Strategic Forgettery: David Brooks Weekend Edition

First, a short course on the meaning of Strategic Forgettery from me back in 2011:

The most formidable weapon the despised Liberal has in his or her arsenal is Memory: the unwillingness to go quietly into that good night of Strategic Forgettery upon which the Right's dominance and the media's shallow cravenness completely depend. It is a theme that you may have noticed dancing around between the lines of this blog fairly often, and one of the small blessings of the blogosphere -- that when some mentally underclocking twat in a tri-corner hat rears up on his hind legs and start raving about, say, deficits, anyone with a decent memory (and a willingness to futilely engage with these political CHUDs one more time) can actually dig the past out the past in high-res detail, and ask, if [Insert any issue in the fucking Universe here]is so singularly fucking important, where the fuck were you during the eight, long years during which Bush was making [Insert any issue in the fucking Universe here] infinitely worse.

And now, America's most famous unreconstructed Neoconservative, Mr. David Brook, from May 2, 2014 on a national teevee show, laying down the same double helping of bullshit -- Strategic Forgettery and Both Siderism -- which he had already shared with millions of Americans via the many, large platforms our mainstream media keeps giving him (emphasis added):

I do think there’s a fraying of the international order. We have an order that the nation are basically sacred. National borders, you don’t invade them. We have an order that there’s free trade, free movement of people. There are sort of procedures that you organize international affairs about. And we have sort of taken that for granted in the post-war world and post-Cold War world.

...

And has been Obama derelict about that? I would say, in some ways, he’s been non-effective. He let the red lines cross in Syria. He hasn’t imposed serious sanctions on Putin. But it’s a much broader problem. The Republicans have definitely not helped by refusing to ratify any treaty, including some of the IMF stuff. They have let the fabric go.

And then the American public wants to withdraw, wants to pull inside. So, the U.S. is playing a less assertive role. And that fabric of procedures is fraying. And that’s really bad.

Because in the quotidian thoughts of Bush-cheerleading, Iraq War chickenhawks like David Brooks, the entire Bush Administration and the bloody shambles they made out of everything they touched has simply ceased to exist.

To his credit, Mark Shields actually pushed back a little on Mr. Brooks grotesquely puerile armchair generalship, albeit in that icky, genteel, PBS-manner in a situation which called for, at the bare minimum, a sharp elbow to the throat.

You saw the president’s traditional and classic cool pierced. He was upset, I think, and I think with some legitimacy, Judy. The fact is that we’re operating in a reality of the last decade of this country, in the sense that the majority of Americans believing that we were deceived and misled into war in Iraq, that whatever one calls our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, they will not be seen as successes.

And they are not viewed that way, and, at the same time, an American people who were essentially spared any involvement in that war, any of those wars, who have just really sort of soured on American involvement in the world.

I give the president credit, quite frankly, because he’s dealing in — not only in this situation, but the sanctions that David talks about are being opposed openly by many American companies right now, I mean, Caterpillar and at others. Boeing is terrified — they have got 100 plane contracts — that Airbus could move in into Russia and take that, if, in fact, you didn’t have a coalition with all the European countries moving at the same time.

And while Mr. Brooks was forced to grudgingly admit that there is something of a "hangover" from the catastrophically failed war he so energetically touted,  he waved away any notion that the monstrous moral, financial and human toll which Operation Endless Clusterfuck took on this country (but not, of course, on any of its sponsors in the press) should in affect how we think about any Future Glorious Wars which may tickle Mr. Brooks' rapidly re-emerging "National Greatness" erogenous zones.

The Bush Forgettery Project: Dubya At CPAC in 2008

Here is Dubya being loudly cheered by people who, five minutes later, would begin strapping on tricorner hats and swearing they'd never heard of him.

Because without its vast reserves of Strategic Forgettery, American Conservatism would fall to dust and blow away.

From me in 2010:

...that specific, mutagenic strain of "Wingnut Doublethink" -- the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.

Because however much one may agree with some of the Conservative Expat crowd over specific issues such as same sex marriage and marijuana legalization, as long as they cling to their own, obsessive Strategic Forgettery, they will always be fools and clowns and chumps. Because as long as they depend on their own Big Conservative Lie to tuck them in at night and tell them that they're good little Reaganites, they cede any pretense of occupying any moral high ground from which to render judgment on the Palinites and the Beckians.

The homunculi who are left inside the Big Tent Batshit Thunderdome are either stupid, evil or nuts...or some cocktail of all three. And if the trend lines of the last 30 years have proven anything, it's that Conservatives are such willing collaborators in their own brainwashing that neither the Expats or the Palnites and their Elite Enablers are capable of retaining any political inconvenient fact longer than 13 seconds (or, in the case of the Palinites, reacting to anything other than what Rupert and Rush tell them to be angry about this time.)

There is absolutely nothing left sifting around inside their mushy, angry skulls except that sparkly aluminum sand that good people at Ohio Arts use to make the Etch-a-Sketch.

Shake-shake-shake...and Ronald Reagan never sold weapons to terrorists, funded an illegal war, raised taxes four times, or left behind the largest deficit in American history up until that time.

Shake-shake-shake...and Bush the Elder never hired Lee Atwater.

Shake-shake-shake...and what Southern Strategy?

Shake-shake-shake...and George W. Bush is the Greatest President Ever, you filthy, Liberal traitors!

Shake-shake-shake...and where did you ever get the idea that anyone in the Conservative Movement supported that "Progressive" George W. Bush?

Shake-shake-shake...George Bush who?

