Books I Would Pay

Cash-money to own.

Generally speaking, I don't need a lot of tactical help when it comes to managing projects unless I am, say, assembling Interocitors from scratch (never done it)

or explaining to the legal department for the 100th time why I should be permitted to cashier an employee who was absent for weeks on end, was incapable of completing a one-day assignment in a month and a half, lied constantly and incompetently, slept snoringly at his desk on the days he did bother showing up for work at all, and had already been verbally and written-ly warned to the point of it being comic opera (did that, and would rather lose a limb to a knife-wielding rat in an alley fight than ever go through it again.)

What I do need help with from time to time is a gentle reminder that while the working world may be a pinata full of loco being beaten with rebar by gorgons, I myself am not mad.

Nor am I alone.

Doomed, perhaps, but not crazy, which, as it turns out, is exactly the brand of parable which Harlan Ellison has been exultantly gift-wrapping in fury and terror and leaving on our doorsteps since before I was born.

Yeah, sure, from the "Glass Teat" books, to "The 3 Most Important Things in Life" essay to his vivid autopsy of what happened to the "I, Robot" script, to the fate of those who live in a world where "The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge" gets disappointed...interleaved throughout his sprawling body of work are all kinds of seams of pure labor relations gold.

But selfishly and frankly it would be a hoot to see a big, mean hardcover by Ellison in the Business Book and/or Current Events section of my local Book-O-Drome, leaping from shelf-to-shelf, chasing Hank Paulson's "On the Brink" out of the store and into oncoming traffic, chewing the heart out of whatever unholy globitarian oligarch dreck Tom Friedman just extruded and laying a clutch of eggs in it's still-warm corpse, and cackling in the corner with Matt Taibbi's "Griftopia".

Suggested titles you ask? What about...

"The Kyben Way: Kanbanning your way to Market Supremacy"

"Jeffty's Visioneering Meeting has been rescheduled to 5:00."

"The Cheese Stood Alone until Someone Moved It."

"The One-Minute Ticktock Manager"

"PowerPoint of the Lost Hour"

"The Man Who Offshored Christopher Columbus"

"The Beast That Shouted 'Synergy' at the Heart of the World"

And of course

"The Management Secrets of Cordwainer Bird"

However since this particular grand idea may never come to fruition, I will probably have to satisfy myself with scraping up a few dollars and running out to buy "Brain Movies".

I can live with that.

A Peek Inside

The Republican playbook for 2012.

In other words, pretty much the same playbook the GOP used
in 2010.

2008.

2006.

2004.

2002.

2000.

And so on.

And so on.

And so on.

If you do not understand this kind of raw, beserker hatred, you will never comprehend the Modern Conservative Movement.

Nor will you understand the depth of Liberal contempt for the "Both Sides Do It" Centrist clowns who populate our mainstream media.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and You

We cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.
We will become all one thing, or all the other.

In belated honor of the coincidence of the 112th birthday of author Jorge Luis Borges and the book tour of unindicted war criminal Dick Cheney (and co-author/bloodthirsty Predator drone daughter Liz Cheney),

I pulled the notes for this post off a digital shelf where I keep the roughly one million jots and paragraph and half posts that I have pasted up and set aside based on my fishing expeditions in the veritable cataract of current events that are constantly roaring past our collective digital front doors.

It is all too much to encompass or even comprehend, and believe it or not for every post that I finish off and publish, there are probably 10 that never make it out of the body shop (insert your own mental image of a clean, well-lighted garage where the jumbled guts of a dozen cars are stacked here there and everywhere, all in various states of assembly, disassembly or being-taken-apart-for-the Hell-of-it. )

But doesn't that mean I could, say, quintuple my output if I really wanted to?

Sure. Piece of cake, actually, if I wanted to go into the sentence-fragment-plus-link business (and make no mistake, the aggregation business is primarily a business.)

In fact, I already tried it on for size and bench-tested just how difficult it really is to do the aggregation thing: a daily clipping service of he-said-she-said links to the same set of a dozen or two others with a thin layer of prose frosting on top.

Turns out it's actually quite easy compared to, y'know, actual writing, but not nearly as much fun, so fuck that.

Where was I?

Oh yes.

Writing.

Specifically fiction writing.

More specifically, powerful, literary, speculative fiction about totalitarianism that is timely enough to constitute "Hey, doesn't this shit look like this guy Borges was talking about the GOP?" news, and obscure enough that maybe you've never heard of it before.

Borges' wonderful "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" does a better job of describing the culture war that we are actually engaged in -- and it is a war -- than almost anything else I have ever read.

"1984" is, of course, indispensable: worth its weight in Victory Gin if only for the terrifying vocabulary it bequeathed to anyone with the will to listen (Who among us does not recognize the "Two Minutes Hate" roots of the Fox News business plan? Who in their right mind can read Orwell's description of "doublethink" --

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

-- and not see the typical Tea Party goon?")

But "1984" is a post hoc story, describing a completely articulated totalitarian state at the height of its power. "1984" is a world where all hope and opposition to tyranny have been finally and methodically eradicated: a place where one can easily imagine the descendants of Oceania 100 or 1,000 years later, completely devolved into terrified, grunting, barely-human animals endlessly charging back and forth from war to want to war, pausing only long long enough to shriek out their hatred of the Universe once a day, mate, and tear this week's designated internal enemy to pieces.

"Tlön...", on the other hand, described what twilight looked like on a world that was going mad; describes the inexorable, intoxicating, nightmare "logic" that bum-rushed that world into darkness:

/Spoiler Alert/

In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", an encyclopedia article about a mysterious country called Uqbar is the first indication of Orbis Tertius, a massive conspiracy of intellectuals to imagine (and thereby create) a world: Tlön. In the course of the story, the narrator encounters increasingly substantive artifacts of Orbis Tertius and of Tlön; by the end of the story, Earth is becoming Tlön.

...
Appropriately, the people of the imaginary Tlön — a fictional construct within a fictional story — hold an extreme form of Berkeleian idealism, denying the reality of the world. Their world is understood "not as a concurrence of objects in space, but as a heterogeneous series of independent acts. One of the imagined languages of Tlön lacks nouns. Its central units are "impersonal verbs qualified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes which have the force of adverbs."
...

In a world where there are no nouns — or where nouns are composites of other parts of speech, created and discarded according to a whim — and no things, most of Western philosophy becomes impossible. Without nouns about which to state propositions, there can be no a priori deductive reasoning from first principles. Without history, there can be no teleology (showing a divine purpose playing itself out in the world). If there can be no such thing as observing the same object at different times, there is no possibility of a posteriori inductive reasoning (generalizing from experience).
...

