Listen My Children and You Shall Hear...

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to listen to a just couple of minutes of conversation between two paid MSNBC contributors who are all over that cable news outlet every single day like a rash.

And while you're listening, keep in mind these facts about these two men.

First, both of these men have been lifelong Republicans who held positions of genuine prominence and influence in their party and spent their entire adult lives cold-bloodedly advancing the agenda of that party.

Second, both of these men, in their own way, are materially responsible for the devolution of the GOP into the fascist shithole it is today.

Third, both of these  men aggressively ignored the every warning, every flashing light and every .alarm bell that something was drastically wrong with their party and was getting worse.

Fourth, both of these men mocked and dismissed as alarmist Liberal crackpots anyone flashing those warning lights and sounding those alarms that something was drastically wrong with their party and was getting worse.

Fifth, once the devolution of their party into a fascist shithole became too much for them to ignore, deflect (Both Sides!) or paper over, both men expressed complete shock at what was happening to their Republican party and continue to insist that it all happened spontaneously and with no warning due to some mysterious Trumpian hoodoo, and that no one coulda seen it coming.  

Sixth, each of of these men were (depending on who you ask) were either tossed out or driven out of the party whose monstrous agenda they had spent their entire adult lives relentlessly advancing.

And seventh, each of these men were immediately snapped up by "Liberal" MSNBC where their pasts were whitewashed away and where they now both make a very fine living warning that something is very wrong with the Republican party.

But when the MSNBC cameras are not around, and their just kicking in the safe-space of Charlie Sykes' reconstituted-Weekly-Standard-but-now-it's-called-The-Bulwark tree fort, here is what Sykes and Michael Steele have to say about people like us.  

People like us...who didn't work hard all of our live to turn our party turn into a fascist shithole and then lied about it.  People like us...who didn't lose our party to a lunatic like Donald Trump.  People like us...who have actually done extremely well in almost every election since 2018 despite the incessant carping and bitching of men like Sykes and Steele who are very put out that Democrats stubbornly refuse to become Republicanish enough to suit their taste.  People like us...who have held this tattered nation together despite the fact that we lack the kind of million decibel megaphone which the Right spend decades building and which men like Sykes and Steele were only too happy to use to tear this nation apart.

Or, if you're rather not listen to these two goofs who let their whole political party go to shit right before their eyes complain about how bad Democrats are at politics, here's a rush transcript, with a few of my own remarks salted in there.

Steele: Because Democrats don't know how to get out of their own way.  They're the most politically inept people I've...I don't even know how they survived this long in politics.  

driftglass: Says the black guy who hired himself out to front for the Party of Bigots and Imbeciles until that party decided it didn't need him anymore and tossed him aside like a used condom.  

Sykes:  Hehehe.

Steele:  I just don't.  I mean you know when your political opponent is digging a hole you don't get in it with him.  Let him keep digging by himself.  When your political opponent is going out saying all all kinds of badshit crazy stuff you don't get in the way of that.  You don't set up an administration that comes in the door with the winds of democracy in its sails and spend the first 18 months talking about filibuster rules...

Sykes:  Oh my God no you go back to that first two years and the amount of time they spend fighting one another...

Steele:  Yes!

Sykes: ...the amount of energy that was spent by Democrats attacking other Democrats while all of this was going along it was almost like, OK, Trump is gone... uh the... the coup failed let's go on and and we're going to scratch other issues here.  And... and they really squandered two years.  

We interrupt this piss-and-moan session about how awful Democrats and how this administration, with the "winds of democracy in its sails" to drop in this from a much longer article in Vox:

Joe Biden has been a pretty good president

...The most basic reason for a president to decline reelection is if they’re doing a bad job and are calamitously unpopular — if they’re overseeing a brutal war like Johnson and Truman were, or surging inflation or joblessness, or some other kind of disaster.

Biden is not in the strongest position you can imagine for a president seeking reelection; he’s less popular than the last three presidents to win reelection were at this point. But he’s more popular than Ronald Reagan was at this point, which — given that Reagan went on to win 49 states in 1984 on his way to reelection — tells you a bit about how poor an indicator approval ratings are this far from Election Day.

But Biden is not at all in the position that Johnson or Truman were in. He is not prosecuting a war with US troops; in fact, he ended the war in Afghanistan after 20 crushing years (a move that, somewhat ironically, marked the beginning of a prolonged dip in his approval ratings). And while the way that withdrawal happened left a lot to be desired, nothing like the sight of US troops being slaughtered during the Tet Offensive (as preceded Johnson’s decision not to seek election) is happening now.

Nor, contrary to much speculation, is the US economy in recession. The economy grew at a steady if unspectacular 2.7 percent last quarter; unemployment is the lowest it’s been since 1969 (LBJ’s war was bad for humans but great for jobs in defense industries); inflation is elevated but falling, or at least relatively stable. Wages are rising quickly, especially for less-educated workers in service and manual labor jobs. You have to go back to the dot-com boom of the late ’90s to get a better economic picture than the one Americans are enjoying right now, and this one is arguably more equitable.

Biden deserves a lot of credit for that state of affairs — more than the credit or blame that presidents usually deserve for the state of the economy.

Learning from the overly tepid fiscal stimulus enacted by the Obama administration in response to the 2007-2009 recession, at the start of his term Biden ushered through a massive $1.9 trillion package, the American Rescue Plan, that kept progress on jobs and wages from stalling out as Trump-era measures faded.

