Every Picture Tells A Story

Don't It?

Nope.

At the Sun-Times, "Story" is out.

"Content" is King,

Athenae at First Draft has the story:

Shutterbugs shut out at Sun-Times 

The guy whose office is next to mine is the head of our visual sequence, a former news photographer and a pretty laid-back guy. During one particularly tumultuous term, however, he ended up in my office with the door closed, looking like he wanted to stab someone to death.

He had just come from a meeting with our chair, in which he attempted to convince the man that visuals needed a bigger place in our curriculum. The conversation turned from patronizing to dismissive, with the denouement being delivered when the chair whipped out his cell phone and said something to the effect of, “Look, I can take pictures with my phone. It’s not a big deal.”

We both thought it was a ridiculous statement. Apparently, the Chicago Sun-Times heard it and thought it was inspired.

The brain trust at the Sun-Times laid off its entire photography staff on Thursday. The paper issued a statement that was clearly written by someone who got his PR degree out of a Cracker Jack box. The Sun-Times blamed the audience that is “seeking more video content” and noted that “business is changing rapidly.” By the time I got to their need to “evolve with our digitally savvy customers,” I stopped reading because I had officially won my game of “buzzword bullshit bingo.”

The paper, of course, is not giving up on visuals, nor is it going back to the days of paying artists to do etchings. Instead, they’ll let reporters with phone cameras do most of the easy work and they’ll hire freelancers to pick up the slack. Where might these professional freelancers come from? Oh, wait… The Sun-Times just created 28 of them by FIRING THE WHOLE PHOTO STAFF.

...

Having heard this same gabba-gabba dressed up in a hundred different suits since the 1980s, it still surprised me that anyone is still surprised to discover (A) when management becomes enamored of the theory that everyone except people like them are fungible meat bags (funbags!) that (B) everything quickly turns to a puddle of cold sick, which is (C) usually when the same management that converted a once-viable enterprise into a puddle of cold sick decides to spend an enormous pile of cash to hire a clown-car of consultants just like them to tell them that even more underlings will need to be "rightsized" onto the scrap heap.

And they called it the birth of the blues.

Professional Left Podcast #182

"Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could."

-- Abigail Adams predicting Ewick Son of Ewick

Links:

• Michele Bachmann cuts and runs.
• Erick Erickson continues to get every possible thing spectacularly wrong
• Time to rename forts dedicated to Confederate traitors.
• War Pimp John McCain continues to necon alley-hump anyone who will show him a little leg.
• Whither Chris Hayes?
• Article on early 20th century Hungarian spec fic writer Frigyes Karinthy(from the science fiction quiz) 

Da' money goes here:

The Specter at the Banquet

Senator John McSame showng here voguing with who-the-fuck-knows Syrian rebels and the undead memory of Ahmed Chalabi

Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee!

Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;

Thou hast no speculation in those eyes

Which thou dost glare with!

...

What man dare, I dare:

Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,

The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger;

Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves

Shall never tremble: or be alive again,

And dare me to the desert with thy sword;

If trembling I inhabit then, protest me

The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow!

Unreal mockery, hence!

-- Macbeth, Act III Scene IV

Danger UXB: The FBI Director Episode -- Update

Mr. Pierce thinks that while Mr. James Comey's resume makes him a credible choice for FBI Director, what his selection up into extra happy funtime business-class is the thought of a live, Bush-era UXB lobbed smack into the middle the the GOP's "Oh God Please Let This All Turn Out To Be Worse Than Watergate!" 200-point, boldface Railroad Font fake-scandal-driven Summer of Rove:

... First of all, Comey is a legitimate choice to head the FBI. The man has the resume and the chops. But the real art in this choice, of course, comes in the fact that Comey was the central player in the single most bizarre episode in the Bush Administration's increasingly bizarre attempts to invent new laws to cover the various extra-constitutional shenanigans in which they were engaged. You want to see a renegade executive branch, this choice asks. We'll show you a renegade executive branch...

Of course, opinions differ.

Here, for example, we find Mr. Greenwald (with emphasis added) once again showing off his almost superhuman ability to infallibly discern the secret motives and future actions of others, this time issuing a trademarked Greenwald Grim Warning approximately nine seconds after the White House announced it would nominate Mr. Comey to run the FBI regarding  (A) James Comey's unfitness to serve as head of the FBI and, (B) how all progressives would certainly react:

"James Comey is far from the worst choice to lead the FBI. I doubt it will change much of anything one way or the other, and there are undoubtedly worse people within the senior ranks of the Democratic Party who would be the likely alternatives. But it's still a potent symbol of how little has changed in the right direction and how much it has changed in the wrong direction. If you had told progressives in 2008 that the Bush lawyer who approved the NSA program would be named by Obama as the FBI Director, they would scoff in disbelief. Now they'll cheer." 