Shake-shake-shake...Sarah Palin never supported the bailout!

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits don't matter.

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits are worse than six Hitlers!

Shake-shake-shake...the Kenyan Usurper's deficits are destroying America.

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Republican"? I'm a Conservative!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Conservative"? I'm an Independent!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Independent"? I'm a Independent/Conservo/Libertarian!

To win elections, crush the New Deal and sell the United States into perpetual corporate serfdom, it was Ronald Reagan and the rest of the Conservative Elites who spent years and years and literally billions of dollars to create the infinitely reprogrammable army of imbeciles from which many of those same Conservative Elites now flee in horror.

And however hard they try, will never let them forget it.

Strategic Forgettery Now. Strategic Forgettery Tomorrow.

US-UK intervention offered Iraq a better future. Whatever West's mistakes: sectarian war was a choice Iraqis made for themselves.

— David Frum (@davidfrum) July 6, 2016

Strategic Forgettery Forever.

Once again I am putting my feet up and taking a certain bitter pleasure in seeing every single awful thing we on the Left have ever said about the various factions on the Right come true in real time right before out eyes,

Of course a Bush regime dead-ender like Mr. Frum can lie with impunity.

And of course Mr. Frum runs no risk of losing his place at the Beltway feeding trough for doing so.

And of course none of his colleagues will be rude enough to mention it.

10 Years After: 2010 -- Coinage

The 10th blogiversary fundraiser continues with the Town Hall Year of 2010.

As it turned out, over the last 10 years, I not only had fun with music and poems and writing and graphics and podcasting, but I also coined a lot of terms, most of which didn't stick.

Still, as long as I'm amused :-)

There was Christopath.

David Brooks: The Plutocrat's Beat Poet

Rovine spongiform encephalopathy ™ (Wherein the Rove mindset continues to eat the brain right out of Conservatism's collective skull, while everyone agrees that Karl Rove specifically and Conservatives generally will never be asked any hard questions about anything because the past is stinky and dark and nobody really knows what happened anyway.)

Burning Man for Birchers.

Half Fox and Half Free.

And Strategic Forgettery among many others.

"...My Name is Ozymandias

king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

However much the various factions and splinter groups on the Right may bite each other's ankles in rage and shock at each other's alleged heresies against the True Faith, the blunt truth is that they're all the same species of drunk drinking from the same bottle, all bombed out of their minds and hanging from the same rail in the same stinkhole bar: The House of Reagan.

From the bitterest Expats to the hardest-core Palinite Cultist, their internecine pissing matches are always over who the "real" inheritors of Ronald Reagan's legacy really is. And the truth is, they are all Reagan's ugly babies.

So when Sullivan calls out Andrew Brietbart's race-baiting as an --

"...old and disgusting canard devised by the Becks and Hannitys and Limbaughs in the tradition of Wallace and Atwater and McCarthy."

-- notice how carefully and gingerly he skips right one over the disgusting race-baiting of two of his Conservative Heroes (Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder) who both waved the Confederate Flag and worked the racist dog-whistle with exactly the same, cold Brietbartian premeditation, and for exactly the same reason: because every Conservative knows deep in their heart that sucking Confederate and Fundamentalist dick is the only way they ever gain power, prestige, profit and victory.

And so they do it, knowing that people like Sullivan and David Brooks will forgive them.

And excuse them.

And forget...

...forget...

...forget.

And that specific, mutagenic strain of "Wingnut Doublethink" -- the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.

Because however much one may agree with some of the Conservative Expat crowd over specific issues such as same sex marriage and marijuana legalization, as long as they cling to their own, obsessive Strategic Forgettery, they will always be fools and clowns and chumps. Because as long as they depend on their own Big Conservative Lie to tuck them in at night and tell them that they're good little Reaganites, they cede any pretense of occupying any moral high ground from which to render judgment on the Palinites and the Beckians.

The homunculi who are left inside the Big Tent Batshit Thunderdome are either stupid, evil or nuts...or some cocktail of all three. And if the trend lines of the last 30 years have proven anything, it's that Conservatives are such willing collaborators in their own brainwashing that neither the Expats or the Palnites and their Elite Enablers are capable of retaining any political inconvenient fact longer than 13 seconds (or, in the case of the Palinites, reacting to anything other than what Rupert and Rush tell them to be angry about this time.)

There is absolutely nothing left sifting around inside their mushy, angry skulls except that sparkly aluminum sand that good people at Ohio Arts use to make the Etch-a-Sketch.

Shake-shake-shake...and Ronald Reagan never sold weapons to terrorists, funded an illegal war, raised taxes four times, or left behind the largest deficit in American history up until that time.

Shake-shake-shake...and Bush the Elder never hired Lee Atwater.

Shake-shake-shake...and what Southern Strategy?

Shake-shake-shake...and George W. Bush is the Greatest President Ever, you filthy, Liberal traitors!

Shake-shake-shake...and where did you ever get the idea that anyone in the Conservative Movement supported that "Progressive" George W. Bush?

Shake-shake-shake...George Bush who?

Shake-shake-shake...Sarah Palin never supported the bailout!

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits don't matter.

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits are worse than six Hitlers!

Shake-shake-shake...the Kenyan Usurper's deficits are destroying America.

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Republican"? I'm a Conservative!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Conservative"? I'm an Independent!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Independent"? I'm a Independent/Conservo/Libertarian!

To win elections, crush the New Deal and sell the United States into perpetual corporate serfdom, it was Ronald Reagan and the rest of the Conservative Elites who spent years and years and literally billions of dollars to create the infinitely reprogrammable army of imbeciles from which many of those same Conservative Elites now flee in horror.

