Not only did all my Klan brothers turn their backs on me, I also lost my steady gig
on the Hate Speech Podcast Network. Now how am I supposed to afford the monthlies on my private skate park, fortified party venue, and large production studio?
And you know what? All the
people whose lives I ruined aren't even saying "Thank You"! They refuse
to welcome me with open arms and set me up with a comparable gig on the Anti
Hate Speech Podcast Network in gratitude for all I've sacrificed.
So much for the tolerant, forgiving Left! Turns out they're just as mean
and intolerant as the Klan!
Maybe I'll just refuse to vote for anyone from now on! That'll show 'em!
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."-- Gore Vidal
As longtime readers will know, I've dedicated a considerable fraction
of this blog to tracking what I call the "razor and the apple" - that's the
point after which a pundit, usually David Brooks or someone like him, has grudgingly acknowledged the sins or crimes or whatever incompetent malevolence
the GOP had gotten up to that week.
But then comes the inevitable "razor and the apple", usually around the sixth or
fifth paragraph: the moment at which they pivot to the blame-dispersal trope
of "But the Democrats..." or "And the Democrats...". Here, the facts will be
waterboarded to the point that, whatever perfidy the Republican party has
gotten caught doing, it will somehow always end up being the fault of
(sing it with me now) Both Sides.
Over the decades, this particular genre of legacy media and Republican Party codswallop became
so automatic and ubiquitous that it reached a point where I could predict to a joyless degree of precision what a mope like David Brooks was going to
write about next: what the subject matter would be and in which paragraph you
would find the "razor and the apple".
Finally, just for fun, let us snap on the hazmat gloves, unsheathe the poo-snippers, and unfairly flense a few sentences from Bobo’s Friday NYT column and assemble them out of all context just to see what we can divine from them – like reading chickenhawk entrails -- about Iraq and who is about to be framed for the GOPs historic failure there. See if you can spot the card Bobo is trying to palm...
If the Democrats don’t like the U.S. policy on Iraq over the next six months, they have themselves partly to blame.
…but the Democrats never came up with anything remotely serious.
…The liberals who favor quick exit never grappled with the consequences of that policy…
…The centrists who believe in gradual withdrawal never explained why that wouldn’t be like pulling a tooth slowly....
Funny, Bobo is usually a little more deft in hiding the razor in the apple.
But then again, when attempting to spackle over such an enormous mound of shit with such a weak and watery thimble of third-rate prose, one has to deal with the fact that entire limbs of feces are going to stick out all over...
And the reason I could be so frequently and depressingly accurate was (and is)
because it's a genre: a genre that is as structured and repeated as Square Dancing, and which, paradoxically allows lazy, fraudulent writers to get away with
being lazy frauds. Lazy, fraudulent writers whose primary mission is to ensure that the party or movement they are there to represent is not blamed
for disasters that their party or movement clearly created. Or, when
there is no way to wish away Republican and Conservative liability entirely,
as has been the case since the collapse of the Bush administration, then blame
must be dispersed.
The public zeitgeist must never, ever be allowed to become, as Norman Ornstein
and Thomas Mann put it in their
2012 Brookings Institute essay:
"Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem." That would
spoil everything!
Instead, some Liberal or some Democrat somewhere -- either wholly imaginary or
wildly exaggerated -- must be dragged into it so that after five paragraphs
quoting Pliny the Elder and grudgingly acknowledging that Republicans have done
something awful, here it comes! Pulling into the station right on
time! The "But the Democrats..." false equivalence that, golly, when you think about it, aren't speech codes at Brown nearly as bad
as encroaching fascism?
And if Democrats had half a chance, wouldn't they nominate and elect someone
just as monstrous as Trump?
To be fair, this became such an easy lie to spot because precisely because, as a
false equivalence, its ridiculousness and ubiquity has had to grow at the
same rate as Republican depravity. And after a while, like an old
programmer ferreting out a specific kind of bug in COBOL code, I knew what I was
looking for: roughly where it was, and roughly what it was going to be. Then you take a look and, "Yep, that's what went wrong, and that's where it
went wrong, and that's why it went wrong."
And now, thanks to you all out there calling out the "razor and the apple"
everywhere, the Both Sides Do It thing, has almost become a group puzzle or a
sport. A genre unto itself. And the ludicrousness of the
false equivalences these days have reach the stage where I barely need to
prompt anyone anymore. Instead, not a day goes by when I don't get a
note from someone saying, "Did you get a load of this shit over here?" and I
go over and take a peek, and yep, there it is.