The narrator learns that as the society's work began, it became clear that a single generation wasn't sufficient to articulate the entire country of Uqbar. Each master therefore agreed to elect a disciple who would carry on his work and also perpetuate this hereditary arrangement. However, there was no further trace of this society until, two centuries later, one of its disciples was the fictional Ezra Buckley. Buckley was an eccentric Memphis, Tennessee millionaire who scoffed at the modest scale of the sect's undertaking. He proposed instead the invention of a planet, Tlön, with certain provisos: that the project be kept secret, that an encyclopedia of the imaginary planet of Tlön be written, and that the whole scheme "have no truck with that impostor Jesus Christ"
...

In the early 1940s — still in the future at the time Borges wrote the story — the Tlönic project has ceased to be a secret, and is beginning to disseminate its own universe. Beginning "about 1942", in what at first appears a magical turn, objects from Tlön begin to appear in the real world. While we are later led to see them as forgeries, they still must be the projects of a secret science and technology. Once the full, forty-volume First Encyclopaedia of Tlön is found in Memphis, the idea of Tlön begins unstoppably to take over and eradicate the existing cultures of the real world.
...

The fictional Borges is appalled by this turn of events, an element in the story that critics Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Alastair Reid[8] argue is to be read as a metaphor for the totalitarianism already sweeping across Europe at the time of the story's writing. Their remark seems only a small extrapolation from a passage toward the end of the story:

Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order — dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too is ordered."

We live in a time when Nixon's Southern Strategy stands triumphant: when the last vestiges of sanity have been finally centrifuged out of the Party of Lincoln, leaving behind nothing but the feverish fascist dregs of American culture. But since the racists, Dominionists, yahoos and oligarchs that remain inside the GOP are not natural allies, they need a story -- a unifying narrative -- to bring them all into alignment to accomplish together what none of them could possibly accomplish on their own: the liquidation of the United States of America as we know it.

They need a lie so big and tightly woven that it can comfortably contain all the smaller lies that make each member of the conspiracy happy.

They need a creation myth about an America that was founded by Conservative Christian Evangelicals who cribbed it all directly from Leviticus.

An America where slavery wasn't so very bad, was fought continuously by the Founders, and would have died a natural death from the benevolent force of the capitalism if the meddling federal gummint had just let things run their course.

An America where Jim Crow barely existed, and the only member of the Klan was Robert Byrd, who (like all Democrats) stayed a secret Klan member and a sworn racist until the day he died. An America where Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. Were Reagan was a fiscally prudent strict Constitutionalist. Where the Depression was created and then worsened by Liberal meddling.

An America where putting a LoJack inside every woman's vagina isn't Evil Big Gummint, but making sure every kid gets a good education and grows up with clean air to breath and water to drink is.

An America where Christ hated the poor and the weak but loved Wall Street and endless war.

An America where the worldwide climate science consensus is nothing but a Leftist conspiracy and evolution is just Communism dressed up like dinosaurs.

An America where Dick Cheney isn't a fucking war criminal and the world just loves in that America invaded the wrong country, and justified it with lies it tortured out of prisoners.

They are all quite dangerously and irretrievably mad, which is why the more logic and data we throw at them, the louder the screech and bray and demand that the history of the world be rebuilt to their deluded specifications out the building blocks of their childish, ignorant, paranoid fantasies.

Remade from scratch out of Tlön, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius.

On The Perils of Running

Too many scams at once.

While Newt Gingrich was busy pissing away his backer's money paying off whatever unholy deal he struck with Wife Number Three to play "candidate" on his Tiffany hegira/jubilee/"campaign" for "President" in such battleground locations as Maui and the sun-drenched deck of a Mediterranean cruise ship his other Ponzi schemes were running out of steam.

Newt Gingrich’s former group, American Solutions, shutters its doors

By Karen Tumulty, Published: August 26

The vast advocacy and fundraising operation that former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) built after leaving Capitol Hill more than a decade ago has ceased to exist — a casualty of Gingrich’s decision to run for president in 2012.

According to an Aug. 1 filing with the Internal Revenue Service, American Solutions for Winning the Future raised more than $2.4 million during the first six months of the year, but it spent almost $3 million.

“It closed down” in July, said longtime Gingrich adviser Joe Gaylord, who had taken over the organization after Gingrich’s departure. “There’s nothing to say. We had difficulty raising money after Newt left. .?.?. We didn’t want to run the organization into deep, deep, deep debt. So we closed it down.”
...

In its heyday, the group raised more money than any other such organization, collecting more than $52 million in its first four years. Nearly two-thirds of that, however, went toward fundraising, which made it an unusually expensive operation.

The group’s donor base included more than 300,000 contributors who gave $200 or less, although it also had a number of wealthy benefactors, including casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who provided $6 million.
...

American Solutions for Winning the Future: Best. Sucker. List. Ever.

Seriously, if it's 2011 and you're actually writing checks to Newton Leroy Gingrich and Lady Macbeth, I definitely want your mailing address. It will make my upcoming Fundraiser at the End of the Universe ever so much easier.

Then again, maybe Newt will fool us all!

The Gingrich Surge!

By David Weigel | Posted Monday, Aug. 29, 2011, at 2:09 PM EDT

What's the best part of this Paul Bedard item? Is it the title, "Newt Gingrich Could Be the New 'Comeback Kid'?'" The conditional tense is a magical thing -- I could write a headline like "Worldwide Pandemic Could Make Buddy Roemer the GOP Nominee, If He Happens to Be the Only Candidate With An Immunity," and it would be exactly as accurate as Bedard's hed. Is it the fact that the evidence for the Gingrich surge is a quote from a "GOP analyst"? What does that even mean? Does this source write psychological profiles of Republicans? I checked with a random GOP source of my own, just to see if I could get an anonymous quote about this article.

It's far fetched bordering on comical. Operationally, how does the guy raise the money to run a campaign?
...

My conclusion: Buy Newt on InTrade. But only do so if you convince yourself that when a man known to almost all GOP primary voters is polling in single digits, it's because he's about to stage a surge.

Rightwing Talking Point Pez Dispenser and member of the Best Damned Political something
something on Cable Teevee -- Erick, Son of Erick -- sits wingnut shiva sheds a sticky little tear for his hero (emphasis added):

...
For many of us who got our start in politics around the Republican Revolution of 1994, it is kind of sad to see Newt Gingrich neither victorious nor really beaten nor vanquished — then it would at least have been a momentous fight. That would have had some catharsis to it.

He’s just out of gas. He fizzled without so much as a flash in the pan. How does that happen to a guy who once was the most powerful Republican in America?

Inasmuch as Conservative death-eaters like Mr. Erickson spend much of their lives frantically fending off with a pointed stick even the mildest forms of introspection, I suspect he really, really doesn't want the answer to that question.

Voice of Empire, Ctd

Two, correctional-facility-based questions bookended the Mouse Circus today: one asked and one unasked.

• Asked: Why the Hell weren't prisoners being held on Riker's Island evacuated?


• Unasked: Why the Hell isn't Richard Bruce Cheney and most of the rest of his Republican politico-criminal enterprise rotting away the rest of their lives in federal prison?

Interred beneath the vast, complicit media silence between the implications of these two questions is where you will find most everything that is wrong with the United States in this Year of Our Lord 2011.

