You Know Much That Is Hidden, Oh Tim.

Tim Miller has a new book all about how awful the Republican party is and his part in making it so.  

I haven't read it, but have read *about* it, and the reviews are mostly positive.

So when then Tim Miller showed up for his regular spot on The Bulwark podcast, I expected it to go roughly the same as it has gone everywhere else he has shown up promoting his book.  Scathing stories.  Regret.  Anxiety about the future.  And so forth.  A Bay-area, Gen X hipster version of Stuart Stevens' It Was All a Lie.

And there was some of that...until Charlie Sykes' steered the conversation right into the one subject he always steers every such conversation into:  his seething contempt for the Left and the "Progressive media".

That's be you and me.

So, after 20 minutes of talking about Tim Miller's book and what a shit Mick Mulvaney is and how, unless you read Tim Miller's book, you will always be caught by surprise by how awfully the GOP base and leadership behave...

Sykes:  If you don't have this template, a lot of what's going to happen will feel incomprehensible.

... Sykes performs the inevitable hard pivot over to what really obsesses and infuriates him: Why aren't we filthy, ungrateful  Progressive peasants building statues to Liz Cheney?

Sykes:  Let's flip the card a little bit though.  How do you explain the psychology of -- and you... you... you... alluded to this -- the psychology Progressives activists including people like Don Winslow, who's a filmmaker, y'know, and, like, anti-Trump Progressive novelist and everything.  Y'know, big Twitter guy who is obsessively -- I mean obsessively -- attacking, right now, Liz Cheney.  It's like this is the moment when Democrats are facing a wipeout in the midterms... 

driftglass: What the hell does how the Dems may or may not do in the midterms have to do with Liz Cheney?

Sykes:  ... when we are facing this existential challenge of the coup... at this moment they've decided... 

driftglass:  "they've" decided?  Who is "they"?  Because the only person Sykes has mentioned is Don Winslow?

Sykes continues:  "No, we can't like Liz Cheney because, y'know, she's a Conservative Republican and pro-lifer and therefore we gotta make sure we tell all Progressives ...

driftglass:  "we gotta make sure we tell all Progressives"?  Who is "we"?  Because, once again, the only person Sykes has mentioned is Don Winslow? 

Sykes continues: ....don't give any credit to these folks who have thrown themselves on the grenade to protect democracy because X, Y, Z."

driftglass:   "these folks"?  Who are "these folks"? Because the only "folks" Sykes has mentioned is Liz Cheney?  Also more about this "X,Y,Z" bullshit at the bottom of this post.

Sykes:  Just explain that to me!  Because you experienced that.  I experienced that.  Why?

Tim Miller now has a problem.  He's trying to sell a book -- a book that Republicans probably would only buy in order to burn.  So a large percentage of his potential customers are going to be those Progressives that his boss Charlie Sykes just trashed.  So a very careful dance is about to ensue.

Miller:  Yeah I got an "R" on my Reddit AMA.  All these anonymous Liberal commenters saying "You should donate all the money you've ever made to (haha!) the Planned Parenthood (hahaha!)."  And I'm just like, yeah.  I hear ya.  I'm doing my best.  OK, I'm trying.  I fought Trump in two primaries, but you can never do enough.  There is something I'm a little bit concerned about when it comes to the Left.  And I'm just going to do a big, right now, at the front of these comments just say thus is not an equivalence.  I think that there is -- and I discuss this in the book -- there are very big differences in what's happening in the Progressive media and Conservative media.   

driftglass:  The Alert Reader will not fail to notice how fast we have escalated from Charlie Sykes' peevish whining about Don Winslow...to how "we gotta make sure we tell all Progressives" ... to "Progressive media".  

driftglass:  Also I am moved to ask, what fucking "Progressive media" he is even talking about?

Miller continues:  And... and... and the coalitions on the Left and on the Right.  There are more antibodies on the Left to the crazy and the rage.  That doesn't mean that there aren't also parallels...

driftglass: And then , after all the assurances that this is not an attempt to draw an equivalence, comes the equivalence.

Miller:  And what I write about in the backwards section of the book -- where I write about my complicity is working with Conservative media types -- is [long pause] this addiction.  To the rage juice.  Right?  This addiction to the daily outrage.  Where you are made to feel like you are good and your other... your fellow Americans as made to be seen as evil.

driftglass:  Let us pause to reflect on the fact that Tim Miller is whining about the insidious effects to the Outrage Media...on a media site that routinely carps about the Republican base being deranged, and 96% of Republican leadership as being either outright fascist or cowards or amoral opportunists willing to ally with fascist to advance their careers.

Miller:  And people like Don...and other Resistance media types...

Sykes [barely audible]:  This is so good.

driftglass:  Here comes another shot at fence straddling  

Miller: I do think there is a big difference between Left media and the Right media...

driftglass:   Golly, thanks Tim.

Miller: ...and there are some Left media who are being good and, y'know, are praising Liz Cheney, so it's not uniform like it is on the Right media.  

Translation:  I hope you don't think I'm talking about you guys on MSNBC. You guys are the best!  No, we're talking about all those other Progressive media outfits.  The ones who are naughty bad and don't have half the staff here at The Bulwark on juicy contributor contracts.  So don't give any of this a second thought.

driftglass:  And here comes the pivot...

