"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
"Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. ... Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life."
The attempt by the left and the neocon right to make [Ron] Paul out to be the real bigot in this race is gob-smacking.
First, for sheer entertainment value, nothing beats occasionally tuning into the long-running Telenovela of Mr. Sullivan's serial, whirlwind affairs with one
very bad idea after another. In this soap-opera, Mr. Sullivan chases virtually any idiotic notion that suits his fancy waaay down virtually any rabbit hole own this it tumbles, alibiing himself all along the way that what he is really doing is exploring some as-yet-unheard-of crenelation in "real" conservatism: a form of conservatism which, as one wag once put it, seems to flicker in and out of existence like some
form of exotic subatomic particle:
Like so many others of his kind, Sullivan maintains his career (and quite possibly his sanity) by hiding out in a meticulously-constructed fantasy-land. Bolted together out of leftovers from the Book of Genesis, it posits a righteous, sinless, pre-Fall "Real Conservatism" that apparently flickered in and out of existence like some exotic subatomic particle (two parts lepton to one part moron) sometime between 7:00 and 7:03 A.M. GMT on March 9, 1981.
And so long as whatever-it-is-this-time bears the whiff of this imaginary "real" conservatism, Mr. Sullivan will wallow in it, lingering
In the rank sweat of [its] enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty
until, of course, it inevitably blows up in his face.
At which point he hustles the hell away Frum from the scene of the crime, whistling loudly and talking about bigger pictures and broader perspectives.
This predictable, recurring FAIL seems to come directly from Mr. Sullivan's fundamental inability to understand the United States as it really exists. As if he had come to our fair shores believing that the Civil War was some merry historical mixup from a bygone age, "General Lee" was just the name of the car on "The Dukes of Hazzard" and that everything of any importance in American history happened after the Ascension of St. Ronald Reagan.
So first, let me say that mere words cannot 'compass round my joy at having America's premier gay Tory Catholic Beltway blogger presume to tell me what "the left" thinks.
About anything.
And second, WTF are you talking about, "the real bigot"?
"The"? Are you fucking kidding me?
It is true that after Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people in the name of striking a blow against the tyranny of Big Gummint
that particular strain of batshit Right-wing crazy slipped hastily into more pastel-colored Libertarian camouflage and became less conspicuous than Santorum's banal Dominionist leftovers. But a quick costume-change doesn't mean that species of militant anti-government loco disappeared after Oklahoma City any more than slapping tri-corner hats onto the pointy heads of dog-loyal Republican Base after the debacle of the Bush Administration magically transformed them into a "Tea Party" which had apparently never even heard of George W. Bush.
The bigger picture here,
Mr. Sullivan, in case you haden't yet pieced it together is that bigotry is the foundation on which your entire movement rests.
Bigotry is the indestructible Adamantine skeleton on which the flesh of 10,000 political campaigns, religious crusades, anti-science think tanks and "traditional morality" ballot measures have been hung. And as everyone on the Left understands but apparently you do not, the reason Ron Paul is momentarily getting more attention for his brand of loco than Rick Santorum is for his is that Santorum's kind of
hatred never went underground.
The bigger picture here, Mr. Sullivan, is that Racism is America's Original Sin.
And whether it comes swaddled in Scripture alongside misogyny and homophobia, or slithers in the back door with a little Small Gummint perfume dabbed behind its horns and tail, it will continue to be our democracy's terrible, wasting disease -- passed down from generation to generation -- until we are rid of it.
Until its adherents and exploiters are shamed or enlightened or marginalized into extinction.
And that will never happen as long as America's Original Sin continues to be wielded by the Right from the podium, from the pulpit, from behind the radio mic and in from of the teevee camera as it's political weapon of choice. Which, as Mr. Charlie Pierce points out, they have been doing since around the same time Mr. Sullivan was taking his first steps and learning his first words:
You know who also thought that "appearing to be racist was a good political strategy in the 1990's"? The same people who thought it was a good political strategy in the 1960's, '70's, and '80's. The same people who hired Lee Atwater. The same people who looked at the white-supremacist backlash against the triumphs of the civil-rights movement and saw, not a outbreak of lawless racism, but a golden political opportunity, and who built a political movement out of the remnants of American apartheid, and who allowed that movement to take over an entire political party until all that's left is what you see now, parading through the streets of Iowa, or working in the state houses to deprive minority voters of the rights for which they paid so dear a price.
