Monday, June 29, 2020

The Susan Collins Threat Advisory System





No Half Measures




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Sunday, June 28, 2020

Bill Kristol: His Life and Times


Thanks to nepotism and the incestuous nature of the American political media Bloody Bill Kristol has managed to remain one of the most prominent and gainfully-employed unlanced boils on the ass of democracy for decades while at the same holding a nearly-unmatched record for being wrong about everything.  Recently as 2014, Steve Benen writing on behalf of the Rachel Maddow show was writing about Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Paul Bremer:
Are our memories really so short? 
...Bill Kristol, for example, was on “This Week” yesterday, sharing his criticisms of Obama’s handling of Iraq – and no one laughed in his face. On “Meet the Press,” viewers saw Paul Wolfowitz. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made not one, but two Sunday show appearances, popping up on “Face the Nation” and “State of the Union.”
When most media professionals reflect on the period preceding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there’s a general consensus that it was not American journalism’s finest hour. News organizations needed to be skeptical, but weren’t. Reporters needed to push back against dubious sources, but didn’t. Nearly everyone in the business realized that we’d all have to be better next time.
Over the weekend, then, it was hard not to wonder: are our memories really so short?...
Of course the answer is, "no", our memories aren't short at all  That's not the problem.  The problem is that when your employers at MSNBC decide to sign a contributor contract with a shitbag like Bill Kristol and he starts appearing as everyone's jovial uncle on Morning Joe, y'all dummy up.   Because everyone knows, once some Republican splooge-rag like, say, Hugh Hewitt or Michael Steele is brought on board, everyone else is obliged to put on a network-issued muzzle, treat them like a valuable colleague and pretend that the past never happened.

 That's the problem.

And thanks to the Beltway media's willingness to degauss the fuck out of the past when it becomes inconvenient to a member of the club, I have no doubt that, Bloody Bill will get away with continuing to pretend to be shocked and dismayed that his Republican Party is full of Republicans!


And Bill Kristol may tell himself
This is not my beautiful House of Representatives!
And he may tell himself
This is not my beautiful life!




So, if the Republiccan Party you see everywhere ever day isn't Bill Kristol's beautiful Republican Party, then what is?  Where can we look to find what a Bill Kristol Republican Party would look like and what ideas it would champion?

Sadly, the answer, to this question is being held in the maximum-security wing of the Beltway media -- the Past -- where it is guarded 24/7 against sneak-thieves who would dare to remember That Which Was without proper authorization from network teevee executives.  

Happily, I am not a member of the Beltway media, so I am free to visit the Past any time I please, stay as long as I like and take what I wish when I go.

And so, for your entertainment, here is a small cross-section of recent vintage of those values and beliefs with which a Bill Kristol Republican Party would be infused...

Remember Benghaaaazi?
Remember how Brexit was gonna look like small beer compared to Obama's appeasing our enemies?
How terribly punked we were as a nation because Obama refused to stand up for us?
And of Obama was just as bad as Trump because Israel!
Yes, the river of bile for everything having to do with  the Kenyan Usurper never ran dry.
And despite what you might have heard, the Iraq War was actually great!
Even as the Kenyan Usurper worked to destroy America's standing in the world.
As for conservative values. per Bill Kristol, Mike Pence is what a "normal conservative" looks like.
Per Bill Kristol, Mike Pence is what a "principled" conservative looks like.
And Jesus Christ at a Motel Six, Bill, why don't you two just get a room?
Per Bill Kristol, this is what a great conservative policy victory was going to look like
Because in Bill Kristol's fairy tale conservatism, imaginary victories that fuck over millions of Americans are the greatest victories of all.
Remember when slashing the CDC budget was a "conservative principle" proposed by Michelle Malkin and endorsed by Bill Kristol?
Remember how awesome the Fake Tea Party was?
Remember when the threat posed by Donald Trump to Mr. Kristol's glorious conservative movement was laughable?

So Trump hates Obama as hard as Kristol did, is as dedicated to gutting the Affordable Care Act as Kristol was and is far more obedient to the wishes and whims of Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel's far right-wing Likud Party than any president in history, so what is Kristol so spun up about?

Well, it's pretty simple.  Kristol's objections to Trump are almost entire based on Trump's loutish manners.

