Donald Trump's Vile, Brilliant Ad

As AMERICAblog pointed out today, Donald Trump's knives-out anti-immigration attack ad against Jeb! is nothing short of a reboot of the infamous Willie Horton ad which Jeb!'s daddy used to blow Michael Dukakis out of way in 1988.

Donald Trump goes Willie Horton on Jeb Bush

8/31/15 1:24pm by Jon Green

With a 21st Century take on one of the most iconic moments of racism in political advertising, Donald Trump hit Jeb Bush today with a video, posted to Instagram, juxtaposing Bush’s “act of love” comments on immigration with pictures of immigrants who have committed crimes...

It's a hateful piece of fascist race-baiting, but it's also a work of minor evil genius.  Because in case you haven't been paying attention to American politics for the last 30 years, from Poppy Bush slinging Lee Atwater slime with both hands while wrapped in an American flag --

...

In 1988, one of the central attacks revolved around the Pledge of Allegiance. Mr. Dukakis, as governor, had vetoed state legislation in 1977 that required teachers to lead their students in the pledge. He did so on the basis of an advisory opinion from the state court, which said the legislation was unconstitutional.

Mr. Dukakis, a Harvard lawyer surrounded by other Harvard lawyers, believed himself on very firm ground. But by August 1988, his Republican opponent, Vice President George H.W. Bush, was rousing huge crowds with a contemptuous question: “What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?”

Mr. Dukakis, Mr. Bush said, was “out in deep left field on these issues.” He was also “a card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U.,” more concerned with giving furloughs to criminals — like Willie Horton — than upholding national values, the vice president asserted.

“I simply can’t understand the kind of thinking that lets first-degree murderers out of jail on a furlough and won’t deal with the Pledge of Allegiance,” Mr. Bush said.

...

-- to his halfwit, dry-drink son unleashing the full ratfucking fury of Atwater's protege, Karl Rove, on John McCain in 2000 --

...

McCain’s closest aides were so stunned by the angle of the attack that at first they tried to shield him from it. “We expected one thing, and it was quite the opposite,” said Fletcher, who personally saw the “Negro child” flyers “all over every car” at the debate. “We figured they would go after him on some sort of philandering issue. McCain had pretty well knocked all that down [by admitting in his 1999 autobiography that, at some point after his five and a half years in a North Vietnamese prison, he’d been unfaithful to his first wife], but I always figured that would sort of be the underground thing there. But, man, the child thing.… I’ve seen the worst form of racist sons of bitches in the world in David Duke, but this was unbelievable.”

Almost daily, the ugly buzz grew. Another prominent rumor was that Cindy was a drug addict. In 1994 she’d admitted that she had a prescription-painkiller problem and blamed it on two spinal surgeries and the stress of her husband’s role in the Keating Five scandal. (He was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a disgraced financier.)

There were other whispers as well: McCain had slept with prostitutes and given his wife V.D.; he’d turned traitor in the “Hanoi Hilton,” or was mentally unstable from his captivity, or was a Manchurian Candidate, brainwashed to destroy the G.O.P. (There was then, and still is, a wacky Web site devoted to those last theories. The former Green Beret behind it, Ted Sampley, is back at it today with a savage “Stop Hanoi John Kerry” diatribe; he also supports the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Beyond Sampley, most anti-McCain vets in South Carolina opposed the senator on political and/or veterans’ issues—not for his war service. A top McCain aide told me he didn’t think the vets’ antagonism was nearly the factor that the more personal attacks were.) For just meeting with the gay Log Cabin Republicans, McCain was labeled the “Fag Army” candidate.

...

-- The Bush Crime family has always been more than willing to spelunk as deep as necessary into any available political sewer in order to win an election.  

And for the most part, the Beltway media has been willing to let the Bushes job out their political wetwork to the scum of the Earth, dab the blood and viscera daintily from the corners of their mouths once the slaughter is done, and then go right back to pretending they're a tribe of genteel, well-mannered aristocrats without too many questions being asked.  As the late Doctor Thompson wrote back in 2000:

...

There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would Never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. ... Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory.

They were strong words and people said he was Bluffing. But I knew better. Of course Bush would win Florida. Losing was out of the question. Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV.

The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's. ... Everything since then has been political flotsam & Gibberish.

The whole Presidential election, in fact, was rigged and fixed from the start. It was a gigantic Media Event, scripted & staged for TV. It happens every four years, at an ever-increasing cost & 90 percent of the money always goes for TV commercials...

Over and over again Trump has whipped his opponents at their own game by simply lifting pages straight out of Roger Ailes' Olde and Forgotten Bewitchments and Charmes and the Bush Family Grimoire and running the dark magic spells and incantations of the Conservative elite right back at them with twice the throw-weight.

As I said, the Trump campaign's latest ad is worst kind of hateporn for brownshirts.  That said, if there are any Democratic campaign advisers out there who are not cribbing notes from the Trump campaign on the general subject of how to use the Right's own hexing powers against them, those advisers should be fired immediately.

Where Yesterday Has Been Exiled, Memory Is Rebellion

"Grow gills." 

