Old School/New School

Today we're making a quick stop at the Before Time to visit the early days of the Liberal blogosphere.

 In and out, nobody gets hurt, OK? 

To begin, it's critical to understand that, as cutting and as harsh as our prose might have been, all in all, the Liberal blogosphere was and is a fundamentally optimistic enterprise.  A belief that we were not doomed.  That the future could be better, and that it was worth fighting for.

First and foremost, it was about creating community with a "You're not crazy, I see it too" ethos.  Back in the depths of the Bush regime, it felt as if a political apocalypse had happened right in our back yard:  something so bad and so surreal that words frequently failed.  And we were the ones slowly scanning the short wave radio bands in search of other survivors.  At the time this was only possible through the blogs because, then as now, the Beltway media was dedicated to the proposition that we were crazy, that there was nothing to see here, so let's move along shall we.   

But the hoped-for secondary effect of the blogs was a stubborn, Quixotic faith in something fundamental about the American people.  

Or at least most of the American people.  

Or at least a bare  majority of the American people.  Something that would be enough to beat the howling, brain-rotted Fox News zombie horde, if...

If people were presented with the facts of the case.  If they could be shown, unequivocally, that  Republican policies had fucked them over but good.  That whatever opinion they had of the Democrats, Dems were, by every metric, vastly better for the public than the GOP.  

It was towards those complacent, habitually fence-straddling Mopes in the Middle that much of our energies were directed.  And there was a moment as the Bush regime was collapsing when we had the momentum of events and history at our backs.  The Liberal blogosphere of the Before Time felt a little like the energy Hunter Thompson describe in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. 

This, but angrier.  

The feeling that, just maybe, together, we could outshout the narcotizing effect of the "Both Sides Do It" Beltway press and Sunday Shows had on the Mopes in the Middle.   If we could pry their eyes open for just a moment -- force them to see what was really happening to their country in their name...

But it was a vain hope.  

Perhaps, with 1000 times the media reach and firepower that the Liberal blogosphere had at its peak, we might have been able to pull it off.  But by then the Republican base was hopelessly addicted to its own rage and racism and the lies Fox News and Hate Radio fed them every day.

And the Mopes in the Middle vastly preferred lolling in a tepid pool of Both Sides Do It goo to a cold shower of facts.  Then as now, they don't know.  They don't wanna know.  And they get very angry if you try to make them know.    

All available evidence shows that the only force that can pry them out of their False Equivalence Goo Spa and spur them in the general direction of productive (if fleeting) civic engagement is having the metaphorical red-hot poker of Republican corruption and catastrophe shoved straight up their metaphorical collective asses.  

Or, to put it a little less graphically,  the only time they can be moved to action is when economic and social pain affects them personally and profoundly.  Then and only then can they be moved to lumber out of their comforting goo bath to go stumbling into the world looking for scapegoats.  

Which, in itself, can be either good news for democracy, or bad news.  Because once they are roused to action, the Mopes in the Middle are none too picky about who they blame for what has happened to them: they're as likely to hold trans people, Mexicans and Democrats responsible for their reduced circumstances as they are fascists, Republican looters and degenerates, and evil billionaires.    

And any grifter running against "the system" or "the duopoly" or "politicians in Washington" will always have the inside track with these idiots.

We of what is left of the Liberal blogosphere will go right on writing.  Some of us also podcast now or are frequent podcast/radio guests, so we'll go on with that as well because trying to make sense of the world and sharing it with others is why we do what we do.  And there is intrinsic value in that.  Every "I never thought of it from that perspective" or "Once you put it that way it started to make sense" or "I thought I was the only one" we get from readers or listeners is worth its weight in gold.  

Of course, we'll gratefully take the gold too, but you get what I'm saying.  

However, for the time being, I think many of us have lost much of our faith in both the utility of persuasion and in most of the American people.  It is a loss that many of us are grieving.  

From the Stay Human - Shape Tomorrow Substack

There’s a grief I don’t see named anywhere. It belongs specifically to people who are older, who have fought long and hard, who still care deeply — and who are now watching the possibility of a better future slip away at the exact moment their own capacity is slowing down. And not just a better future for themselves, but for the younger generations they love so dearly. Mad and sad at the same time. Carrying decades of investment in institutions and movements and people, and watching all of it under threat and being torn down.

