Professional Left Podcast Episode 998: Who's This Jagoff?

“ Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”  -- George Carlin.

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Rules, Schmules

You may have noticed that over the past 10 years or so, actual Liberals (who had the poor taste to have been loudly right about the Right all along) were elbowed aside while recently former Republicans (who hadn't just been wrong about the Right all along, but had been the eager handmaidens of the forces that created Trump) were anointed by their pals in the media as the Voice of the Resistance.

And from their newly bestowed commanding heights within the media, these Never Trumpers handed down a new set of Democracy Alliance Commandments to us little people.  

Those commandments included...

The pasts of these arrivistes -- even their immediate horrendous pasts - are irrelevant!  

Daring to interrogate that past in any way is destructive to The Cause.   

Mouthy Liberals asking them to apologize for building careers slandering them in the most despicable ways imaginable is rude and petty and destructive to The Cause.

All that matters is the Present! All that matters is that they're with us now!

So I am moved to wonder why those very clear and strictly enforced Never Trump Commandments...

...don't apply to this guy?

I'm pretty sure I know why, and I find my answer depressingly predictable.

I Am The Liberal Media

Correction

By no stretch of the imagination has the Lincoln Project ever been the "foremost pro-democracy organization in the United States".  And if Rick Wilson was ever a "principled Republican" for three days straight I'll eat my hat.  

The foremost pro-democracy organization in the United States belongs to the Democratic Party, of which I have been a member my entire adult life. 

The Lincoln Project is an advertising company staffed by mountebanks which cranked out slick, Trump-bashing ads that tickled the pleasure centers of way too many credulous Liberals and made the lads and lasses at MSNBC swoon back in the day.  

However, as I wrote all the way back in November of 2021in "The Fail-Safe Election"  -- 

...there should be one fact that stands out bold and clear to anyone who has eyes to see: that the staggering amount of free publicity and hard cash lavished on the Lincoln Project on the theory that their unique insights into the Republican mind would pay big dividends for the Democrats was a complete bust.  That, outside of the tiny circle of Never Trump Republicans who seem to exist almost entirely on teevee and Twitter -- surprise! -- neither the tens of millions of dollars that credulous Liberals poured into the Lincoln Project...

...nor the Liberal Political PornHub videos they cranked out budged even a fraction of the Republican base one inch...

And yet you will remember that so many of our fair-weather Liberals allies insisted that the Lincoln Lads basically won the 2020 election for Joe Biden despite incontestable evidence to the contrary.  

If you needed a bylined writer to tell you bitter truths, you could've heeded the wise words Charlie Pierce:

The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election

Never Trump conservatives are about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party.

Or you could've read The Hill, although it's kind of a trash publication so I can understand why you might blow them off -- 

Lack of influence means it's time to dismiss the Lincoln Project

-- but the basic electoral math that they buried halfway down the column is not in dispute.

During their time in the sun they even scammed their way into a glow-up from 60 Minutes, back when that meant something.  Later, when the various scandals the Lincoln Lads were drowning in broke into the open, 60 Minutes had to, uh, revise their assessment.

But these veteran grifters hung on like herpes because, as America's most famous capitalist philosopher, Phineas Taylor Barnum, allegedly observed, there's a sucker born every minute.

And two to take 'em.  

No Half Measures

Stupid Is The Fire In Which We Burn

Lest you think Trump's manifold acts of corruption, extortion, treason and unhinged racist lunacy are penetrating the MAGA groundwater, let me disabuse you of that notion right now.  

And to do that, I need us to take a little walk down memory lane.  Specifically, to 14 years ago, before Trump slouched out of the Republican id to swallow the GOP whole.  It was a time during which all your favorite future Never Trumpers were swearing up and down that everything was fine, that the Party of Lincoln had never shone so brightly,  and anyone who suggested otherwise was openly mocked as a crackpot.

While they were busy ignoring what was going on with the base of their own party, this is what your 'umble crackpot scrivener was writing about the state of the Right:

The entire Conservative enterprise is built on delusion and old dynamite, which is why every clock much forever remain stopped at one minute after Reagan's inauguration, every fact must be smothered under the stasis field of Rush Limbaugh roaring, rage-drunk bluster.  It is the sarcophagus of a dead ideology where the walls are now so densely postered and palimpsested with the detritus of Conservatism's lurid, lying history that its denizens cannot find the exit anymore, and its floors are so sticky and pitted with the grue of its savage, tribal, beat-in rituals that no one bothers to even look for the door.

