The 'Stache that Wouldn't Die sat down with Republican Senator Linday Graham, who he found to be all reasonable and centrist-y on the subject of carbon pollution.
His conclusion?
Ignoring the fact that the GOP has been ruthlessly purging its centrists and accelerating exponentially faster in exactly the opposite direction of "reasonable" for 30 years, Tom Friedman opines:
Five more G.O.P. senators like him and we could have a real energy bill.
Look, some writers always shoot for the silver lining in things; the dove that returns in the evening, after the storm, with the olive leaf in her mouth. Nothing wrong with that, but that is emphatically not what Friedman traffics in.
Friedman hustles simpering, centrist bullshit.
He hustles it in a way that is always, always, always carefully calibrated to avoid offending the Republican CEOs ans Chambers of Commerce stiffs who buy his fawning, globalist twaddle by the job lot and force their middle managers to study it like holy writ.
And he hustles it on the Op Ed pages of the NYT.
But what pisses me off most of all?
Friedman is just a goddamn awful writer.
UPDATE: An FYI for those of you who helpfully suggest that impertinent comments like these be "sent to the New York Times". Please know that, occasionally, I do.
Even as you are free to do :-)
I post them, in the only venue available to the general public.
Where they are held for "moderation".
Shortly after which they somehow tend to v-a-n-i-s-h into the pellucid digital ether.
I'm off to stand in line all night with tens of thousand of other fans for tickets to the media event of the decade!
Against all odds, David Gregory has somehow managed to do the impossible: finally score that once-in-a-lifetime on-camera interview with the notoriously reclusive Saint John McSame. So rare a thing it is, that “Meet the Press” has broken with 50 years of journalistic tradition and put an "!" after the word "Exclusive" in their advertisements of the show.
DAVID GREGORY: This is your 54th appearance on Meet the Press. Now I know you're a competitive guy. Bob Dole still holds the record at 63. And so we've been doing the calculations here. We think we can make this up, maybe within a year's time. If you're game for that.
JOHN MCCAIN: I'd love to try. Thank you, David.
DAVID GREGORY: Sen. McCain, thank you very much for being here.
David Gregory was making a joke. And yet there's still much to this that's remarkable. John McCain has appeared on Meet the Press - just one of the multiple Sunday morning talk shows - 54 times, and I would guess that most of them have come in the years since announcing for President in 1999, since before that he was a more obscure figure in Washington. I can't imagine there's anyone else even close to that number. And yet McCain is an easy guy to find on the Rolodex and get to appear on your show. It points to a staleness in the official discourse. ...
I should mention at this point that McCain lost the 2008 Presidential election.
Apparently what finally did the trick this time was returning one of Senator McSame’s 1,755 phone calls demanding to be put on teevee immediately so that he could try to undo some of the damage he did by opening his mouth on Thursday and revealing himself yet again to be a bitter, thin-skinned, malinformed loser.
For those of you just joining us, a little background...
For much of the early part of this decade, Thomas Friedman (aka "The Moustache of Understanding", "Shakes the Clown", "The 'Stache That Wouldn't Die" and "Captain Obvious" and the now-nearly-bankrupt scion-in-law of one of America's greatest real estate fortunes) was the Uri Geller of Neoconservatism; being invited everywhere -- bending keys, reading minds, moving goalposts, rewriting history, miraculously transporting cubic miles of water for the Cheney Administration and generally using his Awesome Mustache Power to magically alter the rules of space, time, causality and human nature to conform to his stupid ideas.
And, tragically, his antics were lent a wholly unearned and undeserved credibility by the entire Mainstream Media Collective, which made it infinitely harder for any honest analysis and critique of Iraq to get any traction. Because, after all, if the BestSellingAuthorofTheWorldisFlat say a thing is true, well then, by God, it must be!
I mean, just look at the way he bent that fucking spoon!
Of course eventually Reality and the Dirty Fucking Hippies did to Friedman what the Amazing Randi and Johnny Carson
did to Uri Geller on the "Tonight Show".
Except rather than slithering off to a life of secret shame and richly deserved obscurity making Neocon balloon animals at kiddie parties, Friedman is still here, writing his piffle for the New YorkT Times week-in and week-out. Which is why, I must admit, I couldn't get past the first sentence. of his latest NYT piece.
Iraq’s Known Unknowns, Still Unknown Sign in to Recommend
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: February 23, 2010
From the very beginning of the U.S. intervention in Iraq and the effort to build some kind of democracy there, a simple but gnawing question has lurked in the background:...
Because unless that sentence ended with the following -- "...:Why the Hell is the thoroughly and infamously discredited eponymous begetter of the 'Iraqi Friedman Unit' still holding six inches of NYT column space captive?" -- then it isn't worth the candle.
It is one fo the great and enduring mysteries of our generation, and one that has me increasingly worried about the actual, physical New York Times column space itself.
I mean, is it stuck in some kind of squatter's rights situation? Has Friedman's long and embarrassing presence there created a kind of journalistic adverse possession?
Is the column a POW?
Is this a full-blown hostage situation?
Do we need the services of a professional negotiator?
Or is a rescue mission called for?
Whatever the plan is, the one thing I would not recommend doing is sending in massive numbers of troops in some damn fool attempt to proves some stupid Neocon talking point.
