"If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared." -- Niccolo Machiavelli
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I think the Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan is a national treasure. There! I said it!
And yet, as I read her column in today's WaPo I just felt...exhausted. Ms. Sullivan's column -- "Our democracy is under attack. Washington journalists must stop covering it like politics as usual" -- is accurate and sobering...and feels like it might have been plucked out of my own archives from 16 years ago.
Minus my swears and verbal curlicues, of course.
In other words, another one of the tens of thousands of urgent-but-ultimately impotent editorials that we've all read (and some of us have written) over the decades pleading with the profession of journalism to police itself. Or, absent that, asking that some senior executives, somewhere with actual clout step up and use their power to put a dent in this plague of Both Siderism -- a plague which everyone but the densest hack knows has paved the road along which the deranged Right now marches, but plague against which no one with the power to do so push back with real authority.
Ms. Sullivan correctly cites "two think-tank scholars, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann" from "back in the dark ages of 2012" writing their book -- “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” -- about the rise of Republican Party extremism and its poisonous effect on American democracy. She goes on to add that, "nearly a decade later" the derangement of the GOP has only gotten worse.
Which is true.
What is also true, but which Ms. Sullivan fails to add, is that during the decade before Ornstein and Mann wrote their book, Liberals were blogging about the metastasizing cancer of Both Siderism in the media every fucking day, and warning as loud as we could that if this went on, sooner or later our democracy would be destroyed from within. That we would end up up exactly where we are now -- with a Republican Party that is openly racist, fascist and increasingly bloodthirsty, and a mainstream press that enables the Right by cowering in its Both Siderist panic room and refusing to see what is unfolding right in front of them.
None of which made much of a difference, although a lot of you have taken it upon yourselves to leap in with both feet on social media whenever you spot some media gasbag trying to gaslight their readers with a spew of Both Siderism. And for that I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Ms. Sullivan also commendably points the Finger of Shame at the offenders' publications (I've chosen not to carry those links into this post because fuck 'em)
“What You’re Doing Is Unprecedented’: McCarthy-Pelosi Feud Boils Over,” read a CNN headline this week.
And...
One writer at Politico called Pelosi’s decision a “gift to McCarthy.” And [Politico's] Playbook tut-tutted the decision as handing Republicans “a legitimate grievance,” thus dooming the holy notion of bipartisanship.
And...
“Both parties have attacked the other as insincere and uninterested in conducting a fair-minded examination,” a Washington Post news story observed.
But Ms. Sullivan never actually names the names of her colleagues whose casual cowardice is abetting Republican sedition. The names of the goofs who very much need to be publicly shunned for doing us all dirty.
For the record, the CNN sinners are Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju.
The Politico offender is Rachael Bade.
Once you drill down through a Tweet... and then a screenshot... and then search for a key phrase from that screenshot you will learn that the Politico Playbook hacks in question are Rachael Bade, Ryan Lizza, Tara Palmeri and Eugene Daniels.
And the goofs right down the hall from Ms. Sullivan at the WaPo who are using that paper's imprimatur to hand the Right ammunition are Marianna Sotomayor, Jacqueline Alemany are Karoun Demirjian.
All of which tells me what I already knew. That despite a decade of Liberal bloggers calling attention to this toxic style of journalism and despite yet another decade -- a post-Ornstein-and-Mann decade -- of slightly more respectable and august personages within the media doing exactly what Liberal bloggers had been doing all along, nothing has fundamentally changed.
What it tells me is that, from well-known names in the media to unknowns looking to make a name, most of them steer what their professional radar tells them is the safest and most reliable course to career advancement -- Both Siderism.
What it tells me is that, at the very top of the corporate media food chain where priorities and preferences are established, promotions are awarded and hiring-and-firing decisions are made, there is nobody home who actually gives a shit about the fact that our democracy is hanging by threads.
And that one political party -- the Republican Party -- is bending every effort to severe those threads once and for all.
Never let it be said that Chuck Todd is incapable of learning
anything.
In fact, quite the opposite is true. Chuck is always learning
stuff! That's the good news.
The bad news is that Chuck isn't learning new stuff.
Instead, every few years Chuck takes advantage of the huge and undeserved
media platform that NBC has given him to announce that he has just had the
same miraculous revelation that he had already claimed to have had a few years
previous.
And again a few years before that.
For example, here is Chuck Todd yesterday in The Verge:
I don’t ever want to be in the access game. And yet the access game is
paying a lot of bills in the social media influencer and cable news
space.
But here is Chuck Todd back in December of 2014 explaining that without
playing the access game, he'd be out of business.
Lewis Black:I watch you and everybody else when somebody comes on [your show] and I
don't know how you do it. Because I'd be barking at them. Because
they sit there and go, 'blah, blah, blah,' and you sit there [and listen
to it].
Todd:We all sit there because we all know the first time we bark, it's the
last time they do the show, There's something sometimes where ...
it's the last time. Nobody will ever come on your show. There is that
balance sometimes.
And here is a link to Chuck Todd's almost-lost-to-history appearance on
The Moment with Brian Koppelman making it perfectly clear he knows what business he's in. Going
into even greater detail about how it is definitely not his job
to irritate his guests by letting his audience know when they're flatly
lying or insane even when he knows for a fact that they are. As I said
back in 2015
when I was the only person writing about this interview (and h/t again to
Alert Reader Walt for pointing me to it):..
[Todd] does go so far as to say (starting at around the 11:00 minute mark)
that he understands that every week elected asshats come on his show and lie
to his face.
And that our politics has become a game of pandering to the "idiots" and
that that is why the public is cynical.
