The 10th blogiversary fundraiser continues with Inaugural Year of 2009. Or, as Conservatives quickly came to think of it, the Beginning Of All Recorded History.
In 2009, I was still on The Sunday Morning Beat, writing long posts as things got very bent very fast. There is an early-year sample down below in which David Brooks was everywhere, first doing breakthrough work in the New York Times conjuring Imaginary Moderates out of thin air and demanding that Barack Obama kick smelly Liberals to the curb and work them... and then re-reading his column on what seemed like every other program on teevee except Storage Wars and re-runs of Bat Masterson. This was the same week RNC chair Michael "Break Glass In Case the GOP Needs a Black Guy" Steele went on teevee and spectacularly failed to understand what a "job" is (a month later, Steele would coronate Rush Limbaugh as the One True King of the Pig People.)
Somehow Bill Kristol got fired, but don't worry chillun. Soon he would be picked up by Fox News, welcomed as a guest on lots of "legit" programs, and finally land a full-time gig as a Very Serious Person on ABC's "This Week..."
Because, boy howdy, if One Lesson has been driven home like a railroad spike over the last 10 years it is this:
In 2009, I was still on The Sunday Morning Beat, writing long posts as things got very bent very fast. There is an early-year sample down below in which David Brooks was everywhere, first doing breakthrough work in the New York Times conjuring Imaginary Moderates out of thin air and demanding that Barack Obama kick smelly Liberals to the curb and work them... and then re-reading his column on what seemed like every other program on teevee except Storage Wars and re-runs of Bat Masterson. This was the same week RNC chair Michael "Break Glass In Case the GOP Needs a Black Guy" Steele went on teevee and spectacularly failed to understand what a "job" is (a month later, Steele would coronate Rush Limbaugh as the One True King of the Pig People.)
Somehow Bill Kristol got fired, but don't worry chillun. Soon he would be picked up by Fox News, welcomed as a guest on lots of "legit" programs, and finally land a full-time gig as a Very Serious Person on ABC's "This Week..."
Because, boy howdy, if One Lesson has been driven home like a railroad spike over the last 10 years it is this:
There is definitely a club.
And you are definitely not in it.
Sunday Morning Comin’ Down – Part 2 of 2
On “This Week” George Stephanopoulos asks Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele about Dubya.
Shorter Michael Steele: Bush was awesome. His economic politics were fooking brill. He inherited a recession from the Evil Bill Clinton.
And then came the Stupid Of The Month.
Steele: Government doesn’t create jobs. Only the private sector creates jobs.
Stephanopoulos: What?
Steele: Government jobs don’t count as jobs,
Stephanopoulos: What…squared?
Steele: They don’t count as jobs, because they have an end point.
Stephanopoulos: So people who will rebuild our shitty schools don’t really count as people who have jobs?
Steele: No. Because those jobs will eventually end. They’re just make-work. And private sector jobs never, ever end.
Stephanopoulos: But…but…3.9 million people lost their jobs year? All of those “private sector jobs” ended.
Steele: Sure, but private sector jobs always come back, George. The Majyk Jobs Unicorn brings them.
Stephanopoulos: OMFG. You’re a complete douche, aren’t you?
Steele: I’m a Republican, George; we’re all douches.
Wow. So this is now the official policy of the Party of God.
That cops don’t have “jobs”.
Neither do teachers.
Or firemen. Or sewer workers. Road construction crews. Bridge builders. Snow plow drivers. Bus drivers. Train conductors. Coast guard.
The United States Army.
has no "jobs".
Neither does
the United States Navy
The Peace Corps?
Nuh-uh.
Neither does the Marine Corps.
No "jobs" for state-funded nursing care. Doctors. Foster care workers.
Consultants and contract employees working the private sector aren’t really really working at “jobs” either, since their contracts eventually end.
The lady who delivers your mail doesn’t have a “job”.
The lifeguard who saved your uncle from drowning at a public beach doesn’t have a “job”.
The public defender that got your kid a little justice doesn’t have a “job”.
The judge who put the drug dealer who was terrorizing your neighborhood away doesn’t have a “job”.
The auditor who makes hedge fund managers pay their fucking taxes doesn’t have a “job”.