Because if history has shown us anything it is that, no matter how tempting it may be, trying to pry some mustachioed idiot loose of a chunk of territory he has sunk his claws is a lot like bending metal with your mind: always way, way, waaaaaay harder to do in Reality than it sounds like when you're just
Last night our rapidly mildewing local PBS affiliate -- WTTW Channel 11 -- plummeted to genuinely new lows when it basically turned over 12 minutes of prime airtime to three generations of cranky, white male teabaggers.
Sure, those of us who are occasional watchers of “Chicago Tonight” -- the nightly local PBS news offering -– have noticed that, for the last several years, the starch in his suits and the lacquer in his hair have been all that's kept Chicago Tonight's Host Phil Ponce from collapsing into a puddle of chipper, obsequious goo, but as with the piece that directly preceded last night’s embarrassment (CTA Management debating Labor over who is going to take it in the shorts first), WTTW still seems to have enough recessive journalism DNA knocking around the place to usually put both sides of controversial subjects at the table -- side-by-side -- with the on-air talent acting as interlocutor.
But instead, last night Ponce basically fluffed the four white, male teabaggers as if they were some local-band-made-good; as if they were “REO Speedwagon”, and did they think they were a one-hit-wonder, or did they have some staying power?
Including Ponce, the Dramatis Personae were as follows:
Steve Stevlic: Tea party coordinator.
John O’Hara, described merely as the author of “A New American Tea Party.”
And Ed Lasky and Steven Baehr whom we are told are the co-founders and the “News Editor” and the “Political Correspondent”, respectively, for “the Conservative website ‘American Thinker’” which draws “150,000 views per day”. They are described by Ponce as “covering” the tea party movement, and were apparently just invited on to the teevee to share their keen, reportorial insights.
That’s it. Three generations of cranky men running the melanin spectrum from "Ed Begley Junior White" to "Eyeball-Smiting Flashbulb White".
And once the introductions were over, the bullshit began to rain so hard and fast that you’d have thought Belphegor’s own celestial outhouse
was overflowing.
According to Mr. O’Hara, the tea baggers are a “…broad, grass-roots uprising with folks that are concerned with the radical…” something something…
According to Mr. Stevlic (the chyron just below his chinny-chin-chin reading “Fast-Growing Groups Gains Influence”) the tea party movement is “a group of people that have never been active in politics before, and they’re just tired of yelling at the teevee…”
Host (to Stevlic): Are you one of those people? Not active in politics, yelling at the teevee?
Stevlic dodges the question about his degree of political involvement and instead offers that he had been one of those town hall shouters last summer.
Mr. Lasky and Mr. Baehr were then asked to weigh in on the topic, again explicitly as people who have been “covering” the movement.
Baehr: "[This is a] movement of people who have not been particularly involved in politics, who are quite fearful of..." yadda yadda yadda trillion dollars yadda yadda
To which he then ads the careful rage-caveat that he is only speaking about debts and deficits “Over the period of 2009, 2010 and 2011..."
Baehr: The people you saw at the [Chicago tea party] "were the kind of people you’d see at a Little League game in the suburbs."
Host: Give me an idea of the range of people who are involved in this movement?
Lasky: “Well, I think it spans both parties.” A shocking – shocking! – study of Iowa Tea Baggers shows that 49% of them call themselves “independent”.
Host: Is it true that your awesome fucking movement started right here…in Chicago!?
…
Phil Ponce then mentions the following, just in passing y'know: "In doing research on this subject – which I admit I hadn’t done until today…
Which is when I stopped listening and starting yelling at my teevee (Hey! Maybe I'm a teabagger too!)
Look, Phil. I’m not a Highly Paid Chicago TeeVee News Host. I don’t have a research department. I don’t have staff.
Not one lone administrative assistant to chase round my desk do I have, nor have I a single intern to get me my fucking latte.
I’m just some poor, civilian goof who can recognize a plague when it's at his door, who is sick of watching paid teevee journalism die of spine-rot, and who does this in his spare time. And yet even I – with about 30 minutes of clicking a fucking mouse on my wheezing, old laptop – was able to find out all sorts of fascinating stuff about your skeevy guests and their mendacious claims that were, for some reason, utterly beyond the collective ability of the mighty WTTW to ferret out.
But first, let us pause for a moment to prefigure the results of my massive research project by coldly gloating over the fact some of us were warning you years ago that these douchbags were on their way. I myself had “2011” in the “George W. Who?” revisionist history pool when I wrote in 2006 ("Christopaths of Glory”) that…
...
In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade.
It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11” as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.
Missed it by 12 months. Damn. Well, I guess with that kind of batting average I won't be getting that sweet, sweet column in the Washington Post again this year.
More immediately, the high percentage of Tea Party activists who call themselves "independents" obscures the fact that most of them are in fact highly partisan Republicans who are close ideologically to the right wing of the GOP. Here's how Blumenthal puts it:
Remember the 52 percent of Tea Party activists who [in a recent CNN poll] initially identify as independent? It turns out that virtually all of them lean Republican. According to CNN, 88 percent of the activists identify or lean Republican, 6 percent identify or lean Democratic and only 5 percent fall into the pure independent category.
Remember that CNN pollster Holland reported that 87 percent of the Tea Party activists would vote Republican if there were no Tea Party-endorsed third-party candidate running? That makes perfect sense for a group that is 88 percent Republican.
...based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?
Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.
Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
But they fool no one.
Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.
