Nervous About The Election?

 

If you are doing all that you can productively do already, then heed the wisdom of officer Jim Malone.

Burn The Lifeboats

Where Have All The Coattails Gone?

Thanks to Sangamon County Board Member Marc Ayers for posting these two door hangers side-by-side. They're showing up around the Springfield, Illinois area in advance of the election next week, and the Alert Reader may notice a glaring difference between them. 

The one on the right shows outstanding Democratic candidates for whom all right thinking people should vote, and is proud to show Kamala Harris and Tim Walz at the top of our ticket, and the diversity of our party.

You will notice, however, that the one on the left makes no mention whatsoever of who is leading the Republican party ticket.  Y'know, the fascist who won the Sangamon County Republican primary just seven months ago with 76.5% of the vote.  The same fascist they proudly nominated at their convention just three months ago.  The same fascist who, just yesterday, staged the first fascist rally at Madison Square Garden since 1938.

From the Washington Post:

Trump rally speakers lob racist insults, call Puerto Rico ‘island of garbage’

Donald Trump was president (God help us) for four ruinous years and has 100% name recognition, and yet our local Republican party -- which has never had a problem pandering to the basest instincts of the party faithful -- is so frightened of reminding voters of who they really are and what they really believe,  that suddenly Trump is...

... He Who Must Not Be Named.  

They're running for office by running away from the top of their own ticket, and I, for one, take that as a very positive sign.  

I Am The Liberal Media

That Time When Republicans, Army Brass and Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense Conspired to Poison the Minds of the American Military

 

From UPI, December 7, 1993:

Armed Forces Radio gets a 'Rush' from Limbaugh

   

WASHINGTON -- Conservative talkmeister Rush Limbaugh may be bringing his view of the world to a new audience -- the U.S. military -- with an agreement to broadcast his show beginning in January, officials said Tuesday.

'We have been negotiating with Mr. Limbaugh's producers and have reached tentative agreement to air a portion of his three-hour radio talk show starting in January,' said Army Col. Joe Cook, chief of staff for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service.

Although the negotiations are not completed, Cook described the talks as 'quite amicable' and that a final agreement could be reached soon.

Local station managers will determine the airtime and frequency of Limbaugh's broadcasts, said Cook.

Limbaugh's availability on the overseas service network has been the subject of a contretemps that has simmered for weeks. Among the entertainer's favorite targets are liberals, Democratic congressmen and President Clinton, the commander in chief.

Limbaugh fans abroad have written Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, protesting that they cannot listen to Limbaugh. And Rep. Robert Dornan, R.-Calif., got about 70 congressmen to sign a letter to Defense Secretary Les Aspin last month, also protesting the lack of Limbaugh from the GI airways...

Meanwhile, [Bill Clinton's SecDef Les] Aspin telephoned Limbaugh last week to reassure the broadcaster personally that the Pentagon had nothing against him.

In his Tuesday broadcast, Limbaugh thanked Aspin for expediting the agreement with AFRTS, which he said took 32 seconds to reach.

'What better day than Pearl Harbor day to conclude negotiations?' Limbaugh asked.

From The New York Times, December 12, 1994:

Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh

To all the advice for the new Republicans coming to Congress, add this from Rush Limbaugh: A hostile press corps lurks inside the Beltway.

"You will never ever be their friends," the talk-show host warned most of the 73 Republican freshmen at a dinner here tonight. "They don't want to be your friends. Some female reporter will come up to one of you and start batting her eyes and ask you to go to lunch. And you'll think, 'Wow! I'm only a freshman. Cokie Roberts wants to take me to lunch. I've really made it!' " The audience laughed.

"Seriously," he added. "Don't fall for this. This is not the time to get moderate. This is not the time to start trying to be liked."

The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November...

In closing, he asked his audience to "leave some liberals alive" as artifacts so that "we can show our children what they were."...

 

And, finally, the circle was complete.  From CNN, February 4, 2020:

President Donald Trump awarded the Medal of Freedom to conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday in an unprecedented move during the State of the Union address.