You see, Kristol's conservatism was always fascist at heart, but what he wanted was a genteel fascism led by a true Conservative hero like Mike Fucking Pence.

But instead he got Trump, who won the hearts of the racist white trash rabble (which Bill Kristol though he had locked down) by offering them the one thing Kristol never could: permission to be as Out and Proud with their depravity, bigotry and paranoia as they pleased.

Kristol and the rest of his Never Trump running buddies spent their entire political careers working to engineer a Quiet Republican Fascism.  A fascism where the racist base of the Republican party was manipulated by dog whistles that were deployed quietly and deniably, like beer farts passing through  silk cushions.  And they they almost made it.  Hell, they might still.

But then Trump came along and starting giving the game away by saying the quiet part loud, and the racist Republican mob love him for it

And now Kristol and the rest of his Never Trump cronies are left to flail around trying to explain how this was all just a terrible, terrible misunderstanding and that certainly none of them are to to blame for somehow never noticing that their Republican Party was full Republicans all along.


No Half Measures


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Sunday Morning Comin' Down


Once upon a time, when I lived in Chicago and did not have cable teevee, I used to be up with the roosters to watch the Sunday Morning Mouse Circus and report on the various crimes against journalism that were being committed on live television.

And then I would write long, stirring, deeply analysed posts about what I had just witnessed which would be read by literally dozens of people.

But over the past few years I've kinda tapered off and this tweet pretty succinctly summarizes why:
It kinda takes the wind out of my sails when I realize that not only are the Sunday Shows an irreparably broken wasteland of toxic claptrap, and not only are they that way because wealth assholes in suits behind the cameras want them that way, but that the nature of their toxic claptrappery is so dismally predictable even a dirty hippie blogger like me can figure out which way they'll jump before the race is run.

From me, yesterday:


For the record, Mr. Hewitt, who we established ling ago is definitely a Cyborg Sent From The Future To Destroy America, lied on national teevee about the pandemic death rate in Germany by a factor of 100.  Then Chuck Todd stopped the show in its tracks, denounced Hewitt as the bloodless Quisling that he is, threw him off the set and told him never to darken Meet the Press' door again!

Bwahahaha!

Just kidding.  Nothing like that happened or ever will happen.  Ol' Shuck just let it slide because letting Republicans lie on teevee is what ol' Shuck was hired to do.

The Internet, bless its hexadecimal heart, was having none of it, and immediately began dragging Mr. Hewitt so hard that he was forced to "correct" his lie on Twitter.  However, Mr. Hewitt remains steadfast that his acclaim for President Cornered Rat's handling of the pandemic based on that lie is still 100% valid.

Although to be charitable, I'm not sure that "lie" is the right word.

After all --


--  the A2s always were a bit twitchy.



No Half Measures


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Saturday, June 27, 2020

Professional Left Podcast #552

"Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world"
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Don't forget to visit our website -- http://www.proleftpod.com -- for all those 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!







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Thursday, June 25, 2020

David Brooks Returns to Form


Warning:  I am about to break the Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks.  By continuing to read this you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to stuff David Brooks wrote in the Before Time.

According to Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times America is now facing Five Epic Crises All at Once!
America Is Facing 5 Epic Crises All at Once
This is not the time to obsess about symbolism.
See?

Four of these five crises are racism,
...all Americans, but especially white Americans, are undergoing a rapid education on the burdens African-Americans carry every day. 
a looming economic depression,
...we could be on the verge of a prolonged economic depression. 
COVID-19 (and not for nothing, but while "we" are pretty thoroughly tired -- like "roll out the tumbrels and lets start with the NYT op-ed page" tired -- "we" haven't given up on a god damn thing.  Republicans have.  Just ask Paul Krugman you smug little tapioca dampness),
Our behavior doesn’t have anything to do with the reality around us. We just got tired so we’re giving up.
and the death spiral of Donald Trump's Republican Party --
The American public is vehemently rejecting Donald Trump’s Republican Party...
-- which, for the record, is also David Brooks' Republican Party, and also for the record, the rejection of that Party of Bigots and Imbeciles is no way a crisis except for a certain species of parasitic pundits whose livelihoods depends entirely on relentlessly pimping the Both Sides Do It Lie.

And speaking of parasitic pundits whose livelihoods depends entirely on relentlessly pimping the Both Sides Do It Lie, you will never guess what Mr. Brooks' Fifth Crisis is.