It was more than Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul, boys. It was the entire Republican party, and the conservative "movement" that energized it. It's why Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign talking about "states rights" in Mississippi, not half-a-mile from the spot where murdered civil rights workers were buried in a dam. It was welfare mothers driving Cadillacs and young bucks buying steaks. It was the slandering of Lani Guinier as a "quota queen." It's all those ID laws in all those states, and the phony ACORN scandal, and virtually everything said by every GOP presidential candidate on the subject of immigration and, in case you haven't noticed, it's an awful lot of the problems your people have with Barack Obama. It's what the pathetic Willard Romney is talking about when he talks about "the entitlement society." It's too late to get out from under it now. Without "appearing to be racist" as a good political strategy, there would be no modern Republican party. Modern conservatism would have ceased to exist after the debacle of 1964. Don't be fobbing it all off on poor Ron Paul
Acknowledgment of Paternity which establishes Ronald Reagan as the political father of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin would completely fuck up Mr. Sullivan's lucrative scam.
The Right built a Party to bring this guy's people
into the showroom.
They created a whole teevee network to do it.
And an entire publishing industry.
And a coast-to-coast radio empire.
And a refurbished hillbilly religion.
They welcomed every stray bigot, spit-flecked snake-handler, bug-eyed Bircher, dreg and douchebag into the Party of Lincoln with candy and flowers and promises of make their wildest, paranoid fantasies come true.
And they succeeded, and in this Year of Our Lord 2011 every facet of the Crazy Diamond they designed and created has been on glittering display for everyone to see.
They got what they paid for -- a headless, shrieking, rage-drunk electoral mob that is impervious to reason -- and it scares the shit out of them because the kind of people that headless, shrieking, rage-drunk electoral mobs rally around are not exactly the kind of people that genteel dumbass Centrists are going to warm to.
And so the sheep are slowly being herded into supporting a cyborg whose moving, calculating, flip-flopping components are so clearly visible whirring away behind a Lucite bubble that every single Christopath and wannabe Klansman can see -- clear as day --exactly how little their Party gives a shit about their interests and desires.
It is, in its own way, as raw a power move as Dubya ever pulled off: fucking the Base...with their pants and tri-corner hats on...on Main Street...at high noon...and getting away with it.
Getting away with it because Republican leaders know that, after years of conditioning and reinforcement, the motives of the Base are pure, reflex/Pavlov and Hate is the bell that makes them drool.
And however much the Party of God may hate Willard Romney, they hate him incrementally less than they hate the sight of that Socialist Kenyan and his family in their god damn White House.
* fic·tile (f k t l, -t l ). adj.
Capable of being molded; plastic.
Formed of a moldable substance, such as clay or earth.
Who once again did the yeoman's work of herding us notoriously flinchy bloggers together long enough to create this year's "Jon Swift Memorial Roundup".
...tradition started by the much missed Jon Swift/Al Weisel. He left behind some excellent satire, but was also a nice guy and a strong supporter of small blogs. As Lance Mannion puts it:
Our late and much missed comrade in blogging, journalist and writer Al Weisel, revered and admired across the bandwidth as the “reasonable conservative” blogger Modest Jon Swift, was a champion of the lesser known and little known bloggers working tirelessly in the shadows...
One of his projects was a year-end Blogger Round Up. Al/Jon asked bloggers far and wide, famous and in- and not at all, to submit a link to their favorite post of the past twelve months and then he sorted, compiled, blurbed, hyperlinked and posted them on his popular blog. His round-ups presented readers with a huge banquet table of links to work many of has had missed the first time around and brought those bloggers traffic and, more important, new readers they wouldn’t have otherwise enjoyed.
