At least that is the most probable reason I can think of to explain why this soulless wingnut conspiracy monger abd calculating machine was inexplicably jumped up seven ranks in the Beltway food chain to become Chuck Todd's "Meet the Press" BFF, where he began dispensing the kind of astute political analysis to a national teevee audience which had heretofore only kept the less lucid habitues of Sandpiper Crossing's day-room riveted to their radio machines.
Hugh Hewitt: Clinton’s the real risk. If we want to stop her, we can’t dump Trump.
If Trump can stay the course he laid out in his post-Orlando speech, he will succeed as the GOP nominee.
...
On the other hand, it is mildly entertaining to watch Mr. Hewitt's awkward attempts to mimic human facial expressions as he struggles to avoid detection until he has completed his mission to destroy America.
My name is Donald J. Trump, Prince of the Great Country of America and I have been requested by the Republican National Campaign Company to contact you for assistance in resolving a matter of importance to your great country. The Republican National Campaign Company has recently concluded a large number of Primaries which have positioned me to assume my rightful title of King of Great Country of America. The Republican National Campaign Company and I are equally desirous of exporting our prosperous greatness to many other parts and regions of the world, however, because of the illegitimate Kenyan regime blocking our efforts in the Great Country of America currently we are unable to move our greatness to other regions.
Dear one, your assistance is requested as a Foreign Leader Friend to assist the Republican National Campaign Company in moving our greatness to other regions such as yours. If certain funds can be transferred to your name, in an American account, then you can forward the funds as directed by the Republican National Campaign Company. In exchange for your accommodating services, the Republican National Campaign Company would agree to allow you to retain up to 10%, or US$4 million of this amount, payable in valuable Trump University certificates which are guaranteed to increase in value during the passage of time!
However, to be a legitimate transferee of these moneys according to the Citizens United campaign laws of the Country of America, you must presently be a depositor of at least US$100,000 in a Republican National Campaign Company fund, which is regulated by the Central Bank of Nigeria Federal Campaign Commission of America.
Dear one, if you value greatness in your region as I know you must, it will be possible for you to assist us, and we would be most grateful. We suggest that you meet with us in person at Mar-a-Lago, and the time of your visit I introduce you to very many great and important American officials such as Reince Preibus and Mike Tyson as well as with certain other officials of the Republican National Campaign Company.
Please call me at your earliest convenience at xx-xxx-xxxx. Time is of the essence in this matter; very quickly the illegitimate Kenyan regime will realize that the Central Bank of Nigeria Federal Campaign Commission of America is maintaining this amount on deposit, and attempt to levy certain depository taxes on it.
Yours truly,
Donald J. Trump, Prince of the Great Country of America
Trump campaign might have broken election law in asking for foreign money
By Shawn Price Updated June 30, 2016 at 3:11 AM
NEW YORK, June 30 (UPI) -- The Donald Trump campaign has been slapped with an Federal Election Commission complaint by nonprofit, nonpartisan group The Campaign Legal Center, for allegedly seeking money from foreign politicians to fund his presidential campaign.
Trump's campaign allegedly sent Icelandic, Scottish, Australian and British politicians fundraising emails asking for donations after the "Brexit" vote took place and as Trump promoted his golf course in Scotland, the complaint contends.
The actions are violations of federal election laws.
"Donald Trump should have known better," said Paul S Ryan, deputy executive director of Campaign Legal Center. "It is a no-brainer that it violates the law to send fundraising emails to members of a foreign government on their official foreign government email accounts, and yet, that's exactly what Trump has done repeatedly."
Leading Brexiter Boris Johnson says he won't run for prime minister
London (CNN)The race to become Britain's next prime minister took a surprise twist Thursday as leading Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson, considered a frontrunner to replace the outgoing David Cameron, announced that he would not be running.
Having outlined the demands of the role to a room full of journalists in London, Johnson announced: "I have concluded that that person cannot be me."
The Conservative MP and former London mayor was a prominent voice in the campaign to lead Britain out of the European Union -- an endeavor many saw as partly an effort to position himself as the future leader of the ruling Conservative Party, and of the country.
...
Turns out, pyromaniacs suck at the boring business of governance on both sides of the Atlantic.
Because wingnuts are congenitally incapable of admitting error, each time another one of their ridiculous lies blows up in their face, rather than providing them with a valuable lesson about not going through life as a brick-stupid chump, it only serves to "prove" that the Very Big Conspiracy To Which Only They Are Privy must go even deeper than even they had originally suspected.
And so this week, as Benghaaaazi -- the last, great Kenyan Usurper conspiracy to which so many idiots pledged to their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Twitter accounts -- finally gave up the ghost, the Pig People did what the Pig People always do.
The main Islamist group in Algeria, the GIA, ended up being led by a Mr. Zouabri, a chicken farmer, who killed everyone who disagreed with him. He issued a final communiqué, declaring that the whole of Algerian society should be killed, with the exception of his tiny remaining band of Islamists. They were the only ones who understood the truth.
A day after the House Benghazi committee released a final report that left Hillary Clinton relatively unscathed, conservative activists — the conspiracy-minded ones who pressured House leaders to appoint the committee in the first place — rounded on Chairman Trey Gowdy for failing to deliver the goods.
