The Fascists and the Blind Men

Since all of us here are snobby Liberal elites, I assume you're all familiar with the parable of The Elephant and the Blind Men.  

If you're not, here it is, minus the happy ending where a Wise Man happens past and says, "Hey, you're all partially right!" and then they're all filled with joy and go off together and get drunk. and they all get jobs writing opinion pieces for The New York Times.

Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them, “Hey, there is an elephant in the village today.”

They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, “Even though we would not be able to see it, let us go and feel it anyway.” All of them went where the elephant was. Everyone of them touched the elephant.

“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.

“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.

“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.

“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.

“It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.

“It is like a solid pipe,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.

They began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that he was right....

Well this is not that story.

This is the story of four elite Conservatives who spent their entire careers willfully blinding themselves to the burgeoning rage, racism, paranoia, arrogant ignorance and lust for a dictator that was motivating the base of their party.

Instead, as they patted down the fascism at the heart of the Republican party,  they reported back to the world that...

“Unlike those heathen, gay-loving Liberals, the Republican party is deeply, sincerely and faithfully Christian,” said David French.

“Virtuous Republicans who care deeply about deficits and institutional norms are all that keep us safe from those Liberal monsters,” said Bret "Bug" Stephens.

"There will be no Trump coup,"  said His Eminence Ross Cardinal Douthat, primate of the Archdiocese of Dorkylvania.

“It's gonna be Rubio!” said David Brooks.

So today The New York Times has presented its readers with four extremely privileged, out-of-touch Conservative white dudes on the payroll of Times, all of whom have spent their entire professional lives being willfully blind to the monsters they were helping to spawn, and being utterly wrong about the one thing they were hired to have savvy opinions about based on their alleged expertise and insider knowledge: the state of play inside the Republican party, and what the Right was thinking and doing behind closed doors.    

Let's see how that worked out!

David Brooks: I’d add another phrase: “brokenism.” This is the belief system popularized by Alana Newhouse in Tablet magazine in 2022. It’s the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all down. Personally, I think some things are broken and some things are OK, but most of my Trump-supporting friends are brokenists. They get this from media consumption.

Translation: I personally have no idea what's going on but I gonna say that I still have Trump-supporting friends for some reason and they tell me...

David French: In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there’s a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other...

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Ross Douthat: I think there are all kinds of ways in which Trump’s popularity is connected to distinctive shifts in the culture in the last 15 years — the trends on both left and right that have boosted populists all over the Western world. But it’s also important to stress that part of what Republicans like about Donald Trump is just that Donald Trump is a Republican.

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides.  Also I don't have that much of a problem with Trump because he's mostly doing Republican stuff that I like.

Brooks: I’d offer up one more word for consideration: “exclusion.” Progressives really have spent the last few decades excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of institutions.

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Brooks: A lot of elite conservatives continue to struggle with what I call the near-abroad problem. They may dislike MAGA, but they (we) are mostly around progressives or moderates on a day-to-day basis, by virtue of being elite. These progressives sometimes make our teeth hurt. We react more strongly to minor sins of the people across campus than the major sins of the people far away. This is something I’m working on.

Translation:  We really don't know what we're talking about.  

Stephens:  The other point that can’t be emphasized enough: Trump wouldn’t be as popular as he is with his side of the country if Democrats and progressives weren’t as unpopular with most sides of the country. Just the fact that he drives the Rachel Maddows of the world into fits of rage and despair and thoughts of European exile is reason enough for many Americans to support him. Sometimes even including me.

Translation:  My bone-deep loathing of Liberals remains undimmed and I will exploit any opportunity to drag them into any subject for a little hippie punching.  

French: Those of us who follow politics closely always seem to forget that we’re the strange ones. I really question how much the average rank-and-file Republican even knows about most of these early controversies. If you’re watching Fox News or other right-wing outlets, you’re hearing a lot of stories about strange, “woke” programs funded by U.S.A.I.D. They don’t know about the lives that are saved or the lives that are at risk.