It may not have been the most heroic endeavor, but it was kind and generous and a lot of us owe our continued presence in the blogging biz to Al.
Excluding blogging, catching up with my long-overdue pile of correspondence and "Thank You" notes is my required writing through the end of the year.
And reading every single one of the posts Batocchio has compiled and offered up for our pleasure is my required reading.
UPDATE -- I have no idea what happened to this video. This is one of two recent posts that had video content which was there 8 hours ago and has since vanished.So we'll see.
UPDATE -- I have no idea what happened to this video.
This is one of two recent posts that had video content which was there 8 hours ago and has since vanished.
So we'll see.
It matters if you’re wrong. Club members never have to worry about being wrong.
It matters if you’re right. Non-Club member are virtually never be credited for being right. The closest we come is that sometimes -- 5 or 10 or 20 years after the fact -- convention Beltway Wisdom will slowly submit to the relentless badgering of Reality, reverse itself (while taking infinite care not to hold any of the advocates of the Old Lie account) and recongeal around the what has been the Dirty Hippie position all along. At no point will Beltway brain wizards ever admit they had been wrong all along (see lie #1.)
Big Media is a disinterested observer and reporter in the political process.
There is no governing elite.
The Republican Party’s priority is family values. It's all IOKIYAR all the time when it comes to sex, power and hypocrisy.
Centrism!
Most Americans are independents. Bullshit. Most Americans are not interested in politics at all, or are afraid to discuss it, or list themselves as "Independent" for a variety of mutually contradictory reasons ("The 'Independent' Granfalloon").
There is a free market. Ha! Any pretense of a free market has been abandoned by big business who use their almost unlimited economic power to stack the government in their favor (for example, BOA President saying “we have a right to make a profit.”)
Voting is a privilege not a right.
Voting doesn't matter. Ha! If voting didn't matter, the GOP would not be spending billions of dollars to stop you from doing it.
Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track?
...But was it a wise choice?
My answer is twofold: “No” and “Maybe, sort of, we’ll see.”
I say “no” because whatever happens in Iraq, even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it. And, for that, I have nothing but regrets. We overpaid in lives, in the wounded, in tarnished values, in dollars and in the lost focus on America’s development. Iraqis, of course, paid dearly as well. ...
Like so much of what Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. lets his pal Tom Friedman shovel into the pages of
his New York Times, this is just another load of Friedman's arrant revisionist bullshit.
But it is also in pretty execrable taste for Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. to let his Neocon pal use the word "we" when listing the butcher's bill for Friedman's catastrophic game of Risk-with-real-humans, given the fact that the Iraqi Debacle has cost Tom Friedman exactly nothing.
Not even the privilege of lying about it with impunity in the pages of America's newspaper of record.
Mr. Friedman added this:
So no matter the original reasons for the war, in the end, it came down to this: Were America and its Iraqi allies going to defeat Al Qaeda and its allies in the heart of the Arab world or were Al Qaeda and its allies going to defeat them?
Mr. Friedman can do this over and over again, year after year -- compact this kind of raw, jaw-dropping dishonesty into sentences and then string them together on teevee or in publications like the New York Times -- because people like Mr. Friedman are never, ever held to account for the terrible things they say and do.
And speaking of unaccountable New York Times Neoconservative frauds who are still allowed by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. to run barefoot through the pages of his newspaper for no explicable reason...
David Brooks had this to say about Iraq last week on "The News Hour":
Yeah, I don't know whether Iraq was worth it. The cost was obviously high in lives, treasure and national morale.
But we have this -- we're left with this thing.
...
And now we have a moment of turmoil. We don't know this turmoil -- it could be worse, it could be better. But it's a moment of turmoil. I think the Iraq war and the deposition of Saddam Hussein was part of the things that encouraged, instigated the turmoil.
...
It's very messy, very complicated.
But, in 100 years or in 50 years, we will look back and see where the turmoil went and maybe we will have a better sense of how the Iraqi elections, getting rid of Saddam, getting rid of the Taliban helped lead to maybe getting rid of Mubarak, Gadhafi and all the rest.
