Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper, "I Fucking Told You So"

 

"Every conceivable standard of conduct, propriety, ethics and governance was shattered by the Lincoln Project board." -- Steve Schmidt, Lincoln Project co-founder.

Part of me thinks that, like Michelangelo contemplating a fresh slab of marble, I should just circle the following Tweets for a year or two, looking at every angle, contemplating them in all their perfection, and letting the underlying truths emerge before picking up my hammer and chisel..

8/ the @ProjectLincoln. Before the organization started @TheRickWilson set up a GO Fund me to make a movie 🎥 about Trump. He raised tens of thousands of dollars 💵 and never made the movie. I asked him about it 500 times. No movie. I was not comfortable with this. It is a big

— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) October 12, 2022

Or perhaps, before putting pixel to paper, it would be best retire to a mountain retreat to meditate on Situationism and postmodernism and the free play of signs and signifiers refracting through these Tweets?

The reason @ProjectLincoln was able to extract millions from gullible liberals -- to say nothing of the petty fraud and theft of Rick Wilson for this film -- is @GoFundMe, @JoyAnnReid, @JoeNBC kept endorsing and glorifying them, so liberals assumed they should keep giving cash.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 12, 2022

But I don't have a mountain demesne to which I can retreat because I'm not a grifting douchebag who suckers credulous dopes out of their cash.  

Nor do have I a year or two to fiddlefuck around while I live off the interest of the large pile of cash which the aforementioned credulous dopes have handed me.  There is no endowment or dark money war chest or internet zillionaire benefactor.  There are no cable news corporations who incorporated me into their business plan and now invest millions in free publicity every month to promote this little blog of mine.  

That tip jar you see at the bottom of these posts?  That's it.

But with that tip jar (and the permanently low profile this blog is going to have until the day they drag me outta here) comes a certain freedom.  Here, I am at liberty to say pretty much whatever I want to say (within the editorial limits I set for myself) knowing that, from time to time, I am going to piss off a nontrivial percentage of my readers and my political "allies".  

Which is a fair bargain.  And why, when I saw that not only was grifting sleazebag (and former Liberal media darling) Steve Schmidt using all of this words to vivisect the grifting sleazebags (and former and current Liberal media darlings) of the Lincoln Project including grifting sleazebag (and Liberal media darling)  Rick Wilson...

...but that grifting Bolshi Freedom Troll (and former Liberal media darling) Glenn Greenwald was using grifting sleazebag Steve Schmidt's words to bludgeon the Lincoln Lads and the MSNBC whelping box that spawned them...

...well let's just say that I smiled.  

Bitterly, but I smiled.

A lot.  

I had all the feels, as the kids say, because this was the crossover "Why Do Otherwise Intelligent People Keep Falling For This Shit" episode I never expected.

And the fact that I had to go to a bottom-of-the-wingnut-barrel schlock shop like Twitchy to retrieve this stuff (no link because fuck 'em) -- 

‘WORST con artists’: Glenn Greenwald takes a cue from Steve Schmidt OUTING The Lincoln Project and DECIMATES Rick Wilson

-- because everyone involved in the story blocked me years ago for the high crime of remembering their inconvenient pasts?    

My smile just kept getting bigger.

You longtime readers can probably fill in the rest of the story, but for the newer arrivals, our tale begins way back during the Obama administration, when Bolshi Freedom Troll Glenn Greenwald was beloved by many on the Left and in the media because Snowden and documents and Russia and "Obama is worse than Bush!" and it was in all the papers, so you can read all about it somewhere else.

Or just rent the shitty movie.

Anyway, almost immediately after Greenwald became the World's Greatest Journalist and before his internet sugar daddy cut him a check for a quarter of a billion dollars, something about the many, bilious diatribes Greenwald was cranking out on a daily basis began to stink.

Greenwald had a whole shelf of ideological axes to grind and petty vengeances to enact, and now he had the clout to do it.  And he did.  Insufferably.  Incessantly.  He bent the truth with abandon and then broke it. Went to the Dudgeon Outlet Mall  and bought the highest dudgeon he could find and used it at an indignation decibel level that could knock satellites from their orbits to rail against anyone who did not meet his standards of ideological and journalistic purity -- standards which he himself freely and frequent broke.

