifying candidate in the center, we might see the first independent president in a coming election cycle.

While an independent in the White House is unlikely, the power of this group of voters could well draw both parties back into a more reasonable position and balance. That might be even more important than forming a third party. 

Extremism kills democracy. We must rein in the country’s political parties soon, immediately, if we have any hope of saving this nation’s position as the world’s most stable democracy. Perhaps even more important, we must bring these parties back toward the center to ensure freedom and civil rights for everyone in the population. 

Oh Gary, Gary, Gary.  Of course you've always voted Republican.  Your whole column screams that, because right at the top you say that "Donald Trump took over the party" which is simply not true.  In fact, it is exactly backwards.   Your party dropped trou, grabbed ankles, waved its rosy red ass around and begged Trump to take it, body and soul.  They did this because the base of your party is largely made up of bigots and imbeciles, and Trump spoke to them in their native language.  The language of hate and grievance and dire conspiracies.  The language of Limbaugh, Levin, Hannity, Beck, Ingraham, O'Reilly.  

I guess you never noticed.  Which, I guess makes you one of the not-very-bright ones.  So cool beans you snagged yourself a White Guy DEI position at your local paper!

See, we over here on the left understand quite well what it means when guys like you go about stomping and fuming about  The Extremes on Both Sides, because we have been dealing with clowns like you our entire adult lives.   You -- a member of the Party of Personal Responsibility -- cannot accept that your side is the fucking problem and that you are, in a very real way, personally responsible for your side being the fucking problem.  Such a thought would fry your circuits right down to the motherboard, so you conjure out of thin air an Extreme Left to counterbalance the very real and very fascist Extreme Right, then stamp your feet and insist that you're actually the Sensible Ambassador from a nonexistent Sensible Center, and if only everyone would drop what they're doing and meet you there... 

As to all the rest of the yadda yadda about Independents and The Extremes on Both Sides and the Glorious Center, I guess the news hasn't filtered all the way down to Tuscaloosa yet that that particular stick of Bubble-Yum lost its flavor about 20 years ago, even though grifters like Third Way, The Purple Project, No Labels, Country Over Party, and Forward have succeeded in bilking wealthy, credulous idiots out of their coin by feeding them wishful codswallop like this.  

And seeing as how you're from Alabama, I'm quite surprised that you are unfamiliar with the most successful third party bid in American history, seeing as how the candidate was a governor of your state, and ran for president using language that was very nearly identical to the language you used in your column.  That's right, it was George Wallace, and you can read all about it here, "More Adventures in Third Party History: Today, The Most Successful Third Party in Modern American Politics" if you are interested.

We also did a whole podcast on the subject which people can still listen to here.  

Now it's time for the PSA in which I remind readers of a fun word, coined by Kurt Vonnegut his 1963 satirical novel "Cat's Cradle" , which I used all the way back in November of 2009 when David Fucking Brooks wrote almost exactly the came column as yours for almost exactly the same craven reasons.  

From The "Independent" Granfalloon, November 08, 2009:

Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":

"...a proud and meaningless association of human beings"

Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.

I Am The Liberal Media

In Case You Were Wondering Where Bolshi Freedom Troll Glenn Greenwald Stood...

 ...on Trump vs. Kamala.

And the beat goes on...

And on...

And on...

A lesser man might be rooting for injuries.

I am that lesser man.

Never change, Spleenwald.  Never change.

BTW, I did try to warn you.

Burn The Lifeboats

On March 8, Don’t Forget to Set Your Clocks Back to 2003

Regime Change Begins At Home

Professional Left Podcast Episode 972: Little Note Nor Long Remember

"The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that's also a hypocrite!" --  Tennessee Williams

• 
  

A Tale Told by an Idiot...

...full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Since the topic everywhere today is the 2-hour shit-stain of a State of the Union delivered on Tuesday night by the decomposing remains of the Dear Leader, I feel sort of obliged to talk about the subject.

However, since I took one for the team by watching the whole, grotesque spectacle (and the godawful pre-freakshow pundit vamping, and the excellent post-SOTU response from Virginia's new governor, Abigail Spanberger) in order to be able to speak intelligently on the matter on both The Bob Cesca Show and The Bradcast, I don't feel particularly in the mood to spelunk into that particular midden pile again.

Let us all agree that the bard nailed Trump's SOTU tour de farce 420 years ago with these lines from Macbeth, because Trump is indeed:

a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. 

And his 2-hour long crime against democracy and rhetoric was indeed:

a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

However, since my duty is to inform as well as entertain, let us together venture once again into the forbidden zone of the Before Time and see if we can find the seedlings of what grew into the monstrous, democracy-killing strangler plant that was on display for all to see on Tuesday night.

Yes, it has been more than a minute since the events of the Fake Tea Party's alternative State of the Union which they held off delivering for an hour so the actual Republican party could deliver it's own terrible alternative State of the Union, which followed President Obama's State of the Union on Jan 26, 2011.

