Looky Who's Getting A Glow Up From Our "Allies"

Once they were let into our Big Tent, unrepentant and ambitious to "reform" our party to their liking...

And once their friends in the media helped them colonize what little was left of the "Liberal" media and banish actual Liberals who had been right all along to the realm of the Neverborn...

...it was as inevitable as night following day that they would use their growing influence to reconstitute some version of the comfortingly familiar media ecosystem they once knew.  One that includes the likes of Chris Cillizza, but where you will find nary a one OG Liberal writer or podcaster.  

Burn The Lifeboats

Hit Dogs Holler: Modern Lessons from a Vintage Freakout

On the next episode of the Professional Left Podcast, we will be taking a deep dive into the long history of Republicans wildly overreacting.  (Spoiler: It didn't start with Natalie Harp.) And I thought one of the examples we pulled from the archives might be of special interest today.  

It's from a November 2005 column in The New York Times by the most ubiquitous Conservative writer in America, who is also America's leading finger-wagging chastiser on the subject of humility, comity and keeping a god-damn civil tongue in your head at all times no matter what the provocation.

At the time this column was published, Bush's Iraq debacle -- the war Bill Kristol said would be over in a matter of weeks and David Brooks declared won in April 2003 -- had dragged on longer than the entire U.S. involvement in World War I.  

2 years, 7 months, and 19 days, and counting.  And no WMDs had been found.  No bioweapons that we had been told were days away from being loaded onto planes and dispersed.  No hint of a nuclear program of any kind.  Nothing, except an armed Iraqi resistance that was getting stronger and more lethal every day.  An armed resistance we had created when Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2: "Dissolution of Entities" was issued on May 23, 2003, by L. Paul Bremer and which told the entire Iraqi army that they no longer had a job or a future under the U.S. occupation.  

So in late 2005,  Democratic Senator Harry Reid made the perfectly reasonable point that, now that it was undeniable that the intelligence used to justify the war had been wrong, Congress should investigate how the administration used – or misused – that intel in the run-up to the war.

And David Brooks Lost. His. Fucking. Mind.

From The Harry da Reid Code, by David Brooks, November 5, 2005, in The New York Times:

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It's been four weeks since he launched his personal investigation into the Republican plot to manipulate intelligence to trick the American people into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Reid had heard of the secret G.O.P. cabal bent on global empire, but he had no idea that he would find a conspiracy so immense.

Reid now knows that as far back as 1998, Karl Rove was beaming microwaves into Bill Clinton's fillings to get him to exaggerate the intelligence on Iraq. Reid now knows that in the late 1990's, Dick Cheney and other Republican officials used fluoridated water in the State Department and other government agencies to brainwash Clinton administration officials into exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein…

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It has been four weeks since he began investigating this conspiracy and three weeks since he sealed his windows with aluminum foil to ward off the Illuminati…

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m. He knows now that seven centuries ago at a secret meeting of the Bilderberg Society-Trilateral Commission-American Enterprise Institute, the six High Lords of the Secret Order of the Neocons decided to implant alien life forms into potential Democratic officials that could be activated in case there was a need to manipulate intelligence on Iraq...

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m. Odd thoughts rush through his brain. He cannot trust the letter "r," so he must change his name to Hawwy Weed. Brian Lamb secretly rules the world by manipulating the serial numbers on milk cartons.

Reid realizes there is only one solution: "Must call a secret session of the Senate. Must expose global conspiracy to sap vital juices! Must expose Republican plot to manipulate intelligence!"

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m. 

Scattered among these feeble chunks of... what?  Humor?  Satire?  ... there is a steady refrain of  "But Clinton!  What about Clinton!"  All of which was sad, and sick, and deeply pathetic. 

But most importantly, it also reeked of shrill desperation.  Because at this point even someone as ideologically blinkered as Brooks could see that the war he had so energetically championed was a disaster.  And the anti-war Left he had so ferociously mocked and slandered were turning out to have been right all along.