Because once you start looking for it, it's like looking for Italians in Inferno -- Dante's in version of Hell. Holy shit, it's everywhere.
And what's really heartening is the number of commenters who now pounce on
this garbage the minute it's published and call it out for what it is really
it. Way to go, everyone!
Well, this week I encountered a mutation of that species of op-ed
writing.
It's by David French, a right-wing, evangelical, professional "hate the
Left" kinda guy who had his resume hurriedly tidied up by
The New York Times enough that he could be slotted into their op-ed
lineup without causing a riot.
Like Liz Cheney, the late Michael Gerson, David Brooks, Michael Steele, Tim
Miller, Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, Kathleen Parker and hundreds more, David
French is just one more Conservative culture warrior who spent his
entire career enthusiastically building a monster which would eventually
turn on him and chase him out of the party. Just one more
Conservative culture warrior who refuses to recognize that the monster he
spent decades helping to build was a monster long before it
chased him out of the party. A monster whose vile nature he took to be a
virtue...as long as its ferocity was directed at people like us.
And when people like us recognized the monster for what it was and pushed back
against it, well you'll never guess how David French remembers it. I
highlighted the relevant passage:
The online response to my argument, however, was volcanic. I was accused
of legitimizing heresy. Another writer said that I’d suffered an apparent
“brain injury.” My appreciation of Talarico’s approach even put the soul
of evangelicalism at risk. Once again, I was written entirely out of the
Christian faith by angry Trumpist evangelicals.
(I did have to laugh at the Babylon Bee’s joke headline: “David French
Praises Satan as ‘Most Christian Person in History.’”)
In their minds, I was elevating “niceness” over justice and
righteousness. To this way of thinking, Talarico’s manner makes him more
dangerous, not less, and it was my responsibility to warn Christian
America away from this dreadful man.
In their anger and vitriol, I saw the mirror image of the far-left
intolerance I’ve encountered through much of my career...
And this is the op-ed in which we find a dizzyingly bizarre inversion of the
usual "razor in the apple" claptrap because David French has managed to write
an entire "apple among the razors" column and publish it without anyone at the
Times throwing themselves in front of the "Publish" button and telling him,
"No. This is too stupid even for the times.
I the name of healing the nation (which his party,
his movement and his faith have damaged almost
beyond repair, French unspools paragraph after paragraph of Both Siderist
false equivalence, pausing only briefly, in the seventh paragraph, to say that
of course isn't doing what he very obviously is doing.
To say that both sides view each other with equivalent disdain is not to
say that both sides are equally dangerous. When a hateful, vengeful man is
in the Oval Office, wielding the awesome power of the presidency beyond its
constitutional limits, then he immediately becomes the most dangerous person
in America.
So, knowing what you know about the Both Sides Do It cult, and the pathology
of it's followers, what word do you suppose Mr. French uses to being the very
next paragraph after explicitly telling his readers that he is not, not, not
doing false equivalence.
If you guessed the word "But", give yourself a big gold star!
French began by asking this question:
Does anyone think a healthy nation with a healthy political culture would
elect a man like Donald Trump not once, but twice? The eternal return
of President Trump is a sign of our national sickness, and a recent Pew
Research Center study shows us exactly what that sickness is.
And what is that sickness? That the GOP has been on rocket ride towards
fascism for more than 40 years? That men like French not only ignored
every red flag, but kept stomping harder on the accelerator? That a
party which elevated racist scum like Rush Limbaugh and his hundreds of
imitators as it's political voice and a vicious Newt named Gingrich and his
hundreds of imitators as their spirit animal was headed towards disaster?
Nope.
French says its because we hate each other. And that is where his
analysis ends, because any further inquiry into exactly why we
hate each other would make men like French look very, very bad.
Instead, French treats hatred as if it were a pandemic that just cropped up
out of nowhere and has no specific, traceable cause. There is no
mention of the fact that racism, misogyny and blind hatred of the Left has
been the Mother Tongue of the Republican party for my entire adult life.
That it has been stoked by the Right for ratings and votes and billions
is profits.
No inkling that, until he got run out of the party, this was the team he happily played for.
