-- contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man."
-- Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Address, February 27, 1860
My amazing wife emailed me this morning asking me if I'd "seen this". We work 20 feet apart in two different rooms, but emails save us shouting political and media updates back and forth, thus disturbing the two-leggers and four-leggers with whom we share our habitat.
Also, shouting website addresses...
"H...T...T...P...S... semicolon, forward slash -- no, wait, make that two forward slashes..."
"Holdonholdon. Can't type that fast. Was that an 'H' before the t's and such or an Eight?"
...is too time consuming!
Anyway, the "this" in question was this post by that outstanding internet citizen and Bigly Supporter of our podcast, Tengrain, over 'ta his blog Mock Paper Scissors.
Adam Kinzinger’s New Both-Sides Political Thingie Is Going Just Great
And no, I hadn't seen it yet. And yes, it was and is delightful.
You should go check it out!
Ol' Cut and Run Kinzinger (see "Why Did Adam Kinzinger Cut and Run?" for further details) has spent a quarter of a million dollars to produced a creepy video that attempts to hybridize Apple's "1984" commercial, a little bit o' The Matrix, and David Brooks' horniest Both Sides Do It McCain/Liebermann slash fic.
In it, faceless warders force an endless stream of people in straight jackets to wear either Red or Blue VR goggles. There are no moral or policy differences between the two sides: prisoners of the K'rupt Duopoly are just randomly assigned a "side".
It is, in other words, a video manifestation of the sleaziest, laziest and most toxic political lie of all. A lie that Kinzinger is careful to never utter when he's on Liberal teevee posturing as your Never Trump bestest buddy and a savior of the republic, but which has always been an integral part of his fundraising apparatus...which is how he raised the quarter of a mil he used to produce this ridiculous monstrosity.
From Axios:
Capitol Hill swarmed by performers in straitjackets
Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) turned heads on Capitol Hill this week by sending performance artists dressed in straitjackets and blue-and-red tinted glasses to the House offices...
Kinzinger told Politico, which first reported his campaign, that the glasses symbolize the ideological binary in the American political system: "We’ve been programmed so much to believe ... that each event in the world should be seen through blue or red glasses."
Now at this moment in history, any normal, decent, God-fearin', red-blooded American should be sprinting the hell away from the Republican Party as fast their feet can carry them. But Mr. Kinzinger wants a political future. A political future with the Republican Party. Again from Axios:
The anti-Trump Republican suggested he plans to stay in the GOP and will likely run for office again: "It's not, like, on my radar right now ... [but] I expect that there will be a moment where it's like, okay I'm ready to do this again."
However at the moment the Republican Party is not congenial to the likes of Adam Kinzinger. So how does one fish a dry a river like the GOP? By betting that one day soon the rains will come, and the water will rise and the fishing will once again be abundant. This means never giving up your spot along the banks of the arid, corpse-and-grocery-cart strewn Republican riverbed, and always making sure you're using the right bait.
And the only available bait for anyone who voted to impeach Donald Trump and sat on the January 6th committee and dreams of a political future in the Republican Party...is leaning as hard as possible into the Both Sides Do It lie. By doing what Conserative media hacks and frauds have been doing for decades of one Republican catastrophe after another, to justify their continued fealty to the Party if Limbaugh and Gingrich and Atwater and on and on and on.
They conjuring out of thin air a completely imaginary Democratic Party that is somehow just as evil, just as deranged and just as authoritarian as the GOP. Maybe secretly more so. A Democratic Party so vile and destructive that it can only be distinguished from the Republican Party by the color of the glasses they wear. And in this pieces of Never Trumper fiction -- where all political options are exactly equally blighted -- an Honorable Public Servant like, say, Adam Kinzinger obviously has no principled alternative but to raise a shit-ton of money from credulous Both Siderist dopes so he can produce idiotic videos about the Scary K'rupt Duopoly while loafing by the toxic ooze of racist, fascist sludge trickling along at the bottom of the Republican riverbed, and waiting for the weather to change.
Honestly, the only quibble I have with Tengrain's terrific post(s) is the use of the word "New" in the headline since Kinzinger has been working his "Country First" scam for a few years now. For more on this, you can visit "Adam Kinzinger's SuperPAC to Hang Out if You Ever Want to Rap or Just Get Weird With Somebody" which I posted on this blog two years ago tomorrow.
The link is at H...T...T...P...S... semicolon, forward slash and then another forward slash...
And on your way out, don't forget to ....
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