And however hard they try, will never let them forget it.

"Forgetfulness - a Gift of God"

"bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience."

-- Ambrose Bierce

Andrew Sullivan dips into the Orwell Goodie Bag.

Oh boy!

Thiessen, Santorum, And Orwell

...

"Enhanced techniques were not used to gain intelligence from detainees — they were used to compel their cooperation. While applying enhanced techniques, interrogators would ask detainees questions to which the interrogators already knew the answers, so they could judge when the detainees had made the decision to begin cooperating. Once they did so, the techniques stopped and the detainees moved into noncoercive debriefing."

- Marc Thiessen.

"'Do you know where you are, Winston?' he said. 'I don't know. I can guess. In the Ministry of Love.' 'Do you know how long you have been here?' 'I don't know. Days, weeks, months -- I think it is months.' 'And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?' 'To make them confess.' 'No, that is not the reason. Try again.' 'To punish them.' 'No!' exclaimed O'Brien.

His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. 'No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.'"

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

"This idea that we didn’t ask that question while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded, [John McCain] doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative."

- Rick Santorum, on Hugh Hewitt's radio show.
...

Of course, when appropriate there is nothing wrong with a dip in the Orwell pool, although back in the Long Ago Olden Bad Times when Mr. Sullivan was making a buck excoriating us "Fifth Columnist", America-hating Liberals (just before he started making a buck aping us) I have a feeling that had any of us cheese-eating surrender-monkeys drawn any such direct and extended comparisons between any of Mr. Sullivan's then-running-buddies on the Right and the pure, noumenal evil of "1984", Mr. Sullivan would have machicolated "Moore Awards" down upon us from the Conservative parapets like boiling oil.

So I do not disagree with Mr. Sullivan's extremely obvious take on torture. I mean, who in their right mind could or would? But I will note for the umpteenth time the Primary Revelation from which Mr. Sullivan continues to flee every day of his professional life: the ugly fact that, behind his specific and damning invocation of Orwellian torture stands the gigantic machinery of constant, routinized memory-slaughter that made the world of "1984" possible:

From George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. (emphasis added and see if this reminds you of any Conservatives you know.)

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink. ”

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

Yes, torture is horrifying, and those who defend it are moral plague-bearers -- no one needs Mr. Sullivan to tell them that. But for all of its repugnance, torture apologism is simply one particularly grotesque symptom of the widespread, insidious and never-to-be-acknowledged-on-teevee ideological infrastructure of lies upon which the entire Conservative Movement depends, and upon which Mr. Sullivan will never touch.

When you understand that the entire edifice of Conservatism is a massive, multi-generational, consensual hallucination -- an exercise in Strategic Forgettery...

...however much one may agree with some of the Conservative Expat crowd over specific issues such as same sex marriage and marijuana legalization, as long as they cling to their own, obsessive Strategic Forgettery, they will always be fools and clowns and chumps. Because as long as they depend on their own Big Conservative Lie to tuck them in at night and tell them that they're good little Reaganites, they cede any pretense of occupying any moral high ground from which to render judgment on the Palinites and the Beckians.

The homunculi who are left inside the Big Tent Batshit Thunderdome are either stupid, evil or nuts...or some cocktail of all three. And if the trend lines of the last 30 years have proven anything, it's that Conservatives are such willing collaborators in their own brainwashing that neither the Expats or the Palnites and their Elite Enablers are capable of retaining any political inconvenient fact longer than 13 seconds (or, in the case of the Palinites, reacting to anything other than what Rupert and Rush tell them to be angry about this time.)

There is absolutely nothing left sifting around inside their mushy, angry skulls except that sparkly aluminum sand that good people at Ohio Arts use to make the Etch-a-Sketch.

Shake-shake-shake...and Ronald Reagan never sold weapons to terrorists, funded an illegal war, raised taxes four times, or left behind the largest deficit in American history up until that time.

Shake-shake-shake...and Bush the Elder never hired Lee Atwater.

Shake-shake-shake...and what Southern Strategy?

Shake-shake-shake...and George W. Bush is the Greatest President Ever, you filthy, Liberal traitors!

Shake-shake-shake...and where did you ever get the idea that anyone in the Conservative Movement supported that "Progressive" George W. Bush?

Shake-shake-shake...George Bush who?

Shake-shake-shake...Sarah Palin never supported the bailout!

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits don't matter.

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits are worse than six Hitlers!

Shake-shake-shake...the Kenyan Usurper's deficits are destroying America.

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Republican"? I'm a Conservative!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Conservative"? I'm an Independent!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Independent"? I'm a Independent/Conservo/Libertarian!
...

...on a cultural/industrial scale -- you begin to see that (to quote the Joker) someone like Newt "Anyone who quotes me verbatim is lying" Gingrich

is not crazy, but merely ahead of a clearly definable curve. Sullivan's Conservative depends completely on everyone agreeing to forget everything that happened before, say, 2006; Palinites and Teabaggers depends on blotting out everything before January 20, 2009; and Gingrich's lies depend on a sliding, three-day window.

Gingrich will probably fail, but he will not fail due to a lack of understanding of the Real Conservative Movement as it really exists. The beating heart of the Modern Right has always been a vicious, xenophobic one – often racist, often fascist and always giddy-drunk on rage and ignorance and fear, and bearing no relationship whatsoever to Mr. Sullivan’s Fantasy Conservative Movement that never was.