And, apparently, Phil Ponce.
Of course, what would be both maximally embarrassing for Ponce and go a long way towards making the point that the Tea Flingers are mostly just a bunch of right wing asshats who have "burned their uniforms" would be if, instead of merely being authors and organizers and reporters, the four, angry white men who were sitting around the table shooting the patriotic breeze with Good 'Ol Phil were actually four hard right wing ideologues.
Well, for starters, here's Steve Stevlic and the odious Fox News excreta known as "Mark Levin" swapping happy, wingnut saliva
...
American Jews face a fateful choice when they cast their Presidential ballots on November 2nd. The world Jewish community - inside and outside of Israel - faces an unprecedented threat from anti-Semitism, which has has spread to points far and wide from its epicenter in the Arab world, and is headed our way. During this perilous time, the anachronistic tendency of American Jews to vote Democratic must end.
This is one tradition that Jews, a people united by their traditions, should put aside. They should refuse to vote for John Kerry for President. Bluntly speaking, his words and actions reveal a man who would imperil our community. Our concerns should not just be about Israel but for the future of the entire Jewish community. It is imperative that Jews understand that the hatred being promoted around the world is directed not just at Israel, but also at Jews as Jews.
But Ed sure luuuuved him some Dubya!
Bush’s record
President Bush is widely considered to be the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. Under his Administration, the ties of cooperation between Israel and America have never been stronger and they serve as a lifeline to the beleaguered Israelis. President Bush has been steadfast in his support despite suffering the slings and arrows of an international community that seems to despise Israel. He has done so because he believes it is the right thing to do, despite the Jewish vote going overwhelmingly to his opponents. He has made it clear to the UN (the so-called Negroponte doctrine) that one-sided Resolutions targeting Israel will be vetoed. He has supported Israel’s construction of a security barrier that has had a dramatic effect in diminishing terror.
Many of his other actions primarily benefit America and the West but also have an extremely beneficial effect on Israel. He has enacted laws (such as the Patriot Act) that have served to cut-off funding for terror acts.
...
And other than throwing a few hundred bucks at Hillary in the Primary, Ed also has an almost unbroken record of financially backing virtually every wingnut cause (From the Swiftboaters to the National Republican Senatorial Committee) and candidate (Michele Bachmann, Pete Coors, Tom DeLay and John Boehner to name but a few) that comes down the pike.
So if Mr. Lasky doesn't exactly practice a Zen-like non--partisan detachment from politics -- and if his site, "American Thinker", appears to specialize in rigid "pro-Israel" litmus testing, climate change denialism, union bashing and a general loathing of every imaginary Dirty Fucking Hippie bogeyman in the world -- then what of his colleague Richard Baehr?
‘Grassroots’ Chicago tea party organized with the help of the right-wing Heartland Institute.
This afternoon on MSNBC’s Hardball, host Mike Barnacle had Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) and Chicago tea party organizer John O’Hara on to discuss the tea party protests. Throughout their discussion, both Pence and O’Hara repeatedly claimed that today’s protests were nothing more than a “grassroots” movement that had finally reached a boiling point. It wasn’t until Barnacle pressed O’Hara on how he got involved with the protests that O’Hara explained that he worked for the right-wing think tank, the Heartland Institute. Still, O’Hara claimed he only worked on the tea party project in his “spare time — on weekends and nights“:
BARNACLE: Why are you involved in this?
O’HARA: I work at a free-market think tank, the Heartland Institute here in Chicago. In my spare time, on weekends and nights, leading up to the Feburary 27 tea parties, my good friend J. P. Freire…at the American Spectator invited me and asked me if I could help get some momentum behind a tea party in front of the White House. I did and we had over 300 people show up. … Ever since then you’ve had thousands come out.
The Heartland Institute, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is, among other things, a proud sponsor of the Annual Big Conservative Fucknozzle Trade Show who believes that anti-tobacco and global warming kooks are destroying America.
So, y'know, not exactly the Old SDS Retirement Home.
Mr. O'Hara has also made several teevee appearances, most notably on Fox News...and of course on Fox News.
The thing is, I don't especially begrudge these Four Heist Men of the Teapocalypse their ludicrous little charade; Hell, if I'd spent the last decade happily sucking the dicks of the people who destroyed my country, I'd guess I'd be dressing up in pantyhose and jaunty little hats and pretending I'd been asleep since the Ford Administration too.
Phil Ponce, on the other hand, is a different story. Letting these clowns use the the public airwaves to put across their underhanded, one-sided scam is unforgivable, and letting himself be used as their sweat rag in the process is beyond embarrassing.
If Royko were alive, he'd be dangling Ponce by his ankle from a fifth story window right about now, making him conjugate the verb "muckrake".
Unless you have, oh, let's call it a Very Deeply Vested Interest in pitching a permanent camp on the floor of the Valley of Utter Denial for the rest of your life, figuring out what the Hell happened to the American Conservative movement really isn’t that hard.
See, starting about 40 years ago, the Party of Personal Responsibility began fucking anything that moved.
It really is just about that simple.
There were gun nuts. And Birchers.
There were anti-women neanderthals. And gen-u-ine, 100% cross-burning Klansmen.