It is (Avert your eyes!  Hide the children, pets and senior citizens!) those terrible...Social Justice monsters!
...a quasi-religion is seeking control of America’s cultural institutions. The acolytes of this quasi-religion, Social Justice, hew to a simplifying ideology...
And the reason I'm sure that David Brooks believes the Social Justice monsters are the worst crisis of all is that he spends literally half his column bed-wetting about them and their elite universities!
The loudest theory of change is coming from the Social Justice movement. This movement emerged from elite universities.
And their performative zealotry (FYI, among the Never Trumpers the word "performative" is their new favorite thing.  It has replaced "Libtard" when they are speaking to each other about you and me.)
They pay enormous attention to repeating certain slogans, such as “defund the police,” which may or may not have anything to do with policy, and to lifting up symbolic gestures, like kneeling before a football game. It’s a very apt method for change in an age of social media because it’s very performative.
And did you hear what they did to the statue of that nice Mr. Jefferson Davis!
Members of this movement pay intense attention to cultural symbols — to language, statues, the names of buildings.  
I read this and honestly my first thought was, "Now here is a guy who hasn't been tear-gassed nearly enough."  Which was unkind of me, I know.

Then I calmed myself and began asking my brain archive of David Brooks trivia when was the last time that Mr. Brooks threw himself into hippie punching with such fervor.  I mean, as America's leading Brooksologist I should know this stuff, right?

Oh yeah.  Now I remember.

It was during the last, catastrophically-failed Republican administration, when a bunch damn dirty performative hippies were in the streets protesting David Brooks' Dear Leader and his most awesome Iraqi Adventure.

Back when David Brooks was making his living working for Bloody Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard and shitting on decent Americans who thought the Iraq War was doomed fuck-up by a despicable administration:
Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil.

 In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.
Back when Mr. Brooks was building a resume that would land him a job-for-life at The New York Times by slandering on people like you and me for our performative zealotry:
In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion -- that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed--but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis.
Back when Republicans confidently predicted that they were never gonna lose again, so David Brooks could let his inner Ben Shapiro run wild and break out his favorite hippie-punching vocabulary, like "parochialism" --
This is the dictionary definition of parochialism--the inability to consider the larger global threats because one is consumed by one's immediate domestic hatreds. This parochialism takes many forms, but all the branches of the opposition to the war in Iraq have one thing in common: Iraq is never the issue. Something else is always the issue. For Schama and many others, the Bush crowd is the issue. They stole the election. They serve corporate America. They have bad manners. This is the prism through which Maureen Dowd, Molly Ivins, and many others view the war.
-- and "the 1960s" --
They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election.
 -- and  "playing culture war" --
They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq.
-- and of course those damn "peaceniks" --
For example, on September 19, a group of peaceniks took out a full-page ad in the New York Times opposing the campaign in Afghanistan and a possible campaign in Iraq. Signatories included all the usual suspects: Jane Fonda, Edward Said, Barbara Ehrenreich, Tom Hayden, Gore Vidal, Ed Asner, and on and on.
-- who were drunk on their own"decadence" and "moral exhibitionism".
The entire exercise is a picture perfect example of moral exhibitionism, by a group of people decadently refusing even to acknowledge the difficulties and tradeoffs that confront those who actually have to make decisions about policy.
Because as every right thinking person knew, opponents of the war were foggy-brained academic and literary intellectuals, probably from elite universities!
When you get deep enough into the peace camp you find fog about the fog. You find a generation of academic and literary intellectuals who have so devoted themselves to questioning meanings, deconstructing texts, decoding signifiers, and unmasking perspectives, they can't even make an argument anymore.
And speaking of  right thinking people, this was all back during a time when David Brooks literally invented a completely imaginary Average American whom he named Joey Tabula Rasa (no I am not kidding) and out of who's mouth came all the working-class, blue collar, aw-shucks pro-war wisdom that David Brooks assured his cloistered, Beltway readership was Out There Somewhere.
The final group Joey sees on the political landscape are the marchers. These people are always in the streets with their banners and puppets. They march against the IMF and World Bank one day, and against whatever war happens to be going on the next. Joey is not sure what these people are for. They don't seem to have any alternative to globalization. They don't seem to know how to deal with the Taliban or Saddam. They just march against. Joey figures it must be part of their personality.
Joey knows that this is what people did in the 1960s, and he regards the marchers as vaguely archaic. He knows that they tend to come from Hollywood and academia. Joey is not hostile to those worlds. He loves movies and likes many of his professors. He just senses that they are cloistered worlds, removed from day-to-day reality, and he doesn't plan on spending his life there. 
That was back in 2003, and 17 years later, Mr. Brooks' remains exactly who he was 17 years ago: a myopic and morally soured little man whose relentless ambition and the mighty shield wall of The New York Times  have liberated from any fear of accountability, freeing him to float above mere humanity, spinning out one asinine economic and cultural theory after another, radically revising history whenever the need arises, freely contradicting himself as he pleases, and always -- 

-- twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!

Not tear-gassed nearly enough.



No Half Measures




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I Do Not Consent to Pretending That History Began in 2016



From the Before Time:

Pew Research Center Religion & Public Life

JUNE 22, 2007
Religious Republicans: Hanging Tough with Bush
by John C. Green
The role of religious voters in the Republican Party has been highlighted by the sharp criticism of the Republican presidential front-runners – Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney – by conservative religious leaders.
Are religious Republicans abandoning President Bush and perhaps the GOP as well? The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted May 30-June 3, suggests that this conclusion is unlikely to be true. (In this analysis, “religious Republicans” are defined as registered voters who identified as Republicans or leaned Republican and reported attending worship services once a week or more.)

Figure
The data show that in June 2007, religious Republicans strongly approved of President Bush’s job performance (71%) and also strongly believed that using military force in Iraq was the right decision (80%). Bush’s approval among religious Republicans has declined significantly since July 2005 (down by 15 percentage points), but support for the Iraq War decision has diminished only slightly (down 3 points).

These figures are especially impressive when compared to the views held by other Americans. For example, religious Republicans are more supportive of President Bush and the Iraq War decision than other Republicans (by 10 and 8 points, respectively). And religious Republicans are far more supportive of Bush and the Iraq War than the public at large, among whom just 29% approve of Bush’s job performance and only 40% agree with the decision to use military force in Iraq.

These findings suggest that religious Republicans are still a firm part of the GOP base...


No Half Measures



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Given The Rate At Which The Past Is Disappearing...



...now that Carly "Destroyer of Companies" Fiornia has begun her desperate sprint for a good seat on the lifeboat by announcing that she is voting for Joe Biden --

-- it is almost certainly against one of the new Liberal High Command house rules to point out that Ms. Fiornia is an objectively loathsome person and remind everyone that during the last presidential election
  1.  Ms. Fiorina went all-in on a modern version of the Blood Libel as her passport to the White House, and...

  2. From Chuck Todd to Andrea Mitchell to David Brooks, the cream of the Beltway punditocracy reacted exactly the way you would expect them to react.
However, since I do not work for Liberal High Command, here is a re-post of a "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" I penned over 1,000 years ago less than five years ago which goes into these subjects in some detail.

Enjoy.

Burn The Lifeboats



Sunday Morning Comin' Down: Carly Fiorina's Blood Libel


You will excuse me if I skip over Shuck Todd (Motto: "Still beatin' that dead horse boss!") using his time with Secretary Clinton this morning to shore of his Beltway cred by beating of dead horse of "Emailghaaaazi" for the umpteenth time and move on to the much more gruesomely a musing subject of Destroyer of Companies, Carly Fiorina, going all in on a modern version of the Blood Libel as her passport to the White House.

...(also blood accusation) is an accusation that Jews kidnapped and murdered the children of Christians to use their blood as part of their religious rituals during Jewish holidays. Historically, these claims—alongside those of well poisoning and host desecration—have been a major theme in European persecution of Jews.
-- is one of oldest, ugliest, most profoundly dangerous lies in history.  Dredged straight from Middle Ages, when frenzied Catholic mobs, whipped up by monstrous slander, would torture and murder innocent Jews, it is also a lie the drips e-f-f-o-r-t-l-e-s-s-l-y from the lips of ghouls like Ms. Fiorina.