What's of interest to me about that night is that I would wager that not one in a hundred of you politics nerds can remember a single word of Paul Ryan's (remember Paul Ryan!) official GOP rebuttal, other than, perhaps, a general and correct impression that while the zombie-eyed granny starver  (h/t brother Charlie Pierce) acknowledged that Obama had walked into a "severe fiscal and economic situation", the balance of Ryan's speech was spent scolding Obama for not dealing with the worst economic catastrophe in 74 years using the only tools in the Republican's bag.

And what tools are those?

If you guessed massive budget cuts, plus a strong suggestion that taxes were too darn high, give yourself a round of applause.

It was weak and dull and forgettable, and honestly he only reason I remember it at all is that "Economic Situation" was the name I DJed under during the late 1980s.

However, I'd also wager that a whole lot of you do remember at least part of Michele "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann staring past the camera for six straight minutes while  delivering some batshit Tea Party nonsense in her aggressively cheerful robot Jesus voice.   

The sum and substance of her breezy twaddle were not terribly different from the  zombie-eyed granny starver's bitching -- OMG, Obama's spending so much money when he should be cutting, cutting and cutting.  ! OMG, "people" are begging him to stop!  OMG, Lookit them deficits!  And OMG, have you seen the unemployment numbers!  Under George W. they were never like this.  

She even had this giant graph behind her showing how much better Bush was than Obama at the jobs thing.  And people remember it because it was something oddball.  Something new.   From The Guardian, January 26, 2011.

Michele Bachmann's state of the union response reveals state of US right

Tea Party leader made surprise intervention after official Republican reaction to Barack Obama's address

A televised attack on Barack Obama's state of the union address by one of the Tea Party's leading lights broke with convention last night and showed just how fractured rightwing opposition has become in the US.

Michele Bachmann, leader of the rightwing movement and a congresswoman from Minnesota, made a surprise intervention after the official Republican response to Obama's second state of the union speech, from congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

Bachmann attacked "a bureaucracy that now tells us which lightbulbs to buy", and used a graph to illustrate that while there had been " unacceptably high" deficits under the Bush administration, these had now "exploded".

She followed a call for a new "miracle" with a reference to the US's 1945 victory at Iwo Jima and the famous picture of soldiers raising the US flag, which she said symbolized "all of America coming together to beat back a totalitarian aggressor".

Bachmann, who is seen as a possible presidential contender in 2012, said she was not seeking to compete with official Republican remarks – her response was made for activists from the Tea Party Express but screened live by CNN – but her approach differed from the more conciliatory remarks made by Ryan...

Bachmann was already under fire for her views on US history, particularly as revealed at a recent Tea Party event in Iowa, when she said the founding fathers "worked tirelessly" to abolish slavery. 

Republicans had insisted before Obama's address that they were not worried by a Tea Party view getting airtime. Michael Steel, spokesman for the House of Representatives' Republican speaker, John Boehner, had said in an email: "Whether it is through a press release, Twitter, the internet, on television, radio, via Facebook, or by other means, virtually every member of Congress will share their thoughts on the president's state of the union."

Not everyone was understanding, however. Columnist Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post said: "Bachmann ignored the fiscal calamity that began on Sept. 15, 2008. She ended her speech, delivered distractingly while looking off-camera, by saying, 'We the people …' Yeah, we the people want to know what that response was all about.

Please not for future reference those last two paragraphs, because what we were seeing – and what many of us were warning about – was MAGA Republicanism in its adolescent state.  

By this point it was already fully nuts and drunk on absurd conspiracy theories.  And when Jonathan Capehart said that Bachmann ignored the fiscal calamity that began on Sept. 15, 2008, that wasn’t the half of it.  She didn’t just ignore the Great Recession:  she pretended it never happened.  

During her speech she had a giant graph behind her “proving” to the bigots and imbeciles how much better Bush was than Obama at the whole jobs thing.  The X-axis represented years, and the Y-axis represented the unemployment rate.

Except the X-axis only showed every other year.  2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009 and so on.

And in her thoroughly whitewashed and rewritten Tea Party version extremely recent history through which the whole world had lived, inn 2007 and 2008, the unemployment rate under Bush was very low, but just a few months after Obama took office, the rate jumped way, way up!  

Clearly Obama is destroying America!  Period.  Full stop.  

Well Jeez oh Pete, does anyone out there in our studio audience remember anything else besides Barack Obama being terrible that might have happened on Bush’s watch – say, around December of 2007– that might have accounted for this sudden spike in the unemployment numbers.

From Federal Reserve History:

The Great Recession – December 2007-June 2009

Lasting from December 2007 to June 2009, this economic downturn was the longest since World War II.

The Great Recession began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009, which makes it the longest recession since World War II. Beyond its duration, the Great Recession was notably severe in several respects. Real gross domestic product (GDP) fell 4.3 percent from its peak in 2007Q4 to its trough in 2009Q2, the largest decline in the postwar era (based on data as of October 2013). The unemployment rate, which was 5 percent in December 2007, rose to 9.5 percent in June 2009, and peaked at 10 percent in October 2009.

