Mr. Hewitt will be given the industry-standard for flagrant Conservative media personality corruption (non-sexual predator category): 30 days on the bench, or "One Gingrich".
MSNBC will find some currently discredited, out-of-the-limelight Conservative clown in need of some reputation rehabilitation and give them Mr. Hewitt's slot during his absence. Even Money: Ben Domenech, working title "How to Win Friends and Influence People by Marrying the Commandant's Daughter". 3-to-1: Andrew Sullivan, working title "Ten Thing Hate About Hillary". Long Shot: Kevin Williamson, working title "Hangin' with Kevin Williamson".
During his downtime, network image consultants will coach the mayor of of Uncanny Valley, USA --
Uncanny Valley -- used in reference to the phenomenon whereby a computer-generated figure or humanoid robot bearing a near-identical resemblance to a human being arouses a sense of unease or revulsion in the person viewing it.
-- in how to more effectively mimic human speech patterns and facial expression.
The network will book Mr. Hewitt onto a couple of panels -- probably Hardball (MSNBC) and Meet the Press (NBC) -- to gin up some momentum for him during the run-up to his Triumphant Return to Comcast's good graces.
Conservative Hugh Hewitt makes surprise announcement MSNBC has pulled plug on his show
But don't worry kids! His nearly-human visage will not disappear from the MSNBC lineup. He's a sunk-cost and I expect the User Engagement executives at Comcast to make every effort to upgrade his firmware to try and make him less terrifying to small children and animals, who can sense these things:
He said that NBC News would continue to employ him as a contributor and he said he expects to continue to be a guest on MSNBC shows. “It’s been great fun to host this show, I’ll see you on MSNBC again soon” the former anchor said.
Well, since the balance of my predictions fall under "time will tell", I'd have to say so far I'm pulling a solid "A" on this once.
“My philosophy of life is that the meek shall inherit nothing but debasement, frustration and ignoble deaths; that there is security in personal strength; that you can fight City Hall and win; that any action is better than no action, even if it's the wrong action; that you never reach glory or self-fulfillment unless you're willing to risk everything, dare anything, put yourself dead on the line every time; and that once one becomes strong or rich or potent or powerful it is the responsibility of the strong to help the weak become strong."
-- Harlan Ellison, writer
Don't forget to visit our new website -- http://www.proleftpod.com -- for all of the sweet bells and whistles: there are links to donate to our podcast work at that site, as well as links to our swingin' Zazzle merch store, our respective blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Kittehs! and much more. Many thanks once again to @theologop for building it all for us! Links:
The conditions necessary the create a Trump were carefully built by the Republican party -- brick by racist, paranoid, fact-averse brick -- over the past half-century. And it all happened right out in the open, where even journalists who were knee-walking drunk on Both Siderist popskull should have been able to see it.
And however much Russian help got him to third base, it was greasy little "Fight The K'rupt Duopoly" media Both Siderists like you, Ron, that waved him home.
To no one's surprise, Mr. Andrew Sullivan (who gets paid to write True Conservative fan fiction for NY Magazine) name-checked Mr. David Brooks (who gets paid to write True Conservative fan fiction for The New York Times) as he joined the ranks of professional cosseted Conservative havers-of-opinions pouring one out for the death of the Glorious American Conservatism That Never Was --
Anthony Kennedy and the Death of True American Conservatism
...
This, to my mind, is the conservative temperament, fully understood. I can hear the howls of those who believe this definition is too esoteric and precious to mean anything in the American case right now. And, sure, the howlers have a point. I’m with David Brooks in his view that Republicanism has become conservatism’s worst enemy — worse even than the social-justice left.
-- and the Noble American Conservatism That Is Yet To Come:
But I’d argue that this variety of conservatism is still essential to the project of liberal democracy, that reviving some of it is our only way out of gridlock, and its eclipse is a sign of how great the danger now is.
This is a ritual in which any decent human being in their field of vision is declared to have really been a Hero of True Conservatism.
And that’s why I loved Barack Obama. In his heart and mind, he is and was a moderate conservative...
That every monster spawned by their myopic cult of sinecured wishful thinkers is really the Villainous Antithesis of True Conservatism
And this is why I despise Donald Trump... he is a lonely, maladjusted id, with Western civilization as a plaything in his hands. And Republicanism — in its shameful embrace of this monster, its determined rape of the environment, destruction of our fiscal standing, evisceration of our allies, callousness toward the sick, and newfound contempt for free trade — has nary a conservative bone in its putrefying body.
And, of course, no public exhibition of preening True Conservative vainglory would be complete without stopping by the Extremes on Both Sides cafe for a steaming cup of self-regard:
[Obama] desperately tried to keep this country in one piece, against foam-flecked racism and know-nothingism on one side and left-wing ideological purity and identity politics on the other.
