Wednesday, March 31, 2021

No One Knew That She Was Secretly...

...a Deep State Doxie!



 
Burn The Lifeboats




at 4 comments:
Labels:

Both Sides Do It: Old Conservative Whine in New Conservative Skins

When you find yourself thirsty for some of that sweet, sweet Both Siderist giggle juice but are stranded in the middle of the week with long, dry days between you and Chuck Todd's Meet the Press, may I suggest you stop by The Bulwark Podcast Network where, now that The Last Guy is gone, our staunch allies are going into the lucrative "But The Liberals..." business in a big way.

They have all the best varietals.

Feeling like something dusty with top notes of vinegar?  Mona Charen invites George Will over for  an hour of fretting about both sides (but mostly the Left.)

Looking for something from deeper in the cellar with more bite?  How about an hour of Deficit Scolding.

For a lazy afternoon, enjoy the robust flavor of two privileged middle-aged white Conservative men tackling the problem of race in Murrica and discovering that it's really the fault of  ...The Extremes on Both Sides!  (Charlie Sykes talks to Tom Nichols)

You see, on the one side is the actual, structural commitment of the GOP to a white nationalism and fanatical denialism:

Sykes: By the way, have you noticed the... the degree to which conservatives are invested in denying any allegations of racism, racial prejudice, white nationalism.  I mean it is really extraordinary the degree to which they have internalized the anti-anti-racist rhetoric.

driftglass:  Yes Charlie.  We noticed.  We noticed a long, long time ago.

But on the other side there is "some guy who called in to a radio show I was doing" --

Sykes:   I think there are people who try to shove everything into the box of white supremacy.  I was on a Sirius XM radio show yesterday and we were talking about the need for voting reform with Dan Abrams ... and a caller called in basically said "You know you guys are you... you guys you...  know are missing the point because you... you shouldn't talk about this without using the word racism in every sentence."

-- and "some guy who popped into my Twitter timeline"

Nichols:  I'll give you a small... um example of it.  I was ... um ... we were talking about ... um this... um Van Halen versus Van Hagar debate that I... and someone I said something about, well you, know the old Van Halen was very MTV friendly ... and someone popped into my timeline to say and what a racist network it was and I thought, you know it's okay for 10 minutes a day for something to not be about a kind of demonstrative or performative denunciation of racism.

But rest assured, these two, random anecdotal incidents are definitely representative of The Left generally because, well, these  two privileged middle-aged white Conservative men say it is.  And therefore the real problem is... (sing it with me now):

Nichols: And this is where I think we have to we do have to talk about the Left for a minute.  Is to say this [fanatical Conservative denialism] is also a reaction to a Left that has become monomaniacal as you point out about race being about um everything. 

Nichols:  And I think this... on this the... the whacked out Right and the Monomaniacal Left have become symbiotic on this question...

See!  See!  If only we Lefties would heed the wise words of Tom Nichols and Charlie Sykes and quit talking about race all the time, Tucker Carlson, Fox News and maybe even the entire GOP would soon blow away like a fart in a wind tunnel.

Stupid Liberals!

But for sheer, cask-strength popskull , you can't beat Charlie Sykes interviewing failed, one-term Republican congressperson Denver Wriggleman yet again.  First it lulls you with Wigglman's preening self-regard and then -- whammo! -- comes the disorienting hallucinogenic strangeness of both men complaining bitterly about the irreversible derangement of the Republican Party that kicked both if them to the curb and the various Faustian bargains Republican office holders have struck with lunatics to hang onto their seats...

Wiggleman: Charlie I lose sleep over this because now I'm not the congressman in the fifth district and we got somebody who actually might be unhinged that has real issues...

Wiggleman: ...but the Republican conference itself is fragmented and I'll give you an example of Adam Kinzinger.  You know he has an opponent Catalina Loft.  The sewer of American politics runs through my phone...

...while at the same time pretending that there are some non-trivial number of Sekrit Reasonable Republican hiding in their offices who would love to jump in and help Joe Biden if only Joe Biden weren't so damn unreasonable --

Sykes:  What I'm sensing -- and some of our listeners are going to be annoyed by this -- but that despite all the rhetoric about unity and healing the administration has not made it easy for Republicans to cross over and vote for some of these big pieces of legislation. 

driftglass:  Admit it, you were passed-out drunk during the entire Obama Administration weren't you Charlie.