Again, this "we" nonsense.
Again, this special pleading of the Neoconservative to stretch of the timeline of judgment out to a distance of hundreds or thousands of Friedman Units. "Let enough decades pass," Mr. Brooks argues. "Let the continents shift and magnetic poles reverse. Then and only then -- long after I am gone and my lies are long forgotten -- should we submit my blood-soaked bullshit to history for judgement."
And when Mark Shields dropped a little truth on his pointy head?
MARK SHIELDS: It's a terrible, terrible policy to go to war, the most serious decision a country can make, with absolutely no justification.
I mean, let's be very blunt about it. Al-Qaida was responsible for 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with it. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and no ability or capacity to deliver those weapons that were nonexistent.
JIM LEHRER:And you don't dispute that, David?
DAVID BROOKS: No. Well, we obviously thought what we thought back then.
But I always thought that the need to disrupt the Middle East was one of the reasons why it was necessary.
Of course, David Brooks' views on the Iraqi Debacle during and immediately after the invasion -- and his contempt for anyone who doubted the nobility and wisdom of George W. Bush -- are well-document all over the internets.
Needless to say they bear almost no relationship to what he now asserts his views
As for myself, I still think now exactly what I thought back then:
"But what struck me about alcohol and Hitch was that it was a kind of rocket fuel. What killed him was not the alcohol as such or the many years of smoking, but the force of will that simply didn't rest, and seemed to punish his body with ludicrously brutal days and nights of sleepless drive."
See, this right here is exactly the kind of romanticized, besotted fluffernutter that gets people into all kinds of trouble. Tempts them to, say, invade the wrong country under false pretenses or radically revise the record of a dangerously bad president and his disastrous agenda into a modern Conservative creation myth.
Because of Mr. Hitchens' death, four facts are known.
Christopher Hitchens' esophageal cancer, in his own words
December 16, 2011|By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times
Writer Christopher Hitchens, 62, died Thursday of pneumonia, a complication of the esophageal cancer he battled for more than a year.
...
2. Mr. Hitchens was an alcoholic with a prodigious addiction.
3. Mr. Hitchens was a chain-smoker.
4. The links between esophageal cancer and alcohol are well-established, as is the fact that the risk increases dramatically when when smoking is added to the mix:
Nearly 50 percent of cancers of the mouth, pharynx, and larynx are associated with heavy drinking. People who drink large quantities of alcohol over time have an increased risk of these cancers as compared with abstainers (8,9). If they drink and smoke, the increase in risk is even more dramatic (5,6).
Until the day he died, my old man swore that it wasn't booze that had doomed him.
It was stress. Or it was the effects of formaldehyde he had worked with as a science teacher years before. Or it was something else. He was adept at spinning out rhetorically interesting reasons why various things -- large and small -- had gone wrong in his life, including why he was ending it in a shabby nursing home half a continent away from his children in the custody of very unpleasant people to whom he had signed his rights away.
But it was the booze.
The booze cost him his first marriage, lashed him to the mast of a deeply dysfunctional second marriage, crippled his career and, the day before Christmas Eve several years ago, I got the call that it had finally killed him.
So, Mr. Sullivan, memorialize your friend to your heart's content. Drape the black bunting. Turn your mirrors to the wall. Start a once-a-week feature called "The Hitchin' Post".
But it wasn't a "force of will" that killed him any more than it was the vengeful act of an invisible Sky God.
It was the alcohol and the cigarettes that killed him.
And a million words of wishful bluster will not make it otherwise any more than they can remake the real, tragic legacy of Ronald Reagan or the real, tragic consequences of the conquest of Iraq.
With no humanizing attachment to anyone or anything outside of the vile white supremacist culture that saturates his world -- with no solid plank of personal experience and fact to nail up against the constant onslaught of the silky lies on which his society is built -- be becomes a monster.
The willing dupe for the depraved schemes of Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh, willing to fight for slavery or against the Kenyan Usurper for exactly the same reason.