This is the current state of a Grand Pundit Unification Theory which we have been watching trying to form itself in the media spotlight for years, and which as sharply upticked since the election of President Stupid: The idea that True Conservatism simply is Both Siderism and Both Siderism is True Conservatism.
Period. Full stop.
Of course, this attempt to continually re-brand reflexive fence-straddling as True Conservatism (so that it's paid spokesmodels will always have a reserved seat at the media table) is nothing new. Once upon a time I took to calling this "Pineapple Ice Cream Conservatism" -- a label which definitely did not take off in a big way, but is nonetheless still true and accurate:
Mr. Sullivan's Conservatism is identical to Mr. Brooks' Moderation in that their respective ideological systems amount to little more than what is convenient and enjoyable for each man to believe at any given moment.
If Mr. Sullivan suddenly developed a taste for pineapple ice cream, within a week he would be penning columns about how "Liking Pineapple Ice Cream" is a cardinal Conservative value because of something something Edmund Burke. If he got sick on bad Thai food, we would suddenly see a spate of columns discussing bad Thai food and how it is something that only extreme Christianists or Left Liberal would ever put in their mouths.
He is, at best, a flighty dilettante with a wealth patron and does not have the slightest fucking clue about how his adopted country works.
Likewise the Moderate Mr. Brooks adds or subtracts from his lexicon of virtues based almost entirely on how best to hide out from whichever one of his until-recently-held principled positions has gone hideously wrong.
So what is this to do with Westworld?
Glad you asked.
You see, both Westworld and True Conservatism are works of fiction.
They are both expensive intellectual properties that may have been fine for the 1970s but never should have been rebooted for our time.
They are both lumber ponderously on about Big Questions Like Free Will And Stuff but never actually arrive anywhere. You'll be riding along, looking at the scenery, wondering "Holy shit, HBO must have crazy money to afford this kind of setup" when suddenly everything stops because the writer wants one of the robots to declaim a Very Important Meditation On The Nature Of Individualism.
To try to hide the fact that the stories they are telling are a disaster, both Westworld and True Conservatism skip across timelines like a record player on a flatbed driving a corduroy road. Skip. You're talking about the first very robots and they were so cool, and Conservatism as it existed during the Devonian Era which -- spoiler! -- was noble and awesome! Skip. You're hearing from your robot daughter from the future about how Conservatism in the 23rd century is also gonna be noble and fucking awesome. Skip. You're in the present and Conservative robots are slaughtering each other and it's all bloody and awful, but the narrator is an emotionless cipher in a suit, safely removed from it all, sitting at a keyboard far away.
Oh no! The narrator is a robot too! Or is he? And is he even the real narrator? Maybe someone else is narrating him! Maybe this is all a flashback!
Hey look! All the brutally butchered robots are alive again, and doing stuff and no one really suffered or died because...
It both Westworld and True Conservatism, there are no stakes. The most basic rule of storytelling -- whether it's a short story, an op-ed, a novel or prestige teevee -- is that you must give your audience something to care about. Someone to root for or against. And things that happen in the story have to have consequences for the characters we care about. This is known in the trade as a "plot". And you know the story you are trying to tell has miscarried beyond redemption when your ideology or teevee series is reduced to populate each episode with the same, meaningless straw men that you mow down and resurrect over and over again. Sure, hardcore fans will go on watching, but everyone else will walk away and look for a better story that speaks to them of real people they care about in a world they can recognize.
Finally -- and this is just speculation, but boy-howdy does it fit the facts -- in both Westworld and True Conservatism, at least some people at the corporations who underwrite those enterprises have figured out that their product sucks. And they have figured out that we have figured out that it sucks. Of course, by sheer power they exercise over the media platforms they own they can bluff and bluster and panel-discussion a semblance of Energy and Relevance into their failed product long after it has keeled over dead. But "baffling them with bullshit" is inevitably a short-term tactic that cannot continue indefinitely.
And this is where the analogy fails in two, important ways.
First, HBO can and will declare victory and bury their mistake in the Valley Beyond while at the same time they break out their enormous checkbook to buy/borrow/reboot/invent their next tent-pole, must-see series. However, there is no "backup Beltway-friendly ideology" under development in the executive conference rooms of our corporate media as a hedge against the day when Both Siderism/ True Conservatism becomes so patently ludicrous that even the hardest-core David Brooks fanboys can no longer take it seriously.
And, second, the reason there cannot be a "backup Beltway-friendly ideology" under development is that while HBO can sack their writers, order up a brand new show and move on, the Beltway media can't sack their Both Siderist pundits for the simple reason that those pundits and their shitty opinions are the show.
And because the professional, financial and political consequences of ever admitting the simple truth that the Left has been right about the Right all along would be so dire for so many powerful interests, this awful Both Siderist freak show is doomed to on and on and on until we force its cancellation.
