No Labels: Everything Old and Horrible is New and Horrible Again

File under: "When your kink becomes your cult."

A lot of you Alert Listeners have sent this Tweet from the No Labels grifters along to me:

Despite an early attempt at bipartisanship, the January 6 Committee’s work has become a partisan exercise about which the public is skeptical.

To see more content like this and learn more: https://t.co/gJ5F11gR4W#January6th #January6thCommittee pic.twitter.com/inZygUpc0g

— No Labels (@NoLabelsOrg) May 18, 2022

And this one:

ICYMI: the No Labels people put out a video complaining about how the Jan 6 investigation was costing more than the Benghazi one. pic.twitter.com/GqZLktmPdg

— Merkin Muffley (@MerkinMuffley5) May 20, 2022

So first of all, thank you.

Second, see the graphic at the top of this post.

Third, we did spend some time on this during this week's Professional Left Podcast (episode #651.)  But not nearly as much time as I spent vivisecting this scam back in 2010,  four days after it launched.

Dead Center 

Political Cowardice Now Has Its Own "Movement"!

Yay!

In case you ever idled away an afternoon screwing around with your old political chemistry set/fantasy football league lineups and wondering what would happen if you took a bunch of Republican primary losers (Charlie Christ)...added in a goonbag of out-of-work and out-of-favor former Republican speechwriters and campaign button-men (David Frum/John Avlon/Mark McKinnon)...the last of the politically arteriosclerotic insider DLC goofs who aren't already drawing paychecks under the Obama Administration's "Former Clinton White House Full Employment Project" (Nancy Jacobson aka. Mrs. Mark Penn)...Republican minor teevee celebrities (Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough)...

...and David Fucking Brooks?

And then sprinkled the resulting crime against nature with an assload of money (because there are always, always endless assloads of money available for any horrible idea that reinforces Villager sensibilities)?

What you get crawling out of the Petri dish are things like the autotuned, content-free, sugar-coma-inducing horror that is

the "No Labels Anthem"

But nothing we did not expect, right?

I mean, ever since the Republican Base ducked out on paying the tab for a generation of being loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything by putting on funny hats, screaming about liberty and calling themselves "The Tea Party", their sleazy Centrist enablers have been seething with jealously. Quite suddenly the monster they built didn't need them anymore and the skeevy hustlers who had helped create the Racist/Corporatist/Dominionist Confederacy on the bones of the New Deal and the grave of the American Dream found themselves cast out and looking for their next meal ticket.

Preferably a meal ticket under a banner that -- like "Tea Party -- wouldn't keep bringing up their horribly inconvenient past as the sleazy, enabling hustlers.

Hey, kids! I have an idea! Lets peel those the icky, damning labels off of everything and -- presto! -- there is magically no longer any difference between rat poison and apple sauce!

Can I haz my million dollars now?... 

And not nearly as much time as friend Tengrain spent also vivisecting this scam also back in 2010:

Every Triangle needs a third leg
Posted on December 14, 2010 by tengrain

Ha ha ha, how did MPS miss this one yesterday?

A group of high-profile Democrats, Republicans, and Independents today launched No Labels, a non-profit that calls itself the “Woodstock of Democracy,” touts non-partisanship, and features a bipartisan bison as its official logo.”

That's when No Labels began sending out a barrage of defensive "Look, man, what's so wrong about rappin' with da youth about Simpson/Bowles?" emails and comments, both directly and through their surrogates.

And boy howdy, did they line up the absolute cream of the whiny, always-wrong Beltway surrogates:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand

Congressman Bob Inglis

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

Congressman Tom Davis

David Brooks

Joe Scarborough

Mika Brzezinski

Senator Joe Lieberman

Senator Evan Bayh

Senator Joe Manchin

David Gergen

Governor Charlie Crist

Lt Governor Abel Maldonado

Congressman Michael Castle

Ellen Freidin

And now, during the intervening 12 years Liberals like me have returned to the subject of the toxicity of the No Labels scam and all of its imitators over and over again.  12 years of shouting into the abyss.

And now. 12 years later, with god-knows how many tens of millions of dollars pissed away accomplishing nothing except providing air cover for the Right to slouch ever further into outright fascism, with god-knows how many corrupt backroom deals cut and god-know many shitty Beltway pundit reputations vulcanized thanks to their membership in this wretched club, look who is suddenly skedaddling the hell away from that shitpile as fast as his stubby cloven hooves can carry him:

Some of the principles which I guess don’t fit in the No Labels pantheon: Democracy. Truth. Accountability. https://t.co/3RRcFgKOUx

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 20, 2022

Once again,  see the graphic at the top of this post.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast #651

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized."   -- Sun Tzu

 

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

The Five or Six Year Wager

Every time I hear another Never Trumper launch into another !Shocking!Discovery! of some horrifying aspect of the Right that Liberals have been warning about for decades, I make this little wager with myself.