This is what "obeying in advance" gets you.  

Burn The Lifeboats

Some Birthday Week Reposts: It’s the Return of the Great Trumpkin, Charlie Brown!

From eight years ago.  

Also an abbreviated birthday fundraiser :-)

There they were -- all the good little Trumpshirts out there in the sucker patch, waiting for Julian Assange to rise up and fly through the night to deliver Donald Trump into the White House and save them horrors of Hillary Clinton.

And the knew Assange would come because they have the most sincere sucker patch in all the land!

See, they genuinely believe every batshit, racist conspiracy theory flapping around inside their empty heads -- even the conspiracy theories that directly contradict other conspiracy theories.  These meatheads, genuinely and deeply believe all of it and, as the world knows, there is nothing Julian Assange respects more than a chump's sincerity.

Thene moon rose.  They settled in.  And they waited...

..and waited...

...and waited.

Until, at last (From Crooks & Liars):

WikiRolled! Assange Makes Crazy Uncle Liberty Stay Up Late; Pimps Book

They were promised that Killary and that Kenyan in the White House would be de$$troyeed at 3am sharp! Benghazi! 9/11! Baby parts!

Apparently it was all a marketing test by the Ecuadorian Embassy refugee Julian Assange, to see just how many rubes with the word "deplorable" in their Twitter handle were willing to drink caffeine after dinner for the purpose of making libruls mad...

The reaction was both swift and hilarious:

But don't worry about them wising up. 

Being chumps is not a hat they put on and take off depending on occasions and circumstances. 

 

"Chump" is who they are. 

 

And falling for the same lying grifters over and over and over again is what they do.

Eight years later and they're nothing but eight years deeper into their chumphood.

Burn The Lifeboats

As We Dance on the Razor’s Edge of This Fateful Election...

...people and institutions are reacting according to their nature.  

By hook or by crook, should Trump end up back in the White House in January, we Liberals know exactly how screwed we are.  Trump 2.0 will be the Republican Hell Train we have been warning about for 40 years arriving, at last, at its final destination.  

To the place where it has been headed all along.

We Murrica-hatin', terrorist-lovin', baby-killin' Libtards knew we had targets on our backs once the blogosphere took off and we found we could tell Bush/Cheney (and the Republican filth and legacy media stooges who gave us Bush/Cheney) exactly what we thought of them in big, bold, public letters.

Along the way from there to here some of us died, some of us disappeared, and others dropped the charade and showed us that they had never been one of us at all.  But for the rest of us, we had a pretty good idea what we signed up for.  

Under a Trump 2.0, the suffering of us small fry would be relatively small, but we'd feel it.  Little things like, say, the heart meds you need are suddenly no longer covered by your insurance.  So sorry!   They might be covered under TrumpCare, but you'll have to talk to your local Loyalty Office about getting on that plan.

On the other hand, the fact that we small fry have been pariahs for so long and so aggressively kept out of the national political conversation may work to our advantage.  After all, in the 20 years that we've been blogging we have proven decisively that  A) we have been right about the Right all along and, B) no one pays us the slightest heed.  And anyway, how far up the Enemies List can we be when we've been cursed, dismissed as rude pests, and blocked by Tim Miller and Matthew Dowd and Tom Nichols and Charlie Sykes and Glenn Greenwald.?

To be held in contempt by all of those and so many more?  Who knows?  With those credentials, in a new regime I might be to wrangle an ambassadorship!   

On the other, other hand, this is a very big country, and with local media being decimated and major media corporations knuckling under to a rising fascist party --

-- in that possible future it will likely fall to the small fry to get the word out about what's really happening to anyone who cares to listen.  So now might be a good time for all of you to archive your writing on a hard drive.  Y'know, just in case.

So much for the small fry like me.  

The suffering of the larger fry will be appreciably worse.  