“To say I was disappointed would be an understatement,” retired Adm. James “Ace” Lyons complained at a meeting Wednesday afternoon of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi, a coalition of far-right foreign- policy types. “Chairman Gowdy is not a stenographer. . . . He was there to make findings and conclusions. He had the information. He copped out, which is consistent that we’ve seen with all our congressional leadership.”
Retired Gen. Thomas McInerney agreed that “the American people want to know from a group that spent almost two years on it what the conclusions are. That’s what we pay you for, Mr. Gowdy.”
And:
They determined that the Obama administration “switched sides in what was then called the Global War on Terror” and “benefited this country’s worst enemies.” They wrote that Clinton herself blocked U.S. military forces from attempting a rescue mission, and they attributed the decision to oust Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi in part to financial interests of the Clinton Foundation.
And:
They judged that Obama — one speaker referred to him as “Barack Hussein Soetero Obama” — had “an ideological commitment” to expanding the Muslim Brotherhood. They even gave longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal credit for the administration’s “support for the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood-led al Qaeda militias.” In one elaborate theory, they tied those guarding the U.S. facilities in Benghazi both to Blumenthal and to the wife of a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
And:
Gowdy “notably refrained from assigning blame or demanding accountability,” Clare Lopez, of the Center for Security Policy and an adviser to the Ted Cruz presidential campaign, told the gathering. “He also did not draw a connection between the dots.”
...
“I think he had his reasons — political,” McInerney said. He speculated that congressional leadership had approved “black operations” to run weapons from Benghazi to Islamic State forces in Syria. “That’s the dirty little secret that nobody wants out,” he said.
After decades of manufacturing wilder and more complex delusions to explain away one humiliating failure after another, all that is left on the Right are the intractably stupid, the hard core crazy and those whose fortunes depend on exploiting the intractably stupid and the hard core crazy.
Longtime readers know that "The Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair" is my shorthand for inbred Conservative meatsticks who have wallowed in wingnut Hate Radio racist dung and Fox News Liberal Conspiracy claptrap for so long that is has become the quotidian argot of their wretched lives. It is their tavern-talk -- their worst, paranoid delusions, externalized, validated, tarted up as The Unvarnished Truth and then regurgitated back to them by ghouls and treason-mongers like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly... which are, in turn, passed around again like so many fish stories, getting bigger and wilder and truthier with each iteration. It is the shit they eagerly rub in their hair -- the shit which, year after year, they sculpt into ever more elaborate pompadours because everyone else in their dingy, lightless corner of Universe is doing it and they lost their sense of smell 40 years ago.
They preen over each other. They are happy in each other's company. They praise each other on the little, individual touches with which they have customized their Shitheap Toupees -- an extra layer of Benghaaaazi, perhaps, appliqued over something something the New Black Panther Party because ACORN!.
And all is right with the world...right up until they leave the cocoon of their Wingnut Pig Sty and step into the normal world, where they are Shocked!Shocked! that ordinary people flee from them in horror.
...
So why do they say and do shit like this, loud and proud and in public?
Simple.
Because among the Pig People, this is the height of wit. To their tiny, debased brains, this is Oscar Wilde-level drollery. This is their Algonquin Fucking Round Table.
Back in the late 1990s while Tom Friedman was profiting hugely from a globalization boner he got while (no kidding) --
...eating a sushi box lunch on a Japanese bullet train after visiting a Lexus factory and reading an article about conflict in the Middle East.
-- and David Brooks was braying about how the productivity of the American worker had turned the American economy into an indestructible prosperity machine capable of indefinitely sustaining any level of tax cutting folly --
Yes, There Is a New Economy
Thanks to once-in-a lifetime productivity gains, Bush's plans are easily affordable
MAR 19, 2001
...even if today's productivity improvements are only on the scale of, say, the improvements our economy saw after World War II, we may be in for a long and sunny ride. There is a rough historical pattern here. A new technology is invented. It takes a long time before people figure out how to use it. The electric motor was invented in the 1880s, but it didn't transform factories until the 1920s, economist Paul David has noted. Once the technology is fully deployed, however, there are decades of positive results. Daniel Sichel of the Federal Reserve points to previous technology-driven surges that lasted 10 and 25 years. That suggests we may still be near the beginning of this particular period of bounty.
If we are, an occasional period of slower growth or even a recession may occur, but the U.S. economy is fundamentally strong, and both laymen and legislators have good reasons to believe it will remain strong for many years. Industrial productivity is surging. Americans are not only the hardest working people on earth (the average American works about 10 weeks a year more than the average European) but also the most productive workers -- by far. If you measure value added per hour worked, Americans do about 20 percent better than Germans and the French, and 40 percent better than the Japanese.
In other words, if you wade through the economic literature, it's hard not to agree with the Cleveland Fed's Jerry Jordan: We are living at a once-in-a-generation moment of economic opportunity. As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?
-- one dirty hippie named Richard Sennett (about whom I have written once or twice) committed an unmitigated act of actual journalism by venturing to the Magic Mountain in Davos where the lords and ladies of capitalism had gathered and reported back on what they had in store for the rest of us.
