Friday, December 29, 2023

After The Harvest The Thresher Rolled Merrily Along



Y'know, I've been writing about the Republican Doomsday Machine for long time now.  

Here's a quick sampling.  


You will find no mention of the terrible wingnut Doomsday Machine that Conservatives like David Brooks eagerly helped construct and set in motion -- a machine built to create precisely the havoc which Mr. Brooks now weeps over.
[Addressing Joe Scarborough] Your party ignored decades of dire warnings from people like me and went ahead and built a political Doomsday machine to fuck over people like me.  And in November of 2016, your good friend Donald Trump and his Russian handler Vladimir Putin took it away from you and are currently using it to blow shit up that you actually care about.
So Conservatives like you [Charlie Sykes] spent decades wrecking the country and creating a Republican doomsday machine with no "off" switch.  And now that that doomsday machine has run out of your control, you think it is mean and unfair that the people you spent decades ignoring, reviling and generally fucking over don't trust you because you won't deal on the square with the fact that You.  Built.  This.
Cheap Grace Republicans like Weepin' John [Boehner] want to be remembered for having heroically said spicy things about the state of their party long, long after it was too late.  And would very much like America not to remember the role they played in building that party in the first place and in mocking and slandering anyone trying to warn them that they were building a democracy-destroying doomsday machine.  In this case, what Weepin' John would very much like America to refrain from remembering that, for all of his boozy bluster, he voted for Trump.

Twice

And the electoral Doomsday Machine which I wrote about was one that arrogant Conservative elites thought they could control because they always believed there was a magic switch.  A magic AZ-5 switch (see the video) -- a Dubya switch or a Jeb! switch or a Chris Christie switch -- that would cool things down if the machine started to run out of control.

But there wasn't.

From "The Doomsday Machine" (2022):

For decades, while the establishment media masturbated itself blind in their Platonic Cave, the GOP has been worked diligently to create an unstoppable Gingrich/Limbaugh political Doomsday Machine.

A Doomsday Machine that could not be reasoned with or bargained with.

A Doomsday Machine with no "off" switch.

And they succeeded.  

What really depresses me, dear reader, is the fact that I wrote about exactly this accelerating phenomenon on the Right using exactly this same metaphor long before Trump was anything but a skeevy New York real estate scumbag, and long before Barack Obama was a blip on the presidential radar.  The year was 2006.  The month was September.  The post was "Reactionary".  Here's the graphic.


And here's a short snip:

Because if the entire Right Wing understands anything it is this – as frustrating and degrading as it is to men like Trent Lott, Tom Tancredo, G. Felix Allen and Rick Santorum who really, really want to shout their love for all things Segregated and/or Despotic from the rooftops, it is still not socially acceptable to publicly embrace and celebrate your Inner Klansman.

Thus they must commune with their Swine Army in code.

They must use lightly encrypting hatespeech to manipulate the Rove Rods to get the Electoral Reactor Core seething hot enough to activate the base...but always keep the Bobo Koolant level of soothing denial, spin and outright lies juuust high enough to keep the Moderates from being directly exposed to and freaked out by the unshielded Core of the GOP.

The only thing that changed in 2015/2016 was that the  Electoral Reactor Core had been kept running so hot and openly racist during the GOP's Fake Tea Party phase that by the time 2015 rolled around the base was hungry for someone who would go all the way.  Yank the rods out, dump all the coolant and stop speaking in code.  

It is a lie that somehow Trump hijacked the Republican base.  Quite the opposite: they happily tossed him the keys and begged him to drive.  Because after being flattered and pandered to by party bosses and Conservative elites for decades -- party bosses and Conservative elites who always promised them the moon and stars to get 'em to the polls but left the high and dry and scurried away back the respectable side of town once the election was over -- the racist base finally figured out that they had all the power.

That they were the party, not the party bosses and Conservative elites.

And once they figured that out, they manifested the candidate of their heart's deepest, most racist desire.  A candidate who would speak to them in their own language.  Not the perfumed code-talk of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but the language of Gingrich and Hate Radio and Fox News.  A candidate who would take the party bosses and Conservative elites by the throat and make 'em squeal and cry and bend the knee to the mob instead of the other way around.

And what further depresses me, dear reader, is the fact that I also wrote about this exact dynamic long before Trump was anything but a skeevy New York real estate scumbag, and long before Barack Obama was a blip on the presidential radar.  This time the year was 2005.  The month was April.  The post was "Little Red State Fundy sez...".  

So how did we arrive at where we are now?

Well, imagine you had an objectively grotesque idea that was going to make you a lot of money, but was also going to kill and injure a lot of people.  How could you make it palatable enough so that once you put it into action, the rest of humanity would not rise up and destroy you?  

Marketing!