Which is why, rather that daring to look Evil in the eye and asking "Why?", everyone instead settled into their comfortable media roles, giggled and whispering uncomfortably about how little regard cyborg and unindicted-war-criminal Cheney had for anyone that stood in his way, and how really, really unapologetic Vice President Sociopath is for anything.

As if this were some kind of surprise.

Also David Fucking Brooks was on teevee to basically re-read his Friday New York Times column verbatim.

Nice work if you can get it.

Our Mr. Brooks' reveals to a stunned nation that his Republican Party is now completely captive to a mob of bigots and yahoos who think Ned Beatty shore has a purdy mouth!

For those of you keeping score out there, these are the same people that Our Mr. Brooks has spend most of his career ignoring, preferring instead to measure out his life's teaspoons of bile onto Dirty Fucking Hippies whenever the opportunity presents itself do so in complete safety:

"In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion -- that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed--but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis."

All of which only served to leave a depressed and distracted America with one more unanswered question:

Hurricane Irene: Good for John McCain...or great for John McCain?

You have now seen Sunday's Mouse Circus, except for the Fox News bit, which I understand was like bobbing for turds in a barrel of molten lead.

As an added bonus, J. Michael Straczynski explains in one minute and twenty seconds one quick way to begin to unfuck our

unholy clusterfuck of a media.

Professional Left Podcast #90

"Episode 90? Really? 90? Damn!"

-- driftglass

Show links:

1. The link to Clifton Yin's terrible, terrible FrumForum post.
2. Wingnut Welfare defined.
3. Calvin Trillin's terrific New Yorker article remembering the Freedom Riders.
   

Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic at the ProLeft website and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget, our archives are available for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

Da' money goes here:

While You Were Busy

busking for nickles and shaking out the sofa cushions one more time looking for a few pfennigs for good causes, here is what Team Evil was up to.

From Talking Points Memo:

Report: Millions Donated To Islamophobic Groups Since 2001

Ryan J. Reilly | August 26, 2011

Seven foundations and wealthy donors gave Islamophobic groups $42.6M from 2001 through 2009, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress.

"Sometimes the money flowing from these foundations and their donors is clearly designed to promote Islamophobia, but more often the support provided is for general purpose use, which the think tanks and grassroots organizations then put to use on their primary purpose -- spreading their messages of hate and fear as far and wide as they can," the report says.

On other words, the Usual Suspects:

• Donors Capital Fund
• Richard Mellon Scaife foundations
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
• Newton D. & Rochelle F. Becker foundations and charitable trust
• Russell Berrie Foundation
• Anchorage Charitable Fund and William Rosenwald Family Fund
• Fairbrook Foundation

Showering cash on the Usual Suspects:

And what does this money fund? Well, here’s one of many cases in point: Last July, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich warned a conservative audience at the American Enterprise Institute that the Islamic practice of Sharia was “a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.” Gingrich went on to claim that “Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world.”

Sharia, or Muslim religious code, includes practices such as charitable giving, prayer, and honoring one’s parents—precepts virtually identical to those of Christianity and Judaism. But Gingrich and other conservatives promote alarmist notions about a nearly 1,500-year-old religion for a variety of sinister political, financial, and ideological motives. In his remarks that day, Gingrich mimicked the language of conservative analyst Andrew McCarthy, who co-wrote a report calling Sharia “the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time.” Such similarities in language are no accident. Look no further than the organization that released McCarthy’s anti-Sharia report: the aforementioned Center for Security Policy, which is a central hub of the anti-Muslim network and an active promoter of anti- Sharia messaging and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

In fact, CSP is a key source for right-wing politicians, pundits, and grassroots organizations, providing them with a steady stream of reports mischaracterizing Islam and warnings about the dangers of Islam and American Muslims. Operating under the leadership of Frank Gaffney, the organization is funded by a small number of foundations and donors with a deep understanding of how to influence U.S. politics by promoting highly alarming threats to our national security. CSP is joined by other anti-Muslim organizations in this lucrative business, such as Stop Islamization of America and the Society of Americans for National Existence. Many of the leaders of these organizations are well-schooled in the art of getting attention in the press, particularly Fox News, The Wall Street Journal editorial pages, The Washington Times, and a variety of right-wing websites and radio outlets.

Misinformation experts such as Gaffney consult and work with such right-wing grassroots organizations as ACT! for America and the Eagle Forum, as well as religious right groups such as the Faith and Freedom Coalition and American Family Association, to spread their message. Speaking at their conferences, writing on their websites, and appearing on their radio shows, these experts rail against Islam and cast suspicion on American Muslims. Much of their propaganda gets churned into fundraising appeals by grassroots and religious right groups. The money they raise then enters the political process and helps fund ads supporting politicians who echo alarmist warnings and sponsor anti-Muslim attacks.
...

In the interest of strict fairness, I'm sure not all of these deeply depraved assholes are in the Hate Business only for the money.

I'm sure that, if it came right down to it, many of them sincerely loathe this country enough that they would lie and slander tirelessly to subvert and destroy it for free.

Last of the Summer Whine

Intrepid Conservative fabulist, Doughy Pantload, finally gets at the real Perry Problem.

Guess what?

Turns out, The Perry Problem has nothing to do with Perry's unhinged ideas or arrogant, diamond-hard ignorance.

Nope.

Turns out, once you flense away all the annoying fact-y stuff, the real problem is, as always, the bigotry and snobbery of those damned Imaginary Hippies that hide under Jonah Goldberg's bed and vex him night and day.

Pantload from the Chicago Tribune:

...
Let's cut through the clutter: A lot of people on the East and West coasts are bigots and snobs about "flyover types." They equate funny accents with stupidity, and they automatically assume someone who went to Texas A&M must be dumber than someone who went to Yale. Overt displays of religion trigger their fight-or-flight instincts, causing them to lash out irrationally.

My favorite example? When John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, University of Chicago professor Wendy Doniger wrote that Palin's "greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

When I read such idiocy, it's impossible for me not to love Bush, Perry, Palin, et al. for their enemies.
...

See! I told you it wasn't 'cause Perry, Perry, Quite Contrary is an injection-mold Dubya replicant made out of Pure Righteous Medieval Dumb!

And with so many powerful, tireless imaginary enemies circling and mocking this Good Christian Man for his Goodness and Christianity, the author of "Liberal Fascism" and inexplicable beneficiary of a million-dollar book contract

finds the notion of defending the verbal tics and cultural projectile vomitings of another shitkicking Preznit Cretin from the Empire of Texas just too, too exhausting.

But here's my problem: I find the prospect of another four or eight years of defending these cultural distinctions to be intensely wearying.

My weariness is hardly a major consideration for anybody, but I think it reflects a larger problem. Conservatism is starting to have an identity-politics problem all its own. I think conservatism needs to spend less time defending candidates for who they are, and more time supporting candidates for what they intend to do.