... while at the same time bitching about how terrible and extreme the Left has become when talking about the derangement of the Republican Party -- so bad that maybe it has caused the GOP to be much crazier that it would have otherwise been.   

Wriggleman: and then I'm thinking there has to be a third way!  There's got to be a third party! There's got to be something else out there that we can get away from this polarization -- this hyperbole and this finger pointing that each side is equally or worse evil than me because they have a "D" behind their name or they have an "R" behind their name.  And that is that is what's happening. It's good against evil on each side and those lines are being drawn and my fear is it's just going to get worse.

Sykes: Yeah as long as it's a binary choice. It's all you know all one way or all the other way  And I do sense that that's getting worse too because you can sort of see that y'know among Democrats, uh, they become frustrated.  And so there's a a drum beat uh forget about bipartisanship...

And then comes the money shot which you would definitely have no idea was on the minds of your Never Trump allies if all you knew of them was the genial, tidied up Liberal-friendly version you see on MSNBC:

Wriggleman:  It's sort of the right now we always have now this "tough guy" thing going on with Trump and... and with Biden, right?

So how exactly should Intransigent Tough Guy Joe tempt these Sekrit Reasonable Republicans into working with him?  Well he should start by immediately apologizing for the parts of the COVID relief bill he just signed into law that Republicans didn't like.  And then:

Wriggleman: ... include some Republicans in your damn cabinet.  Um, you said you were and include some sort of moderate Center/Right voices that can be in your ear... um... with some of the crazy that could come from the from the far Left because it's... it's happening, right? And once you get to Critical Wokeness...

Mind you, these are just selected snippets.  The whole exchange was like this, and in episode after episode, Team Bulwark is making it clearer and clearer that, now that The Last Guy is gone, they will be serving up some Conservative-comforting version of Both Siderism for breakfast lunch and dinner from now on.

Imagine shitty absinthe filtered though a sweaty 2014 CPAC "Impeach The Kenyan Usurper!" tee shirt and decanted into Schrödinger's cat box.  

Forever.  

 
Burn The Lifeboats







at 7 comments:
Labels:

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Matt Gaetz aka Scabio



Management Wishes To Apologize For This Photoshop




at 5 comments:

Matthew Dowd is a Fundamentally Ridiculous Person


In today's exciting installment we find 2021 Matthew Dowd shaking his head sadly because 



Here's the thing.  Some of us remember things differently. 

Very differently.

And those of us who remember things differently because we remember them accurately will never be gifted a megaphone as big and loud as Matthew Dowd's precisely because we remember things accurately. 

This right here is what actual cancel culture looks like: not the one or two isolated examples -- as unfair as they are -- which Dry Drunk Republicans and Both Siderists constantly refer to as some kind of sweeping indictment of "the Left", but the categorical exclusion to which virtually all Liberal voices are routinely subjected.

For example, I remember a relatively recent past in which the signs of the Republican Party galloping towards authoritarianism writ so large in letters of fire that they would have been visible from space. It was a time during which the Liberal blogosphere -- which came into its own because the mainstream media was so terrified of Republican backlash that it wouldn't touch the Bush Iraqi Clusterfuck with a barge pole -- was desperately ringing every "The fascists are coming! The fascists are coming!" alarm bell they could lay their hands on as loudly as their little platforms would allow.

And the Liberals ringing those bells and sounding those alarms were once again systematically silenced by people like Matthew Dowd: people with real media clout who absolutely did not want to hear that Donald Trump and the GOP were categorically worse in ever measurable way than Hillary Clinton and the Democrats -- 

But back in the Before Time, Matthew Dowd really, really hated it when disreputable Liberal bloggers pressed him to admit that he had gotten big, important things wrong.But back in the Before Time, Matthew Dowd really, really hated it when disreputable Liberal bloggers pressed him to admit that he had gotten big, important things wrong.






-- because that plain and obvious fact flew in the face of the Both Siderist poison that was the stock-in-trade of the corporate media until long after it was far too late.

