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

Don’t Hurt You, Don’t Hurt Me...

...hurt that Mexican behind the tree!

That's my variation on a short verse about taxes ("Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree!") attributed to the late Louisiana Senator Russell Long. 

It's also the FA portion of FAFO that Republican voters were only too happy to sign up for when they nominated Trump to be their Dear Leader three times, voted for him three times, and elected him twice.

And now... (from our friends at Crooks & Liars, February 21, 2026):

Farm Bankruptcies Jump In 2025, More To Come In 2026

Farm bankruptcies across the nation have jumped 46% in 2025. You'll never guess why.

A report from the American Farm Bureau Federation shows that farm bankruptcies jumped by 46% across the nation. In Wisconsin alone, there were only 2 bankruptcy filings each in 2023 and 2024. But in 2025, that number leapt up to sixteen filings.

The reasons for this massive increase in bankruptcies should not be a surprise to anyone. They include lost markets due to Trump's illegal tariffs and ballooning costs due to Trumpflation. Everything a farm needs to operate jumped in cost, but farmers weren't getting nearly enough back to meet their costs.

Another factor adding to the farmers' woes was the labor issue. With fewer migrant workers, labor costs rose, squeezing farmers even more.

In Trump's first term, his tariffs and his war on immigrants caused Wisconsin dairy farms to close at a rate of two per day. To do the same thing and expect different results is the definition of insanity - or in Trump's case, dementia.

Unsurprisingly, experts are warning that 2026 is going to be more of the same, only worse.

In keeping with our farming theme, that is what the fruit of the poison tree looks like.

As does this.  From The Daily Beast,  February. 23 2026:

Trump Supporter Learns Hard Way ICE Doesn’t Just Target ‘Worst of the Worst’

A New Jersey couple can’t believe “we were MAGA” after their immigration ordeal.

A Donald Trump supporter is regretting voting for the president after her husband was swept up in the administration’s immigration clampdown.

Sandra Hafraoui’s husband, Abdellatif Hafraoui, spent 108 days in custody after being detained by ICE at Newark Liberty International Airport as the couple attempted to fly out on vacation.

Abdellatif, a Moroccan national who has lived in the U.S. for nearly 40 years, was detained despite having no criminal record. He was caught up in the crackdown because of a missed immigration court date more than a decade ago that he was not even aware he was scheduled to attend, NJ.com reported.

Sandra, who voted for Trump in the last three elections, said she is now reconsidering her MAGA allegiance and the president’s mass deportation plans due to the treatment her husband endured.

“To think we were MAGA!” she told NJ.com. “You [Trump] said you were going after the worst of the worst, but instead you ruined our life.”...

And if these are the poison fruits, this is the seedbed where the poison plant was rooted, watered, fertilized and allowed to grow big and strong.

From Investigate Midwest, November 13, 2024

Trump support grew in America’s top farming counties despite first-term trade war 

Farming-dependent counties rallied behind Trump with an average of nearly 78% support.

America’s most farming-dependent counties overwhelmingly backed President-elect Donald Trump in [2024's] election by an average of 77.7%. 

Trump has appeared on three presidential ballots, beginning in 2016. In 2020 and 2024, he increased his support nationwide, topping 50% in this year’s popular vote. 

However, Trump also increased his support this year among farming-dependent counties by nearly two percentage points compared to 2020...

Fuck 'em. 

And now, an unfairly out-of-context bit of audio for your listening pleasure:

Burn The Lifeboats

Shorter Tom Nichols: Driftglass Was Right All Along

As longtime readers are aware, the chorus of hundreds of Liberal voices which, for decades, provided ample evidence and brutally accurate warnings that the Eisenhower cheese was sliding off the Republican party's cracker and into the fascist abyss was, by, turns, scornfully, mockingly, angrily and then airily dismissed for years by Mr. Tom Nichols of The Atlantic.  

Ol' Tom held those critiques to be ludicrous on their face.  Or, at best, wild over-reactions by alarmist, Liberal cranks.  

Then some time passed and, ok, something has clearly come undone inside the party of Reagan, but it is asinine to suggest that the rise of Trump has its roots deep in the Republican party.  Gotta be something mechanical and fixable like a spun bearing or a cracked dilithium crystal, not structural.  And whatever is going on, calling it "fascist" is waaaay out of line.  At best, Trump was a black swan event.  A fluke.

[brief driftglass aside:  No Tom.  It wasn't something mechanical and fixable.  It wasn't a spun ideological bearing.  It was your party's Pretty Hate Machine with a fatal leaking coolant...