But instead of manning up, doing the right thing and owning his colossal fuck up, Brooks opted to use his Times real estate to do the Republican thing: stage a ludicrously over-the-top attack on Harry Reid for daring to suggest that pre-war intel should be looked into.  

And having been to this rodeo more than once, we OG bloggers know the yelping, freakout sound of a nerve being struck.

It sounds like The Harry da Reid Code, by David Brooks.

It also sounds like this:

Burn The Lifeboats

The Amplification of Memes

No, it's not always this linear.  Often it's recursive.  But I wanted to make it so simple that a child could understand it.

For example, early on, Trump won over the mob by speaking to them in their political mother tongue -- the language and lies of Hate Radio and Fox News.

Later, Trump's lies and slanders got message-tested on MAGA bigots and imbeciles at his rallies.  When they cheered, that line went into the playbook; when they didn't, that line got dropped or sent back to the workshop.

And since America's bigots and imbeciles -- that ignorant army that clashes by night -- saw fit to put him back in office, more and more frequently Trump just commandeers the entire propaganda delivery system.  He demands that everyone downstream of him repeat and amplify his gibbering idiocy, and rise to defend his indefensible behavior. 

So while Trump has risen over the past decade from the Accelerator of Lies to the Father of Lies, the purpose of the system has changed not at all.  It's still doing what it was designed to do forty years ago: vacuum up the most incendiary swill it can find -- or, more often, just make shit up -- and fill the air with it.  

And if Democrats are serious about not just eking out narrow victories over fascism from time to time but crushing it root and branch, then smashing the Conservatives' Pretty Hate Machine is imperative. 

From me, 20 years ago (and from which I assume Rick Wilson has pilfered the title of his upcoming book, because aren't all Never Trump critiques pilfered from the archives of the Liberal blogosphere?)

Sadly, the Democrats' current strategy of pouring crazy amounts of money into campaign ads every two years and nothing into building a genuine, for-real Liberal media is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

I Am The Liberal Media!

Can't Stop Won't Stop

This was a lead story in The New York Times today.

The short answer, which is actually rather long, is "No".

This is roughly the 12,258th "think piece" on progressive outsiders winning a few Democratic primaries.  It's nearing the "But Her Emails" saturation point. And these articles tend to come either in one of two flavors.  

First, Dire!Warnings! cursing Democrats for risking dooming us all by not becoming GOP Lite in order to chase the votes of disaffected Republicans.  These articles tend to come from (small wonder) recently-former Republicans whose "advice" to Democrats has always been -- rain or shine -- to keep moving rightward, ever-rightward -- in pursuit of an imaginary Center which is always, somehow, slipping over the horizon.  

Second, there are the breathless articles touting how a few members of the Democratic majority (do the math) are fighting back hard against a small number of progressives with whom they have no intention of sharing even a small corner of the Democrat's Big Tent.  Mind you, they had no fucking problem when it came to sharing our Big Tent with ghouls like Liz Cheney who spent their entire career slandering Democrats in the most monstrous language imaginable...but us New Deal Democrats get nothing but the stink-eye and a boot in the ass from the gatekeepers who own the velvet ropes. 

From The New York  Times, August 6, 2026:

Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left

One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.

The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful defeat of the year.

Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism. 

It will not shock you to learn that Third Way gets its money from Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech as well as outfits such as ExxonMobil and various health insurance companies.  All the usual suspects who would rather see a MAGA flag flying over this country forever than share the Democratic Party with actual progressives.

Now, it is rumored that this “Better Dead than Al-Sayed” gang of Regressives is led by a shadowy figure known only as “David Fucking Brooks”.  And two Fridays ago Mr. Brooks left his Bethesda Maryland compound just long enough to appear on the PBS News Hour where, practically in tears, he said this.

Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.

That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which the party is moving further and further away from the center, and therefore…

At which point, Brooks co-panelist, Jonathan Capehart, reached his limit of politely tolerating this old fraud's endless bullshit and interrupted him with:

I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket argument that the Democratic Party is running far left. 

That was the signal for the host – Amna Nawaz – to do the PBS thing of quickly moving on to the next topic at the slightest sign of conflict.

