-- and he'd be too tall to go unnoticed if he tried to sneak off and go to the beach.Fetterman: I just want to go home. I've missed our entire trip to the beach… I’m going to vote no. There’s no drama… I don't think it's really helpful to put people here till some ungodly hour.
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 30, 2025
pic.twitter.com/ZJTAYBI74u
...so I'm wondering how this all worked out?
Everything sorted now? Everybody happy?
...there were countless, low-budget films about oppressed minorities kicking the shit out of corrupt cops.
It was part of the Blacksploitation genre and it was glorious.
And I am moved to wonder, as the Trump administration turns masked goons loose in American cities to go full Gestapo, if we might not also be looking forward to a renaissance of indie films about urban heroes, spin-kicking and cock-punching ICE thugs until, at last, they face off against a cowering, sniveling Mr. Big Forehead, who will be played by Pauly Shore
Fun Fact: Believe it or not, before they ran out, one could buy a (reproduction) Superfly movie poster at Bed, Bath & Beyond. Because capitalism.
As most of you already know, thanks to his ability to squint really hard and conjure mirages into mountains, and daydreams into deliverers, decade after decade, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has complied an unbroken record of manifesting, out of thin air, one Republican savior after another and one rising Conservative reform "movement" after another.
Of course they're always juuuust around the corner, "deep in the bowels of the G.O.P" or laboring industriously but anonymously away in statehouses, but always on the verge of springing into action. And thanks to Brooks' insider knowledge and special powers of observation, over and over again he has confidently reassured his readers that salvation was definitely heading our way at speed, so ignore those Liberal crackpots and alarmists in the steeple of the Old North Church, shouting and hooting and waving three lanterns.
(You remember the Longfellow poem, right? One if by land. Two if by sea. Three if by Hate Radio and Fox News teevee...)
Down through the decades as the danger from the Right very publicly loomed ever closer, the legacy media's message never changed: Don't you little people worry your little heads about any of that noise, because the Conservative Establishment (whose spokesmodels found a welcoming home on every channel and in every newspaper) has got this!
By 2009, David Brooks' Republican party was already doomed to eventually become the instrument of some monster or another. It was a roiling shitpile of bigots and imbeciles finishing out their first year of what would be an uninterrupted, eight-year-long hysterical racist primal scream: their reaction to the Democrats electing a Centrist Eisenhower Republican named Barack Obama who wasted his entire first term and much of his second trying to reach out to a mob of angry, racist lunatics who would have none of it, but which the Conservative Establishment kept insisting did not exist.
From his vantage point comfortably ensconced in the Acela Corridor quiet car, Brooks remained willfully oblivious to all of it, leading a legacy media cottage industry dedicated to looking right past what was obviously happening right in front of them, and instead focusing on a series of Conservatives saviors who were just over the horizon and therefor invisible to mere mortals
Instead...
Serious people.
Quiet conversations.
"austerity brigades". Heh.
Even as the Rough Beast -- the end-product of decades of Conservatives handing their politics and media over to monsters like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater and on and on and on -- slouched towards Election Day to be born, this avatar of the legacy media refused to behold what he had helped to create
Brooks, September 2015 with emphasis added for entertainment purposes:
The outsiders are about to slide. Trump’s Don Rickles act wears thin. His ego may be galaxy-sized, but his policy ignorance is a void that overspills the known universe. He’s the Wizard of Oz. When the bluster curtain falls down, what’s left is pathetic...
Instead, the party will veer on a course midway between outsider and establishment. It will probably end up with some hybrid candidate — sharp of tongue, gifted in self-expression and yet still anchored in the world of reality...
That’s where Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio come in. So far, Fiorina has looked like the most impressive candidate. She has a genius for creating signature moments. (“If you want to stump a Democrat, ask them to name an accomplishment of Mrs. Clinton’s.”) But her spotty record at Hewlett-Packard probably means she can’t start at the top of the ticket.
Dig this coo-coo diagnosis of Little Marco:
Rubio is young and thus uncorrupted, and he is a genius at relating policy depth in a way that is personal. He has clarity of mind and can sum up a complex subject — Russia, the Middle East — in a way that is comprehensible but not oversimplified.
This debate was one moment in time, but you can see the vectors of where this campaign is headed. This is no longer Bob Dole’s or George H.W. Bush’s G.O.P. But it’s not going to completely lose its mind, either.
Narrator: Brooks' Republican Party had, in fact, already completely lost its mind long ago.
It’s going to be somewhat the same, but edgier and more renegade. Right now, Rubio, Fiorina and maybe Chris Christie are best positioned to occupy that space.
Sometimes the amount of money, time, energy and professional integrity that legacy media has been willing to burn through -- and is still burning through -- to keep people who wrong all along in the spotlight, and, as a corollary, the keep people who were inconveniently right all along the hell out of the spotlight...takes my breath away.
As you know, over the past few weeks the Pod Save lads have loaned out their increasingly Third Way/Centrist credibility to help rehabilitate Chuck Todd's reputation and give Jake Tapper an open mike to pimp his Biden bashing book.
And now Savvy-o, the Muse of the Punditocracy, has closed that circle by putting Tapper and Todd together so they could take turns holding down Joe Biden's good name while the speculating wildly about all the terrible things they imagine he might have done.
Must be a great relief to both Tapper and Todd to finally be able to shed the "respected journalist" fig leaves they were forced to wear for so long and come fully out as the smarmy, bitter hacks some of us have always known they were underneath.
There is no concatenation of caveats, provisos, conditions, stipulations, reservations, qualifications, and conditional phrases you can deploy to, ahem, bulwark your editorial decision to give Butcher Bill Kristol a platform from which to mouth off about war in the middle east. On that subject, his mouth should have long ago been (metaphorically) filled with salt and sewn shut forever.
And it all began back in 2014 when the then-barely-post-pubescent executive producer of "This Week" , Jonathan Greenberger, took it upon himself to pluck Kristol from the rubble of his many, many catastrophically bad public opinions and rehabilitate his professional reputation.
[Fun fact: In 2024, Greenberger left ABC News to become... wait for it...
Jonathan Greenberger To Depart As ABC News D.C. Bureau Chief For Role At Politico
Jonathan Greenberger is departing ABC News, where he has been Washington, D.C. bureau chief, for a new job as executive vice president of Politico. Greenberger will start in his new position on April 22 [2024]
...because of course.]
Join me now in this brief jog down memory lane.
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?...
What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who were this very loudly dead fucking wrong about everything got to keep their place in elite media circles and get to go right on being courted for their opinions on subjects about which they should shut their holes forever?
What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who were actually right about everything continue to be treated as pariahs, and told to sit down and shut up because it's rude and unproductive to, y'know, remember stuff?
Funny old world.