That means they won’t know, much less care, about any given political controversy until it affects them personally.

Translation:  We really don't know what we're talking about.  

Douthat: Second, I would emphasize that many Americans experienced the recent period of liberal power, especially under Covidian conditions, as much more authoritarian and lawless-feeling in its everyday impact ... than anything they experienced under Trump.

 Translation:  I'm with Stephens.  Liberals are the worst.

Stephens: ...some of what Trump is doing is simply a turbocharged version of what his liberal predecessors did while the mainstream press remained mostly mum. Remember Barack Obama’s threats of unilateral executive action through his phone and his pen? Or Joe Biden’s almost open flouting of the Supreme Court with his student loan forgiveness schemes? I also think millions of Americans are tuning out some of the claims of Trump’s unconstitutional behavior as so much partisan noise. That’s one of the downsides of some of the more doubtful efforts by liberal prosecutors to put Trump in jail.

Translation:  Have I mentioned that I still really, really fucking hate Liberals and will use any opportunity to drag them into any subject for a little hippie punching? Also Liberals are really to blame for everything.

French: ... We’ve seen this pattern throughout the Trump years. Trump will advance an illegal or unconstitutional policy, MAGA lawyers will spring to MAGA media to rationalize and justify it, and then, when even conservative judges or justices block Trump’s actions, they scream that the courts are lawless, not Trump.

Translation:  Fuck you, Stephens.  I'm an actual lawyer not some DEI hire from the Wall Street Journal brought on because Cardinal Douthat here wasn't red meat wingnut enough for the five MAGA rubes who Sulzberger believes still read his paper.  

French: It’s so important to distinguish between the core of MAGA — which dominates discourse online — from the bulk of voters who put Trump back in the White House.

driftglass: No it's not.  If they're not out-and-proud fascists, they extremely cool with being out-and-proud fascist-adjacent.  Fuck 'em all:  the three-strikes rule applies to everyone who voted for Trump during his third run for the White House.

Douthat: It’s not unique to MAGA, though — real partisans don’t change their vote just because the economy goes bad, and especially not under polarized conditions. It’s not like the inflation under Biden suddenly made partisan Democrats...

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Stephens: Well, Treasury Secretary Bessent is right. Market corrections are healthy. Recessions should sometimes happen.

Translation:  Let them eat cake.

Healy: Trump calling for the impeachment of that judge — and the notion of impeaching or disregarding judges generally whom Trump disagrees with.

Stephens: Terrible. I only stop to observe that all the liberals who went berserk over John Roberts’s nomination to the court 20 years ago owe the chief justice an apology...

Translation:  I am so consumed by my hatred of Liberals that there is nothing left inside of me, and it's really, really unfair that Trump's awfulness makes it harder to devote every word in every column I write to the subject of just how monstrous Liberals are.  

Stephens: Musk is off to a bad start in his government career, but I sincerely wish him success. The federal government isn’t just too big, it’s obese. Elon may yet be its Ozempic.

Translation:  Burn it all down -- I'll bring the marshmallows!  -- except for the parts I like.  

Douthat: We are two months into the presidency, and we just lived through four years of dramatic global and domestic upheaval under a Democratic president whose manifest incapacity was deliberately concealed from the country. I have a million concerns about where this administration is going, but it’s a bit soon to attack the president’s supporters for being irrationally loyal.

Translation:  I'm with Stephens.  Democrats are the worst.

In conclusion, while the four New York Times Conservatives columnists did collectively manage to blame both sides, express their unalloyed contempt for people like me, and confess that they have no idea what people outside of their tiny cossetted bubble of privilege think about a damn thing, they very definitely did not pinpoint why the reprogrammable meatbag base of the Republicans party love Trump more than before.