Harlan liked it so I sent it along to him. We corresponded and chatted from time to time. He also liked a story of mine. He offered very good advice. It was pretty terrific.
Of Mr. Ellison, the writer a 1980 L.A. Times profile reportedly said, “Ellison is fiercely independent, proudly elitist, frequently angry, tenacious and downright vengeful.”
Ironically, word has it that he passed away en route to the mandatory courtesy class which all keyboard-wielding Libtards are now required to attend.
Word also has it that he was dressed as a Harlequin, and carrying a monkey-wrench.
"You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
Repeat after me: There is no such thing as a "former" hard-core Republican.
A causal, occasional Republican voter? Sure. They can kick the habit. Over the course of many years I've voted for Republicans once or twice on down-ticket races or in board elections where I knew the person and they were extraordinarily well-qualified. Hell, in my misspent youth I also voted for John Anderson, because Reagan was clearly dangerous, but Carter wasn't pure enough for my noble and rarefied political tastes.
But this it not so for the hard-core Republican. The party activist, campaign coordinator, door knocker, serious donor, straight-party ticket voter, pundit, elected official, analyst or pollster. Anyone who has evidenced a keen and active interest in advancing the Republican party's depraved agenda over any length of time.
They've been in the life too long. They have been too conditioned. Too bent. Their brains and political pleasure centers have been permanently rewired. And so, like any other kind of toxic, lifestyle addiction, the best you can ever hope for with your hard-core Republican is a state of recovery that they can maintain one-day-at-a-time until they shuffle off this mortal coil
But until they join Ronald Reagan in Republican Heaven, they will always be junkies who, given the slightest opportunity to rationalize themselves into just one more little taste, will backslide right back into their bad habits every fucking time.
Like, for example, Steve Schmidt, darling of the Acela corridor rebels because 9/10ths of the way through his career as a stone-cold Republican button man he freaked out that his Republican party was full of -- gasp! -- Republicans and, without missing a beat, started talking like, well, me.
And he was doing a pretty fair imitation of me right up until yesterday when he just could not stop himself from chasing that sweet-sweet Both Siderist dragon one more time...
Steve Schmidt attacks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for ‘dishonest progressivism’ — and says it’s bad as ‘Trumpism’
...
“And what Trump is doing is radicalizing American politics,” the conservative strategist continued. “And he is a beneficiary the more radical politics becomes. When it becomes a game of incitement between a far left who says everybody is going to have a government job, everybody is going to have daycare, everybody is going to have retirement, free schools, free college education — as we careen toward $30 trillion in debt.”
Schmidt added: “When we have dishonest progressivism and we have dishonest Trumpism and an alienated middle that surrenders. They break their will to fight back. They become disenfranchised and hopeless about the idea that free market capitalism or liberal democracy can prevail in a radical era. That is the danger.”...
For 40 years, Mr. Schmidt's party has seized every opportunity to run up deficits as part of a calculated, long-term, poison-pill strategy to create a "But we haz no munnies!" alibi for gutting the social programs they have always hated. So when you hear Mr. Schmidt whining about how radical it is for a candidate to talk like FDR and why we cannot possibly meet the basic needs of our citizens because something something free market capitalism, and then rolling it all up into a big, Beltway-pleasing "The Extremes on Both Side" fatty that he passes around the table to his fellow junkies, you can be pretty damn sure that ol' Stever is no longer in recovery.
Which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone. In the fight to dismember the Republican party the best we can hope for with a Never Trumper is that they act as a helpful political bomb-sniffing dog. And if so, that's great. They should be accorded the same respect as any other, useful service animal -- well-treated but they do not get to set the fucking agenda.
But never, ever be surprised when a Never Trump service animal suddenly takes a chunk out of your leg, shits on your bed, and then dives immediately into their "Extremes on Both Sides" hidey-hole.
Because you can never turn your back on a drug. And as I wrote a decade ago, that is exactly what Conservatism is. And why, once again, this November is not just an election.
...in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull.
Listen to any aging wingnut sighing and jerking sadly off to a tattered photo of Saint Ronnie -- despite the fact that the catastrophes we are now reaping were sown by his ruinous ideology -- and you can hear every addict who ever lived pining for that first Perfect High. The one they spend the rest of their days chasing, regardless of the size of the debts they run up or the ruined lives they leave in their wake.
Clinton? Objectively, Clinton qualifies as the greatest Center/Right President in history, and with balanced budgets, GATT, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, record surpluses, foreign and domestic terrorists brought to book, and an actual military victory, he arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else.
And they hated him for it.
Why?
Because Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.
And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.
Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.
Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.
So what is the last lie a Conservative tells himself? The last lie that the junkies and their suppliers both fight like hell to keep alive and twitching?