-- Jonah Goldberg's advice to the people of New Orleans,  August 29, 2005

Ten years ago, much of our Conservative Alternate Reality Media very publicly shit the bed during the man-made catastrophe that destroyed New Orleans, killed +1,800 people and sent hundreds of thousands of American citizens into exile.

As the disaster unfolded, some of what was being said was captured for posterity at sites like The Cunning Realist, one example of which was Lucienne Goldberg's shitbag telling the losers of New Orleans to "grow gills":

On Monday, August 29, NRO's Jonah Goldberg advises people in New Orleans to "grow gills" (each post header below links back to the original):

ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS

I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared.

The indefatigable Media Matters also documented some of the atrocities:

Ann Coulter just called out MoveOn on Hannity & Colmes:

MoveOn.com is down protesting outside the White House. How about putting together some evacuee bags? How about actually helping out? Speaking of that, I think I’d like to hear a breakdown at the end of this, how much churches are contributing versus… MoveOn.com?

Last Thursday, as tens of thousands of families found themselves newly homeless, MoveOn launched an emergency national housing drive called HurricaneHousing.org. In just one week, over 235,000 beds have been offered to Katrina victims through the site. 

ThinkProgress to Ann Coulter: How about you stop embarrassing yourself on live national television?

This was a rare moment in American political culture because, as the late Steve Gilliard noted at the time, the Bush Administration's complete abdication of its most fundamental domestic civic responsibilities in the face of such a disaster momentarily scrambled the Right's lock-step support of the worst President in American history:

...
At every turn, the right has stepped up to the plate like John Cole and Cunning Realist, or revealed their race hatred, like the folks at the Corner. I mean, people like John Derbyshire have dug up their 1964 nigger hatred guide. I wonder if they pipe in Johnny Rebel and Skrewdriver as they work?

I think it reveals something else, that the divide on the right which is coming is going to be about how they see America. Joe Scarborough has long been a whipping boy for the left, but he actually stood up and tried to help people. The Manchester Union Leader, so right that it should be printed in German, ripped into Bush for his failures. I think a lot of these people see Americans in trouble and want to help them. They certainly act that way.
...

Hell, for several days after it became clear how monumentally the Bush Administration had fucked this up, even David Brooks' reaction was so...appropriate...that I officially retracted 4% of what I have written about him in the past and promised that, yes, if he were on fire, I now would whiz on him to put it out.

Mr. Gilliard got a lot right on his News Blog, but sadly, ten years later, what my friend and blog-father got wrong stands out in more and more painful relief every day.  Ever the hard-nosed skeptic, Steve Gilliard nonetheless believed that catching the racist Right out so far on the wrong side of history might change things:

...

A couple of days ago I was reading a Bob Sommersby post chiding Atrios for calling the Corner folks racist. I had to admit that I don't read Bob much, and with that post, he simply entered irrelevancy. He went on about people being helped in "red states" and blogs recreating the yippies. It was weird, as if he had been living in a cave the last week. I know he has his hobby horses, but after that, I can't imagine anyone taking him seriously anymore.

Why?

Because I have never seen such racism in my life on or offline.

I posted the crap posted by the racists at the Corner, and frankly I'm stunned.

I'm also deliriously happy.

Why, because, they are shown to be the extremists that they are. When I call Jonah a racist, I will forever have his gills post to prove my point.

...

The Southern Strategy has been exposed for what it was, a fraud to con whites into hating blacks while benefitting the rich. Oddly enough, Bush's crony state has failed white Mississippi as badly as black New Orleans. Many conservatives have demanded both accountability and effective responses.

But there are others, like the folks at the Corner, who need to prove how good it is to be white.

You have to see Mark Williams on Headline News. Not only did the Dem react in horror, Karyn Bryant, who is biracial, was equally stunned and angry. OxyBoy Rush called NO Mayor Nagin Nayger

But what is so stunning is how out of tune they are.

They don't get it.

Sometimes the world changes before your eyes. December 7th was such a day, November 22nd was one, so was July 4th. Those days didn't just change America, they changed the way we saw the world.

The right blogosphere, used to defending Bush, is caught on the wrong side here and not only do they don't know it, they keep digging deeper. Ann Coulter says something so dumb, so obviously disprovable, it's like she doesn't get that the rules have changed. Her petty attacks are wildly inappropriate, and more importantly, just not relevant. Everyone from the Southern Baptist Convention to MTV are helping to raise money and feed people. The only people not doing anything are the righties. They're too busy pointing fingers at poor, helpless people who might have picked up a case of water so they didn't die in 90+ degree streets with no shade.

If the GOP is the daddy party, it's a crooked deadbeat dad telling the judge that partial payment is fine, even if the kids are on the street.

Americans don't like open racism, even the TV reporters recoiled after seeing how people used their footage to demonize the poor.

This is the most serious domestic crisis since Pearl Harbor, and these folks are acting like it's still Ok to be Bund members. They don't get that everything changed after Bush failed to help the Katrina survivors.

The right bloggers are treating this as politics.

A lot of people, left and right, realize the implications here, and Bush is being hammered because of this. If there had been a terrorist attack on a chemical plant or if an LNG tanker, FEMA's inaction would have killed thousands of people from untreated trauma injuries. This is no longer about politics, but survival.