To bulldoze their radical “Destroy All Gummint” agenda right through the heart of the Land of the Free, time after time Conservatives were only too happy to stagger into the alley and stick their junk into any weirdo group that would hike up its electoral skirt in exchange for promises of power and prestige once the Glorious Reagan Revolution has been accomplished:
“Oh, yeah,” they whispered to the Coulters and the Falwells. “You, ‘n me, we have this…Conservative connection. Can't you feel how soooo Right this is?”
“You promise this…this…this isn’t just some Primary fling?” the Robertsons and the Malkins asked. Trembling. Venomous. Ready. “’Cause I’ve been hurt before.” Glances at yellowing pictures of George Wallace, Curtis LeMay and Father Coughlin pinned to the wall.
“No, no, sugar-votes. This is fer reals. I want you to have mah babies!”
Cue the wakka-ja-wakka music...
And fade to victory.
Now, 30 years later, what’s left of these same Conservatives have finally started to notice that their political genitalia is all lit up like a pustular Christmas Tree with oozing Newt-shaped sores, and their Shining City on a Hill has been overrun with hyper-aggressive, ethically-stunted inbred dimwit freaks who all point at the mile-high sculpture of Saint Ronald Reagan in the Shining City Mall Atrium and squeal “Daddy!”
William Shatner Cast In Pilot For ‘Shit My Dad Says’
By Sara Welsh on February 22nd, 2010
If you have a Twitter account, you’ve probably heard of ShitMyDadSays.
Justin Halpern created the account after moving in with his 74-year-old father. He claims to only write down some of the jewels his father utters. The quips are so amusing, Halpern has acquired over one million followers, been vaulted to Internet celebrity status, and now has a television pilot being filmed about his family. To top it all off, William Shatner has now been cast to play his father on national television. ...
All but seven of my weirdest dreams have now come true.
No one has any excuse anymore for being surprised when Newt Gingrich once again gets up on his hind legs to publicly lie about Liberals; Newt Gingrich has been lying about Liberals in dozens of different ways and in dozens of different venues for at least three wives now, so nothing remarkable there. No, what sets these particular comments at this particular event apart from all of Newt's other old, stagnant lies is his special emphasis on the urgent newness of the circumstances:
"...because I believe," sez the slimy little fucker, "-- and I would never have said this at any time before now -- I believe we are now in a struggle over whether or not we are going to save America. I believe that the radical left is a secular, Socialist machine so dedicated to values destructive of America..."
...and yadda yadda yadda.
Got it?
Poor, reasonable, level-headed Newt Gingrich has finally been moved --Nay, driven! Impelled! -- into the angry appendix of the Big Book of Impressive Words for Little People to fish out just the right words -- words like "Socialist and "radical"; words like "destructive" and "machine" -- to properly limn the specific and singularly unique nature -- the utter First!Time!Evah!-ness -- of this moment in history.
Except, of course, that's another Big Fat Gingrich Lie, isn't it?
For at least the last 15 years, Newt has been taking his lame "Socialist!" charges for walks around the block oftener than a man with dozen diuretic Pekingese.
And as to the other Very Harsh Words into whose arms he says he has only now been reluctantly driven been , Jesus Fucking Christ, the man wrote a fucking pamphlet for his fellow Republicans in 1996 entitled "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control" (which he followed up with taped training sessions on how to "...speak like Newt.") laying out in detail exactly which words Republicans should train themselves to robotically repeat to describe Democrats every time they were in front of a camera or microphone.
These brainwashing tapes advised that speaking like Newt "takes years of practice" but that basically any properly conditioned simian could become a good little Party Automaton "if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases."
Would it surprise anyone, anywhere (except, of course, the Pig People at the CPAC convention who gave Gingrich a rock star greeting) that among the words Newt was advising Republicans to use to demonize Democrats at every opportunity in 1996 were words like "radical"?
Words like "destructive"?
Words like"machine"?
That while the Reasonable, Slow-To-Anger Newt of 2010 was telling his minions that he had, for the first time in his life, finally just been pushed to the point where he could no long keep from shouting the Terrible Truth about the Radical Left, the Newt the Methodical Pamphleteerwas telling his minions in 1996 that he understood that:
"Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party."
This was the moment when the violent but often scatter-shot fascist impulses of the Conservative Movement made another massive leap into darkness and atavism: when Newt Gingrich -- at the time the de facto leader of Republican Party -- made the calculated decision to systematically deploy the most divisive, hateful and inflammatory language imaginable into the everyday, conversational drinking water of the GOP.
These days, a very famous Conservative Apostate named Andrew Sullivan makes a fine living wondering Very Loudly where all these crazy Palinites that are destroying Saint Ronald Reagan's Beautiful Movement are coming from.
They are, of course, rolling off an assembly line that Gingrich and other of Sullivan's fellow Conservatives built for them long, long ago.
David Brooks prattles on about "Watergate and Vietnam...", but somehow always fails to mention that the frightening trend he sees unfolding before him is nothing more than the blossoming of a terrible harvest which Gingrich and other of Brooks' fellow Conservatives planted long, long ago.
The reason both the Conservative Mr. Brooks and the Conservative Mr. Sullivan spend so much effort strenuously ignoring large swaths of Conservative history and bending their own past into horrid little origami renderings of Ronald Reagan is simple: Mr. Brooks' and Mr. Sullivan's continued economic and professional viability depends entirely on maintaining the absurd and destructive fiction that, sometime between 2004 and 2005, a Pure and Noble Conservatism to which they have devoted their entire adult lives was suddenly hijacked by Dick Cheney.