Bush's inability to articulate arguments had nothing to do with his Texan-ness or his Christianity, but a lot of folks on the right defended him as if that was the case. "He speaks American, don't you get it?"

To which I'd reply: "No, he speaks badly."

Perry's not a bad speaker, and I'm trying to keep an open mind. I suspect I agree with him more than I did with Bush, whose compassionate conservatism I loathed.
...

Actually the real, real problem is that Jonah Goldberg is a very lazy hack and stunningly bad writer whose had hoped this particular, embarrassing cup o' bad Dubya Reruns could pass him by this time and doesn't relish the thought of having to bestir himself, don his cardboard armor, take up his Crayola sword, once again pressed very reluctantly into defending the open, running, yahoo sewer of a Movement upon which his livelihood completely depends.

So why is this bush-league toadstool even in my Chicago Tribune at all?

Oh yeah...

Noted New York Times Columnist*

l
Suddenly notices that his Party is full of idiots and crazy people.

In other words, it's "Hey? What's that 'poo' smell?" once more with feeling.

Well, not "feeling" exactly: Mr. Brooks very carefully squeezes any hint of "judgment" out of his paragraphs, and even halfheartedly tosses in his contractually-obligated gratuitous shot at Liberals ("[Rick Perry's] persona is perfectly tuned to offend people along the Acela corridor..."] which, I suppose, is what passes for geographically-in-the-know cleverdog slang for faggy, America-hating Leftists like me, although

A) The only corridor this flyover faggy, America-hating Leftist lives anywhere near is an industrial one and,

B) If you wanna make it with all the cowboys and razorgirls and coolhunters, you're gonna want to chuck your narctalk and upgrade your nadsat to include references to "The Sprawl" ya sad old Herbert.)

So...where was I again?

Oh yes.

Rick Perry appears to have made Our Mr. Brooks quietly soil himself.

President Rick Perry?
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 25, 2011

...
Within the Republican Party, the rightward shift has been even more vehement. In 2008, roughly 63 percent of primary voters called themselves conservative, according to Public Policy Polling. Now it’s roughly 73 percent. The number of moderate Republicans has withered.

The events of 2009 and 2010 also concentrated the Republican mind. It used to be that there were many themes in the Republican hymnal. Now there is only one: Government is too big, and it needs to be brought under control. It used to be there were many threats on the horizon. Now there is only one: the interlocking oligarchy of politicians, academics, journalists, consultants and financiers who live along the Acela corridor want to rip America from its traditional moorings.

Perry is benefiting from these shifts. He does best among the most conservative voters. He has a simple and fashionable message: I will bring government under control. His persona is perfectly tuned to offend people along the Acela corridor and to rally those who oppose those people. He does very well with the alternative-reality right — those who don’t believe in global warming, evolution or that Obama was born in the U.S.

So, yes, it is time to take Perry seriously as a Republican nominee and even as a potential president.
...

Romney might be able to beat back the Perry surge. In the meantime, it’s time to take Perry seriously. He could be our next president.

/Shrugs/

I don't know anyone on the Left who doesn't take the possibility of a President Perry very seriously, despite clear evidence that a Perry Administration would make a Stillson Administration

look like a model of modestly and restraint.

America was plenty stupid enough to put a reckless, dimwitted dry-drunk clown close enough to the White House so that his Daddy's friends could steal it for him.

And then stupid enough to re-elect the same ambulatory disaster even after he had added treason and war crimes to his scant resume, because Commander Cuckoobananas and President Cheney were perfectly willing to keep America in a constant state of terror by, among other things, raining ads like this down on the public like the Wrath of God

while block-of-affable-wood John Kerry was damnfool enough to think long speeches full of nuance and appeals to sweet reason is how you whip thugs and demagogues.

So yeah, under the right circumstances, we're plenty dumb enough to hand over the keys to an even more perfect distillate version of the lunatic who broke the county in the first place, in no small part thanks to the fact that all of Mr. Brooks' Batshit Chickens have indeed finally come home to roost.

This is not news.

In fact, this doesn't even feel like a proper David Fucking Brooks column.

Something is...missing.

That little...something...that turns a mere turgid recitation of statistics and hackneyed Beltway Common Wisdom into a gem worth mounting in America's Newspaper of record.

Something...something..."But the Democrats...".

Something...something..."Centrism".

Something...something..."Paul Ryan's brave stance".

Something...something..."Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the "tanned"..."prairie, sun-chapped", "handsome", "gracious and ecumenical" mancrush of my dreams that is...John Thune"

Something...something..."Serious People".

Something...something..."Let them eat work!"

Something...something..."Common sense bipartisan solutions."

Something...something..."Liberals who 'cynically manufactured' their anger over the outing of a CIA agent."

Something...something..."Compromise, bitches!"

Something...something..."But I do insist that Trump is no joke."

And of course, something...something..."My motherfucking Green Jacket!"


See what happens when David Brooks goes on vacation?

He forgets how to write a David Brooks column.


*(thanks to Kevin Holsinger for the catch)

Purity of Adolescence

14-year-old Teabagger Superman Marco Rubio explains how Social Security 'N stuff has been sapping America's precious bodily fluids!

Since 1935!

Jesus, no wonder I'm so tired!

From Talking Points Memo:

Rubio’s Reagan Speech: Entitlements “Weakened” Us
Thomas Lane | August 24, 2011, 5:30PM

Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) seems to be the "right" man for the "right" time. Indeed, there's now so much speculation that he'll take the VP slot of next year's GOP presidential ticket that one wag recently tweeted, "Is it time to rename GOP primaries 'the contest to become Marco Rubio's running mate'?"

The GOP heartthrob delivered a much-anticipated speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Wednesday. The address was packed with the red meat Tea Party audiences crave, and at its heart was the reddest meat of all: a "things-ain't-what-they-used-to-be" take-down of entitlement programs.

With a tone that suggested he spoke more in sorrow than in anger, Rubio said that though the creation of a welfare state "was well-intentioned, it was doomed to fail from the start."

"These programs actually weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another.
...

Like so many of his filthy breed, Senator Rubio's Conservatism draws its strength directly from his terrifyingly smug and apparent limitless ignorance of the basic history of this country and its people.

The halcyon past his kind hearkens back to is pure fiction that exists only in half-remembered episodes of "Little House on the Prairie" and "Father Knows Best": the pure and noble pre-Fall Conservatism his kind walk around every day politically-priapistic over, never fucking existed.

And as much as I a tempted to unfurl the Liberal Litany of Actual Facts about the history of Social Security and the horrorshow of poverty and neglect that it was created to mitigated -- a horrorshow that is the inevitable byproduct of unrestricted capitalism -- I figure, why bother?

These people long ago completely stopped listening to anyone who doesn't echo flatteringly back to them the shrieking voices in their head

much less a dirty Hippie like me. So we end up fighting the same skirmishes every few years or so, against more-or-less the same army of Wingnut Billionaire Funded Zombies who come lurching back out of thesewer with a slightly revised set of shiny new lies to publicly justify their single-minded Prime Directive: the complete repeal of the 20th century.