And woe betide the poor fool who noticed and wrote about Spleenwald's lies and hypocrisy.

Well dear readers, I was one of those benighted, woe betided fools, who saw what was going on in plain sight, wrote about it, and got absolutely slagged for it by my "allies".  

Overnight I was no longer a Liberal in good standing.  I was a drooling, jackbooted fascist.  A corporatist shill.  An "Obot".  The blowback was swift, severe and material...but I kept writing while a whole lot of much more connected Liberal writers with steady gigs in the legacy media kept their heads down and said little or nothing because it wasn't worth getting the Greenwald horde on their asses.

Such are the perils and privileges of being an indy writer, beholden to no one.  

Then Glenn started heading off the deep, deep end in exactly the ways I had predicted, and in a manner that his fan boys could no longer ignore.  Showing up on Fox News.  Whoring for Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour.  Yucking it up with Laura Ingraham.  And so forth.  And gradually his mob of avenging Purity Angels stopped showing up at my place and calling me a Nazi.  

Search the blog for "Greenwald" and you'll find all of it.

Not terribly much later, Donald Trump began his steady rise to power in the Republican Party.  And while drooling, jackbooted, fascist "Obot"s  crackpot Liberal alarmists like me were warning that Trump was grotesque end product of decades of Republican Southern Strategy politics come to claim his throne -- that he was the GOP base made manifest -- all the savvy Conservative political havers-of-opinions like David "It's Gonna Be Rubio!" Brooks and streetwise GOP political arsonists-for-hire like Rick Wilson reassured the public that the nomination and election of Donald Trump was utterly impossible. 

Rick Wilson in Politico,  July 22, 2015

Greetings, Donald Trump super fans. I am a member of the GOP establishment. I’m writing to tell you that, no matter how much you wish it otherwise, the Donald Trump candidacy is almost over.

Don’t be fooled by Trump’s double-digit lead in a new poll: He is not going to win. He’s not going to win the primary. He’s not going to win the general. He’s not going to win a third-party bid. Sure, he can damage the GOP ticket badly enough to guarantee Hillary’s election, but he can’t win. He’s too flawed, too liberal, too undisciplined and too afflicted with verbal dysentery when even slightly provoked. He lacks the fundamental presence and gravitas of a commander-in-chief.

Donald Trump is not running a real campaign. He is working the phones, stirring the pot and using the media ecosystem to its fullest. Soon, the bolder members of the field will follow Rick Perry, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush in making harder and more decisive strokes against him. Unlike Trump, they’ll use real oppo, tested and targeted messages—ads built not just to cut, but to kill. They’ll break his operational tempo, get inside his OODA loop and turn his circus into a crispy ruin. It’s what real campaigns do....

Even if it means (and it well may) that Hillary Clinton sits in the White House, names 3 or 4 Supreme Court justices and lets Bill run around the East Wing molesting the help, you’re going to teach the hated Establishment a lesson by becoming Trump Super Fans, even if he runs as a third party candidate and guarantees Her victory...

And just as they had been for decades about every other Republican atrocity, all the Very Serious Conservative havers-of-opinions and all the GOP political arsonists-turned-Never-Trumper and all the savvy mainstream media political pundits were wrong, wrong, fuckity wrong about Trump.  They watched -- stunned and unbelieving -- as the racist base of the Republican party that GOP leadership and media had so carefully cultivated did exactly what we crackpot alarmist Liberals had been warning for decades that they would eventually do: hoist a monster of their own making up on their shoulders and carry him to the White House.

At this point in our story it is terribly important to step back and contemplate how thoroughgoing the failure of institutional media and Conservatives leadership had been up to the day Trump was elected.  How gleefully they had all jumped on the "But Her Emails" bash Hillary bandwagon because they believed it was impossible for her to lose.  

Wrote a whole long thing about it here ("The Candidate Who Has Fallen Under the Weight of Her Stone") if you're interested.  

