Friday, October 11, 2024

David Brooks' Friday Column Is So...


...vapid and lazy, it doesn't warrant the expenditure of even the few words it would take to kill, skin it and serve it up on the good china.

Well, maybe a few words. Just for posterity.

First, Brooks takes the jejune opinions of 13!Count!Em!13! "undecided" young voters --


-- and extrapolates their tapdancing-'cause-I-didn't-do-my-homework reactions to the vice presidential debate out and out and out until they encompass the world.

Second, Mr. Brooks pulls I-don't-know-which-or-how-many writing How-To manuals off the shelf and snatches a few quotes from famous people talking about "story".

Did he borrow from "Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence" by Lisa Cron?  Chris Baty's "No plot? No problem!"?  Annie Dillard's "Talk"?  The classic "The art of fiction" by John Gardner?  "Creative Writing For Dummies" by Maggie Hamand? "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer?

Can't say for sure.

I can say that my own copy of least one of these was in one of the four boxes of books I just donated to my local library.   I can say that, as Mark Twain once noted, "Stringing together a bunch of quotes by notable people to pad out your column when you really have nothing to say is a great way to technically fulfill your 800-word contractual obligation without breaking a sweat."*

Here are a few of the "As so-and-so said" chunks from Mr. Brooks' column.

The playwright David Mamet once wrote...

Hold it right there, because Mr. Brooks might've wanted to catch up with where Mamet is today before copy/pasting him into his column.  From Forward:

Embracing Trump’s politics, David Mamet has become the Kanye West of American letters
The author of ‘Recessional’ offers up a bevy of conspiracy theories

Yeah, he's nuts now.  Orthogonal to reality.  Which is sad.

And as much as I would love to hear Kamala Harris dress down Donald Trump using pre-gone-bugfuck bone-shredding Mamet  language similar to this --


-- should that ever even come close to happening, I am 100% sure that David Brooks' employers at The New York Times would ask Aaron Sorkin to come back and write another dumbass guest editorial demanding that she drop out of the race.  

And speaking of...Mr. Brooks continues:

The screenwriter Aaron Sorkin builds on that definition. He says that strong drama...

Does Mr. Brooks even remember the last time Sorkin entered the 2024 presidential election chat?  It was when he decided that Democrats were idiots who didn't understand how politics works, so he offered the following helpful advice to Democrats about how they should run their campaign:

Aaron Sorkin: How I Would Script This Moment for Biden and the Democrats

It was 9/10ths him ruminating on a West Wing episode and what-iffing its plot.  And then, this:

But there’s something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So here’s my pitch to the writers’ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.

At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.

Subsequent events proved that advice to be so goddamn punishingly stupid and awful that Sorkin asked the public to please, please, please forget he ever wrote it.  Y'know, give it the ol' "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" treatment and ease it down the memory hole as if it had never been.  

 Brooks went on:


Christopher Booker wrote a book called “The Seven Basic Plots,” arguing that...

And on:

As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues

And on

 ...the novelist Mary Gaitskill once told The Atlantic.

And on:

As the novelist and New York University writing professor Darin Strauss has put it...

And on:

 Compelling characters have what the British author and writing instructor Will Storr calls...

And on:

But, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt told Storr for his book...

And on:

The novelist E.M. Forster reminded us...

Having digested this no-calorie, no-protein, no-flavor poached cake of nothing on your behalf, two things come through loud and clear.

The first is that the Kamala Harris which you and I see out there on the hustings every day bears no resemblance to the Harris which the "undecided" children in the Times focus group -- 


-- are bitching about.

And second, Brooks and the rest of his ossified professional-opinion-having colleagues in the dying legacy media are desperate for Vice President Harris to pay them the kind of tribute that Obama offered them during the Before Time of January 2009.  

From Olivia Nuzzi's future ex-fiance, Ryan Lizza.

The Obama Memos
The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency.

In a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post columnist, who had assembled a number of right-leaning journalists to meet the President-elect. Accepting such an invitation was a gesture on Obama’s part that signalled his desire to project an image of himself as a post-ideological politician, a Chicago Democrat eager to forge alliances with conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. That week, Obama was still working on an Inaugural Address that would call for “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Will’s yellow clapboard house. He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan...

However, having learned from Obama's grave error in judgement, Vice President Harris is having none of it.  

*Also, Mark Twain never said that.  

In fact, he said that "Scoundrels who make up false quotes and put them in the mouths of dead men to prove some point are lower than frog-cheating thimble riggers and should have their internet access revoked."**

**Mark Twain never said that either.



I Am The Liberal Media



Thursday, October 10, 2024

Professional Left Podcast Episode 845: "No One Could Have Predicted Hurricane Trump"


“Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.” -- Isaac Asimov


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Wednesday, October 09, 2024

When They Dream, They Dream of Lifeboats

Like climate change, the madness of the Republican party is man-made.

Like climate change, the conditions that created a Republican party base stupid enough and racist enough to manifest a calamity like Trump were a long time in the making.

Like climate change, all along the way there were ample signs warning where the Republican party was headed and how dangerous it would become.

Like climate change, the warning signs kept getting clearer and scarier.

Like climate change, the clearer and scarier the warning signs got, the deeper into denial the professional Conservative denialists sank.

Like climate change, the clearer and scarier the warning signs got, the more those trying to make the public pay attention to the impending disaster were ignored or shouted down or blame-shifted or "whatabouted" to the margins.

Like climate change, there are huge, monied interests with vast resources funding Conservative denialism.  