So at exactly the same time Mr. Sullivan was busy making a career for himself as the Useful Gay Idiot for a Movement that hated everything he stood for, the Movement’s real leaders – freaks like Falwell and Limbaugh and Ailes and Gingrich -- were busy, busy, busy in the lab, refining and growing the Party’s happily-brainwashed Orwellian Base and building the electoral and cultural monster that now controls the Movement entirely.

No one who saw where the Right was headed a generation ago could possibly be surprised that, after 40 years and hundreds billions of dollars of effort, the Right now exists in a parallel, Orwellian universe, complete with its own newspapers, magazines, teevee networks, book publishers, think tanks and Jebus.

All built on Doublethink.

Or, if you prefer Strategic Forgettery --

...the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.

One of the most successful practitioners of which is Mr. Andrew Sullivan.

The Chronicles of Strategic Forgettery: Republican Detachment Disorder

In yesterday's exciting chapter of "The Chronicles of Strategic Forgettery" we used an infamous William Safire New York Times column from 1976 to analyze how Republicans will automatically seek to rewrite the immediate past history of their crimes and betrayals before the Ink of History has dried.  In the case of Richard Nixon, Safire threw every tool in the GOP flunkey toolbox -- accusations of fraud, derangement, hypocrisy, greed and godlessness leavened with a generous helping of Both Siderism -- at the problem of rehabilitating Nixon's reputation.

But sometimes, as was the case with the George W. Bush administration, the party's standard bearers have inflicted so much damage on the country and the rest of his party has accumulated such a massive, public record of supporting his follies, that his record cannot be immediately laundered.  To obliterate from history a catastrophe the size and scope of the Bush Administration, a different level of Strategic Forgettery was needed and today's cautionary tale is about how that works.

Many years ago I coined the term Republican Detachment Disorder to describe the coordinated psychological gymnastics of influential people who spent their entire adult lives helping to build a Republican monster factory and midwifing the orcs and hobgoblins that came off its assembly line and who, once their monsters began running out of their control, erased themselves from their own history and began denying their own pasts harder and faster than Peter denied Christ.  

This is what happened with the Bush Administration.  

At the close of the Age of Dubya, even as we disreputable Liberal bloggers were shouting warnings of the impending Great Whitewash as loud as our shitty blogs would permit, the mainstream press and the Republican Party began colluding to wall-off the entire Bush administration and declare it a Forbidden Zone.  The officially recognized Year One of recorded history was reset to one minute after Barack Obama took the oath of office.  And thanks to the coordinated denialism/Both Siderism of the press and the urgency of the crises Obama inherited and the GOP's decision (taken on the very day of Obama's inauguration) to become an unified, unremitting force of obstruction and sabotage and Obama's own stubborn and ultimately fatal unwillingness to see the Republican Party as the vandals and traitors they were...

...it succeeded.

And because it succeeded, certain beliefs under which the Republican Party had already been operating for decades were cemented into place forever.  Specifically, it became established party doctrine that the Democratic Party is fundamentally illegitimate and therefor cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to govern the country.  To that end, all actions necessary to deny Democrats the ability to govern are permitted, regardless of how radical and anti-constitutional those actions might be.  Fraud?  Voter suppression?  Intimidation?  Soliciting the illegal assistance of a foreign adversary?  Who cares as long as the Dirty Commie Dems are kept out of the White House!  And conversely, because the GOP has a mandate from Heaven to thwart the Evil Democrats, it must, by definition, be a Force For Good.  It therefore follows that the very idea of holding Republicans "accountable" in any way for anything they do is ridiculous.

However, as with Bush Administration, when a handful of "establishment" elites at the head of party screw up so badly that it becomes impossible to thwart the Evil Democrats, well something must be done to take those elites off he board.  Mind you -- and pay attention because there will be a quiz -- it is of vital importance that neither the party rank-and-file, nor most of the party's elected officials, nor the party's own propaganda media, nor the party's collaborators and enablers in the mainstream press ever be held accountable for the actions of a party which they had, just five minute ago, loudly enthusiastically supported.

Because if that happened -- duh! math! -- there would be no party.  

Instead blame must be localized to a handful of elites who, when you think about it, weren't really bad guys at all.  They had merely succumbed to the fleshpots of "Washington" and the blandishments those Evil Democrats.  The party itself is in excellent shape: it just needs an infusion of fresh blood and bold ideas.  

And in 2010, with the GOP was suffering a massive hangover from its leader being a failed halfwit and itsv oting base being a shitpile of blood drunk bigots and imbeciles, the Magic Dolphin Lady knew exactly where to find the scamper juice that'd put the apples back in the cheeks of the Party of Reagan.  Ms. Peggy Noonan via The Wall Street Journal during the Before Time:

Tea Party to the Rescue

How the GOP was saved from Bush and the establishment.

Yay!

Two central facts give shape to the historic 2010 election. The first is not understood by Republicans, and the second not admitted by Democrats.

The first: the tea party is not a "threat" to the Republican Party, the tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn't remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself.

We're saved!

The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration's spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this, the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: "We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!" They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.

And woke!

And they not only freed the Washington establishment, they woke it up. 

That establishment, composed largely of 50- to 75-year-olds who came to Washington during the Reagan era in a great rush of idealism, in many cases stayed on, as they say, not to do good but to do well. They populated a conservative infrastructure that barely existed when Reagan was coming up: the think tanks and PR groups, the media outlets and governmental organizations. 

Boo for "media outlets"!  Except, of course, all the media outlets, including NBC and  The Wall Street Journal, that keep Ms. Noonan in top-shelf hooch!

But "Boo!" for all the others!