However, since I do not abide by PBS rules, I will just add that it is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at this moment".  

It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.

And of course Third Way is not a solo act. They have plenty of fellow travelers who are horrified that a few Democratic candidates have won their primaries in ways that Third Way, LLC does not approve of.  

From The Washington Post, June 3rd, 2026:

Centrist Democrats launch new pledge: ‘We are capitalist, not socialist’

Two Democrats in Congress who flipped Republican-held seats in 2024 are launching a pledge for their party’s candidates they hope will act as a rallying cry for centrists, calling for a “politics of persuasion over purity” and declaring that “we are capitalist, not socialist.”

The pledge is a direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt as democratic socialists such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) capture the party’s energy and activism.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Adam Gray (D-California) said they will unveil the pledge Wednesday afternoon at the center-left conference WelcomeFest, and hope to get candidates up and down the ballot to join them in signing it. 

From Common Dreams, February 9th, 2026:

‘One More Billionaire Front Group’: Centrist Dems Mocked Over New Initiative Led by Corporate Lobbyist

In fact, establishment panic over even mildly social-democratic ideas predates the current cycle by years.

From In These Times, seven years ago,  February 7, 2019:

Why Is the Political Establishment So Afraid of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal?

So, the short answer is "No".

The longer answer -- the reason why the answer is "No" -- is uglier and deeply embarrassing to the legacy media, which is why you will never hear them speak of it.  Because it has to do with what the "Tea Party" actually was.

For several years I bored you all silly with post after post after post about how the Tea Party was not some new, insurgent outsider group who were storming the barricades of the moribund Republican party.  That they were the Republican party: the same ignorant, racist, shoutycrackers Republican base they'd always been, but now that the Bush administration had shit the bed hard enough to crack the Earth's mantle, they needed their own, incredibly inconvenient past to go away so they could get on with the important work of having a full-on, eight-year-long, screaming mental breakdown over the election of a Black man as president.

And they accomplished this by A) Putting on stupid hats, waving Gadsden flags, and swearing that they'd never even heard of George W. Bush and, B) Getting the legacy media to go along with this massive fraud, which the legacy media was only too eager to do, given their own despicable complicity with the various crimes and treasons of the Bush administration.

And it worked.  And, as is our eternal fate, the only people willing to straight-up call bullshit on the whole scam were us dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically not a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam.  Ed Kilgore wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and E.J. Dionne. There was also this July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:

The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

No, no, no!  Definitely could not say that because that would violate the post-Dubya Generally Accepted Beltway Narrative that all problem are caused by "the extremes on Both Sides" and in the middle there is a "vital Center" full of millions of political virgins who had been moved by the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.

And to this very day, that lie continues to be one of those "Zombie lies", which everyone sorta knows is nonsense -- like Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves -- but has so completely passed into the realm of myth that the legacy media keeps right on pretending that it was actually true.  

In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth was so secure that by 2016 Joe Scarborough could finally come right out and say of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all knew it  and know with perfect certainty that there would be consequences (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

And that's the longer answer.  The Democrats are not facing their own "Tea Party" moment because There. Was. No. Tea. Party.  There was just the Bush-Off Machine goin' like 60 to rebrand the Republican base.  

What corporate Democrats are facing are ... New Deal Democrats.  People who revere FDR as the man who crushed fascism, and whose programs built the Middle Class, strengthened the union movement and helped insure that old age and poverty weren't a death sentence.   

People who remember that FDR was called a commie by the Republican party and the Republican media every inch of the way.

People who look at the mess the establishment has made of this country and think the Middle Class could used some help, the aged, infirm and poor could use some help, that good health care should be affordable, that unions are a good thing, that robber barons and Republican looters are bleeding us dry and, most importantly, for any of that to happen, fascism in America must be discredited and destroyed, root and branch.  

I Am The Liberal Media!

Pop Quiz

I've done some very minor tailoring to this column to turn it into a fun puzzle for the whole family!  So...

Who said it?  When?  About what?