For the answer to that question they would need to stop sniffing each others Buckley farts and ask any one of us who A) live well outside their tiny cossetted bubble of privilege and, B) have been writing about the Republican party for 20 years now.  

Which they will never do because an honest answer would, well...

It is one of the more amusing ironies of our age that while elite New York Times Conservatives (and The Atlantic Conservatives, and The Bulwark Conservatives, and so on) may be anathema to the Republican MAGA base, both groups detest Liberals for exactly the same reason:  our existence and our decades of warnings make both groups look stupid.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 885: The Real 'Cancel Culture'

"Where yesterday has been exiled, Memory is Rebellion."  -- driftglass, January, 2010

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 884: Our New Fake Sponsor $BOSCO and The Week's News

"Revolutionize your financial paradigm with BOSCO, the disruptive decentralized ecosystem leveraging quantum-resistant blockchain architecture."  -- Tacitus.

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...Even The Police Began To Sit Up And Take Notice.

 

Some professional journalism types are just now starting to play catch-up, bless their hearts.

To demonstrate this phenomenon, we first have to do some of that No Fair Remembering Stuff.

This is an excerpt from WHYY Boston's Philadelphia's* PBS station, from December of 2014.  And it is recounting events going back to 2001 and 2002:

But the thing is, Dick Cheney always Knows. 

 

His brand is blind certitude – “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” “We will in fact be greeted as liberators,” and the rest of his greatest hits – yet Meet the Press continues to indulge him. Which brings me to yesterday’s most groan-worthy moment.

At one point, host Chuck Todd asked Cheney whether he has any regrets about toppling Saddam Hussein. Cheney naturally said no, because Hussein “had previously had twice nuclear programs going. He produced and used weapons of mass destruction. And he had a ten-year relationship with Al Qaeda.” (Italics are mine.)

For more than a decade on Meet the Press, Cheney has been peddling variations of that lie – the lie that Hussein plotted 9/11 with Al Qaeda – in order to justify the ruinous invasion of Iraq. And he’s still doing it. And his hosts are still letting him get away with it.

Most notoriously, in December 2001 and in September 2002, Cheney said on the show that it was “pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had met in Prague with a Saddam secret agent “several months before the attack.” Actually, it had not been confirmed. As the bipartisan 9/11 Commission reported in 2004, the Atta-Hussein connection had been nothing more than a rumor.

The 9/11 Commission said that Al Qaeda and the Hussein regime had occasionally communicated over the years, but “we have seen no evidence that these contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen any evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

Three years later, in 2007, a report by the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command reached the same conclusion. There was ” no ‘smoking gun’ between Saddam’s Iraq and Al Qaeda,” the defense analysts wrote, because Saddam and Al Qaeda didn’t trust each other. “To the fundamentalist leadership of Al Qaeda, Saddam represented the worst kind of  ‘apostate’ regime. A secular police state well practiced in suppressing internal challenges.”

If a “liberal” media outpost like Meet the Press persists in putting Cheney on the air, the least it should do is fact-check him by quoting the 9/11 Commission and the Pentagon report. Giving him free rein to lie yet again – in support of a long-discredited war rationale – is arguably far worse than giving him the mic to make the case for torture.

Put a pin in the these statements: "'liberal' media outpost like Meet the Press" and "the least it should do is fact-check him".  A big pin.

Early on it came to be known to anyone who was paying attention that the venerable Meet the Press was, in fact, Dick Cheney's favorite place to put his lies into the public record because they never pushed back.  

From The LA Times, February 12, 2007:

Those of us who get a kick out of watching Tim Russert every Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” are feeling a little hangdog these days. We always thought Big Russ Jr. was tough on the powerful. Now we learn that to some Washington media types on both the right and the left, he’s just a tool for the powerful.

What’s occasioned this perceptual turnabout is, of course, the perjury and obstruction trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, where Russert wrapped up two days of testimony last week. Libby says the NBC newsman fed him the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, who is at the center of the trial. Russert says he didn’t.