It doesn't offend me that this trifling hack was ABC News' chief political analyst because I expect no better from the corporate media.  And it doesn't particularly bother me that having been bounced from ABC he immediately landed a new gig at MSNBC because MSNBC has always been the halfway house where trifling former Republican hacks go who need a quick career rehab: their weekly lineup now positively groans under the weight of trifling former Republican hacks who are now paid to wag their fingers and moralize about the same GOP monster machine which they spent their entire career building.

What bothers me is how often these trifling former Republican hacks want complain about cancel culture even as they go right on pretending that the Liberals who have been ringing the bells and sounding the alarms for decades never existed at all.  

What bothers me is how bold these trifling former Republican hacks are when it comes to demanding apologies from others --

-- and how they become very loudly indignant and/or immediately run and hide when anyone dares to ask the same of them.

 
BURN THE LIFEBOATS




at 3 comments:
Labels:

Your Bulwark Quote of the Day: "Retcon"


So The Bulwark co-founder Charlie Sykes has learned a new word.

And that word is "Retcon".

It is a word which originated and has seen long use in the comic book world --

Retroactive continuity, or retcon for short,[1][2] is a literary device in which established facts in a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which breaks continuity with the former.[3]

-- but Charlie Sykes heard some of the hepcat youth of The Bulwark staff use it and now he can't keep it out of his mouth. By my count, he repeated it 15 times, starting here:

Sykes: Can I just start off by talking about retconned. Retconning. Because I... I... I... did my newsletter about this today, y'know, a reader to point out that all these all the hipster pundits, including folks, on... on The Bulwark podcast have been using this phrase retconned a lot and she says "Hey, maybe you should define it for the rest of us."

Because apparently Bulwark readers don't know how to use The Google to look things up.  

Which is sad.  

Anyway, I bring it up to note that apparently using "Retcon" in a political context is now considered some kind of major lexicographic breakthrough among "all the hipster pundits" so Mr. Sykes is now all over it like scarfs on a Birx.

And the reason this cracks me up is...well...this is from me six years ago --

Crisis on Infinite Conservatisms:  The Fall of the RetCon Men 

-- talking about the speed and volume at which Charlie Sykes' good friend and fellow Never Trumper, Joe Scarborough, was rectonning the shit out of his own very public support for Donald Trump:

Which is why the single funniest damn thing on teevee today has to have been the Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough mercilessly chastising Donald J. Trump for lying about Trump's own very public remarks and then blaming "the media" for deliberately misrepresenting what he had said...

...which was followed immediately by Joe "Never Punch Down" Scarborough lying about Joe Scarborough's own very public support of Donald J. Trump and blaming "stupid people in political circles" for deliberately misrepresenting him. It was...perfect.  I mean, Squint was already a shoo-in for the silver medal in Olympic Frantic Backpedaling, but did you see him stick that fucking landing?

And then there was this from me from four years ago -- 

Crisis on Infinite Conservatisms:  The Unending Reign of the RetCon Men 

-- in which Mr. David Brooks repeatedly attempted to retcon the Obama Administration out of existence in order make a horribly stupid political point.  

Then there was this from 2019 in which we once again find Charlie Sykes' good friend Rick Wilson retconning his inconvenient past away:

The Ongoing Adventures of The RetCon Men 

Here's a snip post from a 2019 post entitled "Letter to a Colleague":

The Right has gone so completely around the bend -- and have been trained to attack the Liberal Media so reflexively -- that there is nothing to left to discuss with them.  And speaking for all Liberals everywhere, I have nothing left to say to anyone who still feels the need to pretend otherwise.  The period after after the invasion of Iraq was probably the last chance for leaders in the media to lead such a discussion ... and they blew it.  Comprehensively.  Because if we started holding people accountable for the things they said and did during the Bush Administration, golly, who knows where it might end?

Who knows how many members of the Beltway Insiders Club might have to go get honest work?

And so we on the Left once again found ourselves shouting into the abyss as the corporate media circled the wagons and let it all slide.  As the nation's op-ed columns and cable news seats filled up with Bush regime dead-enders whose careers were being aggressively retconned.  As the GOP base was allowed to put on funny hats and pretend to be Tea Party Patriots who had barely even heard of George Bush.   

