Blogiversary Post: Days of Future Past

So while I was under the weather, it seems my 16th blogiversary slipped right by.

Oops.  Where were your priorities, blogger!

And staring at the ceiling for several days, it came to me that, if I've learned anything after 16 years at this post it's that 16 years is a very long time to stare into the political abyss and write about it every day. Maybe I'll talk about that at greater length later, but it turns out that while I am coming out of the last malady that knocked me flat (yay!), I am also steering into the next thing that's going to keep me feeling like Godzilla kicked my ass for awhile (boo!)

Nothing life-threatening, but painful and unwelcome. Sorta like my congresscritter, Rodney Davis.  

So I'll be brief.  

Well, maybe not "brief".

Also you may consider this a fundraiser :-)  

Fund The Stridency

One of the very first, non-test posts I wrote for this weblog started life as a comment over at the late Steve Gilliard's News Blog.  I was frequent commenter there during the early aughts until he booted me out and told I needed to start my own Little Blog on the Prairie.   

That post from 16 years is the story of the Republican Party as it existed then, how it had gotten to be that way and where it was obviously headed.  And, to borrow a line from True Detective, it was a story with a monster at the end of it.  A deeply corrupt, mentally unstable sociopathic monster which the GOP itself had raised up as its leader at to whom they pledged their fearful fealty.  "Fearful" because everyone knew he was a fucking bug-eyed freak show, and "fealty" because the party had ceded so much power over their political lives to him that one blow from his hammer could turn an ambitious Republican's career to dust.

While your favorite Never Trumpers were busy making very good livings by getting ghouls and hobgoblins elected (looking at you, Lincoln Lads) or using their Hate Radio clout to advance the GOP's loathsome, racist agenda and the fortunes of its foot-soldiers (looking at you, Charlie Sykes) or generally shitting all over everything you value and believe in, this is what certain alarmist, amateur crackpot Liberals like me were seeing, plain as day, when we looking at the GOP as it actually existed 16 years ago: 

Over the long run that the GOP is demographically/electorally doomed to become the minority Thurston Howell Party again. Either when the Fundy Shining Path Rebels that make up their margin of victory make one too many batshit demands, or are are told “No” once too often.

(If you want to get a clear picture of how this will look, rent “Fatal Attraction” or “Play Misty For Me”. I’m not going to be ignored, George!)

So either they take their bat and ball and stomp disgustedly back to Mordor, or a handful of moderate Republicans get so freaked out by the Randall Terry Wing of the Party that they bolt or stay home...

I admit I was slightly wrong about that.  Chalk it up to the optimism of youth.  Turns out "moderate Republicans" didn't exist at all; there were only Republicans who would consort with monsters openly and Republicans who would consort with monsters in the dead of night and in disguise.  And once nut-cuttin' time came, pretty much all those deeply principled Moderate Republicans fell right into line like the good little fascists they always were.

Anyway all of this should sound loudly and painfully familiar because the GOP has not learned or evolved on fucking iota since then.  Quite the opposite: in 2016, after an eight-year racist primal scream over Obama, they demanded another Tom Delay, but Supersized.  

And what happened in the wake of that decision is, once again, nearly identical to what your host was writing/warning about 16 years ago.

...they don’t call him The Hammer for his shipwright skills. He spent a decade forcibly collecting GOP testicles and caching them in his private Crown Royal bag. At the slightest provocation he will to politically and personally destroy anyone who doesn’t bend a deep knee to His Gorgon Awfulness.

And both the Texas and National Republican parties have shown absolutely craven willingness to rewrite the Rules on the fly any time the Beast’s wet-bar needed to be restocked with virgin’s blood, or whenever a law or policy might make threaten to cinch-in the bottomless lust he and his stooges have for Power, Money, Trinkets and Perks, even a trifle.

So (hahah!) they’ve kinda disarmed themselves to accommodate him, and now they’re stuck very much up on that very windy gibbet with him...

"But Uncle driftglass," you ask (so polite!), "what about after Tom Delay finally 'sploded like that guy in Scanners?  After DeLay went *boom*, wasn't there was blood and viscera and indictments everywhere?  Didn't at least the moderate Republicans react in horror at that?"

Well kids, funny story about that.  Because this was the period during which, in order to save their depraved party from extinction and keep their snouts buried in the wingnut welfare media trough, the cream of the Conservative Punditocracy began a swift and tectonic shift in how they talked about the American politics.  Remember, during this period Conservative pundits were unreconstructed Iraq War pimps and they were in clover.  Bush was a fucking genius, wars and massive tax cuts would never put a dent in the budget surplus Bush had inherited from Bill Clinton, and Liberals were, at best, stupid, crackpot alarmists and, at worst, to quote Andrew Sullivan "the decadent left enclaves on the coasts [that] may well mount a Fifth column."