To ordinary viewers, though, whatever transpired during Libby’s phone call to Russert back in 2003 couldn’t be as jarring as what the trial has unearthed about Washington’s deeply cynical attitude toward “Meet the Press,” a venerable, 60-year-old staple of network TV and the No. 1-rated Sunday news talk show.

A former Cheney press aide testified last month that she pushed to get the vice president on Russert’s show to bat down negative news because it was “our best format,” a program where political handlers can “control the message.”

We now rejoin the present-day, already in progress...

This is from Margaret Sullivan who, some of you may know, is the former media columnist for The Washington Post, and the fifth public editor of The New York Times and the first woman to hold the position. In that role, she reported directly to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. as the "readers' representative".

From her newsletter yesterday.

As Donald Trump continued his chaotic and destructive march through a second term, the New York Times had a few choice words for what he’s doing, as they promoted an audio offering.

Ready?

“Trump’s New Charm Offensive.” I posted the full headline on social media, asking “Really, NYT?” and one respondent said she was so upset when she saw it earlier that day, she canceled her subscription over it.

That seems extreme since the Times has done a lot of very good reporting in recent weeks. But the headline does seem quite unhinged from reality, and it makes me wonder why no one stopped to question or change it. It represents the soft-focus presentation we see all too often that may well be an intentional business strategy on the part of the Times — everybody invited in to the big tent.

Here’s another over a David Sanger piece about how Trump’s policies supposedly would restore America’s manufacturing economy. (Sanger is excellent and deeply experienced, and the piece itself — mostly about Trump’s tariffs — is well reported.) The headline: “Trump’s Big Bet: Americans Will Tolerate Economic Downturn to Restore Manufacturing.”

As one Times reader aptly commented: “The headline here is misleading — none of Trump’s current policies will do anything to bring back manufacturing (quite the opposite) so treating Trump’s hypothesis as even remotely plausible is a massive disservice.” Here’s a gift version of the article; judge for yourself, and do scan the scathing comments.

Why does The Times too often normalize Trump like this, even now? Readers, your thoughts? Let me know. I have some theories, hinted at above and probably to be further developed in a separate post.

Ms. Sullivan was a journalist at the Post and the Times for decades, as well as the the public editor at the Times, which gave her daily one-on-one contact with the Times' publisher, so why in the name of Breslin and Royko is she asking her readers for their "thoughts" on the motives behind the Times' publishing this drivel?  

How the fuck would they know?  Also, Liberal bloggers have already spent more than 20 year theorizing why the Times and the rest of the legacy media are so addicted to Both Siderist bullshit, and are so prone to going soft and belly-up when confronted with belligerent Republican fuckery,

So instead coyly trying to crowdsource speculation about a question to which, as a former member of the Times' inner circle, you should damn well already know, why don't you tell us in plain, clear language why Sulzberger is doing this?  Or engage in that, y'know, journalism thing and do what none of the rest of us have the standing to pull off: call Sulzberger directly and ask him?

Meanwhile, over in the March 6, 2025 edition of The Contrarian, former CNN employee Josh Levs says "fact checks" are too little too late: "What we need in America is a truth countermovement." 

Why all those Trump fact checks are too little too late

Many Americans distrust the media, largely because false claims have gone unchallenged for so long.

In the latest episode of my podcast They Stand Corrected, which fact checks the news, I looked at the Sunday political talk shows. By the time I pieced through the transcript for just one of those shows, I found more uncorrected misstatements of fact than I could cover in a single episode. 

First, put another pin in this sentence: "By the time I pieced through the transcript for just one of those shows, I found more uncorrected misstatements of fact than I could cover in a single episode."  Another big pin.  We shall revisit it later.  

Second, wowzers!  

You mean the crown jewels of American political reportage were riddled with uncorrected lies?  

Tell me more!