And that all core truths about the catastrophe our politics has become are
perfectly well known to everyone in The Club, but are only ever whispered
about off the record. Because, as Mr. Todd confesses (at around the 18:15
mark), he is a creature of The Business of Show. A clown, in the employ of
corporate executives whose faces we will never see and whose names will
never be mentioned, but who make it clear to Mr. Todd that his show is all
about gettin' them ratings, and fuck the substance.
It is also kinda hilarious to hear the host of the most influential
political show on teevee hoping (starting at around the 25:00 mark) that
somehow, someday, maybe the Millennials with their Twitters and their
Instagrams and suchlike will start demanding that politicians be on the
record all the time, and then something something a big change might happen.
Here is Chuck Todd once again from The Verge this week rolling out his
inevitable, nauseating, contractually-obligated Both Siderism by first
pointing to an actual, concrete example of Republican perfidy...
Now, let me argue the other side of it. Tax cuts. Republicans have argued
for years, “Tax cuts pay for themselves.” There is not a lick of truth to
this. There is no data that supports this anywhere. And then when you
present them with the data, the tax cuts don’t pay for themselves. “Oh,
well, they would have, had they not done this, or they would have had you
not …”
...and then handwaving in the general direction of you and me and asserting --
without citing s single actual example -- that of course this is
what both sides do That shit is the fault of
"American politics". Of "one side or the other". Of
trying to appease "the base of party X".
So the problem in American politics is that, even when somebody’s point
of view, their rationale for a decision they make, is proven wrong, they
usually, because there’s enough of a following on one side or the other,
there’s enough people invested in making sure that even when their
narrative is wrong, they have to defend why it was wrong. So they say,
“well, it would have paid for itself had there not been reckless spending
by the Liberal Democrats.” Some unprovable ambiguous shot that sounds good
to the base of party X.
But before you can ask, "Who the fuck is 'party X'?", Chuck has toddled
on to his main theme: feigning complete flabbergasterhood that his profession
has fallen so utterly to its knees in the face of the onslaught of attacks
from the Right. Swearing that, boy howdy, he has really learned
his lesson!
I think objectivity and fairness are not the same thing in some ways. You
can’t define objectivity as sort of being equal, that we know. You can’t
balance the truth, that we know.
This is 100% pure, cask-strength bullshit from the mope whose picture you will
see in future editions of the OED next to the term "Both Siderism", but sure
Chuck. Whatever. Proceed. With my emphasis added.
So you have to be fair and have an open mind. Where we did get lost in
this, and this sort of happened to mainstream media in particular, is that
we did let Republican critics get in our heads, right?
The Republicans have been running on, “There’s a liberal bias in the
media.” And talk about, if you say something long enough, there are
liberals who say there’s a liberal bias in the media when you see polling
now...
The point is, if you say it enough, a lot of people believe it. This has
been a 45-year campaign. I mean, Roger Ailes and Pat Buchanan were Nixon
guys and basically blamed the media for Watergate. And it’s been a
sustained campaign.
And Roger Ailes basically built an entire media empire based on this
premise that he created during the Nixon era.
We should have fought back better in the mainstream media.
We shouldn’t [have] accepted the premise that there was liberal bias. We should have defended. I hear the attacks on fact checkers where they
“fact-check Republicans six times more than they fact-check Democrats.”
Yeah. Perhaps the Republicans are being factually incorrect more often
than the Democrats.
We ended up in this both-sides trope. We bought into the idea
that, oh my God, we’re perceived as having a liberal bias. And I think for
particularly the first decade of the century, I’d say mainstream media
overcorrected. And we bought into the Fox motto of “balance.” And it’s
like, Jesus, there’s no balance, they need the truth. There’s fairness,
that’s different than balance. And so in that sense, this is why we’re in
this defensive posture today.
But wait a minute. Didn't Chuck claim to have already learned this same
lesson three years ago, in 2019? From
PressThink:
The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd
That disinformation was going to overtake Republican politics was
discoverable years before he says he discovered it.
‘Round midnight on Christmas eve, Rolling Stone posted a short interview
with Chuck Todd, host of “the longest running show on television,” NBC’s
Meet the Press.
Its contents were explosive, embarrassing, enraging, and just plain
weird.
Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of
“alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd.
Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on
social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you
know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever
controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing
for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to
help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen
actions are reported as news. Todd repeatedly called himself naive for not
recognizing the pattern, itself an astounding statement that cast doubt on
his fitness for office as host of Meet the Press...
And a year before that, in 2018, wasn't Chuck in The Atlantic swearing
that he had finally seen the light?
It’s Time for the Press to Stop Complaining—And to Start Fighting Back
A nearly 50-year campaign of vilification, inspired by Fox News's Roger
Ailes, has left many Americans distrustful of media outlets. Now,
journalists need to speak up for their work.
By Chuck Todd
...
American democracy requires a functioning press that informs voters and
creates a shared set of facts. If journalists are going to defend the
integrity of their work, and the role it plays in sustaining democracy,
we’re going to need to start fighting back.
The idea that our work will speak for itself is hopelessly naive. Fox,
Limbaugh, and the rest of the Trump echo chamber have proved that.
Meanwhile, even in Ailes’s absence, Fox seems more comfortable than ever
pushing the limits of responsible behavior by a supposed news
organization. It recently allowed a sitting state attorney general to
co-host a show for three days. The network effectively gave a GOP
candidate for Florida governor nearly unfettered access to its airwaves
during his primary campaign, providing a more significant boost than any
super pac can offer. The fact that so few viewers batted an eye shows how
conditioned they have become to the network’s unique ethical
standards...
