"Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long" -- Hunter S. Thompson
Don't forget to visit our website -- http://www.proleftpod.com
-- for all those sweet bells and whistles: there are links to donate
to our podcast work at that site, as well as links to our
swingin' Zazzle merch store, our respective blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Kittehs! and much
more. Many thanks once again to
@theologop for building it all
for us! Links:
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Today Rick Wilson strokes his beard ponderously and ponders what in the world
happened to his Republican party?
Spoiler: Cynical, "Toss the bigots and imbeciles red meat until the
burst and then stampede 'em to the polls" Republican operatives like Rick
Wilson are what happened to the Republican party.
Shout out to Alert Reader Katherine for catching this line from from
Bret Stephens at the very end of this
week's New York Times' "Conversation"
feature.
Actual Bret Stephens: And before we go, I hope our readers
didn’t miss Ian Johnson’s extraordinary essay about the Chinese journalists
and historians fighting to preserve the knowledge of China’s tragedies and
atrocities in the face of the regime’s attempts to suppress it. It made me
think of how badly our own sense of history, including events like Jan. 6,
has eroded, and reminded me of my favorite Milan Kundera lines: “The
struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
driftglass: Cool! Hey Bret, what about remembering
the deeply ugly, racist history of your Republican party and your
Conservative movement prior to 2016/2017?
Imaginary Bret Stephens: Shaddap! Shut your lousy,
stinking, disrespectful Liberal pie hole!
driftglass: I see. Touchy subject. OK then,
how about since you brought up the subject of "lice", maybe you could use
your memory thingy to remind us why you are known throughout Christendom as
"Bret Bug"?
Imaginary Bret Stephens stares icily at your 'umble scrivener.
driftglass: Wow. Another touchy
subject? OK then, lets let
The Guardian
have the last word:
NYT columnist quits Twitter after daring critic to 'call me a bedbug to
my face'
Free speech advocate Bret Stephens emailed David Karpf’s boss to
complain about ‘bedbug’ joke – and then quit Twitter after being widely
mocked
KWelker, on MTP, after Sec Buttigieg explains that the shutdown disagreement is ENTIRELY *within* House GOP, Welker: "But again, if there's a shutdown, that falls on everyone's shoulders... Why isn't prez using Bully Pulpit?"
"Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege." -- William Beveridge
Don't forget to visit our website -- http://www.proleftpod.com
-- for all those sweet bells and whistles: there are links to donate
to our podcast work at that site, as well as links to our
swingin' Zazzle merch store, our respective blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Kittehs! and much
more. Many thanks once again to
@theologop for building it all
for us! Links:
The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary
"sponsors" and real listeners like you!
"If you wait by the Twitter long enough, the remains of your enemies' careers will float by." -- Sun Tzu, slightly updated
FYI, this post will add nothing to the David Brooks discourse that has been firing off all over Twitter for the last couple of days. This post will not
posit any new theories on the subject of "How does David Brooks still have a
job?" or the more existential question of "Why does David Brooks exist?" or
the very common "Who the hell is David Brooks?".
None of that here today.
Instead, as America's leading Brooksologist, all this post is intended to do is add one more humiliating example of Brooks' privileged myopia to my already vast
archives. An item that, when I need it five days or five months or five
years from now, will be there, at my fingertips: filed under "The day that Brooks shit
the bed so hard and so publicly"...
...that everyone from me...
Whether it's overpaying for booze and a garbage burger and fries at airports or terrorizing innocent bumpkins with hard-to-pronounce sandwiches, David Brooks' new career as the NYT's Food Critic for the Economically Anxious is off to a rocky start. https://t.co/aJfUhs5bUy
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) September 21, 2023
...to DougJBalloon parking six in a row like this over the left field fence...
Whiskey River, Take My Mind
Red-headed stranger David Brooks is on the road again at the Newark Airport, but the price of scotch has his blue eyes crying in the rain. Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be pundits.
...and listen to two of the recently-former Republican Never Trumpers who
have almost completely colonized MSNBC in which they bitch about --
The madness of the Republican party.
The calculated, reptilian depravity of Mitch McConnell.
The reckless, ratings-driven irresponsibility of the mainstream media.
-- you could be forgiven for mistaking their interlocution for literally any
breakout session at any of the Yearly Kos/Netroots Nation gatherings of the
Liberal tribes going back almost 20 years now.
Or, say, any of the panel discussions and after-hours bull sessions from any
of the Eschaton conferences (EschaCons) that are now almost lost to history.
Do you really think that (almost) any or all of these smart and mic-savvy Liberals, or any of your favorite Liberal podcasters, couldn't do what Charlie Sykes does? Or Tom Nichols? Or Tim Miller? Steve Schmidt? Matt Dowd? Nicole Wallace? Jennifer Rubin? Sarah Longwell? Joe Scarborough? Mika Brzezinski? Mike Fucking Barnicle? And on and on and on?
Imagine for just a moment what the "Liberal" media could have looked like if NBC/MSNBC had put a fraction of the money and talent they put into hyping their crash-and-burn experiments with Greta Van Susteren or Megyn Kelly or Hugh Fucking Hewitt...into promoting (almost) any or all of these smart and mic-savvy Liberals.
Remember Maddow looking directly into the camera and enthusiastically declaring that "Greta is Great!"? The same Greta who now works alongside Mark Halperin and other fallen-from-grace media dregs who have washed up on the shores of NewsMax?
Imagine for just a moment what the "Liberal" media could have looked like if NBC/MSNBC had put a just fraction of the tens of millions of dollars in free publicity they shower on Never Trump media companies like The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project every year ... into promoting the podcasts and projects of talented Liberals who do great work and live out of tip jars and GoFundMes.
So why in the world have the networks chosen to hand all the chairs and all the mics and all the promotional apparatus over to a gang of recently-former Republican Never Trumpers -- who were all disastrously wrong about their own party until five minutes ago, and all contributed mightily to the catastrophe that now faces us -- instead of smart and mic-savvy Liberals, who were right about the Right all along and who can explain, clearly and coherently, the long, appalling history of the Republican party and the Conservative media and the complicit mainstream media that led us to this place?
Oh my sweet summer child. It is precisely because they can lay out in damning detail the long, poisonous, racist road down which the Republican party and the Conservative media and the complicit mainstream media have been racing for decades that these smart and mic-savvy Liberals cannot be allowed within shouting distance of network microphones and cameras.