But of course, that's all bullshit.
The problems that the Conservative Mr. Brooks and the Conservative Mr. Sullivan now decry at 120 decibels were caused, not by some easily dismissible "fringe" group, but by the leaders of the very Movement to which Mr. Brooks and Mr. Sullivan have lent their unstinting and enthusiastic supporting for decades, and to which they both entirely owe with professional success and prosperity. And the moment they are forced to face that fact is the moment their 20-year-long ride on the Conservative Public Intellectual gravy train comes to a screeching halt and they both have to go out and get honest jobs.
So don't hold your breath.
And lastly, despite the fact that Newt Gingrich is a frequent and respected guest at the Sunday Morning Mouse Circus, the reason you will also never hear a single soul challenge him on his squalid, bomb-throwing past -- or a single a word of this discussed in the Mainstream Media generally -- is that there is absolutely no way to look at the political events of the 1990s and pretend that the responsibility for the spread of this virulently hateful political culture belonged to anyone other than the Republican Party. In the 1990s, there simply was no "Liberal" Gingrich (or Falwell, or DeLay, or Robertson, or Limbaugh, or Murdoch, or Koch Family, or Richard Mellon Scaife, or American Spectator Magazine, or Ralph E. Reed, or Grover Norquist, or, well, you get the idea) on the Left inflicting the kind of brutal, grievous, long-term damage to the American body politic that the scumbags like Newt was gleefully meting out every single fucking day.
This was one side-- the Republican Party -- and one man -- Newt Gingrich -- making the conscious, premeditated and utterly despicable decision to abandon Abraham Lincoln once and for all and throw in his his lot with Joseph Goebbels.
And if the last 20 years has proven anything, it is that the Mainstream Media will absolutely never under any circumstances report on any serious and systemic political problem if they cannot somehow figure out a way to allocate at least 51% of the blame to the Dirty Fucking Hippies.
"What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds."
-- Eric Hoffer
As the Republic burns and the New Conservative Barbarians caper in the firelight screaming for blood and tax cuts, America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual sits in an empty lot at the edge of the conflagration, desperately sifting the Sands of Derelict Nostalgia, looking for something other than the complete failure of everything he has ever believed in to write about.
Which is a tough beat.
Because no matter where one pokes one’s pen these days, out oozes a radioactive stream of Conservative fraud and failure, and unluckily for him, for all of David Brooks’ stature and influence, in the end he really only knows three or four card tricks. There is the Barely Humorous Anecdote. The 800-word essay on The Last Book I Read. The “Ain’t Modern Life Kooky?” chestnut.
And, most often these days, there is the Ahistorically Nostalgic Melodrama starring nonspecific groups of People.
When you hear this last one, you can be about 99.9% certain that America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual is lying. About something. And like solving a Junior Jumble, it's really not all that hard to dope out once you figure out how each specific, abstract lie interacts with the Overall Conservative Theme.
And these days the Overall Conservative Theme is always the same:
1. Once upon a time (specifically, when Saint Ronald Reagan walked the Earth) everything was better.
2. Then some stuff happened – no one is quite sure what.
3. Then things got worse.
It is the unmistakable spoor of America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual wearing the corners off his thesaurus as he tries to simultaneously claw his way to relevant commentary on the very grim events of the day with one hand, while desperately whitewashing his own culpability for those grim events with the other.
Very sad.
Yesterday the subject of his Ahistorically Nostalgic Melodrama starring nonspecific groups of People was “The Power Elite.” It seems that, once upon a time...
1. Honest working stiffs and rich white people ran things.
2. Then some stuff happened that let the rabble get edumicated.
3. Then things got worse.
Very sad.
Now while we Frist Fisk (thx. KCinDC) a little bit of Mr. Brooks’ execrable column, let us remember that he is not a mental patient who has scribbled this on the wall with his own poo, but rather America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual, who sits unassailably atop the very apex of the Power Elite.
...
Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite.
…
Since then, we have opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and members of many other groups. Moreover, we’ve changed the criteria for success. It is less necessary to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working.
Yet here’s the funny thing. As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.
…
OK, what “institutions” is he talking about? I mean, as flawed as they may be, it’s hard to believe, for example, that trust in the military has plummeted since it was integrated. Or that fire departments are less respected today because they’re run more professionally than they used to be. Or that cops are more hated now that they can no longer recreationally gun down civil rights activists or club hippies into comas in Grant Park.
So obviously America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual is not talking about those institutions.
So WTF is he going on about?
...
Fifty years ago, the financial world was dominated by well-connected blue bloods who drank at lunch and played golf in the afternoons. Now financial firms recruit from the cream of the Ivy League. In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?
...
Oh.
I get it.
Bankers.
See, although Mr. Brooks says “our institutions” what he means is “Goldman Sachs”.
And it will come as no surprise to you that, although he is talking about bankers, America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual manages to fail to mention the fact that, 50 years ago, Thurston Howell III had to do his drinking and golfing and maid-fucking and minority-hating inside a regulatory cage built for him by Arch Liberal Franklin Roosevelt. Although he may well have wanted to, Thurston was simply not allowed todestroy the global economy in order to make himself and his heirs incrementally wealthier.
Then, 30 years ago, acolytes of Conservatism in both political parties began frantically picking the lock on that cage. They finally succeeded in letting the Beast Capitalism out...and it almost destroyed the world.