There are many more, but to bring it full circle,  there's "The Tea Party at 12: No Bands Playing, No Flags Flying " from last month

...

Over at the Never Trump Revisionism Factory we find Matt Lewis using the corpse of the Fake Tea Party to retcon himself into the now-lucrative pantheon of Republicans who "have long argued" yadda yadda and something something warned years ago...

It’s the Tea Party Anniversary. Here’s Why I’m Not Celebrating.

The famous “Santelli rant” happened 12 years ago last week. I mark it out of sadness. It led us straight to MAGA-land.

...
While many of my Never Trump conservative brethren still see this movement as a largely positive phenomenon, I have long argued that there was a straight line from the Tea Party to MAGA. For sane conservatives, this was the beginning of the end...

Which may have been the impetus for Charlie Sykes to inviting him onto The Bulwark podcast where they could commiserate over various things.  
 
All of which is to say that without massive, ongoing retconning, the entire self-congratulatory Never Trump media ecosystem would collapse, dry up and blow away.  

Also have I mentioned recently that busted up lifeboat timbers make excellent kindling?

 
Burn The Lifeboats




at 2 comments:

Monday, March 29, 2021

Trump's KOVID Kampaign Krew


No Half Measures



at 1 comment:

Sunday, March 28, 2021

Sunday Morning Comin' Down



Breaking:  The Sunday Shows are Conservative-enabling, Both Siderist trash and you shouldn't watch them. 

Exhibit A:


Burn The Lifeboats

at 2 comments:
Labels:

Behold The Southern Avenger


I like our odds.

 No Senator, you are the natural disaster.



No Half Measures

at 6 comments:

Friday, March 26, 2021

Professional Left Podcast #591


“A Cancel Culture so huge and omnipresent that it has become invisible."
-- driftglass, 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!

 Links:  
The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!







at 4 comments:
Labels: , , ,

Now It's Perfect


Burn The Lifeboats

at 5 comments:

Thursday, March 25, 2021

David Brooks: 10 Years After

This is sentence that Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times actually wrote in his column today:

"I worry there’s a great historical amnesia going on."

I read that.  

Then I laughed for an hour.  

Then I drank some pretty good scotch.  

Then I sat down to try to encompass the surpassing weirdness of a world in which Mr. David Brooks -- who's entire career is so utterly dependent on every one of his colleagues agreeing to continually memory-hole the horribly wrongheaded crap David Brooks writes as soon as it begins to rot on the vine that the process has become known as the Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks -- could begin to write such a sentence without his hand striking itself off and scuttling away to begin a new career in the gritty reboot of either The Crawling Hand or The Beast With Five Fingers --

-- or even The Hand.

But that is the world in which we live, so onward we shall go.  However I'll spare you the Brooks-brand, on-the-one-side-but-on-the-other equivocating, the tedious Wikipedia recitation of the History of Budgets and the overall damp hand-wringing of the entire column and instead just embed this Tweet

This is the same David Brooks who, 20 years ago, was 100% certain that Stupid Liberals ("The New Stupid Party") had finally gone of the deep end with their crazy "brainless, self-destructive" fantasy that the policies of the George W. Bush administration were about to wipe out the Clinton surplus, run up a gargantuan deficit and put Social Security under the gun.

OK, begrudge me one more sentence from Mr. Brooks' column today -- 

But I worry about this new economic philosophy that asserts you can have everything you want without trade-offs.

-- to make the point that this is the same guy who confidently predicted that George W. Bush's brilliant mastery of post-causality economics meant that everything Democrats wanted could be fully funded and we could afford as many tax cuts as Republicans desired while never running deficits again!

Yes, There Is a New Economy
Thanks to once-in-a lifetime productivity gains, Bush's plans are easily affordable
MAR 19, 2001
...
This year's tax and budget debate really comes down to one essential question: Is the money going to be there? The Congressional Budget Office projects surpluses of about $ 5.6 trillion over the next 10 years. The Republicans insist that those projections are conservative, so the government can afford to return $ 1.6 trillion to the taxpayers and still have money left over for Social Security, Medicare, and an $800 billion contingency fund. The Democrats cry that projections are notoriously inaccurate, that the tax cuts will blow a hole in the budget, and that the Bush administration's risky scheme (which sailed through the House last week) would cast us back into the days of piling debt.  
 