Because how does the Right keep getting the same idiots to swallow one more round of Conservative rat poison as grits and gravy, served up by the same liars who sold them the last 1,000 toxic Happy Meals?

By leaning hard on that most beloved of Conservative Big Lies -- the wholly fake past:

[Rubios's comments] probably don’t rule out Warren Harding, but even Calvin Coolidge as governor of Massachusetts signed a maximum-hours bill for women and children. For sure, Rubio’s words condemn Presidents Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Truth be told they condemn Ronald Reagan too, but shhh. They condemn almost every one of the party’s presidential nominees since Wendell Wilkie except Barry Goldwater: Tom Dewey, Bob Dole, and John McCain. And of course they condemn almost every important Republican governor, senator and member of Congress of the post-1945 period, Robert Taft very much included.

One of the effects of the Tea Party movement is to cut the Republican Party off – not only from the measured policy preferences of the American people – but from the Republican Party’s own history. It shrivels the GOP into a party without heroes, or rather a party with only one hero, Ronald Reagan, and otherwise a long succession of false and deluded leaders.

And it points Republicans to a doomed future of continuing failure and recrimination.
...

And until their movement is dismantled, their leaders dispossessed, their depraved ideology buried at the crossroad with a spike through its heart, and until their skeevy Centrist enablers start taking some hard, humiliating public defeats that land them in the same category as child-abusers and the scum who torture small animals, this war will drag on and on, and we will continue to lose the country we love one exhausting inch at a time.

Mammon on the Mount

Or would "Stations of the Crass" be more apt?

Or perhaps "Old Whine in New Skins"?

Hard to say.

Maybe all of them, because when America's favorite sociopathic grifter starts making headlines by taking his patent med'cine freakshow to the Holy Lands to relieve a small group of pilgrimaging goobers of their extra cash, there is really no hammer big enough to adequately compass 'round my simultaneous contempt for Beck's grotesque perversion of Christianity and my profound embarrassment that I live in a country where millions of my fellow citizens actually take this fucknozzle's words as solid gold gospel.

From the Daily Beast:

What’s Beck Doing in Israel?

Michelle Goldberg

Aug 24, 2011

At the first of three rallies he is holding in Israel, Glenn Beck preached to his followers like a pastor. Michelle Goldberg reports on Beck’s ridiculous attempt to become a religious leader.

...
On Monday, in the first of three rallies he’s holding in Israel, a mostly American audience gathered in the ancient Roman amphitheater in the northern seaside town of Caesarea to hear from Beck and leading end-times preachers like John Hagee and Mike Evans. “I have spent the last few years trying to find a solution to what’s going on [in] the world,” said Beck, standing on a floodlit stage at the pit of the open-air structure, Roman columns behind him and the scent of the ocean in the air. “Anybody who’s listened to me or watched me for the last few years, you know about five years ago I said, ‘We’ve got to get off the exits. We’ve got to get off the exits. We’re passing the exits!'”

His voice grew more and more urgent, sounding rather like Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka narrating the Wondrous Boat Ride: “There’s going to come a time when there’s nothing but freeway and a cliff!” Then, suddenly oddly calm, he said, “We’re there.” From the crowd, there were scattered assents. “While there may not be a political solution, the good news is, the God of Abraham ain’t running for office!” The cheering crowd leapt to its feet. “Be not afraid! Know who he is! Know his face! Know that he is a God of covenants and a God of miracles! We are leaving the age of man-made miracles of spaceflight, and we are reentering the age of miracles of God.”
...

Beck is working closely with David Barton, the GOP operative and conservative revisionist historian, on “Restoring Courage.” The two acted as cohosts on Sunday night, and donations to the event are being channeled through Barton’s Wallbuilders organization. Barton’s record on Jewish issues is no better than Beck’s. He built his career by arguing, via a selective reading of documents from the Founding Fathers, that the Constitution is rooted in biblical values and that the founders never intended to separate church and state. And early on, he found an eager audience for his dubious history lessons on the right-wing fringe.
...

Prepare Ye, the Way of the Fraud.

Bold Thinkers Boldly Contemplate

The Future of Wealth!

From here, with boldness:

The Future Of Wealth

by Patrick Appel

Sam Harris contemplates it:

[T]here is no reason to think that we have reached the upper bound of wealth inequality, as not every breakthrough in technology creates new jobs. The ultimate labor saving device might be just that—the ultimate labor saving device. Imagine the future Google of robotics or nanotechnology: Its CEO could make Steve Jobs look like a sharecropper, and its products could put tens of millions of people out of work.
...

Yeah, this idea?

It's called "The Midas Plague".

It is a famous short story.

Very, very famous.

Canonical, you might even say.

It was boldly written by Frederik Pohl.

In the bold Year of Our Lord 1954.

Which is a very long time ago.


Here endeth the lesson.

Irrelevant GOP Pervert

Entertains tiny band of weirdos near site of historic leper colony.*

Now that's how you write a headline.

From Maui News:

Gingrich: Obama divided U.S.

Candidate for White House addresses TEA Party of Maui

August 22, 2011

WAILUKU - Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich spoke about his core values to about 150 applauding TEA Party of Maui members Saturday during a brief campaign tour of Hawaii.
...

"The current president is the best food stamp president in American history," Gingrich said to the packed room in the back of the modest church. "I would like to be the best paycheck president in U.S. history."
...

If Gingrich were president, he said, he would dismantle most of Obama's policies by issuing "50 to 200 executive orders right after my inauguration."

Gingrich said part of the problem is that the president is guilty of dividing the country. He accused Obama of halting job growth by pitting corporations and the wealthy against the rest of the country.

"You cannot create jobs with class warfare and bureaucratic socialism going on," he said.

Gingrich said he promotes social responsibility.
...

"Social responsibility", if you were unaware, is Smartest-Man-In-America-speak for "I only fuck one mistress at a time."

I guess we can look forward to reports of the Gingriches dazzling small clutches of crazy white people at key resort-and-shopping-adjacent serial vacation spots battleground states until his stake horse's money runs out he sweeps to victory...just like he mesmerized this wee conclave of bored Maui-ites.

Seriously, if Newt just turned around in line at the DMV on an average day he could claim a bigger audience.

Or, as Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal reported:

"Gingrich Draws a Big Crowd in Hawaii"

*(For the pedants out there, yes, I know Father Damien's famous leper colony was one island over on Molokai. That's why I said "near". You know, this is why we're lose the messaging war.)

Qaddafi Still Missing

Meanwhile, answering the now-nearly-universal plea from the Republican Teabagger Base for a fresh new face that is "even crazier", but can still dupe the all-important "Pathologically Oblivious Independent Voter" into believing the GOP is not really just a Confederate Rump Party made up of racists, Dominionists, oligarchs, fascists and hard-core imbeciles ...mysterious oil billionaire Amid "Buddy" Gammafraud today pre-announced his intention to announce his bid for President following an all-star rock concert his campaign is bankrolling next weekend.