It is a lie which Ms. Fiorina defends aggressively against the pesky intrusion of facts and reality (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars) -- 



-- and it is a lie which keeps Ms. Fiorina rising in the polls because, frankly, there is damn little difference anymore between the modern GOP base, and pig-ignorant Middle Ages yahoos who could be prodded into the worst kinds of atrocities over and over again by fear, bigotry and the Bible.

Of course you would not know any of this if, as part of your court-ordered community service, you had been forced to watch "Meet the Press" today.  In fact, just on the basis of the show's content, one would be hard pressed to figure out that America has two major and distinctly different political parties.  You see, at Shuck Todd's puppet show, there are no Republicans or Democrats at all.  There are no Liberals or Conservatives.  Instead it is the consensus of Mr. Todd's elite, Both Siderist panel that there exists in this country only an undifferentiated slab of humanity called "Murricans" who are also sometimes known as "voters" or the "electorate".  

And it turns out, "issues" do not matter to "voters" at all! 

"Voters" are entirely motivated by their "moods", and consequently it is not the job of elite, Both Siderist pundits to discuss whether some candidate is, say, lying through her fucking teeth or not. They are merely there to note the rise and fall of candidates based on how well they pander to the mood of the monolithic, non-party-affiliated "voter".

David Brooks explains (and yes, emphasis will be added throughout):
DAVID BROOKS:
Yeah, well [Hillary Clinton] was having a little more fun today. Sometimes she's campaigning like she's in Napoleon's march on Moscow, just like a trudge through the winter. This was a little more upbeat, a little more fun. But she's still in her own bubble. Not where the country is, but it's sort of in the Clinton bubble And finally, as Andrea said, she spent her entire political career on the defensive, whether it was the Rose law firm, whether it was Benghazi, whether it was her husband's shenanigans.

She's basically has a defensive posture. And that means she's erecting walls, not trusting people, and there's no romance. People, especially this year, they want a little romance, they want a lot of ideological action going outward. But she's on the defensive. And so that's the core problem. It's not the emails. Nobody's going to disqualify her as president because she used one server versus another. That's not a real scandal. It's her attitude.
See, according to David Brooks, Secretary Clinton's caution has nothing to do with the fact that she and her family have been hunted like wild animals for 20 years by Beltway vampires like David Brooks. That's all just a buncha stuff.

That happened.

In the past.

LaLaLaLaLa!

I mean, who really remembers what really happened anyway? And besides, facts are icky and make pundits like David Brooks look like cowards and frauds and hypocrites, so best stick to fun stuff like moods and attitudes.

And passion!

David Brooks and Shuck Todd explain:
CHUCK TODD:
David, where [Carly Fiorina] showed passion is not, like, she is not accepting any of the fact checks on this Planned Parenthood thing. And she really doesn't want to, you know, she's basically saying, "The details don't matter. You should be outraged."

DAVID BROOKS:
Yeah, well, to Andrew's point, it's not quite clear that reality matters to the electorate right now. And I think that's true with Trump, it's true with her, there are some people that are great campaigners, and some people that are actually good in reality. And so far the good in reality people are not doing so well in the polls.

...Fiorina does not accept the concept that she should answer these questions. She's on the offensive. She's throwing blows. No matter what you ask her, she's throwing blows to the Democrats. And she's just permanent offense.

CHUCK TODD:
Which may explain why she's getting a moment.

DAVID BROOKS:
And that's where the country is. That's the ethos of the country right now.

That's right -- David Brooks believes that wantonly lobbing the Blood Libel into the middle of a presidential campaign and then defending that disgraceful lie to the hilt is not the premeditated act of a professional swindler pandering to the worst instincts of the Republican party's depraved base...

...but merely "the ethos of the country right now."

 Also this entire story line does not pair well with Mr. Brooks' fawning column from less than two weeks ago in which he proposed "The Marco Rubio-Carly Fiorina Option" so, uh, I guess he never wrote it.

Certainly none of his colleagues ever mentioned it.