....even if today's productivity improvements are only on the scale of, say, the improvements our economy saw after World War II, we may be in for a long and sunny ride. There is a rough historical pattern here. A new technology is invented. It takes a long time before people figure out how to use it. The electric motor was invented in the 1880s, but it didn't transform factories until the 1920s, economist Paul David has noted. Once the technology is fully deployed, however, there are decades of positive results. Daniel Sichel of the Federal Reserve points to previous technology-driven surges that lasted 10 and 25 years. That suggests we may still be near the beginning of this particular period of bounty. 
 
If we are, an occasional period of slower growth or even a recession may occur, but the U.S. economy is fundamentally strong, and both laymen and legislators have good reasons to believe it will remain strong for many years. Industrial productivity is surging. Americans are not only the hardest working people on earth (the average American works about 10 weeks a year more than the average European) but also the most productive workers -- by far. If you measure value added per hour worked, Americans do about 20 percent better than Germans and the French, and 40 percent better than the Japanese. 
 
In other words, if you wade through the economic literature, it's hard not to agree with the Cleveland Fed's Jerry Jordan: We are living at a once-in-a-generation moment of economic opportunity. As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?

Mr. Brooks was equally certain 18 years ago that those stupid, arrogant, partisan, Bush Derangement addled anti-war hippies were finally going to be driven from polite society "now that the Iraq War is over" and Bush has been proven to be a fucking military and nation-building genius.  

The same hack who predicted more times than I can count over the past 20 years that the GOP had definitely turned a corner and weren't racist or crazy anymore and/or whatever flaws the GOP might have, Democrats were as bad or worse!
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.

Who confidently predicted that Marco Rubio would definitely win the 2016 Republican nomination.

Who, even after Trump was elected, still swore by God and Emile Durkheim that a Bright Conservative Future was Just Around The Corner...
The Post-Trump Era  
As awful as Donald Trump is, it will be exciting to witness the coming re-creation of the Republican Party. 

So quite honestly I don't much care what would or would not have appalled or thunderstruck or frightened Mr. Brooks' horses in the street ten years ago because Mr. Brooks' opinion on virtually all important matters have been so uniformly terrible for as long as I can remember. 

Don't get me wrong.  If after decades of continuous, spectacular and very public failure as a haver-of-opinions Mr. David Brooks is actually, slowly verging on catching up on this one issue with where the average Liberal was decades ago when he was slagging us all as whiney commie idiots, well that's just great.  

Someone should definitely give him a cookie and a participation ribbon.

But what no one has ever explained to my satisfaction is why the Sulzberger family employed him at heavy expense as a haver-of-opinions in the first place and why, after nearly two decades of continuous Both Siderist bed-shitting, he is still on their payroll.

 


Burn The Lifeboats

at 7 comments:
Labels: ,

The Memory Hole is Deep and Wide


Deadbeat Joe Walsh then:


Deadbeat Joe Walsh now:

Maybe of Deadbeat Joe should take a seat for the next 10-20 years.



Burn The Lifeboats

at 1 comment:

The Five Stories


At any given time there are there are five, distinct, non-overlapping public political narratives going on simultaneously in America and four of them are either Conservative or Conservative-enabling.

They are as follows.
 

1.  Both Siderism.  The following is from back when I was a commenter at The News Blog in 2004.

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...."

I mention it because Both Siderism and the glorification of a fictional "center" in response to every Republican atrocity has been the lazy, toxic, go-to Big Lie for the mainstream media for far longer than I've been writing this blog.   Other than Conservative Hate Radio/Fox News, no force in the American media has been more effective at shifting the Overton Window radically to the right.

Rating:  Conservative-enabling.  


2.  Conservative media.  The massive, well-funded ecosystem of radio networks, teevee networks, churches, book publishers, book imprints at mainstream publishing corporations, newspapers, think tanks and various low-brow, medium-brow and and high-brow publications.  You know who they are and you know the damage they have done.  

Rating:  Conservative.