...which I was writing about in detail 20 fucking years ago.: end brief driftglass aside.  We now return to the cartography of ol' Tom's long, winding, through-gritted-teeth journey to where the Left has been all along.]  

Or, ok, so, Trump's not going away.  The fever is not breaking.  But -- and I want to make this 100% clear -- as a child of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!), there is no way I personally could have known what was happening with the Republican party in faraway lands like Georgia and Mississippi.  Despite the fact that knowing what's happening with the Republican party is my job.

And anyway, ol' Tom's got nothing to feel guilty about because the Left's hands are plenty dirty here!  (From a since deleted Tom Nichols Tweet barking at brother Charlie Pierce who had the temerity to point out that Tom was full of shit.)

You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 14, 2019

And now, at last, in February of 2026 -- decades too late -- we arrive here.  

Call Them What They Are
The Republican Party has become a haven for Nazi sympathizers.
By Tom Nichols

And this is the front-page teaser or "refer" for that story:

The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem
How did the GOP become a haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich?

Great question! Which we will definitely get to in a minute.

But at least as important as what ol' Tom says in this article is where the article was published.    It's in The Atlantic.  

And knowing that, you may ask yourself this question:  how exactly does ol' Tom  -- who has been wrong, tardy and dismissive all along -- rate a column in The Atlantic, while the folks who have been right all along -- folks who ol' Tom routinely derided, ridiculed and blocked from his perch at The Atlantic -- are still legacy media pariahs?

Again, great question.  And I would suggest that it's the same reason so many other recently-former Republicans and Neocons have found a home at The Atlantic.  Because in that pundit world, the fact that you have been wrong all along matters so very much less than the fact that you were wrong in all the right ways.  Ways that flattered the average legacy media reader or viewer.  A writer of things that are declarative, but cautious.  Timid.  And always, always riding that Both Sides Do It lane right down the middle, so that however harsh your Trump critique of the day may be, you make sure to take snide shots at the Left every step of the way.

Which is why this guy --

You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had plenty of matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility here.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 14, 2019

-- was such a perfect fit for The Atlantic.  

Four-fifths of this thing reads like an utterly anodyne, Wikipedia-style history of the modern Republican Party.  Just another 9th grade book report recitation of the familiar facts and milestones of the modern Republican party with which, I'm sure, most of you are not only drearily familiar, but have been shouting from the rooftops since forever.  Of course, St. Reagan’s image is carefully guarded and burnished, but from Nixon to Gingrich to Trump, there’s nothing here we haven’t known, discussed, dissected, blogged about, podcasted about, and thoroughly masticated for decades.

And the striking thing is, it doesn’t sound like Tom Nichols at all.  None of the snark and bile he routinely unlimbers in the cause of belittling and tone policing any Liberal who disagrees with him.  Instead it reads like a second cousin to Jay Rosen's "View from Nowhere".

The only time it even begins to sound like Nichols is when he dips into a wide-eyed, golly-how-did-this-happen voice -- as if he’s a child just discovered that Santa Claus isn’t real. What? When did this happen? How did this happen? 

Then he ambles back over to Wikipedia, looks up the history of the Republican Party during his entire adult life, and says, "Oh, so that’s what happened."

However, to give Nichols his due, there is at least one sentence that had to cost him dearly to see published in a national magazine, and here it is:

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

Then Nichols asks the next obvious question:

Was this a radical, unpredictable metamorphosis, or was a fascist tendency latent in the DNA of the party?

And here was my reaction:

Now you and I both know that, in this life Tom Nichols  -- Mr. "Expertise" -- is never gonna call on a dirty, disreputable hippie to explain [checks notes] his own political party to him.  However, he did the next best thing.  

To better understand the GOP in the years before I joined it, I arranged a Zoom call with Stuart Stevens, a native Mississippian and former Republican operative. Stevens, several years older than I am, joined the Republicans in his youth rather than the segregationist local Democrats, then bolted from the party because of Trump. I asked Stevens to tell me when and where the GOP went wrong, and whether the devolution into a haven for Nazis was inevitable.

For Stevens, racism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States.

In Nichols' view, it was Reagan's personal charisma that kept the various Republican factions -- gun nuts, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, bigots, imbeciles, paranoid conspiracy junkies, millionaires, Conservative evangelicals, Bill Kristol, George Will and Charles Krauthammer -- in line and pulling in the same direction.  But once Reagan died...

Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs.

Allow me to repeat that which I have already said a dozen times on this blog and on The Professional Left podcast:  it's not a "hijacking" when they throw you the keys and beg you to drive.  