That's how they talked about us.  What they wrote about us.  All the time. So just imagine how few fucks I have to give for Conservatives whining about "cancel culture" having started my blogging career in a media environment where shitting on Liberals, valorizing Dubya and cheerleading the Iraq War was a license to print money and an easy, lazy career fast-track for any Conservative hack or bigot who could push two words together.  

And then several Very Bad Things happened.  

Quicker than you could say "Reagan taught us deficits don't matter" the Clinton surplus was gone, and in its place was a Bush deficit that dwarfed anything that had come before it.  And then came the Bush administration absolute botch of Hurricane Katrina and the unconcealed glee among a number of top-tier Conservative bloggers and Hate Radio creeps at the sight of black people suffering and dying.  But more devastating than Tom DeLay's implosion or the whiplash transformation of surplus into deficit or the obvious Republican incompetence in the face of a hurricane  was the complete collapse of Bush's Iraq Clusterfuck, along with the farrago of lies his administration had told to sell it.  

So, for the elite Conservative pundit, whose career had just enjoyed an exhilarating, rocket-fueled boost thanks to incessant slagging Liberals and fawning over Bush, how does one make one's way forward in a world where the Liberals critique of the Right is being vindicated daily and in real time, and you're stuck out there with nothing but Cheney's wizened dick to hang onto?

Enter Mr. David Fucking Brooks of The New York Times and the story of how Brooks navigated one element -- the fate of Tom DeLay -- of the shitstorm that was roaring through the GOP. 

Mr. Brooks' column about at Tom DeLay from 2004, should be in a museum somewhere.  An exhibit for the ages of what the work of a successful Conservative media toady looks like.  First, oozing praise all over Delay's effectiveness and his good manners and pooh-poohed any suggestion that Delay was a thug:

But there's also the fact that most House Republicans like DeLay. It's always important to remember that most of the mythology that surrounds the Hammer is total nonsense...

He is not the vicious strongman who terrorizes members and reduces them to tears to get their vote. Roy Blunt and Eric Cantor are the whips, not DeLay, and they are anything but vicious.

He's not even a terror to his peers. He can be firm, but he and his staff are noted for their graciousness...

And then praising House Republicans as noble and dedicated reformers who resented having their very high moral standards sullied by, among other things, have to bend the rules to make sure their beloved Hammer didn't get nailed -- 

This week, House Republicans bent their accountability rules to protect their majority leader from what they feel is a partisan Texas prosecutor. But they hated the whole exercise. They sat in a conference room hour after hour wringing their hands. Only a few members were brave enough to stand up and say they shouldn't bend the rule. But afterward, many House Republicans came up to those members and said that secretly they agreed with them...

Brooks went on to warned that, even though Delay might not notice it, his power might be ever so slightly slipping (Brooks has always been very big on passing along his unverifiable hunches and wishes as secret, insider dope that only he is privy to) and that if there were any more scandals, well, there was always that nice Mr. Hastert waiting in the wings should those fearless, incorruptible House Republicans tire of Mr. Delay:

He doesn't face an immediate threat. But the next time a scandal licks up against him, DeLay will find his support is not as strong as he thought it would be. He'll turn around and find that his caucus has remembered its core values. 

Savor that last paragraph for a moment and then let us join Mr. Brooks a little over a year later in full freak-out mode in a column entitled "Save The House":

I don't know what's more pathetic, Jack Abramoff's sleaze or Republican paralysis in the face of it. Abramoff walks out of a D.C. courthouse in his pseudo-Hasidic homburg, and all that leading Republicans can do is promise to return his money and remind everyone that some Democrats are involved in the scandal, too.

That's a great G.O.P. talking point: some Democrats are so sleazy, they get involved with the likes of us...

Have I mentioned recently that Mr. Brooks has been completely wrong about everything since forever?

Yeah, it turns out that those virtuous, high-minded House Republican reformers he was extoling were none of those things.  Or, rather, Republicans once again turned out to be everything Liberals had said they were. 

But Republicans need to do more than bump DeLay. They need to put the entire leadership team up for a re-vote. That's because the real problem wasn't DeLay, it was DeLayism, the whole culture that merged K Street with the Hill, and held that raising money is the most important way to contribute to the team.

Catch that?  "Republicanism" wasn't the problem because "Republicanism" can never be the problem.  Instead, a meaningless made-up nonsense word -- Delayism -- was somehow to blame just as now Trumpism is the Big Bad.

So what should the GOP do to fix itself?

First, they need to hold new leadership elections. As Newt Gingrich and Vin Weber told me yesterday...

I know.  It just gets better and better.