That, whether or not their ideology is depraved or deluded, it doesn’t matter because:
“Both side are always equally wrong about everything all the time.”
Doesn’t matter the who or what. The when or how. Doesn’t matter who was driving the bus towards the cliff and who was waving the red flags, throwing their bodies in front of it, trying to make it stop. Doesn’t matter who was trying to douse the conflagration with hoses shredded by 20 year of Reaganism, and who was lobbing milk cartons full of jellied gasoline onto the bonfire.
It is the lie that David Fucking Brooks pushes in the pages of the New York Times.
It is the lie that made David Broder the “Dean” of the Villagers; the lie on which the quarterly profits of the entire Murdoch media empire now rests.
Because these people and thousands more like them are not journalists or “pundits” or expert who offer facts or interpretation or a philosophical framework for illuminating and contextualizing the events of the world.
They are pushers, selling that last, nihilistic lie to the junkies on the Right who will pay any price and cut any throat to escape the fact that they are personally and specifically responsible for the destruction of the country they claimed to love in the name of a God they claim to believe in.
Which is why November 4th is so much more than an election.
November 4th is an Intervention, because the junkie-pusher spiral of the Republican rank-and-file and their leaders has finally hit bottom: we need to heal this country or lose it, and arguing -- "reasoning" -- with wingnuts and their enabling shills and hacks is as pointless as trying to reason with addicts and dealers.
The only way this country is going to be saved is by taking it away from them, school board by school board, city council by city council, congressional district by congressional district, state by state, election by election until they are driven back into the political sewers from whence they came.
On the occasion of the Iraq War turning to shit right before his eyes, noted Iraq War pimp and hectoring rodent, Tom Friedman, penned this odious column blaming -- surprise! -- Both Sides for the failure of that war, I penned this post suggesting that perhaps The Mustache of Understanding would be better off getting out of the having-opinions-for-money business, and getting into the go-fuck-yourself-with-a-steam-shovel business. From me, 13 years ago:
[According to Tom Friedman] The Universe is carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.
It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.
It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.
It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.
However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happened to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong.
And then stamp his chubby little feet and whine that No One Is Listening to Him!
That was roughly two years after the launch of Operation Endless Clusterfuck.
Well here we are again, marching inexorably towards the two year anniversary of the election of President Stupid, and pretty much every horrifying consequence Hillary Clinton warned us about is coming true with a vengeance. Two years after all the media and celebrity assclowns who decided that since Hillary was a mortal lock anyway, it was perfectly safe to play their facile "Disrupt the Status Quo! End the K'rupt Duopoly!" games well past the fail-safe point found out that there were going to be actual, terrifying consequences to their feckless dilettantism.
Last week it was babies in cages and a hundred less-publicized Republican corruptions and treasons, This week it was Anthony Kennedy handing Donald Trump his legacy on a silver platter, and another hundred, smaller betrayals of democracy. Next week it will be something else.
It'll be bad and it will go right on getting worse until at least one lever of actual power is pried out of Republican hands. And bestriding this whole, bloody, decades-long, racist butcher's bill that Republicans keep running up and the rest of us keep trying to pay down is the sad and irrefutable fact that all of the rubble and ruin that the Republicans are leaving in their wake this time was every bit as predictable and inevitable as the rubble and ruin the Republicans left in their wake the last time. From me, 13 years ago:
Now we are falling, out of control.
And pointing out that we are falling because of the lies and delusions of the Administration has nothing to do with whether or not I "want the Bush team to succeed” you contemptible little weed. We are watching the country we passionately love plummet into darkness along the exact trajectory we warned you about, and you think that there is any joy in being right? Any pleasure in seeing your beloved wasted and playing in traffic?
Sorry, Friedman, but no.
Now whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs we might have had have become irrelevant. Flapping our arms doesn’t matter. Prayer doesn’t matter.
Once in the air, the Cold Equations are all that matter.
Once in the air, my nation became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much....
And so, once again, thanks to the Republican party and their quisling enablers, we are in the hellish grip of the Cold Equations.
And although it may seem like cold comfort, what Winston Churchill once said about a different fight against different fascists is still sound advice: If you're going through hell, keep going.
Mrs. Federalist really, really wants a place in the coming Trump/Putin Greater Caucasian Co-Prosperity Sphere and is perfectly willing to shit all over everything her father ever claimed to stand for the get it.
Do you know the first attraction I ever built when I first came here from the Wall Street Journal? It was a Conservative flea circus. It was quite spectacular. Spared no expense. There were miniature think-tanks and a wee Respected Journal and op-ed columns in major newspapers...and a seat on PBS. It was all bullshit of course, but people would swear they could see the policies saving Murrica from the Libtard hordes. "Oh, I can see the Laffer Curve, mummy, can't you see the tax cuts working?" Clown Conservatives and high-wire Conservatives and Conservatives on parade...
