OMG Why Can't Dems Go After Republicans Crazy-Hard Like The Lincoln Project?

The late Steve Gillard

I have heard this lament all over the interwebs for months now.  The Lincoln Lads make a scathing ad, kick it up to Facebook or Twitter and it is immediately picked up, lauded and amplified 1000 times by the lords and ladies of the Beltway media.

So why can't the hapless Dems do that?  Why have the hapless Dems been fighting according to Hoyle all this time while Republicans always go to the brass knuckles and switchblades?

Fair question.

But first, a bit of history.

Here is Joe Scarborough boosting the hell out of his Lincoln Lad pals who also happen to be regulars on his popular cable teevee show.

Angry Republicans declare “This is a time for choosing. America or Trump.” The Lincoln Project ads keep getting tougher by the day.
pic.twitter.com/XSPdnkZZBD

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) June 4, 2020

And here is Joe Scarborough in 2008 slagging Libtard bloggers for daring to correct John McCain on some inconvenient facts:

Also during this segment, Scarborough attacked liberal bloggers for correcting McCain’s error, saying they were probably “just sitting there, eating their Cheetos” and saying, “Let me google Anbar Awakening!” He added, “Dust flying — Cheeto dust flying all over. They’re wiping it on their bare chest while their underwear — you know, their Hanes.”

Here is Jennifer Rubin once again using her Washington Post column to laud the Lincoln Lads:

For their skill, diligence and patriotism, we can say, well done to the creative minds at the Lincoln Project.

And here are a couple of the hundreds of scathing Tweets and columns Jennifer Rubin wrote about Barack Obama --

The left including 99% of lefty pundits have carried Obama water too long on Benghazi, drones, sequester... The lack of standards =shameful

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) March 6, 2013

-- and all of us lefty stooges and lackeys.

@mattsheffield of which 90% is left of Obama

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) March 18, 2013

It is so cute how lefty bloggers try their hearts out ignoring the shift in race and redo of Romney message, still trying to flog tax story

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) July 18, 2012

Here's the inexplicably still-employed Mark Penn scolding Barack Obama for Class Warfare!

Strategy Corner: Obama — Don’t Bring Back Class Warfare

Barack Obama is careening down the wrong path towards re-election.

He should be working as a president, not a candidate.

He should be claiming the vital center, not abandoning it.

He should be holding down taxes rather than raising them.

He should be mastering the global economy, not running away from it.

And most of all, he should be bringing the country together rather than dividing it through class warfare..

And you might recall Mr. David Brooks' hysterical reaction during the 2012 election when Barack Obama dared to campaign like any other candidate (emphasis added):

I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap.

...
[Obama's speech] ideas that couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives...

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it....

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country...

But remember, I’m a sap. The White House has clearly decided that in a town of intransigent Republicans and mean ideologues, it has to be mean and intransigent too. The president was stung by the liberal charge that he was outmaneuvered during the debt-ceiling fight. So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach.

It has gone back, as an appreciative Ezra Klein of The Washington Post conceded, to politics as usual. The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful! I was hoping the president would give a cynical nation something unconventional, but, as you know, I’m a sap...

...The White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths. To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used.

And maybe you remember when the entire Beltway media dropped a house on Hillary Clinton because she had the temerity to point out that some percentage of the Republican voter base were "deplorable"?  From Meet the Press, September 11, 2016:

CHUCK TODD:   I'm going to bring in the panel this morning. Tom Brokaw, of course, is back with us. Joining us for the first time, Audie Cornish, host of "All Things Considered" on NPR, welcome. Stephanie Cutter, former deputy campaign manager for President Obama, now a Clinton supporter. And New York Times columnist, David Brooks, whose book The Road to Character is now out in paperback. Here's Dan Balz's headline this morning. "Clinton's ‘Deplorables’ Remark Sums Up a Deplorable Election Season." David Brooks, what was your initial reaction when you heard?

DAVID BROOKS:  You know, first, it was a terrible week for politics. We've had a race to the bottom before, but this was, like, at speed, like, who's Usain Bolt speed to the bottom, these two. I was struck by another sentence in that quote about the deplorables, that they are "irredeemable."

There's a reason no religion believes that. Because if you believe people are irredeemable, you're saying they somehow lack redeemable souls, they are somehow in a lesser category of human beings and that's just a dark, dark world view. And that's always been the risk with Clinton. As President, she can be very hardworking, very effective, very efficient, but there's a dark world view that is semi Nixonian lurking in there

And those of you with really long memories may actually recall the collective Beltway blacklisting of  boring, Centrist policy wonks, Normal Ornstein and Thomas Mann, when they dared to point out that Both Sides Don't:

Mann and Ornstein Still Off the Sunday Chat Show Radar

I’ve been gone for a couple of weeks and nothing has changed. Greg Sargent reports today that the blacklisting of Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann on the mainstream Sunday chat shows continues apace. Saying that Republicans are mostly to blame for legislative dysfunction and that the media bears some of the blame for this is, apparently, still too hot to handle.