True story, which, for painfully obvious reasons, America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual is desperate to now pretend was a failure of meritocracy and not a failure of Conservatism.
America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual continues…
... Government used to be staffed by party hacks. Today, it is staffed by people from public policy schools. But does government work better than it did before? ...
Wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
So wrong it is actually breathtaking.
So fucking wrong it is hard to know where to begin.
First, I assure you, there are still plenty of party hacks in the gummint, even as there obviously are on the editorial pages of the New York Times.
Second, where America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual sees “party hacks”, the rest of us see a government which used to be staffed with people who knew, at a street-level, that if they didn’t fulfill their end of the social contract by getting the streets paved and the schools open, they’d be tossed out on their asses.
Third, what “government” is America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual talking about? The zoning board? The local school council? Da Mare’s office? In addition to bursting at the seams with Teh Lying, this is also just plain lazy writing Mr. Brooks.
Fourth, and most importantly, to prop up his shabby, bullshit thesis, America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual has to (yet again) resort to deliberately falsifying the historical record by playing "Hide the Salami" with decades of recent American history.
America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual kinda does that a lot.
Because between his teary nostalgia for the Good Old Party Boss Days of yore and the Bad New Days of the well-educated, meritocratically-promoted technocrats, David Brooks desperately hopes that you won't notice that he has dropped people like Messiah College’s most famous graduate -- Monica Goodling -- down the Conservative memory hole.
You remember Monica, don't you Mr. Brooks?
The Wingnut Evangelical who the Bush Administration appointed as the 3rd in command of Alberto Gonzales’ Department of Justice?
The 12-year-old zealot who did not know the difference between rules and laws?
Ringing any bells?
As David Fucking Brooks fucking well knows, the cruel and excruciatingly-well-documented truth is that, in case after case, the Bush Administration filled the federal bureaucracy not with ward bosses or technocrats, but with grotesquely unqualified, anti-gummint Conservative ideologues; stuffing them into the lath and plaster of the United States government like so many wingnut IEDs.
That for eight, long, bloody years -- as David Brooks fucking well knows -- one massive, crippling Conservative catastrophe after another was caused NOT by some non-specific group of People staffing some non-specific Gummint with P-school grads; they were caused by Republicans who deliberately bypassed experts and packed a Republican Gummint with Conservative True Believers.
Thugs like John “Torture Me Elmo” Yoo.
Goofs like the former head of the Arabian Horse Association
who ran in tiny, useless circles while an American city drowned.
Stooges like Monica Goodling’s boss, who found employment in the federal gummint because he got Dubya out of jury duty in Texas (where he’d have had to ‘fess up to a politically embarrassing past) and because he had a positive genius for screwing the gummint up real good
and then forgetting about it.
There were also the armies of True Conservative Believers who were in charge of denying science
and wrecking environmental regulations.
There were outright War Criminals like Scooter Libby, whom David Brooks admired greatly, apparently on the strength of his musky man-smell, manners
DAVID BROOKS: I went to lunch with Scooter Libby twice when he was -- and he told me...
JIM LEHRER: What were the dates of those?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, what struck me was, A, he told me nothing. I didn't even know what he was ordering half the time.
DAVID BROOKS: And he was incredibly discrete.
And the second thing that always struck me is, he would pay in cash. Usually, you can buy somebody lunch if it's up to $20. But he would insist on following the law to the stickler of the detail. He would always put down a $20 bill.
But of course, the havoc wreaked, pain caused and distrust sown by these Conservative political saboteurs was dwarfed into the footnotes of history by architects and executors of the single most catastrophic foreign policy debacle in a generation (From "The New Yorker", with emphasis added):
...
[Bush] forced a congressional vote on the war just before the 2002 midterm elections. He trumpeted selective and misleading intelligence. He displayed intense devotion to classifying government documents, except when there was political advantage in declassifying them. He fired or sidelined government officials and military officers who told the American public what the Administration didn’t want it to hear. He released forecasts of the war’s cost that quickly became obsolete, and then he ignored the need for massive expenditures until a crucial half year in Iraq had been lost. His communications office in Baghdad issued frequently incredible accounts of the progress of the war and the reconstruction. He staffed the occupation with large numbers of political loyalists who turned out to be incompetent. According to Marine officers and American officials in Iraq, he ordered and then called off critical military operations in Falluja against the wishes of his commanders, with no apparent strategic plan. He made sure that blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib settled almost entirely on the shoulders of low-ranking troops. And then, in the middle of the election campaign, he changed the subject.
Like every other failure of the Bush Administration's, their Berserker A-Team were emphatically not street-wise political pragmatists, or “public policy school” graduates.
From the Chickenhawk Brownshirts
who replaced sane foreign policy with masturbatory dreams of Neocon Empire...
...to the legions of Republican clusterfuckers who drove my country
right
off
the cliff...
...these people were Conservative Fanatics, who ran every policy decision from some one-page, all-purpose Randite checklist cribbed straight out of "Atlas Shrugged" (from the late Steve Gilliard's "The guinea pig state"):
When I read that Viceroy Jerry, by fiat, had imposed a 15 percent flat tax, I thought it was a joke. I simply couldn't believe that Steve Forbes had that kind of influence on Iraqi politics.