Go.

___ and the Polls

There's a reason George Washington didn't take a poll at Valley Forge. There are times in the course of war when the outcome is simply unknowable. Victory is clearly not imminent, yet people haven't really thought through the consequences of defeat. Everybody just wants the miserable present to go away.

We're at one of those moments in the war... The polls show rising disenchantment with the war. Sixty percent of Americans say they want to withdraw some or all troops.

Yet I can't believe majorities of Americans really want to pull out and accept defeat…

…one thing is for sure: since we don't have the evidence upon which to pass judgment on the overall trajectory of this war, it's important we don't pass judgment prematurely...

It's just wrong to seek withdrawal now, when the outcome of the war is unknowable and when the consequences of defeat are so vast.

Some of you will respond that this is easy for me to say, since I'm not over there. All I'd say is that we live in a democracy, where decisions are made by all. Besides, the vast majority of those serving... and their families, said they voted to re-elect ... They seem to want to finish the job.

Others will say we shouldn't be there in the first place. You may be right. Time will tell.

But right now, this isn't about your personal vindication…

I Am The Liberal Media

The Lincoln Curse?

As you probably already know, Donald Trump has turned the USS Abraham Lincoln into a floating gulag for any sailor unlucky enough to be stationed there:

Trump says record USS Lincoln deployment 'not nearly long enough'

President Donald Trump reacted to reports of poor conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln on Friday, claiming that families of service members are "not" concerned and saying that the vessel hasn't been deployed for "nearly long enough."

The president also confirmed that a new aircraft carrier is headed to the Middle East to replace it during a very brief gaggle with reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews Friday afternoon. 

The aircraft carrier's movements come amid reports of mental health and supply issues aboard the USS Lincoln, whose long deployment to the Middle East in support of the Iran war includes a record-setting time at sea of more than 200 days. Navy leaders, including the Navy's acting Secretary Hung Cao, last week held a heated town hall for families of the USS Lincoln who had raised concerns about the conditions on the ship.

Tapper: What is your husband saying about conditions on the ship? Wife of Service Member Aboard USS Lincoln: My husband is appalled at the conditions on this ship. This is not his first deployment. And he is saying that it is the worst deployment that he's ever been on. His shipmates say the same.

[image or embed]

— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) August 14, 2026 at 8:31 PM

This should come as no surprise, as Donald Trump has never given a shit about the United States military except as a toy for him to play with.  Trump also thinks anyone willing to risk their life for their country is a "sucker" and a "loser". 

John Kelly confirms Trump privately disparaged U.S. service members and veterans

Trump called fallen soldiers "suckers” and "losers" during his presidency, according to a 2020 report in The Atlantic.

But do you remember the fate of the USS Abraham Lincoln during the last Republican administration that lied us into a disastrous war in the Middle East and then catastrophically botched it?  

It was in all the papers.

That would be Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech, delivered on May 1, 2003.

And that, just two days before that speech, the cover story of the now-defunct Weekly Standard featured David Brooks declaring that The War Was Over! 

Yay!  

The Good Guys had triumphed! Neoconservatism had been vindicated.  And it was time for the resistance to crawl under a nearby porch and quietly die, or dry up and blow away or dissolve into laughably delusional absurdism.  

Pieces of Mr. Brooks' radioactively reckless and vindictive claptrap can be found here.

As you literati know, maritime myth and literature are full of stories about ships "sailing under a doom." The story of Jonah from the Bible.  The tale of the Mary Celeste.  The legend of the Flying Dutchman.  Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Poe's MS. Found in a Bottle.  Melville's Moby Dick.  And so on.

Now I'm not saying that the USS Abraham Lincoln is cursed.  I am saying that, if it is cursed, we definitely know why.  And that, out of an abundance of caution, it wouldn't hurt to burn some sage, flick a little holy water around, ring some church bells, and never, ever put another Republican in the White House.   

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1015: James and the Giant Screech

“All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds"  -- said sarcastically by Voltaire.

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1014: The New Red Scare

“You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.”  ― Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

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