Wednesday, May 17, 2017

We're All Driftglass Now




No, not really.  

In fact, unless something changes very soon, I believe you will see us dirty hippies once again disappear completely from view.

See, I'm so old I remember when pointing out the calculated depravity of the GOP got you shushed by all the Best People, and pointing it out over and over again year after year was a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

So greetings from Palookaville!  Population: you and me and every Libtard in America!

Sure, it may smell weird and we may all be perpetually on our uppers because, unlike the Right's massive and well-funded Wingnut Welfare State, no one underwrites our heresies but a handful of readers (to whom I still owe many, long-overdue "Thank You" notes.)  But for all of it's drawbacks, the view from the wrong side of the media tracks is positively commanding.  While the rest of the media long ago cravenly capitulated to The Gingrich Rules, and the Iron Rule of David Brooks --



-- and every other management directive to never mention the distinctive, suppurating madness of the Right or the media's own excruciatingly inconvenient past. we here in Palookaville can see for a million miles and a hundred years.

And we dare to write about it, every fucking day.

And that is what makes us outlaws.

So when some of the Most Consistently Wrong People in America started using their gargantuan media platforms to write columns in 2017 that are virtually indistinguishable from the Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving, Libtard blogosphere circa 2004, we know that up in the management suites of the American corporate media some things have changed.  Temporarily.  And some things have not.

These days, all you need to do is open a newspaper or get online and you can be treated to the cavil lecture from The Mustache of Understanding in today's New York Times warning us -- you and me --  that we gotta get woke take this this shit seriously people!
The G.O.P. never would have embraced someone like Trump in the first place — an indecent man with a record of multiple bankruptcies, unpaid bills and alleged sexual harassments who lies as he breathes — for the answer to ever be yes. Virtually all the good men and women in this party’s leadership have been purged or silenced; those who are left have either been bought off by lobbies or have cynically decided to take a ride on Trump’s Good Ship Lollipop to exploit it for any number of different agendas.

...
Democrats and independents should not be deluded or distracted by marches on Washington, clever tweets or “Saturday Night Live” skits lampooning Trump. They need power. If you are appalled by what Trump is doing — backed by House and Senate Republicans — then you need to get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face, by running for Congress as a Democrat or an independent, registering someone to vote for a Democrat or an independent, or raising money to support such candidates.

Nothing else matters.

The morally bankrupt crowd running today’s G.O.P. are getting their way not because they have better arguments — polls show majorities disagreeing with them on Comey and climate — but because they have power and are not afraid to use it, no matter what the polls say. And they will use that power to cut taxes for wealthy people, strip health care from poor people and turn climate policy over to the fossil fuel industry until someone else checks that power by getting a majority in the House or the Senate.
...

Or David Fucking Brooks, also in the New York Times pretending that all of this just...sorta... happened and ain't it a crying shame!

When the World Is Led by a Child 
...
By Trump’s own account, he knows more about aircraft carrier technology than the Navy. According to his interview with The Economist, he invented the phrase “priming the pump” (even though it was famous by 1933). Trump is not only trying to deceive others. His falsehoods are attempts to build a world in which he can feel good for an instant and comfortably deceive himself.

He is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon in which the incompetent person is too incompetent to understand his own incompetence. Trump thought he’d be celebrated for firing James Comey. He thought his press coverage would grow wildly positive once he won the nomination. He is perpetually surprised because reality does not comport with his fantasies.
...
Or life-long Hate Radio shit-monger and brand new Respected MSNBC Contributor, Charlie Sykes (in a column over which the aforementioned  Mustache of Understanding creamed himself) gliding effortless away from the catastrophe he created:  
...
One staple of every radio talk show was, of course, the bias of the mainstream media. This was, indeed, a target-rich environment. But as we learned this year, we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media. Over time, we’d succeeded in delegitimizing the media altogether — all the normal guideposts were down, the referees discredited.

That left a void that we conservatives failed to fill. For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Mr. Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled baseless tales of Mrs. Clinton’s murder victims. Rather than confront the purveyors of such disinformation, we changed the channel because, after all, they were our allies, whose quirks could be allowed or at least ignored.

We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.

This was not mere naïveté. It was also a moral failure, one that now lies at the heart of the conservative movement even in its moment of apparent electoral triumph. Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends; the gravitational pull of our binary politics is too strong.

I’m only glad I’m not going to be a part of it anymore.
Or you can laugh yourself to death at the Lassie-Bites-Timmy spectacle of Respected ABC analyst, Bloody Bill Kristol, having a big 'ol sad over how shitty Fox News has gotten in the last 10 minutes.  
Or Erick Erickson fretting about "Whither Conservatism?"

Or Squint Scarborough hoping that if he yells "He's a Dimmocrat!" loud enough, long enough everyone will forget his decades of enabling the Right's insanity and the year-long free media handjob he and his Meat Puppet fiance lovingly administered to Donald J. Trump.

And forgetting is the point.  The entire point.

Because just like the Beltway media let the Right use 9/11 to blot out all the heinous shit they said and did during the Clinton Years...

...and just like the same Beltway media let the Right use the Fake Tea Party scam to blot out all the heinous shit the Right said and did during the Age of Bush...

...even as I write this, the same Beltway media is busy exploiting the collapse of President Stupid as yet another corporate media Etch-a-Sketch moment in which all the sins of the well-heeled degenerates who helped drag us into this Hell will be once again be forgotten.

Utterly forgotten.

Bulldozed right down the memory hole along with any mention of the existence of us terrorist-loving, Murrica-hating Libtards who were right about the Right all along.