You may see faces you know, voices you trusted, on teevee, now disheveled, gaunt and hollow-eyed, recanting their previous criticism of Il Douche.  Or they may just be gone one day, leaving no forwarding address.  Or perhaps they'll find a new base of operations in some congenial foreign land, although congenial foreign lands may quickly become less congenial when a nuclear-armed fascist government declares that harboring an Enemy of the Patriotic American People is something Il Douche does not look kindly on.   

Obviously, I'm not saying any of this will happen.  And I'm sure every one of us is doing everything in our power to make sure this is not our future.  But we writers and we copious readers have the curse of clear and vivid imagination, and this all really might happen. The numbers are so close that the future has become truly unknowable.  

And when the stakes are this high and the outcomes are this genuinely unpredictable, the bet hedging begins in earnest

Right off the bat, everyone knows that, if Kamala Harris wins, she isn't going to avenger herself on crap shacks like The Washington Post, or stage live show trials featuring True Conservative (tm) pettifoggers like Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat (despite my fervent wishes to the contrary,).  And crap shacks like the Post and elite slugs like Stephens and Douthat know it: under a Harris administration, those awful people and institutions will be free to go right on being as awful as they are now. 

Probably worse!

But under a Trump 2.0 administration?

Oh my friends, that is a very different animal indeed, which is why the cowardly, the careerist and the feckless are hedging the hell out of their bets now.

The L.A. Times -- 

The Wrap is reporting the LATimes had also planned a "Case Against Trump" series to run alongside its Kamala Harris endorsement before the owner quashed it: https://t.co/sk6A6RTpjG

— Eric Deggans at NPR (@Deggans) October 25, 2024

-- and the Washington Post --

Today would be a good day to cancel your Washington Post subscription. @wapo will not make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election: Democracy versus Fascism & they don't want to weigh in after 36 yrs despite their Democracy Dies in Darkness sloganhttps://t.co/cokGFw81ny pic.twitter.com/M1hzGHSsLB

— Fly Sistah 🪷 (@Fly_Sistah) October 25, 2024

-- both want to make it abundantly clear to any future Ministry of Truth officers that they never officially took sides against the fascists.  

As if that will save them.

 

If you were wondering about the endorsement policy of our local Republican rag, they abandoned their tradition of endorsing candidates four years ago, because of, y'know, "polarization" and such.  Back when they went from being our local Republican rag to a Gatehouse Media gutted corpse of a Republican rag:

There are few community recognition programs with the esteem of the First Citizen. We are proud to continue the tradition.

And as we celebrate the kick-off of one tradition, we are ending another — the SJ-R will not endorse candidates for office.

That decision was not made lightly.

Political endorsements have been a tradition for many news organizations. However, they are a holdover of days past, and I am not convinced that any endorsement we made would influence you to vote for a particular candidate. In 2008, when the country was not nearly as polarized as it is today...

The SJ-R is not alone in its decision to move away from endorsements. News organizations across the country have made similar choices. The Dallas Morning News announced earlier this year that they would not endorse a candidate for president. The Peoria Journal Star and The Indy Star are among those who also will not make endorsements this election....

While our approach is changing, it fits today's political climate.

As always, thank you for reading the SJ-R.

Leisa Richardson is executive editor of The State Journal-Register and Lincoln Courier.

 

This week, as we have have already discussed, The New York Times' Bret Stephens went to truly ridiculous lengths to hide his terse, grudging endorsement of Kamala Harris under an avalanche of tarted up MAGA talking points about how incompetent and featherweight she is, how she's probably a Sekrit Commie Sleeper Cell and how, if Trump wins, it certainly won't be because the Republican base are a mob of bigots and imbeciles.  Heavens no!  They're all awesome!  The salt of the Earth!

The fault would lie with all of us god damned Liberals calling them bigots and imbeciles.  

And when the mob comes for him, he can calm them and turn them away by waving all of that in their faces.

As if that will save him.
 

And finally there is the case of Ross Douthat: Stephens' fellow True Conservative (tm) at The New York Times'. 

You remember Ross Douthat, right?

