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 Rogêt" (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