Saturday, November 09, 2024

Ozymandias

In modern popular culture there may be no more perfect metaphor for the arc of the Never Trumpers than Breaking Bad, Season 5 Episode 14: Ozymandias.

If you haven't seen it and don't want to know how it goes, leave now.  You have been warned.

The episode opens on Walter White as a happily married man, out in the desert having just cooked his first batch of meth, lying a little awkwardly to his wife about where he was and what he was doing.  I mean, other than the actual cooking of the meth, he's not really a criminal, right?  Not a "criminal" criminal.  He's just breaking somes stupid law to raise enough money so that his wife and children won't be left penniless when he dies of the cancer that is killing him.

He's doing this for his family, for god's sake!  

For the Greater Good!

And for the next five years, as the peril and violence and extortion and bloodshed and money all kept escalating, Walter keeps telling himself that this was all worth it because he was doing this for his family, for god's sake!  

For the Greater Good.

But to keep this all going, over the course of those five years, Walter found he had to partner up with, at first, some bad people.  Then some very bad people. 

Then some very, very bad people.  

And, finally, literal Nazis. 

But when you think about it, golly, none of this was really his fault was it?  This was was just the price of keeping his political party meth empire going.  After all, his intentions were good.  He was doing all of  this for the highest motives.  For tax cuts and deregulation and freedom his family.  This was just how the game of politics meth was played.  Was it his fault he was really good at it?    And besides, he had everything under control and he was getting rich in the process.  Where's the harm?

And then one day exactly what anyone who was not a Never Trumper Walter White knew would eventually happen...happened.

Having grown his meth empire political party at the expense of giving away his power to Nazis. one day the Nazis were strong enough turned the tables.   As Never Trumpers Walter looked on powerless to stop what they he had set in motion, the Nazis at last had the money and the firepower to get away with doing whatever they want to do.  

And what they wanted to do was shoot Walter's DEA brother-in-law Liberal democracy in the head.

Walter begged them not to.  Offered them anything to please just don't do this, because Walter's DEA brother-in-law was family.  Because Never Trumpers Walter still clung to the delusion that somehow all of this had been for Conservative values  for his family, for god's sake!  

For the Greater Good!

Then the Nazis calmly shot Liberal democracy in the head without a second though.

Shot it in the head, laughed about it, collected their reward, buried the bodies in the desert and drove away.



I Am The Liberal Media

At The New York Times, The Inevitable Orgy Of Deflection, Rationalization and Hippy Punching.


All calculated to carry one message from the House of Sulzberger to the incoming fascist regime on bended knee. 

The Left had it coming.  Your rage, racism and paranoia is all completely justified.  So please don't hurt us!   Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don't care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me!



I Am The Liberal Media

America’s Pronoun Is Not “We”


And it hasn't been for a long time.   That graphic is from this post from 2010 about Citizen's United.

So my next doomed word-of-mouth campaign is urging that, whenever you hear pundits tsk-tsking the folly or ignorance or cruelty or 'economic anxiety' of "voters", "the public" or "the American people", kindly put a digital boot up their ass with my compliments.

This disaster was not brought to us by "voters", "the public" or "the American people".  It was delivered to us by the same bigots and imbeciles who always visit such catastrophes on us.  

It's the Republicans, stupid.



I Am The Liberal Media

Friday, November 08, 2024

David Brooks and the Road to Caricature



A few years from now when the New York Times building lies in ruins, you will still find Mr. David Brooks there, sitting amid the rubble like Mrs. Havisham, wearing tatters, keeping himself warm by burning remaindered copies of The Road to Character and offering to trash "the Left" for the price of a meal, a first-class Acela corridor train ticket and a $60 glass of top-shelf airport scotch.

Mind you, he will reassure you, his condition is temporary.  On his uppers only due to mistakes that will no doubt be rectified soon.  Sure, things look a little bleak now.  And, sure, Mr. Brooks' "teevee" appearances are now limited to sitting next to a discarded Amazon shipping box with the words "Meet the Press" scrawled on the side and fielding "questions" from a potato Brooks calls "David Gregory", but this is all just a misunderstanding.  A glitch in the Beltway matrix.  Just as soon as No Labels or the McCain/Lieberman party get back on their feet, and the Sulzberger family finishes up their vacation at whichever reeducation camp they've been assigned to, and that sweet-sweet Third Way money starts rolling, Brooks will be right back in the clover 

Just you watch!

But, or course, that is all in the future.

In the here and now,  Mr. Brooks is still gainfully employed by the House of Sulzberger and still frantically trying to appease the fascists by playing the golden oldies in the hopes that during the Trump 2.0 regime, the orthodoxy police won't take his lunch money and stuff him in a locker forever.