To be frank, all 9/11 did was change the scale of our response to terrorism. It didn't even really change Manhattan. The dead linger in my memory, but except for the few blocks in Manhattan, life went on. Three thousand families were changed. Here, hundreds of thousands of families are going to be changed forever. A lot of sadness, but the subways never stopped running.

But New Orleans is gone. I mean, a unique way of life is gone. It doesn't get much more serious than this. And the right bloggers are making jokes and arguing about buses.

...

But Gilly was wrong.

Ten years later, and the Conservatives who were momentarily driven from their doctrinaire spider holes by Katrina have long since gone back the profitable business of pimping Conservative claptrap, blaming Both Sides and lying about American history.

Ten years later, if you ask the average Republican base voter what happened during Katrina, you will hear a lot about "buses", "Liberal", "government dependence" and more or less everything else that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh shat into their skulls ten years ago. As far as they're concerned, this is settled history, just as the assassination of Vince Foster, death panels and a "stand down" plot by the Obama Administration to murder American foreign service officers in Benghaaaaazi is settled history.

Ten years later, and Jonah Goldberg is still doing just fine, thank you very much, and Ann Coulter is still treated as an honored guest on Fox News, and a trusted adviser by the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

Ten years later, "Heckuva Job, Brownie" is being give the full rehab treatment, and Dubya can visit New Orleans to give a speech and is not drive from the stage by a tsunami of rotten eggs and tomatoes.

Ten years later, the MSNBC you used to know is all but dead, the Liberal blogosphere is a ghost of what it once was, and Steve Gilliard's words crumble quietly to digital dust in the untended grave of The News Blog.

Ten years later and, irony of ironies, it may turn out to be that fighting every day just to remember our yesterdays as they really happened -- just to conserve the past against an implacable onslaught of revisionist propaganda -- is most important duty we dirty Liberals have.

Today In "Both Sides Do It": Ron Fournier

Trumpmania is what you get after the conservative wasn't compassionate and the liberal abandoned hope for change. He's a symptom, not a cure

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) August 31, 2015

Because whatever the hell the disaster is, and however many Conservatives you find gathered at the crime scene, covered in blood with machetes and broken bottles in their hands screaming "Hell yes we did it!", some disreputable hippie somewhere must always, always, always be blamed for at least half of the mayhem.

Or, as one disreputable hippie somewhere wrote a long, long time ago:

...In your weird fetish to be “objective”, the Republicans learned the little trick that makes you dance like organ grinder monkeys. Whatever goofy-assed idea they came up with, you’d reflexively cede them half the distance between the truth and their goal.

There was a book I loved when I was a little driftglass called, “Half Magic” by Edgar Eager, about a talisman that granted the user exactly half of what they asked for. Wish to be ten times stronger that Lancelot, you’ll get five. Wish for a million in cash, you get 500K. In the Mainstream Media, the Right Wing of the Republican Party found their Half Magic Charm. And each time you met them halfway, they moved the goalposts another twenty yards again...and you jogged right on along behind them, ten yards at a time.

The “compromise” between the truth and a lie...is a lie. The “compromise” between science and superstition...is superstition. Now, would you care to guess what the compromise between tolerance and bigotry is? Between knowledge and ignorance? Between Ann Coulter and Paul Krugman?

...

For over 20 years, the Right Wing has gotten fat and rich and powerful running the same scam on you buffoons over and over again. No matter how batshit crazy their position is, you’ll concede half the stage, half the clock and give them the benefit of the doubt. Which give them an automatic victory. They showed up at the table with little more that bad-acid delusions, and now the control 50% of the battlefield because you defaulted it right into their laps.

And when you don’t completely capitulate to 100% of their insanity, they turn right around and feed that into their own Pravada Media as Further Proof of the evil left wing media conspiracy.

“Victim,” they shriek. “Anti-religious Bigot!” They rant this from the rooftops because of the tiny bit of sane ground you did not surrender...and you jellied eels dependably cave in even more.

And thus they have led you – and the rest of the nation you whose common interests you were supposed to be serving -- by these half measures, right into the foyer of your own slaughterhouse.

It’s really quite an amazing story. Too bad we don’t have a press anymore to report it.

The only thing that has changed in the last 10 years is that any remnant of the myth of Beltway media's ignorant complicity is now completely gone.  By now it is clear that deliberately flogging the Big Lie of Both Siderism no matter what has been their business model all along.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

We've secretly replaced America's "news media" with corporate-extruded news-like infoslurry.

 Let's see if they can tell the difference!

This morning on @meetthepress, I'm going to take a closer look at how @realDonaldTrump is framing the race. #MTP pic.twitter.com/c2Zp2wGEwy

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) August 30, 2015

Also on "No Follow-up Questions, We Swear to God!" with Shuck Todd, quite a bit of network time and money was spent carefully placing softballs on the Beltway Media tee-ball apparatus so that little Scotty Walker could keep taking batting practice until his time was up.  For example, on the subject of foreign policy, Scotty promised, among other things, to tirelessly fight the keep Murrica safe from the Freedonian menace --

 -- and got a big, shiny participation ribbon for his effort, because on Meet the Press, every Conservative is a winner!

Scotty's money mommy and money daddy --



-- must be very proud of their brave little cipher!