The point being that this was not the first catastrophic institutional failure of the national media and Conservative elites.  Far from it.  In fact, the savvy havers-of-opinions who were caught flat-footed by the rise of Trump were pretty much the same savvy havers-of-opinions who were caught flat-footed by the collapse of the Bush administration, and flat-footed by the Fake Tea Party once they dropped their masks.  Over and over again they showed themselves to be so pot-committed to their reassuring fairy tales of who they wished Republicans to be that they actively refused to see who Republicans actually were until something big and scary kicked in their doors and grabbed them by the throat.  

And even then, it was unimaginable that they would turn for advice and council to the one group of people who have actually been right about the Right all along.  The dirty hippies.  Once again, the savvy havers-of-opinions were so pot-committed to their campfire tall tales of Liberals as feckless dopes and crackpot alarmists that it was institutionally inconceivable to them that we dirty hippies might be able to explain how Trump came to be.  

It would also be institutionally dangerous to give the dirty hippies a national platform because of our terrible habit of Remembering Inconvenient Stuff.   

It just wouldn't do to have some dirty hippie on a Sunday morning Power Panel explaining that Trump was not a black swan event, but the end-product of 50 years of cynical Republican political and media strategies and a willingness on the part of a complicit national media -- including every sniveling fucker on this Power Panel -- to look the other way or "Both Sides" every Republican act of depravity.  

Nope, that wouldn't do.  Wouldn't do at all.  And since they control the cameras, media corporations just cooked up a narrative that suited their corporate interests.  They bankrolled Trump voter whisperers like Salina Zito to speak to them of "economic anxiety".  They invented the entirely new genre of journalistic fiction that one wag refers to as Magic Ruralism and dispatched their Zeitgeist Action News vans to the interior of the American continent to interview Real Murricans in diner after diner after diner after diner.  

They also repurposed their existing assets.  

Almost overnight Joe Scarborough went from being Trump Fluffer #1 to Mr. Trump Truth Teller Guy #1 Who Had Never, Ever Been a Trump Supporter.  We dirty hippies bellowed our outrage as loudly as our tiny platforms would allow, but when you're a celebrity (and you control the cameras) they let you do stuff like that.  

Almost overnight Bill Kristol went from being a smirking Conservative ghoul and unreconstructed Iraq War pimp famous for being catastrophically wrong about everything (Maddow on MSNBC in 2014), to rambling Uncle Billy, a valued MSNBC contributor  who said mean things about Trump, oh and by the way we're starting a new media company called The Bulwark you should check it out!  

Almost overnight Charlie Sykes went from being Wisconsin's Rush Limbaugh to trusted MSNBC contributor and Man Who Is Perpetually Shocked At How The GOP Completely Lost Its Mind Overnight, oh and by the way I'm part of a new media company called The Bulwark you should check it out! 

Almost overnight MSNBC became the preeminent Reputation Laundromat for outcast Republicans and unemployed Conservative pundits, as long as they stuck more-or-less to the same script.  That the GOP had suddenly and spontaneously lost its mind in 2016.  That no one could have seen it coming.  And that none of the Conservatives who were now employees of MSNBC were in any meaningful way responsible for what their party had become.  

If you were a Bush regime dead ender like Nicolle Wallace or Steve Schmidt, or a friend of theirs like Matthew Dowd, or a fellow traveler like Michael Steele, a place would be found for you in the budget and at the table.  And in this new order it wouldn't do to have some mouthy dirty hippie confusing things by showing up with receipts.

Wouldn't do at all. 

And once the dramatis personae had been cast and seats at the table filled, the ritual among these very recently-former Republicans became a contest to see who could outdo whom in calling Trump a shithead and calling his "followers" racist morons without letting on that these were the same racist morons that these recently-former Republicans had spent their careers cultivating and exploiting.  

A couple of people who excelled at calling Trump a shithead and calling his "followers" racist morons were Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, who were packaged and sold to cable news audiences as canny, street fighting campaign veterans who knew how to win!win!win! despite the fact that their candidates kept losing.  Their candidates for president lost in 2008 and 2012, and in the 2016 GOP primaries all of their show ponies got wiped out and glue factoried.  

