If You Want My Future, Forget My Past: Updated

If you wanna get with me, better make it fast.

Yes, I wrapped a Spice Girls lyric around a clip from Breaking Bad because this tiny sliver of the blogsphere is mine and mine alone and I get to do and say what I want here, which has, from time to time, landed me on the shit list of several of the professional political commentariat.

But first and foremost, congratulations to all of you who have taken up the cause of #BothSidesDont and every day make a mockery of the incomprehensibly still-employed goofs who continue to insist on marching under the banner of Both Siderism.  The fight goes on and Team Collaboration/Appeasement still controls the media's commanding heights, but due in no small measure to your ruthless persistence, critques of "Both Sidesism" and Whataboutism have pried their way into the larger conversation.

And it all began with noticing it in the first place, this lazy, poisonous media construct whose very ubiquity made it so hard to name, to isolate and to attack.  In the Old Days, asking people to call out  Both Siderism was like asking them to mount an assault on gravity or magnetism.  Things that are just eternally there.  Principles of physics. Inviolable laws of nature.  I mean, how does one go about enlisting people in a campaign to take on the Third Law of Thermodynamics?  Especially when the practical result of taking on the Third Law of Thermodynamics is mockery, slander, loss of employment and immediate exile from polite society? 

But by sheer persistence -- by being willing to be mocked and slandered and blocked by all the Very Serious People in the media -- we slowly turned the tide.  There's still an excellent chance we won't win the day  (David Brooks is one of the many top-tier pundits working hard to rebuild Both Siderism's  crumbling cathedral) , but at least we're not losing at the same pace we were a decade ago.  Which is something.  And which bring me to the next, insidious lie that has woven its way through the mainstream media.  Hold your nose and see if you can spot it in this Daily Beast article:

Former Murdoch Exec: Fox News Is Poison For America

First we are treated to several paragraphs of groveling praise of Rupert Murdoch as "brilliant, courageous, optimistic, and a gentleman"  by a former, senior Fox News employee named Preston Padden.  

This is followed by Padden alleging complete bafflement that Murdoch's noble enterprise --

The greatest irony is that I don’t believe that most of the falsehoods on Fox News reflect Rupert Murdoch’s own views. 

-- has gone so terribly awry.

But, in recent years things have gone badly off the tracks at Fox News. Fox News is no longer a truthful center-right news network. The channel (especially the leading prime-time opinion programming) has contributed substantially and directly to...

There follows a familiar list of Republican crimes against democracy and the health and welfare of the American people all of which (Hint! Hint!) have happened over the past 3-4 years.  

And then this:

Fox News has caused many millions of Americans—most of them Republicans (as my wife and I were for 50 years)—to believe things that simply are not true. For example, Yahoo News reports that 73 percent of Republicans blame “left-wing protesters” for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Of course, that is ludicrous. ... As noted above, this ridiculous notion has been thoroughly refuted. But millions of Americans believe these falsehoods because they have been drilled into their minds, night after night, by Fox News.

And then this:

Over the past nine months I have tried, with increasing bluntness, to get Rupert to understand the real damage that Fox News is doing to America. I failed, and it was arrogant and naïve to ever have thought that I could succeed. I am at a loss to understand why he will not change course...

By now, this schtick should sound wearily familiar to anyone who has been paying attention.  It is the dull hum of yet another, expat Team Evil flunky trying to launder their reputation.  The most consequential  story in America suddenly catching the attention of yet another "news" executive.  Yet another breakthrough, "Eureka!" moment from yet another former Republican meth lab employee discovering that, wow, this meth lab is making meth!  And holy shit, meth is, y'know, bad!  And, OMG, how could my beloved former employer Gustavo Fring possibly be cool with running a meth lab when the Gustavo Fring I knew was a pillar of the community.  

Courageous.  

Optimistic.  

And a gentleman.

But for all of that, Mr. Padden has figured the phrase that pays.  The shibboleth that, almost without exception, will allow any recently-former member of Team Evil to immediately return to respectability within the mainstream media.  The New Big Lie that has almost eclipsed the Old, Both Sides Do It Lie.

Did you spot it?  It's this: 

But, in recent years things...

And brothers and sisters, once you start looking for it and one of its many variants such as "Over the past few years" and "In the past five to six years" and "Since Donald Trump..." and "Since I left the Republican Party..." ... you will quickly start to notice that, like "Both Sides Do It", the New Big Lie of "Since Trumpism" is also everywhere.   

And, just like in the Old Days when calling out the most egregious peddlers of the Both Siderism would get you slagged and blocked by them -- 

 -- calling out the most egregious peddlers of the "Since Trumpism" lie will...