Like climate change, the acceleration of the wild lethality of the Republican party exactly fit with the warnings that professional Conservative denialists had been loudly dismissing all along.  

Like climate change, once the wild lethality of the monsters and quislings and cowards which the Republican party has manifested became too catastrophic to ignore, most professional Conservative denialists went right on making a living pretending that none of this was happening.  (A few professional Conservative denialists began to recognize the catastrophe for what it was, but still swear that it all began spontaneously and without warning in 2016.)

Like climate change, the destructive power of one or two or even three violent, "once in a century" events, while, tragic, are no longer the issue.  Because...

Like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, the terrible damage done to our democracy by Hurricane Trump will someday come to an end, but the environment which manifested that particular monster has now changed irrevocably.   There will be more and worse monsters slouching out of the GOP's political whelping box for the foreseeable future.  In fact, they are with us today, all over the country, itching for their chance to unleash their particular brand of ruin upon us.

However, unlike climate change, the transformation of the Republican base into an army of reprogrammable meatbags was not the poisonous byproduct of some other process or industry.  Something that could at least be mitigated if, collectively, we mounted an urgent, spirited and ongoing campaign to do so.  This is not the case in the Republican party.  

In the Republican party, polluting our politics and zombifying the base was the point.  And having achieved all they set out to do, the majority of the party is perfectly content with what they have become, while the tiny minority who have been cast out of the party dream of lifeboats.


From The Bulwark:

Romney Winks 

Mitt Romney is getting a little tired of you asking him whether he’s going to endorse Kamala Harris. He wonders: Can’t you people read between the lines? 

“I’ve made it very clear that I don’t want Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States,” Romney said at an event in Utah yesterday. “And you’re going to have to do the very difficult calculation of what that would mean.” 

The Utah senator has never before implied so strongly that he’s actively rooting for Kamala Harris. What remains fascinating is that he still won’t say it out loud. 

He says his reticence is deliberate. “There’s a good shot that the Republican Party is going to need to be rebuilt and reoriented, either after this election, or if Donald Trump is reelected, after he’s the president,” Romney went on, as is his habit. “I believe I will have more influence in the party by virtue of saying it as I’ve said it. I’m not planning on changing the way I’ve described it.”...

This is madness, and to their credit, the author says as much.   

Why he thinks the GOP will be headed for reorientation if Trump wins again, rather than for four more years of lockstep devotion to the least of Dear Leader’s whims, we couldn’t begin to tell you. ..

The pose Romney is striking here is a common one for many anti-Trump Republicans, ex-Republicans, and conservatives—even ones whose primary political goal is somehow finding a way to move the Republican Party past Trump. These people are open, ideologically, to the premise that Harris would be a far better, safer president than a re-elected Trump. But they’re also still trying to maintain their credibility and moral authority in a coalition whose current sole bedrock principle is the Democrats are always worse. 

Ultimately, the little Fig Leaf Gavotte that Romney is doing here -- and that so many other Never Trumpers have done and are still doing-- is, at once, boring, sad and darkly hilarious.    

They brought this on themselves, and now they want someone or something to save them from the disaster which their ambition, their hubris and their patrician I-don't-want-to-know-what-goes-on-down-in-the-bowels-of-the-party cowardice created.  

But nothing can save them, because by their own hand the ambient political environment of their party has accelerated beyond their ability harness and use it.  They cling to flotsam on a storm-tossed sea they manufactured, and dream of lifeboats.

Sometimes those lifeboats are flimsy, made from simperingly parsed words about not supporting a tyrant but not endorsing the not-tyrant.

Other lifeboats are to be found on teevee and in the op-ed pages of American newspapers, where  whitewashing and rehabbing the reputations of recently-former Republicans has become an integral part of every legacy medis corporation's business plan.  Or in dreams of using their now-outsized media presence to reshape the ambient environment of the Democratic party to suit their tastes.

Other times those dreams take the shape of an entire armada of lifeboats, waiting like so many cruise ships docked nose-to-tail at Cozumel, for the immediate crisis to pass.  Then, once the skies have cleared, presumably under the leadership of newly-minted Hero of the Resistance, Admiral Liz Cheney, the luxury fleet will sail back to power, and back to calling Democrats baby-murderers and "the face of pure evil".

But there is no sailing back to 1980 or 1984 or 2000 in glory.  First, because all of that is gone for good.  And second, and because all of those nostalgia-swaddled Republican landmarks were actually the warning signs along the road to the malignant political ecosystem which not only spawned Hurricane Trump, but is already busy gestating the next monster...

...and the next...

...and the next.

Which is why we...


Burn The Lifeboats




"You"? "Our"? Who The Fuck Are You Talking About?

 


Because "we" never had any illusions about the bigots and imbeciles who comprise the base of the Republican party.

Or the trajectory of the Republican party.

Or the doomed final destination at which the Republican party would eventually arrive if things did not change immediately and drastically. 

Those massive psychological defects belongs to your professional opinion-having Never Trump buddies, not "us".



I Am The Liberal Media


Tuesday, October 08, 2024

Professional Left Podcast Episode 844: Focus on the Future!


“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” -- George Orwell


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At the Villages, a Mother Gives Her Daughter Some Advice...


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Thursday, October 03, 2024

Professional Left Podcast Episode 843: Socialism For All. Again!


"Many a time freedom has been rolled back - and always for the same sorry reason: fear." -- Molly Ivins


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Wednesday, October 02, 2024

Matthew Dowd is a Fundamentally Ridiculous Person


I can't today.

I just can't


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