But none of that mattered.  Because despite the fact that Democrats came roaring back in 2018, taking the House and the Senate thanks almost entirely to Democratic women and minorities working their asses off and organizing, the new mainstream media political fairy tale was that since Democrats are irredeemably and holistically bad at politics, and since Trump must be defeated, the republic was dooooomed unless Democrats wisely stepped aside and let all of these newly ascendant recently-former Republicans tell them how to run things.

These are the same recently-former Republicans who had by now -- surprise! -- colonized cable news and national newspapers, and built their own media corporations like The Bulwark thanks to large infusions of cash from wealthy benefactors and glowing saturation coverage by MSNBC. All of which served only to amplify the message of "Democrats have a sacred responsibility to the future of the nation to immediately stop being Democrats and start aggressively courting phantom independents and reasonable Republicans" until it just about drowned everything else out. 

And so, having carefully prepared a rich, fertile loam of peril and the incessant negging of Democrats as hapless fiddlefucks who don't know anything about the Real Murrica beyond Berkley and Swope Park, a for-profit advertising agency consisting of recently unemployed Republican shit-slingers, con men and perverts was seeded, watered and fertilized by a cable teevee network which was now dominated by the voices of recently-former Republicans.  

And thus The Lincoln Project was born.

The Lincoln Lads specialized in shunting the vast sums of money they were raking in to marketing and production companies owned by Lincoln Lad board members.  Out the other end of that pipeline came slick 30- and 60-second commercials which called Donald Trump a lying scumbag and the "credulous boomer rubes" who supported him stupid.

At this point I am obliged by Clio, the Muse of History to mention that at no point in the entire lifespan of the Lincoln Project have any one any of the Lincoln Lads generated a original single idea or observation that Liberals hadn't already had and made over and over and over again for decades.  However, what we Liberal never had during all of that time (and never will have) were cable news outlets and major American newspapers willing to carry our often salty critiques of the Republican party, every day, for years, for free.

We thundered and sermonized and parodied and discoursed as loudly as out tiny platforms permitted.  We said "fuck" a lot and spilled billions of pixels over the course of decades but to no avail.  We were (and are) pariahs.  Nobody wanted to hear it.  Everyone wanted us alarmist crackpots to STFU and go away.  

Back-to-back, the Lincoln Project scores a glowing front-page article in The New Yorker AND a their own segment on 60 minutes.

Just for fun, let's take a look back at how Liberal bloggers were treated in 2006 for doing saying/exactly the same things.https://t.co/6VIdjny6d2

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) October 12, 2020

Then came Trump, and almost overnight MSNBC became the Recently Unemployed Bush Regime Dead-Ender/Hate Radio talker/Weekly Standard Editor Full Employment Project, which, in turn, gave birth to the Lincoln Project, which MSNBC sold the shit out of as if they were dick pills or reverse mortgages.  

There were endless glowing interviews.  Book promotions.  Practically handing the mic over to them week after week.  Running their ads over and over again as "news".

For decades, the mainstream media Tone Police stomped the hell out of any Liberal who tried to play hardball.  Now, as we all watched in real time, that same mainstream media fell all over itself  giving the Lincoln Lads tens of millions of dollars worth of free, flattering promotion.

Now put on your Imagination Hats and try to imagine a universe in which actual Liberals who had been right about the Right all along -- right about the Right during all the years when the Lincoln Lads were being paid princely sums to angry up the crazies in order to get Republican monsters elected -- got that kind of sweetheart coverage from cable news and American newspapers.  

Imagine if...

...there were bidding wars over who would get to publish Digby's book, and endless coverage of it in the media.  

...instead of dying poor and in obscurity,  the late Steve Gilliard, who had Michael Steele's number from jump, had been given the teevee pundit seat reserved for odious Mr. Steele.  

...it was Eric Boehlert who had been chosen to host Meet the Press and it was Chuck Todd who was hit by a train.  

...it had been the Sexy Liberal crew interviewed by 60 Minutes about their strategy for taking down Trump.

But none of that happened, and nothing like that will ever happen.  

By contrast, the launch of the Lincoln Project was treated by the media as a cause for rejoicing on the scale somewhere between the development of the polio vaccine and the arrival of the Mercury astronauts in New York City:

Finally, there is light at the end of this tunnel!  Finally the heroes we prayed for have come!