Because the only thing the Beltway media is concerned with is money and rating and protecting their privileges.  At any cost.  So unless we use every resource at our command to pick some strategic targets and make their lives utterly unbearable, even as Scarborough and Brooks and Friedman and Erickson and Sykes and Wilson and Frum and Gerson and all the rest brace up their careers by simply ripping us off wholesale, those of us who actually sounded the alarm for decades and who were relentlessly mocked and slandered by these people will once again simply cease to exist as far as they are concerned.

Oh kiddies, I have seen the future because I dare to remember the past.  

For example, I remember saying that it would take five years for the Right to turn Dubya from The Greatest American President Ever And Don't You Forget it Libtard!  into "the parachute pants of this decade". 

But I was wrong...
It took less than two years, millions of FreedomWorks dollars and a big assist from Fox News for the Republican Denial of Bush campaign to achieve escape velocity and it has never looked back since. In fact, before the Kenyan Usurper had even finished appointing his cabinet, the leadership of the Republican Party had met in secret and agreed on a plan of total denial and obstruction... 
...while deceased rage-baiter, Andrew Breitbart (among many, many others), leaped into action, making it crystal clear exactly how the Pig People were going to behave every minute of every day until President Barack Obama was driven from office.
So believe me when I tell you that unless we start bringing howitzers to this gun fight, sooner that you will believe possible, the yesterday's disgraced finge nutjobs of like Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes will be crowned as tomorrow's New Reasonable Center.

And the Left -- you and me and everyone who stands with us in good times and bad -- will once again become a Beltway media prop department straw man, to be hauled out and flayed whenever the New Reasonable Center needs to deflect another Republican atrocity with a blast of pure, old-school Both Siderism.

10 comments:

proverbialleadballoon said...

Absolutely right. The tip of the spear imparts all of the weight and energy behind it into a focused point Pow! It is time for Democrats (elected officials, and shit, all of us, like you say driftglass) to focus the attack. This last fucking week alone is Watergate times 10. When President SmallHands committed treason, Republicans did nothing, and Democrats saved the fucking world. If there ever was a time to show that Both Sides don't do it, to publicly pitch this battle, this is it. Focused concerted effort at the point of attack. There's an opening, this is where we can take the center of the chessboard. Publicly, out in the open, for all the world to see. "It was the Democratic party that saved Freedom and Democracy."

Robt said...

It might be time for DFB to elaborate in story his orthodox ed consistency. Keeping his faith of conservatism's ever devolving and re directing its ideology to entice the Fascists, KKK, Neo NAZIs,Give-me-tarans, Russia loving commies, Self centered oligarchery ego eccentric wealthy owners (donors) who want the world to revolve around them and how to hold this the DOOM republican brotherhood coalition together.

As theropy, it may help DFB get through another epileptic writing seizure.

dinthebeast said...

"He is thus the all-time record-holder of the Dunning-Kruger effect"

No. David, by virtue of having written that sentence, you have won that prize.

-Doug in Oakland

Anonymous said...

We're gonna take our marching orders from The Mustache of Understanding? I think not. We're busy organizing a bunch of Dim's, up north here, to join us in The Zombie Apocalypse and, as always, drifters- we're here for you!

gmoke said...

Don't forget that the Dims like punching hippies almost as much as the Repugs. They'll jump on our little red wagon for a ride when they have to and kick it to flinders whenever they want.

Anonymous said...

gmoke- noted and filed.

crweaver said...

The problem with the 'libtards' and 'dirty hippies', as opposed to the responsible, prim and proper, official Centrists with their belated epiphanies, is that the former, quite simply, are premature anti-fascists!
I hope that clear things up a bit.

Marc McKenzie said...

@gmoke: Cut it out with the "both sides" shit, okay? Not the fucking time for it now.

We're in the middle of one harsh situation--the house is burning down--and you want to start punching on the firefighters instead of going after the damned arsonists? Jesus Bleeding Christ.

Anonymous said...

Does the man not have a lawyer around him saying shutthefuckup? As in- remain silent?
Where's that "polls? what polls?", guy? Michael something, his name escapes. Or Epstein, one Boris. Where's he at? Organizing/'fixing' something? The Mossad says they couldn't run a corner-store.
So they send out a ghost-written statement stating- well, we admit it was hacked, bu! bu! but! there was no collusion...brother. Don't you have da best lawyers too, Trump? Best be rounding some up.
Oh, so AC 360 on mute has Begala, Kingston, Carpenter and Kaleigh McInanely. Aww, Kaleigh's the only one not laughing. Kingston's laughing through his lies. I'll catch it on the replay. Damn funny, I'm sure.

HenryFTP said...

Sorry, Driftglass, to the extent our National Discourse is mediated through network television, Charlie Sykes, Bill Kristol and George Will are already the Center, as you have Fox News on the Right with its Fellini movie cast of characters and Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and some professional comedians on the Left. I found Mr Friedman's column hilarious given how studiously he and others of his ilk have ignored or pretended to ignore what was happening with the Republican Party -- the column had the unmistakeable air of a Collaborationist switching over to the Resistance as General Leclerc's tanks were rolling into Paris in August 1944. Friedman' column is a fairly clear signal that Trump's support among the Donor Class is weakening (i.e., their original plan that their reasonably reliable Republican tools (Pence, Priebus, Ryan, McConnell et al.) would keep Trump sufficiently functional to get their tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks failed to take into account that Trump cannot be "handled" as readily as Reagan and Dubya were). Cynically, you can even read the Friedman column as a coded message from the Donor Class to the Republican Party leadership to either get Trump under control or get rid of him, or else face the consequence of the Donor Class, however reluctantly, bankrolling a temporary Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. You can bet that Mr Friedman will be sinking the praises of all sorts of Rahm Emanuel-type Vichy Democrats to fill out the majority and to ensure that Donor Class interests remain of paramount concern.