The tech guy who makes sure the computer lab at your daughter’s school can take a beating and still run the next day doesn’t have a “job”.
The hematologist at the county blood bank doesn’t have a “job”.
The gearheads and welders who make sure the buses and garbage trucks run, rain or shine don’t have “jobs”.
The people doing the 2010 census don’t have “jobs”.
The job counselors and case managers at your local employment One Stop also don’t have jobs, even though they are the ones who are going to work like hell to help that laid-off lathe operator find another way to support his family now that the GM supplier he worked for for 22 years has closed its doors.
The air traffic controller who made sure your mom’s plane didn’t slam into a mountain doesn’t have a “job”.
Customs agent isn’t a real job.
Even though millions of these people may have worked honorably on a public payroll providing vital services for decades – may have put their kids through college, bought a house and retired on that salary – the Chair of the Republican National Committee does not consider what they do to be “real” jobs.
So my mother, who taught her whole life, never had a “real” job.
My dad, who was a principle, was also somehow actually unemployed.
All of the dams my grandpa built wasn’t real labor. And the defense plants he worked at didn’t really exist.
The truly dreadful thing about this is not merely that in Mikey Steele’s world, all of these jobs and thousands more are all just sorta welfarey make-work, but that I’m absolutely sure Mikey Steele believes every single word of the bilge he hawks up.
Because if you want to rise through the ranks of the GOP, you are required to believe this tripe.
It is doctrine. Dogma. The station of the Conservative Cross and the Passion of the Gipper all rolled into one, big, toxic, Randite fattie.
Smoke it – inhale good and deep – and you’re in the club; take a pass and out into the wilderness you are cast. And because lying, grasping, sellout hucksters like Steele most definitely want to be in the club, they enthusiastically spout this objectively ridiculous bibble, not because the jobs – and they are j-o-b-s – they are talking about are somehow trivial or unnecessary, but because they are middle class jobs.
Many of them are union, middle class jobs.
And if there is anything a Republican hates more than the middle class generally, it is unions specifically. They are all that stands between the GOP and the America of their dreams – a land where the entire government has finally been liquidated, every fucking job in the country (except CEOs and hedge fund managers) has been outsourced to Indonesian slave labor camps, media has been gutted and gelded of everything but ads and trivia, and a corporate feudal state rules unchallenged and unfettered forever and ever, amen.
Over in the Better Universe, Al Pacino takes time away from his busy schedule, borrows Stephanopoulos’ hair and explains to Mr. Steele exactly what not-crazy people think of his “Beat The Working Man Harder” school of economics.
(Not Work Safe)
Over here, most of the media continues to pretend that the GOP wasn’t just crushed and roundly repudiated in two consecutive elections and that their ideas are not the tragically failed ravings of a gang of bitter regime dead enders.
More tax cuts.
Less regulation.
Stall and delay until it all burns to the ground, then lie down and make Happy Reagan Jesus Angels in the ashes while singing martial hymns about how dirty hippies are to blame for it all.
Where oh where is a fucking Rapture when you need one?
Finally, on ”The Chris Matthews Show”, well, lets just say if David Fucking Brooks hadn't been positively everywhere over the last few days I wouldn't be writing this, but Holy Mother of Dog.
He was positively Chairman-Mao-ubiquitous
in the Big Dollar Media this week, playing the “reasonable” conservative to Limbaugh’s “shrieking Bircher” conservative as the Party of God desperately rolls out its hoary Good GOP/Bad GOP one more time.
First, the NYT wrapped up his extra-smarmy leavings in a big, gray bow (apparently the exodus of Bill Kristol from the Times means the Last Neocon Standing gets a the "Get Out Of Cesspit Free" letters of transit [They're signed by Pinch Sulzberger himself. They cannot be rescinded — not even questioned!"])
"The Obama administration sent a series of stimulus principles to Capitol Hill and allowed the Old Bulls in the House and Senate to write legislation. They produced sprawling bills that gathered dozens of traditional liberal ideas. The resulting bills would have been no different if Nancy Pelosi had been elected president, or Harry Reid, or any other conventional Democrat.Of course, there are no "moderates" anymore. There are "Rush Limbaugh Republicans" on one side, and lots of not-crazy people on the other.