For example, claiming that the objectively evil institution of human chattel slavery was actually ordained by God, and clad in scripture.  From the March 21, 1861 "Cornerstone Speech" by Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens.

They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal...

The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made "one star to differ from another star in glory." The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.

Then claiming that, since God had obviously ordained that white men should rule over all creation, opposition to this law of nature was obviously insane:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics.

Which is why the objectively horrifying concept of white supremacy not only survived the complete the annihilation of the Confederacy and the destruction of the South, but sprang right back into power all over the South the minute the Union army was withdrawn, and stayed in power until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.  It's why it also survived the Civil Rights movement and went on to become the bedrock of Nixon's Southern Strategy, the rocket fuel of the Reagan Revolution, and the rage that drives the reliable base of the Republican party to this very day.  

Because once the monstrous economic system of human chattel slavery had built a virtuous Christian shield around itself, the ideology of white supremacy -- an ideology of divinely authorized hatred and racism -- became self-sustaining.   Slavery could be eliminated.  Jim Crow could be defeated.  But the ideology of white supremacy rolled merrily along, because there was always going to be trouble and strife in the world.  And for unscrupulous men, trouble and strife were always going to be opportunities to advance their own agendas by finding scapegoats to blame, then rallying the meatheads to hate the scapegoats, then conning the meatheads into believing that only way to save the nation from the wicked schemes of scapegoats was by elevating these unscrupulous men to positions of political power.  

And that is exactly what the modern Conservative movement did.  It took the building blocks of white supremacy and built a bigger, broader coalition of hate out of them by adding gays and immigrants and unions and non-Christians and mouthy women and dirty, commie Liberals and the media and on and on and on.

And they had a name for this new nemesis of all that was good and holy.  And that name was Big Gummint!


Big Gummint was the Enemy of Freedom!

Big Gummint's dirty, commie social programs were stealing your tax dollars, Mr. and Mrs. Hardworking Murrican, and give them to moochers and takers and Welfare Queens.  

Big Gummint was stealing your job and your future and giving it to you-know-who.  


And the only way to defeat Evil Big Gummint and its cabal of blacks and women and gays and liberals and so forth, was to smash it!  Slash it!  Shrink it!

"My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." -- Lobbyist Grover Norquist.

And obviously the only way to do that was to cut off it's funding through massive tax cuts for the wealthy and across the board deregulation of powerful corporations.  But don't worry about cuts to any of the stuff that matters to you, Mr. and Mrs. Hardworking Murrican.  These sweeping tax cuts will pay for themselves!  Just ask respected Conservative haver-of-opinions and managing editor of The Weekly Standard, David Fucking Brooks.  (From 2001, but the link to The Weekly Standard article died when The Weekly Standard died.)

The New Stupid Party

LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of excellence that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime,

Last week the Congressional Budget Office came out with a budget forecast. The report immediately got submerged in a chatterstorm about whether Congress or the White House would dip into something called the Social Security trust fund, but the essential facts are these: The CBO economists estimated that the federal government will run a surplus of about $150 billion in 2001. That’s a lower surplus than the CBO estimated a few months ago, before the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge. But even in these adverse circumstances, the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006.

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund."

By now, the new machinery was fully in place.  Thanks to Reagan bringing Conservative Evangelicals into the Republican coalition of  monsters, the ancient evil of white supremacy and it's sweeping contempt for all "others" and anyone allied with those "others" now had a religious shield to hide behind.  And in September of 2001, the reactionary faith-based defense system of Modern Conservatism was suddenly right there, out in the open, with its poisonous, bigoted fangs bared for all to see.

  

A few years ago when I wrote -- 

...we are not in the fourth year of the Trump Administration.

We are in the fortieth year of the Reagan Revolution. 

-- I wasn't kidding.  

Just as the ideology of white supremacy outlasted the depraved economic system it was created to justify, so too has the Right's unhinged hatred of Big Gummint (and its evil cabal George Soros, Bill Clinton's kill-list, Hillary Clinton's email, Obama's birth certificate, Pizzagate, Hunter Biden's laptop and whatever) outlasted the crackpot economic dogma of Tax Cuts Will Solve Everything which that hatred was deployed to enact.  

And the thing is, all your bestest Never Trump pals knew all this.  Knew that the base was racist and nuts and getting worse.  Knew that pandering to that base was the price their favorite candidates had to pay to get through a Republican primary.  

After all, how could they not know?  How could professional political operatives working inside the Republican party not see what was happening right in front of them, and how could the highly paid, widely respected cream of the Conservative public intellectual pundit class not see the trajectory their party was on, when dirty commie nobody Libtards like me with no access to anyone "inside" could see it so clearly and write about so passionately long before Trump was anything more than a skeevy New York real estate developer?