Over the course of many, many years, this really has proved to be David Brooks' Great Project. A project which The New York Times has underwritten at heavy expense and to which the elite men and women of the Beltway media have lent their credibility.
And the reason the establishment has backed Mr. Brooks to the fucking hilt, no matter what, is that he is the perfect Beltway Man. A man of no fixed beliefs or principles, who glides through this life on dirigible of undeserved wealth and unearned privilege, far above the petty problems of real people living in the real world.
Unfortunately for Mr. Brooks what he really wants to do with his power is to issue sweeping Beltway dicta to the teeming masses below about specific, tangible, measurable problems down here in the real world -- pronouncements which not only invariably prove to be hilariously wrong in every way imaginable --
The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. (David Brooks,November 2014)
It's going to be Rubio. I'm telling you, it's going to be Rubio. (David Brooks,January 2016)
-- Mr. Brooks really is.
That's the bad news for Mr. Brooks.
The good new for Mr. Brooks is that, clearly, none of this matters in the slightest to his employers at The New York Times, NPR, PBS or NBC. So what if the most revered Beltway Conservative observer of America politics and culture doesn't know shit-all about America politics or culture and proves it over and over again in the most public ways imaginable? For Mr. Brooks, the only adjustment his failures ever require is that he has to lightly tweak the propaganda he hands down from his Mighty Gas Bag Of Truth to the little people down on planet Earth. Rather than gassing on about all the tricksie Liberal subjects that trip him up so easily -- things like math or history or causality or what he himself wrote last year -- Mr. Brooks now uses his column to drizzle saccharine pseudo-scriptural argle bargle down to the masses.
Pious myths of the Glorious Conservatism Of Old (from Mr. Brooks today):
The practical upshot is that conservatives have always placed tremendous emphasis on the sacred space where individuals are formed. This space is populated by institutions like the family, religion, the local community, the local culture, the arts, the schools, literature and the manners that govern everyday life...
Over the centuries conservatives have resisted anything that threatened this sacred space...
And fairy tales of the Glories of Conservatism Yet To Come:
The next conservatism will be built on the back of these real-life communities, and the way they nurture good citizens and healthy attachments. It will be based on new alliances, which have little to do with your father’s G.O.P.
But what of the Conservatism which Mr. Brooks has spent his entire adult life relentlessly pimping? The here-and-now Conservatism and its bestial offspring, the Republican party, which Mr. Brooks assured his readers less than four years ago had completely detoxed itself of racism and crazy?
Well very much like White Queen's rules of jam in Through the Looking Glass --
"The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today."
-- the promise of tomorrow's Conservatism never actually arrives. And it has certainly never resembled either Mr. Brooks' Glorious Conservatism Of Old or the Glories of the Conservatism Yet To Come: a fact that he skips very lightly past, pausing only to lie his ass off about the central reality of his ideology:
Conservatives fought big government not because they hated the state, per se, but because they loved the sacred space. The last attempts to build a conservatism around the sacred space were George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” and, in Britain, David Cameron’s Big Society conservatism.
They both fizzled because over the last 30 years the parties of the right drifted from conservatism. The Republican Party became the party of market fundamentalism...
No, Mr. Brooks, Conservatism fought Big Gummint because Big Gummint wanted to take its money and give it to shiftless brown people and the mooching poors. I know this because when he was campaigning on the hustings of the Old Confederacy, Ronald Reagan wasn't quoting Burke or Niebuhr. Instead he was talking energetically about "welfare queens" and "young bucks".
Because Reagan knew perfectly well that racism was the beating heart of the Right.
I know this because when George H.W. Bush was running behind in his 1988 campaign to succeed Ronald Reagan, he didn't turn to Russell Kirk or William Buckley. Instead turned to one of the nastiest racist thugs in politics.
Because Bush knew perfectly well that racism was the beating heart of the Right.
And 30 years ago, The Republican Party did not "became the party of market fundamentalism". 30 years ago, the Republican Party became the party of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. I know this because the Republican's threw big fucking party a quarter of a century to brag about it.
Because Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich know perfectly well that racism was the beating heart of the Right. As does every other sentient being in the solar system except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks. Which is why, over the past 20 years, Mr. Brooks has announced that a Renaissance of the Right had either just happened or was right around the corner more times than I can count.
And every time has has been spectacularly wrong.
But at this late hour, it is no longer professionally or psychologically possible for Mr. Brooks to face the fact that his Conservatism has always been a fake. A flea circus. And it always will be. And that is why working for an outfit like The New York Times where none of this matters in the slightest works out so well for Mr. Brooks.