Because a world constructed from the ground up out of one lie bolted to another is a zero-gravity world of mere data -- where particles of information swirl undifferentiated and unpolarized by truth or falsity like snow flakes in a snow globe. It is terrifying place of chaos and eternal falling, and so to orient themselves as they float adrift inside it, adherents desperately crouch on the flimsy deckplates of demagoguery, and the purer the demagogue, the more kinetic energy their arguments pack, precisely because those argument have been stripped of any need to pay any attention to the truth.
This is why both Newt Gingrich's steady stream of napalm-slathered crackpottery and Michele Bachmann's fact-free steamrolling monotone comfort the base of the GOP, and why Mitt Romney's endless public rewriting of his source code scares the hell out of them. Because what the Base believes has nothing to do with whether they are right or wrong as normal human being understand those terms: all that matters is that their bigotry and paranoia is regurgitated back to them in simple, declarative sentences by someone in a suit packing an enormous Bible.
This is the entire idea behind Fox News, Regnery Press and the rest of the Conservative media complex; an idea which has relentlessly distilled the Party of God down to its pure essence -- a mob of ignorant, angry Authoritarians who want to follow a loud, bloody-minded Dear Leader into glorious (and cost-free) crusade against hippies and Negroes and...well...whoever. And Mitt -- a demagogue by awkward rote and script, not by nature -- represents exactly the kind of weak-kneed, nuance-loving, fact-Nancy that could lose his nerve at some crucial moment and bring the whole House of Atwater down around their ears.
This was all baked into American Conservatism decades ago.
In the 1990s, for example, "being right" on the Right meant the catechistic acceptance of every scurrilous rumor about Bill Clinton as gospel. It meant to exist in a state pf perpetual outrage over the imaginary sins and crimes of "Slick Willie" and perpetual contempt of the "Liberal media" for not sufficiently reporting their every paranoid delusion as established fact.
All of which came swaddled in a layers and layers of pious claptrap about respecting the rule of law, "even appearance of impropriety", and the dignity of the office of the Presidency, and all of was instantly inverted 180 degrees once George Bush was appointed president by a 5-4 vote.
Because that's how a party-line change happens in closed societies like Soviet Russia or the GOP.
The million words of pious claptrap all when straight down the memory how, and "being right" quickly
came to mean "shutting up and obeying the Commander in Chief" no matter what the facts said. Seven long years of endless obstruction, investigation and impeachment were obliterated in one, massive EMP (Electoral/Mnemonic Pulse) of Strategic Forgettery, and, as usual, the Beltway press -- ever terrified of being called "liberal" -- went right along with the program.
Crimes that would have gotten Clinton impeached were shrugged off and crimes that would have gotten Clinton lynched were laughed off by the Ministry of Truth and their brainwashed, idiot followers.
Eight years of it: all well-documented and on the public record, and now airbrushed into oblivion by the inconvenient election of Barack Obama.
Because that's how a party-line change happens in a totalizing cult like North Korea or the GOP.
And so after another flash of Conservative EMP-powered doublethink and flurry of tri-corner hats, birth certificates and fakes ACORN videos, the Bush years ceased to exist. Turns out, by golly, that nobody liked George Bush. Not one little bit. Nobody voted for him or agreed with him (apparently not even when they were on the payroll.)
And so once again the party's leading hustlers and lunatics scramble up another, dangerously-teetering mountain of lies and pious claptrap to compete for the right to lead an army of bitter morons into another round of Conservative failure and catastrophe.
Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died Thursday at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 62.
The cause was pneumonia, a complication of esophageal cancer, said the magazine Vanity Fair, which announced the death.
In recent days Mr. Hitchens had stopped treatment and entered hospice care at the Houston hospital. He learned he had cancer while on a publicity tour in 2010 for his memoir, “Hitch-22,” and began writing and, on television, speaking about his illness frequently.
“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist,” Mr. Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair, for which he was a contributing editor.
...
There is a fluke symmetry there that might tempt some to find a deeper meaning, but there is no deeper meaning.
America's occupation Iraq -- a Neoconservative abomination which should never have happened -- lasted far too long, cost far too much in blood and treasure, and was ended by the conscious actions of sovereign governments.