They knew all of it, but were willing to go right on cashing those checks and chalked it up to "political sophistication" until the moment when it was very much too late to undo the damage they had done and unmake the monster they had created.  

And while it's great and all that recently-former Republicans like Miller and Longwell are now building lucrative media careers out of exactly the same materials and observations that made us Liberal into media pariahs not so many years ago, it would be nice if some Never Trumper somewhere would admit just once that, by Jove, the Left really were right about the Right all along.  

Instead of, y'know, blocking us any time we bring up the inconvenient past.



I Am The Liberal Media



Thursday, December 28, 2023

Professional Left Podcast Episode #767

“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” -- Rainer Maria Rilke

 

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That 2023 List We Promised You In The Podcast



We watched, enjoyed and can recommend the following teevee programs:

  • Silo
  • Pale Blue Eye.
  • The Fall of the House of Usher.
  • Blue Eye Samurai.
  • Fargo,this season.
  • Slow Horses.
  • Murder at the End of the World.
  • The Bear, season 2
  • Poker Face.
  • The Gold.
  • Bodies.  (We did a podcast at Science Fiction University on this one.)
  • Only Murders in the Building
  • Perry Mason season 2
  • Picard season 3.
  • The Mandalorian season 3
  • Ted Lasso season 3.
  • Hijack.
  • Loki season 3.
  • The Continental: From the World of John Wick
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2
Watched to be appalled:
  • Gilded Age – Blue Gal hate watched it. 
Will watch later or not at all:
  • Scott Pilgrim Takes Off – Will get to it.
  • For All Mankind – Started it but taking a break.
  • Justified: City Primeval – Started but it just didn’t work.
  • Beacon 23 – Started but it just didn’t work.
  • White House Plumbers – Started but it just didn’t work.
  • Foundation Season 2 – Season 1 was so disappointing that we never got
  •       back to it.
  • House of the Dragon – Nope.  
Everyone but us watched these: 
  • Succession
  • Barry
  • Yellowjackets
  • Ahsoka
  • Jury Duty
  • The Wheel of Time
  • Daisy Jone & The Six
  • The Boys, Season 3
Movies we watched in theaters, at home or both and recommend
  • Godzilla Minus One.
  • The Holdovers.
  • Spider Man --Across the Spiderverse.
  • Asteroid City.
  • Dream Scenario.
  • Barbie.
  • The Burial.
  • The Killer.
  • Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
  • Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.
  • Late entry, Coherence ( from 2013)
Movies watched and not recommended
  • The Flash
Movies we haven't watched but one or both of us probably/maybe will someday:
  • John Wick: Chapter 4
  • The Marvels
  • Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
  • Blue Beetle.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
  • Indiana Jones and Medicare Part “D”.
  • Saltburn
  • Killers of the Flower Moon
  • Oppenheimer 
  • Poor Things.
  • Wonka
  • Dumb Money
  • A Haunting in Venice
  • American Fiction
Whew!

Happy New Year everyone!

Bret Stephens Is Now a One Issue Op-Ed Guy


Since October, New York Times Conservative affirmative action hire Bret "Bug" Stephens has written fifteen op-ed columns for his employer, all on the same subject.

In fact, this is the title of his latest column.

Why I Can’t Stop Writing About Oct. 7.

Other than his icky, stilted "Conversation" thing with Gail Collins once a week or so, this is now all Stephens writes about, and during those icky, stilted "Conversations" with Ms. Collins, it is almost all he talks about.  When she tries to steer him into talking about, say, climate change, he shrugs  and quotes some poem he claims his father made him memorize, then they're done.  When Collins brings up domestic politics, he automatically dismisses Liberals as idiots.  When the subject of the elections of 2024 is raised, here's Stephens' opinion.:

How about putting in a good word for Dean Phillips, the Minnesota representative challenging Biden? Or at least urging the Biden team to lose Kamala Harris in favor of a veep pick more Americans would feel confident about as a potential president, like Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary?

Then, back to Israel.  

Or, to change things up just a little, Israel with a lot of Liberal Colleges Are All Neo-Fascist Cesspools top-spin:

Colleges have discovered the virtues of free speech only now, when the speech in question hurts Jews.

If Archie Bunker and Benjamin Netanyahu had a baby, and then sent that baby to the University of Chicago so it could learn to express the crabbed thoughts of its small mind using Big Words, that baby would be Bret Stephens.  And against that kind of sneering contempt for anyone who does not share his opinions, Gail Collins is a poor match.  Should  Stephens opine that, say, it was Liberal swine that ruined Murrica and drove Real Murrica into the arms of Donald Trump, Collins would likely riposte with something like, "Ha ha ha! Agree to disagree, Bret!  Let's move on to...what do you think of the lovely fall foliage!"

