Monday, October 29, 2018

On The Occasion of Joe Scarborough Admitting That The Left Was Right About The Right All Along...


...(h/t the mighty Crooks & Liars) during a panel discussion featuring an entire parade of Republican horribles who have spent their entire adult lives creating the Republican monster factory that produced Trump and now swear that none of them ever had the slightest fucking idea what was really going on inside their Republican Party...



...Rick Wilson finally blocked me on The Twitter for the egregious sin of pointing out over and over again that the Left has been right about the Right all along.

Rick Wilson will spend endless hours amusing himself online punching down at mentally underclocking MAGA stumblebums with 10 followers.   Rick Wilson will while away even more hours online calling Respected Blue Check Republican rage monsters funny names.  But Rick Wilson has never had the guts to field any of the pointed and obvious questions I have sent his way over the past couple of years. Questions about his culpability for the madness he now pretends he had no hand in.  Questions about the ethics of looting the Liberal critique of the GOP from 1998 and selling it back to credulous Centrists as breathless epiphany in 2018.

You know, stuff like that.

This is the lifeboat we all said the Brain Caste of the GOP would build for itself to preserve their careers and privileges.  This is what it looks like -- a Mercedes SL-Class version of the old, reliable Bush Off Machine, now re-purposed for the Age of Trump.  And they don't want any Libtard troublemakers with long memories and inconvenient questions fucking it up for them.

And so, for asking these very basic questions on behalf of every Libtard who has been slandered as an America-hating coward and traitor and moonbat for decades for the unpardonable sin of being right about the Right all along, Mr. Wilson has now joined Matthew Dowd, Charlie Sykes and Jonah Goldberg in blocking me.

And I can think of no more perfect way to end my birthday fundraiser that that :-)

Your pal,

driftglass




 ...Birthday Fundraiser!




Sunday, October 28, 2018

Sunday Morning Comin' Down




In which Paul Krugman recapitulates several thousand posts I written over the past 13 years (sample from December, 2008 -- and yes, Newt Gingrich really did go on Meet the Press to denounce "Republican-style attack politics” because Gingrich is a soulless, grifting monster and that was the direction the wind happened to be blowing that week)  --
The most intriguing turn of events happened on “Meet the Press” where you could almost hear the off-camera gear-grinding of the network's clatteringly awkward attempt at a party-line shift.

Of course you had typical, MSM comfort food. Things like a video of Noot! Gingrich taking a bold position that “People are tired of Republican-style attack politics” which for some reason was not followed by 20 solid minutes of artery-bursting, pee-spigotting, coffee-gushing-from-nostrils-like-David-Bowman-being-blown-out-an-airlock laughter.

Which ceases only as the laughers pass out from chortle-induced hypoxia, and awake, moments later, gasping and asking “He wasn’t really serious, right?”

I mean, Noot “Call ‘em traitors” Gingrich denouncing “Republican-style attack politics” verges deeply into Professor-Moriarty-standing-up-in-Parliament-demanding-stronger-Victorian-era-anti-fictional-supervillainy-laws territory.

So there was that.

And there was Rich Lowry pulling a wholly voodoo-based reading of recent history out of his ass to advise that we’re maybe having a “paradigm-shift” election because whatever it is we’re pissed about is coming to a head before Inauguration Day. Or something.

But it is a strange an magical day when a Washington Post financial writer (Michelle Singletary) quotes Proverbs – “The borrower is slave to the lender” -- at the Mouse Circus, and got even more entertaining as I watched the strong parallel between the collapse of the credit markets and the collapse of Conservatism play itself out in sharper relief than warm snuggly Centrist Committee Teevee usually allows.

Sunday the specific object was Rich Lowry.

Lowry is another in that subspecies of talent-challenged Conservative hacks who have commandeered serious media time and attention for far, far, far too long: those proudly turgid supporters of Sarah Palin and tireless advocates of “It's not torture if we do it. To brown people. Who scare me.” school of foreign policy who have gone so politically cyanotic rebreathing their little Randite beer-farts of Freedom that their faces have permanently frozen into blue-tinged smirks. But like the Banker Bubble, the collapse of the Wingnut Bubble means the careers of people like Lowry are now backed by worthless paper. He is now stuck in the drying mudhole of evaporating Republican delusions, pooping out tired retreads like “Both. Sides. Equally. Bad.” and “Iran/Contra = Monica Lewinski” and “No attacks on American soil”.

He is, in other words, every bit the same mendacious and ideologically-atherosclerotic organ-grinder's monkey screeching for coins he has always been, but instead of being Villager-polite and clubby-insider-deferential...

-- in one Tweet.


I've been at this a long, long time now and I know one thing:  nothing will change as long as men like Chuck Todd are more afraid of the Right than the Left. 


 ...Birthday Fundraiser!





Saturday, October 27, 2018

Matthew Dowd is a Fundamentally Ridiculous Person





Do I think Mr. Dowd is wrong?

No.