Because however many times the latest iteration of his Conservative flea circus shits the bed in public, Mr. Brooks will always assert, with the perfect, imbecile confident of someone who can never be fired, that next time it will be flawless:
Behold, a Tip Jar!
PS. For extra credit, you are free to peruse this vituperative, foul-mouthed snippet from a piece I wrote back in March. Of 2006.
...
Like a week-old-dead-clown, Bobo manages to be both amusing and nauseating at the same time.
No, Mr. Brooks, the anthracite soul of your Party hasn’t fundamentally moved one inch in the last three decades, it's just gotten more and more brutally proficient at implementing and capitalizing on the same, loathsome strategy year after year.
Your Southern Strategy Party welcomes, waters, fertilizes and then cross-breeds new generations racists, Bobo…as a matter of policy.
Your Lee Atwater/Karl Rove-addiction keeps the air full of bile, the communal well of culture full of poison, and the nation at each other’s throats for no other reason than partisan gain…as a matter of policy.
Maybe in whatever fart-propaganda-rebreathing Bell Jar you call home, Mr. Brooks, your ravings sound reasonable. But out here in the Real World you simply sound insane.
Your “analysis” bears no relationship to any country, party or movement I have ever heard of outside of, oh, maybe, lurid "Shocking True Collectivist Sex Slave Stories!!" in the yellowing pages of "The Objectivist" magazine circa 1961.
Out here in the Real World, even your own Party’s founders flinch in horror at the irrefutable fact that your Party is now owned an operated by an raving mad cult of anti-Enlightenment/pro-Dark Ages freaks who think of the End of the World as an action plan.
To the left them are the racists, and to the right, the “Fuck ‘Em All” libertarians.
That’s your Party, Mr. Brooks.
Your Party, your movement and your dogma, which have now shown themselves to be so spectacularly corrupt, and on a scale so massive, it’s hard to gauge how deep the cancer goes.
What is clear is that Republican Conservativism has failed.
Republican Conservativism has failed because when given a chance to express itself fully, cities die.
Republican Conservativism has failed because once it gets its stinking paws on the helm of the Ship of State, it rams the nation into reckless and incompetent war.
Republican Conservativism has failed because it would rather the world perish than pay to save it.
But like the Commies before you, Bobo, you are almost congentially incapable of facing up to the idea that your Holy Writ is toxic, intoxicating, theoretical drivel that will always come to tears when applied to the Real World.
And so, like the Commies, you comfort yourself by whimpering that the Plan was perfect; it was the People that failed.
The Dear Leader was Great; it was the Peasants that let him down.
That there is nothing wrong with the disaster Republican Conservatives have wrought that a steaming load of More Republican Conservativism can’t fix.
With is why, in the end, the likes of David Brooks and Pat Roberts will always find their way into each other’s arms out behind the barn where no one looks.
Because men like Roberts wants the change the law to make Bush’s criminality retroactively licit, and men like Brooks wants to change the subject to make Reality the criminal and Dubya the victim.
Whores both, and the price men like these exact in American blood and treasure for their wretched social experiment is far to high to bear any longer.
...apparently, the elite political media is so banjaxed on the subject of civility and what they consider to be fairness that the president* could have said we have three million judges and half of them are Martians, and he would be said to be only “obfuscating” or “exaggerating,” especially about the number of Martians.
I mention this because, in an un-bylined piece on Monday, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times, tied himself in a sheepshank trying to explain the rules under which his newspaper would call a lie a lie. (The piece was unbylined because Baquet did away with the job of NYT public editor over a year ago.) From the NYT:
The word “lie” is very powerful. For one thing, it assumes that someone knew the statement was false. Another reason to use the word judiciously is that our readers could end up focusing more on our use of the word than on what was said. And using “lie” repeatedly could feed the mistaken notion that we’re taking political sides. That’s not our role. Of course, even when we don’t say “lie,” we try to make it very clear to readers if a politician says something false, and to present the evidence showing that the statement isn’t true.
Can you figure out what the standard is? I can’t. “We’ll demonstrate that it’s a lie but we won’t call it a lie because our readers might be confused if we call a lie a lie”? The real problem for all the rest of us is that, if you don’t call a lie for what it is, you can’t reasonably evaluate the motive the president* might have for telling it in the first place, and then persisting in it later.
The reason I pulled this portion of Brother Pierce's estimable efforts was that I had a fairly involved conversation with the editors of our local paper on the subject of why "editorial discretion" on the op-ed page always amounted to nothing more than giving Republican liars and lunatics a pass.
It was perfectly civil, but it was also perfectly, depressingly predictable.
And I can faithfully report that it's Baquets all the way down.
-- Jonah Goldberg's advice to the people of New Orleans, August 29, 2005
Once upon a time, way back when your humble scrivener lived alone in Chicago in Castle Driftglass, I would rise early on Sunday to watch the Mouse Circus or Gasbag Cavalcade (or whatever the kids are calling the shitty Sunday Shows these days) and critique them, fast-n-dirty to the best of my ability.