Next -- and strictly from the point of view of grim amusement -- it was hella entertaining to see Mrs. Alan Greenspan (suddenly and far too late) try to grow a conscience --
ANDREA MITCHELL:
But let's face facts here. The facts are also that that fetus was from a Pennsylvania miscarriage. That fetus had nothing to do with Planned Parenthood. And Planned Parenthood does not get federal money for abortions, period. Abortions are 3% of their work. The rest is women's healthcare...
-- and then, as if realizing she was on the verge of violating the cardinal rule of Both Siderism by blaming Republicans for the behavior of Republicans, just as suddenly reverse herself mid-paragraph and smother her own argument in its crib:
ANDREA MITCHELL:
...Now that said, you're absolutely right. Carly Fiorina is in tune with the mood of the electorate. The electorate, actually in both political parties.
And just in case anyone in the Comcast Human Resources and Both Siderist Enforcement Bureau might have been listening and gotten the impression that Mrs. Alan Greenspan had just blamed Republicans for being Republicans, moments later she took a second, big bite of that turd to prove her loyalty to the corporation:
CHUCK TODD:
Is Hillary Clinton in tune with the mood of the electorate?

ANDREA MITCHELL:
Not so far. Not so far. She's not angry enough. She's not-- And it's hard for her to be angry because then you've got, you know, Donald Trump saying, "She's shrill," which is a sexist word,let's face it. But she has to get around that. But the anger, the passion is all on people going on the attack, whether it's, you know, whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's Carly Fiorina, or whether it's Bernie Sanders.
You know, both sides so pleeeeeease don't fire me!

And in case at this point you still were still clinging to any fancy-pants notion that this country has two, clearly delineated political parties, one of which is A) a deranged, paranoid, rage-drunk mob which B) just forced its Speaker toes-first through a wood-chipper, Shuck Todd swapped his Both Siderist framing hammer for a Both Siderist sledgehammer to drive such silly notions out of your damn fool Liberal head:
CHUCK TODD:
And by the way, and this is the mood. And this is the electorate that just forced John Boehner out of his job.
Eugene Robinson at least had the decency to be gobsmacked by the sheer enormity and bald-facedness of Ms. Fiorina's Blood Libel:
EUGENE ROBINSON:
Yeah, but I was actually floored by that though because she simply would not deal with the factual issue. She would not deal with the issue that she has misrepresented the facts about that video. And you correctly told her what the facts are. And she simply wouldn't deal with it. I don't think you can continue to do that on a specific issue time after time after time, because people are going to keep bringing it up until you acknowledge that well yes, these are the facts. She wouldn't even acknowledge that fact.
Which Mr. Brooks dismissed with a satisfied, moon-faced smirk.
DAVID BROOKS:
You seem to think the laws of gravity are applying this year. But so far, they haven't applied.
And which, in turn, led to this exchange:
CHUCK TODD:
Well, it's funny you say that--

EUGENE ROBINSON:
--I do forget, I do forget

CHUCK TODD:
Can I just tell you that Bill Kristol wrote this great column yesterday where he basically said, you know...
And that is the exact moment I turned off "Meet the Press".

Because it's just too damn much.

However, even after watching Shuck Todd's claptrap mudslide sweep away any pretense of journalism on Sunday teevee, I have to say that this week, for sheer, surreal Bizarro World impressiveness, nothing exceeded this exchange between Martha Raddatz and Newt Gingrich on "This Week...":
RADDATZ: You, of course, resigned the speakership in '99. What's different here?

GINGRICH: I'm not sure a lot is different. John and I both faced the fact that there was a hardcore group, sort of a minority of the party, who were prepared to cause total chaos. In my case, they had announced they would never vote for me for speaker, and I'd never get to win a smaller majority, I'd never get to the 218. And so you just have chaos in the House...
Let the record show that it was Newt Gingrich who fucking invented that "hardcore group, sort of a minority of the party, who were prepared to cause total chaos."

Let the record further show that Ms. Raddatz did not ask Newt! a single follow-up question to challenge the great, steaming dump he took on her desk.

Let the record also show that Ms. Raddatz did not roll her eyes and make the universal gesture for Giant Blowjob --


-- nor did she wallop Newt! upside his head with a folding chair.

And thus did Martha Raddatz absolve me from ever taking her seriously as a journalist again.



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Wednesday, June 24, 2020

They're Afraid of Americans



From The New York Times:
E.U. May Bar American Travelers as It Reopens Borders, Citing Failures on Virus

European Union officials are racing to agree on who can visit the bloc as of July 1 based on how countries of origin are faring with new coronavirus cases. Americans, so far, are excluded, according to draft lists seen by The New York Times.
Donny wants a brain
Donny wants to suck on a Coke
Donny wants a woman
Donny wants to think of a joke
Donny's in America...