Do I think it is fucking hilarious that just two years ago Matthew "Mr. Both Sides Do It" Dowd not only blocked me but went out of his way to personally insult my readers for saying this very thing.

Yes.

Do I think it is a national tragedy that, until it was far too late, men like Matthew Dowd kept themselves is a state of near-catatonic denial about the completely preventable catastrophe that was rushing right at us? A catastrophe that was somehow perfectly obvious to disreputable, foul-mouthed Libtard bloggers like me, but completely eluded ABC News' very own chief political analyst?

Boy howdy.

Can I forgive him?

Absolutely.  All he has to do is unblock me.  Then apologize to my readers.  Then resign and go do something far, far away from the cameras since he is clearly just fucking awful at both the "politics" part and "analysis" part of being a political analyst.

Oh, and my birthday fundraiser is still underway, so if Mr. Dowd is feeling anywhere near as guilty and penitent as he should feel, the plenary indulgence window is now open.  It comes with no guarantees, but like chicken soup, hitting the tip jar of the honest and honorable person you insulted over an issue that you were dead wrong about all along couldn't hurt. 



 ...Birthday Fundraiser!


Friday, October 26, 2018

Professional Left Podcast #464


“Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred."
-- Joseph Goebbels

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 Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!




Everybody Needs to Lighten up on Hugh Hewitt


Sure the most inhumanly bloodless, clueless drivel imaginable routinely comes pouring out of his word-hole at the worst possible times:



But see, that's his job.

"Inane, bloodless Republican drivel-spouter" is what Comcast hired him to be.

As longtime readers know, Hugh Hewitt is, in fact, a Cyborg Sent from the Future to Destroy America and therefor he has no understanding of basic human emotions, nor does he understand how rudimentary human activities such as "the consumption of food" and and states-of-being such as "mortality" work.  And because all human activities and states-of-being are equally mysterious, he values them all equally, which is why he incapable of comprehending the difference between "Mitch McConnell getting yelled at while he east soup" and, say, "Barack Obama getting blown up by a MAGA lunatic".

Sure, this time his failure to even pretend to imitate human behavioral norms was so jaw-dropping that even Joe Scarborough -- a "True Conservative" sent from the 1980s to Destroy America -- was moved to ask his what the hell has gone wrong with him:

But the truth is, Joe, there is nothing "wrong" with Mr. Hewitt at all.  His circuitry and software are undamaged and he is functioned as programmed: bloodlessly and heedless of normal human conventions, performing exactly the job that your friends Andy Lack and Phil Griffin hired him to perform, in exactly the way he has always performed it.

You know, speaking of androids, one of the ways we non-androids celebrate our non-androidness is by marking the anniversary of our birth.  In fact, some of us even run fundraisers during the run-up to these "birthdays" because a) honest labor deserves an honest wage and, b) we are keenly aware of our very human need to be able to purchase and consume food :-)



 ...Birthday Fundraiser!


10 Years Gone, Ctd.



You all might find it amusing that I wrote this post -- "The Bubba Bubble" -- exactly decade ago tomorrow.

It was a brief meditation about how various Loyal Republicans and True Conservatives were suddenly "discovering" much to their "shock" that their Republican Party was ... OMFG! ... full of Republicans!

You see, a decade ago the state of the GOP was already so blindingly obvious that even a nobody Libtard blogger in the middle of Middle America could see it as plain and clear as the noonday sun.

Which I hope explains at least a bit of my skepticism, a decade later, about the many Loyal Republicans and True Conservatives who have gone on to great success in a popular new genre of fiction called "Never Trumping" in which the protagonist pretends to be shocked to suddenly discover that their Republican Party was full of ... OMFG! ... Republicans! ... all along.  

And yes, this it part of my...

 ...Birthday Fundraiser!


+ + + + + + + + + + 


The Bubba Bubble


4 Sale: One Big Tent. Slightly Used. (click pic for larger)

For most of my adult life, Conservatism has been a cult where rich people exploited stupid people by playing on their fears and bigotries.

Period.

The idea that most of the margin-of-victory orcs the GOP sopped up during the "Reagan Revolution" were participating in some glorious, Randite uprising or gave a shit about rights -- civil, individual, property or otherwise -- for anyone but themselves and for any reasons other than to ratify their particular strains of paranoia or bigotry was laughable.

Up until very recently, a loose but accurate translation of the Right's technical term for anyone who pointed this out was "Dirty America-hating Liberal Traitor".

Of course, now that the Bubba Bubble has collapsed and Conservatism’s cultural hedge-fund managers like David Fucking Brooks, George Will, Andrew Sullivan and Kathleen Parker have found the product they’ve grown wealthy and influential flogging is as worthless and lethal as a 1970 Ford Pinto made out of securitized mortgages and Chinese dog food, they have come up with a Brand Spanking New technical term for people who question the wisdom of the Dear Leader and the sanity of the Party Base:

“Real Conservatives”

Bwahahaha!



UPDATE: Link fixed (thanks, cyrano.) Now must dash to mine the NaCl.