Either Donald Trump was the inexplicable and miraculous cause of the spontaneous racist derangement of the otherwise healthy, sane Republican Party...

...or the systematic creation of a Republican voting base of deranged bigots and imbeciles over the course of decades was so wildly successful that an openly racist con man, pathological liar and sexual predator like Trump could walk in and take over the party with virtually no opposition by simply repeating back to the base, more loudly and crudely than anyone else, the same lies that Fox News and Hate Radio had been shitting into their skulls for years.  

UPDATE:  And so here, submitted for anyone who cares to look, is a snapshot of the state of Republican politics from 1994.  Note how all the elements of the modern Republican party -- the rage, the racism, the lying, the shameless hypocrisy, the ginning up of wild conspiracies, the knives-out demonization of Democrats as fundamentally illegitimate monsters -- had already been fully and successfully incorporated into the GOP's playbook.

 From the LA Times:

Let’s Look at the Real Newt Gingrich : His hypocrisy and his deliberate misreading of history are detriments to leadership.

What do we really know about Newt Gingrich, soon to be third in line for the presidency, other than that he has been immensely successful in a long-festering plan to gain power: “I have an ambition. I want to shift the entire planet,” he told the Washington Post eight years ago. Now he has the power, but who is he and what is he after?

The media have basically accepted him on his own terms as a righteous champion of family values determined to do battle with the “counterculture” and big government in Washington. Yet here is a professional politician who walked out on his own family with two young children at a time when his wife had cancer. Those kids were the basis of this super-patriot’s draft deferment during the Vietnam War.

He talks endlessly about self-reliance and local initiative, but he represents Cobb County, an affluent white-flight suburb of Atlanta that is the third-largest recipient of federal funds of any suburb in the nation--57% over the national average. Cobb County wouldn’t even exist as an economic powerhouse had not the federal government decided to make it a major interstate highway crossing point.

Gingrich loves to beat up on welfare mothers, who he claims are ripping off the taxpayers, but his district is a perfect example of the welfare state for the rich. The biggest employer, the engine that drove the county’s rapid development, was Lockheed, a mega-recipient of defense contracts. He even lobbied the feds to approve the sale of Lockheed’s jets to Moammar Kadafi in Libya.

So he’s a hypocrite; what else is new? It’s the total disconnect from reality, the search for simplistic solutions and easy scapegoats. That and the venom. At a time when the nation faces serious problems, here is a major leader who insists that he alone has the answers, and that his chief opponent, the President of the United States, is a captive of a suspect “counterculture.”

He fueled the Nov. 8 Republican sweep by denigrating the President as “the enemy of normal Americans,” and held him and his party responsible for virtually every crime committed.

When Susan Smith confessed to drowning her two children in a South Carolina lake, Gingrich was quick to blame the Democrats. “I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. . . . The only way to change is to vote Republican.”

It is absurd to insist, as he does in almost every speech, that the world was just peachy until the civil-rights era and its Great Society programs ushered in by Lyndon Johnson.

This is the big lie technique. For the representative of a county in which the KKK long held sway to suggest that things started to go wrong in his South only in the 1960s, when civil-rights workers broke a pattern of centuries of slavery and segregation, is to stand history on its head with a vengeance. The youth rebellion of the ‘60s began with the civil-rights movement, and thanks to the heroism of those freedom riders, a new South was born...

Gingrich’s holier-than-thou attacks on liberals--"the counterculture"--reeks of McCarthyism, which appeals during times of serious economic trouble. In uncertain times, the mass of people, who have come to accept prosperity as their birthright, are prone to this siren song. Right-wing extremism depends on two ingredients--nostalgia for a storybook past and the conjuring up of a scapegoat whom you blame for desecrating that paradise.

There is much to debate about the proper role of government, reforming welfare for the rich as well as the poor and retooling management and labor to be effective in a dramatically changed international economy. But instead of facing our real problems, Gingrich and his followers would lead us on a mad hunt for scapegoats in an attempt to restore the good old days that never existed.

In other words, 27 years ago -- an entire generation ago -- all of this was going on right out in the open, in plain sight, where anyone with an unjaundiced eye and who was not on the GOP's blood money payroll could clearly see what was happening and where it was headed.

And you can gauge how terrified the mainstream media and the Never Trumpers are at the idea of discussing which one of these these two mutually exclusive alternatives is true -- whether Trump is the cause of the GOP's derangement or Trump is the product of the GOP's derangement --  by how adamant they are that the whole fascist Republican freak show which is holding a knife to the throat of our democracy somehow sprang into existence, fully-formed and with no warning, over the past few years.

No Half Measures