3.  Dry-Drunk Republican media.  A much smaller ecosystem of anti-Trump Republicans who were run out of their party, whose media startups were then immediately underwritten by wealthy donors, and who have been handed book contracts, op-ed gigs and privileged, reserved-seating on cable teevee.  Dry-Drunk Republicans are Republicans who have largely given up the demon rum of party affiliation because of Trump, but still believe in the demented Conservative ideology that made Trump possible.

Rating:  Conservative.


4.  Red Rose Left.  A still smaller, but Very Loud niche market.


These Greenwald-wannabe trolls and useful idiots accomplish nothing except building a brand and convincing some of the weak-minded that voting is pointless.
Rating:  Conservative-enabling.


5.  Liberal/Progressive/Democratic/What-have-you.  The sprawling, raucous, infighting caucus of everyone else who, broadly speaking, wants to move the country forward -- a process which rarely happens in breathtaking leaps but instead in halting, maddening, grinding half-steps.  Often loosely defined as "The Left" and never been better described than by Will Rogers, "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."  

Rating:  Awesome, chronically-underfunded and occasionally self-defeating.

If you're wondering why you're so damn tired, it might be because in the public square you're routinely outnumbered 4-to-1.



Burn The Lifeboats

at 1 comment:

Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Over At The National Review...

 
...keeping up with the ever-increasing demand to memory-hole the past is no job for amateurs (no link because fuck 'em):

Unlike Obama, Biden Doesn’t Even Pretend to Care about Tackling Our Historic Debt
By PHILIP KLEIN
March 24, 2021 6:30 AM

In the 2020 campaign, Joe Biden proudly ran as an “Obama-Biden Democrat.”

But there is already one important difference between Biden and his old boss: Obama used to at least pretend to be concerned about our long-term debt, while Biden isn’t even going through the motions.

In his rush to bunch up his Fiscal Responsibility Panties and keen like a banshee about president Joe Biden, Mr. Klein seems to have misplaced at least four Republican presidents I could name.  

Presidents who swore on the graves of their ancestors that their gargantuan tax cuts would end up paying for themselves.

This is such a weird article because it finds Mr. Klein in the same wingnut limbo as other Very Serious Conservatives, stranded between two irreconcilable desires: the desperation to scurry back to some Conservative safe space of performative outrage over deficit hawkery or abortion or guns or whatever and the fact that, at the moment, Conservative revisionist scientists have not yet cracked the technology to make the history of the Trump years disappear.  

And so, temporarily robbed of a high horse from which to glower down at president Joe Biden and we dity, commie Dems, Klein must instead awkwardly stumble through (as briefly as possible) the Very Serious Conservative's ritual head-fake that somehow Trump and "Trump-era Republicans" were sui generis and in no way related to the party that spawned them.

Trump-era Republicans not only ignored entitlements and failed to repeal Obamacare, but they ditched the crowning achievement of the Tea Party by nuking the spending caps put in place by the 2011 debt-ceiling deal.

Once that ritual is completed, Klein can then go on to pretend that there was once some Golden Age of Republican budgetary prudence:

With shocking speed, the GOP went from the party of Paul Ryan, entitlement reform, and dire warnings about the debt to a populist party that rejected entitlement reform and didn’t care much about debt.

And that because of Trump's unique profligacy, Democrats now have an excuse to treat all of that Conservative deficit zealotry during the Golden Age of Republican budgetary prudence as so much flapdoodle. 
 
The drastic shift convinced Democrats that all the Tea Party Republican talk about fiscal responsibility was merely a bad faith way to thwart liberal policy priorities. As Democrats now see it...

This is unresolvable paradox facing all Very Serious Conservatives who still demand to be taken very seriously.  They cannot let go of the depraved ideology and pandering-to-bigots-and-lunatics electoral strategies that gave them real political power, but they also cannot explain how Trump could have come be were it not for their depraved ideology and pandering-to-bigots-and-lunatics electoral strategies.  It's as if the engineers who built the Hindenburg and flew it smugly across an ocean...and then watched it crash and burn...

...held a press conference in the still-smoking debris to insist that, well, yeah, sure, that giant sack of hydrogen was problematic, but that was just a crazy, fluky, one-in-a-million thing and in no way an indictment of our whole concept of filling giant sacks with hydrogen and flying them over population centers.