I’m not advocating for a more activist press in the political sense, but
for a more aggressive one. That means having a lower tolerance for talking
points, and a greater willingness to speak plain truths. It means not
allowing ourselves to be spun, and not giving guests or sources a platform
to spin our readers and viewers, even if that angers them. Access isn’t
journalism’s holy grail—facts are...
And yet, for all of his serial revelations that the Left has been right
about the Right and the mainstream media all along, has Chuck
lifted a finger to actual do anything but "look with alarm" in the pages of
The Atlantic or The Verge or The Rolling Stone?
After all, Chuck Todd doesn't own Comcast/NBC. He's an
employee of that media corporation who serves at the pleasure of its
executives. For all of you out there who are (mistakenly) nostalgic for
the Good Olde Days of Tim Russert, remember first that Russert was no fucking
prize, and second, that Russert was not Chuck Todd's immediate predecessor.
Todd was given the Big Chair by Comcast/NBC after they fired David
Gregory. And as
longtime
readers of this blog will remember, during his six years hosting Meet the
Press, Gregory was exactly as awful as Todd in
exactly the same way. From
me in 2011:
Caution: Extended flashback ahead!
In the last six year, I'm sure I've done over 200 of these Mouse Circus
"Sunday Morning..." playlets and watch hundreds more, and I honestly am hard
pressed to recall another time when the contrast between the grave, complex
realities of world events and the fatuously smug dysfunction of the Villager
Sock Puppet brigade was on such blinding display it was on
"Meet the Press"
today.
First came the Tweets.
Gregory: Hey, lets look at a bunch of tweets Chuck Todd.
Chuck Todd: That's a lot of tweets, David Gregory.
Gregory: Would you call it an assload of tweets, Chuck Todd?
Chuck Todd: Many American would, David Gregory. According to our new
Gaffer/Quinnalporpoise poll, 44.5% of Americans either agree or are
quite likely to agree if you bought them a couple of Stingers, while the
Nabob/Abendigo numbers say 48.2%.
Gregory: Wow, Chuck Todd, that is nearly a majority.
Second came an "interview" with Tom Friedman that consisted of The Mustache of Understanding standing in front of a
camera at Davos -- at the single point on the face of the Earth which,
at the moment, is almost literally the opposite end of the cultural,
political, climactic, ethnic and economic Universe from everything that
is happening in Egypt -- to yap out platitudes about globalism:
Friedman: You know, the first rule of politics...
Friedman: You know, the big danger in punditry is to confuse your hope and
the reality of the politics...
Friedman: You know, the looting and whatnot...
Friedman: There are three things that could happen: Something good, something
meh and something bad.
Gregory: Tom Friedman, you are wise beyond all human understanding and other
than getting everything fucking thing wrong for as long as anyone can
remember, you have never been surprised by anything in the Middle East.
Does this surprise you?
Tom Friedman: Not a bit. Now I have to go -- we're doing naked 1995 Krug Clos
Ambonnay champagne and Truffle Chutney shots off of Arianna Huffington's
tits in the hotel hot tub.
Gregory: Sounds exciting.
Friedman: Winner gets to pick an industry to randomly fuck with, use our
captive media courtiers to bubble it up to 100 times its actual value,
cash out and strip it bare at the top of the market, toss the carcass on
the scrap heap of history and call it "creative destruction".
Gregory: And now, back to our panel.
Harold Ford, Junior: You have lots of people in Egypt who have education and
stuff.
Gregory: Great insight, Harold Ford, Junior!
Chuck Todd: The White House is afraid of what effect this may have on Israel.
Gregory: Would you like to randomly interject some words and phrases,
Republican analyst Mike Murphy?
Murphy: Turkey. Muslim Brotherhood!
Gregory: And based on that, what are the likely outcomes?
Murphy: Two things that might happen -- One good and one bad.
Harold Ford, Junior: I read on Wikipedia that the median age in Egypt is 24. Also I
would like to mention that I am under 40. This is important for reasons I
obviously do not understand, but which I will vaguely imply with words
like "global citizen".
driftglass: Why, Harold Ford, Junior?
Harold Ford, Junior: In order to get my turn on camera while at the same time not saying
anything definitive that will make me look like an idiot a week from
now.
driftglass: Not to worry, Harold Ford, Junior. The Friedman Rule applies here
-- no one on these shows is ever held responsible for anything they
say.
Harold Ford, Junior: I agree with everyone about everything. I will now say "Walk to the middle." "Alienating the extremes on the Left and the
right." "Compromise." and "Center." very quickly, back-to-back.
Gregory: Your ham-fisted navigation of this complex topic back to safe vocabulary
that we can all enjoy has given me a steely erection.
End of extended flashback.
Comcast/NBC didn't fire Gregory because he's a craven hack who wallows in Both
Siderism and rolls over for Republican lies at the slightest touch.
Hell, that's Comcast/NBC's fucking job description for
whoever they seat on the Meet the Press throne. They fired
Gregory for bad ratings. And they hired Todd because they wanted someone
who would be just like Gregory but who wasn't Gregory.
So you needn't take Todd's periodic, performative outbursts seriously.
They are as obvious and insincere a marketing gimmick as the mustaches,
sideburns and below-the-collar haircuts that middle-aged local teevee news
anchors began uncomfortably sporting in the 1970s try to try to attract the
youth market by looking "hip".
No kiddies, Chuck Todd has not seen the light.
But he may very well be seeing the handwriting on the wall.
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:
So the reviews are in and now we know. Since we must now all just accept
that Republicans are basically feral trolls who we should never expect to be
held responsible for the evil that they do (from today's
WaPo) --
Have Trump voters come down with a serious case of Snowflake Syndrome?