Hitchens -- who possessed a keen, combustive intellect -- became deranged after 9/11 and thereafter used his keen, combustive intellect to support the Neocon's Iraqi abomination and thus allowed the smirking dregs of American Conservatism the use of the phrase "But even the Liberal Christoper Hitchens..." as an ideological sledgehammer whenever remorseless reality threatened to close in on them.
He held on a long time against a very aggressive form of cancer, and died because that is almost always what happens with very aggressive forms of cancer.
Here is Mr. Hitchens in fine form, letting the air out of the ideology of Ayn Rand
And deforesting the lazy, leafy kudzu of bullshit that had begun to immediately grow over the real and dreadful legacy of Ronald Reagan.
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.
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
Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead.
Mr. Brooks is taking a vacation from his two-day-a-week job at the New York Times where he reprints slightly modified versions of previous David Brooks New York Times' columns.
There is apparently a very good living in this.
But dedicated professional that he is, Our Mr, Brooks cut into his "Me" time long enough to "converse" with Gail Collins, beg Jeb Bush to run for President, and take the following gratuitous shot at OWS.
This is one more piece of evidence, by the way, that the Occupy movement is the most over-hyped story of the year. The O.W.S. people want one thing, and the rest of the country is shifting in the opposite direction. The only people who lavish attention on the Occupiers are editors at various coastal media outlets. The rule seems to be that the more Louis Vuitton ads a magazine carries, the more stories it will run on O.W.S.
David Fucking Brooks extracted that massive piece of lumber he keeps firmly jammed up his ass long enough to use it to write another 800-word chapter in his ongoing Alternate Wingnut History of America: "Those Darn Hippies!"
Which is a little ironic, considering that when you cut out the hateful little fillet hiding at the center of his column (and trust me, you will virtually always find some bilious little right-wing slur cowering behind the quivering walls of pudding that make up a David Brooks column) and unstring the words just so, you end up with a kind of semi-passable free verse beat poetry.
From the Bizarro Universe.
Here then is Our Mr. Brooks, verbatim, from today's"Children of the ’70s", spruced up a bit with some pictures I had laying around.
Because I happen to think that a few pictures here and there can liven up even the drabbest room.
... The crime wave
killed
off
The hippie movement.
The hippies celebrated Disorder,
Mayhem
And the whole Dionysian
Personal Agenda.
By the 1970s, The menacing results
Of that agenda
Were all around.
... The crime wave Made it hard
To accept
The story line
That the poor
Were always
Spiritually pure,
Noble And oppressed.
"...the story line that the poor were always spiritually pure, noble and oppressed."?
Are you fucking kidding me?
Maybe Bobo receives these divine revelations about the What Liberals Sekritly Believe during some kind of Neocon Spirit Walk after huffing the last, few drops of dusty mansweat out of Bill Buckley's underpants, but speaking as a Liberal who lives in the real world, I don't know anyone in our club who romanticizes poverty. (This is particularly true among those who have devoted their professional lives trying to end poverty in the Land of Plenty: they are generally as hard-eyed and brutally pragmatic a bunch as you're ever likely to meet outside of a battlefield.)
However I do know plenty of aging, Reagan-era wingnut relics who have spent most of their adult lives furiously rewriting their own histories into some kind of “Our Gang” adventure wherein -- by dint of nothing but their own, personal Randite awesomeness! -- they bootstrapped themselves up from life in a tarpaper shack sleeping 188 to a bed and into prosperity...
…while conspicuously ignoring the fact that the ladder up which most of them climbed into the middle class was constructed out of things like the WPA, the NRA, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the GI Bill, free public education, free school lunch, free roads, the built-in advantages that came with being born White and Male in America, rural electrification, farm subsidies, labor and workplace safety laws, and a few hundred other intrusive, Big Gummint, Socialist-y kinds of things without which they'd could just as easily have been dead of starvation or over-work or a factory owner's private goon's club to the skull before their 30th birthday.