This whole "Conversation" conceit is useless, pundit padding in a paper already overstuffed with stupid, bad opinions.  It should have been retired decades ago, back when it was David Brooks blaming the Left for whatever wild hair he had up his ass that week, and Collins coming back with ,"Ha ha ha! Agree to disagree, David!  Let's move on to...what do you think of the Cubs chances this year!"

But...

But...since goofs like Stephens never risk putting themselves in any venue where anyone will ask them any questions on any topic that he had not already agreed to, I sometimes allow myself to dream that, just for one day, a little journalism might slip into this puppet show.  

That Gail Collins might dare to Remember Stuff Bret Stephens Actually Wrote.  

And. y'know, ask him about it. 

Like, say, three years ago when (from "Today In "Liberals Are The Real Hitlers":  Bret Bug Stephens")...

...Bret Stephens quickly and airily dismisses Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party as an irritating but transient inconvenience -- much like, say, an infestation of bedbugs --

Reading Orwell for the Fourth of July
As we celebrate freedom, speaking freely is in danger.

...
We also have our own problems with freedom.

For once, the main problem isn’t Donald Trump. The president may be an instinctual fascist, a wannabe autocrat. But, after nearly four years in power, he’s been unmasked as an incompetent one.

Trump may have privately praised Xi Jinping for building concentration camps for Uighurs. Congress still passed legislation to impose sanctions on China for them. He may want to bring Russia back to the G7. The other six won’t let him. He may have sought to abolish DACA for the Dreamers. John Roberts decided otherwise. He may call the press an “enemy of the American people.” That enemy still operates without restraint when it comes to slamming him.

To adapt the Lloyd Bentsen line, Donald John Trump, you’re no Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

-- before taking on the real fascists who are, even as we speak, sneaking sneaking up on Murrica through the tall grass of the Oberlin college quad:

The more serious problem today comes from the left: from liberal elites who, when tested, lack the courage of their liberal convictions; from so-called progressives whose core convictions were never liberal to begin with; from administrative types at nonprofits and corporations who, with only vague convictions of their own, don’t want to be on the wrong side of a P.R. headache...

Press him.   

Ask him if he still thinks Trump isn't the main problem?  

Ask him whether "the more serious problem today comes from the left"?  

And keep asking until, "Ha ha ha! Agree to disagree, Gail!  Let's move on to...what do you think of the chocolate chip ice cream!"


No Half Measures




Friday, December 22, 2023

No Judgment at Nuremberg


After 40 years of poisoning public discourse, relentlessly demonizing their opposition and teaching their voting base that their paranoia and racism was actually patriotism and that they should never believe anyone who told them anything that made them sad or uncomfortable, in 2015 the Republican's very own Monster from the Id came slouching down the escalator to take control of their party.

And now he is running again.  The greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.  And the very best defense against this monster they created that his primary opponents can summon is a tepid variation of Nicole Wallace's, "My former boss, whatever you thought of him" apologia of the previous worst president in modern history, Republican George W. Bush.

Given these realities, Nikki Haley on the Christian Broadcasting Network three days ago outlining her three-pronged strategy for getting at least some of the bigots and imbeciles that comprise the Republican base to vote for her should come as no surprise.

First, praise Il Douche and make sure the base knows that she will never pass any negative judgement on his actions (or theirs) in any way.  It's just that, for some inexplicable reason, bad things happen around him.  Follow him around.  Like a poltergeist. 

But what I will tell you is I think President Trump was the right president at the right time. I agree with a lot of his policies. I had a good working relationship with him. But rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him.

Second, absolutely do not identify Republican bigots and imbeciles as bigots and imbeciles.  We've had quite enough of [checks notes] calling things by their correct names.  

...first of all, I don’t think we need to label members of the Republican Party. I think that’s happened for too long. 

Third, for fuck's sake people, you know the rule!  No Fair Remembering Stuff!

...we need to start answering the issues of tomorrow and not looking back to the past. And we can’t keep going back to that negativity and baggage of the past.  

Like every other politician and media person who still envisions a future for themselves in the Republican sewer, for Nikki Haley there is no way forward except cowardice, complicity and the saccharine flattering of ghouls who should horrify you.  


No Half Measures







Thursday, December 21, 2023

Professional Left Podcast Episode #766

“Neutrality is at times a graver sin than belligerence.” -- Louis D. Brandeis

 

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Wednesday, December 20, 2023

A Republican Party...*



No Half Measures



*An intentional play on the Benjamin Franklin quote, “A republic if you can keep it.

The Pods That Do Not Bark in the Night-Time*

In his very first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet" (1887), Arthur Conan Doyle has the good manners to tip his hat to Edgar Allan Poe, who had invented the consulting detective genre 46 years earlier with his C. Auguste Dupin stories,  "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie RogĂŞt" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844).

