Portrait of a Taliban Mullah...

...exhorting an Al-Qaeda terrorist.

No Half Measures

Now Charlie Sykes Is Just Trolling Me

Honestly Charlie, if you and your guest are going to use the phrase "Dumpster Fire" three times in one podcast, and breathlessly compare Trump and the rest of your Republican Party to arsonists as if you just figured this shit out yesterday (from me, 14 years ago) --

Drunk on their own Rapture Narcosis, blissfully refusing to listen or learn, they are the base of the Party that makes all the crimes and tragedies and incompetence possible. That incomprehensibly ignorant army who refuse to acknowledge the existence of the fascist conflagration that is burning their asses…while simultaneously and ferociously guarding the arsonists who set and tend the blaze.

And like mercury or PCBs, their pollution now taints everything, so tracking and cataloging each mutagentic nugget of toxin that they leach into our democracy can seem overwhelming. Until the proper context swims into view and you can see that all of their skirmishes on every front – from pulpit to classroom to pharmacy to school board to Congress – all are bred from the same DNA.

Fear.

That, in the end, is all they have. They mine it, mill it, extrude it, tuckpoint it into every sermon and speech, deep-fry it and package it a hundred different ways in a thousand scary packages...but in the end its always the same product.

Fear.

Which is a useful emotion in small doses, but anyone who is trying to keep you afraid all the time is your enemy.

And anyone who is afraid all the time is their ally.

A fearful man can’t be reasoned with; he just wants everything that scares him to die and will pay a premium price to anyone who will do the job for him, even if the killers he hires just happen to be the same thugs who have a vested interest in keeping him perpetually panicked. The same people who are jabbing his fear-sac with knitting needles to make sure not a day goes by when he isn’t terrified out of his right mind...

-- the very least you could do is either hit my tip jar on the way out ('cause I know you read this blog Charlie) or quit hiding from me on social media.

And I know we can rely on you Never Trumpers to always do the very least you can do.

No Half Measures

Professional Left Podcast #561

 "We live here in the United States of Amnesia. No one remembers anything before Monday morning.  Everything is a blank.  They have no history.”

-- Gore Vidal, writer

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!

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The Renomination of the Mayor of Shark City

At the beginning of the pandemic, I compared President Stupid to the mayor in Jaws.

This is no longer true.

In Jaws, after enough people had died and the existence of a man-eating shark was confirmed when it literally swam up in broad daylight and ate a kid in front of the entire town on the Fourth of July, the shaken mayor finally relented and authorized spending whatever was necessary to kill the shark and save the town.

But here in the real world, as the death toll tops 180,000, President Stupid has...

...fired the sheriff...

...fired the shark expert...

...fired the professional shark-hunter...

...put the town drunk, the town crackpot and his own idiot son-in-law in charge of shark stuff...

...declared victory over the shark even as a feeding frenzy of thousands of sharks turns the beach red with blood every day...

...put his idiot children in charge of telling everyone how awesomely their daddy handled the shark thingie...

...and ordered that his renomination party be held waist-deep in the shark-infested waters.

The Unmasked Ball: Trump Creates His Own Pandemic-Free Reality

Borrowing the White House as a campaign stage, the R.N.C. closed by garden-partying like Covid-19 was over.

COVID-19 has no greater ally than Donald John Trump and the Republican Party.

No Half Measures

Box Seats at the Republican Civil War

As the two sides of the wildly over-privileged, undeserving, bespectacled white male Conservative pundit ecosystem struggle for dominance, let's not deprive ourselves of the opportunity to sit back, pop a cold one, and root for them to annihilate each other.

Hugh Hewitt Thursday night on the Twitter machine:

Terrific speech. Terrific convention. And there’s never been a convention to end with such a display. Ever. The greatest American political traditions of parades and stemwinders just got topped.

— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) August 28, 2020

Glenn Beck Thursday night on the Twitter machine:

This is the most humble speech I have seen from href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@realDonaldTrump or @BarackObama. Obama was always I, I, I. Trump touts himself as well. BUT TONIGHT IT WAS ALL ABOUT YOU AND US. If he stays the course, #Trump2020Landslide #RNC2020

— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) August 28, 2020

David Brooks Thursday night on the PBS:

 "This was the worst acceptance speech I've ever heard... That was a Morning in America speech...because in six minutes it will be morning in America.""

David Brooks in The New York Times:

Trump and the Politics of ‘Mean World’ 

A four-day showing of apocalypse now.