That whatever the awfulness is and however endemic it has been on the Right since at least the Age of Reagan, the Never Trumper who is coming to terms with the !Shocking!Discovery!   is definitely gonna confine the phenomenon to the period after they were run out of the GOP.  In other words, none of this is their fault because no one could've seen this coming because everything monstrous about the Right happened suddenly and inexplicably  "over the last five or six years".

Which brings us to this conversation between Tim Alberta and Charlie Sykes ("Tim Alberta: The Poisoning of the Evangelical Church") , out of which I have parcelled these quotes and added emphasis where I want your eyes to alight.

Right out of the box, Charlie Sykes begins with...

Sykes:  ...this is a tough piece to wrestle with.  I'll be honest with you because, y'know,  it's... it's one of the things that I will admit that I have had the hardest time understanding over the last ... and now it's you know going on five, six years.  The transformation of the Christian church.  The, y'know, white evangelical churches.  And what your piece suggests is that whatever has happened to them seems to be accelerating and that that's difficult to get your head around...

And then we're off to the races: 

Alberta:  I've had this conversation over and over and over again with pastors and with church leader types and just with everyday church-goers over the past year while i've been doing all this reporting. And for all of the disruption and volatility of the previous five, six years you know Trump's presidency obviously..

Alberta:  what he's seen happen over the last four or five years is that all of these really ugly and intense and polarizing debates over politics and policy and you know culture and social...

Alberta: ...what you've seen here really over the past five years it traces back a bit further, but it's really intensified here over the last five years.

Sykes:  ... I think this is important because there will be people who say, "Well nothing's new. That's always been this way."  No, um, this is in fact new the last five years.  Let's talk about Donald Trump...

Two things.

First, it is impossible for me to ever trust "allies" like Charlie Sykes who lie so easily, automatically and declaratively about their own past and trajectory their party has been on for decades, and who regularly blame Liberals for the miserable shitpile of bigots and imbeciles their Republican party has become.   

Second, Never Trumpers repeat their bullshit, self-absolving "the last four or five year" mantra so incessantly that if my little wagers with myself had been actual wagers, by now I'd have amassed enough of a money pile to buy MSNBC outright and turn it into an actual Liberal media powerhouse.

Until then...

I Am The Liberal Media

There Are Too Many Pigs for the Teats -- Abraham Lincoln

Having spent decades creating a reliable voting base of reprogrammable meatbags, internecine fighting among the GOP's top grifters and demagogues has once again broken out over the issue of  --

Sean Hannity is no different than these left leaning Liberals. So disappointing!

— Diamond and Silk® (@DiamondandSilk) May 17, 2022

-- who gets to bilk the chumps --

Tucker Carlson derisively refers to @DanCrenshawTX, who lost his eye while serving our country as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan, as “eye-patch McCain.” pic.twitter.com/ItsrNyPGQd

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) May 17, 2022

-- and for how much.

No Half Measures

The Curse of Chucky

How soon until Chuck Todd's genius employers replace his Peacock "Let's Play Risk In My Basement" dumpster fire --

-- with a VR app that requires a $300 proprietary headset --

 

-- in which every character will eventually be voiced by Alan Tudyk?

I Am The Liberal Media

Dear "Normal" Apolitical People

I am going to predict your future.

Ready?

Right now there are a thousands of elected officials in Washington D.C. and in statehouses across the country fighting over some really important things.

Many of those elected officials are straight up fascists, just like the ones your daddies and granddaddies fought in WWII.  Many of the other elected officials -- the ones in the Not Fascist party -- are pretty typical, American politicians.  Largely decent, some goofballs. and generally trying hard to serve their constituents and stop the fascists with the very limited tools they have available to them.

So here's your future.

The things the fascists want to do will  drastically affect your lives in years to come, but since you pay no attention to politics, you don't know this.  So if they win and the shit really hits the fan, you will be taken completely by surprise.  

You will demand to know why the no one warned you this might happen.  Why the people who have been fighting long and hard against these fascists didn't fight harder.   Why they "let this happen".  

You will turn for wisdom and solace to the same mainstream media hacks you always turn to.  

These mainstream media hacks will reassure you that whatever the Republican atrocity of the day happens to be is the fault of "congress" or "our broken politics" or "tribalism" or "partisanship".

Then you will go forth, secure in your cynicism, confidently blaming Both Sides.

Then you will shrug, adjust to the new regime, and go back to being "normal" apolitical people.

Both Sides Don't

Bolshi Freedom Troll Glenn Greenwald Doing Bolshi Freedom Troll Stuff

Glenn Greenwald tells Tucker that tweeting death threats and watching porn is an "outlet" for people who harbor a desire to murder and rape. He and Tucker argue that removing those "safety valves" of expression lead to things like January 6th. (Choppy video from FN, sorry) pic.twitter.com/zMKSKl3F8k

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) May 12, 2022

I Told You So

Professional Left Podcast #650

"Jesus Christ, the one thing every shit-apple redneck is guaranteed to take with both hands and left foot is money."   -- Raylan Givens, Justified

 

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!