And while Persistent Vegetative Station MSNBC (Motto: "Remember when we used to not actively hate Liberals") is still being kept alive by machines so that at some point Phil Griffin can harvest its organs, there were tiny sparkles of the old days this weekend as Steve "Chuck Todd Lite" Kornacki took a vacation and let Jonathan Capehart run the place for a few days. And either by accident or design, when the Obligatory Heritage Foundation Stooge was wheeled in to barf up Conservative talking points, this time around he was not deferred to like the éminence grise of a powerful cartel, but was instead treated like a rusting derelict left over from three wars ago which has been towed into the harbor for target practice.

The truth is, it is absurdly easy to whip virtually any Conservative any day of the week on virtually any issue. The Republican's glass jaws runs right down to their Achilles heels, which is why they depend on corrupt media referees like Shuck Todd to keep their candidates and talking heads propped up enough to simulate sentience.

We have finally arrived at a place where Republicans have declared war on reality itself because reality won't stop punching them in the balls. This has made them frantic to lay their hands on enough unfettered power to finally stomp objective reality to death and bury it in an unmarked grave. At the same time, our political media has arrived at a place where it simply will not report on any political story that cannot be hammered into the mold of a horse-race between two roughly equal and evenly matched contenders. Which is why, for tawdriest of ideological, psychological and financial motives, the Right and the Beltway media now collaborate tirelessly to maintain the illusion that the GOP is something other than the unhinged mutant whelpling of the incomprehensibly wealthy, the insufferably ignorant and the irredeemably racist.

And...as always:

"No one's talking about it. It's like it's not real."  -- Fear The Walking Dead

10 Years After: 2005 -- Which One's Pink?

This one went around the world and back in September, 2005.

Damn but I really did do a lot of writing that first year.

Oh by the way, which one's Pink? *



* (I will rarely do a modification to an existing post, but this seemed too sadly appropriate not to add.)

This is a graphic-intensive post, and be advised the last few images are rather strong.

They are tragically nothing you won't see on your local news, but some people may find them disturbing, and my intention is not to be gratuitous.

I'm simply furious.


("Us and Them", from "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd, 1973)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Us



and Them



And after all we're only ordinary men

Professional Left Podcast #299

"Trump Trump Trump Trumpity Trump Trump Trump."

-- MSNBC introduces its new Fall lineup

Links:

• Donald Trump tells a truth about the media
• Black Lives Matter - Campaign Zero and one kind critique
• Rand Paul whitesplains to BLM. Again.
• Joe Scarborough claims Hillary timed her press conference with shooting
• Mark Halperin false equivalency on “terror” comments
• Sununu’s son out at Boston Globe due to $750K conflict of interest
• Victory with Labor Relations Board
• Ray Bradbury’s FBI File.
• Neil Gaiman:  Science Fiction in China

Strategic Forgettery? You're Soaking In It!

Now that MSNBC has kicked Liberals and our ratings-killing obsession with facts 'n shit to the curb and gone into the Drudge Report content-generation business full-time, you can expect more and more of their extruded news-like teevee slop to be picked up and repeated enthusiastically by right-wing slop-houses like Newsbusters more and more often.

Like, for instance, today:

Halperin: ‘World Would Come to a Halt’ If GOP Said Dems Were Terrorists

On Friday’s Morning Joe, Bloomberg Politics managing editor Mark Halperin strongly condemned Hillary Clinton’s decision to compare Republican politicians to terrorists over the issue of abortion.

Halperin did not mince words when he repudiated the Democratic frontrunner's language and argued that “[i]f a Republican did this the world would come to a halt.”

Co-host Joe Scarborough was just as harsh on Mrs. Clinton and called her comments “disgusting." The Morning Joe host suggested Clinton "wanted us to talk about this. She wanted to throw a bright shiny object out there. So they don't -- so they don't talk about the e-mail scandal.”

After Scarborough listed off the numerous atrocities terrorists like ISIS commit against women on a daily basis he maintained that Hillary’s comments expose the “sick radicalism” of the Democratic Party:

Is this the radicalism, we've been talking about the craziness of the Republican Party. But is this the sick radicalism that is now infecting the Democratic Party that if you're Barack Obama you compare Chuck Schumer to people shouting death to America in Iran? And if you're Hillary Clinton, you compare pro-life Democrats and Republicans to ISIS? What happened here yesterday? This is so over the top. 

The MSNBC host went one step further and stressed that Clinton’s rhetoric was a “disgusting” “planned” strategy as she tries to distract from the FBI’s ongoing investigation into her private e-mail server containing classified information:

This is a strategy of her to be -- to engage in gutter politics to distract from the fact that the FBI is investigating her because she's been called a liar by the American people. So she's just going to try to change the subject. Democrats that are concerned about what's going on should just be more concerned this morning. 

After Mika Brzezinski played Clinton’s full comments once again she admitted that her remarks were clearly “written” and not merely off-the-cuff remarks. Halperin also made sure to point out the media double standard in its coverage of the 2016 campaign and how a Republican would have been swiftly condemned for invoking terrorists while talking about the Democratic Party:

The world would come to a halt. There would be editorials in every newspaper condemning him and demanding he apologize. 