Burn The Lifeboats

at 8 comments:

Monday, March 22, 2021

Kristolize


Verb:   To build an entire career as a media tycoon slagging the Left for pointing out that the GOP is an irredeemable shithole of bigots and imbeciles.  Then, after your party tosses you out on your ass, spend the twilight of your career being praised by your peers for noticing that the GOP may, in fact, be an irredeemable shithole of bigots and imbeciles.


No Half Measures


at 3 comments:
Labels:

Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says

As the official, original source for "Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says" news, it has been frankly pitiful to peek over the fence every now and then and watch as this fading, flailing fop tries to stay relevant and slow his slide into substack has-been obsolescence by flinging increasingly ludicrous contrarian bullshit in every direction:



As I gear up for my 16th blogiversary festivities, perhaps this would be a good time to look out across the political media landscape and begin to note all the broken, hollowed-out creatures which the Right has sucked into its vortex and left in its wake.  



Burn The Lifeboats




at 3 comments:
Labels:

Friday, March 19, 2021

Professional Left Podcast #590


“Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out. "
-- Anton Chekhov, 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!

 Links:  
The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!







at 2 comments:
Labels: , ,

Thursday, March 18, 2021

J.D. Vance: A Farce in the Crowd

This is not J.D. Vance.

This is Tucker Carlson, who, along with every other Republican-who-would-be-Trump, has figured what Liberals have been pointing out for decades:  that the surest route to success on the Right is not to be found archly quoting Buckley and Burke to your fellow snobs, but instead by tarting yourself up in faux hobo threads and hieing yourself on down Tobacco Road as fast as your Tom Ford Elkan loafers will carry you.  

A plain and obvious fact that continues to come as a complete shock to Never Trumpers every time it rises up to slap them in the face.  Proving once again that no Never Trumper ever read All the King's Men:

Or watched A Face in the Crowd:

Or even Blazing Saddles:

Because they sure do seem to get shucked in exactly the same way over and over again.  

From The Bulwark:

J.D. Vance Joins the Jackals
How the path-breaking writer became a Trumpist troll.
by Mona Charen,  March 17, 2021 5:30 AM
...

Whatever the future of the Republican party will be, the shape-shifting J.D. Vance sheds light on the dynamics of how we got here and where the Republican party is headed. This week, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel announced that he is donating $10 million to a super PAC supporting Vance’s potential run for the Senate seat from Ohio. Vance hasn’t yet declared his candidacy, but Thiel has been boosting him for a while and it’s a safe assumption that he isn’t prone to throwing away his money.

Vance today is a fixture of the Trumpist right, but that isn’t the way he debuted. Not at all.

Rarely does a nonfiction book make the kind of splash Hillbilly Elegy did in 2016. I was part of the cheering section...

But a funny thing happened after the introduction of J.D. Vance, anti-Trump voice of the working class. He began to drift into the Trump camp. I don’t know why or how, but Vance became not a voice for the voiceless but an echo of the loudmouth. Scroll through his Twitter feed and you will find retweets of Tucker Carlson, alarmist alerts about immigration, links to Vance’s appearances on the podcasts of Seb Gorka, Dinesh D’Souza, and the like, and even retweets of Mike Cernovich...

Remember, Mona Charen is one of those Conservative Ubermensch who spent their entire adult lives  building a Potemkin façade of respectability around American Conservativism's three pillars -- rapacious greed, dogmatic contempt for government and white supremacy -- in order to get progressively more monstrous Republicans elected to high office.   

The same political Galaxy Brains (who are also the most smug and self-congratulatory group of losers in American political history) who spent their entire adult lives mocking and sneering at the Left for warning that their Republican Party was headed into darkness and madness.

The same mollycoddled fopplings who got run out of their own party (and directly into MSNBC's Green Room) by monsters they created and whose alibi is, in so many words, that none of them ever had the slightest fucking clue what was actually going on inside their own party.

The same rumbumptious word-grubbers who nonetheless continue to insist that they and only they are uniquely qualified to lecture those of us on the po' dumb America-hating Left about how we should be going about saving the nation from the horrors that they inflicted on it.

Which is very nice work if you can get it.