To hear some pundits and Republicans
tell it, millions of people across the country who voted for Donald Trump
are suffering from an affliction that you might call “Snowflake
Syndrome.”
On numerous fronts in our politics — from voting rights to covid-19 to the
legacy of Jan. 6 — we’re being told these voters are afflicted with a deeply
fragile belief system that must be carefully ministered to and humored to an
extraordinary degree.
We must pass voting restrictions everywhere to assuage
these voters’ “belief” that the 2020 election was highly dubious or
fraudulent. We must not argue too aggressively
for coronavirus vaccines, lest they feel shamed and retreat into their
anti-vax epistemological shells.
And we must allow Republicans
to appoint some of the most deranged promoters of the stolen election myth
to a committee examining the insurrection so they’ll feel like its findings are credible...
-- from now on the rest of us will now be required handle them like Dan
Akroyd's Jimmy Carter handled Peter Elton of West Burke Oregon: calmly
talking to them as if they're freaked out 17-year-olds on acid and having a
very bad bad trip.
Except Republican aren't scared 17-year-olds who will fall asleep in a few
hours and get over it.
They're full-grown paranoid, racist and often violent adults, and their bad
trip never, ever ends.
UPDATE: Had to bring this comment from GrafZeppelin127 up from the comment section:
...lest they soil their nice clean "F*** YOUR FEELINGS" t-shirts with sad, sad tears.
Because there is clearly no one at The New York Times with the clout to
shut him down or put him out to pasture. In this way, he is their Sean
Hannity or Tucker Carlson. Bigger than the game...whatever game it is
The New York Times is playing.
Today I glanced at The New York Times just long enough to notice that
this was one of those days when Mr. David Brooks decided it was his job
to explain to American something about which he knows nothing.
This morning's subject?
Racism, and how exactly we are measuring up.
This latest in Mr. Brooks' ongoing series of
"America: A Land of Contrasts" book reports has statistics and
percentages and everything and in three little words, Twitter user Wii Spa
summed up my reaction accurately:
Let's judge how accurately Mr. Brooks' instincts about race are calibrated by
using two of clearest metrics from The Before Time: The Fake Tea Party,
and the wider Republican freak out over the nomination and election of Barack
Obama, starting with a few note from post of mine from A Very Long Time Ago
(2008) entitled
"The Negrological Constant":
In this election, the predictive model we use to explain our cultural
Universe is also deeply warped. Warped by race. Race is, yet again, the
17-ton mastodon in the room, but continues to scud and swirl quietly around
the dark corners of American political discourse like errant dust bunnies.
And so the media develops a suite of “Negrological Constants” to explain
what is happening in the polls without having to face the reality that we
are not a post-racial society.
Not by a damn sight.
Better than we have been? Yes.
Getting better every generation? Yes.
But in 2008, to pretend that that all objects in motion in the American
political system are not being acted on by racism is as silly as pretending
that all objects on the face of the Earth are not being acted on by gravity.
I wrote that in reaction to Mr. Brooks' appearance on the now-defunct
Charlie Rose Show where Brooks was completely befuddled as to why
Barack Obama was clearly being held to different a standard than Jonh
McCain. From David Brooks during that 2008 round-table:
I think there is no doubt that Barack Obama is much more specific than John
McCain. If this were about issues, Obama would be winning by 15 points. The
mystery is, why he's not.
Except, of course, it was most definitely not a mystery to anyone who hadn't
been a privileged, myopic, white Conservative living in the Beltway media
bubble their entire adult lives.
Like Michele Norris appearing on the Charlie Rose Show over the past two
nights:
"One thing we've only touched on lightly here is the issue of race, and
the polling has shown that many of these voters when they say "he's not
patriotic enough", "we just don’t know who he is", "we don’t know what he
really stands for", if you dig down a little deeper there are suggestions
that some of these issues are proxies for this issue of race."
Like Connie Schultz of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, also appearing on the
Charlie Rose Show over the past two nights:
“It hurts me to say, as the child of working class people, what these
people were saying. When I get email from these people, there ain't a lot
of nuance.”
And
Connie Schultz:
I think Michele makes a very important point about race ... I've been
writing about this because I come from the working class, and I am very
troubled by some of the things I'm hearing from the working class. About
race. And I said, you gotta go home and have the tough conversations with
family members.
Rose: What do they say?
Schultz: (They say) "I will not vote for..."
Rose (because he is congenitally unable to stop interrupting people trying
to finish their sentences): "...an African American?!?"
Schultz:
Right. If they say it well. If they say it kindly. I think it's code when
they say "Well we really don't know if he's a Muslim" and "we don't know
if he's patriotic". That’s all code for race. And for us to pretend that
isn't happening is irresponsible for us in the media.
Anyway, that was David Brooks --
The New York Times' senior Conservative political columnist --
in 2008 staring Republican racism square in the eye and swearing he didn't see
a thing.
Here is
David Brooks in 2009,
cocking his ear at the deafening, racist primal scream of a Republican party
reacting to the election of Barack Obama, shrugging, and swearing he can't
hear a thing:
Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s
critics, so I can’t measure how much racism is in there. But my impression
is that race is largely beside the point.
We next encounter
David Brooks a year later, in 2010, flashing his PhD in Knowing Racism Stuff in 2010, on Meet the Press,
when E.J. Dionne rolled out this inconvenient truth:
Dionne: Look, there is a concerted conservative campaign on part of the movement,
a minority of the movement…to use race to split people. Glenn Beck says
Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." J. Christian Adams, a
Republican activist pushing this new Black Panthers story, says the Obama
Justice Department is motivated by a "lawless hostility toward equal
enforcement of the law." Now, there are people playing with this racial
politics out there. I am not saying, the NAACP certainly isn't saying that
this is the whole conservative movement…or most of the conservative
movement or most of the tea party. But it's a part of this strategy, and
people should condemn it.