The neo-cons are going to impose every half-wit idea in Iraq they can dig up. Illegally, without Iraqi consultation or any understanding of the Iraqi government or economy, he's going to change the rules of the game.
People have died for less.
...
Finally, America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual turns his beady eyes to his own profession:
... Journalism used to be the preserve of working-class stiffs who filed stories and hit the bars. Now it is the preserve of cultured analysts who file stories and hit the water bottles. Is the media overall more reputable now than it was then? ...
The idea that David Brooks can seriously reference the words “journalism” and “meritocracy” in the same paragraph without the topic sentence of that paragraph being “My presence in the field of journalism proves beyond any doubt that it is anything but a meritocracy” is enough to make H. L. Menken laugh himself out of his unquiet grave.
No, Mr. Brooks, journalism used to be the preserve of smart, working class stiffs who were unafraid to tell the truth. Who believed it was their mission to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” To the throw the first punch.
Now it is the preserve of rich, pudding-soft, establismentarian careerists who think missing blonds and adulterous golfers are Important!Breaking!News! but who wouldn’t call out the Devil for reeking of brimstone if you put a gun to their heads.
Journalism lost its good name and died a whore the day it was moved into the Entertainment division and told that it had to turn tricks to make a profit.
Or, as Jim Sleeper at TPM succinctly expressed it ("Where the Power Elite Gets Its Power") after slogging his way through this same, dreary mess
...Brooks will keep on dancing around that mirror, holding it up to others to make them feel guilty. He'll dispense barbed apercus while careening from Ivy envy to Ivy ingratiation and plucking those same chords in his fans. "[O]ur system of promotion has grown some pretty serious problems," he'll fret. But he won't name those problems' causes; he'll point fingers at their carriers, at least on the days he's resenting the carriers rather than courting them.
Also I have some leftover graphics to haunt your nightmares from a long post I never finished (but which turned out much better in last week's podcast than it was ever gonna in print) about Conservatism being exactly the same as pornography. Because, like porn, wingnut politics evokes the same visceral responses, caters to the same kinds of obsessions, forgives the same kinds of irrationalities, and rewards the same kinds of extreme behavior.
Which is why, over and over again, we on the Left cope so poorly with it.
Because since its earliest, most flamboyant days
To its corpulent twilight
Conservatism has been swept along by not by the power of its plot or its policies, but by the sheer ugly, violent prowess
Hoping the rest of the world wouldn't notice, today RNC Chair Mikey Steele hooked up with Rightwad Crazies in the political Men’s Room for a brief, degrading “Tory Hole” assignation.
Tea partiers get audience with RNC chairman but not a shared public stage
By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele treated tea party leaders like an ugly date Tuesday afternoon: They were good enough to take upstairs, but not good enough to be seen with in public.
Steele invited leaders of the conservative movement over to the GOP's Capitol Hill headquarters (to the adjacent National Republican Club, technically) for a private meeting on the third floor. But Republican leaders, probably wary of TV footage showing a tea party takeover of RNC headquarters, denied the activists' request to use the facility for the news conference they had planned for afterward.
…
…
The moment encapsulated well the Republican Party's dilemma as it tries to harness the considerable energy of the tea party movement. Steele's task is essentially to co-opt its leaders, keeping them from electoral challenges that could hurt the GOP's chances. Yet at the same time, he can't appear to the rest of the country to be embracing a movement known for extremist words and deeds.
…
Even as he roasts in the depths of Hell, at this moment Lee Atwater is laughing hard enough to lactate bile.
Don't you think it's time to make our elected officials full-time employees prohibited from outside employment?
Or maybe we should just ban the Burke family from elected office.
Not only is Ald. Fast Eddie Burke a lawyer on the side who represents clients before the county tax appeals board, but his brother Dan is a state legislator who is a - wait for it - lobbyist - on the side. (Ed Burke also slates judges for the Democratic party while his wife was scammed into a seat on the state supreme court, but let's set that aside for today.)
"[Dan] Burke, 58, is one of several elected officials in the Chicago area who also work as lobbyists," the Sun-Times and the Better Government Association report.
And that's not all.
Burke also collects a $68,828 annual pension from the City of Chicago where he was once deputy city clerk.
...
Without question there are a lot of problems with gummint: Gummint is broken; it's broke; it's drowning in dirty money; it's beholden to goofs and grifters.
All true, but there is another, even more closely-guarded secret about gummint -- Most people who work in it actually work pretty hard and try to do a pretty good job. They labor at catching bad guys, educating our kids, pulling our asses out of burning buildings, digging up ancient, collapsed, stinking pipes at 2:00 A.M. in the dead of winter so I can have a hot shower in the morning and the endless other difficult, important, unsexy nuts and bolts of keeping civilization from flying apart. And they do this work in exchange for the predictability of a steady paycheck and and a small pension.
When the cotton is high, they get called chumps by their friends who went into banking or real estate and pull down six-figure bonuses: when times are tough, these same people are suddenly castigated for daring to insist that society stick to the fucking bargain -- years of mostly honest labor in exchange for a small measure of security and a little set aside for old age.
You know, things that in this country we used to consider everyday, commonplace Middle Class Values; remuneration that, now that the Casino Economy has imploded and screwed everyone who fell for the supply-side okey doke, are suddenly considered -- without a hint of irony -- unforgivably lavish and greedy.