The work of President Stupid and the Plague Rat Party is almost done.

It has taken the Republican Party decades of effort and billions of dollars to systematically cripple the United States and corrode our democratic institutions, but they are finally within striking distance of delivering the final kill-shot to this country which they hate so deeply.


No Half Measures



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Today In "Both Sides Do It"...



...this shithead.


For me, it makes decision-making so much simpler knowing that Every Single Republican is a completely irredeemable monster.  Each one's depravity manifests itself in its own unique proportions -- some are more stupid than evil, some are more nihilist than racist -- but they are all monsters.

Even the ones who are currently your "friends".


Behold, a Tip Jar!


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Missouri to Change Its Official Nickname From the "Show-Me" State...


...to the "I'm Not Gonna Look, You Can't Make Me Look, There Is Nothing to See Here,  La-La-La-I-Am-Not-Listening-To-You" State.



No Half Measures

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Tuesday, June 23, 2020

My Clone Went Into Stasis In 2007 and Just Woke Up This Morning...


...and I don't know how to explain to him that David Brooks has not only not been fired from The New York Times for being horrendously bad at his job...

QUEENBOBO_SM


...and not only are virtually all the Liberal writers who were right about the Right all along still media pariahs who can't snag a paying gig anywhere...

...but Mr Brooks now has a second paid writing sinecure at The Atlantic where he is currently penning paeans to multiculturalism, race relations and the plight of the blue collar worker --


-- as filtered through the music of Bruce Springsteen.

Bruce Springsteen’s Playlist for the Trump Era
“I don’t know if our democracy could stand another four years of his custodianship.”

This is a moment of tumult, anger, hope, and social change. At moments such as this, songwriters and musicians have a power to name things and help us make sense of events—artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Janelle Monáe, Tom Morello, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen.

 It’s been 20 years since Springsteen wrote “American Skin (41 Shots),” a powerful song about the police killing of a black man. I thought it might be a good idea to check in with Bruce, to get his reflections on this moment and on music in this moment. Here’s a slightly edited transcript of our conversation, which took place on June 9.

 David Brooks: We’ve got people marching in the streets. We’ve got great tumult. What do you see? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about what’s going on out there?

Bruce Springsteen: I don’t think anybody truly knows where we’re going from here yet. It depends on too many unknowns. We don’t know where the COVID virus is going to take us. We don’t know where Black Lives Matter is going to take us right now. Do we get a real practical conversation going about race and policing and ultimately about the economic inequality that’s been a stain on our social contract?

And of course, nobody knows where our next election is going to take us. I believe that our current president is a threat to our democracy. He simply makes any kind of reform that much harder. I don’t know if our democracy could stand another four years of his custodianship. These are all existential threats to our democracy and our American way of life...

Because the past does not exist and nothing means anything anymore.



No Half Measures

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Monday, June 22, 2020

Eventually Republican Scum Always Get Around To Flag Burning



Here's the joke.   In February, I promised you:
A summer full of Flag Burning amendments, English-only education "debates", medicinal wine from a teaspoon, beer from a bottle, Libertine men! Scarlet women! Ragtime! and whatever else the GOP can dredge up from the very bottom of the Conservative Culture War sewer.
Here's the punchine:  That was February of 2012, "Libertine Men! Scarlet Women!"

 Which I realize violates the non-aggression pact that many of my Liberal "allies" have signed with the Never Trumpers in which the Establishment Left agrees to pretend that history began in 2016, and the Never Trumpers agree that while Donald Trump is definitely not a Republican, and that they bear no responsibility whatsoever for his rise to power, and that the GOP was doing just fine before 2016, and that  Liberals are still shit...something something...wait, remind me again just exactly what concessions the Never Trumpers are making?

Anyway, since I never signed any such agreement, I thought I would take this moment to remind you that when the Party of Bigots and Imbeciles gets in trouble -- 

-- they always go back to the same filthy playbook.  


No Half Measures


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Extraordinarily Dangerous








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Sunday Morning Comin' Down



Some of you might remember that once upon a time I did a weekly roundup of the crimes against journalism committed by the Sunday Morning Gasbag Cavalcade.  This gathering and collating of the lies and failures of our nation's premier network teevee political reporting did not change the course of events one micron, but I felt that, as we bloggers of olde used to say, "documenting the atrocities" was reason enough to do it.