Democracy Dies...In The Washington Post Magazine


This is the actual headline of an actual fizzy, gushing +4,400 profile fluff piece on the latest model to roll off the Fox News Blonde Dimbo assembly line which was published in the actual Washington Post Magazine:
The Making of Britt McHenry 
Is the rising Fox star a thoughtful conservative or a right-wing troll? As she finds her way in the world of punditry, striking the perfect balance isn’t easy.
And here is a tiny sip from that wretched jug:
Her hair has been loosely curled and teased, her black eyeliner applied, her pink lip gloss dabbed on. A thick cloud of sweet-smelling hair spray has been unleashed, fumigating any natural scent previously on her person. When she gets up from the TV makeup chair, smoothing out her black body-con dress with trendy shoulder cutouts, she towers over everyone in the room, because she is 5-foot-10 and wearing three-inch stilettos. She spits out her gum. Britt McHenry is ready for Fox News...

Many Fox News viewers probably already follow McHenry on Twitter, where, after her layoff from ESPN in April 2017, she cultivated a provocative brand of conservative punditry. “Between Gigi Hadid’s ‘blackface,’ or as some of us call ‘bronzer,’ & a high school girl’s prom dress, apparently Caucasians have to apologize for existing. The reverse racism is ridiculous in 2018,” she tweeted in May. The month before: “Love triggering the Libs.” ...
Oh how far we have fallen from Frank Sinatra Has a Cold
...
Frank Sinatra, leaning against the stool, sniffling a bit from his cold, could not take his eyes off the Game Warden boots. Once, after gazing at them for a few moments, he turned away; but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in them watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, The Oscar.

Finally Sinatra could not contain himself.

"Hey," he yelled in his slightly harsh voice that still had a soft, sharp edge. "Those Italian boots?"

"No," Ellison said.

"Spanish?"

"No."

"Are they English boots?"

"Look, I donno, man," Ellison shot back, frowning at Sinatra, then turning away again.

Now the poolroom was suddenly silent. Leo Durocher who had been poised behind his cue stick and was bent low just froze in that position for a second. Nobody moved. Then Sinatra moved away from the stool and walked with that slow, arrogant swagger of his toward Ellison, the hard tap of Sinatra's shoes the only sound in the room. Then, looking down at Ellison with a slightly raised eyebrow and a tricky little smile, Sinatra asked: "You expecting a storm?"

Harlan Ellison moved a step to the side. "Look, is there any reason why you're talking to me?"

"I don't like the way you're dressed," Sinatra said.

"Hate to shake you up," Ellison said, "but I dress to suit myself."

Now there was some rumbling in the room, and somebody said, "Com'on, Harlan, let's get out of here," and Leo Durocher made his pool shot and said, "Yeah, com'on."

But Ellison stood his ground.

Sinatra said, "What do you do?"

"I'm a plumber," Ellison said.

"No, no, he's not," another young man quickly yelled from across the table. "He wrote The Oscar."

"Oh, yeah," Sinatra said, "well I've seen it, and it's a piece of crap."

"That's strange," Ellison said, "because they haven't even released it yet."

"Well, I've seen it," Sinatra repeated, "and it's a piece of crap."

Now Brad Dexter, very anxious, very big opposite the small figure of Ellison, said, "Com'on, kid, I don't want you in this room."

"Hey," Sinatra interrupted Dexter, "can't you see I'm talking to this guy?"

Dexter was confused. Then his whole attitude changed, and his voice went soft and he said to Ellison, almost with a plea, "Why do you persist in tormenting me?"

The whole scene was becoming ridiculous, and it seemed that Sinatra was only half-serious, perhaps just reacting out of sheer boredom or inner despair; at any rate, after a few more exchanges Harlan Ellison left the room. By this time the word had gotten out to those on the dance floor about the Sinatra-Ellison exchange, and somebody went to look for the manager of the club. But somebody else said that the manager had already heard about it—and had quickly gone out the door, hopped in his car and drove home. So the assistant manager went into the poolroom.



Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!

Now That NBC Has Room Under The Salary Cap...


...rumors are starting to circulate about who will take Megyn Kelly's place.
Who will replace Megyn Kelly on 'Today'? 'The Voice' coach reportedly being considered by NBC

And based on the profiles of their past hiring disasters --

A) Grievance-peddling Blonde


B) Unsettling on-camera presence


C) Dentist-drill-in-an-oil-drum voice


D) History of crackpot ideological positions wildly at odds with the job.

-- I have to believe they're going with Ben Shapiro in a wig.



Happy early Halloween kids!

And my birthday fundraiser continues with the "stretch goal" of raising 1/10th of what NBC will be paying Megyn Kelly to go away.

Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!


Today In "Everybody Has a Podcast"...



Hey kids! After you have literally run out of every other form of human interaction, reviewed every news item back to the Battle of Tours, read and re-read every book in the Library of Congress, watched and re-watched every movie from Newark Athlete (above) to Slender Man ...

... you can listen to S.E. Cupp is kickin' it old school with Glenn Greenwald.