Impressive command of pre-crime techniques, Glenn!

Mr. Greenwald continues...

In other words, there was something the NSA was doing for years - that we still don't know - even more extreme than the illegal NSA program revealed by the NYT in 2005. It was Comey, along with Ashcroft, Mueller, and Goldsmith, who threatened to resign if it did not stop, and they deserve credit for that. But the reason they didn't end up resigning was because Bush officials "modified" that NSA program into something those lawyers could and did endorse: the still-illegal, still-radical NSA eavesdropping program that spied on the communications of Americans without warrants and in violation of the law. And this was accomplished by inventing a new legal theory to accompany the old one: that Congress, when it enacted the 2001 AUMF, silently and "implicitly" authorized Bush to eavesdrop in exactly the ways the law expressly forbade. 

Thus, it was Comey who gave his legal approval to enable that NSA eavesdropping program to spy on Americans without warrants: the same program that produced so much outrage and scandal when revealed by the NYT. How can any progressive who spent the Bush years vehemently denouncing that domestic spying program as the symbol of Bush radicalism and lawlessness now cheer when the lawyer who approved it is about to be put in charge of the FBI?

Which sounds pretty bad.  

Possibly unmitigatable.

Then again, I suppose it is also possible that at the time Mr. Comey just "wanted the president to succeed"?  Maybe he let his "loyalty to [his] country" -- and that fact that Dubya was "the leader of [his] country" -- overwhelm his otherwise good judgement?  I don't know, of course, because I am not gifted with Mr. Greenwald's  superhuman ability to infallibly discern the secret motives and future actions of others, but I supposed it is remotely possible that Mr. Comey simply felt the administration deserved "the benefit of the doubt".   Or "believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to".

I was not there and I cannot say, but it I have it on excellent authority that this sort of misjudgement happens even in the best of families.

But let us move on to Mr. Comey's April 27, 2005 email which Mr. Greenwald uses as an opening to discuss:

... Comey's mixed and quite murky role in authorizing Bush's torture program. Internal DOJ emails released to the New York Times in 2009 show Comey expressing serious reservations, and even objections, to the willingness of Albert Gonzales to legally authorize any interrogation techniques the White House wanted, and he warned those officials that their involvement would be condemned by history. But even as he did so, Comey, as the New York Times explained, eventually, albeit reluctantly, gave his legal approval to those techniques:

"Previously undisclosed Justice Department e-mail messages, interviews and newly declassified documents show that some of the lawyers, including James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who argued repeatedly that the United States would regret using harsh methods, went along with a 2005 legal opinion asserting that the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were lawful.

"That opinion, giving the green light for the CIA to use all 13 methods in interrogating terrorism suspects, including waterboarding and up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation,'was ready to go out and I concurred,' Mr. Comey wrote to a colleague in an April 27, 2005, e-mail message obtained by The New York Times."

As I wrote at the time, the NYT article significantly overstated Comey's role in approving these torture programs. But it is true that he ultimately acquiesced to their legalization.

...

Of course, back before Barack Obama nominated Mr. Comey to head the FBI, Mr. Greenwald's  own 2009 takeaway from this incident was not what a "mixed and murky" dick Mr. Comey was for ultimately "acquiescing" to the Bush White House, but instead what extraordinary lengths the Bush White House went to to "coerce" the compliance of people like Mr. Comey.  

From Mr. Greenwald in 2009:

But the real story here is obvious — these DOJ memos authorizing torture were anything but the by-product of independent, good faith legal analysis.  Instead, those memos — just like the pre-war CIA reports about The Threat of Saddam — were coerced by White House officials eager for bureaucratic cover for what they had already ordered.  This was done precisely so that once this all became public, they could point to those memos and have the political and media establishment excuse what they did (“Oh, they only did what they DOJ told them was legal”‘/”Oh, they were only reacting to CIA warnings about Saddam’s weapons”).  These DOJ memos, like the CIA reports, were all engineered by the White House to give cover to what they wanted to do; they were not the precipitating events that led to and justified those decisions.  That is the critical point proven by the Comey emails...

Still, that's was some bad judgement Mr. Comey showed eight years ago. 

Maybe even disqualifyingly bad, regardless of whatever else Mr. Comey may have said or done since.   

But I'm just a rinky-dink Obama Cultist who cannot help but uncritically "cheer" for everything President Obama does, so you cannot trust my judgment in such matters. So let me take my po', brainwashed Obot self completely out of the picture, and take the matter straight to a best-selling author and acknowledged expert on how much stock we should put in the writing and thinking of actors today who were on stage in 2005 when it comes to judging their credibility today?