And "Yay!" for stiffening!

Finally, the tea party stiffened the GOP's spine by forcing it to recognize what it had not actually noticed, that we are a nation in crisis. The tea party famously has no party chiefs and no conventions but it does have a theme—stop the spending, stop the sloth, incompetence and unneeded regulation—and has lent it to the GOP.

And who is to blame for all of our woes?  

One man.  

One black man.

The second fact of 2010 is understood by Republicans but not admitted by Democrats. It is that this is a fully nationalized election, and at its center it is about one thing: Barack Obama...

This election is about one man, Barack Obama, who fairly or not represents the following: the status quo, Washington, leftism, Nancy Pelosi, Fannie and Freddie, and deficits in trillions, not billions. Everyone who votes is going to be pretty much voting yay or nay on all of that. And nothing can change that story line now.

This was rebutted by several hundred posts by disreputable Liberals demonstrating that the Tea Party was, in fact, just a rebranding scam designed to get Republicans off the hook for all the shit they had said and done during the Bush Administration.  And those hundreds of posts accomplished... exactly... nothing because too many influential people stood to lose too much if it were true.

And thus the Age of Bush vanished from the memory of man.

And then one day the Beltway media collectively decided that the danger of accountability had passed and the Fake Tea Party had 1) outlived its usefulness and 2) was becoming a pain in the ass.   At which point Very Serious Conservatives pundits from David Brooks to Joe Scarborough suddenly noticed that -- OMG! -- the "Tea Party" had never been anything more than the same, old batshit GOP base in funny hats after all!

It's that just fucking hilarious!

And I tell you now with all the clear-eyed pragmatism of Don Vito explaining to Michael just  how Barzini will move against him, that some variation of this "Fault the Leader/Exonerate Everyone Else" scheme is what awaits us on January 21st, 2021.  

No Half Measures

I Am Amazed That Anyone Is Still Pretending To Be Amazed By This

Soledad O'Brien calls this "So, so bad"

And now, exactly 31 years later, @realDonaldTrump is making history as well. https://t.co/yDMd6rd3KT

— GOP (@GOP) June 12, 2018

And David Frum asks, "How low can [the GOP] go? This low."

I, on the other hand, pariah Libtard that I am, feel compelled to ask, how in the hell is anyone surprised by this?

And by way of elaboration, here for is a post of mine from 2010...long before Donald J. Trump slithered down the Elevator of Doom and into the hearts of Republican voters everywhere.

"...My Name is Ozymandias
king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away. 

However much the various factions and splinter groups on the Right may bite each other's ankles in rage and shock at each other's alleged heresies against the True Faith, the blunt truth is that they're all the same species of drunk drinking from the same bottle, all bombed out of their minds and hanging from the same rail in the same stinkhole bar: The House of Reagan.

From the bitterest Expats to the hardest-core Palinite Cultist, their internecine pissing matches are always over who the "real" inheritors of Ronald Reagan's legacy really are. And the truth is, they are all Reagan's ugly babies.

So when [Andrew] Sullivan calls out Andrew Brietbart's race-baiting as an --

"...old and disgusting canard devised by the Becks and Hannitys and Limbaughs in the tradition of Wallace and Atwater and McCarthy."

-- notice how carefully and gingerly he skips right one over the disgusting race-baiting of two of his Conservative Heroes (Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder) who both waved the Confederate Flag and worked the racist dog-whistle with exactly the same, cold Brietbartian premeditation, and for exactly the same reason: because every Conservative knows deep in their heart that sucking Confederate and Fundamentalist dick is the only way they ever gain power, prestige, profit and victory.

And so they do it, knowing that people like Sullivan and David Brooks will forgive them.

And excuse them.

And forget...

...forget...

...forget.

And that specific, mutagenic strain of "Wingnut Doublethink" -- the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.

Because however much one may agree with some of the Conservative Expat crowd over specific issues such as same sex marriage and marijuana legalization, as long as they cling to their own, obsessive Strategic Forgettery, they will always be fools and clowns and chumps. Because as long as they depend on their own Big Conservative Lie to tuck them in at night and tell them that they're good little Reaganites, they cede any pretense of occupying any moral high ground from which to render judgment on the Palinites and the Beckians.

The homunculi who are left inside the Big Tent Batshit Thunderdome are either stupid, evil or nuts...or some cocktail of all three. And if the trend lines of the last 30 years have proven anything, it's that Conservatives are such willing collaborators in their own brainwashing that neither the Expats or the Palnites and their Elite Enablers are capable of retaining any political inconvenient fact longer than 13 seconds (or, in the case of the Palinites, reacting to anything other than what Rupert and Rush tell them to be angry about this time.)

There is absolutely nothing left sifting around inside their mushy, angry skulls except that sparkly aluminum sand that good people at Ohio Arts use to make the Etch-a-Sketch.

Shake-shake-shake...and Ronald Reagan never sold weapons to terrorists, funded an illegal war, raised taxes four times, or left behind the largest deficit in American history up until that time.

Shake-shake-shake...and Bush the Elder never hired Lee Atwater.

Shake-shake-shake...and what Southern Strategy?

Shake-shake-shake...and George W. Bush is the Greatest President Ever, you filthy, Liberal traitors!

Shake-shake-shake...and where did you ever get the idea that anyone in the Conservative Movement supported that "Progressive" George W. Bush?

Shake-shake-shake...George Bush who?

Shake-shake-shake...Sarah Palin never supported the bailout!

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits don't matter.

Shake-shake-shake...Deficits are worse than six Hitlers!