Cupp and Spleenwald, together at last!

Oh boy!

So what could possibly make me sprint roadrunner-fashion in the opposite direction faster than that?

Well, maybe this.  Just maybe this.




Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!

Thursday, October 25, 2018

The Despairing Posture of His Fall


Like Prince Prospero in Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, a devastating plague has been sweeping across CNN president Jeff Zucker's lands for many years.  A plague of Republican madness and racism.  Of paranoia and malignant ignorance.  Depravity.  Authoritarianism.  And lying.  Always. always lying.

And always escalating.  Always getting worse.

And just as Prince Prospero coped with his plague by walling himself and his courtiers off from the rest of the world with every amusement and amenity at their fingertips--
When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his crenellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts.

They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death."
-- so too have Jeff Zucker and the employees of his media corporation protected themselves from the consequence of our Republican plague behind a wall of power and privilege and money.  Safe and amply provisioned inside the Beltway Bubble, they know that no one is going to throw their children in cages, or take away their health insurance or tell them that they can't vote.  And while their occasional jounropological expeditions into the Great American Interior to observe Trump voters in the wild might be a little scary, they are no real threat.

This, however, is where our analogy breaks down, because whatever your opinion of Prospero may be, at least he didn't actively work to propagate the plague.  He didn't hire people specifically to make sure the Red Death went pneumonic.  And he sure as shit didn't try to turn a profit off of the misery and ruin he himself was spreading across the land.

But that exact scenario has been Jeff Zucker's business model all along. 

You see, the problem isn't that Jeff Zucker loves ratings.  It's that Jeff Zucker so obviously doesn't give a damn about anything but ratings.

From The Wrap:
How Jeff Zucker Turned Donald Trump From a Reality Star to a Frontrunner (Video)

The CNN boss and The Donald have both benefited from a relationship some of Zucker’s friends find troubling

The rise of Donald Trump has stunned almost everyone in the media and political establishment — except for a TV executive who can take more credit for Trump’s media success than almost anyone:

CNN President Jeff Zucker.

Zucker has given Trump so much play on his network — sometimes airing Trump rallies end to end —  that it has shocked some colleagues and media observers. For the once-lagging network, the Trump play has paid off wildly: Its ratings have skyrocketed this election cycle.

As Trump prepares for yet another appearance on CNN — on Thursday’s Republican debate — the symbiotic relationship between the two is a reminder that Trump and Zucker have done this dance before, when Zucker was running NBC and Trump’s “The Apprentice” became a hit for the once-struggling network...
And this is how Jeff Zucker has run his media empire during the Rise of Trump: by garnishing his panels with ridiculous pro-Trump cartoon characters like a tiny pile of shaved ice and bile name Kayleigh McEnany, talking patio furniture like Paris Dennard, dead-eyed, bullet-necklace-sporting killbot Katrina Pierson and Pastor "We Love The Amos & Andy Thing, But Could You Take It Up a Notch?" Mark Burns -- all hired to smirk and screech and gibber nonsense at sane people in a grotesque parody of civic debate.

Jeff Zucker is the flesh-peddler who hired Corey Lewendowski  to lie his goon ass off on camera:
Lewandowski was one of the most controversial additions to CNN in many years. He was hired just three days after being ousted from the campaign. He became a familiar face during CNN's election coverage, frequently sparring with liberal commentators like Van Jones and Christine Quinn. 
Lewandowski brought unique first-hand experience running a historic presidential campaign. But some viewers -- and even some CNN staffers -- felt Lewandowski never should have been hired at all. 
Lewandowski was bound by a non-disclosure agreement that impeded his ability to criticize Trump publicly. He also received severance payments from the campaign.
CNN President Jeff Zucker stood by the decision to hire Lewandowski, pointing out that it was critical to have ideological diversity on the airwaves.
Jeff Zucker is the procurer who found a gaunt, ranting, wild-eyed Rick Santorum living in filth at the Bull Goose Loony Home for the Mentally Underclocking and put him on prime time teevee because racist-crazy-Fundy draws a crowd.

Jeff Zucker is the guy who would (it is rumored) break into his Happy Dance --


-- every time Jeffrey "Seig Heil" Lord shit the bed hard enough to be seen from space.

Then, one day and with no warning, the Red Death appeared inside the walls.  Right in the middle of the prince's revels:
And thus too, it happened, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, of horror, and of disgust...
And suddenly, our very own Prince Prospero started caring very deeply about the plague he thought would remain forever outside, never touching or troubling him or his courtiers:

The ending of this story is not yet written, but time is quickly running out for it to be a happy one.


Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!


.

Republicans Today...


Versus Republicans back in the Good Old Days:



Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!



Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Ten Years Gone



I write the ads that make the whole world rage
I write the ads of race baiting sewage
I write the ads that make the Libtards cry
I write the ads, I write the ads...
Ten years ago, ads like these and drive-by commentary like this --
Even Obama’s much-lauded Tuesday speech, which detailed his relationship with his church and focused on the issue of racial reconciliation, failed to shake the notion that Republicans had been given a rare political gift.