No Half Measures

Professional Left Podcast Episode 995: The Politics of Pronouns

“ Time moves in one direction, memory in another.“  -- William Gibson, writer

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Dubya Walked So Trump Could Run: Part 1003.

As you read this, please note that this NBC headline is not from last week.

It's from 20 years ago.  NBC, August 8, 2006:

Administration seeks to weaken war crimes law

The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the amendments...

Bush regime panic was triggered by the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which ruled that the Bush regime's existing military tribunals for Guantánamo detainees violated both U.S. military law and parts of the Geneva Conventions.

The Bush Regime's reaction to that ruling was on par with General Saito's reaction to the Conventions in The Bridge on the River Kwai

Since it was pretty clear Republicans were widely expected to get their asses kicked in the 2006 midterms and lose control of one or both houses of Congress (sound familiar?) with Republicans facing the likely end of four years of unified control of Washington.  Before that happened the Bush regime hurry-up-quick rammed through the  Military Commissions Act.

Remember: it authorized new military tribunals, drastically narrowed the definition of punishable war crimes under U.S. law, gave the president broader authority to interpret the Geneva Conventions, and attempted to block detainees from challenging their detention through habeas corpus petitions in federal court. 

There was little debate or somber reflection of what this might mean.

Instead it flew through the Republican-controlled Senate on September 28, 2006.  The vote was, Republicans: 53 despicably predictable yesses, 1 no, 1 absent,  Democrats: 12 shameful yesses, 32 no, and Independent: 0 yes, 1 no.

Then it flew through the Republican-controlled House the very next day, September 29, 2006.  The vote was, Republicans: 218 despicably predictable yesses, 7 no, 5 not voting, Democrats: 32 shameful yesses, 162 no, 7 not voting,  Independent: 0 yes, 1 no 

Then George W. Bush signed it into law on October 17, 2006.  But in 2008, the Supreme Court (No kidding!  Guess you had to be there!) ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that the law’s attempt to strip detainees of habeas corpus rights was unconstitutional.   The court was split 5-4, and it will surprise absolutely no one that the four Republican-appointed dissenters were John Roberts,  Nino Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

You see kids, the depraved values and trajectory of the Republican party were there for anyone to see who cared to look with honest eyes.  A Republican president and his blood-thirsty regent who believed the president should be able to rule as an emperor (as long as he was a Republican.)  A Republican Congress eager to let the president do it (as long as he was a Republican.)  And a slim Republicans minority on the court -- two appointed by Dubya, one appointed by Dubya's daddy, and one appointed by Dubya's daddy's boss -- willing to bless that unholy Republican aspiration.   

I keep 20 or 30 of these examples in my back pocket for when our Never Trump supervisors figuratively put their feet up on our coffee table, swill our good beer and begin to wax nostalgic about the "good old days" of the GOP before Trump.

I usually get through three or four examples before they block me and stomp away.  Which is weird, 'cause didn't you want to talk about the past?

Burn The Lifeboats

Portrait of the Texas Republican Party

The entire Republican party, really.

Because "MAGA"'s just another word for nothing left to lose.

Burn The Lifeboats

Trump In The Bunker: February, 2027

Army Group Steiner Will Not Save Him

Alt History

All the way back during the closing days of the Before Time, as the GOP was loping eagerly at speed towards the monstrous abyss into which they have now dragged us, I began documenting a rapidly spreading Republican condition, which I called Republican Detachment Disorder.  

From me in January of 2016:

Now that Donald Barnum Trump, Failgunner Ted Cruz and the caravan of benighted shoutycracker GOP candidate wannabes that follow them around have removed any lingering doubt that nothing short of the Bến Tre Option --

'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it'

-- will ever "fix" what is actually wrong with the GOP, the Republican establishment's most obedient and reliable public avatars have all suddenly come down with the same, tragic affliction: Republican Detachment Disorder.