For example, on a recent Meet the Press, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said, “What Oklahomans want is to make sure that we get rid of the waste and fraud inside the federal government. And that's exactly what the president has done. They've already identified billions, billions of dollars of waste and fraud for the taxpayers.”

Host Kristen Welker mentioned that “they haven't provided proof of fraud.” But Mullin’s claim about all that alleged “waste” went uncorrected, even as he repeated it. “Within only four short weeks, we've already identified over fifty-five billion dollars of waste and fraud,” he insisted. That's not true. At the time of the interview, there was already proof that “DOGE,” the Department of Government Efficiency, had no clue what it was doing. Viewers wouldn’t know this.

Mullin was also asked about protests across the country and in his home state. “The chair of the DNC, Ken Martin, openly admitted on MSNBC just yesterday that they were manufacturing these protests,” he insisted. “They were bussing in armies to manufacture these protests.” None of this is true. But NBC’s Meet the Press let that claim go.

Meanwhile, CBS’ Face the Nation interviewed Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Trump’s request. “We've had, you know, close to a million-and-a-half deaths” in the Ukraine war, he claimed. No. Trump and his team have thrown around figures like that, but none of the figures available about Russia’s war on Ukraine shows casualty counts anywhere near that high. But no one watching that interview would know.

When I bring up this problem to news executives, they often respond with some version of, “Well, it's live. How are we supposed to fact check everything?” That's faulty thinking. Who says all this has to be live? What if news agencies—shocking idea—pre-recorded interviews and only aired them with fact checks?

And the solution?

What we need in America is a truth countermovement: a national demand for the media to cut through disinformation and deliver only the truth, always.

Until then, Americans will all too often be left freezing in a blizzard, drenched by a firehose, or under fire amid a blitzkrieg. And unscrupulous leaders will continue to wreak havoc through shameless lying.

I must now reveal a terrible truth about myself.  For the better part of two decades I ran a feature on my little blog out here in the middle of Middle America called "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" or "Sunday's Mouse Circus"  or "Voice of Empire".  I got bored every few years and changed the name.  

Anyway, every Sunday I wrote out a long deconstruction of most of the network Sunday Shows.  I started doing this back at Castle Driftglass in Chicago, before I had cable or any "Pause" or "Rewind" capacity.  This was before YouTube had video clips up for reference (Hell, practically before YouTube existed) and before transcripts were readily available.  

I watched as many as I could manage, live, on over-the-air broadcast teevee, remote in-hand, clicking back and forth between them all, or as many as I could stand, and transcribing as fast as I could, or at least extracting the gist and presenting it in my own, uh, style.

Here's a sample.  From me in January of 2006.  And, yes, that's 19 years ago...

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Through an ass darkly…”

Wherein the GOP demonstrate their “Pre-1776” mindset.

Two quick-and-dirty highlights right up front that had me worried about my mental health.

Consider…

On Fox….in his ongoing fit of “Everybody Does It!”, Dirty-Jack was-a-bipartisan-pimp compulsive onanism, Chris Wallace frantically Abramoff’s himself all over his guest’s clean, Progressive suit, followed by an interview a coupla “Young Guns of the GOP”.

(Last week it was three Republican “reformers” that had squeegeed enough Dirty Jack Wank off their faces for us to see their lyin’ eyes and, forming a Papa, Mama and Baby Bear GOP Denial Kickline, managed to force their mouths to say the words “GOP Reformers” without that chemical cocktail that supersized The Joker’s pie-hole in “Batman”.

The contest, last week and this, is now how far and how fast can you distance yourself from Abramoff, and how many times can you repeat a variation of the phrase “bipartisan scandal”.

Abramoff? Never met the man.

Jack Abramoff? Never heard of him.

Lifelong-GOP-powerbroke-and-my-son’s-godfather, Jack Abramoff??? Why, he doesn’t even really exist. He’s just a Neocon Kaiser Soze we dreamed up; a myth to scare little Republicans.