GG [Glenn Greenwald] note: This post was written in 2005, one month after I began blogging. It was recently dug up by some Obama cultists trying to discredit my criticisms of the President (to understand what I mean by "Obama cultists," see this 2006 post I wrote about Bush cultists: exactly the same mentality).... 

That's why Obama cultists have to dig back 6 years into my archives to try to find things to discredit me.

One interesting detail of Mr. Comey's resume that Mr. Greenwald neglects to mention is that shortly after succumbing to Bush Administration coercion (and, coincidentally  shortly after Mr. Greenwald wrote his now-famous 2005 post that he now gets Very Very Angry at "Obama Cultists"  for citing as proof of anything), the undeniably competent and experienced Mr. Comey abandoned the senior DOJ career fast-track along which he had been sailing for most of his career for a job  in the private sector.

Since 2005 Mr. Greenwald has made many, important contributions to our public discourse which I have actually, occasionally cited for reasons other than task taking or when he and I were in the running for the same, now-defunct award.

What a loss to the public it would have been if, based solely on his public mistakes eight years ago and on nothing he has done since since, Mr. Greenwald had let himself be permanently run out of his vocation by an very angry, obsessive individual wielding a very large megaphone and a very large grudge.

UPDATE:  Wonkette weighs in

POTUS Nominates Enzo the Baker To Run the FBI

From the NYT:

Former Bush Aide Said to Be Choice to Be Chief of F.B.I.

WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to nominate James B. Comey, a former hedge fund executive who served as a senior Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, to replace Robert S. Mueller III as the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to two people with knowledge of the selection.

By choosing Mr. Comey, a Republican, Mr. Obama made a strong statement about bipartisanship at a time when he faces renewed criticism from Republicans in Congress and has had difficulty winning confirmation of some important nominees. At the same time, Mr. Comey’s role in one of the most dramatic episodes of the Bush administration — in which he refused to acquiesce to White House aides and reauthorize a program for eavesdropping without warrants when he was serving as acting attorney general — should make him an acceptable choice to Democrats.
...

In the 2004 episode that defined Mr. Comey’s time in the Bush administration, the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, and Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., sought to persuade Attorney General John Ashcroft — who was hospitalized and disoriented — to reauthorize the administration’s controversial eavesdropping program.

Mr. Comey, who was serving as the acting attorney general and had been tipped off that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card were trying to go around him, rushed to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room to thwart them...

As I said, Enzo the Baker:

Update: Big h/t to "Unsalted Sinner" for reminding us of this much better, Andy Cobb version:

Silly Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

"But Reagan’s Republicanism has long gone, replaced by militarism and paranoia."

-- Andrew Sullivan, May 29, 2013

Telling themselves fairy tales of a bygone Golden Age of Conservatism is how discommendated Conservative Public Intellectuals

manage to sleep at night, wake up in the morning and go right back to work spinning newer, shinier fairy tales.

The Iron Loony Steps Down -- UPDATE

The Mad Queen of Jesusland gives up quest for the Iron Throne.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Ardent conservative Bachmann to not seek re-election to Congress

Fred Barbash
Reuters
7:49 a.m. CDT, May 29, 2013

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Michele Bachmann, the firebrand conservative 2012 presidential contender, announced Wednesday she will not seek re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, did not rule out another run for the Republican presidential nomination.

She said in a video posted on her campaign website that four two-year terms was enough time for anyone to serve in the House. She gave no other specific reason for not running for a fifth term.

Bachmann faced a House challenge from Democrat Jim Graves who came within one percent of beating her in 2012. But fear of a difficult race in 2014 was not her reason for leaving the House, she said in the video.

Bachmann's campaign for the 2012 nomination, which centered around charges that President Barack Obama was putting the U.S. "on the road to socialism," brought her wide attention. But much of it was negative thanks to regular misstatements of fact.

...

Yes, "ardent" is one word for it.

For the record, I believe she's not quitting Congress so much as she's changing her revenue model.

Also for the record, the Photoshop above dates back a couple of years when some long-forgotten wag was trying to get the public to draw obvious, harsh comparisons between Congressnutter Bachmann and a soon-to-be-deceased former British PM.

UPDATE:  Via Charles Pierce I see that one of the Voices of Jesusland has finally picked up on

that long-forgotten wag's brilliant 2011 comparison of Congressnutter Bachmann to the then-soon-to-be-deceased former British PM, but as is always the case with Conservative headcases, has gotten it all entirely ass-backwards.