Of course then comes the inevitable Brooks Both Siderist bulldozer to bury everything he had just said under a steaming pile of false equivalence --

The larger threat is that we’re caught in a polarization cascade. Mean world fanatics — on the left and right — are playing a mutually beneficial game. Trumpian chaos justifies and magnifies the woke mobs on the left. Woke mobs magnify and justify Trumpian authoritarianism on the right. 

The upshot of the mean world war is the obliteration of normal politics, the hollowing out of the center and the degradation of public morality...

-- because David Brooks is a pathological asymmetriphobe -- one who fears asymmetrical things --

-- and, as he as shown in pretty much every single god damn column he has written for for The New York Times over the past 17 years, is psychologically incapable of processing political and culture any other way.

So what is there to say but...

No Half Measures

Online Bio of Timothy McVeigh Shows That He Had No Offspring

This is not correct.

He

Has

Thousands

Of

Them.

Spotting The "Tell"

From Wikipedia, in case you were unaware, because you'll need to know what it means in a minute:

A tell in poker is a change in a player's behavior or demeanor that is claimed by some to give clues to that player's assessment of their hand. A player gains an advantage if they observe and understand the meaning of another player's tell, particularly if the tell is unconscious and reliable.

So this week the chief political correspondent for Politico, Tim Alberta, wrote a big ol', magazine-length article that reads very much like a mix-tape of every Liberal critique and dire warning about the Republican Party that every disreputable Libtard has penned over the past few decades. 

It is full of spicy, up-to-the-minute insider details.  Interviewing Frank Luntz, for example:

I decided to call Frank Luntz. Perhaps no person alive has spent more time polling Republican voters and counseling Republican politicians than Luntz, the 58-year-old focus group guru...

Or Mark Sanford:

“If you think about the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—they’re all about ideas. Parties were supposed to be about ideas,” said Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and congressman who ran a short-lived primary against Trump in 2020.

Or someone like Brendan Buck, who I had never heard of before this:

“Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”

But if you take a step back and look at Mr. Alberta's thesis statement --

The Grand Old Meltdown 

What happens when a party gives up on ideas?

-- and then dial in on his major supporting themes -- that the Republican Party as a party is dead, that where it once stood nothing remains but a white-grievance mob that kills any whiff of criticism or introspection with the Mighty Hammer of Whataboutism/Both Sides Do It, and that everyone in Republican leadership and in the media damn well knows it -- you would find exactly (and I mean exactly) the same vivisection of the GOP and the media that's gotten Liberals thrown out of every respectable establishment since before Newt Gingrich dumped his first wife.

And I'm not just talking about disreputable, gadfly bloggers like me.  Remember what happened eight years ago when the very establishment Messrs. Ornstein and Mann tried to sound the alarm about what was really going on with the GOP?  From the WaPo way back when:

About a month ago, I noted here that none of the Sunday shows appeared to have any interest in discussing the deeply controversial thesis — suggested by Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein — that perhaps both parties are not equally to blame for what’s gone wrong in Washington.

Mann and Ornstein argued in a widely circulated Post opinion piece and a new book that the GOP — by allowing extremists to roam free and by wielding the filibuster to achieve government dysfunction as a political end in itself — were demonstrably more culpable for creating what is approaching a crisis of governance. For the Sunday shows, however, this topic was seen as either too hot to handle, or irrelevant entirely...

What’s particularly curious about this is that there’s a media angle to this story, too — and most of the time, at least, media figures love talking about themselves and the media’s role in politics. In particular, Mann and Ornstein are alleging that the press’s addiction to fake even handedness has led them not to acknowledge, or at least grapple with, a fact that is absolutely central to understanding what’s happening with our politics right now. Yet none of the Sunday shows want to touch the topic.

“What continues to strike me is the radio silence on these shows about both these themes,” Ornstein said by phone moments ago. “The Republicans bear a lot of the onus for rank obstructionism. But there’s a false equivalence here, and the press crops has been AWOL in its duty to report the truth.”

”Judging by emails and phone calls and personal conversations we’ve had with major reporters, this has generated lots of discussion in the newsrooms, but the shows are making a conscious decision to ignore it,” Ornstein continued.

When the embargo against them finally began to weaken slightly and they were provisionally allowed back inside cable news' Golden Circle they found themselves alternately bullied, eyerolled, bellowed at and shivved by Joe Scarborough and Mark Halperin on MSNBC's Morning Joe --

-- relentlessly "Whatabouted" by MSNBC's Chuck Todd and Gish Galloped by the odious Stephen Moore while MSNBC's Ali Velshi sat back and stared at his shoes.