While little is known of "Buddy" Gammafraud's past, his campaign was immediately and fulsomely endorsed for its "job creating swagger" and "business savvy patriotism" by the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, while Fox News and various prominent Conservative pundits and bloggers leaped to praise his "take no prisoners and shoot the hostages" stances on oil exploration, tax-free repatriation of vast, secret caches of offshore money and, most importantly, his virulent four-hour long ranting denunciation of "The Infidel Obama" and demand that all US, NATO and other "vermin-led" support for the "Satanic forces of international gangsterism" who have driven Libya's "beloved leader and shepherd" into exile be immediately withdrawn and summarily executed.

Beltway insiders Mark Halperin and the late David Broder pronounced "Buddy" Gammafraud's candidacy "exciting" and "Serious", noting that Mr. Gammafraud possessed a "very powerful toolkit" for making a run at the Presidency, specifically citing his apparently unlimited access to "vast, secret caches of offshore money" several times.

When asked by an NPR reporter if "Amid Gammafraud" wasn't kind of an unusual name, Mr. Gammafraud answered through a translator that the reporter would be "shot like a the devil's own dog" and left in the open desert for "carrion birds to feast on your entrails."

When asked if this response wasn't psychotically over-the-top, Mr. Gammafraud replied

"You understand Texas not mess with very good!"

All further questions were directed to Mr. Gammafraud's campaign staff of young, medically-certified brunette female ninjas who said Mr. Gammafraud's formal announcement will come at an All-Star Rock and Roll Concert featuring Usher, Beyonce and Mariah Carey.

Polls conducted just after Mr. Gammafraud's press conference show him now in statistical dead heat with Creationist Governor Bolt Vanderhuge Rock Pretty, and the animatronic replica of Mitt Romney.

Voice of Empire, Ctd

Live from The Ministry of Money.

At the Mouse Circus, the walking dead took the stage this week. With nothing else to talk about (except everything of importance) and everyone on vacation, the Sunday Gasbag review rolled out their "B" teams, and a guest-list packed wall-to-wall with the one group that never sleeps: Wall Street apologists.

Needless to say, not a single, remotely full-throated Liberal voice was to be found anywhere.

Regular readers know there are any number of political unicorns which no amount of cheap talk and expensive liquor will ever get me to believe in: phantasms like the Tea Party (There. Is. No. Tea. Party), Centrists and, most especially, "The American People".

Other than legally and geographically, there is absolutely no such thing as "The American People" about which one can speak authoritatively or monolithically. Half the adults who comprise "The American People" haven't got the slightest fucking clue what's going on around them at any given time. They zoom through their days barely aware of the most basic elements of government and how they work, or don't work. Completely oblivious that one of America's political parties is now fully insane, and is run by economic terrorists, oligarchs and theocrats.

They only know what they absorb during their quick suck off the Mainstream Media teat, which means all they know is that "both sides are wrong", that their taxes are too damn high, that they don't trust nobody, that they don't want nobody messin' with their Social Security and Medicare, and that those damn Washington D.C. politicians bicker too much.

Also that the United States is, without question, the greatest single accomplishment of Almighty God in the History of Recorded Time.

Also gas is too high, and I'm sick of having some "Do you wanna speak Messican?" option on the phone every time I call my bank!

They are, in a word, morons

but since they don't vote, in the end I don't really give a flying fuck what they think, and mention is made of the Great Wad here merely to underscore the fundamental absurdity of the idea of speaking on behalf of the dreams and desires of a group 50% of whom are flat-worm oblivious to the most basic, A-B-C's of politics, economics and culture.

Of the other 50% -- the ones who do vote -- 40% of those are stone crazy, and another 8-10% believe only in being on the winning side, and so blow with the prevailing wind.

Which is why an entire Mouse Circus that is now no longer much of anything but back-to-back...

The American People believe...

Everybody knows...

The American People are frustrated...

The American People clearly...

The American People no longer...

Everybody says...

The American People are angry...

The American People intuit...

The American People hear...

Everybody understands...

The American People touch...

The American People feel...

The American People taste like chicken...

...feels a lot like being hit in the head over and over again with a hot lump of stupid, underscored by the presence of the truly loathsome Frank Luntz, on hand to lend his special expertise to the discussion of which phonemes can be used to stimulated which parts of cerebellums of "The American People" in order to induce them to commit mass suicide.

That it involves something called "The Three P's" was all I could catch before my overwhelming contempt for Frank Luntz and everything he stands for made my cerebellum move my hand to the teevee channel changing thingie just in time to stuff Frank Luntz back into the Schrodinger Cat Box (yay!) only to be replaced by the even-more-existentially-loathsome Karl Rove (sigh), who came on my teevee long enough to lecture me that one shouldn't question the motives of "Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Mitch McChinless" and "people on the other side".

Yes, this Karl Rove:

"...liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

What is/was/never-will-be mentioned on my teevee are subjects like the indisputable fact that Karl Rove should be in a federal prison right now, getting his ass traded around the cell block for cigarettes.

Mentioning really, really important stuff like Rove's treasonous past, or lying present, or the fact that the Party he serves is now 100% insane makes Wall Street People nervous, and so we do not talk about such things.

Instead we get Harold Ford Junior -- Wall Street's most faithful manservant -- bookended between the staggeringly irrelevant Peggy Noonan (rubbing one out under the table to the Sainted Memory of Ronald Reagan once again) and Maria Bartiromo (a Wall Street stooge reporter for CNBC) repeating the latest focus-group-tested Wall Street Mantra:

• Lower taxes.
• Less regulation.
• The President needs to stop talking mean about Big Business and Wall Street.
• Wall Street is Main Street.

Substitute "Meet the Press" host Savannah Guthrie: What does Wall Street think of Rick Perry being a lunatic, Maria Bartiromo?

Maria Bartiromo: Wall Street, Main Street, people are sick and tired of the us-versus-them. This country has never been more divided.

Except, of course, we have

And Conservatives have never gotten over it.

Peggy Noonan: The crazy Right wants more crazy people to choose from!

Harold Ford, Jr.: Whoever the Republicans nominate will be a Serious Candidate. Chris Christie! Somebody! Giuliani! Is there anybody out there?


Harold Ford, Jr.: We need certainty! We need a moratorium on new regulations! Repatriation of the money my rich friends have stashed overseas. Who cares if we don't tax it: if you just beg hard enough, my rich friends might give you a job.

Harold Ford Junior: Truly one of the finest Imperial testicle cozy money can buy.

On "This Week...", John Huntsman made his big, bold move.

Huntsman giving the Centrist Party Line: America is a center-right country, and I am the Sensible Center candidate.

Huntsman giving the Villager Party Line: Fringes on both sides; Barack Obama on the Left, and "some" on the Right.