I swear, there are times when I think that if I could have just one, big Hot Tub Time Machine wish, I would zip back to the late 60s or early 70s and arrange to have this uptight, moon-faced, wingnut apple-polisher buried under enough post-pubescent hippie pussy to keep him coitally comatose for a year. Thus sparing the World of Tomorrow the horror of David Fucking Brooks using the pages of the Times year after year to work out his barely-repressed, middle-aged, soul-rotting contempt for all the free and happy Libidenous Liberal Lasses whose laughter at his greasy, fumbling "Have you read 'The Fountainhead'?" overtures has clearly tormented him down through the decades.
Then again, if wasting my own youth in the science fiction aisle of my public library has taught me anything it is that tinkering with History is a tricky business, and one messes with the space/time continuum at one's peril.
And I definitely believe the Universe is plenty capricious enough that I would return from my temporal good deeds only to find an alternate 2010 where David Brooks was writing breezy, Bohemian essays on modern dance for "The Rolling Stone"...
...while over at the New York Times, Matt Taibbi was churning out treacly 800-word paeans to the wisdom of J. Edgar Hoover, G. Gordon Liddy and President Sarah Palin.
Americans awoke today to discover that the Heroes of Market Capitalism thieving pricks who destroyed the world's banking and credit systems continue to go right on behaving like Heroes of Market Capitalism thieving pricks even after Congress wrote them a stern-but-polite note with a $700 billion dollar check inside asking them very nicely to stop behaving like Heroes of Market Capitalism thieving pricks.
Wall Street Fat Cats Are Trying to Pocket Billions in Bailout Cash By Nomi Prins, AlterNet Posted on November 7, 2008, Printed on November 8, 2008
The election results pretty much confirmed the extent to which Main Street is rightly livid about the Wall Street mentality that led to our financial crisis. During his historic victory speech, President-elect Barack Obama told supporters, and the rest of the world, "If this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers."
But, it seems that Wall Street didn't get that memo. It turns out that the nine banks about to be getting a total equity capital injection of $125 billion, courtesy of Phase I of The Bailout Plan, had reserved $108 billion during the first nine months of 2008 in order to pay for compensation and bonuses (PDF).
Paying Wall Street bonuses was not supposed to be part of the plan. At least that's how Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson explained it to Congress and the American people. So, on Oct. 1, when the Senate, including Obama, approved the $700 billion bailout package, the illusion was that this would magically loosen the credit markets, and with taxpayer-funded relief, banks would first start lending to each other again, and then, to citizens and small businesses. And all would be well.
That didn't happen. Which is why it's particularly offensive that the no-strings-attached money is going to line the pockets of Wall Street execs. The country's top investment bank (which since Sept. 21 calls itself a bank holding company), Goldman Sachs, set aside $11.4 billion during the first nine months of this year -- slightly more than the firm's $10 billion U.S. government gift -- to cover bonus payments for its 443 senior partners, who are set to make about $5 million each, and other employees.
Whereas Wall Street may not believe in higher taxes for the richest citizens, it does believe in higher bonuses for the head honchos. No matter what the market conditions are on the outside, steadfast feelings of entitlement tend to prevail. ...
In other words...
These people don't need another dime of our money.
... Newt’s shoestring Lazarus resurrection in the polls is a testament to perseverance and ingenuity--to the Power of Gall--but it’s also an indictment of the wet-cardboard strength of the rest of the Republican field. Here they have a clean shot to take the White House in 2012 and they troop out this Gong Show* cast of contestants, most of whom couldn’t find their ass on a map and speak entirely in re-masticated phrases and sentiments tossed into their mouths by Rush Limbaugh, Grover Norquist, and Frank Luntz for years. The Republican field reflects the weak-minded, strong-willed prejudices of its base, hooked up to Fox News as if it were an IV drip. So when rightwing bloggers complain about the candidates, they need someone to skywrite for them, “If they suck, it’s because YOU suck. You’re the guys who believed once upon a fairy tale that Fred Thompson was a political steamroller and that Herman Cain was a fresh breeze.” ...