Miller:  But there are people on the Left that use that same tactic on the Right.  

driftglass:  And here is where Tim Miller, confessional writer slips out the side door, and Tim Miller, veteran Republican hatchet, man slips in.

Miller:  The...no, you need to be mad at Liz Cheney because she was pro-life and she said this mean thing about Ralph Northam four years ago.  And, like, you need to be mad at Adam Kinzinger because he didn't vote for this bill.  And you need to be made at even Democrats...you need to be mad at Joe Manchin, mad at Kyrsten Sinema, and mad at Nancy Pelosi and mad at Chuck Schumer and mad at anyone who's not, like, walking the right line. 

driftglass:  And in the blink of an eye, Tim Miller escalates all the way from scolding people for being "mad at Liz Cheney" to scolding anyone who gets mad at anyone for any reason for being an Outrage Juice addict.  Which I'll remind him of in my calmest voice when the Supreme Cult comes for his gay marriage. "Hush now, Tim. That's just the Outrage Juice talking, and not your perfectly justified fury."

Miller:   You see it on teevee.  People yelling at Biden for not being mad enough.  

Translation:  But once again, to be clear, I am not talking about you fabulous people on MSNBC who dole out tens of millions of dollars worth of free media to us here at The Bulwark every year.  

Miller: We saw this after the shooting.  People were upset Biden wasn't mad enough about the shooting.  

Now watch carefully as Charlie Sykes casually bulldozes three decades of Hate Radio depravity,  Fox News monstrousness and Gingrich-style slash-and-burn Republican politics right down the Memory Hole, along with the entire Clinton administration and the entire Obama administration.

Sykes:  Yeah, this is a very, very important point here.  To understand this addiction to the rage juice as you describe it.  Because, um, obviously you don't get the endorphin rush from compromise.   You don't get the endorphin rush from bipartisanship.   You don't get an endorphin rush from governance.  So all of the incentives now in politics have shifted from, y'know, getting things done, being pragmatic, being prudent, being reasonable to, again stoking the perpetual grievance machine and pumping out the rage juice.  Which then explains this moment that we're in.  

As I impudently remind Never Trumpers every time they try to run this dodge:

...The Republican base only came to believe that Clinton was History's Greatest Monster because the Republican Hate Machine spend eight years continuously cranking out an unending stream of wild, hair-on-fire propaganda, culminating in four years of Republican congressional witch hunts and impeachment.  

And Barack Obama?

Barack Obama was a perfect, eight year experiment in giving the Centrists and Both Siderists  exactly what they said they wanted.  What they said "the American people" were crying out for.  A Democrat who was ideologically an Eisenhower Republican and who was built from the ground up to be a compromise machine.   A Democrat who the nation hired to help  repair all that the Bush administration had wrecked.  

A Democrat who was treated like this by the Republican Hate Machine from Day One:

A Democrat who nonetheless patiently offered Republicans the hand of comity and accommodation over and over again only to pull back a charred stump every single time.  

And for all of Obama's truly superhuman efforts to find some way to bring Republicans to the table to collaborate on healing our nation's deepest wounds and solving our deepest problems, what we got in return was eight years of Republican sabotage, sedition, unhinged racism, Birtherism and, finally, Trump.  

Making the mistake of thinking we could be pragmatic, prudent and reasonable with fascist scum is what landed us here in the first place, so just shut your hole Sykes.

Finally, let us talk for a minute about the imperious way both Sykes and Miller dismissed any objections to elevating Liz Cheney to sainthood.  As if any objections were inherently so trivial -- so ridiculous -- that it was beneath them to even mention -- 

Sykes: ...because X, Y, Z.

-- what those objections were:

Miller: ...because she was pro-life and she said this mean thing about Ralph Northam four years ago.

I can't find any reference to anything Cheney said about Ralph Northam...unless Miller was referring to this:

Democrats meet Liz Cheney:

The Vice Chair of the @January6thCmte believes that Democrats are "killing babies AFTER they're born" and are the "face of pure evil" and that Democrats will create "maternity wards turned into killing fields" if not stopped.pic.twitter.com/qXy9iPZ8bF

— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) July 6, 2022

Which is not merely being pro-life, nor is it merely a "mean thing about Ralph Northam", nor is it whatever the fuck "X,Y,Z" means.  It is a full-on, Blood Libel attack on the "Democrat" party as a cabal of "pure evil" who sanction the murder of children after they are born.

Cheney has a long record of trafficking in such filth.

Jesus. pic.twitter.com/BJRoRWvgrN

— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) July 13, 2022

In fact, one might even say, like virtually all of her fellow Republicans and the Conservative media that lifted them to power, her career was made possible by keeping the Republican base drunk on [checks notes] Outrage Juice.  Which is what stood her in such high regard in the Republican Party --

-- until Trump's attempt to steal the election and his subsequent January 6th coup brought her brand of Lawful Republican Evil into direct conflict with Trump's brand of Chaotic Republican Evil.

So am I glad that Nancy Pelosi found a way to harness the Cheney family's insatiable appetite for blood and vengeance and put it to work in the service of democracy?

You bet I am.

But that's all the plaudits I have to spare.

And after all, why the fuck do Miller and Sykes care what we pure-evil, baby murdering commies think about anything?

I Am The Liberal Media