And the money poured into the Lincoln Lads' coffers.  And out came more ads calling Trump an asshole.  And calling Susan Collins a ditzy fuckface.  And calling Lindsay Graham a gimp.  

And in poured even more money.  

And a few of us in what remains of the Liberal blogosphere digital world -- a very few of us -- started looking around and asking, "What the actual fuck is going on?"  Do you people know who these goof are?  What dregs of the racist Right they were palling around in just five minutes ago?  These guys built entire careers calling you commie scum and electing ghouls to destroy everything you hold dear.  And these ads?  They're not going to budge any Republican votes.  They're not going to "mess with Trump's head".    All they're doing is repeating back to you your own fantasies of rage and revenge and getting right up in some fascist's grill and shouting "Fuck You!".  

Jesus, Seka and Johnny "Wad" Holmes  people, these ads are just political PornHub clips for Liberals.  How can you not see that?

But the people liked their political porn.  They thirsted for it.  And so the cycle of porn, followed by free publicity for that porn on cable news, followed by money continued.  I wrote about it, over and over again, in great detail, and the general reaction from my allies (such as it was) was that I needed to shaddap and get with the program.

Being a good soldier I reassured my scolders and upbraiders that they had nothing to worry about.  That I had written on a wide variety of subjects over the past 17 years, and however right I turned out to be in the end, none of if had ever made the slightest difference and none of it had ever earned me one iota of credibility for the next time I started making unpopular predictions.  So they needn't be concerned that some nobody blogger out here in the middle of Middle America pointing out that, say, the Lincoln Project has a Rick Wilson problem will ruin everything and get Trump re-elected 

Don't worry Susie, I have a long history of nobody listening to me, not even my "allies" :-)

Until 4-5 years later.

And then it's all "Holy shit, why didn't anyone warn us!"

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) June 18, 2020

But the doomsayers kept at it, warning me that jostling the Lincoln Lads' elbows even slightly could mean the ruin of us all, and whether or not I was actually right about the sleazoid character and histories of the Lincoln Lads was beside the fucking point because didn't I realize that American democracy was on the line!  So if I wanted to remain a Liberal in good standing I had damn well shut up and start clapping or Tinkerbell would be dead, dead, dead and it would all be my fault!

Well, (he said, rounding the clubhouse turn) since I had already been through this sort of thing with the Cult of Greenwald, this time around this "friendly fire" didn't really bug me.  I kept right on writing and watched as all my initial predictions about how these recently former Republican would leverage the existence of Trump and the legitimate threat he posed into lucrative new media perches for themselves --

Trump was sent by Satan to normalize Bill Kristol

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) August 16, 2017

-- from which they could virtually embargo any discussion of their own complicity in building the GOP monster machine that made Trump possible in the first place.

The Lincoln Lads moved fast, grabbing book deals extolling their electoral genius (and calling Trump a shit head), setting themselves up as the sole arbiters of Who Shall Be Forgiven of Their Political Sins and Who Shall Be Damned Forever ("Boom Times Are Coming to the Indulgence Factory") and going international:

The Trump-taunting Lincoln Project Is Coming to Israel. But Not as Liberal Saviors

Fresh from what fans consider their Never Trump triumph, the Lincoln Project founders have a new mission: To help ditch Netanyahu. But you might not like what happens next.

The media did its part as well.  Before the smoke had cleared from the 2020 election, Brian Williams (Brian who?) was on the air throwing "Michael Steele and the Lincoln Project" a victory parade.

Brian Williams is now telling America that Michael Steele and the Lincoln Project should take a "well-deserved victory lap" for this election.

JFC

The Fail-Safe Election https://t.co/srfywM8Hp8

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) November 5, 2020

Except, no.

Because for all their faunching and preening and all the unlimited and glowing free media they were handed by virtually every media outlet, the Lincoln Project amounted to nothing.  Sure, they had built a very profitable Liberal political porn site, but by every electoral metric it was a failure.  Trump's 2020 vote total was +10M higher than 2016, not lower.   Their main senatorial targets like Graham and Collins -- who the Lincoln Lads promised they would knock off without breaking a sweat -- both won handily and by much bigger margins than they had had in their last elections.  