Since over the years I have seen Mark Halperin on teevee yammering out his asinine Conservative talking points in his android monotone many times --

 -- and read about him jamming himself sideways into the stories he is "reporting" many times and heard him administering what may have been the loudest on-air blowjob in modern radio history, it is an objective fact that Mr. Halperin has been alive and at least minimally aware of his surroundings in this country for many years.

Therefor it is also objectively true that Mr. Halperin could not possibly have missed the fact that the entire fucking Conservative Hate Machine -- from its most elite power brokers and elected officials to its lowliest scut-working droolers -- have done nothing but bellow at the tops of their lungs (since before he was even elected) that Barack Obama is a dirty, Murrica-hating terrorist or a terrorist-sympathizer or a Commie Kenyan sleeper cell programmed by his foreign handlers to destroy Murrica by any means necessary.

In fact, other than periodically trying to destroy the country by crippling the economy, shutting the government down and holding daily ritual votes to get rid of health insurance for millions of Americans, pointing at Democrats and screaming "Traitor!  Terrorist!  Commie!" is pretty much all they do anymore.

Pretty much all they have done for the last 20 years.

Therefor it must also be objectively true that Mr. Halperin is a lying liar who lies for a living.

And we all know what happens to naughty lying liars who lie for a living, don't we?

They are praised and feted and paid vast sums of money to go on national teevee over and over again to share their wise counsel with millions of Americans forever and ever.

Sociopaths of Glory

If you ever wondered what would happen if you gave a mediocre Conservative toady an incredibly influential job for life, a shit-ton of money and 100% amnesty from any fucking accountability whatsoever, you're in luck!  The New York Times has been conducting just such an experiment for over 10 years now, and the results are impressive.

For example, while David Fucking Brooks is paid a princely sum to write something like this --

President Obama has said that ISIS stands for nothing but savagery. That’s clearly incorrect. Our military leaders speak of the struggle against ISIS as an attempt to kill as many ISIS leaders and soldiers as possible. But this is a war about a vision of history. ISIS ideas have legitimacy because it controls territory and has a place to enact them.

So far the response to ISIS has been pathetic. The U.S. pledged $500 million to train and equip Syrian moderates, hoping to create 15,000 fighters. After three years we turned out a grand total of 60 fighters, of whom a third were immediately captured.

It’s time to stop underestimating this force as some group of self-discrediting madmen. ISIS is a moral and political threat to the fragile and ugly stability that exists in what’s left in the Middle East. ISIS will thrive and spread its ideas for as long as it has its land.

-- the real perk that comes with the job of being David Brooks is an absolute, iron-clad Beltway guarantee that absolutely no one but few uppity commenters and disreputable bloggers will ask him any follow-up questions like...

Hey, David, how come you didn't mention George W. Bush, the author of this catastrophe, even once in this column?

And how come you didn't mention Dick Cheney?

And how come you didn't mention Paul Wolfowitz or Doug Feith or L. Paul Bremmer or Richard Perle or your former employer, Bill Kristol, or any of your other neocon fellow travelers who designed, built and defrauded the America public into buying George Bush's Iraqi clusterfuck?

And whatever happened to the billions of American taxpayer dollars and American taxpayer-funded materiel we already flushed down the rathole which President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney both solemnly promised us back in 2004 would be more than sufficient to meet the needs of keeping Iraq free and secure from just these kinds of threats?

And speaking of competing "visions of history" how do you keep getting away with constantly lying about the immediate past history of your Republican party and your Conservative movement? 

And as long as we're asking impossible questions which no one will ever ask and which you will never answer, do you even remember when you wrote shit like this back in the day?

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces

Mass destruction of mistaken ideas.

APR 28, 2003

...

Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are.

...

Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

...

The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media has conspired to liberate pundits like America's High Priest of Telling Other Journalists to Atone and Repent from the need to atone or repent of his own loathsome actions or even acknowledge that his own words exist.  This has enabled pundits like Mr. Brooks to build global brands and lucrative careers despite the mountains of easily-researched and publicly available evidence of their lies and hypocrisy.

And I find the sheer nakedness of that fact breathtaking.

Three Million and Counting

When you look at your podcast stats & see 3 MILLION total plays. Thank you! 300th episode is Sep 4! @Mr_Electrico pic.twitter.com/wweIe9KV0b

— Blue Gal/Fran (@bluegal) August 27, 2015

Many, many thanks to all of our listeners from all over the world.

After all this time it's still just Blue Gal and me, in a hobbit hole in the cornfield, with donated microphones, talking about culture, politics, media and our lives, once a week, every week, for the last 300 weeks and counting.

Apparently the key to keeping going is to keep going :-)

Trump is the Tea Party

(Please note:  There.  Is.  No.  Tea.  Party.)

From The Week:

Trump crushes the rest of the GOP field in new nationwide poll

Donald Trump's lead in the race for the GOP presidential nomination just reached an all-time high in a new national poll conducted by Gravis Marketing. The survey, released Tuesday by One American News Network, shows Trump leading the Republican field with a whopping 40 percent, up from 31 percent in Gravis' July poll.