The package overshot significantly; he made the opposite mistake that Obama made in 2009. But his was the better direction in which to err: the inflation that resulted, while painful, was less painful than the many years of excess unemployment and depressed demand that resulted after 2009. In the meantime, the measure plunged child poverty to a record low by expanding the child tax credit.

Much has been made of the ways in which moderate Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Krysten Sinema (I-AZ) frustrated Biden’s grander ambitions. It’s certainly true that Sinema blocked his plans to tax high earners more heavily, and Manchin kept the child tax credit improvements from being made permanent.

But looking at what actually did pass during Biden’s first two years, one gets a different picture. Biden signed the largest investment in R&D and deployment of clean energy in US history into law; the head of the International Energy Agency termed it the world’s most important climate action since the Paris accords.

Separately, Biden signed into law hundreds of billions in new science funding, passed on a bipartisan basis as part of an effort to strengthen semiconductor manufacturing. After the Trump administration’s famous failure to pass an infrastructure bill, Biden did it.

Looking abroad, the administration’s handling of the Ukraine war has been outstanding. Choosing to release intelligence showing Russia’s invasion plans in the weeks leading up to the attack was a masterstroke, denying Russian President Vladimir Putin any ability to claim that Ukraine provoked him. Biden has kept his G7 counterparts aligned in imposing sanctions on Russia, denying it oil revenue, and supplying weapons to Ukraine.

The result is a war that is already vastly more costly than Putin bargained for, without US or NATO troops being dragged into the conflict, and backdoor progress on something US presidents had been fruitlessly pursuing for years: increased European military spending.

Biden does have some notable failures, most importantly the continuing massive death toll of Covid-19. In his first year, he mobilized the largest vaccination campaign in our history to face it, with shots going from coveted and hard-to-access to ubiquitous and available at any pharmacy in a matter of months.

But the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to allow a vaccine mandate for most employers slowed adoption, as did partisan resistance to the shots among conservatives. The emergence of the more transmissible delta and omicron variants meant the disease surged even as vaccines were readily available

While it is unclear how much the administration could have done to encourage more mitigation steps, like funding for better ventilation systems, Biden once said in a debate with Trump that anyone responsible for 220,000 dead Americans “should not remain as president of the United States of America.” Given that the US Covid death toll currently stands at 1.1 million, it’s fair to say he hasn’t fared much better.

Taking the good with the bad, Biden looks like a fairly successful president, overseeing an unusually good economy without US troops in danger. That’s not normally someone you want stepping aside.

 We now rejoin Sykes and Steele pissing and moaning about how yadda yadda yadda...

Sykes:  I mean maybe they'll get it back at some point you know but counting on the Republicans to do it for them...

We interrupt Sykes commentary about how Democrats are lazy dumbasses who are "counting on the Republicans" for whatever with this clip from the 2023 SOTU of Diamond Joe Biden head-faking the entire Republican party into publicly supporting his position on Medicare and Social Security in front of an audience of millions:  

 

We now rejoin Sykes whinging about how progressives live in a bubble too!

 

Sykes: ...uh... I know it's tempting, and I know that they, uh, live in their own...  And, see this is the thing about it.  I mean you and I both know that the Fox folks live in a bubble.

Steele:  Yes!

Sykes: I'm not sure that progressives fully understand and how they live in a bubble as well.

Steele: Yeah they don't they don't.

Sykes: They don't. And there's not much we can do to tell them about it except, hey, we have these podcasts this is what we do.

driftglass: The only "bubble" progressives have is a tiny corner of one cable news channel which, over the past seven years, has been completely colonized by an army of recently-former Republicans like Sykes, and still-Republicans-because-God-knows-why like Steele.

Steele:  That's why we're here baby! 

Sykes: Michael Steele it is always great to have you. Michael Steele is host of the Michael Steele podcast also a political analyst for MSNBC... 

And just for fun and at no additional charge, here's little background on Sykes from a 2017 Urban Milwaukee article on "The Many Faces of Charlie Sykes":

...I can only imagine how hard it must have been for someone like Charlie, always deeply cynical and Mencken-like about the intelligence level of the great unwashed masses, spending day after day — for 24 years — stoking the anger and wing-nut conspiracy theories of his listeners.
But the paychecks were great. Between his radio gig and right wing dollars for his books from conservative groups, Sykes did very well. And he had the power to help elect and defeat candidates, and make friendships with heavyweights like Gov. Scott Walker, House Speaker Paul Ryan and the conservative Bradley Foundation’s president Mike Grebe.

By 2016, however, Sykes must have gotten sick of it all. Sources tell me he applied for the position of president of the Bradley Foundation after Grebe announced his resignation, and Sykes was never seriously considered for the job. After all he had done for the right-wing cause. That had to be infuriating. (And yes, there has always been some anger fueling Charlie’s views.)

So Sykes fell back on his well-practiced turn as the enlightened political turncoat who has suddenly — and ruefully, wittily, quotably — seen the error of his former ways. Rather than become king of the nation’s biggest conservative foundation, Sykes maneuvered to become the titan of talk radio traitors, getting coverage in the Politico and National Public Radio, and winning a position as contributor to MSNBC... 

 

...As former Wisconsin Democratic Chairman Mike Tate put it to Barabak, Sykes is like “a guy who slowly fed poison to his dog for 10 years then, when the dog dies of poisoning, throws up his hands and says, ‘My God, how did that happen?’”

 

Burn The Lifeboats