Burn The Lifeboats




at 5 comments:

Spleenwald Being Spleenwald

Portrait of a grifting viper in freefall:


But don't you worry one little bit about ol' Glenn kids. As long as Fox News remains a profitable White Nationalist enterprise, he will never lack for an audience of millions eager to be able to say, "See!  See!  We're not crazy!  Even Liberal Glenn Greenwald agrees with us!"

Perhaps someday our credulous Liberal brothers and sisters will finally learn to stop handing their hard-won Liberal credibility over to a passel of frauds.

Or at least have the decency not to come 'round here after they get screwed over yet again weeping about how those grifters turned around and used the credibility and cash that our credulous Liberal brothers and sisters poured into their coffers to advance their own fortunes and agendas. 
 
Hey, speaking of The Lincoln Project...


The Tip Jar Is Open.

at 4 comments:
Labels:

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

21 Years Later and Not a God Damn Thing Has Changed


The incredibly destructive "liberal media bias" lie is now old enough to have one kids of its own in college, and yet if you squint ever so slightly you could hardly tell whether this column --

CHAREN LEANS TOO FAR RIGHT AND FALLS ON HER FACE

-- is from 21 years ago or from yesterday.  Here are some bits and nibbles.

At least Mona Charen got this much right: ABC's Sunday morning show "This Week" will be a less lively and provocative show without William Kristol participating in its weekly roundtable.

Kristol, who edits the influential conservative magazine...

Getting rid of Kristol won't fix "This Week." Neither will such softball bookings as...

But Charen's column last week (syndicated in newspapers nationwide, including The Courant) positing liberal media bias as the reason for Kristol's departure is as ridiculously nonsensical as ABC's decision. She's so far right that she's dead wrong.

Charen's argument goes like this: Kristol and former White House wonderboy George Stephanopolous were hired by ABC at the same time to spice up...

Now conservatives have gotten more mileage out of the old "liberal media" canard than Scotland has gotten tourism dollars out of the Loch Ness monster myth. But a convenient myth is exactly what it is, and Charen's argument couldn't be more disingenuous...

Not until the second-to-last line of her column does Charen mention conservative George Will, who remains on the show...

Moreover, Charen's generalizations about the politics of Donaldson, Roberts and Stephanopolous are highly speculative at best.

Donaldson has a reputation as a liberal more because he came to prominence as a hostile, aggressive questioner of President Reagan...

Indeed, Donaldson is not so much a liberal voice as a loud voice. He's rarely insightful, rarely interesting and rarely correct...

As for Roberts, she's the daughter of the late, legendary back-room congressional leader Hale Boggs and the sister of big-time Washington lobbyist Tommy Boggs. She doesn't represent the left or the center as much as she does the establishment. Roberts is the voice of the inside-the-Beltway Georgetown dinner-party set. Her insights are just as banal as Donaldson's...

Even Stephanopolous is hardly a reliable liberal voice. If Roberts represents Washington insiders, Stephanopolous represents himself. The former Clinton adviser has been so terrified of being seen as a partisan pundit that he routinely pulls his punches during the roundtable segment.

He's more interested in carving out a career in journalism...than rolling up his sleeves and defending Clinton and the Democrats...

That's not liberal bias. It's bias in favor of safe, conventional opinion. It's also not particularly interesting TV.

Yet despite the way the conservative argument about media bias crumbles when examined, it persists because the right clings to it with such insistence...

And take note, Mona. The ubiquitous Kristol hardly disappeared. He didn't even miss a roundtable. Sunday morning found him opining on CBS's "Face the Nation."

That was from the Hartford Courant on January 4, 2000.  That's four days after the Y2K bug didn't take down Western civilization, one day before UFOs were credibly reported over Southern Illinois --

-- and eleven months before George W. Bush stole the 2000 election.

Consider all that has happened in the decades between then and now.

And then consider that, in all that time, absolutely nothing about the way the mainstream media continues to comprehensively fail the democracy which makes that media possible has changed in any substantive way at all.


Burn The Lifeboats




at 2 comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
  • "Times are bad.
    Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." The quote, in case you didn’t know, is not from nattering m...
  • I'm Spartacus.
    Shakespeare’s Sister has announced that she is bowing out of the Edwards campaign . Needless to say this is a very sad and sobering dev...