And so, as was the case in 2004 and 2006 and 2008 and 2010 and 2012 and 2016 and 2018 and 2020 and 2022, so is now the case in this annus horribilis of 2024.   It is once again time for Brooks to assure his tiny, terrified readership that: 

  • None of this has anything to do with racism or misogyny, 
  • Trump is not a fascist, 
  • The concerns of the "working class" (about whom Brooks knows absolutely nothing) are all legitimate and economic-anxiety based, and,
  • This is all the fault of the pampered, privileged, college-degree-flauntin' "Left" who were so concerned with gender-studies classes or whatever that they yadda yadda yadda...

Think I'm kidding?

Nope.

From Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times today:

We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.

Fun fact:  Without the largesse of us snooty Blue state elitist snobs, the economies of those coal-and-Jebus-and-we-hate-Libtards Red states would collapse almost overnight.

Brooks again: 

[High school graduates] don’t speak in the right social justice jargon or hold the sort of luxury beliefs that are markers of public virtue.

The chasms led to a loss of faith, a loss of trust, a sense of betrayal...

And:  

These people, and many other Americans, weren’t interested in the politics of joy that Kamala Harris and the other law school grads were offering.

And:  

The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it’s hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and diversity seminars for a major corporation...

Except the Biden administration has been laser-focused on fighting for the working class.  Here is just a partial list of what they got done in the face of rabid and nearly-unified Republican opposition.

  • Unions are the strongest they've been in decades. 
  • Wages among the lowest earners grew the fastest.
  • The child tax credit was expanded.
  • A minimum corporate tax was enacted.
  • A tax on stock buybacks was added.
  • Passed the CHIPS Act.
  • High inflation was brought down to normal levels without a recession.
  • Millions of jobs were created.
  • Unemployment has remained low.
  • Presided over the return of manufacturing to the US.
  • Lowered prescription drug prices.
  • More Americans have healthcare than ever before.
  • Billions were given to student debt relief.
  • The American Rescue Plan got Americans back to work, covered Cobra payments, and even directly gave Americans money.
  • Biden actually, publicly supported labor.
  • Biden saved union pension funds.
  • Biden helped negotiate a favorable labor contract for railroad workers.
  • All the labor people here were *very* pro Harris.

And what did the Trump administration do for working men and women, besides getting hundreds of thousands of them killed by botching our response to the COVID pandemic?

You may remember almost exactly eight years ago, in November of 2016, when the election of Donald Trump shattered Brooks' hermetically-sealed terrarium of smug Centrism, Brooks did exactly the same thing: went hunting for villains on the Left to blame.  

And, finding none, he just made a bunch of shit up to justify his contention that if only Democrats had heeded Brooks' advice and been more Centrist...

From N.Y Magazine, November 29, 2016:

Brooks spent the last eight years defining the center as something Obama was not. It didn’t matter that Obama supported a health-care plan first devised by Mitt Romney, or a cap-and-trade plan endorsed by John McCain. Brooks nestled himself into the territory between Obama and the angry, no-compromise Republicans who were shutting down government and boycotting all negotiations with the president. If Obama endorsed the policies Brooks preferred, he would simply pretend that Obama had not proposed them. Indeed, one of the most common genres of David Brooks column was a sad lament that neither party would endorse policies that in fact Obama had explicitly and publicly called for.  

And eight years later, rather than inflict some painful truth on his privileged, timorous readership, it's once again time for Brooks to go 15 rounds with some of the tiredest, stupidest, most toxic Beltway straw men extant.

"What painful truth might that be?" you ask    This one.  From Esquire:

Kamala Harris Never Had a Chance

It’s obvious now. We should have known all along.

...Donald Trump’s victory lays bare the troubling-to-the-max truth that Vice President Kamala Harris never had a realistic shot to become the next president, that millions upon millions of Americans had predetermined to vote, at all costs, on behalf of white power/supremacy. That it mattered little-to-not-one-motherfucking-iota how much the vice president’s backstory affirmed the so-called American dream, or how excellent or qualified or experienced she was, or the fact that she has a clean criminal record and no bankruptcies. Her landslide loss made plain the truth that there was no policy she could propose to persuade a majority of white people, that it didn’t matter how much she preached about unity and peace and hope, that it mattered none the number of times she flashed her bright smile or how charismatic she was on SNL, that I was naive as fuck to think any of that would have ever been enough. 


Back to Brooks today again:

As the left veered toward identitarian performance art...

And again: 

There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again.

The alert reader will notice how, in Brooks' construction, the demonstrably bigoted, brainwashed and completely reprogrammable Republican base are transformed into "the American people".   Just as, say, a $60 glass of top-shelf airport scotch magically becomes "This is why Americans think the economy is terrible."