And given that the base of the party threw the keys to Trump three times in 10 years...? Sure as shit doesn't sound like a hijacking.  Sounds like the fascist Meathead Messiah had arrived and the bigots and imbeciles were and are ecstatic about it.    

But the best -- the very best -- use of the view from nowhere comes in the form of a very familiar dodge.  A dodge I hadn't heard deployed so brazenly since Matthew Dowd was making the rounds with it. 

Nichols, who has a long and well-documented history of dismissing or swatting away criticism of Republicans from the left, suddenly transported himself up, up, up to David Brooks' "view from nowhere" orbital punditing platform where he can safely opine about the deplorable Both Siderism of "Conservatives..." and "People on the right..." -- 

Conservatives will complain that Democratic Party leaders have often tolerated their own extremists. People on the right point to radical professors lionizing Angela Davis, a Communist Party figure who was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list, or a future president socializing with Bill Ayers, who co-founded a Marxist militant organization and participated in bombings of the U.S. Capitol and the New York Police Department headquarters. Ayers may have casually socialized with a 30-something Barack Obama, but he did not get an office in the West Wing 15 years later. And no one on the left has shown up to work dressed like a conquering Nazi general swanning through the streets of Smolensk, the way Bovino did in the Midwest.

-- without having to add the damning modifier,  "Conservatives like me..." and "People on the right like me..." 

Moral grandstanding with a big bump of selective amnesia is a helluva drug.  Because what Nichols was up to during all the years he was averting his eyes from what his party was doing was busying himself telling liberals to calm down. Informing Democrats what they should and shouldn’t say. Tone-policing anyone who challenged his perspective -- a perspective now definitively disproven. 

What’s striking isn’t simply that he’s arrived at this realization.  After all, the world is full of slow learners and thumb-suckers who need to be told, over and over again, in the immortal words of Wade Garrett, "Don't Eat The Big White Mint."

What's striking is that Nichols is my age and he is only now, grudgingly, arriving at this revelation.  

What's striking is that, instead of being some waterhead propping up a wall at a dive bar, Nichols' whole deal is Expertise.  Right from jump he'll let you know that, in his expert opinion, he is always the smartest guy in the room.

What's striking is that he holds a column at The Atlantic based on his alleged expertise in this very subject. One he appears to have been in denial about until roughly ten minutes ago.

And so to wrap this up, we circle back to these questions.  Why does The Atlantic staff itself with people like this? Why are the people who were right about the Right all along still treated as pariahs? Why are they not only unwelcome in the circles where Tom Nichols, David Brooks, David Frum, and the rest circulate, but are treated as if they do not exist at all?

Because The Atlantic is in the business of telling its audience what it is prepared to hear. Its readers are ready to hear that Donald Trump is as bad as he appears, that the people around him are terrible. But they are not prepared to hear that the Left was right. They cannot bear the thought that the highly paid columnists of legacy media were wrong -- and that their readers were misled along with them -- while the so-called dirty hippies were right all along.

That possibility is unbearable. It’s unthinkable.

I Am The Liberal Media

Shorter Trump Presser

In case you missed Piggy's post-SCOTUS rebuke of his tariff regime...here's the short version.

The six justices who voted against the tariffs are fools, lapdogs, a disgrace and have betrayed ’Murrica. 

The Democrats on the Court did it because Dems want to destroy ’Murrica. The Republicans on the Court who overturned Trump’s tariff regime — including the two muppets he himself appointed — are actually RINO stooges under the influence of foreign powers.

But it doesn’t matter, because what the decision really said was that I have vastly more power to tariff, embargo, and destroy other countries than ever. I can destroy anyone. Any country. I tried to be nice before. I was a good boy. But now? Forget it.

Biden was incompetent. 

This country was dead a year and a half ago. Dead. Now we’re the hottest country in the world.  Barely legal but tits out to *here*!  And that ass!  

Every president but me was stupid for not using tariffs to make us all rich.

I’m very good at reading!

Brett Kavanaugh is a good lil’ stooge who’s gonna get two scoops. His dissent is genius, and you have to be a radical left lunatic to disagree.

I won. In a landslide. There was so much cheating, but I still won.

Yadda yadda yadda. All the usual demented rambling claptrap intermixed with the usual lies from a degenerate old criminal whose brain is turning to prune dip before our eyes. I’m sure I missed some of the finer points, since after a few minutes of this maniac slurring and stumbling us onto the ash heap of history, it all sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher — if that teacher were George Wallace, drunk and brain-damaged.

And if this makes your blood boil, don’t forget to thank your Republican neighbors, co-workers, and fellow churchgoers for putting this depraved, bigoted monster back in the Oval Office.

No Half Measures