The Lincoln Lads Just Can't Stop Ripping Us Off

Over the decades, this blog and the Professional Left Podcast has marched under a number of banners such as "Both Sides Don't", "Memory is the Liberal Superpower", "Go Postal Unions", "No Fair Remembering Stuff", "Burn the Lifeboats" and "You Can't Be On Both Sides Of The Edmund Pettus Bridge." 

Since before Donald Trump was elected (and ever since), Blue Gal and I have been shouting this last one, "You Can't Be On Both Sides Of The Edmund Pettus Bridge",  from the rooftops since the choice that election represented were so stark and clear, and the judgement it rendered on those who voted for Trump is so eternally damning.  In fact, in September of 2016 I wrote a long post about it that ended with the graphic you see above, and this:

...

Once the rage-drunk bigots and imbeciles and their collaborators in the media are defeated yet again by the rest of us, maybe we'll get back to having intelligent debates over other important matters, but  I doubt it.  I doubt that anything short of a comprehensive rollback of anything that remotely smacks of "Republican" will give us back our national adulthood and equilibrium and get us back to having grown-up arguments over reasonable marginal tax rates, structural racism, expanding national health care, demilitarizing our cops, disentangling ourselves from ill-advised alliances an commitments around the world, global climate change, and so forth.

And I would love that.

I would love it if I could box this blog up and get back to meaningful public policy debates without being smothered under the dead weight of 30 million screeching Republican idiots being whipped into targetable mobs by domestic enemies like Fox News, Hate Radio and The Breitbart Collective.

But we're not there.  Not by a damn site.

Right now we're just barely holding Little Round Top by our nails.

Right now we're marching towards the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

And you cannot, cannot, cannot be on both sides of that conflict.

Of course, as a shrill, alarmist Liberal crackpot, I have long since stopped being surprised that not matter what I do or how hard I try, my shrill, alarmist, crackpot writing never achieves escape velocity and makes it out of the Coventry of the Liberal blogosphere.  Instead, I usually have to wait for years or even decades for some Very Serious Conservative to rip it off, file off the serial numbers and tweak it slightly before I see venerable Liberal ideas in the good gray pages of America's leading newspapers.

So imagine my complete lack of surprise when I find that The Washington Post has gifted the Lincoln Lads --  Stuart Stevens, Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt and Reed Galen -- with yet another acre of free real estate on it's op-ed page where they can explain that...

None of us can choose history. History chooses us. If you ever wondered what side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge you would have stood on, this is your chance to choose. Those who went before faced dogs and fire hoses, and yet they did not flinch.

This is followed by a lot of treacle about how no one could have seen a monster like Trump coming (bullshit, Liberals have been warning your for decades the GOP was a monster factory and that something like Trump eventually shambling off the assembly line was inevitable), how they realize that those siding against Trump risk paying a steep price -- "Your phone calls and texts may go unreturned. The receptions, parties and dates on the social calendar may be outside your reach. You may be ostracized. You may lose business." -- (notice that the worst horror the Lincoln Lads could dream up was the idea of being treated like Liberals have been treated every fucking day for decades) but how they should risk it because we all love our country (bullshit, Conservatives despise this country.)

Last night, Brian Williams invited two of the Lincoln Lads -- Steve Schmidt and Michael Steele -- on to his show, because it is now federal law that every single non-Fox cable news program and major American newspaper must gift the Lincoln Lads at least four million dollars in glowing free publicity every quarter.  In this case, the Lads were there to hear Williams somberly repeat that exact quote back to them and then talk about how many Republicans are now trying to quietly edge their way out of the blast radius of a possible Trump defeat.

When Mr. Schmidt is asked what a post-Trump GOP would look like, he simply recapitulates what every Liberal was warning about the post-Dubya GOP 12 years ago, because why have an original thought when you can just plunder the Liberal treasure house with impunity?

But friends, Libtards, countrymen, today I come to neither bury The Lincoln Project (which is a thousand miles above my pay grade and has zero support among my Liberal allies anyway) nor to praise them, but to ask a simple question:  What kind of country would we now be living in if, say, four or five or eight or or ten or 12 or 16 years ago, The Washington Post and The New York Times and CBS and NBC and ABC and CNN and MSNBC and NPR and PBS and Crown Books and Penguin Books and on and on and on had collectively decided to give the thinkers and writers and speakers of the Liberal blogosphere -- who have actually been right about the Right all along -- just a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free air time and print space they have lavished on the Lincoln Lads over the past 11 months?

https://twitter.com/Mr_Electrico/status/777173192028852224?s=20

No Half Measures