Shake-shake-shake...the Kenyan Usurper's deficits are destroying America.

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Republican"? I'm a Conservative!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Conservative"? I'm an Independent!

Shake-shake-shake...why do you keep calling me a "Independent"? I'm a Independent/Conservo/Libertarian!

To win elections, crush the New Deal and sell the United States into perpetual corporate serfdom, it was Ronald Reagan and the rest of the Conservative Elites who spent years and years and literally billions of dollars to create the infinitely reprogrammable army of imbeciles from which many of those same Conservative Elites now flee in horror.

And however hard they try, will never let them forget it.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Hūsker Dū: Butcher's Bill Kristol Edition

"Exonerated" is a word with a specific meaning.  You can look it up in any dictionary.  It means "(especially of an official body) absolve (someone) from blame for a fault or wrongdoing, especially after due consideration of the case."

"Vindicate" is another word with a specific meaning, which is also right there in the Merriam-Webster or the OED -- "show or prove to be right, reasonable, or justified."

Given Kristol's very long and very public record of being pretty much wrong about everything (from the WaPo) --

Bill Kristol knows his predictions have been bad but he’s going to keep making them

...
“With Kristol what I love are not so much the big, grand predictions that are always wrong, but the smaller ones that really demonstrate how poor his actual grasp of politics is,” says Alex Pareene, the editor of Gawker, one of Kristol’s regular tormentors. “He is sort of ideologically motivated to make certain ridiculous claims — Iraq will be a huge success, Romney will win — and even his ‘peak Trump’ predictions are based on the fact that he can’t abide the ongoing rejection of his entire ethos by Republican voters. But it’s when he makes claims that are just wrong but not motivated by the advancement of his worldview . . . that we see just how bad he is at his ostensible job.”

-- at no point in the past 20 years have any of the many corporate media drones who have chosen to hire him (and his idiot son-in-law, Matthew Continetti) ever been vindicated in that decision (from Politico in 2014)

Bill Kristol joins ABC News

Bill Kristol, the editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard, has joined ABC News as a contributor, "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos announced on Sunday.
...

The agreement, one source said, includes regular appearances on the Sunday show, as well as special events and other political-relaed events. But there's also a window that allows him to do other shows on cable television.
...
Jonathan Greenberger, executive producer of "This Week," said in a statement Kristol is "an original thinker" that will make their team stronger:

“Bill makes our outstanding team of contributors and analysts even stronger. He’s an original thinker with a unique perspective on the political and cultural landscape, and we look forward to hearing his voice on the 'This Week' roundtable on a regular basis."

Furthermore, at no point in the last two decades has Kristol been exonerated of the years he spent strutting across the American media stage, blood-drunk and smirking, confidently insisting that not only could unleashing hell on Earth in Iraq “have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East” and that it would be a “two-month war, not an eight-year war” but that inflicting Kristol-brand democracy on Middle Eastern countries at the point of an American sword was something we should be doing a lot more.

So how, you may fairly ask, is Butcher's Bill Kristol still abroad in the land?  And where, you may fairly ask, does this ghoul get the colossal nerve to lecture anyone else on the subject of "our military's honor" and "our country's decency":

If you care about our military's honor and our country's decency, do read this piece. And all honor to the SEALs who bravely stepped forward to tell the truth. “Not compromising our integrity and keeping right on our side is all we can do.” They did it.https://t.co/oIauuM6poY

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 27, 2019

The answer, of course, is that he gets that colossal nerve from Jonathan Greenberger and from every other amoral corporate media drone who chooses, week after week, to pull out the Big Media Chair for monsters like Bill Kristol.  And the reason they get away with it is because of a phrase you are not going to find in the Merriam-Webster or the OED:  Strategic Forgettery.  From me in 2015:

Dr. Krugman Explains Strategic Forgettery In Two Sentences

From the New York Times:

If the historical record runs counter to what powerful interests want you to believe, well, history will just have to be rewritten. And constant repetition, especially in captive media, keeps this imaginary history in circulation no matter how often it is shown to be false.

This is the Conservative way.  After every Conservative debacle -- foreign or domestic, military or economic -- there is an brief period during which the story of that debacle is still molten and malleable.  Without an agreed-upon fairy tale and a Liberal villain to blame, for a moment both the Beltway media and the Wingnut Hive Mind are in chaos. This is when the cogs and gears of the Mighty Wurlitzer are most in evidence:  the interregnum during which you can actually watch the Right invent, test and discard various bullshit cover stories before settling on one that the Pig People will swallow:

• The Clinton's assassinated Vince Foster.
• Trayvon was a thug who had it coming.
• The ACA Website was Obama's Katrina.
• etc x 1 million

Of course, since it cost trillions of dollars and got thousands of Americans killed, George W. Bush's Iraqi Debacle required a series of series of fire-and-forget alibis --

Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are in league together and just weeks away from leveling New York City with an A-bomb

-- each of which was utterly false --

The war will pay for itself, we will be greeted as liberators and we'll be home before Christmas.

-- each of which was embraced enthusiastically --

Dubya is the greatest Murrican preznit in history and Liberal Iraq war opponents are terrorist-loving surrender monkeys who hate Murrica.  Also Murrica!

-- and then discarded unceremoniously once it was used up --

The Surge worked!

-- until, inevitably, the most transparently ridiculous placeholder of all was put in play --

Who the fuck are you calling "Republican"?  I'm a Constitutional Independent Libertarian Conservative Teabagger who has never even heard of George Bush.