Symptoms include adopting the basic Liberal critique of the Right chapter-and-verse while forgetting to acknowledge that "Liberals" as such even exist, and pretending that "the Republican establishment" is some mysterious directorate that you barely know which meets in a secret lair far, far away instead of a club which you have been a card-carrying member of for your entire adult life.

Today's spotlight Republican Detachment Disorder sufferer: David Frum.

Maybe the Republican Establishment Can’t Have It All

Given their failure to take down Donald Trump, is it time for GOP elites to let go of some cherished inward-facing policy priorities? 

...

Maybe it’s time for the party’s elites to let go of some of their cherished inward-facing policy priorities.

Notice how RDD particularly affects the speech centers of the brain. "[T]he Republican Establishment" instead of "we". "Given their failure" instead of "Given our failure." "[T]he party's elite" instead of "Me and David Brooks and Michael Gerson and Ross Douthat and the rich fuckers we work for".

Sad, really.

But there is hope!

With your generous support, blogs like this can continue working tirelessly towards the goal of eliminating RDD in our lifetime...

 Which I simplified to this in March of 2016:

It's a huge shit sandwich and everybody but me is gonna have to take a bite.

Then I spent more time than I should have documenting one prominent Republican/Conservative after another deploying the same lies in the same order.  That the GOP had gone spontaneously mad.  That they had nothing to do with it.  That once they caught wind of it they'd righteously rebuked everyone involved, but before that moment there was nothing detectably wrong with the GOP. 

Every one of these lies was and is ludicrous on its face, and yet the promulgators of these lies were invited to spout them on the largest legacy media outlets in the country, while those on the Left who had been warning for decades about the dangerous trajectory of the GOP were given the stiff arm and the stink-eye by those same legacy media outlets.

Which led me to ask why?  

And the answer is pretty simple and twofold.

First, the creators of this new mythology already had deep, fraternal ties to major legacy media outlets.  They all knew each other professionally and socially, so once places like MSNBC went full-time into the Republican reputation rehab business, GOP spin doctors and comms people and ad merchants who had bet wrong on the rise of Trump and fallen from grace from the party were lining up three deep to get the Nicole Wallace treatment.  

And second, the gauzy, heroic bunkum these Never Trumpers were selling was much more congenial to the legacy media's self-image than the hard truths Lefty writers and podcasts were offering.  In the actual history of the era that Liberals were documenting, the legacy media was deeply complicit in the rise of a monster like Trump, spending decades ostentatiously ignoring what was really going on on the Right, or, when the stench of racism and crazy leaking out of GOP containment got too knock-the-flies-off-a-shitwagon strong to ignore, they'd "Both Sides Do It" handwave any concerns.

Obviously this is a story the legacy media wants no part of.  

But the fiction the Never Trumpers were selling?  That the entire Republican base just suddenly went nuts one day and no one coulda seen it coming?  That maybe a lot of it was actually justifiable backlash to all those terrible, imaginary excesses of the Left?  That was a story the Beltway was only too happy to metabolize, to repeat endlessly, and to promote to the front of the line any recently-former Republican who was willing to help them sell it.  

And over the course of the last decade you can actually track as this bullshit hardened into the foundation of Beltway-approved agreed-upon history of the era.  Then, once the foundation was laid, came all of the refinements and embellishments.  

So what we're going to do now is step back in time to 2016 and watch as Republican Detachment Disorder became the go-to alibi for Conservatives trying to run away from what they had helped do to their own party.  Then we're going to jump back to present day for a small taste of how that fiction has evolved.  For the stroll down Cursed Memory Lane, I'll mostly provide links only to Conservatives as they floated their own variation of RDD.  If you want to dive deeper, have at it.

January, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Tucker Carlson, Super Class Warrior Hero Guy.

January, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Boss Limbaugh.

In his article in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan's former protege -- Young Conor Friedersdorf -- makes the following case:

Rush Limbaugh Doesn't Know He's Part of the Establishment

A portrait of a man who is unaware of his role in the system that he savages...

February, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Frank Luntz.