Which is why  no deviation can be permitted, no error can be admitted and no apologies can be allowed.

As I wrote last year, this catastrophe all began as a headlong dive into the best fucking high the Right would ever have ...

Now the bender is over.

Outside, Reality's beating sun is stationed in the treetops, so bright and close to the Earth that it vaporizes shadows inside of pockets and purses, and through the sodden walls of their fragile fastness Conservatives they can feel its slippery photons circling their ideological clubhouse, sniffing the hinges and lintels like wolves, looking for a way in.

This time, there is no trick-or-treat scamper to safety for them in the kindly, Tea Party gloaming: no way to scuttle off to the next wingnut spider hole in a tri-corner hat and tights pretending they'd never even heard of George W. Bush. No, the rotting hulk of the Party of Lincoln has become their crypt, and inside of it there is nothing left for them but to sink forever deeper into the shadows until they become one with the darkness.

And from deep inside their narrow house, you can hear the terrified squeals of Conservatism's pasty, self-righteous, rigidly ignorant, sexually-terrified wingnut child-men trying frantically to spackle up the little holes through which modernity, complexity and reality continue to leak...

The point of pulling this out of the archives is threefold.

First, labor-saving.  Since I've been on this beat for a good long while and since Republican bigotry and depravity are an endless cycle of repetition and escalation, why not borrow from my younger and less emotionally exhausted self?

Second, to show why, for all their professed interest in talking with people whose viewpoints are different than their own, no way no how does any Never Trumper want to talk about which crew was actually right about the Right all along, and which team of esteemed paid professionals absolutely blew it.  

Third, and of more importance, is to put the cast-iron obstinance and denialism of the GOP base in its proper context.  They didn't suddenly get this way yesterday.  They've been this way for decades and, year after year, they've only gotten louder, stupider and more intransigent. They can no longer metabolize reality.  It's poison to them, so, marching under Trump's banner, they make war on it, and only get more berserk with fury the more Reality leaks into their lives.  

So, while irrefutable evidence of Trump's madness and venom rage all around us like a hurricane, and we're shouting at these idiots as loud as we can, "Can you see it now?   Can you see how bad it is now!" -- inside the shuddering hovel of their media bubble, they're busy grabbing anything they can to nail up over the windows to keep the storm at bay.

Two local examples.

First, there is the case of the Illinois Democratic legislator who, this last January, proposed giving local municipalities the authority to charge people a $5 permitting fee in unincorporated areas if they want to have an "open burn", and the flexibility of levy stiff fines if anyone conducts an "open burn" without a permit.  Important fact: this legislation -- which, I'll remind you, was proposed by one lone state congressperson in January and has gone nowhere since -- would in no way affect barbequing in your back yard, or having a cozy little marshmallow-toasting fire in a firepit in your back yard.  

State Rep. Briel: New bill is not targeting your campfire

The local MAGA meatheads went absolutely ballistic.  Jackbooted this and overreach that and the gummit telling you it's gonna slap you with a $100,000 fine if you have a weenie roast with the kids in the yard.  And of course the fact that this legislation would do none of those things was irrelevant to the ginned up firestorm (pun intended) that was whipped up on the Right.  Because all they fucking care about is having something scary and Liberal to shriek about to drown out all the actual catastrophes their Dear Leader is inflicting on this country in their name.

How bad is it?

It's worse than ballroom!

This is the pattern: a minor, local policy proposal becomes, through media amplification, a nationwide moral panic completely detached from reality.  

And remember kids, by the commutative law of MAGA meathead media, what one Democrat does, all Democrats are responsible for.  And if all Democrats everywhere don't stop what they're doing and unanimously denounce whatever ginned up claptrap Fox News is troweling out today, then all Democrats everywhere are guilty!guilty!guilty!

And when you tar the entire party with the slander-brush, don't forget to cram as many magic conjure words into the headline as possible.  For example, this from Murdoch's New York Post checks just about every box.  