Escapist Literature My Ass -- UPDATE

Dr. Krugman finds that "Idocracy" was more present-day documentary than satirical futurist speculation:

Krugman Feud With Reinhart-Rogoff Escalates as Austerity Debated

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman refused to back down in a dispute with Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff over a 2010 paper they wrote that’s been used to justify austerity in the U.S. and Europe.

Reinhart and Rogoff, in a May 25 letter posted on Reinhart’s website, accused Krugman of “spectacularly uncivil behavior” for asserting in an article published in the New York Review of Books that they had withheld data from their research. A day later, Krugman said the two have done little to dispel what he called a misconception generated by their paper -- that economies falter when debt levels exceed 90 percent of gross domestic product.

Nobel Prize-winning Economist Paul Krugman pauses during a Bloomberg Television interview in New York. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg “If the authors ever made an effort to correct this misconception, or indeed if they have ever even acknowledged that it’s a misconception, it was done very quietly,” Krugman wrote in the May 26 article on the New York Times website. “I’m sorry, but the failure to clear up this misconception has done a great deal of harm.”...

For those just catching up on this subject, here is a brief summary of Dr. Krugman's debate with the Beltway Insider Club over the last five years:

Krugman: Okay, look. You wanna solve this problem. So why don't we just try it, okay, and not worry about what economies crave?"

Entire Beltway Media Consensus: But austerity has what economies crave!

Entire Beltway Media Consensus: It's got Reinhart-Rogoff!

Krugman: What is Reinhart-Rogoff? Do you even know?

Entire Beltway Media Consensus: It's what they use to make austerity.

Krugman: Yeah, but why do they use them to make austerity?

Entire Beltway Media Consensus: Cause austerity's got Reinhart-Rogoff.

UPDATE -- Those with mad science fiction chops and a long memory know that the plot for "Idiocracy" was borrowed almost entirely from "The Marching Morons" by C. M. Kornbluth, which was first published in Galaxy over 60 years ago:

"The Marching Morons" is a science fiction story written by Cyril M. Kornbluth, originally published in Galaxy in April 1951. It was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two after being voted one of the best novellas up to 1965.

The story is set hundreds of years in the future: the date is 7-B-936. John Barlow, a man from the past put into suspended animation by a freak accident involving a dental drill and anesthesia, is revived in this future. The world seems mad to Barlow until Tinny-Peete explains the Problem of Population: Due to a combination of intelligent people not having children and excessive breeding by less intelligent people, the world is full of morons, with the exception of an elite few who work slavishly to keep order. Barlow, who was a shrewd real estate con man in his day, has a solution to sell to the elite, in exchange for being made World Dictator.

They'll Have to Make the Best of Things

It's an uphill climb.

Over at Balloon Juice, Doug J notes that Young Conor Friedersdorfferundgruntomatoes (sp?) has made a fresh baked ass-pie out of comparing a President to a teevee sitcom (Arrested Development).

Because it's May, 2013 and apparently Young Conor has run out of things to run on about:

Take me to another place

If you thought that inane pop culture political analogies would play a less prominent role in elite political discourse once people stopped reading Frank Bruni and MoDo…I present you with young Conor’s latest:

I’ve never watched “Arrested Development”, I’m sure it’s great, but I’m Ron Howard-phobic, so I couldn’t make heads or tails of the article.

Like most normal people, Doug J is unaware that checking the "Drawing a ridiculous parallel between the President and a sitcoms" on your resume is absolutely mandatory for any young Conservative careerist pundit on the make.

Such as this pair of vintage 2001 assless chaps modeled by a Young David Brooks (then of "The Weekly Standard") as part of his long-running one-man show, "David Brooks Rhapsodizes About The Manifold Small Town Gosh Darn Virtues of George W. Bush":

Farewell to Greatness

America from Gilligan's Island to The X-Files

SEP 17, 2001, VOL. 7, NO. 01 • BY DAVID BROOKS

I'D NEVER REALLY CONSIDERED the way George W. Bush resembles Gilligan of Gilligan’s Island until I read Paul A. Cantor’s brilliant book, Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization. As Cantor points out, Gilligan is not the smartest one on the island. He doesn’t have the obvious leadership résumé. Yet the audience instinctively sympathizes with him, and the show’s creators were right to put him in the center. In episode after episode, the fate of the islanders usually rests in his hands and he usually serves them well.

That’s because Gilligan possesses a subtle but important set of virtues: the democratic virtues. He is agreeable. He is decent. He never looks down on people; instead he gives others the benefit of the doubt. As Bush would say, he has a good heart.