And yet, eight years later, Mr. Alberta's hammer-and-tongs autopsy of the depravity and nihilism of the GOP has passed into the mainstream media bloodstream without a quibble.  He is quoted and interviewed favorably enough (and Politico has enough Beltway media clout) that even someone as cautious as Robert Costa can recommend reading Mr. Alberta without fear of tar and feathers.  (At least until this morning when Mr. Alberta shit the bed normalizing Melania Trump.)

So, in the words of Mike LaFontaine, hey, wha' happened?

Well, obviously Trump happened, but not in the way our new Never Trump BFFs would like you to believe.  And right here, just past the 21 minute mark of this Bulwark podcast exchange between Charlie Sykes and Tim Alberta, you can hear the verbal tic -- the "tell" -- that has given permission to the Beltway media to take seriously that which they once dismissed as crazy Liberal crackpottery just a few years ago.

Of course, if you'd rather not listen to it (and really, why would you?) here it is rendered into written form, with the "tell" emphasized for you convenience.

Sykes:  So you have a couple of lines I want to ask you about.

"To be a Republican today requires you to exist in a constant state of moral relativism, turning every chance at self-analysis into an assault on the other side, pretending the petting zoo next door is comparable to the three-ring circus on your front lawn." 

Sykes:  But this really is the constant state of moral relativism where every conversation that I've had I feel for the last three years with a Republican immediately switches to "whataboutism".  To changing the subject.  Well yes, everything you...even conceding that every point you might make say yes, the Democratic Party is so much worse, is so much more dangerous.  And that's become...that's become a reflex.  That's a way of life. That is the governing principle right now of the Republican Party, isn't it.

Alberta:  Oh yeah...

I'll spare you what follows (Alberta waxing nostalgic for the good old days of the Tea Party.  Or at least for the five minute period during which he contends the Tea Party was noble and pure before it became, y'know, the Tea Party) and instead, draw your attention to this clear, bright line on the calendar which your Never Trump BFFs and the mainstream media are all fighting like hell to formally canonize as the Official Date When It All Went to Shit:

 ...for the last three years with a Republican immediately switches to "whataboutism".

Three years?  Are you fucking kidding me?  For at least the past 20 years, every Republican I personally know has gone immediately to the "Both Side Do It" lie every time I've torn one of their stupid, Fox-issued talking point into little bits.

In fact, if any one theme could be said to be the through-line of this little blog of mine for the past 15 years, it has been punching back against the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It, which I've done literally thousands of times, to the point of  numbness.  Hell, Both Siderism has been such a suffocating and all-pervasive pathology of the mainstream press that one of the "jokes" I wrote back when I was but a mere commentor at The News Blog back in 2004 was:

Q: If Dick Cheney were caught red-handed tossing burning kittens at homeless veterans from the White House lawn, what would be the first three words out of Cokie Roberts' mouth? 

A: "But the Democrats...."

Or, if you prefer, all you have to do it watch Joe Scarborough and Chuck Todd and Mark Halperin, long before Trump arrived on the scene, aggressively dismissing and denying the dire warnings from Messers. Ornstein and Mann about where the GOP was headed with a relentless barrage of  "whataboutism" to know that Charlie Sykes is lying.

But why is he lying?  Why do pretty much all of these mopes tell thissame god damn stupid lie over and over and over again?

It's very simple.

Since Trump was elected, I've watched an army of Republicans who all bet the ranch that Trump would lose in 2016 and lost bigly, use the one resource they all have in abundance -- cronies in the mainstream media and access to huge media platforms -- to mount the most remarkable defense of their life-long complicity in building the Republican monster machine that made Donald Trump possible. 

That none of it ever happened. 

That the GOP was cooking along just fine until Trump showed up and the wheels came off.  That they have no idea how thing got so bad so fast, but they're damn sure they personally had nothing to do with it.

I'm talking about Republicans you see in print or on teevee all the time.  People like Charlie Sykes and Bret Stephens and Peggy Noonan and Rick Wilson and Michael Gerson and David Fucking Brooks and Tom Nichols and Joe Scarborough and on and on and on.   And while it's hard to pick one who is worse than the rest, for me probably the most morally repellent member of the bunch is Michael Steele, who is now employed by The Lincoln Project and who is still out there pitching the same bullshit story about how he personally drove the racists out of the GOP during his tenure as RNC chair -- racists who only returned after he was betrayed and deposed. 