Douthat goes even further down Vichy Highway than Stephens by declaring that Harris is so terribly unfit for the presidency that he cannot bestow upon her his meaningless endorsement.  And for reasons I will leave it to you all to chew over out for yourselves, our Never Trump "allies" felt that two weeks out from this fateful election was the optimal time to elevate the petty, whiny opinions of their very good friend Ross.

Douthat argues that since Liberals have gone insane in the past five years, he cannot in good conscience support Kamala Harris.  In support of his thesis, Douthat cites wildly goofy nonsense like crazy Liberals are responsible for things like [no kidding] increased traffic deaths during COVID so, y'know, he just can't get onboard.  This is someone who has left the bottom of the barrel far behind that he is now scraping at the Earth's asthenosphere for excuses to keep his True Conservative (tm) skirts clean and hold himself aloof from making the only and obvious choice.

So when a phalanx of enforcers from Stephen Miller's Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice show up at The Bulwark's door, they can wave this interview in their faces as proof that they were committed to making sure Both Sides were fairly represented.  

And when they come around to Douthat's house to "interview" him, he can wave the very same interview in their faces as proof that he he was an obedient and loyal citizen who never took the side of the dirty Commie Marxist Left!

As if that will save them.

Burn The Lifeboats

All the World’s a Stage

 

Burn The Lifeboats

The Razors Are Moving

As longtime readers of this blog know, the easiest way to spot a bad faith Both Siderist hack in the wild is to peruse their work for the Both Siderist "razor in the apple".

OK, to be 100% fair the truly easiest way to spot a bad faith Both Siderist hack in the wild is to notice telltale signs like "Opinion columnist at The New York Times" or "host of Katy Tur Reports" or "Chris Cillizza" in their bio.  But the second easiest way to spot 'em is the quickscan their column or podcast or whatever to locate the inevitable Both Sides Do It"razor in the apple".  

If you look, you will almost always find it.  It's both a ritual and a contractual obligation.  Like the Introductory Rites and Concluding Rites of a traditional Catholic Mass, the absence of a Both Siderist razor in the apple would be the shocking aberration, not its presence.  

And, in the case of Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times, for a while there I got to be eerily good at predicting what the subject of his next razor in the apple would be, and in which paragraph he would make that turn.  That I could do this magic trick -- predict the size, shape and subject of a Brooks column before it was published and tell you within a couple of column inches where he would inject the poison -- amazed my wife (no small thing) but, I think, also freaked her out a little.

But it wasn't really a magic trick.  It was just that Brooks is so utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly, predictably banal.  Like the press and die of a metal stamping machine that spits out 1,000 screwdrivers an hour, or the filling heads of a bottling machine, the whole reason for the existence of creatures like Brooks is to reliably hammer home exactly the same bullshit over and over again, decade after decade.

And here I am going to borrow a line which Brother Charlie Pierce used in a different context in his excellent Esquire column today:

We’ve wandered into a deranged political version of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, in which we are warned:

“Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.”

Interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.

Yep.  That is indeed the pernicious labor of the professional Both Siderist, captured neatly in a phrase.

But I've noticed a change.  Interesting to me only, perhaps, but I've noticed that the Both Siderists seem to be burying their razors further and further down.  Even tacking it on to the tail end of whatever they're writing or saying as if, of yeah, I'm still required to tell this stupid lie aren't I?  So they toss it on the table practically as they're walking out the door.  I would speculate that it even feels like an act done with a sense of shame...but we all know that professional Both Siderists are untroubled by emotions like shame or guilt.

I'll give you two examples and you can judge for yourself.  Both from New York Times employees.  Both named "David".  One, a printed column, and the other, parting remarks on a podcast.

In The New York Times today, Mr. David Brooks opens his column by tripping over a fact that Liberals have been shouting about for decades

I had hoped this election would be a moment of national renewal. I had hoped that the Democrats could decisively defeat MAGA populism and send us down a new national path.

That’s clearly not going to happen. No matter who wins this election, it will be close, and this is still going to be an evenly and bitterly divided nation.