Well, it turned out that it was pretty much the whole
Conservative movement -- and certainly the overwhelming majority of the GOP
base -- but we'll leave that aside for now and move on to Mr. Brooks'
reaction to this inconvenient truth
First, he rolled out his trademark, "Liberals are just as bad in the opposite
way" thing:
Brooks:There are liberals who call conservatives racist as a matter of
tactics, too
And then, extrapolating from his single, jog-by observation of a Fake Tea
Party Rally and a Black family reunion going on near each other that didn't
result in a riot, that the Tea Baggers are the goddamn salt of the goddamn
Earth. The best kind of people. And not at all racist!
Brooks:Listen, I was out jogging. You wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out
jogging in the mall. I was at a tea party rally, tea party rally. Also
there was a group called the back--Black Family Reunion, celebration of
African-American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle, sitting
at the same table, eating, watching concerts together. Among most of those
people there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on a, on a
warm Sunday afternoon.
Four years later, we find David Brooks was reassuring his readers that whatever scary
weirdness his party might have been up to, it was over now! The
GOP had detoxified it's brand and there was nothing but blue skies ahead.
Less than two years after that turned out to be utter bullshit, Mr.
David Brooks was back on Meet the Press reassuring his reassuring
his readers that
"the governing wing of the Republican Party" would soon swing into
action and save them from both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz by rocketing Marco
Rubio to power.
And less than two years after all of that turned out to
be utter bullshit, Mr. David Brooks was reassuring his readers that
Trump winning was actually a good thing because it was definitely going to usher in a
New Conservative Intellectual Renaissance
-- a Conservative Intellectual Renaissance so powerful and catchy that it
would sweep aside stodgy oldster political thinking and by next summer all the
rock and roll kids would be dancing to it in their raves and discotheques and
sock hops.
Just like in Footloose!
And then there was Brooks' brief non-confessional confession tour, launched
during the 2016 campaign, when his job was clearly on the chopping block
because he had fucked up so consistently and so very, very publicly on the
pages of The New York Times. Here is a particularly illuminating
snippet from Brooks from the still-defunct
Charlie Rose Show in 2016:
Rose: So you think you were wrong? That you had
somehow been on the Acela too much and had not done what?
Brooks: As I say, I'm out in the country ... every week
I'm somewhere ... but somehow I didn't see it coming.
I'm...I'm...I'm...I was not alone in that. A lot of
us didn't see it coming.
Rose: Oh I don't know anybody that saw it
coming.
Brooks (smirking): Yeah, I'm sure now there are
people claiming they did but...um...
And right here you can see the Beltway Common Wisdom being set in
concrete. Since no one saw this coming, everyone failed equally so no
one is guilty. No one is to blame. And as long as we all
agree to pretend that all the lowliest Liberal bloggers -- who had been
warning about these conditions within the GOP for decades -- simply do not
exist ... and so as long as Brooks promises to do a little painless penance --
to sojourn into the heart of American darkness and compare notes on Edmund
Burke with shit-shovelers in Nebraska and pawn brokers in Kansas -- everything
will be cool. Everyone could safely return to their default setting and
no one would lose their job just because events had shown that they never had
the slightest fucking idea what they were talking about.
So, return now to July of 2021, in the grand scheme of things it it good that
getting punched in the face by Reality over and over and over and over and
over and over and over and over and over again for decades has finally pried
Mr. Brooks' eyes open enough to see some of the realities of race in these
United States?
Yes, in the grand scheme of things, that's good.
But are the standards at The New York Times op-ed page really so low
that a 60 year old ultra-privileged, myopic white Conservative professional haver-of-opinions grudgingly
coming to recognize that racism exists in the United States is a story worthy
of publication and praise?
Listening to Michael Steele interview Alice Stewart is the weirdest, most
dissociative "We're Still Republicans But Not The Bad Kind" audio experience you
can have for free.
For those of you who are late to the party, Michael Steele is the former RNC
chair who swears that, sure, before he ran the party it was, indeed,
full of racists. However, during the brief interregnum when he was party chair
he drove all the racists out of the GOP just like Saint Patrick drove the
snakes out of Ireland! But once he had been cruelly deposed, all the
racists came back. Sad! And thus, in his own mind, Michael Steele
-- the black man who hired himself to front for a party defined by contempt
for people of color -- bears no personal responsibility whatsoever for the GOP
being what it is today.
And for his sins, Michael Steele is now a paid MSNBC contributor and was
awarded a Senior fellowship at Brown University's Watson Institute for
International and Public Affairs.
For her part, Ms. Stewart has spent her career working for the worst of the
worst -- Santorum...
New Bachmann press aide Alice Stewart was former news anchor and
Huckabee aide
...Cruz...
...and so forth -- and is entirely unapologetic about every bit of
it.
And for her sins, Stewart is now a paid CNN contributor and was awarded a
Harvard fellowship at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
And what's notable about these two prominent Republicans in conversation in
July of 2021 is not just that they are delusional, but that each of them is
delusional in their own distinct way that reflects their own, unique
failings. Like listening to two children arguing over whether
Martians are three feet tall and blue or eleven feet tall and orange when,
hate to break it to you kids,
there are no fucking Martians. But the way the respective
delusions of these two adult professionals carom off of each other is what
makes it weirdly entertaining and instructive.
