The Plundering of the Liberal Blogosphere Continues Apace

"Where I steal, I leave my knife." -- Michelangelo

"Where I steal, I leave...and pretend the people I'm stealing from never existed." -- The Bulwark

Once upon a time, many years ago, when I was running a half-Apple, half-Microsoft shop at Columbia College, my Mac gurus used to joke (bitterly) that Apple was actually Microsoft's much-despised and unpaid research.  Apple would take an idea (or "borrow" it from Xerox PARC), refine it, engineer it, tweak it, test it, make it look really cool and release it at fairly steep price point...

...and then Microsoft would reverse-engineer what Apple had done and create a shittier, buggier, cheaper version of it that was compatible with the IBM platform that 80% of office computer users were already wedded to and make a Bill Gates & company more money than God.

And emotionally that is right about where I am now in my life as a blogger.

Believe me, I am never happier than when ideas that have languished in Liberal Coventry for years or decades finally take wing and fly.  When YearlyKos really came of age in Chicago in 2007 -- with hundreds of credentialed press people there from around the world and every candidate (but one) who was running for the Democratic nomination in attendance -- and everybody cheered when they flashed "What Digby Said" on the big screen because everybody knew what that meant, it was exhilarating.  And when I run across a social media beat-down of some Republican goon or Beltway media hack led by a mob of dirty hippies chanting "Both Sides Don't" --

-- or "Burn The Lifeboats" --

-- or "No Fair Remembering Stuff" --

-- my heart sings.

I could even abide is being ripped off by the people who hate us -- people who have spent their careers slandering us and stomping all over everything we hold dear -- if their change of heart were genuine.  If they had actually seen the error of their ways and were willing to acknowledge that the Left has been right about the Right all along.

But that is not what's happening.

Instead, you and I and the rest of the exhausted, outspoken Left are begin systematically unpersoned by these people.  And all the stuff that the mainstream press and elite Conservative media mocked and despised us for saying out loud -- all that we have been warning about the racist, fascist trajectory of the Republican party for decades -- is being looted, given a quick tuck-and-roll job, recycled as Insightful Genius and used as a lifeboat to escape accountability for the monster they created.

Now objectively, does it matter whether someone like me can or cannot abide such as this?

Of course not.  After all, I don't even exist and neither do you.

But from the hard-won perspective that many of us have from being engaged in politics at this level for decades, we can see what is really going on here.

This is not a bunch of new allies who just moved into our neighborhood showing up at our door to borrow a cup of insight.  This is the latest skirmish in war between the Left and the Right over who gets to define history.  Who gets to ink the final word about how the past actually unfolded, how that past led to inevitably to the dark and terrible present through which we are now slogging, and how the trajectory of that history will shape all future political discourse.

And in one battle after another in that Long War, we on the Left have lost and lost badly.

When we tried to hold the Bush Administration to the same lofty, righteous principles Republicans claimed to have when they were busy sabotaging Bill Clinton and impeaching him over trivia, the Right and the mainstream media simply ignored us and rewrote the history of those years to suit themselves.

Then, as the Bush Administration collapsed, we tried once again with all our strength to hold their minions and stooges to that new set of lofty, righteous principles they all swore they believed when they thought their Iraqi Debacle was going great, that tax cuts would dry every tear and bind up every wound, and that George W. Bush was the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

And we lost that battle too.  Bigly.  Quicker than you could say "Halliburton", those Bush administration minions and stooges were installed at the highest levels of American journalism, where they used their exalted positions to bulldoze their immediate past into a big, dark hole and bury it under 20 feet of "Both Sides Do It" concrete.

Then, with cover provided by the mainstream press, the entire Republican base was allowed to duck out on paying the tab for the country they nearly ruined, scuttle away into the political woodwork and emerge, shriven and reborn, as "Independents" and "Tea Partiers" who had never even heard of George W. Bush but who all somehow despised the Kenyan Usurper and his wicked socialist ways with the heat on 1,000 suns.

And no matter how many "There.  Is.  No.  Tea.  Party." essays we disreputable Liberal bloggers published year after year, the Right and the mainstream media just rolled right over us like a fucking Panzer division.  Until, of course, it became politically expedient for them to drop that lie and switch to another lie.  Then, quite suddenly, corporate media Republicans from David Brooks to Joe Scarborough all spontaneously sat up and took notice of the fact that the Tea Party had actually been nothing but a bunch of rock-ribbed, life-long Republicans all along!

Then, just last week, at the headquarters of our new, Never Trump allies, there was Tim Alberta and Charlie Sykes wringing their hands and rending their garments over those horrible Republicans and their horrible "whataboutism"

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.

To which I replied:

I'll spare you what follows ... 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...."

And what does The Bulwark have on offer today?

I'm all out of words.

So since nothing else has ever worked, I'm thinking about trying a different tack.

Perhaps sending The Bulwark crew a lovely Professional Left gift basket complete with bumper-stickers, mugs --

-- and perhaps a tee-shirt or two?

No Half Measures