If you needed a byline to tell you bitter truths, you could turn to the wise words of Brother Charlie Pierce:

The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election 

 

Never Trump conservatives are about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party.

But credulous Liberals continued to defend these goofs because they had gotten in too deep, which is what every con man bets on.  Because they gave their hearts and dollars away to grifters that their trusted Liberal teevee network re-branded into heroes by putting them on the air practically every day while banning any discussion of their sleazy pasts.  

And what would it say about them -- about their faith in their own their judgement -- if they were now forced to admit they were not only wrong, but that they had been so easily scammed into carrying water for and lining the pockets of a bunch of Republicans?  

What would it say about them  that the mouthy grouches who warned them not to do it were right all along?

And yet, because reality doesn't care about our feelings, and because beneath its glowing mainstream media façade, the Lincoln Project has always been a rat's nest of cynical, profit-driven and just plain skeevy Republican operatives, it came as no surprise to this tired, old blogger that when it fell apart, it fell apart really fast.

First came the revelations of scandal.  Then the attempts to cover up the scandals and smear anyone who spoke out of school.  Then the mass resignations.  And, of course, there was all of that grifting.  All of which I documented here as it was happening.

And now, as foretold by your host (albeit through a glass and darkly) two years ago -- 

I look forward to Matt Damon playing Rick Wilson and Ben Affleck playing Steve Schmidt in an 8-part, Lincoln Project funded Showtime series called "Saviors of the Republic".

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) October 27, 2020

-- ShowTime has indeed completed and is releasing a five-part documentary about the collapse of the Lincoln Project.  

Which, in turn, has prompted Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt to leap into his own hīnayāna and (as I said miles and miles ago at the beginning of this very long post) use all of this words to paddle the hell away from the Lincoln Lads as fast as he can.  

Which, along with the documentary itself, is now getting all kinds of play in all kinds of places:

From NBC:

Showtime’s ‘Lincoln Project’ doc, like the super PAC, is noisy but not all that effective

It felt like watching a reality TV show about a group of attention-seeking political consultants.

From The Washington Post:

Seven bleak takeaways from Showtime’s ‘The Lincoln Project’ miniseries

From The Daily Beast:

How the Lincoln Project Hoodwinked Anti-Trump Liberals

From Vanity Fair:

“You Can Feel When the Stakes Are Real”: The Lincoln Project Is Still Alive and Kicking After a Near-Fatal Tumble

And, of course, Fox News hobgoblins Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald are immensely grateful to all the credulous Liberals who bankrolled the Lincoln Project sword with which Fox can now stab us:

Lincoln Project's Steve Schmidt blasts co-founders as unethical, suggests disgraced group should disband

Schmidt says Showtime documentary on Lincoln Project shows 'some of the most despicable and unethical behavior'

So how in the world did this dirty commie nobody Liberal blogger from the middle of nowhere with no friends inside the media draw such an accurate bead on the true nature of the Lincoln Lads from the start...

...while every voice in the mainstream media was singing paeans to them and virtually all of my "allies" were telling me to shut up and sit down?

Well, let's answer that question by rephrasing it like this:  How in the world could I have predicted that building a Super PAC out of the timbers of old GOP pirate ships, selling it to a credulous public with tens of millions of dollars worth of free publicity and enlisting "liberal" MSNBC to endorse it,  and then crewing it with Republican brigands, mercenaries. marauders and cut-throats would lead to conflict, scheming, plunder and betrayal?

Golly, I dunno.  I guess I'm just a fooking genius.  Fooking psychic!

Either that, or maybe I just understood what was likely to happen when a bunch of Republican mercenaries and con men were handed the keys to the media, while at the same time credulous Liberal were told over and over again by that same media that unless these grifters were given their unswerving support democracy was doomed.  

Understood it in the same way one can understand a simple, well-known chemical reaction. The same way any high school chemistry teacher can tell you what will happen if you drop metallic sodium into water.

It will go boom.

I Am The Liberal Media