First, their similarities. They are bot still card-carrying members of
the GOP. They both despise Liberals like you and me. They both
like Joe Biden personally, but hate his agenda in which they see the hidden hand
of AOC in "paying people not to work" and so forth. They're both
adamant that this is still a "Center/Right" country". They both want
to see Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion outlawed. And they both
clearly long for the glory days of their youth when Reagan bestrode the
Earth like a colossus and there appeared to be no limit to the damage they
could do in the name of Freedom.
But their differences are where the crazy really comes out.
Stewart wants the wind the clock back to 2015. Of maybe just 2019. She
is Terminator-focused on winning the congress back in 2022 and the White
House back in 2024, and insists that returning unified control of the
government over to the Ted Cruz/Rand Paul/Marjorie Taylor Greene/Mitch
McConnell/ Paul Gosar/Jim Jordan GOP will somehow cure the party of its
flaws and let it return to the good old days and values of [checks notes]
Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.
The Republican Insurrection and the Republican Big Lie leave a bad taste in
Stewarts's mouth, but she is 100% cool with everything else her party has
done. She would be delighted to keep Trump himself in the party if he
would just chill out a little bit. She definitely wants to keep the
Trump base in the party and thinks if the party could just just move on all
the, y'know, out-and-proud racism, insanity, violence and treason -- just
put it all in the past -- that there are a millions of "rational
Republicans" out there who are horny as hell to leap back in bed with the
Party of Bigots and Imbeciles.
Stewart's delusions about the existence of massive numbers of "rational
Republicans" who she wants to add to the party without displacing the
existing base of bigots and imbeciles reflect the profound depths of her
sociopathy. The fact the actual base of the GOP are Fox-drunk
meatheads and white supremacists does not bother her at all, because in her
mind you and me and everything we value are the
real enemies. And therefor the thought of keeping the
existing Republican mob of racists and lunatics intact and in-harness as a
tool for crushing the Evil Left once and for all is, to Stewart's way of
thinking, a perfectly acceptable means to that noble end.
Steele believes the exact opposite: that the key to glorious Republican
victory and the enactment of the despicable agenda that both he and Stewart
believe in is to cut the base loose. Just grab 'em by the Klan hood
and chuck 'em out the door. How exactly he would go about kicking them
out of the party when, for all intents and purposes,
they are the fucking party I have no idea -- but in response to
Stewart's insistence that she still wants Trump around -- still wants him to
be part of the party -- Steele says:
Steele:But do we? Do we? Do we
really still want him around? I'll be honest with you, I
don't. I think he's an abomination. I think he...I think he's
an apostate to everything I grew up believing in the party, even in the
face of some of the ugly stuff in the...recent history of the party.
I think Trump has been an avatar for a lot of that...really given a breath
of fresh air to the Southern Strategy...
And in that confession, and in this one...
Steele:
Like the worst cancer you could possibly have, cut that shit out of your
body. You need it gone.
..and this one...
Steele:
To be honest with you, I don't want...I don't want a redneck white
nationalist racist to be a Republican. I don't want them in my
party.
...you see Steele's delusions manifested.
Until Trump ripped the mask off of his party, Steele could get away with the
shuck that, hey man, the party wasn't this was when I joined up,
when I rose in its ranks, or when I was its national
chair. Because to admit that would be to confess what everyone knows:
that to succeed in Republican politics, either Mr. Steele had trained
himself to not to see what his party truly was, or he knew that, as a black
man willing to swallow his dignity and front for a racist party, his future
was secure...as long as some fool didn't come along with a very big
megaphone and give the game away.
And then along came this fool with a very big megaphone --
-- who gave the game away.
So the only way Mr. Steele can continue to keep his pathetic delusions intact
(and continue his cable teevee viability) is to conjure into existence an
entirely imaginary future Republican party full of so many rational,
honorable humans (all of whom agree with the GOP's depraved agenda) that
they can not only displace the entire Republican base, but will flock to
Steele's banner in such numbers that they can sweep this New GOP to power
and something something freedom.
When pressed on where exactly all these people are going to come from once
he somehow managed to kicks 90% of Republicans out of "his" Republican
party, Steele gets very metaphysical. As if he were building a
ballfield in the middle of an Iowa cornfield because a disembodied voice
told him to.
Except he's not.
Instead what he's proposing, in effect, is that Baskin-Robbins keep their
name, but stop selling ice cream and instead offer the public what's left
over -- empty cones, tiny spoons and napkins -- on the expectation that even
bigger crowd will show up for that. And when pressed even further for
any example of such a thing ever happening anywhere, Mr. Steele had to go
all the way back to the early 1990s when he was chairman of the Prince
George's County Republican Central Committee and he and a small band of
Republicans managed to get a few reforms passed. Property tax
stuff. Charter school stuff. That sort of thing.
That's it. That is the quarter-century-old weak reed on which Mr.
Steele's whole fantasy future GOP rests.
And this really is all that remains of the mopes who think Trump is icky but
continue to remain loyal Republican party members.
One zombie-eyed, True Believer who wants to snuff out Liberalism so badly
that she's perfectly happy keeping Trump and his brown shirts inside the
party but thinks that cladding a layer of non-existent "rational
Republicans" on top of that radioactive crazy will be enough to cure the
party of its excesses (Translation: Can just go back to not saying the
quiet part out loud...) and win smashing victories forever.
And one life-long Republican hood ornament who believes that the key to the
future success of his GOP consists of...
Kicking 90% of the Republican party out of the Republican party and
Replacing those tens millions of bigots and imbeciles with
even more tens of millions of imaginary new Republicans
who believe all the same horrible shit that current Republicans believe
but minus the overt racism.
I took this photo on a Sunday morning in a McDonald's parking lot in Effingham,
Illinois, population 12,563.