February, 2016:  David Brooks' Life When It Is Written Will Read Better Than It Lived

David Brooks -- the world's most ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual, globe-trotting lecturer on character and humility and Patient Zero of Republican Detachment Disorder -- managed to write an entire fucking column about the madness which has killed his Republican Party...
...without mentioning the word "Republican" at all.
Instead...
They want “outsiders"
They delegitimize...
They’re willing to trample...
they don’t recognize other people...
They suffer from a form of political narcissism...
they don’t accept the legitimacy of...
They don’t recognize restraints.
They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.
The antipolitics people elect legislators who have no political skills or experience...
The antipolitics people don’t accept...
They make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations...
The antipolitics people refuse compromise...

February, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ron Fournier, The Sad Clown of Centrism

March, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Gerson

Themselves. Them. Not "me". Them. Thus begins the tsk-tsking cavil lecture of yet another Republican who stood proudly with a party that has been coasting along on the momentum of the Southern Strategy for his entire adult life.  Yet another Republican who stood proudly by an Administration which resorted without hesitation to the tried-and-true Republican electoral strategy of Fox News, Hate Radio, mass-slander and demonization to win re-election in 2004...

April, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Joe Scarborough

May, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Peggy Noonan Finds Her Magic Cab Driver

May, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Jennifer Rubin

Key Date.  From NPR, May 26, 2016: Donald Trump Clinches GOP Nomination

June, 2016: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ramesh Ponnuru

By June of 2016, Suddenly There Is No "I" In "Republican"  Note the time.  Almost exactly  decade ago, when all of these Conservative heavy-hitters and dozens of others had begun to change their political pronouns.

Key Date.  From CNN, July 19, 2016: It’s official: Trump is Republican nominee

July, 2016: Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Steele, Patient Zero

September, 2016:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: George Will

October 20, 2016:  Joe Scarborough and Bill Kristol -- Cannibals Fighting Over The Place Settings -- in which they traded "This wasn't my fault, this was your fault" finger-pointing.  

December, 2017:  Today In Republican Detachment Disorder [Bret Stephens]

 December, 2017: Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Charlie Sykes

They're all in on it.  All of them.  And 18 months to two years is officially the new, Beltway Approved Absolution Lifeboat.  And all of the Republican scumbags who reaped enormous rewards for decades paving the road down which Donald Trump shambled to the White House -- who are now frantically  rebranding themselves as "independent" 30 years too late once -- are scrambling on board.  From Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough yesterday:  "Republicans across the United States will now pay a heavy price for two years of moral indifference."

There are dozens more, and a lot of repeat customers:  the same elite Republican pundits and opinion-havers using the commanding media heights of the multiple platforms on which they are welcome, all hard-selling the same lie over and over and over again.

Now buckle up as we quantum leap from a decade ago to five days ago to observe how deeply rooted in the everyday political language of Never Trumpers this detachment disorder has become, and how every other political event has been warped to fit that narrative.

The occasion was The Bulwark's live thing in Los Angeles.  Big crowds.  Much merch.  Much call-and-response.  A delegation from the Pod Save Lads showed up.  And during the event, Bulwark owner and publisher, Sarah Longwell, regaled the audience with her version of history...

Sam Stein: What is the Bush line? Like what actually number is the Bush line? 

Sarah Longwell:  Uh this is a great question... It's 32%.  But that is that is the number that George W. Bush was at when he left office. Okay? And the reason again that this is important is if you think about the historical precedent when Bush left office, the Republican party never recovered from his unpopularity. 

This is so ridiculous I almost don't know where to begin.  In 2010, Longwell was working for conservative PR outfit in Washington D.C. and was recruited into the Log Cabin Republicans, where she eventually became chair  From that vantage point, surely she could not have missed the Giant Red Wave that deluged Washington in 2010 and completely reversed the political fortunes of Ms. Longwell's party.

I mean, I don't know exactly how Ms. Longwell would measure "recovered popularity", but it seems to me that taking back the House in 2010 with a net gain of 63 seats -- the largest turnover of seats by either party since 1948 -- constitutes a pretty good metric of resurgent popularity.  As does the net seven seat Republican pickup in the Senate, picking up six governorships, 680 state legislative seats, flipping control of 20 legislative chambers across the country, and having "independent" voters, who had largely voted for Democrats in 2006 and 2008, swinging overwhelmingly to the right.