His account from twenty years ago reads like it could have been ripped from pages of yesterday's New York Times. Here are his conclusions:
The dizzy life of Davos man
Every year, on a magic Alpine mountain, the monarchs of capitalism assemble their courtiers and meet to plot all our futures. Is the world safe in their hands? Richard Sennett thinks not
Richard Sennett Saturday 10 October 1998
...
Yet I had an epiphany of sorts in Davos, listening to the rulers of the flexible realm. "We" is also a dangerous pronoun to them. They dwell comfortably in entrepreneurial disorder, but fear organised confrontation. They of course fear the resurgence of unions, but become acutely and personally uncomfortable, fidgeting or breaking eye contact or retreating into taking notes, if forced to discuss the people who, in their jargon, are "left behind." They know that the great majority of those who toil in the flexible regime are left behind, and of course they regret it. But the flexibility they celebrate does not give, it cannot give, any guidance for the conduct of an ordinary life. The new masters have rejected careers in the old English sense of the word, as pathways along which people can travel; durable and sustained paths of action are foreign territories.
It therefore seemed to me, as I wandered in and out of the conference halls, weaved through the tangle of limousines and police on the mountainous village streets, that this regime might at least lose its current hold over the imaginations and sentiments of those down below. I have learned from my family's bitter radical past; if change occurs it happens on the ground, between persons speaking out of inner need, rather than through mass uprisings. What political programmes follow from those inner needs, I simply don't know. But I do know a regime which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy.
Once again, the dirty hippies were sounding the alarm bell in the night about dangerous forces that were being unleashed for the benefit a tiny, privileged minority at the expense of the rest of us.
Once again, none of the Very Serious People wanted to hear the roar of the avalanche until it was at their door.
As for Friedman and Brooks, I wonder whatever happened to those guys?
Once again let me state for the record that I am delighted whenever one of America's professional, respectable news/teevee/movie review johnnies catches up with where Liberals have been for decades:
America Has a Republican Problem — and the Media Is Partly to Blame
Donald Trump is a distraction from the fact that the mainstream media has pretended the GOP is a normal party with values just to the right. Now the country is paying the price.
BY NEAL GABLER | JUNE 22, 2016...
Let me also state -- once again and for the record -- that the pariah-hood that went along with being right about such things back when it was virtual career suicide to say such things out loud was not so delightful.
Honestly, I would gladly doff my pseudonymous colors tomorrow if I thought there was a chance of doing what I do here under a byline and at a living wage.
For the record, the most "Oh fuck, I just give up" sentence I heard in the last week was spoken aloud by John Dickerson, who was appointed moderator of "Face the Nation" once Bob Schieffer quit the Great Game to become an undercover detective on the hod rod circuit.
Lets burn rubber baby!
See if you can spot the point where my patience ran dry:
DICKERSON: Susan, haven't we known, though, that voters are angry and upset for a while? I mean when we -- I -- I -- because what I'm trying to figure out is -- I mean if you covered the Tea Party movement, you -- you knew that people were unhappy...
By continuing to deliberately conflate "unhappy people" and "angry voters" with the "Tea Party movement" media featherweights like Dickerson continue to do the work of the radical Right by letting them hide in plain sight.
See, There. Is. No. Tea. Party.
There never was.
There was only ever a rebranding scam by millions of unhinged imbeciles who did not want to be held accountable for backing the worst President in American history to the hilt for eight, disastrous year. Instead, they wanted to get a head start on hating Barack Obama -- whose mere existence had driven them exponentially more unhinged than they already were -- with the heat of 1,000 suns without a lot of tricky questions like "How come you suddenly give a shit about deficits? " and "Remember about 10 minutes ago when the white Christian Conservative idiot was president and you averred loudly and unequivocally that saying mean things about a president during these parlous times was tantamount to treason?"
So here we are in 2016 when everybody -- and I mean everybody -- knows full well that the Tea Party was just another Republican responsibility-deflection scam. And yet the irresistible, lemming-like compulsion to continue repeating the lie is still so strong -- so deeply rooted in the Beltway's corrupt narrative -- that they simply cannot stop themselves.
Oddly enough, the most "Marie Antoinette" sentence I've heard in the last week was also spoken aloud on the aforementioned "Face the Nation" by famed Beltway prophetess and Modern Drunkard Magazine's "It Girl" of 1985, Peggy Noonan, And here it is.
NOONAN: All this is true, but you know what was interesting in Anthony's polling? It was that in each of the states he looked at, the battleground states, it was fairly close, but also Trump was holding on to Republicans. He may be losing Republicans in Washington. He may be losing Republicans in media land, but he's holding on to Republicans in Colorado and various states that's so interesting to me. It's as if they're looking at all of us and saying, I don't care.
John Dickerson, professional corporate news moderator, loyally beating one of the Beltway's deadest horses because no one told him to stop.
Peggy Noonan, professional Republican pundit, giddily admitting in front of three million people that she has never had the slightest fucking clue what was really going on down on the factory floor of the Republican party.
Hey there Mr., uh, Brown Shoes! How bout that local sports team eh?