Ben Carson, who placed second in the new poll, had just 13 percent — 27 points behind Trump. Jeb Bush came in third at 10 percent, followed by Ted Cruz at 7 percent, and John Kasich, Carly Fiorina, and Marco Rubio at 5 percent each...

The real, shocking news about Donald Trump's popularity with the Pig People is that our corporate media continues to pretend that Donald Trump's popularity among the Pig People is shocking news at all.  As I wrote way back in 2009 when these dregs of American democracy initially began quietly shredding their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and calling themselves "independents"...

...

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

...

They got away with eight years of Clinton witch-hunts.  Then they got away with eight years of incompetence and treason under Dubya,  And with the wild, reckless arrogance that comes from living on a perpetual holiday from accountability, they have been going ever more boldly and publicly insane, getting ever more knee-walking drunk on cask-strength Strategic Forgettery and scampering through the latest iteration of the Bush-Off Machine over and over again, faster and faster, like kids running through a sprinkler on a hot summer day.

Thirty years of being kicked in the balls by Demon Reality every day has taught the Pig People nothing except to band together tighter, amp their reality denial shield up higher and scream that much louder every time it looks like Demon Reality might kick some sense into them.  So don't expect anything on that front but more dangerous, shoutycrackers crazy every day.  

The media, for its part, is now suspended in a state of paralysis, stranded between being mesmerized by this monster they have created, and being repelled and terrified by it.  

And frankly, watching them drown in this cesspool of their own making is one of the few pleasures we peasants have left here at the ass end of the American Dream.   

Donald Trump Says The Truest Thing About Our Political Media

That you are likely to hear anywhere, from anyone.

I listened to part of this speech yesterday.  In between promising to restore Teutonic greatness and annex the Sudetenland (OK, I was only half listening) Trump also said a few very true things -- radically true things -- about how complicit our media has become and how completely money has warped the political process.  Obvious shit, which really does drive good people to despair, and which under normal circumstances would never, ever be talked about on nation teevee.  

In a sense Trump is running the campaign Rand Paul wanted to run -- say some sensible stuff before gobbling down a fistful of mescaline, dropping trou and letting your crazy off the leash.  But Trump is mixing the ingredients and proportions much more proficiently than anyone in the Paul family ever did. 

Well, There's Trump, Egg, Sausage and Trump

That's not got much Trump in it.

From every god damn cable news outlet in Christendom:

Man: You sit here, dear.

Wife: All right.

Man: Morning!

Cable news: Morning!

Man: Well, what've you got?

Cable news: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and Trump; egg bacon and Trump; egg bacon sausage and Trump; Trump bacon sausage and Trump; Trump egg Trump Trump bacon and Trump; Trump sausage Trump Trump bacon Trump tomato and Trump;

Wingnut Chorus: Trump Trump Trump Trump...

Cable news: ...Trump Trump Trump egg and Trump; Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump baked beans Trump Trump Trump...

Wingnut Chorus: Trump! Lovely Trump! Lovely Trump!

Cable news: ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and Trump.
Wife: Have you got anything without Trump?

Cable news: Well, there's Trump egg sausage and Trump, that's not got much Trump in it.

Wife: I don't want ANY Trump!

Man: Why can't she have egg bacon Trump and sausage?

Wife: THAT'S got Trump in it!

Man: Hasn't got as much Trump in it as Trump egg sausage and Trump, has it?

Wingnut Chorus: Trump Trump Trump Trump... (Crescendo through next few lines...)

Wife: Could you do the egg bacon Trump and sausage without the Trump then?

Cable news: Urgghh!

Wife: What do you mean 'Urgghh'? I don't like Trump!

Wingnut Chorus: Lovely Trump! Wonderful Trump!

Cable news: Shut up!

Wingnut Chorus: Lovely Trump! Wonderful Trump!

Cable news: Shut up! Bloody wingnuts! You can't have egg bacon Trump and sausage without the Trump.

Wife: I don't like Trump!

Man: Sshh, dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your Trump. I love it. I'm having Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump beaked beans Trump Trump Trump and Trump!

Wingnut Chorus: Trump Trump Trump Trump. Lovely Trump! Wonderful Trump!

Cable news: Shut up!! Baked beans are off.

Man: Well could I have her Trump instead of the baked beans then?

Cable news: You mean Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump...

Wingnut Chorus: Trump Trump Trump Trump. Lovely Trump! Wonderful Trump! Trump Tru-u-u-u-u-mp Trump Tru-u-u-u-u-mp Trump. Lovely Trump! Lovely Trump! Lovely Trump! Lovely Trump! Lovely Trump! Trump Trump Trump Trump!

In Which The Donald Sends Roger Ailes a Sicilian Message

Khartoum. Khartoum.  

Remember the scene? Not the horse's head, but the one before that. The one where studio mogul Jack Woltz reveals his weakness by taking Tom Hagen down to his stables and showing him what he values most:

Hey, come on over here with me; I wanna show you something really beautiful. You do appreciate beauty, don't you? There you are, $600,000 on four hooves. I bet a Russian Czar never paid that kind of dough for a single horse. Khartoum. Khartoum.