And who does Brooks offer up as the saviors of the GOP?

You're gonna laugh...

A party led by young talents like Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, Mike Pence and Mark Kirk would be taken seriously as a party of reform.

I told you you'd laugh.  

Then came a bunch of stuff that were either terrible ideas or were never going to happen, followed by:

Finally, today -- before noon -- fire Bob Ney as chairman of the House Administration Committee. For God's sake, Republicans, show a little moral revulsion.

There has always been a lively debate on the Left as to whether David Brooks was just a colossal schmuck who Republicans could toy with, lie to and otherwise bamboozle over and over again and who never catches on, or whether he is just a pathological liar who has succeeded in life by telling the wealth and powerful the comforting, toxic fairy tales they wish to believe are true.

Well, there's ample evidence on both sides, but hey, I promised you a peek into the formative moments of a major shift in how elite Conservatives in the media -- standing in the rubble of the Bush Administration and the ruin of the Tom Delay's House of Representatives -- would deflect and diffuse accountability for all Republican future atrocities, didn't I?  

So join me now and witness the ascension of Both Siderism to the status of official state religion among Conservative pundits and their mainstream media collaborators as reflected in how David Brooks will now use use the implosion of Tom Delay's political career.  Mind you, Brooks cobbled together the following column -- "Party No. 3" -- less than eight months after his "For God's sake, Republicans, show a little moral revulsion." column.  For those of you who have heard it before, you know where we're going.

There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.

All were on display Tuesday night.

The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind. The Republican Party was represented by its collapsing old guard — scandal-tainted Tom DeLay trying to get his name removed from the November ballot. And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.

Did I mention that Brooks was absolutely livid that his very good friend Holy Joe Lieberman was defeated in a free and fair Democratic primary?

So what exactly is the "McCain-Lieberman Party"?  It's David Brooks' entire "Wouldn't it be cool if..." wish list stuffed in to one kielbasa.  It's his the "All Good Things and No Bad Things" Party and what kind of asshole would a person have to be to stand against that!

And the other two parties?  The real parties?  Well according to Brooks they're both so equally awful in exactly the same ways that there is really no point in examining them separately.  Or factually.

Instead...

The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.

And here comes the Delay!

But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.

And just like *that* Tom Delay stops being "Tom Delay" and began his new life as as the ideological counterpart of those scurrilous and wholly imaginary "net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party".

On some level Brooks knows his "All Good Things and No Bad Things" Party will  never happen but perhaps (and this is why The New York Times pays him the big money) one of the parties will be wise enough to adopt McCain-Liebermanism -- another one of Brooks' hideous neologisms that he coins in the column's last, dying gasps.

The history of third parties is that they get absorbed into one of the existing two, and that will probably happen here. John McCain and Hillary Clinton will try to reconcile their centrist approaches with the hostile forces in their own parties. And maybe they will succeed.

And in explaining that it would be easier for McCain to absorb the wisdom of McCain-Liebermanism (after all, his name was already on the letterhead) Brooks could not help venting his spleen one last time on the real villains here: Liberals.

McCain has a better chance, since the ideologues on the right feel vulnerable while the ideologues on the left, perpetually two years behind the national mood, think the public wants more rage.

Brooks' was beside himself with rage that the Left would dare to primary his very dear, morally bankrupt, backstabbing friend Joe Lieberman, and he never forgave us for humiliating him over and over again by being right about Iraq, the Bush administration generally and, well, the entire Republican Party.  So he couldn't resist bitterly asserting that we crazy alarmist Liberals are "perpetually two years behind the national mood" and that we couldn't possibly be honestly and justifiably furious at what the GOP was doing to the country.  Instead it must all be cynically performative -- the "net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party" putting on a little show because we thought it would go over well with the public.  

And this is when the tectonic shift began.   A period when things were going very badly for the GOP and were about to get ever so much worse.  They were about to get creamed in the midterms.  The Iraq War was now clearly seen as a disaster, possibly on a scale not seen since Vietnam.  A number of Bush Administration scandals were beginning to draw blood.  There was the aforementioned Hurricane Katrina.  There was Terri Schiavo.  Credible rumors that torture had secretly become official U.S. policy. And the economy was getting ready to collapse.   

Suddenly all of the talking points that unreconstructed Iraq War pimps like Brooks has used as career rocket fuel --  Bush was genius, we are victorious in Iraq, deficits are never coming back, Liberals are Bush-deranged idiots -- were turning to ash in their mouths.  And so began the Golden Age of "Both Sides Do It" with David Brooks leading the way.  