Now that he has lived among the natives for a minute, Mr. Brooks can once again bring his tone of Sweeping Authority to the problems of the grubby working class:
Anybody who spends time in the working-class parts of America (and, one presumes, Britain) notices the contagions of drug addiction and suicide, and the feelings of anomie, cynicism, pessimism and resentment.
Sure. Anybody. Literally anybody could do that by spending time among the wee folk of the shire. Or by, say, picking up a newspaper anywhere in America and skimming it lightly. But let us get back to Mr. Brooks' tone of Sweeping Authority. And,of course, by "Sweeping Authority" we mean "Hacking together a fast and dirty book report of someone else's work":
We all have a sense of what that working-class honor code was, but if you want a refresher, I recommend J.D. Vance’s new book “Hillbilly Elegy.” Vance’s family is from Kentucky and Ohio, and his description of the culture he grew up in is essential reading for this moment in history...
Mr. Brooks goes on to rhapsodize second-hand about the Noble Poor who lived Far Away in the Days of Yore.
He describes a culture of intense group loyalty...
It’s also a culture that values physical toughness...
Mr. Brooks then injects his opinion about those silly, out-of-touch Progressives who don't understand 'bout guns an' life down t' the mines like David Brooks does:
It’s a culture that celebrates people who are willing to fight to defend their honor. This is something that progressives never get about gun control. They see a debate about mass murder, but for many people guns are about a family’s ability to stand up for itself in a dangerous world.
DAVID BROOKS: Well, I’m for doing all the gun control you can think of, the gun show loophole, the background checks, assault weapons ban. And so I’m for it. I think, if you increase the number of filters between the buyer or shooter and the weapon, you might do some good...
So there's that.
But the one thing Mr. David Brooks can state with Sweeping Authority and from Personal Experience is that the wee shire folks love, love, love them some sport! Why, it's practically all they talk about, presumably as they sit around the Applebee's salad bar (from Crooks & Liars in 2008) --
Memo To David Brooks: Applebee's Doesn't Have A Salad Bar
By John Amato
In an earlier post, C&L and many other sites caught David Brooks say this:
DAVID BROOKS, “NEW YORK TIMES: Obama‘s problem is he doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there. He has to change to be more like that Applebee‘s guy and as he‘s done that he‘s become much more transactional. Much more, I‘m going to deliver this and this and this to you on policy.
C&Ler Mitzi left this in the comment section:
I called my Applebee’s today to make sure I was correct and they do not have a salad bar. Just goes to show how much these people who make these comments have no idea how “regular people” live their lives.
I called an Applebee's also and they told me that none of their restaurants have a salad bar. David, sometimes the jokes write themselves. What an idiot.
-- sharing wondrous tales about that time the Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings came to town.
See, Mr. Brooks has always been America's leading expert on the likes and dislikes of the Imaginary Ordinary Folks and, as long as there are a sufficient number of rich, feeble-minded shut-ins who want to hear fairy tales about America as the wish it to be, he always will be.
And if Mr. Brooks knows one thing about the wee shire folk, it is that their love of sport is unique and transcendent in a way the rest of us dazzling urbanites just would not understand.
It’s also a culture with a lot of collective pride. In my travels, you can’t go five minutes without having a conversation about a local sports team. Sports has become the binding religion, offering identity, value, and solidarity.
So please, no one mention to Mr. Brooks (who is an a very delicate state right now) that members of this fierce and closed-off tribe of proud, sport-loving hill people that he just now discovered include the 40 million Americans who filled out NCAA brackets last year, Spike Lee, the New Batman, the Old Joker, Bill Murray --
Bill Murray would rather see the Cubs win a championship than Xavier
Bill Murray's devotion to the Cubs runs so deep that he's willing to put the team before his family. When Esquire magazine asked Murray to choose between Xavier University -- where his son Luke is an assistant men's basketball coach -- winning the national championship or the Cubs winning the World Series again, Murray offered a simple answer. "Well, I have several sons, but I only have one ball club," said Murray, who grew up in Wilmette.
...
-- and the President of the United States:
Then comes the inevitable blaming of Both Sides:
From 1945 to 1995, conservative and liberal elites shared variations of the same vision of the future. Liberals emphasized multilateral institutions and conservatives emphasized free trade. Either way, the future would be global, integrated and multiethnic.
But the elites pushed too hard, and now history is moving in the opposite direction...
David Fucking Brooks skipping right over the Southern Strategy, the Rise of Reagan, Hate Radio, Fox News and Newt Gingrich so that he can get on with the important business of clucking his tongue at the arrogance those god damn elites is the funniest thing I have read in a week.
Maybe two weeks.
You want to figure out what has gone wrong with this country, Mr. Brooks? Start with the fact that one of our two major political parties -- your party, Mr. Brooks -- is completely fucked in the head. And it is completely fucked in the head because the elites of your party, Mr. Brooks, built their political fortunes and media empires by feeding a mob of angry, paranoid, intractably ignorant bigots a steady diet of praise, validation, false promises and wild conspiracies for the last 30 years.
