Bupkis

You took my arm, with golden charm,
a diamond mine, a love so fine.
But what did I get from you?
Bupkis!
What did I get from you?
Bupkis!
Bupkis is a lot of nothing and that's what I got from you.
Bupkis is a lot of nothing and that's what I got from you.

For those of you who are old enough to have grown up with the "Dick Van Dyke Show" (or have caught up with it on your local nostalgia teevee station) you probably, vaguely remember an episode where Rob Petrie -- our hero -- happens to be listening to the radio and catches a few bars of a new rock 'n roll single called "Bupkis" -- a piece of generic 60s bubble gum that only snags his attention because it slows dawns on him that he himself had actually written it, years ago.

This was a memory which snapped into sharp focus when my wife slipped a digital copy of this "Reason" magazine cover

into my digital hands with a wry, digital smile.

Oh my goodness.

Is it a direct, line-by-line heist of the literally thousands of critiques which Liberals have leveled against the New York Times' most infamously fatuous, fact-challenged Fake Centrist simpletons over the last decade?

No.

Instead it dresses a three-page summary of every critical element of that immense body of work up in Nick Gillespie's Libertarian Leather Jacket and ports it over onto the cover this Koch brothers'-funded magazine as it if were something fresh, insightful and groundbreaking...

... instead of soil that many, many on the Left have been tilling for many, many years, daily carrying on the late Steve Gilliard's 2005 call-to-arms --

...the GOP will curse the name of Karl Rove for letting the Jesus freaks think the GOP is God's Own Party. Personally, I plan on handing them anvils and watching the fucking bubbles hit the surface. 

And about the media: subvert it where you can, provide alternatives when you can't. We have to challenge them when they are wrong. We can't let them get away with bullshit and then whine about it. And we have to start picking friends and enemies. No law says you have to talk to the Weekly Standard or NRO and I wouldn't bother. Let them say what they want, racist thugs, the lot of them. We don't have to make their job easier. 

The GOP worked the refs to the point that they shit themselves. It's time to do the same. Someone ought to be deconstructing David Brooks and sending out PR releases highlighting his fucking errors and sexism weekly. This is not a game to win on defense. Sulking about how things don't go your way gets in the way of making them go your way. You have to assume that they're against you and you have to hammer them. I don't care if they say they're liberal or not, their owners aren't. They're greedocrats.

-- with panache and persistence.

In the dissonance created by building an entire story around taking on the Beltway's biggest Moby Dicks without ever mentioning all the Ahabs, great and small, who have gone gray in the hunt over the years, the "Reason" story is quite remarkable:  it is as if they had done a cover story on the state of movie criticism but had failed to mention Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, or a retrospective of the New York music scene at the dawn of punk without taking any editorial notice of CBGB, James Wolcott or Patti Smith.

It's all there: a brickbat upside David Brooks' Big Giant Serious Head here, and over there the obligatory head-shaking astonishment at Tom Friedman's ongoing molestation of the King's English.  Hell, even born-again "No Labels" hustler David Frum takes a round or two in his wheelhouse --

... 

This kind of playground chest thumping was par for the course. David Frum, lately seen putting his shoulder on the wheel of a third-way political organization called No Labels, was at the time the war began attempting to purge the last intervention skeptics from the Republican Party. “They began by hating the neoconservatives,” Frum wrote in a National Review cover story titled “Unpatriotic Conservatives” in April 2003. “They came to hate their party and the president. They have finished by hating their country. War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen —and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.” 

 -- after which the author circles back around to take another bite out of David Brooks' inconvenient past:

David Brooks at the time was withering in his contempt for those who lacked his interventionist conviction, writing in The Weekly Standard in March 2003 that “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. But those who actually have to lead and protect, and actually have to build one step on another, have to bring some questions to a close.”

...  

All in all, what "Reason" has produced is no more or less than a heat-n'-eat political MRE that tastes a lot like -- an awful lot like -- what the Dirty Hippies have been serving up into a hostile media abyss since forever...with a handful of Randite croutons tossed on top, and all of the Left's colorful prose, "fucking fucks" and excellent graphics omitted :-)

 

















To be 100% fair, the author does use the word "liberal" twice  ( "...Arne Duncan (liberally quoted throughout...)" and "Friedman was among the most influential 'liberal hawks'...") and Matt Taibbi is mentioned fleetingly.

But it is an article of faith across the entire Right side of the political spectrum -- from Randite to Christopath -- that the Dirty Hippies must never, ever be acknowledged as having been dead-bang-right about anything

And so, once again, the Left gets Bupkis.