And how did Sarah Longwell's party achieve this amazing feat?  They did it by throwing everything they had into the largest coordinated campaign of often openly racist slander, obstruction, sabotage, and fear-mongering in modern political history, all aimed at destroying Obama before he even got started.  If you're interested in the gory details, we did a whole podcast about that very subject last week:

Add to that the massive Republican "Tea Party" branding scam in which the legacy media abetted the lie that somehow the base of the party had just up and disappeared one day and had been replaced by a brand new "movement" -- heavily financed by the Kochs and promoted around the clock by Fox News.  These Teabaggers had two things in common: they swore they'd never heard of George W. Bush and they despised the black guy in the White House and eagerly rallied behind every racist lie about Death Panels and "government takeovers" and birth certificates and on and on.  They flooded town hall meetings, shrieking about Communists.  They suddenly cared about deficits.  

In Congress, Republicans did everything they could do to drag the Great Recession out as long as possible -- ferociously opposing the Obama plan for saving the economy, extorting concessions so that the final package was only half the size it should have been (and a third of that was tax cuts) and then voting against everything along party lines.  So by 2010, with the Republican base rage-drunk on Fox News racist propaganda, and hapless "independents" terrified by the legacy media repeating Conservative lies unchallenged, the GOP was able to grab hold of real levers of power at the national and state level and use them to further hobble Obama administration initiatives.  

Ms. Longwell resumes.  

Longwell:   He had a bad war and he had a bad economy.  That sounds familiar, right? And so when you have those things, what happened is then the Republicans went into the wilderness. They lost two national elections. They struggled with their political identity only to have Trump then come in and completely revamp the party. 

First, notice the pronouns?  The same sleight of hand as a decade earlier.  "the Republicans went...", "They lost...", "They struggled...", not "We lost..." or "We struggled..."  

Second, in the Republican voter's berserk reaction to Barack Obama -- their eight-year-long racist primal scream -- it's painfully obvious that their "political identity" was right there in plain sight for anyone to see who cared to.  Once a reality show douchebag and skeevy real-estate slimeball named Donald Trump latched onto the biggest and most overtly racist lie of that era and ran with it (from Politico, August 4, 2010) --

41% of GOP: Obama foreign-born

On President Barack Obama’s birthday, a new CNN/Opinion Research released Wednesday shows 41 percent of Republicans believe Obama was “probably” or “definitely” born in another country.

 -- it's very clear that a plurality of the party had no "political identity" problem at all.

Now, stack that Big Stupid Lie on top of all the other Big Stupid Lies Republicans believed.  For example:

From Politifact, December 18, 2009:

PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'Death panels'

Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.

"Death panels."

From KUNC Colorado, June 18, 2012:

As the Supreme Court is about to rule on the constitutionality of the health care law, one-third of Americans are worrying about a part of the legislation that isn’t there.

A Kaiser Family Foundation’s tracking poll [.pdf] found in March that 36 percent of respondents erroneously believe that the law “would allow a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.” Another 20 percent said they are not sure whether it does.

The foundation, a nonpartisan organization that provides health policy analysis, reports the “prevalence of these misconceptions is essentially the same it was at the end of 2010.”

From PolitiFact, December 17, 2010:

PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'A government takeover of health care'

In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama's ambitious plan to overhaul America's health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a "government takeover."

"Takeovers are like coups," Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. "They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom."

The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the "public option" concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.

But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn't let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.

From Pew, November 2, 2010:

Majority of Republicans No Longer See Evidence of Global Warming

A 53%-majority of Republicans say there is no solid evidence the earth is warming. Among Tea Party Republicans, fully 70% say there is no evidence. 

Add to these Big Stupid Lies all the dozens of Smaller Stupid Lies that were firehosing out of the Conservative media puke-funnel, hyped by Republican party leaders, and passed along uncritically by the legacy media, and even a low-born, nobody blogger from the middle of Middle America like me could see that this was not a party lost in "the political wilderness" in any way.

In fact, the "political identity" of the Republican party was never in question at all.  