Granted, the acknowledgement was snippy and dismissive --   

“It is simple enough as you explain it,” [Watson] said, smiling. “You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe’s Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.” 

Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. “No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,” he observed. “Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”

-- but that's because the nod of recognition was delivered through the character of  Sherlock Holmes, who was snippy and dismissive of virtually everyone.  

Today, we're going to take a refreshing dip into the form-follows-function pool. Specifically, once one begins to undertake a serious ontological and epistemological deconstruction of the American Right -- how it grew to be such a wildly destructive force, how this wildly destructive force continues to sustain itself and how we know all of this -- a certain framework and vocabulary begins to organically develop.  

You begin by stating what is obvious and true and irrefutably happening right before your eyes.

Second, you start to get very pissed that people who know better are not taking the threat seriously.   Instead, they are clearly working very hard to mock/deflect/ignore your increasingly dire warnings.  

Third, the Bad Things that you warned were going to happen start happening, dividing the commentariat into those who were clearly right and those who were clearly wrong.

Fourth, you start to get very, very pissed that the people who were clearly wrong go right on being gainfully employed at lucrative opinion-having jobs, while the people who were right go right on being mocked/deflected/ignored.

Fifth, you wonder loudly why the fucking New York Times continues to employ obviously wrong mopes who are still writing obviously things for the  New York Fucking Times.

Finally, realizing that the institutions which are supposed to protect our democracy have been corroded from within by financial and political interests which have no interest in democracy and that all the shouting in the world will not change this, you resolve to, in your own little way, make war against the the wildly destructive force that threatens our democracy using the only means left to you: you resolve to Remember Stuff.

If you are a longtime reader, you may have noticed that this has been the framework and vocabulary of whatever is left of the Liberal blogosphere for decades.  It has certainly been the framework and vocabulary that has defined my blog and The Professional Left and the No Fair Remembering Stuff podcast for decades.  

So imagine me laughing my little laugh went I fired up the Philco and tuned in a relative newcomer to the world of podcasting and heard the following Remarks of Indignation, onto which I have imposed some emphasis because it amused me to do so:

  • The first stage is claiming that we are overreacting. And that’s where everybody is right now.
  • And in fact in a the land that they’re really gonna live in and this is where I just get so angry. We were right all along.
  • We have been correct about the nature and the degree of the threat. Mhmm. Everything that has happened has proved that our judgment, which was like a clear cut moral judgment. We didn’t twist ourselves into pretzels justifying at all. And as a result, what we said was right.
  • In fact, it was all a little worse than even what we thought.
  • Yeah. So the all of the... the alarmism actually wasn’t alarmist enough
  • I’m not sure. I think there’s anyone worse than these folks. But here actually, here, but here’s the bigger thing. We have been right, and they have been unyieldingly, unrelentingly, without exception wrong, not just in their moral judgment, but in their political judgment.
  • And predictive judgments.
  • Right. This is what I mean.  Like we knew...
  • Anyway, this is this is coming and I’m already I I... just the fact that anybody listens [to this]... 
  • But your point about going back and reading what people said, like, I think we should just do a massive blow out of, of let’s look all of these. I mean, you know, we all just kind of grab the same Ross Douthat [bullshit column about how there] won’t be any Trump coup or whatever, y'know, it’s like... But they are high profile examples of something tons of these guys were saying. And they should not be allowed to be taken seriously anymore.
  • Take it up with the New York Times. They keep publishing Ross Douthat.  I don’t understand it. The Wall Street Journal did this their... their editorial page this last week...  But you saw that, right?  It was the same thing.
  • Yeah. I think it’s it is cynical and it is depraved, but it’s also indicative of what? What it what the entire conservative project is anymore? Right. Right.  Because it’s like okay. So that’s to what end. Right? What... what is the end to which one would do something cynical. And... and the answer is nothing real.

Checks every box, doesn't it?

Sound like every Liberal blogger going back to the days of Haloscan1.0  Or every Liberal podcaster going back to, well, the dawn of Liberal podcasting.

But it's not

These are remarks and exchanges from these guys (Jonathan Last and Sarah Longwell) on their Never Trump podcast --

-- part of the larger recently-former Republican project to carve out for themselves a huge media space based on the assertion that they and they alone were right all along, and fueled by their fury at the madness that Very Serious Pundits who were "unyieldingly, unrelentingly, without exception wrong" are all still gainfully employed by respected American journals of record.

How very strange it has been to watch people who spent their professional careers mocking, slandering or ignoring Liberals who "have been correct about the nature and the degree of the threat" now building themselves an entire media industry on the foundation of our critiques and our vocabulary while continuing to "unyieldingly, unrelentingly, without exception" pretend that we do not exist.

*A play on the famous exchange from Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of Silver Blaze".