And that is what drives me up a wall with douchbags like Burke; the fact that he clearly doesn't care. He has worked his whole life to worm his way into a position where he and his cronies can sprinkle magic statutory dust on their slimy racketeering and -- poof! -- all their graft and gravy becomes as legal as sea-water.
If he had been hired or appointed, the City has elaborate ethics regulations that would, in theory, have gotten his grifting ass fired years ago. (In practice, somehow the Ethics Hammer seems never to fall on friends of Da Mare no matter how blatant or public the offense.)
But Moneybags is elected, not appointed or hired, which means he and his pals get to rewrite the rules however they please. Which -- unless you are a congenital idiot or cosmically hoggish -- makes it infinitely easier to openly fleece the citizens of Chicago while technically staying on right side of the law.
While making it infinitely harder for those of us who are still in there pitching Liberalism and trying to convince a cynical public that government exists for any reason other than to allow douchbags like Moneybags Burke to loot the public treasury with impunity.
In which The Defender of the Villager Faith Completed a “Full Bobo”.
(Hereafter, the “Full Bobo” refers to the appearance of a single pundit with no particular specialty or relevant expertise – usually David Fucking Brooks – who is nonetheless invited to appear in a single week on a major outlet of every major media genre – radio, teevee and print – to push some laughably-absurd bit of ideological twaddle …and is never once challenged by any of his peers in any of those venues.
Thus is “conventional Beltway Wisdom” manufactured right before our eyes. )
On another channel, an infamous American liar, traitor and war criminal named Dick Cheney was invited onto a major Mouse Circus Outlet where his depraved opinions were sought on a variety of subjects.
I mostly skipped past it, as the only question I am interested in vis-à-vis Dick Cheney is whether he will be tried for his crimes before a military tribunal or in a civilian court, but Cheney’s presence on teevee is a gravity-well that sucks every other topic on every other channel into it.
On “Meet the Press”David Gregory began his day by asking Joe Biden the same question over and over again.
Gregory: Mr. Vice President, given that you are a Democrat, I will be asking you 15-70 very aggressive questions about a single topic -- terrorism trials and Dick Cheney.
Biden: I see.
Gregory: If you were a Republican, I would be braiding your hair and asking why Democrats are such assholes.
Biden: Of course.
Gregory: It is my sincerest hope that you will made some huge gaffe around which we can build our entire pundit lineup next week.
Biden: Ahhh.
Gregory: If you have somehow managed to keep your comments on a leash, we have a panel on after you who will invent a controversy, which we hope will dominate the ratings.
Biden: My grandpa had a saying. If you see a pig fall past your window, don’t assume that pigs fly. Or maybe it was dogs. Or sheep. Ok, look, I did a lot of acid and listened to a lot of Floyd back the day
so let's just stipulate that I said something folksy and move on.
Later, after David Gregory lets Illinois Republican Congressman Aaron Schock run off at the mouth unchallenged, Maddow elected to step in, do Gregory’s fucking job for him, and play Congressman Schock’s ‘nads like maracas.
(Despite the fact that she’s a head smarter that everyone else at the table -- and has so completely lapped the hapless, establishmentarian fop of a host that it is almost painful to watch – it is initially jarring to see Rachel Maddow show up on “Meet the Press”: sorta like seeing Cindy Lou Who show up in a “Saw” movie.)
And to keep from letting Maddow just stomping his guests to death, David Gregory had to repeatedly and valiantly interpose himself between her ugly, relentless facts and everyone else’s sweet-sweet Beltway Insider Bullshit.
Danger! Danger! Liberals have breached our bullshit perimeter!
David Gregory: Where are they?! David Brooks: 9 meters, 7, 6. David Gregory: That can't be, that's inside the room. David Brooks: It's reading right man, look. Harold "Slicky" Ford: Then, "you're" not reading it right.
MR. GREGORY: But, but answer--all right, let me, let me...(unintelligible)...Rachel, which is that the, the question about you--you've…
And like that…
David Brooks again conveniently misplaces three and a half decades of Republican political history and completes his “Full Bobo” by trying to run his “Both parties are responsible”, “Vietnam and Watergate…caused the teabaggers” scam one last time.
Rachel got Bobo sweating right though his makeup when she wheeled around and said “We’re not talking about 'bipartisanship'; we’re talking about hypocrisy.” This is what makes Maddow so very dangerous: she does her homework. She comes loaded for bear and is able to take full advantage of any opening to point out things that are “factually wrong even though they are beltway common wisdom.”
Bobo needn’t have worried; game show host David Gregory did what NBC pays him eight-figures a year to do; aggressively abort any serious discussion of what is really wrong with Washington that might challenge established Villager norms and protocols.
Gregory: Bobo, you wrote a column this week about how awful everything is, and how hard it is to fix shit now. But would it have been possible to fix this stuff before?
Bobo: Thank you for awkwardly handing me that completely scripted question David Gregory. The answer is “No”. There was this period between 1932 and 19?? When we trusted gummint. Then there was Watergate and Vietnam and a bunch of other shit…after which we magically end up in 2010 with everybody hating Washington.
Later, Harold Ford proved his bipartisanshiup by affably humping everyone’s leg equally, for which he was rewarded by being given five minutes near the end of the show to campaign for office by long-answering softball “questions” with no follow-up which were lobbed to him underhanded by Gregory.
Gregory: Harold, tell us more about your “special purpose”.