“It was a speech written to mau-mau the New York Times editorial board, the network production people and the media into submission. Beautifully calibrated but deeply dishonest,” said GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, who crafted the 2002 ad tying then-Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden. “Not good enough.”
-- were the fruits of Rick Wilson's labor.

And very profitable fruits they were.

You see, up until about five minutes ago, Mr. Wilson had spent his entire adult life as a shit-slinging, Republican smear-merchant for hire.  And Mr. Wilson was very good at his job because he understood exactly what kind of knuckle-dragging, atavistic racists made up the GOP base and exactly what kind of venomous language to deploy to fire them up and get them to the polls.

In fact, as late as March of 2016, Mr. Wilson was one of Ted Cruz's corner men and was relieved when the Cruz presidential campaign finally filled its pockets with stones and walked into the sea.

And now, just two years after being the reluctant defender of Ted Cruz (and thanks to the tireless promotional efforts of his many, many, many friends in the Liberal media) Fredrick G. "Rick" Wilson is the much-sought-after, New York Times best-selling Never Trump author of "Holy Shit!  The Republican Party is Full of Republicans!" and can pretty much pick and choose which publication will print his words.

This is all apparently the result of the mind-blowing epiphany -- "Holy Shit!  The Republican Party is Full of Republicans" -- that came to Mr. Wilson over the same long weekend in 2016 that the same mind-blowing epiphany came to every other life-long Republican Never Trumper who wanted to continue making a living by selling their opinions.  Which, when you think about it, is truly hilarious given the fact that Donald Trump could never in a skajillion years have won the nomination of the Republican Party if he had not been willing to sing from the Paranoid Racist Wingnut Hymnal more loudly and proudly than any other Republican candidate -- a hymnal that has been relentlessly shaped and refined and weaponized over the last 30 years by none other than men like Fredrick G. "Rick" Wilson.

In fact just today in The Daily Beast, Mr. Wilson has a featured article in which he likens the Republican base supporters of Donald Trump to addicts, and Trump himself to a pusher:
Trump Shoves Nationalist Needle Into His Followers’ Veins

While the 70-year-old Queens racist with authoritarian statist leanings has long clad them in nationalist rhetoric, Monday was the first time the word escaped his blubbery lips.

On Monday night, Donald Trump shoved the nationalist needle into the veins of millions of his followers, and slammed the plunger home. He finally said what we’ve known all along: He’s a nationalist...
And this time you can actually believe this assessment of Donald Trump and the Republican base because it's coming from a real Murrican patriot like Rick Wilson, and not from a buncha stoopid, flaky Libtards!
It isn’t feckless, PC social justice-warrior hand-wringing to remind you how dangerous nationalism is as a tool in the hands of those who believe racial identity defines a nation...
Makes you feel kinda warm all over, doesn't it?

Oh, and one more really important thing for every Never Trumper to remember.  If any nosy, Libtards come sniffing around, asking a lot of tricky questions about what was going on inside the GOP before Trump arrived, just remember that every single shitty, unhinged racist element of the Republican Party all sprang simultaneously and spontaneously into existence two years ago, at exactly the same moment that Rick Wilson was grabbing his hat, leaving the sinking ship and suddenly discovering his inner driftglass.   Before that, everything was just fine, and if we all stick to that story we're all gonna get paid!
Trump’s two years of twisting truth after truth past each one’s breaking point have led to a trillion pixels spilled calling out his serial deceptions out, with so far zero political consequences...
And so here is your fun fact for today.

Do you want to know what I was doing a decade ago, at almost exactly the same time that Mr. Wilson was putting the final licks of paint and bile on his Jeremiah Wright add?

A decade ago, in October of 2008, was a vituperative foul-mouthed blogger of the Left, who was, unbeknownst to me, digging my own professional grave by writing rude, strident posts like the one I am reposting below.

One in which I compared the Republican base to addicts.

Shocking!

And compared the Bush Administration to their pushers.

Bad blogger!  Bad, bad blogger!

Having ruined my reputation with such salty, strident talk a decade ago, needless to say that today I do not have a book about how stunned I was to discover in 2016 that the Republican Party was full of Republicans, nor do I have featured articles in national publications.  But I do have a tip jar and a birthday fundraiser, which you are free to support or not as you see fit.

Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!


And now, join me on a brief and sobering trip back to the weeks before the 2008 election and note with both fury and terrible sadness how almost nothing about the underlying facts of our politics and media have changed at all and, because of this, how much worse things have gotten:

Understanding the Right #1

Junkie logic.

The last lie a junkie tells himself isn't "I’m not an addict."

The last lie a junkie tells himself is "My being a addict doesn't matter."

And 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 the hagged-out Cokie Roberts pushes week after week after week on “This Week…”

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.

The Campbell Soup Nazi


From Bloomberg:
Campbell Disavows Executive’s Tweet Alleging a Soros Conspiracy

Campbell Soup Co. is distancing itself from a tweet sent by one of its executives that knocked Open Society, a group backed by investor George Soros.