The substance of the legislation set up the polarized debate that followed. Liberal interest groups were happy. Conservative Republicans were united in opposition. But something interesting happened this week. The momentum of the debate was set by moderates. Conservative protests wouldn’t have amounted to much without nagging moderate unease.
...
The liberals already are mobilizing against the Moderate Gangs. On Thursday, the liberal interest groups were intensively lobbying against the stimulus cuts. But there’s no way that Obama, who spent two years campaigning on postpartisan politics, can reject the single biggest manifestation of postpartisanship in the country today. If he does that, his credibility will be shot.
Obama didn’t plan them. He didn’t create them. He isn’t yet leading them. But the gangs could be the big new fact in domestic politics. If nurtured and used creatively, they can be the lever by which Obama transforms the landscape of government and creates a broad postpartisan coalition.
...
But this reality is too horrifying and unprofitable for Bobo to contemplate, so he invents a fictional cast of moderates and then invests them with Majykal Fulcrumy Powers over all issues.
Of course, these non-existent neo-modero-centro-reasonablites must have a leader.
And his name is…
David Brooks.
Then over to NPR (Nice, Polite Republicans) to clear my head and, holy shit!, there he is again.
Re-reading his column.
Later, I gritted my way through "The News Hour" and listened to Bobo...re-reading his column...again.
"…the resulting bill, which was huge and sprawling, was something liberals could love, all conservatives hated, and moderates were extremely uneasy about. So what happened this week was you had a group of moderates -- 18 to 20, holed up in the Dirksen building, 15 Democrats, 5 Republicans unhappy with the bill, but not wanting to be against it.Then, trying to drift off into dreams of spring and employment, there he was.
And those centrists were taking stuff out, yesterday, a lot of education bills. That made the liberals unhappy. They wanted that education money back in.
So it was a tension between the center and the left, basically, to try to find the right size. But the core problem was they created a bill so far left the center really wanted changes in it.
JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you read this, Mark?
MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: I disagree with David. Ninety percent of what's in the bill coming out of the House was Barack Obama. I mean, it wasn't some leftist plot that was foisted upon them by these barons on Capitol Hill.
On Charlie Rose.
For a half an hour.
Re-reading his fucking column.
“The worst thing about the stimulus package was that it ‘offended the moderates’.”Again.
“When you start with a bill that is, frankly, so far to the Left…no matter how smooth your operations, your just not going to get a lot of Republicans and the moderates are going to be unhappy.”
And so I ran for it, like a cur. Blindly and without shame. Like a College Republican sprinting away from an Army Recruiter, I fled into the night, hiding out in the abandoned condo blocks that are shot through my city like blood poisoning, sharing a hearty hobo meal of beans and dumpstered peanut butter cooked over a campfire made from busted up Ikea bookshelves and bales of Lehman Brother stock.
I spent all night on the other side of digital divide, dancing merry jigs, singing traditional white collar chanties
and purging myself of the creepy notion that I was trapped like Joe Chip in Phillip Dick’s “Ubik” -- stuck with millions of others in a cold-pack, half-life facility where the lees of our life energy is being gobbled up by a psychotic delinquent whose is slowly taking over everything.
Then as they melted into a Brigadoon dawn, I bid the people of the night farewell and headed back to the castle to strap on the Mouse Circus helmet and watch Conservatives argue one more time that the person holding the gun screaming "Getthefuckouttathecarnownownow!" and the one with the gun shoved in his face are somehow both culpable for the carjacking.
And there, on “The Chris Matthews Show”, was David Fucking Brooks.
Sigh.
So I powered everything down and spent the rest of the daylight hours remembering the bygone age of a Centrist President who thought he could govern by selling Liberal principles down the bi-partisan river in order to give Republicans virtually everything they ever dreamed of
including budget surpluses.
And for his troubles? (this video is no more)
Modern Conservatism is the rotgut that has gotten this country shitfaced, reckless, bellicose drunk and run it off a cliff.
And chugging it mixed with a bump of bi-partisan apple juice won't make it any less fatal.
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