At the time, I was working +100 hours a week at my main job and teaching class in the evenings twice a week. I didn't have cable, but I did have a work-supplied Blackberry (text only) and pretty fast internet access, so I streamed what cable news I watched via sites like Rockin' Rooster.
Fun fact: I also never ran fundraiser, partly because my income was adequate to my needs and partly because I had to sign an ethics and financial disclosure statement every six months and tell my employer where every nickle of outside income came from. And I knew once anyone on the job found out I was a Liberal blogger my career would be over. See, back then we terrorist-loving, American-hating Libtards would use naughty words from time to time as we named and shamed the Republican party in ways which are absolutely verboten in swoon-prone polite society.
But I kept writing, every day, either very late or very early and often over lunch at a the hippie coffee shop down the street, because in addition to supporting Liberals causes, donating to Liberal campaigns and fellow bloggers and generally being politically aware and active, it's what I could do.
You might remember that after the 2004 election, we on the Left were furious and shellshocked.
It was inconceivable to many of us that this country could possibly (re)elect a man who was clearly unfit for the job, had surrounded himself with fanatics and criminals and already lead the race for worst president in history by a full lap.
But Karl Rove, Matthew Dowd, Hate Radio and Fox News made sure the madness of the Right stayed at a full boil, and the gutless Center hopped in the windowless van with maniacs because, um, reasons, and so off the cliff we went.
But the momentum of events already long in-progress could not be stopped, and before the fanfare from Dubya's Second Inaugural had died down, the reek from everything that we we terrorist-loving, American-hating Libtards had used our naughty words to warn the country about -- the lethal depravity, incompetence and corruption of the Bush Administration -- began to flood into the public square, figuratively and literally.
And as the sheer comprehensiveness of the failures of the Bush Administration on every front became clearer with every passing day, it became harder and harder for the Conservative media to shout it all away and for the Beltway media to pretend it wasn't happening. The Conservative media did not change, of course, but it did double down on blaming the Liberal Media Conspiracy for, well, everything. In fact, in my very first Sunday Morning Comin' Down from April of 2005 we find:
Sen. Santorum [appearing on This Week...], calls Tom DeLay. “passionate and effective” and apparently the MEDIA is the problem.
As for the establishment Beltway media, well before you could say, "Why does Bloody Bill Kristol still have a fucking job?" the world was suddenly loud with the splashing of their lifeboats hitting the water and paddling like hell away from the unfolding catastrophe they had so eagerly enabled.
And every one of these lifeboats bore the same, proud name: The S.S. Both Sides Do It.
Overnight that became the shibboleth. The magic media conjure words that would allow the worse enablers of the shitstorm that was starting to break to survive with their careers and parking spaces intact. Suddenly, no one was to blame for anything because everyone was toblame everything -- it was so thick in the air that by 2006 it as already a tired joke among certain shitty Liberal bloggers:
So Dick Cheney is found, naked, on the White House lawn tossing burning kittens at homeless veterans and hitting babies with a ball-peen hammer.
What are the first three words out of David Brooks’ mouth?
“But the Democrats!”
Anyway, this is a thing I used to do. Week after week, year after year. And although I still keep my hand in (like today) I have given up entirely on the idea that the institutional political media can reform itself.
It can't, because whatever behind-the-scenes corporate directives have turned the fourth estate into a mindless Both Siderist Pez dispenser, it is clear that the sanctity of our democracy is simply irrelevant to the people who control the news. Which is why, 13 years after taking up my pen and pixels to "document the atrocities" as we rage and lament in the long, dark shadow of yet another Republican catastrophe in the White House, who has also surrounded himself with fanatics and criminals and imbeciles, once again doing irreparatble harm to our already maimed democracy and already a full parsec ahead of everyone else in the race for worst president in history...
...I was absolutely unsurprised to find that two reliable, teevee-friendly dregs of the Right -- Stephen Hayes and Erick Erickson -- had been invited by Chuck Todd to share their scintillating Conservative insights with the rest of America on Meet the Press.
ERICK ERICKSON: You know, I disagree with my friend George Will on this, although I do agree with him, that Congress has let their muscles atrophy in legislating. Congress now apparently is a class of pundits, as opposed to a class of legislators. It's a real problem on both sides of the aisle...
ERICK ERICKSON: Yeah, I think it is going to get uglier. I think that James Hodgkinson is less an anomaly and an inflection point. We're headed towards more violence I think if people on both sides don't rein it in. It's not enough to say, "Well, you started it," "No, you started it," "This happened," or "This happened."...
STEPHEN HAYES: Right, President Trump wants to do this. But look, so do the Democrats. I mean, what was so interesting about your conversation with Angus King and James Lankford, it was a thoughtful, substantive conversation.