Then there was the maddening example of the Fake Tea Party, which a few -- a very few --  Liberal bloggers shouted themselves hoarse trying to get anyone to listen to the heretical idea that the Tea Party was actually just a Republican rebranding scam designed to get the meathead GOP base off the hook for all the shit they had said and done during the Bush Administration.

And because none of the Very Serious People of the mainstream media wanted to hear that, that story stayed effectively walled off within the political ghetto of the Liberal blogosphere...

...until the risk that the GOP and its media enablers might be actually be held accountable for its sins had passed.  Then and only then did those same Very Serious People suddenly realize  -- ha!ha!ha! -- that the Tea Party really had just been a Republican rebranding scam all along!

The fact is, the Tone Police of the mainstream media hew to a very strict, very narrow political narrative governed by very strict, very narrow rules about who gets to say what.   And they wield that extraordinary gate-keeping power ruthlessly when deciding who gets all the free media attention they want and who get shoved into a corner and told to shaddap.

Who gets labeled "patriots" and who gets labeled Cheeto-dust-smeared alarmist cranks.

And the fact is, you will find nothing in any of the Lincoln Lad's ads that Liberals haven't already  been saying and writing about the Right every day for decades, using whatever tiny platforms we could carve out for ourselves to warn the country that the GOP was dragging us into the fascist abyss.

But as long as the growing existential from the Right could be kept at arm's length and as long as the warnings were coming from the Left, the Beltway media remained 100% committed to maintaining the status quo: using their control over where the cameras are pointed to keep us America-hating, terrorist-loving Libtards the hell away from any national dialogue about politics and relying instead on the unfailingly wrong political insights of its most esteemed members:

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. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase. 

--  David Brooks, November 5, 2014.

And long as it did not threaten them personally, the Beltway media insiders could get away with palling around with liars and monsters, feeding them all the flattering, free airtime they wanted.

A reminder that in 2015 and 16 #MorningJoe had MONTHLY, phone-in, softball interviews with their good friend Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/zfzoHQWcuX

— Frances Langum 🧶 (@bluegal) May 1, 2020

But once the monster they had created turned on them personally, all of that inconvenient history was rewritten in the blink of an eye.

Suddenly -- OMG! -- Donald Trump was actually The Worst and -- OMFG! -- the Republican Party has always been shit!  

From Joe Scarborough in The Washington Post:

Six decades of Republican overreach and corrosive causes have instead led to the rise of Donald Trump and a foreign policy run by John Bolton, an economy guided by Larry Kudlowand a legal team led by conspiracy theorist Joseph DiGenova.

Bolton’s elevation to the position of national security adviser is a fitting coda for a movement whose adherents spent decades throwing themselves on an endless array of ideological barricades while vilifying opponents whose responses to Soviet Russia or Islamic fundamentalism were deemed insufficiently

From long-time Republican campaign veteran Stuart Stevens in The New York Times today:

We Lost the Battle for the Republican Party’s Soul Long Ago  

I'm here to bear reluctant witness that Mr. Trump didn’t hijack the Republican Party. He is the logical conclusion of what the party became over the past 50 or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race-baiting, self-deception and anger that now dominate it. Hold Donald Trump up to a mirror and that bulging, scowling orange face is today’s Republican Party...

Almost overnight, within the same mainstream media which had, for generations, effectively banished all Liberal voices that dared to plant their feet and tell the unvarnished truth about the Republican Party, it became a mark of special grace -- of patriotism, for goodness sake! -- to plant your feet and tell the unvarnished truth about Donald Trump and his enablers.

But only if you were an apostate Republican and only if you were already a member of the Beltway media insider's club.

So I suppose the answer to the question, "Why Can't Dems Go After Republicans Crazy-Hard Like The Lincoln Project?", is that we have been.

Every day.

Year after year.

For decades. 

From the late Steve Gilliard, nearly 20 years ago:

I'm a fighting liberal

You know, I've studied history, I've read about America and you know something, if it weren't for liberals, we'd be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren't fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.

What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn't given us anything we didn't have and it wants to take away our freedoms.

The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slave-owners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man's path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?

Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. "Globalism" which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.

For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn't. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn't enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.

Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.

Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.

It's time to regain the spirit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.

It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.

Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi satellite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America's defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.

It is time to stop looking for an accommodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?

No Half Measures