So do let me know when you stop asking Mr. Brown Shoes about his local sports team and start asking him about the trail of bodies he is 100% sure the murderous Clinton's have left in their wake, and that that the rest of American would know about if it weren't for the god damn Liberal media covering the whole thing up.
I'll be over here, in the American heartland, not holding my breath. UPDATE: Meanwhile and predictably, Ron "Severe Dementia" Fournier cannot find enough glowing things to say about Mr. Brooks, who is apparently strummin' our pain with this fingers, and singin' our live with his words...
And then I'm very much looking forward to watching the Trumpshirts cheer, the Trump campaign goons grabbing every microphone in Christendom to denounce the "real" villains -- "PC culture" and Elizabeth Warren -- and the complicit Beltway media and the institutional "support-but-not-endorse" Republican party bend the spacetime continuum to the point of existential collapse pretending that it never happened.
Since Sunday was a travel day (In three days, we partially traversed five states getting there and five states getting back, and I still managed to talk to dozens more ordinary Americans than David Brooks has in the last decade) I was spared the horrors of watching the entire Beltway media join hands and jump off the White Cliffs of Both Siderism.
Wheeee! We're flyyyyying!
However, thanks to the magic of "radio" I was able to listen to a significant fraction of the Mouse Circus and I can say with some authority that the only person anywhere who suggested that --
Maybe the problem with our country is not caused by Both Sides but by the Republican party,
Maybe the reason the Republican party is so fucked up is because its full of Republicans and,
The media's obsession with horse race coverage is deeply warping the way they talk about the 2016 presidential freak show
-- was Joy Ann Reid on MSNBC.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that media's wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away,
George Will renounces GOP, declares ‘This is not my party’
By Andrew Blake - The Washington Times - Saturday, June 25, 2016
The Republican Party’s acceptance of Donald Trump as its presumptive presidential nominee has prompted acclaimed conservative columnist George Will to change his political affiliation, the writer revealed Friday.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post, Mr. Will changed his voter registration in the state of Maryland earlier this month from Republican to “unaffiliated,” he told PJ Media during an interview Friday.
“This is not my party,” Mr. Will said at an event in Washington, D.C. earlier in the day, the website reported.
Mr. Will has been a vocal critic of the GOP’s presumptive nominee since well before the New York businessman announced his candidacy 2015, and said the decision to part ways with the party was the result of the recent endorsement made by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, according to PJ Media.
...
Makes a giant, reeking mess.
Abandons it.
And is now bitching about how the help isn't cleaning it up fast enough.
Many UK voters didn’t understand Brexit, Google searches suggest
"What happens if we leave the EU?" and "What is Brexit?" were top search terms.
In the wee hours of Friday morning, the people of the UK voted to leave the European Union with a majority of 52 percent—and according to Google, they don't really know why. Two hours after the referendum polls closed, roughly midnight UK time, the Google Trends Twitter account reported a 250 percent increase in people searching "what happens if we leave the EU." "Are we in or out of the EU?" spiked by 2,450 percent.
Other search terms that peaked following the result include "what happens to foreigners if we leave the EU," "what happens if we stay in the EU," and—perhaps most worryingly considering the gravity of the decision—"what is Brexit?"
Earlier in the evening, the top search in Sunderland (one of the first cities to declare its results) was "How do I vote in the EU referendum?"
...
As a public service, let me add that the answer to "Is Nigel Farage really going to build an Atlantic Wall and make Mexico pay for it?" is "No".
Inside his holding cell under CNN's Red Keep, Wolf Blitzer watched this, stunned.
"We can do that?" he whimpered.
Acting quickly, newly-minted CNN "analyst" Corey Lewandowski grabbed CNN's dust-covered 1990 Peabody Award from the trophy case and beat Blitzer with it until he shut the hell up.
And so, the Great Walk-back begins.
For future reference, this is what Day One of a Trump Administration would look like.
And Day Two.
And Day Three.
And...
Remember the "lost letter" episode of the West Wing (""Enemies Foreign and Domestic") in which letter that a young boy sent to Franklin Roosevelt is finally delivered to the White House +60 years later?
Well, the Dirty Hippies have been sending letters to the Republican party for decades now warning them that climbing into bed with the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Payul Weyrich and the rest of the hypocrites and pharisees and pit vipers on the "Conservative Christian" grift was seven different flavors of catastrophe. Bad for the Party of Lincoln. Really bad for the country. Really, really bad for Christianity. Just bad all around.
Well as it turns out, decades later, some kind soul has delivered all of our missives to the home of former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, senior Republican policy adviser, Conservative Christian and reliable Beltway Republican stalactite, Michael Gerson. And he is terribly shocked and put out over how those people over there are behaving:
Oh, God — and I mean the entreaty seriously — the Trump/evangelical summit in New York was just as bad as some of us feared...
Seldom has a group seemed more eager to be exploited...
Yet this event was not the tortured search for partial truths in a fallen world. It was a sad parody of Christian political involvement, summarizing all the faults and failures of the religious right...
We are reminded, second, that much of the religious right’s criticism of President Bill Clinton’s character was a ploy. Franklin Graham now argues that because Abraham lied, Moses disobeyed God and David committed adultery, Trump should get a pass, not just on his personal behavior but also on his deception, cruelty and appeal to bigotry. It is a non sequitur revealing the cynical subordination of faith to politics...