They were and are the same mob of bigots and imbeciles we Liberals have been warning about for decades.  The "reprogrammable meatbags" which the GOP has spent decades and billions of dollars cultivating, and about which I've been writing on this here blog for +21 years.  

And yet back in the Before Time when it might have mattered, not a single Never Trump you can name had a problem with any of it.   They were perfectly willing to ride this rage-and-racism fueled rocket as long as it took them where they wanted to go.  As long as it got their guys elected.  Which is why Longwell's notion that "Trump [came] in and completely revamp[ed] the party" is not just laughable, but exactly backwards:  Trump didn't change the party, he revealed it.  The base wasn't bamboozled by Trump, the base manifested Trump as the avatar of their truest selves.   

And that's the shame Never Trumpers refuse to face.  That they built the Republican electoral meth lab, supplied the chemicals and created the distribution network.  All Trump ever did was use their own lab and their own chemicals to cook their own product better and purer than they did.  

Back to Ms. Longwell for her solution:  

Longwell:  But like the one way that [the Republican party might become something that is not a criminal enterprise, that is not like an authoritarian fascist enterprise] ... the one way that it would happen is for Donald Trump to leave office with America going that fucking sucked. Like we don't want to do that again. We want to discredit Trump and everybody in his administration, right? You want Rubio and JD Vance to wear Trump like an albatross around their necks.

Well best of luck with that.  I hope it works.  However, since I've been to this rodeo more than once already, I feel it is my duty to mention that, prior to Trump, the previous Worst President in Modern American History was George W. Bush.  After whom her "Bush line" is named.  And after he left office, there was a broad consensus that, god damn, that was awful.  And golly, we sure don't want to do that again!

And yet, in the blink of an eye, the Republican base had scuttled through the Bush-Off Machine and was reborn as blameless, patriotic Tea Baggers.  

Conservative hacks and henchmen in the media all kept their jobs or got promotions, and many of the Bush administration's loudest cheerleaders were rewarded with positions at The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The New York Times.  

Overnight, the entire Conservative media machine became the very loud, very racist, and very profitable Voice of the Resistance.  

Ann Coulter went right on making scads of cash writing garbage.   

Just before Obama took office 2008, Rush Limbaugh signed a $400 million, 8-year deal.

Bush's go-to torture apologist, John Yoo, was appointed the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at UC Berkeley Law.

Paul "Spitcomb" Wolfowitz was gifted the presidency of the World Bank.

Dick Cheney's mini-me spawn, Liz, was elected to the House and quickly rose to a leadership position by telling monstrous, toxic lies just like dear old dad.

And as far as I can tell, most of the rest of them ended up being re-elected to congress, as regular MSNBC contributors, or with their own shows on MSNBC.  

And I see no reason why the people with the megaphones wouldn't rerun the process of mass strategic forgettery and ouchless absolution post-Trump just as they did post-George W.    Because RDD is still as contagious as the flu and more persistent than herpes.  

I Am The Liberal Media!

Killing The Steel Man

This month's announcement from Liberal High Command of the new regulations will be of special interest to Liberal podcasters and bloggers:

Henceforth it shall be considered a Class Three Code of Conduct violation to perform Steel Man or Steel Man-adjacent* "debates" in public.    

A "Steel Man" argument is defined as taking an ordinary, stupid, easily-debunked Conservative talking point and saying, "Well, OK, but if my opponent were 100 times smarter and not a liar and a lunatic and a bigot, here's the argument they would have made." then debating that.  This absurd ritual is performed because you're so keen to show everyone how smart and civil and according to Hoyle you are by debating a sane Conservative that you invent one (known in the trade as "Sorkening".) Except that species went extinct a long time ago, so there you are, playing chess in the park against yourself.

What you do in the privacy of your own home is, of course, your own business.  If your kink is "Steel Manning" Ayn Rand or Nick Fuentes behind closed doors, have at it.  

But when you put it out on the street, it becomes public ontological masturbation.  

Stop it.

*(Steel Man-adjacent debates can be identified by the use of phrases like "To be fair..." and "The most generous interpretation..." and "Even if we grant the premise...")

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 994: An Epidemic of Recycled Lies

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.“  -- probably not Mark Twain

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