For us Liberal groundlings who no one listens to anyway, it is definitely entertaining to watch the Republican party and the Beltway media run in circles, set their own hair on fire and beat themselves to death with their own dicks while whining that they have no idea why all of this circle-running, hair-blazing, dick throttling is happening to them.
Definitely entertaining.
However, before we break out the Liberal chardonnay and declare a Jubilee, I would like to remind my Liberal brothers and sisters that we have been here before. Well not here here, but we have had moments in our recent past when it looked like Reality had at last whipped the shit out of the Bad Guys so badly that this time they were going down for the count. In fact, ten years ago, in his 2006 year-in-review post, the late Steve Gilliard noted that with the Bush Administration in full collapse and Congressional Republicans in full retreat, it finally looked like the end of Rico...
The collapse of the right blogosphereRemember how the year started? People took Powerline, Red State and Instacracker seriously.Well, when they tried to promote Young Ben from Red State, he got gutted and exposed as a plagiarist and racist in a day or so, and from there, it didn't get any better. Mike Krempasky had problems with Wal Mart, which was quietly sending bloggers PR pieces to defend their company from facts.But my favorite moment of impotence, showing the divergent growth patterns between right and left, is the way the right had to sit and watch how the NRCC savaged conservative Steve Laffey in Rhode Island to save a doomed Chaffee campaign. They had no power to raise money, or even rally people to their cause. Other people they raised money for lost.They bitched and moaned about AP photos, but no one cared. When Chris Bowers raised a couple of million dollars and Matt Stoller helped campaigns draw support, the right sat at their keyboards, impotent.Now they rage against Muslims as they lose relevancy by the day
Were he alive today, I would imagine Steve would be thoroughly-pissed-but-not-exactly-surprised that the "right blogosphere" (as it was called back when dinosaurs and Haloscan walked the Earth) has not only not collapsed, but has actually prospered, while the Left is being starved and cut into insignificance. This is thanks entirely to the fact that the Right is the beneficiary of massive financial and institutional support from the wealthy individuals and groups that are willing to underwrite just about anyone with a keyboard who will take up the wingnut cause.
And so, while Red State would certainly have gone the way of Flooz and Friendster and shuffled of its mortal coil if normal, competency-based market forces prevailed, it's still around and doing fine, and its former Editor-in-Chief -- Ewick son of Ewick -- was not sunk by his shitty public behavior but has instead used his hate site resume as a stepping stone to mainstream "respectability" and seat at the GOP big kids table.
The "Young Ben" Steve refers to is Young Ben Domenech, who has most definitely not gone away either. Mr. Domenech -- who has worked Conservative chop shops from Regnery Press to NRO -- was instead saved from scandal and media oblivion by a series of boons granted him by everyone from (infamous climate change denial hack-shop) the Heartland Institute, to (inexplicably) his very good friends at MSNBC, who have dusted him off and propped him up often enough that he is now invited to appear semi-regularly on both MSNBC and "Face the Nation".
Finally, the "Instacracker" Steve refers to is Glenn Harlan "Instapundit" Reynolds who, instead of politely vanishing in a cloud of stink, has also done very well for himself. In fact, you can see Mr. Reynolds' most recent work on display in USA Today, in an article which begins with the headline --
Glenn Reynolds: How David Brooks created Donald Trump
-- and then proceeds to get just about everything single thing wrong about both the Republican base voter and David Brooks.
Too bad USA Today didn't drop me a line. I could have saved them this embarrassment, given them 800 glistening, fact-checked words on how David Brooks actually did help create Donald Trump, and they could have given me a check.
Ah well.
I guess after 11 years of doing this, I just don't have what Ben and Glenn and Ewick have.
8 comments:
No, you don't. Unlike them, you don't have a exponentially growing, Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars-sized black hole where your soul used to be.
So you are proposing America be prepared for another republican rebranding?
Tea Party outlived it's lie?
Perhaps they can uprise from the astro turf roots to form the ,
"Rough Riders"
relabeling worked on conservatives so many times before, why not?