Huntsman giving the Wall Street Party Line: Cut taxes! Chloroform regulation! "Broaden the base" (translation: cut taxes on my rich friends, and make up for it by taxing the fuck out of the poor and middle class.) Fix our "heroin-like addiction" to imported oil (presumably by using up every last drop of oil.)

Finger-pointing!

Name-calling!

The extreme ends of the political spectrum.

Huntsman on the Debt Ceiling Hostage Crisis: If we had defaulted, we would have been fucked. There was zero leadership from the President.... He should have walked away from the TelePrompTer.

Substitute Host Jake Tapper: But you raised your hand in agreement with that incredibly stupid "10-to-1 cut is still not enough" question at the Republican debate. Doesn't that make you just as guilty of reckless brinkmanship as the other crackpot assholes who are running for the nomination of your Party?

Huntsman: It was a nonsense question so my answer doesn't count.

Tapper's eyebrows: WTF? So...you just lied?

Huntsman: I prefer to think of it as my Magic Mormon Underwear protecting me from the consequences all the stupid Republican shit my Party is hooked on.


On "Reliable Sources", Mistah Kurtz interviewed The Moustache of Understanding

about golfing with Obama and how nice it would be if all the imaginary stuff Tom Friedman pulls out of his ass were actually real.

Friedman: Cable and media generally is so fucked and the issues I'm talking about are so important that we stepped back and wrote a book about it.

Mistah Kurtz: But don't you have a very big megaphone in that you have a column in the New York Times?

Friedman: Lalalala.

Mistah Kurtz: So you played golf with Obama. How was that?

Friedman: Very journalist-y.

The Ministry of Money never closes.

Moments later my teevee made a long, pleasant dopplerish sound as it sailed out the window.

Team Koch Explains

Our bright, Conservative future.

Professional Left Podcast #89

"Mawwiage. Mawwiage is what bwings us togethaw today"

-- The Princess Bride

Mentioned in this episode: Alexander Stephen's Cornerstone Speech

Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic at the ProLeft website and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget, our archives are available for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

Da' money goes here:

How to Recognize Different Types of NYT Columnists

From Quite a Long Way Away

No. 1 - The Larch

I met him at the remote mountain camp where he now lives, a bumpy 4-hour ride south of Nairobi near the Rift Valley. Leakey and his wife Katy — an artist who baby-sat for Jane Goodall and led a cultural expedition up the Amazon — have created an enterprise called the Leakey Collection, which employs up to 1,200 of the local Maasai, and sells designer jewelry and household items around the world.

One of the benefits of being a Club Member is that Our Mr. Brooks got to spend a portion of his Summer Vacation ambling around Nairobi with the Leakeys.

Like many summer vacationers, he has returned with a slide show.

Like few summer vacationers, rather that a bedsheet tacked up on the wall, Our Mr. Brooks gets to use United States' newspaper of record as the screen on which he shows his slides.

The Leakeys live in a mountaintop tent. Their kitchen and dining room is a lean-to with endless views across the valley. The workers sit out under the trees gossiping and making jewelry. Getting a tour of the facilities is like walking through “Swiss Family Robinson” or “Dr. Dolittle.”

The exercise, of course, comes with an Important Lesson that makes it all deductible worthwhile.

Some people center their lives around money or status or community or service to God, but this seems to be a learning-centered life, where little bits of practical knowledge are the daily currency, where the main vocation is to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen.

Some people specialize, and certainly the modern economy encourages that. But there are still people, even if only out in the African wilderness, with a wandering curiosity, alighting on every interesting part of their environment.
...

One might, of course, also note those vast numbers of other-other people whose lives are neither built around money nor status nor specialization, but are instead highly focused on hanging onto what's left of their sliver of the American Dream by their nails.

But that would be rude.

I am very glad you had a nice vacation, Mr. Brooks.

Now welcome back to America.

They Need a Hero

They're holding out for a hero

'til the end of the night.

He's gotta be nuts

And he's gotta be loud

And he's gotta be Righter than Right...

And With That

A "movement" was born...

From the NYT:

Crashing the Tea Party
By DAVID E. CAMPBELL and ROBERT D. PUTNAM

...
Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.

What’s more, contrary to some accounts, the Tea Party is not a creature of the Great Recession. Many Americans have suffered in the last four years, but they are no more likely than anyone else to support the Tea Party. And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics.
...

And once again, the only people stupid, corrupt, oblivious or just plain damnfool enough to buy yet another transparently obvious Republican Big Lie were the people who rule our elite Imperial not.




UPDATE: Nothing better crystallized the Serious-Person-Fart-Rebreathing-Bell-Jar mentality than this exchange between Devid Gergen (adviser to Presidents "On Both Sides" and former occupant of the Reasonable Republican Chair on "The News Hour" [currently being warmed by the Godawful David Fucking Brooks]) and Matt Taibbi (scruffy, Unserious Outsider who says "fuck sometimes", names names, and does the kind of actual, Honest-to-Royko reporting that David Gergen cannot even comprehend) from 2010:

Gergen: If it were not for the extra boost of enthusiasm the Tea Party provided, I imagine the Republicans would have won only 40 to 50 seats, instead of the 60-plus they gained. But the Tea Party also makes it harder in the future for Republicans to maintain a coherent party. Matt is right that they will have a large voice in the nomination process in 2012. But one cannot discount that someone could arise, as Reagan did in the past, who can bridge the differences within the party and keep people united.

Taibbi: To me, the main thing about the Tea Party is that they're just crazy. If somebody is able to bridge the gap with those voters, it seems to me they will have to be a little bit crazy too. That's part of the Tea Party's litmus test: "How far will you go?"

Gergen: I flatly reject the idea that Tea Partiers are crazy. They had some eccentric candidates, there's no question about that. But I think they represent a broad swath of the American electorate that elites dismiss to their peril.

Hart: I agree with David. When two out of five people who voted last night say they consider themselves supporters of the Tea Party, we make a huge mistake to suggest that they are some sort of small fringe group and do not represent anybody else.

Taibbi: I'm not saying that they're small or a fringe group.

Gergen: You just think they're all crazy.

Taibbi: I do.

Gergen: So you're arguing, Matt, that 40 percent of those who voted last night are crazy?

Taibbi: I interview these people. They're not basing their positions on the facts — they're completely uninterested in the facts. They're voting completely on what they see and hear on Fox News and afternoon talk radio, and that's enough for them.

Gergen: The great unwashed are uneducated, so therefore their views are really beneath serious conversation?

Taibbi: I'm not saying they're beneath serious conversation. I'm saying that these people vote without acting on the evidence.

Gergen: I find it stunning that the conversation has taken this turn. I disagree with the Tea Party on a number of issues, but it misreads who they are to dismiss them as some kind of uneducated know-nothings who have somehow seized power in the American electorate. It is elitist to its core. We would all be better off if we spent more time listening to each other rather than simply writing them off.

Two years later, Taibbi and the Dirty Fucking Hippies are once again proven right and the Very Serious Gergenites are once again proven to be dead wrong.