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes


I Am The Liberal Media


Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Professional Left Podcast Episode #765: No Fair Remembering 2023




“If we can't make memories, we can't heal.” -- Memento

 

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Thursday, December 14, 2023

Professional Left Podcast Episode #764

“As the Irish joke had it at the time, the wolf was at the door, howling to get out.” -- Fintan O'Toole

 

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Kalliope Pays a Visit

I had written the opening paragraphs of this post three different times, and last night all I wanted to do was button the damn thing up and move on.  But sometimes, Kalliope, the Greek muse of epic poetry and eloquence, drops something in your lap that demands that you set aside what you had planned to do and instead take what the goddess offers.

Today, I was offered this.  From Carlos Lozada at The New York Times, from which I will cite only the first paragraph (plus a sentence) and last paragraph. 

Liz Cheney Is Very Worried

Deep in her new book, “Oath and Honor,” Liz Cheney points out that the likeness of Clio, the Greek muse of history, is found in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. “Clio is depicted riding in the chariot of time, making notes in the book in her hand,” Cheney writes, “as a reminder that what we do in the Capitol Building is written in the pages of history.”

Cheney’s book is likewise an attempt to write the history of our time, a history in which Cheney has become a protagonist...

Like every other Never Trumper, Liz Cheney is now exploiting the credulity of the "liberal" media to get on with her real, long-term project: writing the "history of our time".  Except...

Yet, for all the insider detail Cheney offers, her memoir is truncated, treating the period between the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack as the beginning of history, or the only history that matters, as though no prior warnings about Trump had been warranted or even audible. Cheney once believed in the staying power of the country’s constitutional principles, she writes, “but all that had changed on January 6 of 2021.”

Surprise, surprise, surprise.  Yet another Never Trumper writing yet another book absolving themselves of any responsibility for or knowledge of any of the events that led us the rise of Donald Trump.  

All the way back during the 2016 GOP primaries, I defined this emergent characteristic of the Never Trumpers as "Republican Detachment Disorder".  Which is, simply stated...

It's a huge shit sandwich and everybody but me is gonna have to take a bite.

Which brings us to another writer of "OMG! Trump!" books who has also been making the rounds.  Tim Alberta has been been vigorously promoting his book, "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism" at many of the same venues where Liz Cheney can be found flogging her book-shaped product.  

One stop on Mr. Alberta's book tour was a certain, prominent Never Trump podcast, where he recounted a story from his book about his father's wake and funeral.  His father had the Conservative evangelical pastor of a megachurch.  Tim had been on the air discussing his previous book which was critical of Donald Trump.  And after his father died, Tim was attacked by some of the parishioners and family friends who had known him since childhood.  They accused him of being an agent of the Deep State who had betrayed his faith, but he could still get back in good with God if he turned his mighty powers of journalisming to investigating and exposing Deep State conspiracies.  

Upon reading one particularly hateful, deranged letter, Tim's wife yelled, "What the hell is wrong with these people?"

All of which tracks.  

From the podcast.

Alberta:  Because, Charlie [Sykes], here's the thing, right?  If... if... if they're willing to treat me that way?  I'm the son of their pastor.  They've known me since I was. like, four. I've... I've been there my whole life.  They know who I am. They don't know Trump.  They don't know Rush [Limbaugh]. They don't any of these people, [but] they know me, and they know what I believe, right?  If they're willing to treat me that way on the occasion of my dad's funeral, then how are they treating the rest of the world.  How are they treating, y'k now, the... the... the... their neighbor, right?  Like, can you love your neighbor if you're treating your pastor's like that?  When he's grieving his father's death?  I... y'know, my hunch is probably not.  And so, yeah, "What the hell is wrong with these people?" was sort of a call to action for me, even though I didn't realize it.

Then came Charlie Sykes, who one must always remember, has two jobs on his podcast: to give his almost exclusively current- and former-Republican guests a platform to tell their stories, and reinforce basic Never Trump orthodoxy.

The orthodoxy bit has been highlighted for your edification. 

Sykes:  Have you figured it out?  Because I... I... feel that we've been wrestling with for seven and eight years.  I have had many podcast discussions with you, with David French, with Peter Wehner, with Russell Moore.  And it comes back to, like, what had happened?  How did you go from being a committed Christian and reading the gospel, to what this cult has become?

At this point I have listened to hundreds of hours of Never Trump podcasts and seen them guesting on cable teevee who-knows-how-many times and I guarantee you that, if you were to make a word cloud of their most commonly repeated phrases, you would immediately notice that "seven or eight years ago" or "five or six years ago" or "in the last few years" or "since Trump" is by far their most common ritual incantation.  

Like a brick wall, sentence-by-sentence in every venue where they speak, they have erected a barrier between the nomination and election of Donald Trump (or, in Cheney's case, January 6tm 2021) and everything else that has ever happened in the history of mankind.  