CHUCK TODD: But by the way, they are in the 40 yard lines of American politics.
STEPHEN HAYES: They are. And the politics here, I think one of the reasons you don't have solutions to the broader immigration problem is because it works politically for both parties, the extremes of both parties. Look, Kamala Harris talking about abolishing ICE? Really? That's the solution here is we're going to abolish the bureaucracy that's responsible for enforcing these things?
HEATHER MCGHEE: Because Republicans hate abolishing agencies? I mean, this is an agency, I will say--
STEPHEN HAYES: That's not the point. The point is, she's offering an extreme solution that doesn't actually solve any problem, because somebody's going to have to perform that duty.
CHUCK TODD: To build on Heather's point here, and I want to get Kasie in here, since you did the interview, is this in a way that conservatives will say, "Abolish the I.R.S.," which is sort of a ridiculous proposition, is this going to become that "Abolish the I.R.S." chant on the left?...
CHUCK TODD: I hear you. All I know is whatever happened to the golden rule? If everybody just did golden rule, we might be in a tiny bit better place...
We have long since passed the point where the the mainstream media pays any attention to the causal, quotidian racism, paranoia, non-stop lies and hysterical Liberal bashing from the Right. It's like living next to the "el" track in Chicago, which I a did for a couple of years when I had a little apartment on Roscoe. After awhile you stop noticing it. It becomes background noise. It becomes normal.
But this same media absolutely freaks the fuck out when when the Left punches back.
Suddenly everybody's got to go to courtesy class, right now!
They will get no argument from us regarding Mr. Trump’s border policy, and when it comes to coarsening the debate, he is the prime offender. The poisonous fruits could be seen, as it happens, Saturday morning in a vile tweet from Ms. Sanders’s father, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, that associated House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, with the vicious MS-13 gang.
We nonetheless would argue that Ms. Huckabee, and Ms. Nielsen and Mr. Miller, too, should be allowed to eat dinner in peace...
If Trump succeeds in getting us all to talk and behave like him, he will have won a larger cultural battle than you could ever imagine. In this regard, i fear he is well on his way.
If we reach the point where we decide that marching, voting, suing, and speaking isn't enough -- that we have to get in a person's face or disturb the peace of their home -- then we're crossing a dangerous threshold: https://t.co/TyzpW2mrgC
It is time to stop looking for an accommodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?
If a hateful person makes you hate, they win. If a bully makes you bully, they win. If a vulgar person makes you vulgar, they win. Let us meet hate with love. Let us meet bullying with an embrace. Let us meet vulgarity with civility. This is how our country and world win.
How well I remember how the Allies beat the Nazis with hugs.
And Lincoln broke the Confederacy with kind words.
And the United Stated federal government finally ended Jim Crow by asking the Klan reeeeeeeal nice to stop terrorizing and murdering African American citizens for attempting to exercise their inalienable rights.
A reminder that these are not the musings of some maudlin old water-head drunk sitting in his own piss wildly misremembering the past to soften his present circumstance.
I know for a FACT that @FLOTUS has been a strong voice of compassion for migrant children. The vicious treatment of her over the last day is a reminder of how Trump Derangement Syndrome,where hatred for him justifies everything,has become an epidemic. Totally lunacy everywhere!!!
Longtime readers will remember that, like every other respectable coward, clown and con-man in American politics, Marco Rubio practically lives in the basement of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It.
In case you missed Jon Stewart's award-verging "interview" with Marco Rubio, here is your rush transcript of Senator Rubio's answer to Jon Stewart every single time Mr. Stewart tried very respectfully to point out that Senator Rubio was, um, lying, and that the relentless, pathological obstructiveness of the Republican Party was unmatched by anything Democrats have done in modern history.
"Both sides..."
"Well, you know, both sides..."
"Both Democrats and Republicans..."
"That's just politics..."
"The Democrats left us no choice..."
"Both sides..."
"Democrats and Republicans..."
"Both sides..."
"Both Democrats and Republicans..."
And so forth, to the point of being comical.
Like every other Republican culture war criminal, Senator Rubio has been conditioned within an inch of his life to always answer any question about the unique perfidy and hypocrisy of his political Party with the Big Lie of Centrism and to refuse to stop repeating the Big Lie of Centrism until the questions stop regardless of circumstances...
However much of a Republican mass-electoral-extinction event the administration of President Stupid turns out to be, the cold fact is that afterwards there will still be 50-60 million brain-dead Fox News brownshirts wandering the countryside looking for someone to absolve them of their atrocities, preach to them that it was all the Libtard's fauly anyway, and to lead them back to the promised land.
And right now, everyone in Republican party politics is positioning themselves to harvest that crop of toxic miscreants.