Any bets that Gergen will get his Sage Insider ticket lifted over this?

Over anything?

Ever?

Of course not.

Because long ago at the heart of the American Empire, "properly vetted and researched" stopped meaning much beyond that which has been passed to you under the Men's Room stall partition at Bistor Bis on "Matt Drudge" letterhead.

At the heart of our falling Empire, if you side with the Villagers, any amount of incompetence, contempt for the facts and just jaw-dropping fuckuppery will be instantly forgiven and forgotten: side against them, and unless you are very lucky and very good, the tiniest slip -- even no slip at all -- means your career will killed as as dead as Dillinger.

Monkey Poo Discovered

On Monkey House wall.

Film at 11.

Fresh from the desk of the World's Greatest Blogger:

The Tea Party As A Christianist Force

We've been told again and again that the real motivation of the Tea Party is a multi-partisan movement to bring the debt and government under control. I've never believed this, partly because these people were never to be found under Bush. It was primarily a laundering device to disappear the Bush years, re-brand the GOP as a wholly different entity and thereby avoid the long wilderness that the catastrophes of the first decade of this century might have led them into.

Now we have some large data sets to review the reality. And the reality is that the Tea Party is the Christianist right-wing of the GOP.
...

I agree, although I'd like to know the names of the people Mr. Sullivan believes have been lying to us "again and again" about "the real motivation of the Tea Party".

Names, Mr. Sullivan. Names, and then a sustained call for some substantial consequences to come down on the necks (or at least the wallets) of the people who have been lying to us about such vitally important matters.

Names, Mr. Sullivan, unless of course they are friends of your, in which case we don't name names or call for contrition and atonement do we?

I was also pleased that it came sans Mr. Sullivan's usual, gratuitous shot at the imaginary sins and distant histories of Culture Warrior Liberals, remains the highest form of tribal-identification-invective/Crazy-Lefty-Sauce-lobster-bib among Ivory Tower "Conservatives" who want to make loudly certain that none of their frathouse brethren mistake them for Evil Libruls in the dark as they parrot exactly the same fucking critiques that Liberals have been leveling at the Right (and for which we have been roundly mocked) for decades.



As as I (like many Liberals) wrote many, many times before it was fashionable, the Tea Party -- like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin -- is nothing but the GOP Base who have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created just long enough to burn their uniforms and pretend they were all in Switzerland the whole time.

Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":

"...a proud and meaningless association of human beings"

Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.

...

Snake-handling queer-hating Leviticans who think the GOP is too gutless because it won’t advocate rounding up Teh Gay and putting them in camps?

Independents.

Bunker-dwelling survivalists?

Independents.

Pimple-faced 30-something John Galt wannabees who masturbate themselves blind to “Atlas Shrugged” because that hot chick in accounting won’t give them a second look, but won’t she be sorry when Objectivists stop the engine of the world and people like her will have to stand in like to offer their vajay-jays to the alpha studs wealth producers!

Independents.

Klansmen who want to smoke a little weed?

Independents.

America's compulsive political middle-children who have been taught so thoroughly to compromise their way out of any conflict that they will travel a 1,000 miles just to find a fence to straddle?

The opinionless little ciphers who just want to make sure they line up with a winner?

The moral cowards wouldn’t pick a side with a gun pressed to their heads, because of the terror of then being committed to actually doing something instead of snarking their way through life declaring "Well, ya know, bote sides are juss a buncha crooks anyway!" about every situation regardless of context and circumstances?

If asked, I guarantee you all virtually of those people would tell you that they think of themselves as “independent”.

And 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.

They have, as always, been aided and abetted in this latest Big Conservative Lie by our idiot media.

the same media that jumped on the Iraq bandwagon. The same media that went right along with the Conservative Lie that Clinton was a depraved monster. The same media that has been on-board with every other Conservative or Fake Centrist Lie before and since.

However, the big, ugly fact that you continue to run away from is that your whole movement has itself been one, long "laundering device". One long exercise in feeding the paranoia and rage of the mad Dog Base with lies and red meat, followed by some horrible failure, followed by pressing the Media Memory Reset Button and pretending it never happened or that Imaginary Libruls were just as bad or worse, followed by rinse-and-repeat-and-up-the-ante.

Like a Virgin.

“...they turned to prayer, beseeching
that the sin which had been committed
might be wholly blotted out.”

-- 2 Maccabees. 12:42

After conspiring to bring about two of the most destructive events in modern American history -- the impeachment of a US President over trivia, and the probable theft of the subsequent Presidential election -- to what God could Republicans possibly pray that their eight years of insanity, venom and violence "might be wholly blotted out?”

On 09/11/01, their dark miracle came winging its way out of a clear, blue sky.

Eight years ago, this is what we all saw.

All of us, all together across all political, cultural and religious spectra watched the worst thing many of us had ever seen.

Together.

But in what now seems like less time than it took to wipe away our tears, the same depraved thugs who sponsored eight years of "Clinton Murdered Vince Foster!" hysteria began hijacking of our pain and patriotism to serve their partisan interests right before our eyes.

The minute the Bush Administration began trying to stretch the war they got into an excuse for the war they wanted, 9/11 stopped being merely a national tragedy and started being the Bush Administration's bottomless political ATM machine.

The minute the Party of Personal Responsibility began using the mantra "9/11 changed everything" as the political equivalent of the Blood of Christ -- as a means to absolve themselves of their personal responsibility for eight years of malice and derangement -- for them September 11, 2001 stopped being a moment of shared, national anguish and started being a suit of cultural body-armor which magically deflected any criticism of their lies and their and hypocrisy.

An impervious sniper's nest from which they could cynically escalate

their war on the Left.


Or don't you remember the day the Right robbed the graves of all those who perished on 9/11 to turn this


into their all-purpose

"Get Out of the 90s Free" card?

And the thing is, it worked.

By selling 9/11 for a mess of wingnut pottage, the Right bought itself an anti-Liberal free-fire zone and two Presidential terms-worth of blank checks. Two terms of an alternately supportive and supine media. Two terms of catastrophe, corruption and treason protected from scrutiny by an ablative shield made out of solid "Why do you hate America?", and a promise that they could go on bareback fucking diseased monsters in the alley all night long, every night, forever and wake up each morning miraculously clean, virginal and still beloved in the eyes of God.
...

There is nothing going on with the Tea Party that was not baked into the Conservative Movement like the bean in a King Cake under Nixon, metastasized under Reagan and predicted by those Damned Dirty Hippies decades ago. And because of that intractable and irrefutable fact, the professional survival of Conservative Public Ineffectuals Intellectuals like Mr. Sullivan depends 100% on "laundering" their own past every bit as much as the Teabaggers "launder" theirs.

And it is perhaps this sheer, ludicrous hypocrisy of the foundation on which they have built their critiques of their former partners in Conservative crimes that is the reason why none of these fearless public intellectuals will publicly debate -- or even acknowledge -- this old and fatal lie at the heart of their brave, new Conservative World.