If you don't know who Michael Steele is, you can now find him almost any day perched in a comfortable chair on MNSBC wagging his finger and warning about the cruel fate history has in store for those who have collaborated with the destroyers of his Republican Party.

Yeah, this guy is now making a living scolding go-along-to-get-along cowards who helped wreck his party.

This is the guy who would have you believe he ran the tens millions of bigots who make up the base of his party right on out of the GOP.

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”
...
On Monday night, DNC Chairman Tim Kaine called on Republicans to "stop following divisive figures" like Limbaugh.

"I was briefly encouraged by the courageous comments made my counterpart in the Republican Party over the weekend challenging Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican Party and referring to his show as ‘incendiary’ and ‘ugly,’" Kaine said in a statement. "However, Chairman Steele’s reversal this evening and his apology to Limbaugh proves the unfortunate point that Limbaugh is the leading force behind the Republican Party, its politics and its obstruction of President Obama’s agenda in Washington."

In the interview with Politico, Steele called Limbaugh “a very valuable conservative voice for our party.”

“He brings a very important message to the American people to wake up and pay attention to what the administration is doing," Steele said. "Number two, there are those out there who want to look at what he’s saying as incendiary and divisive and ugly. That’s what I was trying to say. It didn’t come out that way. … He does what he does best, which is provoke: He provokes thought, he provokes the left. And they’re clearly the ones who are most excited about him.”

Of course all of it would fall apart like cardboard luggage in a bonfire if the networks allowed actual, trouble-making Liberals within a mile of these people while they're yapping this bullshit --



-- which is precisely why they don't do it. 

Instead media companies are investing enormous resources protecting and grooming their stable "It All Started With Trump" Never Trumpers, one or two of whom appear to be on the air all the time these days.

Because the war to win the future by controlling the past has already begun.

And in case  you hadn't noticed, the good guys are losing.

No Half Measures

RNC Alternatives

The RNC:  One Day Over, Three To Go

The Republican convention is a fascist shitshow and it's gonna last for days, so instead of screaming at the teevee until you pass out, why not leave assessing the damage to paid professionals and enjoy some good science fiction that might have slipped under your radar.  Or dradis.


1.  11.22 63, streaming on Hulu

Stephen King purists may fault it for not including every subplot from the novel, but damn if I didn't start watching this time travel series about a diner, a portal and a schoolteacher trying to change history (and history not cooperating) one evening and three episodes later I noticed it was getting light outside.  Also the letter-perfect recreation of the 1960s is something to see.

2.  The Expanse,  streaming on Amazon Prime.

I had to be tricked/guilted into watching this show (Such a "meh" title!) about the intrigues of Solar System politics and culture hundreds of years from now. I even relented and watched the first episode and bailed so I could check the box in my head marked "Tried it/Didn't like it", because really, how could there be much new to say on a subject that had already been well-trodden by Golden Aged science fiction authors 60 years ago, right?  

Wrong.  Great series.

3.  Repo Man, streaming on Amazon Prime and Hulu

People say that all practical wisdom about how the world works can be found in Godfather I, Godfather II and Casablanca.  They are incorrect.  All practical wisdom about how the world works can be found in Godfather I, Godfather II, Casablanca and Repo Man.

RNC 2020

From its uplifting opening music...

...to its spellbinding orators...

...you don't need to professional pundits to understand the unifying theme of the 2020 RNC because it's exactly the same theme as the 2016 RNC.

It isn't about reaching out to anyone outside the cult.

It isn't about persuading anyone that Conservative policies are superior because the GOP doesn't care about "policy".

It's about completing the long, ugly, downward slide into a terminal racist abyss that the Republican Party began decades ago.

It's about making sure the party's existing base of bigots and imbeciles is fused into a single mind with a single voice all goose-stepping in the same direction.  All locked and loaded and roaring their adulation for the Dear Leader.  All ready to do whatever is required to hang onto power and purge the nation of the troublemakers that are standing in the way of their glorious future.

It's about...

Ein Volk.

Ein Reich.

Ein Führer

And the only thing standing in their way is us.