And this was taken on the same Sunday morning while driving through Beecher City,
Illinois, population 453. The "McKinley" named on the sign apparently
refers to a dog at the Donaldson’s Standard service station.
And while I don't know what they manufacture in this Beecher City
establishment besides entropy and despair --
-- it's a fair proxy for the state of soul of many of the South/Central Illinois towns we passed
through. Rusted out. Neglected. A large number of long-ago
abandoned buildings and several buildings which had obviously been in the
middle of some kind of Hail Mary, paint-and-pray renovation before they too had been
abandoned. "Abortion is Murder" billboards. "Guns Save Lives" signs like
old Burma Shave signs that tell a little four-panel story about the importance of owning an in-home arsenal planted out where
the cornfields and soybean fields edge up to the road.
We also passed (but did not photograph) a coal mine museum, but it was the
Moweaqua, Illinois Coal Mine Museum and not the Christian County,
Illinois Coal Mine Museum nor was it the Illinois Coal Mine Museum at
Gillespie.
Because while we did spy the top edge of a Pride flag peeking over the tall
fence of someone's yard, this is Republican Trump Country. This is where the battle for
hearts and minds was lost decades ago as Hate Radio and Fox News and
Republican ad-makers quietly invaded thousands of towns like this and set up shop, telling the rubes the same lies, over and over again, year after
year, until it became part of their hardwiring. That the reasons their lives were getting worse and their children left for the Big City and never came back were, in no particular order, the Gay Agenda, Welfare Queens, Feminazis, Abortionists and, of course, those dirty, Commie Libtards and their
Soros-controlled media.
And however obvious it may be to any objective observer that their lives have been and would continue be materially improved by the policies of the Democratic Party, they would no more consider abandoning the comforting, rage-fueled, white supremacist ideology of the Right than they would consider abandoning the ashes of their fathers and the temples of his Gods.
A man in a gladiator costume filmed the Jan. 6 mob for his mother, feds
say: ‘Here comes the riot police, Mom’
When Nathan Wayne Entrekin joined a crowd of rioters that pushed its way
into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, he donned a Roman gladiator costume over
jean shorts and a T-shirt despite the winter chill, federal investigators
say. As the mob chanted, Entrekin allegedly filmed videos on his cellphone,
narrating the action for his mother, who was back in Arizona.
“Wow, Mom. I wish you were here with me,” Entrekin said in one video,
according to a criminal complaint. “It’s really exciting in here. It’s
joyful and it’s sad at the same time. We can’t let Biden … be our president.
We can’t … there’s no way.”
Federal prosecutors on Thursday arrested Entrekin, of Cottonwood, Ariz., for
his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, during which he allegedly defied police
orders, entered the U.S. Capitol and witnessed people looting offices.
During an interview, Entrekin told investigators that “the calls of former
president Donald Trump inspired him to attend the rally,” the complaint
states...
Narrator: No one explained to Nathan the Patriot LARPer that gladiators
existed to feed the Roman entertainment machine. To be pitted against
other gladiators, wild animals and condemned criminals for amused the mob.
Mamas don't let your babies grow up to be Cawthorns.
"'When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his blogs were read.'"
-- Hilaire Belloc (slightly modified), poet
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:
Suborbital flight, in contrast [to orbital flight], requires much lower
speeds. A suborbital rocket doesn't have the power to achieve orbit.
Instead, it will fly up to a certain height that depends on its speed, and
then come back down once its engines are shut off... At the top of their
flight arc, passengers in a suborbital vehicle will still achieve a few
minutes of weightlessness. They are, in fact, falling back toward Earth, but
they are experiencing freefall, similar to an airplane completing parabolic
maneuvers to simulate zero gravity.
During the Trump Years, altogether too many people who should have known
better -- should have learned from the rapid Conservative recovery and
retrenchment after the collapse of the Bush Administration -- became possessed
of the belief that some of the more genteel, respectable, mainstream peddlers
of Conservative drivel might have at last figured out that it was the flaws of
American Conservatism itself that paved the way for Trump. That without
the diligent work of decades belt-feeding red meat to bigots and imbeciles
(because that was the only way to whip up enough of an electoral mob to enact
the Conservative agenda) --
-- there would never have been the rich soil of paranoia and rage on the Right
from which a Trump could grow.
That without the diligent work of decades relentlessly demonizing the Left for
warning that playing footsie with fascism and white supremacy would lead to
disaster, the malignant trajectory of the Right might have been diagnosed and
arrested long before it became depraved enough to nominate, elect, and then
re-nominated a monster like Trump.
But that never happened, because even the most genteel, respectable,
mainstream peddlers of Conservative drivel are still Conservatives and
are incapable of facing the terrible truth that all that they have always held
to be true is false, and that those shiftless, mooching, woke, America-hating,
terrorist-loving Liberals were right about the Right all along.
And because facing this terrible truth is beyond them, they take refuge in
their own versions of what I referred to as David Brooks' Great
Project several thousand posts ago::
Sure, the Trump administration was depraved and grotesque and many
respectable, mainstream peddlers of Conservative drivel said so out
loud. And, yes, for a few, giddy years they called a Republican
president a shithead, and rendered their garments and crushed their pearls
demanding to know when the "real" Republicans and the "real" Conservatives
would show up to save them.
But all that amounted to was a few, fleeting moments of ideological
weightlessness before they began falling back to Earth. Because in the
end no Republican calamity will ever terrifying enough or
crushing enough to lift them out of the deep gravity well of their own
ideology.