-- long enough for a proper Liberal Villain could be framed for their disaster --

We won in Iraq until Obama stabbed us in the back and invented ISIS.

so that it can pass  into the wingnut pantheon of perfidy where it will be remembered forever more as the Undisputed Truth...

...enabled every step along the way by our compliant Beltway media who are more than willing to hold out chair for the liars and lend their tattered credibility to the lies they tell...

And right on time we are reminded by the late, great Gwen Ifill that the lords and ladies of the Beltway media are never sorry for doing the shit they do.  They are only sorry when someone catches them.  Which why controlling the cameras and the microphones are key to controlling our culture and our politics.  Because if the only people who are allowed on teevee are those who meekly consent to never calling out the people across the table from them for the grotesque lies they've told or the depravity they've tolerated, then those lies and atrocities are simply forgotten -- smothered under the weight of the mediums compulsory, collegial bonhomie:

"My concern ... is not that people are sorry that they say these things, they are sorry that someone catches them.”

In 2007, Gwen Ifill appeared on @MeetThePress, with Tim Russert, @nytdavidbrooks, @JohnJHarwood and @Eugene_Robinson, to discuss Don Imus: https://t.co/8H8tmzzBGx.

— David Gura (@davidgura) December 28, 2019

Help Fund The Heresy!

Paul Krugman and Strategic Forgettery

Longtime readers of this blog know that one of the themes I have returned to year after year is that a conspiracy of ongoing and radical denial of the recent past has become the central pillar of Conservatism in America.  And that Conservatism's program of mass "Strategic Forgettery" continues to succeed because it is actively aided and abetted by the mainstream media.

So imagine my delight when I found the awesome Paul Krugman taking that theme and running with it in the New York Times, reaching more readers in an afternoon that I could reach in a year of  daily blogging and weekly podcasting combined.  

Ideology and Integrity

...

Times like these call for a combination of open-mindedness — willingness to entertain different ideas — and determination to do the best you can. As Franklin Roosevelt put it in a celebrated speech, “The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

What we see instead in many public figures is, however, the behavior George Orwell described in one of his essays: “Believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.” Did I predict runaway inflation that never arrived? Well, the government is cooking the books, and besides, I never said what I said.

Just to be clear, I’m not calling for an end to ideology in politics, because that’s impossible. Everyone has an ideology, a view about how the world does and should work. Indeed, the most reckless and dangerous ideologues are often those who imagine themselves ideology-free — for example, self-proclaimed centrists — and are, therefore, unaware of their own biases. What you should seek, in yourself and others, is not an absence of ideology but an open mind, willing to consider the possibility that parts of the ideology may be wrong.

...

...as far as I can tell no important Republican figure has admitted that none of the terrible consequences that were supposed to follow health reform — mass cancellation of existing policies, soaring premiums, job destruction — has actually happened.

The point is that we’re not just talking about being wrong on specific policy questions. We’re talking about never admitting error, and never revising one’s views. Never being able to say that you were wrong is a serious character flaw even if the consequences of that refusal to admit error fall only on a few people. But moral cowardice should be outright disqualifying in anyone seeking high office.

...

I still think this election should turn almost entirely on the issues. But if we must talk about character, let’s talk about what matters, namely intellectual integrity.

It is heartening to see public thinkers and writers I admire eventually arriving at the same place and describing the topography of the most important ideological battlefield of our times in the same terms we on the Left have been using for decades.

We on the Left remain a ragged and mostly ignored or despised few.  We are perpetually outspent and outnumbered by the Crazy Right and the Enabling Center by many, many orders of magnitude, and we're also kinda tired of punching away at the same fucking brick wall with our bare fists year after year and having little more than chipped paint and sore hands to show for it.

But...

But at least we know we are punching away at the right wall.

And, more importantly, we know exactly why the wall is there in the first place and why it is so heavily defended.

Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Charlie Sykes UPDATE

Update:  They're all in on it.  All of them.  And 18 months to two years is officially the new, Beltway Approved Absolution Lifeboat.  And all of the Republican scumbags who reaped enormous rewards for decades paving the road down which Donald Trump shambled to the White House -- who are now frantically  rebranding themselves as "independent" 30 years too late once -- are scrambling on board.  From Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough yesterday:

Republicans across the United States will now pay a heavy price for two years of moral indifference.

How can you help?

Well...

To help fight the scourge of Republican Detachment Disorder --

Republican Detachment Disorder is an extremely common and contagious affliction which my copy of the Fake Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines succinctly as "It's a huge shit sandwich and everybody but me is gonna have to take a bite." 

Of course, Republican Detachment Disorder has been a persistent component of Beltway Both Siderism for years, but since the Rise of Trump the condition has gone airborne and is now fully pneumonic and spreading like wildfire among Conservatives who made an entire career out enthusiastically helping the GOP shit the bed over and over again, and then, as Reality closed in, suddenly started pretending that it was all the fault of some other Republican Party waaaaay over there.

--  we at the Professional Left Podcast are thinking of launching a game show.

Working title:  "2017...or Not?"

Each week, a prominent Republican media person and Detachment Disorder carrier would be invited on the show to wager some fraction of their wildly inflated salary on whether they can guess which quotes are from the Age of Trump (when they believe their Republican party suddenly and inexplicably went to shit) and which quotes are from a time before Il Douche rode the Escalator of Doom into history (when their Republican party was doing great!)

Example:  Federal judges pose a “more serious [threat] than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings"?

Example:  "...the courts are forcing us to a constitutional crisis because of their arrogance and overreach. The courts have been trying to impose an elitist value system on a country that is inherently not elitist.”