You see, Mr. Gerson is deeply concerned that these sellouts will give a black eye to his brand of noble Christian activism:
A powerful source of passion for social justice — a faith that once motivated abolitionism and various movements for civil and human rights — has been tamed and trivialized.
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science...
May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests? It is the first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.
But Mr. Gerson's really jumps his denialism up into David Brooks territory right at the end where he acknowledges that Conservative Christians once made a similar error in judgement way back in the 1960s --
It is not the first time. During the civil rights movement in the 1960s, one of the main organs of white evangelical opinion, Christianity Today, defended “voluntary segregation,”...
-- and then completely o'erleaps the last half century and lands safely in the middle of this week --
It is happening again. Evangelical Christian leaders, motivated by political self-interest, are cozying up to a leader who has placed bigotry and malice at the center of American politics. They are defending the rights of their faith while dishonoring its essence.
-- without mentioning any of the truly egregious shit that was happening every day at the very ippy tippy top of the Republican party during the period when he was one of its most active members and influencers.
Wave goodbye to that fantasy of a more inclusive Republican Party.
George W. Bush and John McCain have planted themselves on the wrong side of the Confederate flag issue. And last week, there was Mr. Bush in Greenville, S.C., happily touting ''our ideas, Republican ideas, conservative ideas'' at Bob Jones University, which maintains its perverse rules against the mingling of races and its disgusting hostility to the Catholic religion.
Love is fine at B.J.U. as long as it doesn't cross the color line. Mr. Bush's brother and sister-in-law -- Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, and his Mexican-born wife, Columba -- would have been condemned and expelled from Bob Jones for having dared to fall in love and marry...
What Mr. Gerson dare not say is that "Conservative Christians" are neither Conservative in any traditional sense, nor Christians and their political movement was always been an unholy abomination combining the sickening snake-oil piety of professional god-bothering con men who work the front of the room, and the millions of credulous chumps and self-righteous bigots who flock to the Church of St. Reagan because it promises to let them
...clothe [their] naked villany
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most [they] play the devil.
The reason Mr. Gerson is reduced to lying about the history of his Conservative Christian movement is the same reason he has been reduced to lying about the history of his Republican party -- for the entire duration of Mr. Gerson's professional life, they have both been just fucking awful. And having attached himself to fundamentally depraved causes and profited handsomely thereby for decades, Mr. Gerson simply cannot afford -- financially or psychologically -- to be honest about his own complicity in the horrors he helped to create and unleash.
Despite Campaign Woes, Donald Trump Flies to Scotland to Tend to Business Interests
By ASHLEY PARKER and MAGGIE HABERMAN
JUNE 23, 2016
AYRSHIRE, Scotland — His campaign is desperately short of cash. He has struggled to hire staff. Influential Republicans are demanding that he demonstrate he can run a serious general election campaign. But, for reasons that emphasize just how unusual a candidate he is, Donald J. Trump is leaving the campaign trail on Thursday to travel to Scotland to promote a golf course his company purchased on the country’s southwestern coast. Normally when presidential contenders travel abroad, they do so to burnish their foreign policy credentials, cramming their schedules with high-level meetings with foreign dignitaries and opining on the pressing international issues of the day. But, to a large extent, Mr. Trump’s business interests still drive his behavior, and his schedule. He has planned two days in Scotland, with no meetings with government or political leaders scheduled. And despite the fact that Mr. Trump touches down in Britain the day after its “Brexit” vote on whether to leave the European Union, his itinerary — a helicopter landing at his luxury resort, a ceremonial ribbon cutting and family photo, and a news conference — reads like a public relations junket crossed with a golf vacation. “Traditionally, nominees travel overseas during this period to brush up their foreign policy depth and visit 10 Downing Street and Israel — for politics back here,” said Scott W. Reed, senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Everyone knows this is the wrong thing for the nominee to be doing now, and it is amazing this can’t be stopped.” ...
Also the London Underground is not a political movement.
Barack Obama is not a Kenyan-born, Sekrit Muslim Terrorist sleeper cell.
Whenever there is home headline-grabbing barbarity somewhere in the world that is in some way related to those who pervert Islam to serve horrific ends, you can always -- and I mean always -- count on two things.
First, America's premier, globe-trotting, indignance-chasing attorney (who, somehow, is still not being held incommunicado in some lightless super-max prison cell) will be johnny-on-the-spot to set up his card table right in the center of it so he can angrily pamphleteer passer's by about the real tragedy.
But at the heart of these actions is more than a protest against inaction on the issue of guns. It's a protest against inaction, period, against the repulsive and cowardly vandalism-by-inaction that has been the hallmark of the Congress almost from the second the president's hand came off the Bible in 2009. Politicians should vote and then explain their reasons why to the people that elect them. The government should function. Period. That's an issue worth fighting over.
Getting Twitchy About Mr. Trump
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
JUNE 22, 2016
...
Fully 70 percent of registered voters now say they dislike Mr. Trump, including more than three-quarters of women and nearly 90 percent of nonwhite people, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll. Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has opened a double-digit lead in some national polls.