He is also public spirited. Though humble, he is forever filled with good-natured plans to make other people happy. He doesn’t have a narrow perspective, like the other characters—the Professor, or the Millionaire, or the Movie Star. He doesn’t want to mold other peoples’ lives for them. But because of him the island is a happy community—happier, the show continually implies, than the world the castaways are stranded from.

Though Cantor doesn’t make the connection, Bush is a lot like that. He’s not the smartest one in his administration. He doesn’t possess the aristocratic spirit we associate with, say Churchill, or the intellectual or military virtues of Lincoln or Washington. But he does possess the democratic virtues; he’s decent and grounded and in tune with the aspirations and values of middle-class Americans today, who have democratic souls, after all.

...

Yes, young Mr. Brooks really wrote that.

He also wrote this:

 The real subject of Gilligan Unbound is globalization.

Because of course he did.

OTOH, comparing Gilligan's Island to another teevee show

can be an act of unalloyed genius.

You'll Never Go Broke

sticking it to those damn Liberal "coastal elites".

In the past, such was the Big Magic to be found in bashing the Liberal coastal elites that it could simultaneously make the Scintilla from Wasilla wealthy and give David Brooks something to tsk-tsk Centristly over:

...
But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
...

This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

From the grandest of Conservative enterprises (reanimating the corpse of Richard Nixon's dead career or providing the cemtral pillar for entire American Conservative movement) to the smallest dab of Centrist editorial spackle (giving Mark Halperin something to gush about between trips down to the Piggly Wiggly to buy peppermint foot lotion for John McCain) -- 

FROM: Mark Halperin
TO: Coastal Elites, the Media and Establishment Politicians of Both Parties
RE: Sarah Heath Palin 

Don't underestimate Sarah Palin. Yes, she is hyper-polarizing: she sends her fans into rapture and drives her detractors stark raving mad. But she can dominate the news cycle with a single tweet and generate three days of coverage with a single speech (as she did this past Friday in Iowa). Her name recognition is universal.

You are right to complain that she is not offering specific policy proposals and that her inaccessibility to media outlets other than the one that pays her — Fox News — puts her beyond the kind of scrutiny and accountability we have come to expect for our leaders.

But the mistake you are making is to assume that Palin needs or wants to play by the standard rules of American politics. Or that it even occurs to her to do so...

-- the mob-whipping potency of screeds against Liberal coastal elites is undeniable.

It gives the Breitbart Collective something on which to glut itself.

One of the lasting legacies of the Tea Party protests is how that movement finally and forever exposed the utter contempt and loathing coastal elites harbor for everyday Americans.

It has given Andrew Sullivan a shot at immortality:

The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.

And now it is Mr. Greenwald's turn to turn that well-turned phrase:

What Obama has specialized in from the beginning of his presidency is putting pretty packaging on ugly and discredited policies. The cosmopolitan, intellectualized flavor of his advocacy makes coastal elites and blue state progressives instinctively confident in the Goodness of whatever he's selling, much as George W. Bush's swaggering, evangelical cowboy routine did for red state conservatives.

I guess I don't get out enough.  Because while Mr. Greenwald lays claim to special insight into the instincts of "coastal elites and blue state progressives", I personally don't know anyone who has said they believe or accept President Obama's speech holus-bolus.  Nor do I know anyone (including me) who has not been bitterly disappointed at one point or another -- or frequently --  by some backslide or fuckup or sellout or egregiously stupid, one-sided attempt to "compromise" with one more olive branch extended to a clutch of fanatics who cheerfully use olive branches to torch bridges, immolate budget agreements and otherwise burn any attempt at comity to the fucking ground.

Of course, my knowledge of Liberals is meager, confined as it is to actual people living in the real world. As such, I cannot hope to match Mr, Greenwald's apparently vast and comprehensive Palinite expertise on the subject of the secret motives of unnamed "coastal elites and blue state progressives".  So speaking only for myself, I would certainly welcome any post-Obama speech editorial which counselled skepticism and a need for measurable outcomes as wise and appropriate.

But of course limiting an editorial to justifiable skepticism and a demand for tangible verification would also be so boring!  

Such a piece of work would in no way help Mr. Greenwald further his corollary goals of shitting on Progressives whenever possible (even if doing so means leaning hard on such pillars of dispassionate credibility as Ross Douthat, who, for the record, doesn't actually  manage to conjure up any actual Liberals who accept President Obama's speech in toto on which to hang his critique either) -- 

Obama may do things you progressives find distasteful, but at least marvel at how thoughtful and torn up he is about it all. The New York Times' Ross Douthat had quite a good column this week about this preening pageantry.

and burnishing his "Worse Than Bush" thesis:

No progressive wants to believe that they placed such great trust and adoration in a political figure who is increasingly being depicted as some sort of warped progeny of Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney.