Trump is a monster who thrives on conflict, disorientation and always pressing, pressing, pressing his advantage. Where there is no turmoil, he will manufacture some, and how better to do that than to publicly remind Ailes that Trump can fuck up the most valuable piece of horseflesh Ailes' owns, any time he feels like it.

I liked The Kelly File much better without @megynkelly. Perhaps she could take another eleven day unscheduled vacation!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2015

After forcing Roger Ailes to sign a truce less than three weeks ago, it now appears that Donald has spent that time re-arming with the intent of forcing Ailes to renegotiate the terms of their non-aggression pact.

OMFG! 

It's Munich all over again!

David Brooks Multiple Choice

Five of these are delivered to you hot and stanky from America's Most Respected Moral Thought Leader, David Brooks, via a column in the New York Times for which he is paid large sums of real, American money.

One of them I just made up.

1. Live life as a series of revelations.
2. We’re social creatures.
3. We’re historical creatures.
4. We’re mystical creatures.
5. We’re moral creatures.
6. Have you ever looked at your hand, man? I mean really, really looked at it?

I currently hold the title of America's Leading Brooksologist and I have no fucking idea what he is prattling on about.

Did I mention that this --

Let’s say you had the chance to become a vampire.

-- is the opening sentence?

Is the New York Times paying him to creep on some co-ed who's into Twilight? Or is he barely sublimating his divorce into his column again? Or does he haz a sad that Donald Trump is making a picnic lunch out of the carefully constructed fascist political movement to which he has devoted his entire adult life?

No. Fucking. Clue.

David Brooks Endorses Donald Trump?

Sure as hell sounds like it, because his famous National Greatness Manifesto from back in his Weekly Standard glory days --

A RETURN TO NATIONAL GREATNESS

A Manifesto for a Lost Creed

MAR 3, 1997, VOL. 2, NO. 24 • BY DAVID BROOKS

-- starts right out of the box by telling his readers that Buildings Are Important.

Especially, big, brassy buildings that wave their big, Murrican dicks around!

...

But the Jefferson Building is more than just a giant Faberge egg. When you get down to looking at the details, you find that the craftsmanship is actually mediocre: You can travel around Europe and find a hundred buildings with better paintings and better sculpture. Nonetheless, there is something about the energy of the building that makes it more than the sum of its parts, that makes it not so much an artistic wonder as a spiritual artifact. How did any group of builders muster so much vitality?

The answer is that this is an American building. For all its classical and Renaissance style, this 1897 building speaks to us in American. It embodies the optimism and brassy aspirations of Americans in the Gilded Age, their faith in the power of beauty to elevate, their confidence in America, their brash assertion that America was emerging as a world-historical force...

But since the glorious Gilded Age, everything as gone to pot.  Heck, even Murrica's greatest politicians are boring 'n shit:

For all that our current politicians take advantage of the library -- J. C. Watts delivered the Republican response to the State of the Union there, Bill Clinton signed the telecommunications bill there -- present-day leaders possess none of the library's confidence and sureness of purpose. American politicians show little evidence of the great national vigor that animates this building. They don't dare to make great plans or issue large challenges to themselves and their country. At a moment of world supremacy unlike any other, Americans are not asking big questions about their civilization, nor are they being asked anything but the sorts of things pollsters and marketers want to know. And so our politics has become degrading and boring. Political conflict appears trivial, vicious for no good reason.

Because the fucking hippies ruined everything!

For much of this century, liberals possessed high aspirations and a spirit of historical purpose. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, the New Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier -- these were efforts to aim high, to accomplish some grand national endeavor. Liberals tried to use American preeminence as a way to shape the world, fight communism, put a man on the moon. But then came the 1970s, and suddenly liberalism became a creed emphasizing limits. Small became beautiful. A radical egalitarianism transformed liberalism, destroying hierarchies and discrediting elitist aspirations. An easygoing nihilism swept through academia, carrying away any sense of a transcendent order. The civil- rights era turned into the affirmative-action era, and what had been a great national crusade for justice devolved into a series of petty squabbles over spoils.

Worse, under the influence of the New Left, the personal became political. Private concerns came to eclipse the larger public realm. At a time when a teenager's haircut was a political statement to be adjudicated by the Supreme Court, all the issues of the private realm -- smoking, methods of raising children, sexual preferences -- began to overshadow the traditional subjects of the public realm: subjects like order, justice, and the distribution of wealth. Americans have almost forgotten what the public realm is and how it differs from the sum of private concerns.

...

But cultural liberalism has smashed reticence, mistaking it for hypocrisy. Finally, the national-greatness ideal was based on iron discipline over the passions. But cultural liberalism mistook self-control for unhealthy repression.

...

But you know what? It's really Conservative who are to blame, because WTF people?  Why aren't you Reaganing the shit out of everything?

But it is primarily the fault of conservatives that America has lost a sense of national mission and national greatness. After all, this is a conservative era, and one shouldn't expect the Democrats to come up with the energy that animates a conservative era. But since Ronald Reagan returned to California, conservatism has shrunk.