As twas prophesied, they shall deny him three times before the cock crows. And Andy Sullivan wasn’t even on the Matthews’ Show this week.)

And then, on NBC – this week as last -- Chris Matthews doodles “George + Chris 4ever!!!” all over his Sunday Morning spiral-notebook, and openly pines and sighs for his Strong Man President to Rhett Butler him up the stairs, into the Lincoln Bedroom, for some rough, fascist sex that will finally make a real woman out of him...

FYI, the post goes on and on, covering most of the Sunday Shows.  For context, at this point George W. Bush's little over-by-Christmas Iraqi adventure was a full-on clusterfuck and now everyone could see it.  Which made all the usual Conservative pundits (who has spent the last few years giddily shitting all over us Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving Liberals on these very same shows) very uncomfortable.  

Here, preserved in the digital amber of my blog archives, was just such a moment on "This Week...".  From the same January, 2006 post.

[George] Will unpacks his wee soapbox, clambers atop it, and says, sure, we can bomb the crap out of Iran and knock it back ten years or so.

But, Will asks, “Then what?”

“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask bef…”

And in that perfect little jewel of a moment you could positively smell Karl Rove tickling the joystick that controls the high-voltage, barbed wire cock-ring that the GOP keeps wrapped around the withered sac of its pet journalists.

George unwrapped his lips from around the words he was just about to say like a man stung in the gums by a wasp the size of an Escalade. He then quickly shifted gears and began nattering on about Admiral Yamamoto telling the Japanese high command that, sure, he could attack the U.S. fleet and run wild in the Pacific for a “year and a day.”

…but “Then What?”

Of course the statement Will was verging on making before Karl the Klown jolted him back to goodthinkfulness was this:

“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask…before we invaded Iraq.”

But of course, that’s kind of a sore subject; one that the Stalinist Right has striven mightily to stomp down the ol’ Memory Hole and piss away into the mists of forgotten myth and lore.

Because, of course, people did ask that question before Dubya rolled our children into Iraq to be slaughtered behind his PNAC fantasies and petroleum dream, didn’t they George?

Millions and millions and millions of people asked that very question.

Very Loudly.

They were called Democrats, George.

And your Party called them unAmerican, remember George?

And even the Democrats who supported the invasion of Iraq –- and there were many of them -- made it very clear that they were not giving your President a blank check.

The Dem’s made it abundantly clear that there needed to be concrete, convincing evidence of an imminent threat. Evidence of WMDs delivered by inspectors on the ground. Evidence of some linkage to 9/11.

They demanded that enough troops be used to get the job done. And they insisted on a clear exit strategy.

And your President mumbled, “Yeah…Ok…whatever”, blew off every warning and caution, grabbed the keys to the car and drove it right off the fucking cliff, didn't he George?

And the Democrats who had made the epic mistake of trusting a dim little creep like George Bush to behave responsibly with the national Credit Card?

Your Party called them weak and cowardly, remember George?

Funny how you seem the effortlessly remember, oh, say, every stray stat surrounding Cal Koonce’s ERA, but can’t seem to remember these rather vitally important, life-and-death facts about your Party and President, isn’t is George?...

Once again, back in present day, someone needs to tell former CNN employee Josh Levs that my stuff is not unique.  A lot of other Liberal bloggers and podcasters were doing this too, and some still are.  We didn't just "[piece] through the transcript for just one of those shows" one time: collectively we deconstructed all of the shows, every Sunday, for decades.

And you know what, Josh?  It didn't make the slightest difference.  In fact, all of those shows just kept getting exponentially worse.  

So Josh, when you say "What we need in America is a truth countermovement." I don't know whether to laugh or cry or simply reply,  you mean like... Liberal bloggers and podcasters?

Because we're already out here, Josh, promiscuously violating the legacy media rules about not remembering inconvenient things every day,

And we've been doing it for decades.