Behind today’s radical, Jew-hating Democratic Party is a monster created by Barack Obama

Yes, they forgot to squeeze in Hillary's emails and Benghaaaazi, but I'm pretty sure that's a headline page-limit thing and not some swine of an editor having a mild attack of conscience and thinking, "Nah.  We dare not go that far."

Speaking of playing the hits is a desperate attempt to distract from how comprehensively Trump is fucking them over and what utter, drooling idiots this makes all of them look like, MAGA mouthbreakers are even dragging the already-infinitely-debunked "Clinton Kill List" out of cold storage.  

Because while their soft lizard brains are incapable of processing facts they don't like, they all have fond memories of the lies that made them feel smart.  Of the glory days of beating up on Hillary Clinton.     

Which is why we must...

Burn The Lifeboats

I Took This More Than 20 Years Ago...

...with my Canon PowerShot A95 digital camera.

The signs went up shortly after Salem Communications acquired the station in 2004 and flipped it from Spanish-language programming to all-conservative/all the time, talk radio. 

Salem was on a buying spree at the time. Between 2000 and 2008, its all-conservative programming footprint grew by roughly twenty net stations, though the gross number of acquisitions was higher because Salem frequently sold, swapped, and consolidated signals during the same period.

The result was that, at almost any time, anywhere in the contiguous 48 United States, you could find an AM powerhouse station slandering the Left, 24/7.  Depending on the time of day, you'd hear degenerate gambler and author of the "Book of Virtues" Bill Bennett,  Laura "Eva Braun-Nose" Ingraham,  Dennis "Prager U" Prager, Michael "Irrelevant Jabbering Mustache" Medved, Michael "The Savage Weiner" Savage or Hugh "Cyborg Sent From the Future to Destroy America" Hewitt. 

That means Salem's portfolio grew by about 20 stations net between late 2000 and late 2008. However, the actual number purchased was higher because Salem also sold, swapped, and consolidated some stations during that period.

And mind you, Salem wasn't even the most prominent dispenser of wingnut poison across this Land of the Free.  Tired of Michael Medved running his mouth but still need your fix of Libtard hating? Spin the dial just a little and you'll find the Premier Networks ready to fill your skull with incandescent rage against imaginary enemies.  

At the time, the Premier Networks was syndicated to around 650 stations from coast to coast and it's main lineup was (surprise!) Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and, later, Glenn Beck.

We're your tastes a little more boutique and regional?  ABC/Citadel had you covered.  They didn't own stations, but they syndicated their conservative programs to several hundred stations and featured the likes of Charlie Sykes, Mark Levin, Larry Elder and Mike Gallagher.

And if that wasn't enough to slake your thirst for hatin' on the Left, there was the feisty,  independent Talk Radio Network.

Against that absolute blitzkrieg of well-financed, nationwide saturation Conservative programming (and Fox News, and all the well-funded conservative magazines and rapidly multiplying websites) the Left had this pea-shooter: the financially unstable, multiply bankrupted and incompetently managed Air America.  Which, at its peak, could be found on a mere 50–70 affiliate stations.

It had terrific on-air talent -- no doubt about that -- and when I lived in Chicago I was an Air America listener, but it was a tricky business.  Frequently I had to walk my radio around my condo until I found a spot where I could pick up the signal.    It had the staticky intermittence of a French underground pirate radio sending German troop movement intel across the channel -- hardly a match for the million megawatt megaphone the Right had built for itself.  

Anyway, that was the state of play more than 20 years ago here in the Home of the Brave.  So the next time someone tells you the Republican base went suddenly and inexplicably berserk with rage, racism, and grievance after Donald Trump showed up and put the whammy on them, spit in their eye and show them this post.    

Nothing about this was sudden. It was financed, distributed, syndicated, and broadcast -- everywhere, day after day -- for decades.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 997: What Do Democrats Want?

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”  -- American author and teacher Verna Hills, 1937,  later adapted by teachers and parents to the melody of the traditional English folk song "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush"... which itself probably originated with female inmates at England's HMP Wakefield, who exercised around a courtyard mulberry tree with their children.

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 996: The Maine Event

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”  -- Sun Tzu

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At Murrica 250, Headliner Tiny Don Will Regale a Hand-Picked Audience...

...with his seven-hour version of "Tiptoe Through The Tariffs".

No Half Measures