Nearer My Blog to Thee

Now that the mainstream media has once again blown blithely past the ragged line of dirty hippies who have been warning them this was coming for years and arrived precisely where we told them this was all heading, let's take a fast look at the bleak and hilarious landscape of Where We Are Now.

There are freelance lunatics and nutso mobs of hysterical Trumpkins swelling and heaving and reeking like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch:

From NBC Chicago:

Joe Walsh: ‘If Trump Loses, I’m Grabbing My Musket’

The former Illinois congressman tweeted that he plans to take up arms if the Republican nominee loses on Election Day...

From The New York Times:

Beneath Cheers at Donald Trump’s Rallies, Dark Fears Take Hold

COLORADO SPRINGS — Big crowds still mob Donald J. Trump when he comes to town, with fans waiting in long lines to attend his rallies, where they eagerly jeer his Democratic rival and holler happily at his message.

But beneath the cheering, a new emotion is taking hold among some Trump supporters as they grapple with reports predicting that he will lose the election: a dark fear about what will happen if their candidate is denied the White House. Some worry that they will be forgotten, along with their concerns and frustrations. Others believe the nation may be headed for violent conflict.

Jared Halbrook, 25, of Green Bay, Wis., said that if Mr. Trump lost to Hillary Clinton, which he worried would happen through a stolen election, it could lead to “another Revolutionary War.”

“People are going to march on the capitols,” said Mr. Halbrook, who works at a call center. “They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there.”...

Paid idiots gibbering into hungry teevee cameras that pass their poison along to millions:

From HuffPo:  

Anderson Cooper Smacks Down Newt Gingrich Over Megyn Kelly Sex Claims

“This is a guy who is, what, on his third marriage, cheated on his first two wives, and was having an affair while he was impeaching Bill Clinton.”

From Think Progress:

Trump campaign boasts of ‘major voter suppression’ effort targeting women and black people

Senior campaign officials say the goal is to depress African American voters...

Ideological looters swaddled in tattered, shit-streaked American flags no longer even pretending to give a damn about keeping up appearances because frankly their followers are too stupid to notice or care:

From CBS News:

Ted Cruz raises possibility of keeping seat vacant on Supreme Court

WASHINGTON Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is raising the possibility that Republicans would decline to fill the Supreme Court’s vacancy if Democrat Hillary Clinton is elected president.

Cruz is the second Republican to suggest that the GOP will simply block any Democratic nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February. Arizona Sen. John McCain made a similar assertion earlier this month.

Speaking to reporters while campaigning for Republicans on Wednesday, Cruz was asked about Supreme Court vacancies...

From the Washington Post:

House Republicans are already preparing for ‘years’ of investigations of Clinton

SOUTH JORDAN, Utah — Jason Chaffetz, the Utah congressman wrapping up his first term atop the powerful House Oversight Committee, unendorsed Donald Trump weeks ago. That freed him up to prepare for something else: spending years, come January, probing the record of a President Hillary Clinton.

“It’s a target-rich environment,” the Republican said in an interview in Salt Lake City’s suburbs. “Even before we get to Day One, we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it ain’t good.”

In a tweet Wednesday night, Chaffetz reaffirmed his distaste for Clinton and his refusal to endorse Trump — but reversed his plans not to vote for the Republican nominee...

Idolaters of the Beltway media packed wall-to-wall into the seedy Both Siderist temple on the hill, pleading with their Craven Images to explain how things ever got this bad:

From me. mere days ago!

Today In Both Sides Do It: The Return of the Pope of the Church of Both Siderism

High up in the spindly trees, aging Bush regime dead ender frat-rats go right on flinging their poo in every direction, hoping to maybe hit a Liberal or something.

From BizPac Review:

Tucker Carlson’s joining ‘The Circus’ – Has Hillary survived the Wikileaks tightrope?

Mark McKinnon, host of Showtime’s “The Circus: Inside The Greatest Political Show on Earth,” tipped off “Fox & Friends Weekend” viewers on Saturday that Tucker Carlson will be joining him on Sunday night’s show.

…and the topic of discussion is not likely to make Hillary Clinton very happy.

“We’re going to focus the whole show tomorrow night on the circus of WikiLeaks,” the former GOP strategist announced.

McKinnon, who advised former President George W. Bush, said the reason the media is not more focused on the hacked Clinton-related emails published by WikiLeaks is because of Donald Trump.

“The media is going to talk about what [Trump] talks about and he doesn’t have enough message discipline… he should be talking about that 24/7,” McKinnon said. “There is so much in there.”

