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