Small wonder that yet another group of Republicans has mounted yet another long-shot effort to deprive Mr. Trump of the nomination. Called “Free the Delegates,” it’s an initiative to rally convention delegates to vote against Mr. Trump in Cleveland next month. Kendal Unruh, one of the group’s founders and a Colorado delegate, told The Washington Post that this can be done by passing a “conscience clause” before the convention that would allow delegates from states that Mr. Trump won to abstain or vote for another candidate.
Courageous Conservatives PAC, whose founder, Chris Ekstrom, is a pro-Ted Cruz Dallas businessman, backs the group. The conservative pundit Bill Kristol has voiced support for the movement, too, having failed so far to recruit a kindred spirit to start a third-party campaign against Mr. Trump.
Free the Delegates is not an effort to find an alternative to Mr. Trump with broad appeal. It’s a campaign to ditch him because he’s not conservative enough, and it has no apparent plan beyond that...
So far, the latest dump-Trump scheming seems less like a cohesive strategy than another manifestation of the intraparty war of ideologies that led to Mr. Trump’s win in the first place. Having wooed and accommodated the forces of chaos, party leaders now fear that Mr. Trump will not only lose, but that he’ll cost them control of the House and the Senate, too...
After all, the Right's eagerness to exhaustively self-document their own paranoia, racism and
mind-boggling stupidly, in microscopic detail, every fucking day for the last eight years is gonna save historians a ton of work when they begin the task of figuring out which ash heap their remains should be consigned to.
The one, great virtue of Candidate Trump is his utility as the most efficient Liberal labor-saving device since George "Segregation Now" Wallace.
Unless we want to for sporting purposes, we dirty hippies no longer have to waste our precious time debunking the vast shitpile of the Right's racist, crackpot nonsense one lie at a time...only to have the meathead scampering back to their local Wingnut Bullshit distillery for a fresh batch of stupid every time their current batch of stupid blows up in their faces.
It's not that they're going to change, because it was never about them changing. Because they are incapable of changing.
Instead, we can finally can admit to ourselves that the fault was never in our principles or our powers of persuasion, but in our opponents. Now that Trump has shown anyone who is not utterly brain-dead or sold-out that the Republican base is nothing but a midden pile of unsalvageable ideological trash, every time the Centrists regroup, it is now within our power to point at Il Douche and say "We fucking told you so" and watch them scuttle away.
The Centrists have always been the real threat anyway -- the "archenemy" villain behind the wingnut's "soldier" villain (from Unbreakable):
Mrs. Price: Mm-hmm. That's what I said to my son. But he says there's always two kinds; there's the soldier villain — who fights the hero with his hands; and then there's the real threat — the brilliant and evil archenemy — who fights the hero with his mind.
Without their Centrist enablers, the Right will collapse. And without their "Both Sides Do It" narrative, the Centrist have no power.
But it is up to us. To you and me.
This time, when the Right breaks for the exits and tries to disappear once again behind another Koch Brother's funded rebranding scam, they need to find the doors locked, This time, when the Beltway media tries to slip away from the scene of their crimes back into their comfy Both Siderist patter, they and their employers need to be buried under letters and tweets and emails and a cataract of spilled coffee and dropped plates everywhere they eat.
This time, as all America's domestic enemies conspire to bury the Trump Incident year under the mighty waters of Lethe, it will be up to us -- America's loud and disreputable dirty hippies -- to hold back the flood.
Well, not so much "China" as the "China Department at Bloomingdales", but Mr, David Brooks -- Conservatism's own Miss Havisham -- has left his Satis House and ventured out into the world to solve the Riddle of Trump.
Specifically, how the fuck did Donald Trump happen and how did David Brooks -- America's Most Respected Conservative Public Intellectual -- completely miss it?
But instead of finding clues to the Riddle of Trump, mostly Mr. Brooks found the Bedeviled Middle Class and Noble Poor living various places in America and, by some strange miracle, all of them have stories which Mr. Brooks finds a way to scale up into one of Mr. Brooks' preconceived ideas.
I met a woman in West Virginia who had just learned, to great relief, that she didn’t have to give an anticipated speech at church. “We’re not word people,” she explained.
-- becomes an indictment of Our Modern Digital Economy
A lot of wonderful people speak through acts of service, but it’s hard to thrive in the information age if you don’t feel comfortable with verbal communication.
A man who is having trouble filling manufacturing and heavy machinery jobs because candidates flunk their piss tests --
If he pulls in 100 possible hires, most of them either fail the drug test or don’t show up for it because they know they will fail.
-- is transformed into a bit-player in a Sermon on the Ravages of Drugs:
You see the ravages of drugs everywhere.
And while there is undoubtedly some truth in this, speaking as someone who worked for years as an expert in the workforce development field with a special emphasis on manufacturing, there even more truth in the fact that...
Since the beginning of time, business owners have always bitched about how hard it is to hire the perfect person. Always. And,
Welders (to pick on one group) are not especially "ravaged by drugs". But they do like to smoke pot, and they know that for every suit who won't hire them because of the THC in their pee, there is someone down the road or in the next county who will put them to work tomorrow in their body shop or warehouse, for cash, no questions asked.