Brooks again:

American voters are not always wise, but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us. 

And again: 

Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores do this?

And again: 

Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism.

I would remind Brooks that every actual expert on fascism disagrees with his stupid opinion, and that sowing chaos is precisely how fascists rise to power,  but I'm betting Brooks already knows all of this.

Because Brooks is not a stupid or clueless man.

Brooks is a toxic parasite whose job for the last 20 years has been to spin reassuring fairy tales for the shrinking, cosseted readership of an ossified, terminally-ill media corporation run by a fourth-generation nepo baby.   


I Am The Liberal Media

Thursday, November 07, 2024

Professional Left Podcast Episode 852: Dread and Circuses


""There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny." " -- Frederick William Robertson.


Links:  

The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!













Wednesday, November 06, 2024

The Second Tower

It wasn't a fluke.

It wasn't pilot error.

It wasn't instrument failure.

This is what Republicans wanted, and now they have achieved it.

For longer than I'd care to think about we have been warning anyone who would listen that the Republican party was building a monster machine, and that if this went on, it would end in tears and terror. 

The Conservative elite laughed those warnings off as Liberal hysteria and crackpot alarmism until it was far too late.  Now most of the Conservative elite bends the knee to the demons they created, while a few flail around trying to understand what just happened, and a fewer still seem willing to entertain the possibility that the Republican base they helped to create really are a mob or reprogrammable meatbags and completely lost to reason.

The legacy media mocked and ignored those warnings as absurd, or childish or otherwise unserious, or somehow too shrill and strident to be "tonally" acceptable.  They categorically refused to see the danger coming for them with knives out until it was far too late.  Now most of the legacy media bends the knee to the monsters they enabled, while a few stumble about looking for an answer -- any answer -- that doesn't implicate them.

As for me, other than being unutterably sad at the outcome of the election and fearful in a hundred new ways about the future, nothing has fundamentally changed in my estimation of the forces at work in our country.  The Republicans party remains a fascist killdozer being run by hobgoblins and grifters.  The legacy media continues to be a near-comatose husk of its former self, being run by amoral moguls and fascist-friendly cooperators.  

The dangers have escalated and are much more immediate, but other than the fact that no one need bother with figleave hyphenates like "neo-" or "proto-" to describe what is very clearly our  American fascist party, the job remains the same.  Protect the weak and the vulnerable who didn't ask for and do not deserve any of this, support each other and take it one day at a time.  

So whether you are a person of faith or not, whether in victory or defeat, this by  John Wesley remains sound advice.

“Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.”

Best of luck to us all. 

-- driftglass



I Am The Liberal Media



Tuesday, November 05, 2024

Hi Keith!


"Tontine" is a fun word.  

ton·tine
/ˈtänˌtēn/

noun
  • an annuity shared by subscribers to a loan or common fund, the shares increasing as subscribers die until the last survivor enjoys the whole income.
  • a life insurance plan in which the beneficiaries are those who survive and maintain a policy to the end of a given period.

Ancient.  

1755–65; < French; named after Lorenzo Tonti, Neapolitan banker who started the scheme in France about 1653.

Nice mouth-feel.  And fairly obscure.  You who know me know I love obscure words.   And you just don't see "tontine" in everyday conversation.  Ever.  

Except, strangely enough, in the last two days, in two places.  Even stranger, from two different Liberal media sources.

The odds of this happening coincidentally?  

At least as long as drawing to a Royal Fizbin. 


The first "tontine" was on this very blog just two days ago!

And the second?

That was Keith Olbermann.  Today:

Olbermann [referring to the  New York Times' one last, godawful, drive-by election headline]:  

 "Win or Lose, Trump Has Already Won.” How about "Win or Lose, Cancer Has Already Won” or maybe the New York Times -- and I assume they're just trolling us now or they have a bet -- a tontine -- as to who gets the Times when everybody else is no longer subscribed.  The last subscriber gets the paper.  I don't know...

Y'know, Keith, the next time you drop by for a quick read, leave a comment :-)

It don't cost nuthin'.


I Am The Liberal Media



Monday, November 04, 2024

Feels Like April 17, 1970

The third day of the near-disaster of the Apollo 13 moon shot.

Everyone involved has been doing everything they can to save the crew: frantically trying to think and improvise their way through a minefield of potentially lethal problems, using only the materials at hand on the damage spacecraft to stave off catastrophe.  

And everyone involved is exhausted.

The whole world is watching, worried, riveted, hungry for any scrap of reliable information, not knowing how this will end.

Except this time roughly half of our own country is openly rooting for Lovell, Swigert and Haise to crash and burn.



No Half Measures