Example:  "...we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. . . . And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence."

We are hoping to coax Valued MSNBC Employee and noted Republican Detachment Disorder carrier Mr. Charlie Sykes to join us as our first contestant.

Because given his utterly inexplicable and very profitable media ubiquity and his willful Strategic Forgettery of the well-documented history of his own party, we should be able to skin him for at least five figures.

And what do I mean by his willful Strategic Forgettery of the well-documented history of his own party?

Well before reading on, take a wild guess as to the date, time and location that Mr. Sykes identifies as the moment his party began sinking into madness and degeneracy, which he describes in yesterday's New York Times as "A G.O.P. Tragedy in Four Acts"?

Ready?

It may be worthwhile charting the party’s descent to this moment. 

Think of it as a drama in four acts.

And when, pray tell, does Act I begin?

In Act I, the curtain opens to reveal a gaudy golden escalator, and as Donald Trump descends to...

Boom.  Done. You need read no further.

This is the toxic lie they will go right on telling themselves and the public until they are forced to stop telling it.

And by "forced" I mean publicly confronted, publicly humiliated and rendered unemployable.

But the most hilarious predictable part?  

This is how Mr. Sykes ends his column:

Throughout this final act, the party’s leaders will desperately try to pretend that this is not a tragedy and that they were not the ones who brought this upon themselves. Some of them will know better, but I suspect that in the final scene they will be left with the question “What have we done?”

Once again the same Republican rats are building themselves another flotilla of lifeboats on which they hope to escape justice for the ruin they have brought upon us all

And this time those lifeboat must be burned to the waterline. 

Behold, a Tip Jar!

All 17 "Swing" Voters Deeply Impressed

by White House's "reasonableness"

From "The Hill":

Obama is winning on debt debate, but there’s no room for moral victories
By Sam Youngman - 07/13/11

...
On Monday, television networks cut into “The Price is Right” and “The View” to show Obama’s press conference.

The White House hopes independent swing voters watching at home, who like most Americans are not following the back-and-forth of the debt-ceiling debate, saw a president willing to take on his party’s sacred cows. They also hope these voters buy Obama’s message that it is Republicans who are not being statesmen.
...

Some quotes --

Mr. Tab U. Larasa, Gropeton, FL

"I don't follow politics in any way, but it seems to me that splitting the difference between two positions I do not understand is always the best thing to do."

Mrs. Blanche Slate. Stinkvale, MN

"Oh. oh, oh. The partisan bickering on both sides! It makes my head all itchy. Make it stop!"

Miss Ida Know, Rocktop, IN

"Politics is too much thinky. Blaming everybody the same makes me feel smart."

Mr. Notta Damcloo, Numb-on-Clature, England

"I have many opinions that are based on stuff I overheard when I was six. "

Mrs. Jesswanna B. Popular, Clownposse, TN

"Too loud. Too loud. Barack Obama talks like a really nice man."

Mrs. Bunny Dunning-Kruger, Wilmette, IL

"I like commonsense solutions that don't involve a lot of math. Math is scary and never leads to anything good."

Mr. O. Blivious Dolt, Cowtip, MI

"Burreck who? Oh, you mean that Kenyan fella? Really? Is he still the President? Wasn't there an election or something?"

Meanwhile at the New York Times, the Shrill One dumps a pot of cold "fuck you" into the adjoining cubicle. Some snips:

Do You Believe in Magic?

OK, David Brooks has what amounts to a reply. I don’t want to get into a tit for tat. But I do want to take on the claim that believing that simple actions can bring big improvements in the economy amounts to belief in magic.
...

Stroking your chin and saying, well, I don’t believe in magical solutions because experience shows that raising growth is hard sounds serious, but it’s actually silly.
...

But haven’t we tried a huge fiscal expansion? No, we haven’t.
...

Rejecting all that may sound judicious, but it’s actually an act of intellectual amnesia.

Of course, when intellectual amnesia is all you have left...

...My Name is Ozymandias

...
And that specific, mutagenic strain of "Wingnut Doublethink" -- the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.

Because however much one may agree with some of the Conservative Expat crowd over specific issues such as same sex marriage and marijuana legalization, as long as they cling to their own, obsessive Strategic Forgettery, they will always be fools and clowns and chumps. Because as long as they depend on their own Big Conservative Lie to tuck them in at night and tell them that they're good little Reaganites, they cede any pretense of occupying any moral high ground from which to render judgment on the Palinites and the Beckians.

The homunculi who are left inside the Big Tent Batshit Thunderdome are either stupid, evil or nuts...or some cocktail of all three. And if the trend lines of the last 30 years have proven anything, it's that Conservatives are such willing collaborators in their own brainwashing that neither the Expats or the Palnites and their Elite Enablers are capable of retaining any political inconvenient fact longer than 13 seconds (or, in the case of the Palinites, reacting to anything other than what Rupert and Rush tell them to be angry about this time.)

There is absolutely nothing left sifting around inside their mushy, angry skulls except that sparkly aluminum sand that good people at Ohio Arts use to make the Etch-a-Sketch.

Shake-shake-shake...and Ronald Reagan never sold weapons to terrorists, funded an illegal war, raised taxes four times, or left behind the largest deficit in American history up until that time.

Shake-shake-shake...and Bush the Elder never hired Lee Atwater.

Shake-shake-shake...and what Southern Strategy?

Shake-shake-shake...and George W. Bush is the Greatest President Ever, you filthy, Liberal traitors!
...

...there is no limit to how big a fool you can make of yourself in the New York Times.