Kelly Johnston, Campbell’s vice president of government affairs since 2002, sent a tweet this week that said Open Society had “planned and is executing” the migrant caravan that is heading to the U.S. Johnston, 62, is a former secretary of the U.S. Senate and a Republican.
...
Cheap joke, I know, but when have I ever pretended to be anything but low and perverse?


Ron Fournier Appalled To Wake Up In The Bed He Made



Even America's Sad Clown of Centrism has no more fucks to give for the Hamlet of Snowflake, Arizona:

Spineless Republican fence-straddler kicked out of bed by the champion of spineless fence-straddling.

Lordy Moses :-)


Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!



Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Whenever I See A Never Trumper These Days


...all I hear is this.

This probably makes me a bad person, but at least I'm not trying to sell your own words from 20 years ago back to you as some Earth-shattering political epiphany.

I would, however, appreciate a contribution to my birthday fundraiser.

Right now, for example, a single copy of Rick Wilson's book "Holy Shit, The Republican Party Is Full Of Republicans" is selling for $27.00 in hardback at Barnes and Noble.

Something to consider :-)


Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!



David Brooks: Portrait of a Drowning Man Bitching That Lifeguards Are Saving Him Wrong



David Brooks four years ago:
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 two years ago:
It's going to be Rubio. I'm telling you, it's going to be Rubio. Right now, you have the conflict between the conservative, the philosophical conservative wing, which is the National Review crowd, and the rogue wing, which is talk radio and Trump. And so it's interesting to see how that breaks down.

Right now, Trump has the advantage in that, because the conservative movement is less conservative than it was ten years ago. The financial crisis has hit people hard, and they want a government that's on the side of the little guys, as long as it's not filled with liberal values. So Trump, in the short term, but we're prepping the establishment. Do not panic. There are going to be months of this. Wait for Rubio.
David Brooks today:
You know, if they gave prizes for impotent hectoring, finger-wagging, pecksniffery and being wrong about everything all the time...

Wait a minute. I just remembered.

They do give prizes for impotent hectoring, finger-wagging, pecksniffery and being wrong about everything all the time!

In fact, the top prize is a job-for-life at The New York Times. 

So what does Mr. Brooks have to add to our national discourse today?
The Materialist Party
The Democrats fail to take on Trumpism.
Yes it's one more laundry list of impotent hectoring, finger-wagging and pecksniffery about how the Democrats are not reining in the bile-vomiting, hate-mongering Republican hellbeast to Mr. Brooks' specifications and satisfaction.

But for the millionth time, let's clear this up before proceeding. Take it away, Blue Gal:
Don't You Dare Call It 'Trump-ism'

Have you noticed a number of media outlets calling the Republican campaign for President, "Trumpism"?

It isn't Trumpism. It's the Republican Party. And it has been for far longer than Donald Trump has been running for President.
And now (sigh) back to Brooks:
But the Democratic campaign is inadequate to the current moment. It offers no counternarrative to Trump, little moral case against his behavior, no unifying argument against ethnic nationalism. In politics you can’t beat something with nothing. Democrats missed the Trumpian upsurge because while society was dividing into cultural tribes, they spent 2008 through 2016 focusing on health care. Now that the upsurge has happened, they are still pinioned to health care.
So many lies here, all tangled together like a Rat King, so let us boil down a 10,000 word rebuttal into something simple and clear.

Something like, hey asshole,  how about you go just back and read your own god damn writing from 2008 through 2016.

Democrats did not miss "the Trumpian upsurge".  We were beating every drum and sounding every alarm we could lay our hands on.   No, it was you and the rest of your simpering pundit cronies who missed "the Trumpian upsurge".  Missed it and over again, by a fucking parsec, which is both hilarious and terrifying given that this was literally your only job.  The easiest, laziest wingnut welfare job imaginable for which, by any objective measure, you are wildly overpaid.

Your job was to tell millions of readers around the world what was going on inside American politics based on your alleged deep, insider knowledge and supposed access to power.  And in column after column, decades after decade, you got every fucking bit of it wrong.  (Not Safe For Work)


Oh, and for the record, the reason Democrats ran on health care and saving the global economy from collapse and getting us out of the ruinous war that men like David Brooks lied us into was because our country was on life support and taking on all of these legacy disasters from the Bush Administration all at once was necessary for the survival of the nation.  Because Mr. Brooks' Republican Party was perfectly content to see uninsured and under-insured American die like mayflies.  Perfectly content to see the world fall into another Great Depression.  Perfectly content to keep Americans dying in Iraq for another 100 years. 

And since Mr. Brooks was never personally in danger death or bankruptcy from being uninsured, or dying in the desert for George Bush's Excellent Iraqi Adventure, or seeing his personal standard of living lowered by a second Great Depression, the actual fears and tragedies of real humans always mattered so much less to him that making great, gassy pronouncements on the importance of humility and Centrism.