But the picture at the top of this post is not from seven or eight years ago but from from nearly half a century ago.

And by 1981, not seven or eight years ago, the language of violence, apocalypse and the election of a Republican president as a leader in a holy war against us villains of the secular Left was already part of lexicon of the white Conservative evangelical Christianity (from "Reagan's Christian revolt: How conservatives hijacked American religion"):

[Francis] Schaeffer himself developed the theme in his most influential call to action, "A Christian Manifesto," a 1981 book that Falwell described as “probably the most important piece of literature in America today.” As in his other recent works, Schaeffer stressed the inevitability of an authoritarian takeover if Bible-believing Christians remained indifferent to politics and failed to take a stand. He believed that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 might represent a window of opportunity to reassert Christian values. But he also warned that the power of relativistic secular humanism was so strong in the government, in the courts, and in the schools that it soon might be necessary for Christians to resist through civil disobedience—and even with violence—much as the United States had resisted British tyranny at the time of the American Revolution. Christianity and secular humanism, he emphasized, were opposites. “These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other,” he declared. “It is not too strong to say that we are at war, and there are no neutral parties in the struggle.”

And this video is not from seven or eight years ago but from 22 years ago:

I don't doubt that prominent and influential Never Trumpers like Charlie Sykes have personally been wrestling with this for only seven or eight years, because with the rare exception of people like Stuart Stevens, Never Trumpers all have an entire suite of excuses for why they personally never saw any of this coming.  

Excuses which all amount to elaborate, psychological detachment disorders.

Never Trumpers who want to maintain their cozy sinecures inside the mainstream media need to constantly maintain two, diametrically opposed propositions.  That yeah, sure, waaaaay out there on the fringe on the Right there was some unsavory weirdness going on, but, (they will rush to add with nary a comma or pause for breath) that group was almost entirely irrelevant to the larger Republican project and was considered such a joke that no one coulda possibly predicted what was to come:

Sykes again:  As you pointed out, I mean, there’s this the low simmering schism in the church that’s been there for a very, very long time between the Christians who want this transcendent experience and who don’t want the church fighting the culture war versus the more, you know, militant approach. And again, I wanna talk about this transition. So you write. In the last five or years though...

This is where it helps enormously if you're a writer or a shrink and can understand the interior topography of people who can ping-pong back and forth between multiple and mutually exclusive beliefs without their heads exploding.  

In one moment they can accept that, for half a century, every Republican victory has been dependent on Rush Limbaugh's Hate Radio dittoheads and the evangelical Right...while at the same time dismissing both groups as irrelevant fringies.

In one moment they can shrug and claim that the activities of these groups were somehow so opaque and happening so far away from the centers Republican political power that no one coulda seen their takeover of the party coming, despite the fact that everything the Fundies and the Hate Radio thugs were up to was very open, very public and was often happening with the overt blessings of the leaders of the Republican party.

From The Washington Post, June 9, 1992:

Limbaugh, Bush's house guest

President Bush last week sought the views and carried the bags of Rush Limbaugh during an overnight stay at the White House, but neither the conservative talk show host nor a Bush spokesman would discuss specifics of the evening's conversation.

"The president never once asked me about the views of my listeners {or callers}. ... He did, however, ask me for my views on a few things," Limbaugh said in a written statement to The Post on Sunday. Bush "did not ask me to discuss anything at all on my radio program. He inquired very little about the program, other than how I got started. I discussed my program only when answering his questions about its history. I did not ask him to guest on my program," he added.

Limbaugh, heard by almost 12 million listeners a week on nearly 500 stations -- including WMAL-AM (630) here and on WCBM-AM (680) in Baltimore -- said it would be "inappropriate to discuss specifics, but our conversations ran the gamut from baseball (I used to be with the {Kansas City} Royals), to politics, to the campaign, to his press conference the next evening, to my life history."...

From The New York Times, Dec. 12, 1994

Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh

...The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November.

Mr. Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the class as its members tonight finished a three-day orientation here sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Empower America, two conservative Washington research organizations.

Barbara Cubin, an incoming freshman from Wyoming, told Mr. Limbaugh that because 74 percent of the nation's newspapers had endorsed Democrats, "talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide." On behalf of the women in the class, she gave him a plaque that said, "Rush Was Right." He also received a pin like the ones the freshmen wore, saying, "Majority Maker."

"Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those are the people who elected the new Congress," he said...

In other words...

And yet, as I mentioned, all the way back during the 2016 Republican primaries, when it was becoming clear that not only was Trump was going to be the party's nominee, but that he was going to easily sweep the field...

...back when frantic, backpedaling excuses were pouring like a mighty river from the keyboards of the Very Savvy Pundits who had all sworn mighty oaths that none of this was possible...