A wise lefty blogger once said "there's a club, and you're not in it" or words to such effect.
While historians of a future generation may look back at this era and wonder why in bloody fucking hell retrograde lollygaggers like Ben Douchemenech and Glenn Reynolds, to say nothing of Hugh F'ing Hewitt, (seriously, Hugh F'ing Hewitt!?!!) got into the Club, for some reason they're in, and there's nothing they can do to lose their membership card other than, perhaps, a live boy/dead girl situation, or of course, having an epiphany and becoming a fire breathing liberal, that will get them kicked out.
It's really hard to decipher what these troglodytes actually believe, but in my experience, people who lie constantly, especially those who lie really big, often end up believing their own bs. A teacher of mine opined that denial is really very powerful, and it's applicable not just to issues such as drug and alcohol abuse & addiction. Denial is very much in operation when someone constantly denys reality in favor of a made up set of circumstances.
At any rate, those on the rightwingnut welfare circuit certainly know on which side their bread is buttered. They stand ready to continue in their propagandistic ways in service of the 1%. It's what's for dinner, doncha know?
Lefties are f*cking ret*rded, doncha know? We've certainly been told that often enough, and mostly by "our own" so-called "leaders." Our viewpoints are not to be tolerated, no much how much reality is breaking down the walls to intrude on our cloud-cuckoo la-la fictional fantasyland.
The GOP ain't going away any time soon, I predict. And these same spooge buckets will hack and shill and flail away to paint a picture about how faaabulous the new "regime" is. The GOP is dead, long live the GOP. Lather rinse repeat ad nauseum.
Someone getting David Brooks wrong is like a level of irony beyond irony. Almost like an Act of God kind of irony.
Brain-dead stupidity?
Or just the proper connections to power?
As a 91-year-old neighbor of mine says almost daily in wide-eyed disbelief "The unmitigated corruption of the corporations who don't want to pay taxes or produce nonpoisonous products explains everything you hear and see on the news."
He was a chemist in his youth and is spending most of his time today in a wheelchair in abject horror as he watches the decent world he thought he worked hard to make right after WWII disappear under wheelbarrows of freshly printed money.
And hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills although he's covered by Medicare, VA and private insurance.
Welcome to the "conservative" future.
I'm sure all these TV fakers will enjoy it immensely when they figure out how tenuously attached they turn out to be to those who benefit the most from their mindless cheerleading.
It's not a club, it's the grift.
If you're not using your blog to sell gold, Sleep E-Z mattresses, or Richard Nixon Commemorative place settings, or your own brain-drippings published by local HackFactory Press and distributed en masse to Churches and conservative thinktanks across the nation, you're considered to be Doing It Wrong.
Every article? Click bait. Every link? More click bait. And in between every article is an appeal to FIGHT SOCIALISM in the USA by either buying worthless shit at Amazon or to Watch TV or by donating money to people who will use it to line their pockets, thus protecting you from the evil of socialism of FCC, FDA, SEC, or IRS.
In the Conservative vs Liberal blogs...count the ads.
Follow the money.
There's your club. The money club. Same as it's ever been. And all the ideological peddlings online is just the honey-pot to attract people with more money than sense.
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I read the Insta-idiot's piece. How touching to learn that the Tea-Partiers were "smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, [and] harassed with impunity by the IRS". This rhetoric apparently absolves the ole Perfesser from actually having to deal with racism and fascism in Trump's camp, and among his Tea-Party camp followers. As far as the IRS "harassment" goes, my understanding was that their tax-exempt status was bullshit to begin with because of their overtly political positions, and all the wingnut rage was engendered by the fact that the IRS was looking at this.
Also, not a word about Trump's inflammatory anti-immigrant, nativist rhetoric. Were the facts there too hot for Reynolds to cobble together even a bullshit argument? Apparently so.
Where Reynolds really loses even a semblance of logic is in his claim that the Tea-Partiers "picked up their trash" before the great GOP Establishment "betrayal," so now it's OK for them to embrace violence because "When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly.
Unbelievable.
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