Wednesday, July 29, 2020

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.

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 --

-- and all of us lefty stooges and lackeys.


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.


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

8 comments:

duquesne_pdx said...

Still one of the best things ever written on the interwebs.

janet said...

He was such a great writer and thinker. What a loss. But we have you and I'm happy for that.

Jason said...

I can't believe I've never read that Steve Gillard manifesto before. The best written description of a liberal I've ever read. That was fantastic.

Anonymous said...

There's a club....

...thanks for remembering Steve.

RetiredPatriot

Neo Tuxedo said...

"You get lung cancer and so they shoot you full of radiation. You complain about smog so they bury plutonium in your back yard. YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT CORPORATE CRIME SO THEY KILL YOU. Well, maybe not. Maybe they don't even jail you.
"They just don't listen. You can rant all you like, but not on their networks."
-- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, The Book of the SubGenius (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983 [Simon Fireside, 1987]), p.97 of the second edition

Robt said...

rirst, Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt might be the Lincoln Project faces.

It is the media tech employees that are producing the Ads.

There is an assortment of causes for these ideological conservatives to take this position in opposing Trump.

It is the Charlie Sykes syndrome .
He was paid well to fill the minds with hate,spite, anger, racism, etc. And ounce of truth and a ton of lies blended just right. He was provided with the radio media station platform. Every day. He received the morning Joe from Drudge Report, Rush and Heritage Foundation. and repeated the materials and ad lib off the cliff..

Never did he expect his hungry zombies to look at him with the hateful hunger seeing a meal in him.
They were to be anarchists at others. But they turned on him. He had no more use for the GOP after that. kristol was left out of the White House important people list. Republican Morning Joe had to be given a socialist position at MSNBC because he wasn't pure enough to be racist, fascist and Commie at the same time. Ex REp. Jolly who fought tooth and finger nail to obstruct the A.C.A. Once he left the house of reps., he found he needed health insurance on his own. He ad his family with pre conditions found it health insurance affordable. Except for the horrible Obama Care that made insuring him and his family possible. He now admits this. He even spoke of the GOP leadership jack boot that was on his neck to oppose the ACA. How he waived the value of what was best for the people in his district to be "in with thein crowd" with the GOP leadership. made him feel important and like he was really going somewhere. They even patted him on the head. But he asked the wrong questions about health care to his GOP leadership and they primaried his butt for it.
Just not pure enough. OPurity may sound familiar to anyone who has some high school history recall. Hitler's Germany had some very strong feelings over purity.
As did Newt Gingrich when he began the house republican purdes for his biggest donor (Koch Brothers).


Anyways,
They are all aging out, didn't inject the zombie venom they pumped into the American blood stream. They did it all for the bucks and fame and feeling of power around powerful people in positions of power. The prosperity Gospel, where you suck up and do the bidding of the rich and powerful and money will rub off them and onto you. Walls, you are wealthy.

These relic GOPers want to stay in the game. Trump finished the excommunicating of them for the younger likes of hateful corrupt mindless young ones. Like Steve Bannon, Steven Miller. Sure mark Meadows (TEA party) no government dude) is now president's Chief of staff. But Koch Brothers money does more than speak loudly.

After their usefulness has passed. They find they have no marketable skills besides lying cheating, spreading hate. You can't expect them to go out and find a actual job and work for a living.
They are special. Not like the iron workers or other that saw their jobs go to China because of their "free market lies.
The smell Trump going down. They are positioning themselves through these ads to the weal;thy donors of the GOP tor a re branding top position of the GOP.

The Right wing not only won but succeded in all their ideological wet dreams.

There hasn't been any such animal as a moderate republican since the purge or even before.

It is not about them being politically ideological. It has always been what can they do for the wealthy assholes no matter who it harms.

Dark Phoenix (Nixa) said...

And I fully expect the next week of Beltway news will solidify this double standard. Anyone want to take bets on which of the following is likely:
1) The pundits spend the week talking about Trump's threat to postpone elections.
2) The pundits spend the week talking about how horrible it was that Obama used John Lewis' eulogy to take shots at Trump and the Republican Party.
3) The pundits actually discuss both, but only so they can cry about how horrible Both Sides are being, and can't we all just get along?

Big Guy said...

I notice media have erased Mary Trump. I could see that coming when she said Trump's enablers (and she included media) needed to be held responsible for his ascent.Can't have that. Plus too many Dems would freak out if Dems posted ads like LP. Too many of them fall for the both sidey crap.