And now that the damage is done? Now that his party has dropped the final veil and bared its fascist fangs for all the word to see?
Now we get this:
For example, in a 2022 survey, Pew found that large shares of Democrats and Republicans thought of each other as closed-minded, dishonest, immoral and unintelligent, and the measurements were getting worse every year.
And this:
Both sides hate each other so much that it’s almost meaningless to ask who hates whom the most.
And this:
If you’re a Republican or a Democrat, the best way to imagine the other side’s view of you is to simply mirror your own attitude. They despise you with the same intensity that you despise them. They view you with the same sense of threat and alarm that you view them.
The rest of the column is spent hand-wringing, wishful thinking and pretending the Obama administration never existed.
So the problem is very clear. David French's party, his movement, and his religion, are the
fucking problem.
Period.
But David French cannot bear the thought of living in a universe where this is true, because, well, for one reason, there's no money to be made in that universe. Because that
universe is already occupied by Liberals living out of
tip jars, because we've been writing about this shit for decades now. So there's no
fortune to be found -- no New York Times audience to be found -- for
someone who says, "Yep, the Republican party sucks, and it's sucked forever,
and the Right-wing evangelicals like David French were at the core of the
problem."
Instead, we get the same Republican Dissociative Disorder we've seen in virtually every other Never Trumper. Everything was fine and then, suddenly and with no warning, everyone around David French in the fundy evangelical world went spontaneously crazy. To men like David French, modern history began on that day. Before that day, everything was fine. After that day, everyone went nuts, except him.
And since people like David French cannot live in a universe where they and their people are the villains and the authors of the madness and ruin we see all around us, they very badly needs for there to be a bunch of people on the left who are just as bad.
Which is how we get a little bite of apple among the razors.
Please forgive my Google Translate French. I can practically hear Madame
Alfille wagging her finger at me and scolding me for wasting my time on debate
and track in high school when I should have joined her French club.
Alas, I am poorly made, and this was the best French translation I could come
up with for, "Wouldn't Piss On You If You Were On Fire. And You
Are On Fire."
Trump’s panicked plea goes largely ignored by world leaders: 'No country
stepped forward’
President Donald Trump issued a plea Saturday to several countries in the
hopes that they would “send ships” to a major shipping route off the coast
of Iran to help the United States’ war effort against the Middle East
nation, a plea that as of Sunday afternoon appeared to go largely
ignored
In response to the U.S.-Israeli joint military siege launched late last
month, Iran has vowed to attack any sea vessels aligned with the United
States and its allies that attempt to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a
major shipping route through which 20% of the world’s oil trade flows. As
a result, oil prices have skyrocketed, reportedly sparking panic within
the Trump administration.
“Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are
affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so
that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has
been totally decapitated,” Trump wrote in a social media post on Saturday.
Begging a community of nations -- which he has spent a decade shitting on --
to come and save his rapidly decomposing ass from a catastrophic war of choice
he launched with no plan and no warning is the most beta cuck thing I have
ever heard of.
And so far the silence from other nations is coming through loud and clear.
In Japanese:
Tatoe kimi ga moete ite mo, kimi ni shōben o kakeru koto sae shinai yo.
Soshite kimi wa ima, moete iru nda.
In Simplified Chinese:
Jiùsuàn nǐ húnshēn zháohuǒ, wǒ yě lǎndé sā pào niào jiù nǐ. Ér nǐ xiànzài
quèshí zhèng zháohuǒ ne.
In Korean:
Nega bultaoleugo iss-eodo ojum han bang-uldo an ssal geoya. geuleonde neon
jigeum bultago issjanh-a.
Welsh: Fyddech chi ddim yn Pissio Arnoch Pe Byddech Ar Dân. A Ti Ar Dân.
Cockney:
I wouldn’t ‘ave a slash on ya if ya was goin’ up like Guy Fawkes Night —
and look at ya, you’re already bleedin’ burnin’, ain’t ya
Even in Klingon: Vaj Dunay'Qo' meQlI'chugh vay'. 'ej bImeQlI'.
All three of them were lying. Reagan was lying after the fact. Bush was lying before the invasion, laying the fraudulent predicate for it. And
Trump was lying in medias res, so to speak.
But they're all liars. Republican liars.
The difference is that Trump didn't have speechwriters like Landon Parvin
(Reagan) and Michael Gerson (Bush) bending the language around to tailor those lies for general public consumption.