...that was when I defined the emerging Republican Detachment Disorder simply and clearly as:

It's a huge shit sandwich and everybody but me is gonna have to take a bite.

Suddenly, RDD was the new hotness and it was everywhere, and as we proceed and I want to stress three things.  

First, the links below do not remotely represent a complete list of offenders. 

Second this is nowhere near everything I wrote on the topic: this is a sampler, and everyone I wrote about has been a serial offender.  

And third, pretty much everyone who has steadfastly stuck to the RDD alibi has profited thereby: some by simply maintaining their privileged positions within the pundit ecosystem when they should have been sacked, some got promotions and books deals, many got contributor contracts on cable teevee, and some built entirely new media corporations based on the RDD bullshit. 

As I wrote in June of 2016, suddenly there Was No "I" In "Republican"

January 27, 2016 -- Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: David Frum.

January 29, 2016 -- Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Tucker Carlson, Super Class. Warrior Hero Guy.

January 30, 2016 -- Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Boss Limbaugh.

February 13, 2016 -- Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Frank Luntz.

February 26, 2016 -- David Brooks' Life When It Is Written Will Read Better Than It Lived.

February 29, 2016 -- Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ron Fournier, The Sad Clown of Centrism.

March 08, 2016 -- Today In Republican Detachment Disorder News: Kathleen Parker.

April 27, 2016 -- Today in Republican Detachment Disorder: Wouldworking Class [Michael Gerson]. --

May 14, 2016 -- Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Peggy Noonan Finds Her Magic Cab Driver.

June 3, 2016 - Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Ramesh Ponnuru.

June 15, 2016 -- Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Joe Scarborough.

July 20, 2016 -- Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Steele, Patient Zero

 October 20, 2016 -- Joe Scarborough and Bill Kristol -- Cannibals Fighting Over The Place Settings.

September 30, 2016 -- Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: George Will.

 December 14, 2017 -- Today In Republican Detachment Disorder: Charlie Sykes UPDATE.


Understanding how (almost) all of these mopes have prospered even though they were prominent leaders of the army of Respectable Media Validators who created the conditions which made Trump possible is easier if you think of the mainstream political media as a loosely confederated hydraulic empire with a great deal power and wealth at its disposal, but no moral compass, only a corporate imperative to remain profitable 

A hydraulic empire (also known as hydraulic despotism, or water monopoly empire) is a social or governmental structure which maintains power through exclusive control over water access.

The mainstream political media doesn't have a monopoly on water, but for a significant percentage of the population, it exercises enormous influence over the political lens through which its readers and viewers see the world.  And that influence depends entirely on their audiences continuing to believe in the deep knowledge and expertise of the mainstream political media, which can be an extremely volatile currency.  

But can also be a very potent currency.  

After all, during times of drought, a water monopoly can't just pretend it isn't happening.  Instead, water is allocated to only the most obedient provinces.  Loyalty to the empire is thus reinforced, troublesome provinces die off, problem solved!  But an industry with even a limited media narrative monopoly can do what a water monopoly cannot: it can bend perceived reality around any inconvenient obstacles.  

Which we have talked about on this here blog for nearly 20 years now.

From obligingly cheering on the Republican slander, bomb throwing and obstruction campaign against Bill Clinton...to obligingly shoveling the Republican slander, bomb throwing and obstruction campaign against Bill Clinton down the memory hole so they could cheerlead Dubya's Great Patriotic Christian War against the wrong country....to obligingly shoveling the corruption and catastrophe of Dubya administration down the memory hole so they could obsess over the Fake Tea Party and cheer on the Republican slander, bomb throwing and obstruction campaign against Barack Obama...to their relentless "But Her Emails" attacks on Hillary Clinton...and on and on and on...the mainstream media has used its power to erase its own complicit role in every step along the way to Donald Trump.

NBC, ABC and CBS can no more afford the relitigate the past +40 years of Republican perfidy and disaster than The Bulwark, The Lincoln Project or Liz Cheney can. And so the mainstream media has made itself willing accomplice to the larger Republican project of eradicating their mutually inconvenient pasts.   

As one crackpot alarmist Liberal blogger wrote more than a decade ago about one of the most flagrant and successful of the mainstream media's professional Conservative Molesters of History: 

...it is now painfully clear that Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political  economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

And every day, right before our eyes, they're getting away with it.  



I Am The Liberal Media


Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Professional Left Podcast Episode #763: No Fair Remembering The History of U.S. Immigration Policy.


“My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.” -- Barack Obama

 

Links:  


The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!







Thursday, December 07, 2023

Professional Left Podcast Episode #762

“I'm not writing to make conservatives happy. I want them to hate my opinions. I'm not interested in debating them. I want to stop them.” -- Steve Gilliard

 

Links:  


The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!