Apparently Mr. Brooks' interns failed to inform him that Yastreblyanksy at The Rectification of Names took this little anecdote apart back in May when Mr. Brooks originally trotted it out.
However, mostly Mr. Brooks found the Noble Poor.
You know, the people that Jesus said would always be with us? Mr. Brooks has found them! And by Jiminy, they're plucky and cheerful bunch.
But this kind of tour is mostly uplifting, not depressing. Let me just describe two people I met on Saturday in Albuquerque.
...
The social fabric is tearing across this country, but everywhere it seems healers are rising up to repair their small piece of it. They are going into hollow places and creating community, building intimate relationships that change lives one by one.
And thanks to the mighty power of Controlling the Narrative, Mr. Brooks "discovers" exactly what you would imagine the Beltway's most stalwart Centrist would discover. That the answer to every problem in every broken place is not Imaginary Stinky Liberal Socialism or Actual Heartless Conservative Libertarianism but beautiful, beautiful Brooksian Beltway Centrism, arising juuuuust out of everyone's sight except our intrepid reporter:
I know everybody’s in a bad mood about the country. But the more time you spend in the hardest places, the more amazed you become. There’s some movement arising that is suspicious of consumerism but is not socialist. It’s suspicious of impersonal state systems but is not libertarian. It believes in the small moments of connection...
For the record, in his inaugural column onhow Donald Trump happened and how he completely missed it, Mr. Brooks does not mention the word "Trump"at all.
However, you can definitely see the outlines of the route Mr. Brooks plans to take on his journey. Or, rather, you can see the pre-fabricated destination where Mr. Brooks has already decided he will arrive, He will skip lightly across the land, seeking out stories which confirm his Both Siderist bias. He will crank out a column every now and then about how the American people have been failed by the Corrupt Duopoly. By Both Sides. He will "discover" a brand new Imaginary Centrism alive and well down among the Noble Poor and the Bedeviled Middle Class. He will explain away the manifest fascism and racism a the heart of his Republican party as a merry mix-up. A misunderstanding. An unfortunate but understandable backlash against the Corrupt Duopoly of blah blah blah.
And based on his brave sojourn among the hoi polloi, Mr. David Brooks will inexorably arrive where he planned go all along. That the last, best hope for America is that a Paul Ryan or a Marco Rubio 2.0 or some other standard-issue Republican tool will step forward and lead some new iteration of David Brooks' oldest masturbatory fantasy -- the McCain-Lieberman Party -- into our bright, Whig future!
The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.
The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.
But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.
The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country comes before party, that in politics a little passion energizes but unmarshaled passion corrupts, and that more people want to vote for civility than for venom...
Donald Trump spent more than $1 million in May reimbursing his companies and family
By Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy June 21 at 12:43 AM
...
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, raised just $5.4 million in May, including $2.2 million that he loaned his campaign. Almost as startling was how little Trump had in the bank when June began: less than $1.3 million.
Where did it go? The real estate mogul does not have much of a ground operation yet or a significant paid media effort. But he managed to shell out $6.7 million last month, including more than $1 million in payments to Trump companies or to reimburse his family for travel expenses. Here are some of the campaign's biggest expenditures.
...
Air charters: $838,774
Nearly $350,000 of the money spent on private jets went to Trump's own TAG Air.
Event staging and rentals: $830,482
This includes the fees for renting facilities such as the Anaheim Convention Center ($43,000) and the Fresno Convention Center ($24,715). But the biggest sum went to Trump's own Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., which was paid $423,317 for rental and catering. The Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Fla., got $35,845, while the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fl., was paid $29,715. His son Eric Trump's wine company received nearly $4,000.
...
Of course, the real pioneering work of in the field of campaign infrastructure three-card-Monte was done five years ago by America's own Teacher of the Rules of Civilization -- Newton Leroy Gingrich --
-- who sweet-talked crackpot wingnut billionaire Sheldon Adelson to underwrite Callista's book-and-merch tour dates by tarting them up as campaign stops:
Gingrich’s book-selling efforts test campaign laws
By Amy Gardner December 8, 2011
You would never know on the campaign trail that Newt Gingrich is no longer at the helm of his for-profit enterprise. There, his presidential candidate activities and book-selling business mingle as one.
In a hotel ballroom in Naples, Fla., last month, Gingrich regaled political supporters with a rousing stump speech — then sidled over to a table in the corner to sell books. In Charleston, S.C., a few days later, hundreds of fans crammed into a historic theater to listen to his pitch to be the next president — then lined up in the lobby to buy books.
The story is the same virtually everywhere Gingrich goes: a political speech here, a book-signing there — often in the same place. And Gingrich isn’t just selling one book. He has produced nonfiction, novels and documentary movies, and his wife, Callista, recently wrote a children’s book that she sells just about everywhere they go.
Their activities raise two appearances, both unsavory: that Gingrich is using his presidential bid to make money, and that he is using his business to juice his campaign. And although there is agreement that Gingrich is following the law, there remains a perception, in part because of how much money his businesses have earned him over the years, that what he’s doing isn’t quite right.