Your friends at MSNBC polished him up like a shiny new penny and presented
him to their Liberal audience dozens (hundreds?) of times as a penitent
ally. A humbled sinner, truly sorry for his role in the rise of Donald Trump.
And
then... From WFMD "Free Talk" AM 930 in Frederick, Maryland,
January 19, 2026:
MS NOW stays silent on Michael Cohen’s admission he felt ‘coerced’ to
give anti-Trump testimony
He was MSNBC’s golden goose — until his story no longer fit the network’s
preferred narrative.
President Donald Trump‘s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was a
frequent MSNBC guest for years while he was a key member of the
#Resistance. But the liberal network — now called MS NOW — has not covered
his striking admission he felt “pressured and coerced” to deliver
testimony that would help secure convictions against the president.
Cohen, who was a key prosecution witness in two New York cases against
Trump, accused New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan
District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Friday of pursuing evidence squarely
aimed at getting Trump. He alleged in a Substack post that prosecutors in
both offices were uninterested in testimony that didn’t fit their
narrative...
Cohen had long been a fixture on MSNBC, which changed its name late last
year, appearing over the past five years on programs such as “The Beat
with Ari Melber,” “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “Inside with Jen Psaki,” “The
Weekend,” “Deadline: White House” and “PoliticsNation,” often to deliver
anti-Trump commentary. He was also frequently discussed on the network
even when he wasn’t appearing as a guest...
The progressive channel covered Trump’s criminal case in New York
extensively in 2024. According to a Grabien transcript search, “Michael
Cohen” was mentioned 10,906 times from the start of the trial on April 15,
2024, through May 31, 2024 — the day after the verdict was announced.
But MS NOW has, as of Monday afternoon, ignored Cohen’s revelation that
he felt “coerced” to deliver anti-Trump testimony...
And thanks to the MSNBC Republican Reputation Rehab project, as long as he drew clicks, your bestest buds over at the Meidas thing also had much love for Trump's
repentant fixer:
And then...
Programming note: MeidasTouch Network will no longer be producing or carrying the shows Political Beatdown or Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen.
Your recently-former Republican Never Trump pals at The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project (who also enjoyed the lavish benefits of MSNBC's Reputation Rehab spa treatment) also managed to find time in their busy schedules to squeeze a Cohen appearance or two into their lineups:
And then...
Michael Cohen announces to Lara Trump that he is teaming up with Laura
Loomer to do a podcast together.
Perhaps consider this the next time the "liberal" media offers up yet another Republican with their new Resistance spray job still wet from the paint shop as our new Hero of Democracy.
How horny is the political media for any "Democrats in Disarray" story?
On the venerable Blue-Balls scale of 1-to-10 they're now clocking in at around
a 12. Which is how the usual rough-and-tumble of Illinois politics is
magically transformed into a Big Story about
splitting, division and splintering, so mama,
break the fainting couch out of storage and fetch the
spirit of hartshorn!
The New York Times also knows a free lunch when they see it:
Will Another Black Woman Join the Senate? This Messy Primary Is Set to
Decide.
Two Black female candidates may split Democratic primary voters in Illinois,
and anger is growing at well-funded efforts to widen the divide.
Messy. Split. Divide. Better make that two doses of
hartshorn!
Election day is Tuesday, March 17, so this will all be over in three
days.
And, if you dig down a few paragraphs you find...
Unlike other major Democratic primaries for Senate this year, the contest
is not so much a test of the party’s ideological or messaging direction —
the three candidates are broadly similar on policy and style — as it is a
fight over identity and who deserves a Senate seat.
But that's not much of a lede, is it? So much better to frame it as a
bar fight that'll be settled on St. Patrick's day in Chicago.
But now riddle me this: if Politico and the
Times really wanted a story of rancor and disarray in Illinois
primary politics, why not focus on the Republican party? After all,
instead of running three, well-known political professionals, the Illinois GOP
senate primary is a freak show with Six!Count 'Em!Six! weirdos and nobodies
all competing to see who will get hog-slaughtered in the general election in
November. Which is why bigger name Illinois Republicans like Mike Bost
and Darin "Disgrace to his Family Name" LaHood took a big ol' pass at running
for that office this year.
Or how about the Illinois gubernatorial primary, where Four!Count 'Em!Four!
goofballs are competing feverishly to see who gets to lose to JB Pritzker in
the Fall?