But I suppose you go to war with the sniveling Obot caricatures you have now, not the sniveling Obot  caricature you might want or wish to have at a later time.

In any event, as Mr. Greenwald works his way though the lexicon of editorial contempt, I can hardly wait until he hauls the word "luxuriating" out of his arsenal.

I wonder if it will read anything like this?

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 President Barack Obama  is a monster who must be brought down -- but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis…

We Can Dance If We Want To

Napoleon in Mini-Dreads and The Language That He Used

This week in Grandstanding With Rand, we find the indefatigable Most Reverend Senator Galt Q. Aqua Buddha promising that if the Kenyan Usurper takes a few more IRS scalps the Most Reverend Senator Galt Q. Aqua Buddha may permit him retain his moral authority to lead the federal government of the United States of America.

I can only assume that in the vernacular of Galt's Gulch, the word "lead" translates approximately as  "will continue to be fanatically obstructed at every turn and beaten like a pinata 24/7 with one,  imaginary '-gate' after another."

So if you're still planning on Standing with Rand, you'd better hurry on up.

Go to him now,
He calls you,
You can't refuse.

Show Us Your Tits!

In lieu of another chapter of "Sunday Morning Comin' Down", here is a short, unfair history of teevee journalism documenting its devolution from a cadre of truth-seeking pros to a cesspool of moneyed narcissists and gossip mongers.

Stupid Shit Former RNC Chairs Say -- UPDATE

Ken Mehlman edition.

Ken Mehlman Launches Project To Build Conservative Support For Marriage Equality

Mehlman writes that a majority of the country -- and a majority of independents -- favor marriage equality, but that the polling also found there is growing GOP support. Of the 7,000 Republicans surveyed, 73 percent said they back employment nondiscrimination protection for gays and lesbians, 61 percent back safe-school protections and 46 percent say same-sex couples should be able to file joint tax returns, according to the op-ed.

On the issue of marriage equality, support is strongest among younger voters.

"These trends are accelerating, not going away. And I hope and trust that they will accelerate even faster as conservatives, and all Americans who cherish freedom, commitment and stability, support equal rights under the law for all citizens," Mehlman wrote in his piece.

While Project Right Side is a new venture, Mehlman has been a strong supporter of LGBT rights since he announced he was gay in August 2010. He has fundraised for marriage equality initiatives and has publicly spoken out in favor of such measures.

"Conservatives -- and I count myself as one -- succeed when we attract new supporters to timeless traditions," he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday. "The Republican Party's loss in this month's presidential election resulted partly from a failure to embrace some of America's fastest-growing constituencies. One area of significant change is in attitudes toward legal equality for gay Americans."

Mehlman attempts to make the conservative case for the freedom to marry, talking more about individual freedom than civil rights.

"Conservatives don't need to change core convictions to embrace the growing support for equal rights for gay Americans," he wrote. "It is sufficient to recognize the inherent conservatism in citizens' desire to marry, to be judged on their work, and not to be singled out for higher taxes or bullying at school. These objectives can be achieved while also protecting religious liberty, as demonstrated by states enacting civil marriage with exemptions for religious institutions."

Mehlman did not respond to a request for further comment.

Project Right Side makes the case that supporting marriage equality is a winning issue. It commissioned the GOP consulting firm Target Point to survey 16,000 voters over the past year, with an oversampling of Republicans and swing voters in battleground states, including 2,000 voters on election night.

Mehlman, however, was not out of the closet as chair of the RNC during President George W. Bush's presidency, when Republicans were stepping up their anti-gay activities. In 2010, he told the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder that it was all "very hard, personally" for him, but he felt he could not go against the party consensus.

...

The "the inherent conservatism in citizens' desire to marry, to be judged on their work, and not to be singled out for higher taxes or bullying at school".

Because Liberals don't value marriage.

Or work.

Of fair taxes.

But we are apparently pro-bullying.

It would be impossible for gay Conservatives like Mr. Mehlman to reconcile themselves the fact that they spent most of their lives in the service of a cause that made hating them one of its load-bearing pillars without also admitting to a fundamental moral incompetence and pathological self-loathing that would drive any normal human to flee into the wilderness and spend the rest of their lives a cave begging God for forgiveness.

Since that is never going to happen, self-deluded Conservatives like Mr. Mehlman do the next best thing: jettison reality altogether and begin tying themselves into vast Gordonian knots inventing a wholly imaginary Conservatism (See "Something Something Whig Something Something Burke",  "Here is a Revised List..." and a hundred posts in between) made of snips and snails and puppy dog's tails and equal rights for gay Americans and a bunch of other values (what I refer to as "Pineapple Ice Cream Conservatism") that have nothing to do with the actual American Conservative Movement to which they have devoted so much of their lives and to which they owe every nickel of whatever prosperity they have enjoyed.