*Thanks Alert Readers for the catch!

I Am The Liberal Media

Cuck Schumer

"You were given the choice between war and dishonour.  You chose dishonor, and you will have war" -- Winston Churchill.

In February of 2021, seven Republican senators crossed the aisle to vote with Democrats to impeach Donald Trump for the second time:

7 GOP Senators Voted To Convict Trump. Only 1 Faces Voters Next Year

That vote failed to meet the 2/3rds majority threshold which would have removed Trump from office, barred him from holding any future office and spared us all the nightmare we are living through now. Because, despite giving as good an imitation of an impassioned speech as an empty husk with a dead soul can give, in the end then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to take the coward's way out when he refused to vote for impeachment, and refused to whip his caucus for enough votes to impeach.  

In private, of course, Republican leadership knew full well what kind of monster they had on their hands.  But after a minute or two of virtue signaling, they collapsed back into the cowardice/cynicism crouch which has defined the modern Republican party.  

‘I’ve Had It With This Guy’: G.O.P. Leaders Privately Blasted Trump After Jan. 6

In the days after the attack, Representative Kevin McCarthy planned to tell Mr. Trump to resign. Senator Mitch McConnell told allies impeachment was warranted. But their fury faded fast.

The confidential expressions of outrage from Mr. McCarthy and Mr. McConnell, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the immense gulf between what Republican leaders say privately about Mr. Trump and their public deference to a man whose hold on the party has gone virtually unchallenged for half a decade.

The leaders’ swift retreat in January 2021 represented a capitulation at a moment of extraordinary political weakness for Mr. Trump — perhaps the last and best chance for mainstream Republicans to reclaim control of their party from a leader who had stoked an insurrection against American democracy itself.

Instead McConnell took the time-tested approach of ignoring the problem and hoping it would just go away on its own.

‘Unchecked’ book excerpt: Inside McConnell’s decision not to convict Trump

“Let’s just ignore him,” the GOP Senate leader said at one point, underscoring his hands-off approach on whether to stand up to pro-Trump lawmakers after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol

And if ignoring the monster they created didn't work, well, who ya gonna call when Republicans fuck things up and don't have the moral character to fix what they have broken?

“The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” Mr. McConnell said, referring to the imminent impeachment vote in the House.

And now, by a darkly hilarious quirk of history, seven is also the number of Democratic senators (well, six and one Independent) who, instead of crossing the aisle to stand up to Trump, have crossed the aisle to join with 100% of Republican senators to invest Trump with virtually dictatorial powers ... sign Washington D.C.'s death warrant ... a list of other horribles

For future reference, the senators who sold us out and sold out their House colleagues who voted the right way are John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, my very own senator Dick Durbin of Illinois to his everlasting shame, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Gary Peters of Michigan, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York,  Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and  Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats.

And the leader of this cadre of weaklings and sell swords was, as you also already know, Senate Minority Leader, Cuck Schumer.

Schumer is a creature shaped by the ancient mores and folkways of a Beltway culture which no longer exists and which, by all rights, should have died when they put old David Broder in the ground.  The culture of High Borderism in which it was acceptable for Republicans to lie and sabotage with, as Steve Benen wrote back in 2009 "no apparent interest in being a credible governing partner, and no intention to negotiate honestly", but it was unpardonably rude -- perhaps even a fainting offense -- for Democrats to point this out.

As I wrote of David Fucking Brooks a short time ago, even though, just like the rest of us, Schumer has had his nose repeatedly rubbed in the fact that the old gods are dead, unlike the rest of us, Schumer is still paying obeisance to this long-dead god in a temple which has long since fallen to rubble.  

Schumer is a creature of back-slapping, backroom deal-making, where there is always a shitty "bipartisan" compromise to be found somewhere.  He is one of the last of a species that is going extinct, but that doesn't realize they are already doomed.  Who doesn't know how to function in a world where Trump is possible, and where all his friends on the Right have either retired, died or gone full fascist, but who are equally incapable of understanding that it is long past time to step aside and let the new people fight this new fight. 