And Both Sides, also too, because it comes with everything David Brooks writes.  Like shitty little plastic forks.  You can tell them at the drive-thru "No, thanks, I have one million forks at home and I do not need your shitty plastic cutlery" but damn if, when you open them bag, there it is, at the bottom, mocking you.  Same thing with David Brooks and Both Siderism, always forever:

Currently, American political philosophy has divided itself into the opposing principles of "order" and "freedom." Now, when liberals stand for one, conservatives stand for the other. Liberals want economic order; conservatives want economic freedom. Conservatives want social order; liberals want social freedom.

So now that you are sufficiently sad and paranoid and pissed off at the Dirty Hippies for messing up Murrica and at Conservatives for not punching those damn hippies with sufficient vigor, what's the solution?  How do we get on with the business of....  Restoring American Greatness?

It turns out, the answer is that you build something.  Build anything.  Because it literally doesn't matter what we build so long as it Yooooge!  And built by ambitious individuals, because the gummit is run by craven idiots.

The national mission can be carried out only by individuals and families -- not by collectives, as in socialism and communism. Instead, individual ambition and willpower are channeled into the cause of national greatness. And by making the nation great, individuals are able to join their narrow concerns to a larger national project.

Historically, national missions have included settling the West, building the highway system, creating the post-war science faculties, exploring space, waging the Cold War, and disseminating American culture throughout the world...

The most successful missions have set physical goals, rather than abstract ones: America in 1897 constructed the world's finest library. The library has had an important impact on culture, but its impact is the byproduct of a physical project. Sometimes the federal government has funded these efforts. Sometimes it has merely identified the new national cause. Sometimes it has eliminated barriers to ambition.

It almost doesn't matter what great task government sets for itself, as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness. The first task of government is to convey a spirit of confidence and vigor that can then spill across the life of the nation. Stagnant government drains national morale. A government that fails to offer any vision merely feeds public cynicism and disenchantment.

But energetic government is good for its own sake. It raises the sights of the individual. It strengthens common bonds. It boosts national pride. It continues the great national project. It allows each generation to join the work of their parents. The quest for national greatness defines the word " American" and makes it new for every generation.

Which, taken all in all, sure sounds like one hell of an endorsement of a plan by the loudest, most ambitious New Gilded Age asshole in Murrica to build the yooogest, most beautiful wall ever on the face of the Earth.

And the cherry on top? The fact that now that the candidate of The Weekly Standard's wet dreams has finally arrived in the flesh, Bloody Bill Kristol (Mr. Brooks' former Weekly Standard employer and fellow National Greatness tub-thumper) is scuttling as fast as possible in the opposite direction:

Is It Time for Another GOP Candidate?

August 24, 2015

By Taegan Goddard

Bill Kristol says it may be time to encourage another candidate to enter the Republican presidential race.

“It may seem odd to suggest that the solution to an already unprecedentedly large field is to expand it further. But politics is full of oddities. And what would be truly odd would be to go into battle in 2016 with a candidate we settle on rather than a nominee the country can rally behind.”

...

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

The Beltway Gasbag Cavalcade in one picture:

"If you want a vision of the future of news, imagine a Beltway loafer stamping on real news - forever."

There was one bright spot.

The Hillary email story is manufactured by the combo of a bored press and GOP conspiracies - Howard Dean to @chucktodd on @meetthepress

— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) August 23, 2015

But one bright spot is not enough.

@kille_nw @jaymarose @owillis Understand. Can't believe I get paid to scold political hacks. Most folks do it for free.

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) August 24, 2015

Not nearly enough.

As The Late Mr. Gilliard Used To Say --

"When your opponent is drowning, throw them an anchor."

Or, in this case, "anchor babies".

From CBS:

Donald Trump calls out Jeb Bush for flip-flopping on phrase "anchor babies"

Donald Trump and Jeb Bush are both taking heat for using the derogatory term "anchor babies," but Trump on Friday suggested that he's at least been consistent and straightforward about using it -- unlike Bush.

As Trump tweeted, the former Florida governor is indeed affiliated with a group that has advised Republicans to stay away from the derogatory term for American babies born to undocumented immigrants. In 2013, the Hispanic Leadership Network produced a memo that said, "When talking about immigrants... Don't use the term 'anchor baby.'" Bush helped launch the group and is still a part of its national advisory committee.

Straying from the advice of the Hispanic Leadership Network, Bush used the term on a conservative radio show on Wednesday. He said there should be better border enforcement "so that you don't have these, you know, 'anchor babies,' as they're described, coming into the country."

Later, when a reporter asked him if he considered the words "bombastic language," Bush testily replied that "no, it isn't."

"Here's the deal -- what I said was that it's commonly referred to that," he told reporters Thursday. "I didn't use it as my own language."

Asked if he regretted using the term, Bush said no, and responded, "Do you have a better term? You give me a better term, and I'll use it."

Trump, meanwhile, has had no qualms about using the term as he discusses his proposal to end birthright citizenship, even though the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

...

And it's too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around.

So have a good drown, as you go down, like a chump,

Dragged down by the Trump...

Professional Left Podcast #298

Thanks one more time to Kevin for the promo video that remains evergreen.

"Trump Trump Trump Trumpity Trump Trump Trump."

-- The name of a reality teevee show in which
various members of the Mainstream Media
pretend to be baffled about why
Donald Trump is on teevee so much.

Links:

• Wild, Wild Planet 
• That New York Times article on Amazon