As I wrote back in 2006 on the occasion of Mr. Mehlman's resignation as RNC Chair:

Mehlman lives in a well-appointed, voluntary Hell and has for a long, long time.

A specific kind of schizophrenic Hell which, one may speculate, manifests itself in ways perfectly consistent with someone who operates with a flaming straight-razor (insert 1 million jokes here) of deep denial and self-loathing splitting him right down the middle of his spiritual corpus callosum.

A singular kind of Hell that permits a man to be reasonably accurate diagnostician

(Mehlman, for example, apologized for the ‘Southern Strategy’ "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization," Mehlman said at the NAACP convention. "I come here as Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

even while a million of other Republicans were (and still are) furiously denying that such a thing ever existed or happened.) while simultaneously rendering him incapable of taking the honest actions – perform the honest surgery – necessary to cut away the contaminated tissue and genuinely cure the disease.

So while Mehlman tried to pretend that the Republican Southern Strategy was some dim and now-irrelevant relic from prehistoric past, Corker, Allen, Vernon Robinson, Peter King and others were amply demonstrating – through both explicit and dog-whistle appeals to naked racism – that the Helms-Wallace- Faubus Axis of Dixie is still alive and well and absolutely necessary to keeping the Republican’s base molten-crazy enough to vote GOP in their New Confederate States of America.
...

And of course, in the process of stocking the shelves of their imaginary Conservatism with their favorite knick-knacks self-deluded Conservatives like Mehlman cannot help but hideously offend anyone who, for instance, thinks marriage or work are very important but don't think "Inherent conservatism?  You soaking in it!" when getting out for a date-night with their spouse or working through the holidays because the project has to get done.

In the end, self-deluded gay Conservatives like Mr. Mehlman have not come out of the closet so much as they have recycled that closet's timbers to build themselves an ideological coffin.

Requiescat in pace.

UPDATE:  Welcome Crooks and Liars visitors!

It's Like "Which Twin Has Got The Toni?"

I used to watch a lot more movies.

And play a lot more pool.

Finding Out That Chuck Woolery

is a great big slab of wingnut gabble-gabble was...weird.

Not shocking or disappointing.

More like finding out that Scrappy Doo
is a member of the Bilderberg Club.

Weird.

The Great Recidivist

David Brooks Versus The Hippies:  Chapter Eleventy-Zillion

Everyone but a very few of us on the raggedy, disreputable Left has agreed to forget that ten short years ago, Mr. Brooks was busy making a very good living at Bloody Bill Kristol's neocon chop shop cranking out partisan tracts mocking antiwar protesters for being posturing, self-absorbed kooks with no respect for the Real World of Serious People like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith and Donald Rumsfeld.

Everyone but a very few of us on the raggedy, disreputable Left has also agreed to forget that while making that very good living at "The Weekly Standard", America's Foremost Irony-Deficient Future Yale Professor of Humility never had the slightest qualm about cheerfully heaping terms like "decadent" and "moral exhibitionism" onto the opponents of George Bush's Operation Clusterfuck for rudely expressing themselves in whatever small venues the go-along/get-along media would permitted them to use:

For example...

The Fog of Peace

The evasions, distractions, and miasma of the anti-war left.
SEP 30, 2002, VOL. 8, NO. 03 • BY DAVID BROOKS

...For example, on September 19, a group of peaceniks took out a full-page ad in the New York Times opposing the campaign in Afghanistan and a possible campaign in Iraq. Signatories included all the usual suspects: Jane Fonda, Edward Said, Barbara Ehrenreich, Tom Hayden, Gore Vidal, Ed Asner, and on and on. In the text of the ad, which runs to 15 paragraphs, Saddam Hussein is not mentioned. Weapons of mass destruction are not mentioned. The risks posed by terrorists and terror organizations are not mentioned. Instead there are vague sentiments, ethereally removed from the tensions before us today: "Nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers. . . . In our name, the government has brought down a pall of repression over society. . . . We refuse to be party to these wars and we repudiate any inference that they are being waged in our name." The entire exercise is a picture perfect example of moral exhibitionism, by a group of people decadently refusing even to acknowledge the difficulties and tradeoffs that confront those who actually have to make decisions about policy.

...