No Half Measures

Libertine University

Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. resigns as president of Liberty University after a series of public controversies around his behaviorhttps://t.co/Ui4JwKun0Q

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) August 24, 2020

No Half Measures

Lifeboats as Far as the Eye Can See

To keep me amused during quarantine, Reality arranged for a veritable Lifeboat Parade of former Republican who are definitely not responsible for the condition of the party for which they have worked their entire adult lives and/or are completely shocked that their Republican Party is full of Republicans.

Sunday, on the AM Joy program, former RNC chair Michael Steele led the way, repeating the same fairy tale that he must practice every night in front of the mirror:  that when he ran the GOP he personally drove all the racists out of the party.

Yay!

But the moment he left they all came back.   And now the party is fucked.

Sad!

Steele was followed by "The Death of Expertise" author Tom Nichols, whose own expertise on the one subject on which he is called upon to opine -- the state of the Republican Party -- apparently only extends as far as the Berkshire mountains.  Because, according to Tom, during all the long and terrible decades during which the GOP was very publicly devolving into a shitpile of bigots, he, personally, never had any idea that his Republican Party was full of Republicans because, uh, see, he was in Massachusetts the whole time.

And just this morning there was Lincoln Project co-founder Jennifer Horn crying into Joe Scarborough's beer because she could not understand how her awesome 2015 Republican Party became -- overnight and with no warning or explanation -- the 2016 Trump Party.

Joe, of course, enthusiastically agreed:

Scarborough: When I went up and visited some of your events I saw people who I see now quoted on TV and they are unrecognizable.  Their words are unrecognizable from the groups and the meetings that I sat through just four, six years ago. So I guess as we go into an RNC that looks like, you know, a South American strong man celebration of his family speaking at some event, have you come to grips yet, have you come to terms yet, with what happened to our Republican Party? Again, we’re not — I’m not talking about the Republican Party of 2000. I’m talking about even the Republican Party of 2014, 2015.

And there it is.  The Big Lie which Conservative meatheads like Scarborough have every reason to believe will save them once again.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” -- George Orwell

"When you control the cameras, you can remake the past into whatever you want it to be." -- driftglass

No Half Measures

Howard Fineman Puts On a One-Man "This is Why Journalism is Screwed" Clinic

Good for the #Conways. Family is paramount. I’ve known Kellyanne for many years and always liked her on a purely personal level. I wish her and her family the best. It’ll also help her (and perhaps all Conways) to get as far away as possible from a certain poisonous personality.

— howardfineman (@howardfineman) August 24, 2020

Look for more of Kellyanne's pals to gingerly attempt the "There are very fine people on both sides of the Conway's marriage bed" defense.

No Half Measures

Bargaining

As the Republican Party dies an ugly, protracted, very public and long-overdue death, the Conservative elites and GOP nabobs who have scampered away from the flailing monster they helped to create now appear to be permanently stalled in "bargaining" mode.

This is a state of being in which Republican luminaries and message-makers who have hastily emigrated to a fairer shore will finally acknowledge that something has certainly gone badly wrong inside their former party, but would now like everyone to believe that they never had the slightest idea that the Republican Party was full of Republicans all along.

Men and women who have spent their entire adult lives behind a microphone or in front of a camera or tapping away on a keyboard spreading the Republican gospel of "America is being destroyed by godless Libtards and their army of welfare cheats" now desperately want you to believe that they weren't malicious or mercenary, merely naive.

The senior executives and decision-makers of a party which feted Rush Limbaugh with a plaque and a  party a quarter of a century ago and explicitly praised Conservative Hate Radio for sweeping them into power now really want you to believe that they personally never had any idea that Rush Limbaugh and Hate Radio were ever anything but fringe loonies*  --

Steele to Rush: I'm sorry

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”
...

On Monday night, DNC Chairman Tim Kaine called on Republicans to "stop following divisive figures" like Limbaugh.

"I was briefly encouraged by the courageous comments made my counterpart in the Republican Party over the weekend challenging Rush Limbaugh as the leader of the Republican Party and referring to his show as ‘incendiary’ and ‘ugly,’" Kaine said in a statement. "However, Chairman Steele’s reversal this evening and his apology to Limbaugh proves the unfortunate point that Limbaugh is the leading force behind the Republican Party, its politics and its obstruction of President Obama’s agenda in Washington."

In the interview with Politico, Steele called Limbaugh “a very valuable conservative voice for our party.”...

-- who held no real sway over anything.

Whose continued professional survival depends on maintaining the fiction that somehow Trump used dark magic to transform their party of patriotic, Burke-loving yeomen into a mob of racist zombies overnight and that they just never saw it coming.