I gradually tapered off because eventually it was clear that there was no one left to convince.  Either you got that programs like Meet the Press and This Week were the political media equivalents of hobble skirts and chopines -- horrendous freaks of contemporary fashion that our decedents will look back on in complete bafflement -- or you didn't.  Sure, the occasional "OMFG, can you believe Chuck Todd?!"-type remark would bubble up from the muggles when one of the Sunday Shows went so far off the tracks and into the tall grass that it brutalized their soporific indifference, but mostly the Gasbag Cavalcade remains the elevator music of our political discourse watched by people who have no idea how badly the Republican Party has wounded this country -- and, most importantly, don't want to know -- but instead want to give off the musk of an Informed Citizen should the subject come up.

They want to be able to quickly identify themselves as members in good standing of the Tribe of Reasonable Centrists by muttering "Isn't it a shame that Both Sides are so fucked up?" to the grunts and nods of their fellow tribesmen.

But this Sunday, Tim Scott, the Republican Party's One Black Friend went far enough above and beyond serving the agenda of a party built on the hatred of people who look like Tim Scott that I thought it deserved memorializing for posterity.

First there was this, which gave me cause to wonder --

-- whether Michael Steele will be sending Tim Scott a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Scott stop doing Steele's Republican buck-and-wing act from 2009?


And then there was this little charade which depends entirely on --
-- no one mentioning that just five month ago Scott was talking out of the other side of this mouth. 

Republican senator says he wishes John Bolton would've testified in Congress — months after he rejected calling for new witnesses during Trump's impeachment

Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina says he wished former national security adviser John Bolton would have testified before Congress — nearly five months after he voted against calling new witnesses to testify for President Donald Trump's impeachment trial...

 Scott's comments come nearly five months after he joined his Republican colleagues to prevent new witnesses and evidence from consideration for President Trump's impeachment trial. On January 31, Scott voted along party lines against the measure in a 51-49 vote, which would have compelled Bolton and other White House officials to provide testimony of their knowledge about the Ukraine scandal.

 "The fact remains, nothing presented so far, even as a theoretical, has shown [Donald Trump] committed an impeachable offense," Scott tweeted two days before his vote. "This continues to be just a Democratic political charade."
This is one of those really important "facts" that it would have been helpful to bring up in real time, but the person emceeing Tim Scott's open mic night was Jonathan Karl, and calling out Republicans for lying to his face is not something Karl does.

At this point I have no doubt that when this life is over, Scott will find himself where he has always dreamed of being -- at the Pearly Gates of White Heaven talking to Ronald Reagan.


What Scott does not understand is that he will never actually be admitted into White Heaven but will instead be posted outside where he will be forced to read “Battle Royal”, the first chapter of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, aloud over and over again for eternity for the amusement of White Heaven's members and guests.




No Half Measures


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Saturday, June 20, 2020

As They Pulled You Out Of The Oxygen Tent...


...you asked for the latest party.


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Congratulations Bovine University Class of 2020!







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Friday, June 19, 2020

Professional Left Podcast #551


"Logic and practical information do not seem to apply here."
"You admit that?"
"To deny the facts would be illogical, Doctor."
-- Spock and McCoy, A Piece of the Action

Don't forget to visit our website -- http://www.proleftpod.com -- for all those 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!







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President Stupid Taking Credit for Popularizing Juneteenth





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Deleted Scene From "Get Out"





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If You Give a Never Trumper a Cookie



If you give a Never Trumper a cookie, he'll demand a glass of milk.

If you give a Never Trumper a glass of milk, he'll demand a large media platform.

If you give a Never Trumper a large media platform, he'll demand that you give him your hard-won credibility and the right to speak on your behalf.

If you give a Never Trumper your hard-won credibility and the right to speak on your behalf, he now has reason to believe that he can boss you around and can break out the "Both Sides Do It" cudgel and drive you to where he wanted you to go all along.



And now that he's the boss of you, why don't get off your lazy, Liberal ass and bring him a glass of milk.

And a god damn cookie.

Because taking your movement away from you is hard work!

And Never Trumpers are always hungry.


No Half Measures

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