He also said WikiLeaks may be Trump’s last, best chance...

Those willing to dive deepest into the rankest sewers of Conservatism still find gold down there...

From Crooks & Liars:

Hugh Hewitt Gives Free Advertising To James O'Keefe

From a distant mountaintop, the leader of the Free World at long last can find no language appropriate to the occasion other than the ancient tongue of the vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers of the Left -- language which, not very long ago, got the ragged line of dirty hippies alarm-raisers run out of polite society on a rail (from The New Republic):

Obama Was Right About Republican Extremism All Along*

They should've listened to his warnings about the dangers of right-wing rhetoric. Now they're going to pay for it.

BY BRIAN BEUTLER

October 25, 2016

On the stump, Obama now regularly links Trump’s candidacy, and the bind he’s created for down-ballot Republicans, to a greater theory about the way the right has practiced politics throughout his presidency.

“For years,” Obama said in Las Vegas, “Republican politicians and the far-right media outlets have pumped up all kinds of crazy stuff about me, about Hillary, about Harry [Reid]. They said I wasn’t born here. They said climate change is a hoax. They said that I was going to take everybody’s guns away.”

Obama went on:

[T]here are a lot of politicians who knew better. There are a lot of senators who knew better. But they went along with these stories because they figured, you know what, this will help rile up the base, it will give us an excuse to obstruct what we’re trying to do, we won’t be able to appoint judges, we’ll gum up the works, we’ll create gridlock, it will give us a political advantage. So they just stood by and said nothing. And their base began to actually believe this crazy stuff.

So Donald Trump did not start this. Donald Trump didn’t start it. He just did what he always did, which is slap his name on it, take credit for it, and promote it. That’s what he does. And so now when suddenly it’s not working, and people are saying, wow, this guy is kind of out of line, all of a sudden, these Republican politicians who were okay with all this crazy stuff up to a point, suddenly they’re all walking away. “Oh, this is too much.” … Well, what took you so long? What the heck?

It should be alarming to Republican strategists that the outgoing Democratic president has a better handle on what’s happened to their party than GOP politicians and conservative intellectuals—many of whom blame Trump’s rise on the media, or liberal dirty tricks...

While high above the whole hot mess the carrion birds circle, calculating the best way to monetize the madness they created (from Brother Charlie Pierce):

This Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Trump Campaign Is Terrifying

...

But the story's real news is how the overall Trump operation is built to last, which is the thing that ought to shake Republicans all the way down to the tassels on their loafers. Unless the whole thing is some kind of Potemkin fundraising scam, and I do not dismiss that possibility entirely, any hope that the Republican establishment has of hand-waving Trumpism into ancient history is clearly doomed.

Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, his team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook. By Election Day, the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million. "I wouldn't have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn't known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine," says Bannon. "Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power." Since Trump paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds, he alone will own it after Nov. 8 and can deploy it to whatever purpose he chooses. He can sell access to other campaigns or use it as the basis for a 2020 presidential run. It could become the audience for a Trump TV network. As Bannon puts it: "Trump is an entrepreneur." Whatever Trump decides, this group will influence Republican politics going forward. These voters, whom Cambridge Analytica has categorized as "disenfranchised new Republicans," are younger, more populist and rural—and also angry, active, and fiercely loyal to Trump. Capturing their loyalty was the campaign's goal all along. It's why, even if Trump loses, his team thinks it's smarter than political professionals. "We knew how valuable this would be from the outset," says Parscale. "We own the future of the Republican Party."

This Parscale cat seems to be the star of the piece, setting up this massive machine out of a storefront in San Antonio. A longtime and devoted Trump employee, Parscale, who was born in where-the-fck-else? Kansas, has his eye squarely on the prize...

In other words, borrowed from another occasion:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

And all I know for sure is this: once the smoke has cleared, the Beltway media will lay on second and third shifts to make sure all of this is bulldozed into the memory hole and all that will be left behind is the vague impression it was all somehow the fault of The Extremes On Both Sides. 

*  Actually, no.  Barack Obama was most emphatically not "Right About Republican Extremism All Along".  Liberals like Paul Krugman and me were right about Republican extremism all along, and we spent a considerable amount of time and  energy during President Obama's first time begging him to please, please stop trying to play nice with the rabid weasels at the expense of our priorities and values and please, please just speak honestly about the GOP as it really exists.

From me, back in November of 2010, when it was professionally and financially detrimental to say such things out loud: "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Left"

Behold, a Tip Jar!