That is exactly what you see in the writings of the peace camp generally--not only in Chomsky's work but also in the writings of people who are actually tethered to reality. Their supposed demons--Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and company--occupy their entire field of vision, so that there is no room for analysis of anything beyond, such as what is happening in the world. For the peace camp, all foreign affairs is local; contempt for and opposition to Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, et al. is the driving passion

...

You begin to realize that they are not arguing about Iraq. They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election. They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves.

...

For most in the peace camp, there is only the fog. The debate is dominated by people who don't seem to know about Iraq and don't care. Their positions are not influenced by the facts of world affairs.

...

When you get deep enough into the peace camp you find fog about the fog. You find a generation of academic and literary intellectuals who have so devoted themselves to questioning meanings, deconstructing texts, decoding signifiers, and unmasking perspectives...

Ten years later we find Mr. Brooks has leveraged his rancid record of hippie punching and staunch support for the worst foreign policy disaster in modern American history into an even more lucrative gig cranking out drab globules of Centrist piffle for the New York Times.

Ten years later we also find Mr. Brooks still loathing antiwar protesters and still hectoring them about the proper protocol for registering their objections from high atop his absolutely unearned and undeserved pile of media privilege (via NPR):

May 24, 2013

BROOKS: Yeah. First, let me say I think Code Pink are reprehensible narcissists, by the way. They interrupt these events continually. This is not the proper [way] to have protest.

DIONNE: It's free speech, David. It's a free country.

BROOKS: Well, and there's also such a thing as civility and respect.

After a solid decade of being horribly, unimpeachably wrong about just about everything David Brooks remains a cosseted media insider whose opinions are still solemnly and deferentially sought.

And after a solid decade of being tragically right, the Left remains exiled to the disreputable media wastelands, shouting just to be heard over the deafening roar of Mr. Brooks' humility.

When Privileged, "Libertarian" Elephants Fight -- UPDATE

1. Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald8m

   I dream of the day when someone will engage this argument without first wildly distorting it beyond recognition http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/24/an-islamist-beheading-in-britain-ctd-3/ …

   
   

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2. Andrew Sullivan ‏@sullydish37m

   Greenwald's blindness to the savagery at the heart of Salafism is very hard to understand, let alone forgive: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/05/24/an-islamist-beheading-in-britain-ctd-3/ …

   
   

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It is the grass that suffers.

UPDATE:

The ref's have examined the instant replay footage and have declared Mr. Greenwald to have cleaned Mr. Sullivan's clock:

...

So self-evident was Sullivan's Friday night bad conduct here that, within hours, numerous people had harshly condemned it. Law professor Kevin Jon Heller wrote: "Sullivan distorts Greenwald's argument beyond all recognition; I can only assume deliberately." University of Chicago Professor Harold Pollack complained that he "shouldn't have to click past Sullivan's angry post to see that Greenwald labelled [the] beheading 'barbaric and horrendous'". One of Sullivan's readers wrote him a lengthy and very astute email, published in full here, explaining to him that "your fundamental misreading of Greenwald's column is succinctly stated in your sentence: 'How can that [U.S. history in the Mideast] legitimize a British citizen's brutal beheading of a fellow British citizen on the streets of London?' Greenwald never remotely said that."

Now we arrive at the broader points that I think are raised by all of this. Contrary to Professor Heller's suggestion, I actually don't think that Sullivan's flagrant misrepresentations of what I wrote were deliberate. I definitely do think that about Jeffrey Goldberg and other various neocon smear artists who spent the last couple of days endlessly and loudly accusing me of being a pro-Terror, US-blaming Terrorist-lover, Jew-hating Terror-apologist and all the other tired neocon clichés that have been hurled at anyone and everyone over the last decade who questions the Mandated Narratives about "Islamic Terror",

Although the best and most appropriate same-day response overall remains that of the Muslim Council of Britain:

"This is a truly barbaric act that has no basis in Islam and we condemn this unreservedly.

"Our thoughts are with the victim and his family.

"We understand the victim is a serving member of the Armed Forces. Muslims have long served in this country's Armed Forces, proudly and with honour.

"This attack on a member of the Armed Forces is dishonourable, and no cause justifies this murder. This action will no doubt heighten tensions on the streets of the United Kingdom.

"We call on all our communities, Muslim and non-Muslim, to come together in solidarity to ensure the forces of hatred do not prevail."

Also this bit from Mr. Greenwald, who is not generally known for sparing the throat-ripping invective when someone disagrees with him,

What, then, accounts for the distortions and sustained rage that ensues every time I make these arguments - not just from Sullivan but generally?

I think the answer lies in the very first sentence Sullivan wrote when responding to my column: "I really have to try restrain my anger here." It's an intensely emotional reaction, not a rational one. 

 was too hilariously clueless not to mention.