Or that none of that matters because...uh...because Donald Trump isn't really a Republican anyway!

But wait.  If the guy who won more Republican primary votes than any Republican in history and enjoys the unwavering support of +90% of the Republican rank-and-file isn't a Republican, then what is he?

The answer may surprise you!

From a former Florida Republican congressman who has his own, 3-hour show every weekday morning on MSNBC:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: As Mika and I have said from the very beginning, one of those people it would annoy is Donald Trump who we've always said was a big government Democrat. He's proven that...

But a bargain is fundamentally an "agreement between two or more parties as to what each party will do for the other" isn't it?

And I for one have no intention of being duped or pressured or proxied into letting the same trolls, ghouls and political contract killers who built the monster machine that begat Trump get away with blotting out their long list of crimes against our democracy.

* This citation from Politico is from more than a decade ago, back when Michael Steele was the hype man for the Party of Bigots and Imbeciles and not a respected MSNBC contributor who can count on his colleagues to never, ever mention his inconvenient past.

No Half Measures

Professional Left Podcast #560

 "It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.”

-- Mark Twain, writer

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!

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Get Your Election On: Satan's Little Helpers Upset That Hell Has Really Gone To Hell

From Vanity Fair:

“HANNITY HAS SAID TO ME MORE THAN ONCE, ‘HE’S CRAZY’”: FOX NEWS STAFFERS FEEL TRAPPED IN THE TRUMP CULT

Inside the network staffers are cringing, and even Trump’s “shadow chief of staff” has his doubts. “If you were hearing what I’m hearing, you’d be vaping too,” Sean Hannity told a colleague during Trump’s early days...

Fuck every one of these people with an atomic pile driver.  Because, as I have mentioned once or twice before ("There's Always Work at the Post Office"), every one of these assholes are being pain in blood money.

And that shit never washes off.

(Concept lifted from David Rees' brilliant, Bush-era "Get Your War On" series -- a well from which I may continue to draw inspiration from time to time as the crazy continues to grow exponentially.)

No Half Measures

Get Your Election On: Battle of the Bands

(Concept lifted from David Rees' brilliant, Bush-era "Get Your War On" series -- a well from which I may continue to draw inspiration from time to time as the crazy continues to grow exponentially.)

No Half Measures

Get Your Election On: The Story Continues 7

(Concept lifted from David Rees' brilliant, Bush-era "Get Your War On" series -- a well from which I may continue to draw inspiration from time to time as the crazy continues to grow exponentially.)

No Half Measures

Get Your Election On: The Story Continues 6

(Concept lifted from David Rees' brilliant, Bush-era "Get Your War On" series -- a well from which I may continue to draw inspiration from time to time as the crazy continues to grow exponentially.)

No Half Measures

Sounds Eerily Like...

...everything Liberals have been writing over the past [checks notes] several decades.

Today The New York Times boldly speculates that maybe, just maybe, the Republican Party is fucked-in-the-head and will remain fucked-in-the-head long after the head head-fucker-in-charge is removed from office.

What if Trumpism Is the G.O.P.’s Natural State?

Beating Trump would be just the beginning. Democrats would still be confronted with a radical Republican Party.

...
Joe Biden holds a lead in the polls, giving Democrats hope that President Trump will be soundly defeated in November.

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news: Beating President Trump is just the beginning. If Mr. Biden wins and if Mr. Trump leaves office peacefully — two big ifs — Democrats will be confronted with a more intractable problem: The Republican Party is the party of Donald Trump, and it is not likely to change.

If Mr. Biden wins, there will be a temptation to embrace a big lie: Mr. Trump was the problem, and with him gone, the Republican Party can return to normal. But today’s Republican Party won’t moderate itself, because Trumpism is its natural state. Democrats should avoid the temptation to expect Republican cooperation in governing this country...

No Half Measures

Professional Left Podcast #559

“Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.”

-- Jean-Paul Sartre, writer

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!

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Mr. David Brooks Indulges Three of His Creepiest Fetishes

The New York Times op-ed page is this man's "Penthouse Forum" -- a clearing house for his own forbidden desires, insatiable needs and unspoken lusts...

Creepy Fetish #1. Inventing an imaginary Third Way along which Mr. Brooks strides humbly between the Extremes on Both Sides:

Mostly I find myself supporting the conservative radicals, leaders who are confident that we can push for big change while defeating the illiberalism of radicals on left and right.