The financial effects of the Great Recession were similarly outsized: Home prices fell approximately 30 percent, on average, from their mid-2006 peak to mid-2009, while the S&P 500 index fell 57 percent from its October 2007 peak to its trough in March 2009. The net worth of US households and nonprofit organizations fell from a peak of approximately $69 trillion in 2007 to a trough of $55 trillion in 2009.

As the financial crisis and recession deepened, measures intended to revive economic growth were implemented on a global basis. The United States, like many other nations, enacted fiscal stimulus programs that used different combinations of government spending and tax cuts. These programs included the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. 

Oh yeah.  That's right.  On Bush's watch, the entire world economy imploded and it was only thanks to the massive (if maddeningly imperfect and inadequate) recovery assistance rendered by the Obama administration that the world was saved from a second Great Depression, and the permanent collapse of, among other things, the United States auto industry.

There were and are literally hundreds of articles on the Great Recession at the fingertips of anyone who gave a damn about the truth.  For example:

The New York Times “The Recession’s Hidden Victims”: Stories about homeowners who lost their homes and how families coped with foreclosure.

Los Angeles Times “Lives on Hold”:  A multi-part series following individuals who lost jobs and struggled to rebuild their lives.

NPR “A Decade Later, the Great Recession’s Human Costs Linger":  Audio stories and written accounts of people still feeling the effects years later.

The Atlantic:  “The Lost Decade: What the Great Recession Did to American Families”: A deep look at how long-term unemployment reshaped communities and family structures.

ProPublica “In the Shadow of the Recession”: First-person, in-depth reporting on people dealing with medical debt, housing instability, and job loss.

These are stories about real families who were evicted or forced to downsize after losing income.  Real workers who lost not just jobs, but their careers and their identity.  Young adults delaying homeownership, marriage, or kids. Communities devastated by factory closures and foreclosures.   The long-term damage done to people' mental health and sense of financial insecurity.

But all of this Michele Bachmann just hand-waved away.  Instead, in her Tea Party Republican version of history, unemployment was all Obama’s fault.  

Then Bachmann pitched a fit over all the money Obama is just throwing away for no good reason.  

The sum and substance of her breezy twaddle was not terribly different from the  zombie-eyed granny starver's bitching -- OMG, Obama's spending so much money when he should be cutting, cutting and cutting ! OMG, "people" are begging him to stop!  OMG, Lookit them deficits!  And OMG, have you seen the unemployment numbers!  

Under George W. they were never like this.  

This is from her speech that night.

And what did we buy with all that money?  A leaner, more efficient government?  No.  We bought a bureaucracy that tells us which lightbulbs to buy and put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's healthcare bill. 

Obamacare mandates and penalties may even force many job creators to just stop offering health insurance altogether.   Unless, of course, you're one of the more than 222 privileged companies or "unions" that's already received a waiver under Obamacare.

In the end, unless we fully repeal Obamacare, a nation that currently enjoys the world's finest health care might be forced to rely on government run coverage.  And that could have a devastating effect on our national debt for even generations to come.  

For two years, president Obama made promises just like the ones we heard him make this evening.    Yet still we have high unemployment, devalued housing prices,  and the cost of gasoline is skyrocketing! 

For those of you who were there at the time and paying attention this should cause a shudder of recognition at all that it foreshadowed.  

Then all the golden oldies came a'tumblin' out.  

Gotta gut the "job destroying" EPA.  

Pass a balanced budget amendment.  

Drill baby drill! 

Get rid of some unspecified number of "regulations" which may cost our economy one hundred million dollars.  

And Obama should repeal Obamacare immediately and support "free market solutions". 

Tort reform! 

Allow suckers to buy crap insurance out of the back of a van!

Kick out all the big spending scum! 

And this is just the beginning, because we swept to power in the midterms!

The Alert Reader will have noticed by now how neatly Michele Bachmann's "Obama ruined everything and Bush was awesome" lies from 15 years ago prefigure Trump's "Biden ruined everything and I was awesome" lies in his speech on Tuesday. 

And going back to the 2011 Guardian article, the Alert Reader may have also noticed how Michael Steel’s blasé attitude towards the Fake Tea Party prefigured the downfall of the Conservative elite.   

All the pieces that would grow at lightning speed into a full-grown fascist threat to American democracy led by a corrupt, lying sociopath were there.  All you needed to do was look.  The pre-MAGA Republican willingness to repeat big stupid, easily-debunked lies.  Demonizing Democrats as nearly destroying the country.  Casting themselves as the lone saviors of the republic.   And establishment Republicans like Steel not taking the internal threat seriously.  

So for our recently-former Republican Never Trump "allies" who definitely read his little blog o' mine, I'll leave you with these wise words from Peter Clemenza:

Burn The Lifeboats