From now on, virtually every single David Brooks column would be the same column over and over again.  There would never be another Republican atrocity that would not be deflected and diffused by a "...but the Democrats" column from Mr. Brooks asserting that, while the facts of whatever-it-is-this-week may not be in dispute, out there somewhere, perceptible only to Mr. Brooks antennae, there was probably some Liberal doing something just as bad.  Maybe worse!  

Every escalation of Republican obstructionism, sabotage and hysteria would henceforth be blamed on "The Extremes on Both Sides!" who were ruining everything for the vast, calm, reasonable and completely fictional Center that Mr. Brooks claimed to speak for.  

"Both Sides Do It" was the perfect, all-occasion Big Lie for media hacks and frauds everywhere so it propagated fast, fast, fast like a plague.  It became holy writ in the mainstream media.  The Sunday Shows became temples to it, where each week the same panels of gasbags gathered to ritually repeat the Big Lie.  It was suffocating.  It was Orwellian.  It was everywhere.  And it was the greatest gift the increasingly unhinged and openly racist Republican Party could have hoped for.  Because the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It demanded that the teller of that lie give up objectively evaluating and reporting on anything in its own context.  Give up doing actual journalism and thereby voluntarily choose to deprive themselves of the one tool they would need to see just how dangerous the GOP was becoming.

In the last 16 years I've written literally thousands of posts on the subject of Both Siderism and its corrosive  toxicity.  So have many other Liberal bloggers.  And instead of being given a fair hearing, we have routinely been mocked and ignored -- "cancelled" if you will -- by the same mainstream media that mocked and ignored us during the Bush Administration.  Just ask respected, sober-minded D.C. political analysts Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann who were all but blackballed for saying out-loud what every already knew but refused to talk about. 

This blanket cancellation of those of us who saw where the Both Sides Do It lie was leading and spoke out about it was due in no small part to the fact that those unreconstructed Iraq War pimps I referred to earlier hadn't been driven out of polite society as would have happened in an healthy culture.  Instead many of them had been immediately handed influential jobs-for-life in the mainstream media where they had become  -- surprise! --the bishops and cardinals of the High and Holy Church of Both Side Do It.

Time passed.  

The cult of Both Siderism thrived.

David Brooks continued to make a fine living and enjoy the accolades of his peers while being jaw-droppingly wrong about everything.

Dire Liberal warnings about the trajectory of the GOP were repeatedly ignored.  

Things got exponentially worse. 

And then came Trump.  

Suddenly, the very few unreconstructed Conservative Iraq War pimps (who were now Both Siderist High Priests) who spoke against Trump and found themselves run out of the party.  Almost overnight they were on the outside of their GOP looking in.  And they began demanding to know what the fuck had just happed, who were all of these crazy people and how did they get in here!

And we on the Left had answers for them.  Clear, well-documented answers.  But as it was during the Rise of Hate Radio, the Rise of Gingrich, the Rise of Delay and the Iraq War debacle, the rise of Trump was clearly the result of massive, long-term dereliction, lying and willful blindness on the part of the now-completely dysfunctional mainstream media and elite Conservatives.  And these guys -- who now called themselves "Never Trumpers" -- emphatically did not want to hear those answers because those answers clearly implicated them. 

Instead, they floated a series of zany and (most-importantly) self-absolving theories to explain How We Came To This Sorry Pass, all of which were obvious hogwash.  But since the mainstream press had no interest whatsoever in an explanation of the Rise of Trump that began, "The Republican Party has been racing towards white nationalist fascism for decades and you have been doing everything in your power to lie about it..." once again the Liberals who had been right all along were shoved aside by the media, while another clutch of Republicans who had been wrong all along -- the Never Trumpers -- were handed control of the narrative.

Are we seeing a pattern yet?

So after all of this, how stands the High and Holy Church of Both Do It?

Well, it's battered but still standing.  

On the one hand, in the twinkling of an eye, some of yesterday's most relentless peddlers of Both Siderist snake oil --

-- have suddenly become some of today's most emphatic opponents of it.  Without, of course, ever acknowledging that they had ever said or believed otherwise.

And the stank coming off of Both Siderism is strong enough in some quarters that no less a mainstream media mainstay than Lester Holt is now unafraid to say a few words against it.  From Crooks & Liars:

At Long Last, A Network TV Anchor Admits: Both Sides Don't

Lester Holt accepts his lifetime achievement award by admitting that "fairness is overrated" because lies aren't worthy of news media attention.

Which predictably caused Conservative schlock shops like Fox News and The National Review to lose their minds.

So good job troops!

But now that the immediate threat of Trump in the Oval Office has passed, those of us who have made it our job to carefully watch and listen and write down what we believe is coming next, can hear the unmistakable sounds of the usual suspects struggling to slide "...but the Democrats" back into their lexicon.  

Because these fuckers never learn.  

No Half Measures