Nothing to add here that I haven't written 1.000 times before. The Big Lie of Both Siderism is Brooks' cathedral, his Bible, his vision of paradise and his 401k all rolled into one.  And no force on Earth is ever going to force him or his hundreds of imitators in the media give this lie up.

Creepy Fetish #2.  Pretending that the Civil War never happened:

In the middle of the 19th century, radicals like John Brown and purists like Horace Greeley gave way to the incrementalist Abraham Lincoln.
...

Lincoln had to slowly bring a whole nation around to the abolition of slavery. He had to compromise and gather a broad coalition to pass the 13th Amendment.

Good Christ at Appomattox, these Very Serious Beltway Pundits just fucking love, love, love them some Lincoln, don't they? They just can't stop dream-casting him into every modern travail. Raising him up like a lantern in every dark and bloody corner into which the Republican Party drags us -- a beacon of presidential rectitude and strength.

And Lincoln really was all those things. And more. This is not what makes Brooks' invocation of the man so appalling.

What's appalling is that Very Serious Beltway Pundits like David Brooks have no love for the actual Lincoln. The guy who is buried two miles from my front door. Instead, they love their imaginary Lincoln just as they love their imaginary Reagan.

Their imaginary Lincoln is a Lincoln without Shiloh or Cold Harbor. A Lincoln without the Wilderness or Vicksburg or the Shenandoah Valley.

Their Lincoln is two-dimensional caricature of the actual Lincoln. A gentle redeemer and uniter, and not the man who went through just about every general in the Union Army until he found one that would do what needed to be done: crush the Confederacy completely, regardless of the cost. One that would bomb their cities, burn their crops, slaughter their armies and starve their citizens until, at last, their will to make a traitor's war against the United States was broken and they finally gave up.

There is no place in Mr. Brooks' gauzy cartoon version of American history for a Lincoln who recognized a mortal threat to the nation coming from a despicable confederacy of its own citizens, and who ruthlessly used every bloody means at his disposal to utterly destroy that threat. No place in his idylls for a Lincoln who offered reunion and reconstruct to the South only after they had been beaten to their knees and forced to accept surrender or face extinction.

If all of that sound familiar it should.  I wrote it the last time Brooks tried to shove Actual Lincoln into the dirt and replace him with Brooks' Imaginary Lincoln ("When Beltway Pundits Dream, They Dream of Imaginary Lincoln".)


Creepy Fetish #3.  Pretending the Dubya Administration never happened and the Republican Party is an entirely different beast than what it self-evidently is.

I’m convinced that if Donald Trump is defeated, revolutionary zealotry will fade as debates over practical change and legislation dominate.

No, no and no.

We already know how the Republican Party will react when they are handed a resounding ass-kicking because it already happened in 2006 and again in 2008.  The racist "revolutionary zealotry" of the Republican base and the reactionary madness of GOP lawmakers did not fade.  Instead, it went thermonuclear...right under Mr. Brooks' nose.

In fact, over the past 20 years pretty much every Republican catastrophe and every lurch the Right has made deeper into Crazytown has preceded by a reassuring pronouncement by Mr. David Brook that a glorious Conservative Renaissance is just around the corner. 

Which is a helluva record.

No Half Measures

This Won't Do Any Good.

You'll never understand me, but I'll try once and then give it up.

When a man's country is killed, he's supposed to do something.

It makes no difference what you thought of it.  It was your country, and you're supposed to do something about it.

And it happens we're in the democracy business.

Well, when one of your democracies gets killed, it's...it's bad business to let the killer get away with it.

Bad all around.

Bad for every democracy everywhere.

No Half Measures

I See That The Fox News Brain Trust Still Has No Idea How To Deal With Senator Harris

Turns out, spending decades turning the average Fox News viewer into a reprogrammable meatbag with a 50 word vocabulary (Ook ook!  Radical!  Ook ook  Straws!) --

Hannity struggles to find a narrative against Kamala Harris pic.twitter.com/fWqS1wYeEF

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) August 14, 2020

-- has certain drawbacks.

No Half Measures

Then, a Few Years Later, Walter Sobchak...

...snapped completely.

Bully who believes Coronavirus is a hoax harasses city of Austin lifeguards working as park monitors. pic.twitter.com/FLqmBWnXQ7

— Scott Cobb (@scottcobb) August 10, 2020

There's Never a Cancel Culture Around
When You Need One