And the thing is, above almost anyone else, Schumer should fucking well know better.

As I write this we are just days away from the 22nd anniversary of George W. Bush's Iraqi Clusterfuck.  His ill-conceived war of conquest, launched on March 20, 2003 on the basis of a farrago of lies, and which ended up being the greatest American military debacle since Vietnam.  But Bush's Iraqi Clusterfuck would never have gotten out of the gate without the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution.

And the day after the House passed the AUMF, the Senate followed suit, and by a vote of  77–23 gave Bush their official OK to go forth and conquer. And one of the 29 Democrats who voted to give Bush permission to do whatever the fuck he wanted to do was Schumer.  

Of course, a lot of Dems made the same mistake, including John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.  In fact, it's fair to say that had Barack Obama not been able to point to the position he publicly took against the war --

-- Hillary Clinton may well have been the party's 2008 nominee.  And had Obama not "blessed" Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton by making them his Vice President and Secretary of State respectively, it's quite possible that neither one of them could have overcome the stigma of their vote enough to win the party's nominations for president. 

However, today that's not the point.  Today we ask the question, "What should Schumer have learned from the last time he voted to hand a lying and dangerously incompetent Republican president a blank check?"

And thanks to his own public comments, we have the answer to that question.  From the AP:

Twenty years on, reflection and regret on 2002 Iraq war vote

... Another “yes” vote on the Senate floor that night was New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, now Senate majority leader. With the vote coming a year after Sept. 11 devastated his hometown, he says he believed then that the president deserved the benefit of the doubt when a nation is under attack.

“Of course, with the luxury of hindsight, it’s clear that the president bungled the war from start to finish and should not have ever been given that benefit,” Schumer said in a statement. “Now, with the war firmly behind us, we’re one step closer to putting the war powers back where they belong — in the hands of Congress.”

With the luxury of hindsight of Trump's first term and everything he has said and done since then, it is 100% obvious to anyone with a pulse and a conscience that he should never, ever have been given the kinds of powers embedded in the CR.  

So, what did Cuck Schumer get in exchange for selling out his party and his country?

He earned himself the most bankrupt currency in politics: a handful of "Good Doggie" points from Grandpa Syphilis -- 

-- just days after Grandpa Syphilis said this about him:

Trump has decided that Chuck Schumer is ‘not Jewish anymore’

The American presidency is a powerful position, but it does not include the power to decide who is and is not Jewish.

And he appears to have succeeded in getting huge swath of the fractious and demoralized Democrat base to unite around a single issue:  Getting Cuck Schumer the fuck out of Senate leadership.  

 

Sunny is done with Sen Chuck Schumer’s bullshit and so am I. We need a strong leader that understands the threat that Donald Trump is. Time to step down Chuck, we need a new minority leader that will fight this current administration. #TheReformers pic.twitter.com/FopXGPNYzH

— Brian Cardone 🏴‍☠️🇺🇦 (@cardon_brian) March 17, 2025

Gone But Not Forgotten

Burn The Lifeboats

Il Douche Defiles The Memory of Fallen Soldiers. Again.

From Task & Purpose:

Arlington Cemetery website drops links for Black, Hispanic, and women veterans

The website for Arlington National Cemetery "unpublished" links to lists of notable graves, walking tours and educational material pertaining to Black, Hispanic and women veterans, as well as some Medal of Honor recipients.

Far too many otherwise intelligent people continue to be shocked when the America fascist party takes another depraved leap into darkness.  

Stop it.

The key to understanding American Conservatives is to never underestimate how deeply they hate this country.

Period.  Full stop.

No Half Measures

Professional Left Podcast Episode 883: The Media's Favorite Drug

"A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because it's accepted by a majority."  -- Booker T. Washington.

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