And now Mr. Brooks presumes to appoint himself Lord Admiral of the lifeboat we are providing.  Presumes to lecture us on what a poor job we are doing navigating away from the carnage he created.

Wow.

Mr. Brooks continues:
This familiar, orthodox argument pushes left and right back into their normal categories. It destroys any possibility of a realignment...
I have no desire to "realign" with Mr. Brooks' party of rage-drunk, racist brown-shirts.  I want to drive them back into the political sewers from whence they came and keep them there until they die of a broken heart.

Mr. Brooks continues:
It has now become evident that Republicans are better at politicizing cultural issues and Democrats are better at offering economic benefits to those who are struggling.
For the uninitiated, "politicizing cultural issues"  is Brooks' weasel-speak for "lying".   And that simple truth is both so glaringly self-evident and utterly ruinous to the sniveling Both Siderist bullshit that David Brooks writes for a living that Mr. Brooks will not under any circumstances acknowledge it.

Because the simple fact is that Donald Trump don't have a coherent cultural argument to make to his base, because he doesn't need one.

He just needs to lie.

Lie to stoke racist.  Lie to amplify paranoia.  Lie to bring the GOP base's rage to a full boil and then direct it at the targets the party wishes to destroy.  Lie about crazy stuff.   Lie all the time.  Lie about everything.   And the reprogrammable meatbag base of the Republican Party love it.

They sop it up with a biscuit and ask for seconds. Because lying has always been the source of GOP power.



And before the arrival of Donald Trump, Mr. David Brooks never had a problem with any of this.

Because it was all part of the plan.  This was the Pretty Hate Machine (from me, 12 years ago) --



-- operating as designed, fueled by a pliant, mindless GOP base that would deliver one smashing victory after another.  And sitting high above all, steering the mighty GOP killdozer in the name of True Conservatism, would be men like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Mitt Romney. 

And right by their side, whispering in their ear, would be men like David Brooks.

But it turned out that -- surprise! -- the GOP's grand army of bigots and imbeciles figured out who had the real power in that relationship.  And that, when offered the choice, they not want to fall in line behind Beltway establishment-approved muppets like Jeb or Mittens or Marco or David.  They wanted to goose-step along with someone who understood the lyrics to the music they had been hearing on Hate Radio and watching on Fox News for decades.

Someone who told them, loud and proud, that the voices in their heads were real and true.

They wanted this guy --



-- because the Republican Party had spent 30 years and billions of dollars engineering them to want this guy

And after 30 years of letting Rush Limbaugh taking a dump in their skulls, and 30 years of learning that clowns like David Brooks would let off the hook for any atrocity if they just mumbled the right magic words -- "Muh!  Both sidez!  It were Both sidez made me do it!" -- there is no longer any combination of facts, logic or sweeping words that is going to turn the GOP zombie herd around.

This is the terrible truth that Mr. Brooks would rather eat his own ass than ever admit. 

That All Your Base are Belong to Trump.

Steve M. sums it up nicely:
We've tried offering a "counternarrative to Trump," a "moral case against his behavior" -- and at least 45% of America thinks we're getting upset over nothing, or is inspired to like Trump more.

So screw those people. We can't talk to them. We've made the moral case against Trump, but making it is an exercise in futility. So now we make it only among ourselves; with everyone else, we talk about other issues.

We tried, David. For three years, half of our fellow citizens have told us unambiguously that they don't care. They're the ones who are failing morally. Why is it our responsibility to keep trying to make them change?


Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!



The Crazy Prophecies Of The Dirty Hippies Once Again Come True




This is from me, back in 2012:

June, 2024: At the New Tea Party Rally



And this is from CNN today (h/t Hullabaloo from a post entitled, no kidding, "Keep yer guvmint hands off my Obamacare" :-)
After confidently attacking the law in four consecutive elections, Republicans for the first time this year are playing defense. They are especially struggling to defend the provisions in the House-passed repeal bill, and a separate lawsuit by attorneys general and governors from 20 Republican states, to unravel the law's requirement that insurers provide coverage, with no surcharge, to patients with preexisting health conditions. Over half of all Democratic ads in House and Senate races over roughly the past month have dealt with some aspect of the health care debate, far more than in the past, according to ad tracking by the Wesleyan Media Project. "Health care is the defining issue of the election," Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who is consulting for several liberal groups on the issue, including Protect Our Care, says flatly.

Yeah, I was off by six years.

So sue me.

Also, if you would like to help support my sorcery, please considering contributing a few ducats to...

Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!

Monday, October 22, 2018

The Monster Beneath The Mask


Dr. Wynn: Well, he's your patient, if you knew that the precautions weren't strong enough, you should have told somebody.

Loomis: I told everybody! Nobody listened.

-- Halloween, 1978

For the record (and Lord, how I hope there will be a record), your humble scrivener began writing about the rise of Trump less than 48 hours after he came slouching down the Escalator of Doom --
...in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.
-- and for the last three years, this tiny blog in the middle of Middle America  has been sounding one consistent alarm:
Donald Trump Is The GOP
A warning that Donald Trump was not some one-off, Black Swan event, but rather the logical and inevitable end-product of the Republican Party performing exactly as it had been designed and built over the last 40 years.