In retrospect, I think I was expecting too much of politics...

And as usual, we Liberals have warehouses full of receipts explaining in excruciating detail exactly how our country got to be this way.

Let me explain.  

No.  There is too much.  Let me summarize.

The deplorable state we are in is all down to David Brooks' former party -- the Republican Party -- which David Brooks swore in 2014 had "detoxified" itself, and David Brooks' conservative movement, which he has been swearing every few months since Christ was in short pants would be flowering into a full-on renaissance of awesomeness any minute now.

For more on this subject, try here: "In The Beginning..."

Brooks then takes his readers on a typical Brooksian "America: A Land of Contrasts" speed tour through the late 19th and early 20th centuries:

For example, the Settlement House movement, led by women like Jane Addams of Chicago...

moguls like J.P. Morgan...

Philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller...

By the time Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901...

Before finally arriving at the razor in the apple in the very past paragraph of this forgettable mishmash.

For a whole society to change, the people in the society have to want to change themselves. A smug, self-satisfied, “I am right” nation is going to be perennially stuck in place.

This is Brooks prescription for social change: everyone has to simultaneously agree to change all at once, and everyone [meaning Democrats] needs to stop going around claiming that we anti-fascists are right and that the fascists are wrong in that smug, self-satisfied way of ours. 

The other David is Mr. David French, also now of The New York Times, who had a long and not-particularly-interesting conversation with Mr. Tim Miller of the MSNBC Green room about...stuff.  Mostly about the intractability of the zombie Republican base.  About how creepy it is that absolutely nothing can or will budge them.  

Miller: It's just, to me, it's, like so obvious that if you see the Trump threat, like, why aren't there more of us?  Why are there so why are there so few of us? I guess that's my final question.  Do you do you have any clarity for me on that?

As you might imagine, I have many thoughts as to why this is so, which neither Mr. French nor Mr. Miller would want to hear, but that's not where we are going today.

So, as Miller and French are wrapping up, French is explaining that, as cynical as he is, he was surprised at the intensity of the backlash that was (and is) directed at him now that he has finally endorsed Kamala Harris (you may remember that French was one of those whiny Republican hard-cases who pissed away their vote in 2016 and 2020 by voting third-party.)

Which would have been an excellent place to stop.  

But Both Siderist can't stop, can they?  They have this kind of compulsive false-equivalence logorrhea 

And so...

French:  And I think Tim what we constantly underestimate, just because it's kind of hard to wrap our minds around, animosity at the level of intensity that we see.  We constantly underestimate the raw animosity that exists on the Republican side for Democrats and by the way on the Democratic side for Republicans.

Yes, even before Trump, French says, Both Sides hated each other.  

So where did all that anger on Both Sides come from?

French says, three or four times, that it's "negative polarization" which is defined as:

Whereas traditional partisanship involves supporting the policy positions of one's own party, its negative counterpart in turn means opposing those positions of a disliked party.

There's is not even a passing acknowledgment of the decades of labor men like David French poured into turning the Republican base into an army of reprogrammable meatbags whose reflexive response to the word "Democrat" is "Marxist!Commie!Socialist!Monster!"

Or, as Never Trumper Hero #1 Liz Cheney was describing us until about five minutes ago, baby-murdering filth who are "the face of pure evil":

Instead of correctly diagnosing what the fuck happened to the Republican party as the end product of a decades-long Republican campaign of calculated, premeditated and well-funded demonization of Democrats -- and Democratic reacting to the rise of this American fascist party by despising fascists as any patriot should -- French whisks all that inconvenient history away with the magic conjure words "negative polarization" which is a mysterious thing that apparently just happens.  You know, like an ill-timed fart at a funeral or the like the description of the wind from John, 3:8

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.

The Both Siderist razors on the apples are shifting location, kids.

But they are most definitely still there. 

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 849: Fox News Host Sez: 'Nazis, Whatever'

"Courage is grace under pressure." -- Ernest Hemingway, writer

Links:  

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