And so, this week in my local paper, we saw an avatar of the far-right
Illinois Policy Institute named Scott Reeder, being given column inches to
preach the gospel of the Evils of the Extremes on Both Sides, with nary a mention of Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell or the 01/06
Republican Insurrection or the Big Lie or the history of the GOP ("It's Brookses All The Way Down").
At the national level, this week we also saw Andrew Sullivan returning to
exactly where he was 20 years ago -- ranting that the real danger to America
was the decadent coastal elitist Left. This time around, Mr. Sullivan's
rant took the form of a Wake Up White People! Substack
screed that was first reprinted in The New York Post and then
re-reprinted on the Fox News site. And once again, in Mr. Sullivan's
telling, Donald Trump, the Insurrection, the Big Lie and the entire history of
the GOP have simply vanished. Instead,
starting in 2015, all of our nation's problems have been caused
by the ruthless and all-powerful woke Left forcing decent, God-fearing',
real Murricans into a corner ("Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says: The Adventure Continues").
And today we find confirmation Mr. David Brooks of
The New York Times has fully returned to pre-Trump status as the Pope
of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It.
[David Brooks has returned to his] decaying cathedral of empty platitudes
and false equivalence where, somehow, the Donald Trump and the entire
Republican base, and
"Some students at elite schools" are both such equally
dangerous threats to democracy that they need to be presented side-by-side
in the same paragraph:
But Donald Trump doesn’t get away with lies because his followers flunked
Epistemology 101. He gets away with his lies because he tells stories of
dispossession that feel true to many of them. Some students at elite
schools aren’t censorious and intolerant because they lack analytic
skills. They feel entrapped by moral order that feels unsafe and
unjust.
Where Conservatives and Progressives are just two equally poisonous sides of
the same America-smashing cudgel:
Part of the blame goes to conservatives who try to whitewash history.
Part goes to progressives who tell such a negative version of history that
it destroys patriotism.
This week he's in the same pulpit, preaching the same sermon, but this time has decided to wade straight into the one subject above all others that he should be barred for
life from ever mentioning again. From The New York Times:
For most of the past century, human dignity had a friend — the United
States of America. We are a deeply flawed and error-prone nation, like
any other, but America helped defeat fascism and communism and helped
set the context for European peace, Asian prosperity and the spread of
democracy.
Then came Iraq and Afghanistan, and America lost faith in itself and
its global role — like a pitcher who has been shelled and no longer has
confidence in his own stuff...
Yeah, you read that right.
This guy.
This fucking guy -- who was the Managing Editor of this
now-defunct hippy-punching and war-porn rag when they ran this cover
19 years ago --
-- is actually gearing up to lecture Americans on the importance of staying in
Afghanistan forever.
But first comes the obligatory detour to you-know-where (emphasis added):
On the left, many now reject the idea that America can be or is a
global champion of democracy, and they find phrases like “the
indispensable nation” or the “last best hope of the earth”
ridiculous. On the right the wall-building caucus has given
up on the idea that the rest of the world is even worth engaging...
What follows is just, well, wow. Brooks' Great Project on stilts.
Inconvenient history rewritten. American foreign policy reduced to
single stupid and dangerously wrong baseball analogy. And a profession
of befuddlement that the Left has no appetite for Republican foreign policy
debacles that men like David Brooks are always eager to champion, but not so
eager to put their children on the firing line.
I guess what befuddles me most
is the behavior of the American left. I get why Donald Trump and
other American authoritarians would be ambivalent about America’s role in
the world. They were always suspicious of the progressive package that
America has helped to promote.
But every day I see progressives defending women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q.
rights and racial justice at home and yet championing a foreign policy
that cedes power to the Taliban, Hamas and other reactionary forces
abroad.
I'm not sure, but I think David Brooks just told Joe Biden that he should not
just roll out the full might of armed forces of the United States to
"defend women's rights L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice" here
in the Land of the Free, but that we should keep the military on that task for
as many decades as are necessary, at whatever cost in blood and treasure that may be required, to completely destroy the Republican party and establish a working democracy
here in American.
As the kids on the internet say, shocking if true.
But I suspect that Mr. Brooks isn't saying that at all. I suspect that
since his Republican party is now a of bigots and imbeciles that
no longer cares what David Brooks says about anything, he is actually trying,
in his own painfully hamfisted way, to guilt us Liberals -- the same people he
spent the bulk of his career slagging as decadent America-hating children,
scheming academics, parochial morons and deluded hippies -- into backing his
stillborn Neocon dreams of global American military hegemony.
The good news is that, as of this writing Mr. Brooks is being thoroughly
dragged, ass-backwards through the cactus patch that is Twitter.
It seem very clear to me that BoBo is many laughably obtuse things, but BoBo
Don't Surf. He isn't simply misguided and there is little chance that he's
ever going to see the light and change his mind: he reasons backwards from
his ideology into his limp diatribes, instead of forward from the facts to a
reasonable conclusion.
Instead (and in answer to those questions) I believe Brooks is a serious,
committed Wingnut middleman -- sort of the Fundamentalist's pet PBS
Mennonite -- which IMHO is much more dangerous than a fully outed DeLay.
Brooks' job is to sell the poison to the Center: to reassure the Moderates
and “Reagan Democrats” and to coax the Undecideds into the Windowless Fundy
Panel Truck by dandying their evil up in perfumed NYT-speak, and since the
battle for the future of the country takes places in the middle, these
wingnuts-in-sheeps-clothing are the ones that deserve extra-special
beatings.
The good news is, BoBo obviously doesn't know he's an idjit. Instead, he
thinks he's tricksey, which is why he keeps obligingly waddling into the
thresher blades.
-- I could have written today with just a minor tweak or two.
Because, except in a few, rare cases, Conservatives are fundamentally
incapable of change.