Every poll these days shows what Liberals have known and have been saying all along -- that Trump is the Party and the Party is Trump.  And yet our free press  -- that  venerable constitutionally-chartered American institution which is supposed to tell us the truth and shame the Devil -- not only failed repeatedly and catastrophically to take this threat seriously, but actively lied about the threat.  Downplayed it.  Jokes about it.  Deflected and diffused is into a fine mist of toxic Both Siderism which blew equally in all directions.

And this is the other, deeply depressing truth which we Liberals  had to come to terms with a long time ago.  The fact that our vaunted Fourth Estate more often than not acts as a Fifth Column. The fact that our corporate media simply does not live in the same world as the rest of us.

This is why the Beltway media was never going to admit that Trump is the GOP and the GOP is Trump no matter what.  It's why every Both Siderist hack in Christendom blithely went right on Both Sidering right through the nomination and the election (and blocked and insulted vituperative foul-mouthed bloggers of the Left like me who were jumping up and down on our tiny soapboxes screaming that, no Both Sides were NOT the same.)  It's why cable news made a corporate decision to run live coverage of empty podiums at Trump rallies over and over again rather than use those precious minutes to talk about anything substantive.  It's why the Never Trumpers carefully pre-positioned themselves as the "We Told You So" wing of the GOP who would sweep to power and rebuild their shattered party after Hillary Clinton's inevitable victory.

We on the Left knew going into the 2016 election cycle that the corporate media was not going to raise any fundamental questions about the depravity of the Republican Party, because the corporate media never raises any fundamental questions about the depravity of the Republican Party.  I know this because, as I wander through my archives (+8,600 posts and still going) if I squint my eyes slightly it becomes virtually impossible for me to tell the difference between what I was writing about the GOP last week, and what I was writing about the GOP more than a decade ago:
You know that if you really, actually flushed the scum of the Earth your Southern Strategists have so carefully cultivated down the drain, the Republican Party wouldn’t win another election – anywhere – for another generation...

You know it and, more importantly, they know it, which is why they own you.

They are the emergent and inevitable result of the hate-driven moral absolutism, racism and pathologically perverted variant of Christianity that is the bedrock of the Modern GOP. And as long as they are allowed to remain as the pillar of your Party, it will always end in tears…
And it is precisely because we on the Left have been right about the Right all along, that when I look at the loud, clanking, ludicrous, racist, lying, terrifying freak-show that is Donald Trump --


-- I no longer really see Donald Trump.

Sunday, October 21, 2018

It's Always 2004



The mighty birthday fundraiser continues...


Behold, a Birthday Fundraiser!


 ...with this quick retrospective.

This is the "Bad" Post-Trump Republican Party (from Vox, today)
The Trump administration reportedly wants the government to revoke civil rights protections from transgender people

They want to define gender at birth — and force DNA tests to prove otherwise.

And this is the "Good" Pre-Trump Republican Party (from The New York Times, 14 years ago):
'Moral Values' Carried Bush, Rove Says

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 - President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, said Tuesday that opposition to gay marriage was one of the most powerful forces in American politics today and that politicians ignored it at their peril.

"This is an issue on which there is a broad consensus," Mr. Rove said, discussing a presidential election that took place as voters in 11 states backed constitutional amendments barring same-sex marriages.

"In all 11 states, it won by considerable margins," Mr. Rove said, adding, "People do not like the idea or the concept of marriage as being a union between a man and a woman being uprooted and overturned by a few activist judges or a couple of activist local officials."
...

Mr. Rove appeared to stifle a grin when asked whether he was "indebted" to Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, who opened his City Hall to gay marriages until he was blocked by a court, and to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, for ruling that gay couples have a right to marriage.

"If you look at things that intrude into American politics through a nontraditional method -- through a judicial vein -- they tend to have a huge impact," he said...
In the Republican Party, it's always 2004.

And 2001.


And 1994.




And 1990.


And 1988.


And the entire Obama Administration



And on and on and on.

This is who they are.

This is who they have always been.

And anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or is an imbecile, and either way is probably trying to sell you a book.

As a bonus, Matthew Gertz as pulled onto Twitter this Media Matters collection of Hot Takes By Prominent Pundits who were all tingly about how pro-LGBT Trump was gonna be.

My favorite?

 Oh please don't make me choose.

But if you stuffed by tip jar full of doubloons and said I absolutely had to (from the July 22, 2016 edition of Morning Joe)...
JOE SCARBOROUGH (CO-HOST): You don't want to overstate anything, but I think culturally, I think that was a significant landmark for this country, culturally, and the party that has been seen as the most reactionary to the rights of many, many Americans and many different groups, responded that way to Peter's declaration.

MARK HALPERIN: In the history of the Republican Party and gay rights, last night was one of the biggest days ever...