See what I did there? Answering my own question? Because in
Illinois it is a foregone conclusion that, barring a tectonic event involving
pods from space and zombies, whoever wins the Illinois Democratic senate
primary will, along with Pritzker, win at a walk in the general
election.
Which, from a policy and governance, perspective, is obviously great
news. But which, from a "fun news stories" perspective, has
deprived Politico readers of the opportunity to learn about characters
like perennial Illinois office-seeker, Jimmy Lee Tillman II, who is the
son of longtime (now retired) Illinois alderwoman, Dorothy Tillman, and who
runs under the name "Dr. Jimmy Lee Tillman II" although no one can tell you
what exactly he is a doctor of.
According to his campaign website, Dr. Jimmy Lee Tillman II would like you to
know that "Our state stands at a crossroads", that "Illinois is the
battlefield and Chicago is the frontline."
I am Dr. Jimmy Lee Tillman II from Chicago—leading the MAGA Cavalry as
the only GOP candidate who can win Chicago and has the strong name
recognition statewide that Republicans need to win in Illinois. I'm also
the only GOP candidate that the Democrat machine is afraid to face. While
other candidates have ideas, I have a proven record of accomplishments.
As a bestselling author, historian, Heritage Foundation Academy Fellow,
and President of the Martin Luther King Republicans,
And so forth.
Then there is Jeannie Evans, a partially self-funded attorney, would like you
to know that she is "Unstoppable. Innovative. Illinois." and appears to think
that it's 1994. As a " a mother, wife, and winning attorney" and "Not a
Politician", once she's in the U.S. Senate, she promises to:
...bring that same unstoppable energy to build Illinois’ future: reducing
taxes and costs, supporting innovation and education, securing safe
communities, and creating opportunities for every family and business. The
future doesn’t wait. Let’s build it.
Not a word about MAGA, America First or Donald Trump is to be found anywhere
in her campaign website.
And let's not forget, Pamela Denise Long -- occupational therapist and
political newcomer -- who has also heard the Siren's Song of the Senate.
We are in a fight for the soul of our nation. Cancel culture is off
the rails. Gender ideology has gone too far. Mass immigration has flooded
our neighborhoods and job sites.
And
I never wanted to be a politician. I was convinced to run for office
after Illinoisans tapped me to help stop the flood of illegal immigrants
into Chicago. Unlike the powers that be, I've spent the last four years
and hundreds of hours listening to a diverse array of Americans express
their needs and concerns. I see the Black American voting bloc has finally
begun to divorce the Democratic Party. At the same time, Americans of all
stripes are sick of the divisive rhetoric that gets politicians elected
but keeps neighbors apart.
Her campaign website features several embedded YouTube videos of her talking
about things like the horrors of DEI and ending birthright citizenship, with
a giant picture of Donald Trump rampant on an American flag as her
background.
Casey Chlebek is also running for U.S. Senate on a platform of cutting
practically every form of taxation you can think of. That's his
"MAGNA" plan: Making America the Greatest Nation Again.
Casey is the former President of the Polish American Congress (Illinois
Division) and his site features all the usual MAGA yadda yadda about open
borders, CRT, and Trump being awesome. And, damn it, he is
not a politician. But I think the real story here is
found in the second line of his campaign resume.
Former Commodore of the Chicago Yachting Association and the Joseph
Conrad Yacht Club.
Come on! If you write about politics and you can't take yachts,
"Commodore Casey" and tax cuts and run all the way down field with it, then
get outta the business kid.
Dark money group offers influencers $1,500 for posts attacking Chicago
Democratic primary candidate
Progressive House candidate Kat Abughazaleh told MS NOW the secretive
campaign is “filled with false and defamatory claims.”
A week out from a crowded and contentious Democratic primary in
Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, Amanda Informed, an online
influencer in Florida received an email with an offer: one negative post
about candidate Kat Abughazaleh on Instagram and TikTok, for
$1,500.
The request, which came from a secretive political organization called
Democracy Unmuted, was forwarded to her by Matt Anthes, founder of
Advocators, a digital marketing agency focused on politics and advocacy
through micro-influencers.
They're scared of her.
Good. They should be.
Honestly, any influencer (god, how I loathe that word) who gets this offer should take the
money and then just post a copy of Kat's own "negative" ad:
