Professional Left Podcast Episode #782: Confront the Problem, Go, Fight, Win!

“Splat The Rat! Splat The Rat!” -- Timothy Dalton, Hot Fuzz

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Both Siderism WIll Never Die

 Y'know, it feels like only yesterday that I wrote these words:

Q:  What's more addictive than meth, more profitable than iPhones. more indestructible than Kevlar and easier to make than Top Ramen?

A: Garbage Both Siderist opinions.

"Both Sides Do It" is easily the biggest of the Big Lies.  The Big Lie that enables all the little lies. From trying to sound smart at the office, to propping up an entire political media ecosystem, it's a lie that's perfect for all circumstances and occasions.  

Since the very earliest days of the blogosphere, we Liberals have spilled tens of millions of pixels debunking the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It, week in and week out, year in and year out, decade in and  decade out.  And we have actually made some progress, so "Yay!" for us.

And yet, when cornered, what is still the first tool the worst people always reach for?

But it wasn't yesterday.  It was two days ago.   So there's that.

But it's also a variation of something I've been writing nearly every day for, Jesus Christ on a Fake ID, has it really been 19 years?

Yep.  19 years.  Four presidential administrations.  And practically from Day One I have been beating this tiny little drum of mine begging people to Please Pay Attention to this poisonous false-equivalence garbage that has saturated the media ecosystem like microplastics.  

It's everywhere, like Strontium-90 in the milk.  

It's democracy's retrovirus: the bad thing that would enable the other bad thing to kill us. 

So today, fresh off the assembly line, NewsNation announced its brand new show.

Take it away Jay Rosen:

Nothing can kill the both-sides Sunday talk show, with each new one pretending to be the REAL both-sides show because finally someone had that light bulb moment and saw that what American viewers want is... both sides, fairly dealt! Here's the latest one. https://t.co/bgOagR0Jer

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) February 29, 2024

That new show is called “The Hill Sunday” it will be on NewsNation and anchored by a guy named Chris Stirewalt?

Where have I heard that name before?

Oh yeah, my aching archives!

The Dispatch is an outfit that was conjured into existence after the pro-Trump shitshow at Fox got to be too much even for Stephen Hayes and Jonah "Dought Pantsload" Goldberg, who scampered across town, started The Dispatch on SubStack, quickly raised six million dollars and were off to the races.

They hired rightwing religious nut David French from the National Review.  French has since been hired by The New York Times (after he tidied up his resume and hastily disavowed some of his uglier bigotries) because there is always room on the Times payroll for one more Conservative creative typist.

They hired Sarah Isgur, former spokesperson for Donald Trump's Department of Justice where she defended the Trump administration's family separation policy, as well as Trump's travel ban. Isgur was also hired as an analyst by ABC news.

They hired  Nick Catoggio is better known to you and I by his wingnut blogger pseudonym Allahpundit.  He was also the former senior editor for the godawful Hot Air from its founding in 2006 through his resignation on September 2, 2022.

They hired Kevin D. Williamson, who, it seems, has always been going through some stuff. 

And they hired this Fox News stooge named Chris Stirewalt, who now has his own show on NewsNation.

Here is how Variety is reporting this story, to which I am adding some gratuitous emphasis here and there:

Stirewalt is set to anchor  a bid by upstart cable-news player NewsNation to insert itself into the Sunday-news field typically dominated by decades-old programs with strong video imprimaturs. The anchor believes viewers still yearn for something that tones down the red-versus-blue bickering that has become a bigger part of analysis and opinion programming.

“The underserved portion of the American news market are folks who are not looking for an emotional attachment or partisan cues for how to consume their news,” he says. “They are looking for something that seems like it’s trying to be fair, and I think that it’s a harder way to make a buck in the news business, for sure,” he adds, but “there is a lot left on the table in terms of Americans who have mostly tuned out the news because it’s just too much.”

In a world where the media's Both Siderist slop-trough is a horn of plenty that never runs runs dry, continuing to insist that Both Sides Don't will always be heresy.  

And after 19 years, I remain a proud heretic. 

I Am The Liberal Media

The Crepes of Wrath Ride Again: Another David Brooks Working-Class Adventure.

Never doubt that Mr. David Brooks has thoughts.  Thoughts of his own.  Mighty thoughts that explain all human behavior it is totality and complexity.

But his thoughts are wrong and dumb, so you will (almost) never catch David Brooks sharing his thoughts directly.  Instead, every week, you will find Mr. David Brooks down at the Farmer's Marketplace of Ideas looking for just the right crop of other people's thoughts to put together into column that proxies for Mr. Brooks' own thoughts but leave no fingerprints.

However, if you actually track Mr. David Brooks' trips through the Farmer's Marketplace of Ideas over time,  like Jimmy McNulty putting his kids to work on a front and follow surveillance of Stringer Bell --  

-- you start to notice that he blows right past most of the succulent, inviting Ideas on display, and instead focuses on one or two stalls full of old, stale, rotting produce. 

Cherry-picked factoids that are barely adjacent to his theme.  

An analysis of more than 65,000 people across 36 countries by the Dutch scholar Jochem van Noord found that people who do not belong to the new elite are united not only by... 

Polls that don't really say what he wants them to say.  

Broad generalizations.  

And when Mr. Brooks feels the need to protect his left flank with a "liberal" perspective -- because fairness! -- he goes fishing around at the bottom of the bin and always somehow comes up with this guy, who hasn't been relevant in decades and long since decamped to the American Enterprise Institute because Conservative knocking shops always need a token "liberal" figleaf.  

All right, I finally got through this interview with Ruy Teixeira and it is one of the most garbage things I've ever heard. Ezra gives him chance after chance to clarify his views and he just can't. He's awful.

— David Roberts (@drvolts) February 2, 2024

Read this thread on how wrong about politics Ruy Teixeira is.
Then realize that Washington Post Opinion hired Ruy Teixeira to write about politics.

(Why is WaPo doing this? Because Teixeira, in his wrongness, flatters the rich comfortable Post readership.) https://t.co/UkrF7FS0yY pic.twitter.com/dVsjQTVD94

— Eric Blair🔥🟧 (@protecttruth_) November 13, 2023

 Which is what Mr. Brooks did today:

As the analyst Ruy Teixeira pointed out in his The Liberal Patriot Substack...

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

 Here is the opening coda of Mr. Brooks' very own Fanfare for the Common Man:

After Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, most sensible Democrats realized they had a problem. 

Was that problem...

...the baseline misogyny of way too many voters?

...the effect of +20 years of relentless Conservative propaganda turning Hillary Clinton into a murdering lesbian hellbeast who wanted to eat their children?

...the effect of +30 years years of relentless Conservative propaganda turning the GOP base into a zombie army of bigots and imbeciles?

...the effect of +30 years years of the mainstream media aggressively refusing to believe that the Republican party was full of Republicans?

...David Brooks' employer's wildly out-of-bounds obsession with the nothing-burger of Hillary Clinton's emails?

...an FBI Director who decided to break all precedent and the DOJ's own internal policy and drop a big, stinky turd into the Clinton campaign just 11 days before the election?

...the entire mainstream media's wall-to-wall obsession with Both Sidesing every Trump atrocity?  Of beating Hillary Clinton every day like a career-advancement pinata on the theory that, no matter how despicably they behaved, since Hillary Clinton could not possibly lose, it was all good?

A rich and toxic hellbrew of all of the above?

Nope.  Not according to Mr. Brooks, who has fully shed his scared-shitless 2016 self.  The version of Brooks which we find running from door to door begging anyone who will listen to save him from the monsters he helped create.  The following is from me from all the way back in March of 2016.  Just before the Before Time became the Before Time.  Which, FYI, was read by around 2,700 people at the time.  Miniscule by Atlantic or Washington Post standards, but pretty big for me:

And now, that Trump has done all the things David Brooks swore he could never do at the head of an army of fire-eyed Republican meatheads that David Brooks swore could not exist,  Mr. Brooks has written a column so redolent with the stink of begging and fear and schadenfreude that it almost defies analysis.  Suffice it to say, Mr. Brooks really, really, really wants someone to come along and save him from the beast he has been feeding for 20 years.

Donald Trump is an affront to basic standards of honesty, virtue and citizenship. He pollutes the atmosphere in which our children are raised. He has already shredded the unspoken rules of political civility that make conversation possible. In his savage regime, public life is just a dog-eat-dog war of all against all.

A beast he promised over and over again to that small clutch of wealthy men who underwrite his idiocy and protect him from harm was thoroughly saddle-broke and ready to be ridden like Ann Romney's prized Lipizzaner right back into the White House.

A beast that has now kicked the barn door off its hinges and is currently stomping their carefully laid plans for oligarchy to bits.

So today David Brooks wrote a very special column.

It was not a column explaining that the Republican party -- his Republican party, his Conservative movement -- really is just a festering cesspit of paranoia and bigotry and fury, because he has already written himself into an inescapable corner by writing so many columns over so many years swearing that this was not so.

And it certainly was not a column saying the simplest, and most obvious truth of all -- that the Left was right about the Right all along -- because on that day the small clutch of wealthy men who have subsidized his Whig Fan Fiction Factory for years would cast him down from his high  place and leave him unprotected to the predations of the job market.  Were that to happen, Mr. Brooks would not last a week.

Instead, Mr, Brooks has written a letter of supplication to that small clutch of wealthy men, begging them to let him keep his job as the Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual in Murrica.  Promising to do better next time.

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

Ah, but David, when was your job ever to "report accurately on this country"?  You're not a journalist.  You tell lies for a living.  Your lies are not as hot and violent as Trump's, but you and he are basically in the same racket.  You make a princely living trafficking in fairy tales about "real America" that comfort and flatter the thousands of Beltway insiders and cosseted plutocrat rubes you hustle every week, and Trump is paving a path to the White House by telling millions of low-information rubes the flattering, reassuring lies that they want to hear.

Same scam, different chumps, except Trump's chumps are ecstatic, rage-drunk and armed with mighty weapons which you helped to forge, while your chumps are freaking out and terrified because the Plutocrat Potemkin vision of America you sold them is being overrun by hordes of rage-drunk, invincibly-armored Visigoths you told them did not exist.

But of course Brooks kept his job at The New York Times.  

And his job at PBS.  

And the one at NPR.  

Even picked up a new gig at The Atlantic.  

And now that the Before Times are well and truly the Before Times, about which none dare speak, , Brooks can safely forget that scary moment when the true, raging, racist face of his Republican party came so close to him that his preposterous worldview was very nearly snatched right out of the window of the Acela Corridor Quiet Car.  Instead, Brooks can now get back to pretending that the GOP base are merely the misunderstood and righteously aggrieved working class.

The [Democratic] party was hemorrhaging support from the white working class. More than 60 percent of Americans over 25 do not have a four-year college degree; it’s very hard to win national elections without them. 

So in 2020 the Democrats did something sensible. For the first time in 36 years, they nominated a presidential candidate who did not have a degree from Harvard or Yale.

Because people with degrees from Harvard or Yale lose?  And the mere existence of one of those degrees on the wall -- or, really, any degree on the wall -- is disqualifying to the white working class, while being a rapist and a traitor is not?

But...but... George H. W. Bush had a degree from Yale and he won.

And George W. Bush has a degree from Yale and he won.

And Bill Clinton has a degree from Yale and he won.

And Barack Obama has a degree from Harvard and he won.

Also J.D. Fucking Vance has a degree from Yale.   They made a movie about it!  And yet the morons lined up three deep to vote for him. 

And Ted Fucking Cruz has degrees from Princeton and Harvard and Texas meatheads have elected him twice.

Is it the beards?  Do the meatheads look at Vance and Cruz and say, well, sure, fancy-pants college degrees are skeery, but lookit them dang beards?  Or is it that the meatheads believe that scumbags like Vance and Cruz make Libtards cry and they're willing to overlook the fancy-pants degrees so long as some Libtard somewhere is crying?

So, right out of the gate, Brooks has boldly flung (flang?  flinged?) himself in entirely the wrong direction, which, to be fair, he has been doing pretty much his whole career and it never matters, so why not!

So in 2020 the Democrats did something sensible. For the first time in 36 years, they nominated a presidential candidate who did not have a degree from Harvard or Yale. Joe Biden won the White House and immediately pursued an ambitious agenda to support the working class.

By the way, did I mention that it's been 20 years since the Republican party has won the popular vote?

No?  

My bad.

2024 will mark 20 years since Republicans last won the popular vote.

To misquote David Brooks from just a few paragraphs back, it’s very hard to win national elections without winning the majority of the voters. 

Oh, and if you do the math, the last time a Republican presidential candidate won the popular vote was George W. Bush in 2004, and did I mention that George W. Bush has a degree from Yale?  And yet somehow he won.  With no beard!  Unpossible!  Unless, according to Brooks' theory, it was Bush's relentless pursuit of programs for the working class that overcame his beardless Yaleness! 

Sorry, no.  Instead, it was a potent combination of strategic gay-bashing -- 

... on the eve of George W. Bush’s reelection bid, the anti-gay vibes were still so strong that Karl Rove, his political swami, had a brilliant brainstorm. Rove wanted gin up 2004 turnout among Christian evangelicals who, in his calculations, had been insufficiently enthused when W. eked out his first win in 2000. And what better way to drive evangelicals to the polls than to put anti-gay marriage referenda on the ballots in 11 states – most notably Ohio, a swing state back then.

As numerous political science scholars have since determined, those referenda (which warned that scary gay marriage would sink western civilization) helped attract an outsized number of evangelical voters – particularly in pivotal Ohio, where some analysts even believe that the heftier base turnout was pivotal in putting Bush over the top in 2004. That’s precisely what a “wedge” issue was designed to do.

-- and GWOT (remember GWOT?) warnings from the White House that if beardless Eli John Kerry were elected, terrorists, may well murder your children in their sleep.

Cheney Warns of Terror Risk if Kerry Wins

Brooks continues:

The economic results have been fantastic. During Biden’s term, the U.S. economy has created 10.8 million production and nonsupervisory jobs, including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs and 774,000 construction jobs. Wages are rising faster for people at the lower end of the wage scale than for people at the higher end.

True.  The results have been terrific, especially since the party of bearded demagogues have, A) been trying everything in their power to sink the economy so they could hang that around Biden's neck while at the same time, B)  taking credit for programs which they loudly opposed and tried to kill.  

Republicans Are Taking Credit for Infrastructure Bill They All Voted Against

Amazing about-face from the members of Congress who tried to stop the bill in the first place

It's almost as if the hirsute Just Plain Joe Lunchbucket leaders of the Republican party have such contempt for their base that they figure they can just lie to their faces over and over again and base voters are just too fucking stupid to know better.  

Or maybe, just maybe, most of them really are that stupid?

Or maybe they're some hellbrew of both stupid and reprogrammable.

But of course that diagnosis doesn't fit the cure Brooks is pushing, does it?  Because in Brooks' mind it's always the Democrats that needs to show grace and be understanding.  Always the Democrats who need to be more accommodating to the wingnuts and less judgemental and Yale-ish.   Whereas the Republicans -- the Party of Personal Responsibility -- can never expected to be anything more that raging toddlers who have no agency or responsibility for terrible things they say and do.

And since Brooks has no intention of ever changing his ludicrous diagnosis to fit the disease, he spends column after column after column trying to bend and blur and rejigger the disease to fit his diagnosis.  And this is where Brooks' stockpile of anecdotes and cherry-picked factoids that are barely adjacent to his theme comes in handy.  

For example, Brooks doesn't mention that the study from which fancy-pants, beardless scholar Jochem van Noord is drawing his conclusions --

Finally, less-educated voters feel morally judged for being socially backward. An analysis of more than 65,000 people across 36 countries by the Dutch scholar Jochem van Noord found that people who do not belong to the new elite are united not only by... 

-- is the European Quality of Life survey and has nothing to do with the base voters of the Republican party.

And the two authors he drags into this are both British writers, one of whom is writing explicitly about Britain.

Matthew Goodwin, a political scientist who writes about the diploma divide in Britain, titled his recent book “Values, Voice and Virtue.” He argues the educated and less educated have different values...

Now let me stipulate something.  Having worked all kinds of jobs, and having been a workforce development professional specializing in manufacturing and getting young people into manufacturing (and persuading parents that we were not dooming their kids to dangerous, dead-end jobs...and persuading lawmakers that manufacturing wasn't dead...and convincing the Chicago Public School bureaucracy that opening a high school with a manufacturing-centered curriculum wasn't madness...and convincing the Chicago City Colleges bureaucracy that they really, really needed to change their 20-years-out-of-date curriculum and buy $4M worth of new equipment...and convincing manufacturers who hated the public schools and the city colleges to give us a shot at changing them... and convincing manufacturers that they really, really needed to change their 20-years-out-of-date human resources protocols for hiring) I would never argue that the dignity of that kind of labor hasn't taken a hit over the last 40 years.  

However the extent to which David Brooks has spent his entire career negating, deflecting, minimizing, ignoring and just plain lying about how ruthlessly Conservative media has worked to warp and corrode the Republican mind in inexcusable.  As is Brooks' ongoing and disgraceful denial of his Republican party's calculated strategy of rolling out the welcome mat for racists, homophobes, xenophobes, misogynists', gun nuts, dominionist Conservative christians, grifters, traitors, fascists, white nationalists, demagogues and a grab bag of assorted other weirdos and freaks.   

For example, Brooks is eager to credit Tom Suozzi's victory in Long Island to --

...playing up issues like controlling the border and fighting crime.

-- but he just can't bring himself to mention the third pillar of Suozzi's campaign.  From Teen Vogue:

 2024 Election: Tom Suozzi’s Win Proves That Abortion Is a Winning Issue

As Trump reportedly supports a 16-week abortion ban, Democrats would do well to remember that abortion rights win elections.

Also Suozzi has not one but two fancy-pants degrees, no beard, and:

Before entering politics, Suozzi worked as an accountant at Arthur Andersen from 1984 to 1986, a law clerk to Thomas Collier Platt Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York from 1989 to 1990, and a commercial litigator at Shearman & Sterling from 1990 to 1993

Very glad he won, but we're not exactly talking Tom Joad here.

 And as much as Brooks wants to fuzz up the Republican party's "white working class" problems with soft spongey language like "the diploma divide", "traditionalist" values, "feelings of misrecognition " and so forth, the real issue is the same as it ever was.  From The Intercept:

Time to Kill the Zombie Argument: Another Study Shows Trump Won Because of Racial Anxieties — Not Economic Distress

Three previous studies found a link between cultural anxiety and Trump voters. 

Now a fourth, from the Voter Study Group, finds the same connections.

DO YOU REMEMBER “economic anxiety”? The catch-all phrase relied on by politicians and pundits to try and explain the seemingly inexplicable: the election of Donald J. Trump in November 2016? A term deployed by left and right alike to try and account for the fact that white, working-class Americans voted for a Republican billionaire by an astonishing 2-to-1 margin?...

Everyone from Fox News host Jesse Waters to socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders has pushed this whole “economic anxiety” schtick. But it’s a complete and utter myth. As I pointed out in April 2017, referencing both pre-election surveys and exit poll data, the election of Trump had much less to do with economic anxiety or distress and much more to do with cultural anxiety and racial resentment. Anyone who bothers to examine the empirical evidence, or for that matter listens to Trump slamming black athletes as “sons of bitches” or Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas” in front of cheering crowds, is well-aware of the source of his appeal...

Brooks core assertion is that Republicans have an iron grip on the base of their party because "less-educated voters feel morally judged for being socially backward".

Is this true?

Hell yes, as long as we stipulate that "less-educated" and "socially backward" are just the latest in a long line of Brooksian euphemisms deployed to avoiding saying "racist" at at costs. 

In this Year of Our Lord 2024, I for one definitely pass severe moral judge on the millions and millions reprogrammable meatbags in the GOP who are racist and form the bedrock of that party.  I also pass severe moral judge the party's cadre of homophobes.  And Republican transphobes. And Republican xenophobes.  And Republican misogynists.  And Republican  gun nuts.  And Republican Christopaths (tm).  And Republican fascists.  And Republican traitors.  And Republican grifters.  And Republican white nationalists.  And Republican demagogues,  And the assorted other Republican weirdos and freaks who are too intellectually underclocking or to deluded not to know any better.

So, subtracting out all those mopes, who does that leave inside the Party of Trump that feel aggrieved  that Liberals like me judge them too harshly?

A small cohort of rich assholes, who all still believe their Republican party is something it manifestly is not, and who all cry themselves to sleep at night jerking off to David Brooks columns.

How Does David Brooks Still Have A Fucking Job?

Science Fiction University Episode 23: The Maltese Falcon

All episodes available at our Science Fiction University website here.

Today In "Both Sides Don't" News

Q:  What's more addictive than meth, more profitable than iPhones. more indestructible than Kevlar and easier to make than Top Ramen?

A: Garbage Both Siderist opinions.

"Both Sides Do It" is easily the biggest of the Big Lies.  The Big Lie that enables all the little lies. From trying to sound smart at the office, to propping up an entire political media ecosystem, it's a lie that's perfect for all circumstances and occasions.  

Since the very earliest days of the blogosphere, we Liberals have spilled tens of millions of pixels debunking the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It, week in and week out, year in and year out, decade in and  decade out.  And we have actually made some progress, so "Yay!" for us.

And yet, when cornered, what is still the first tool the worst people always reach for?

From Crooks and Liars via Media Matters for America:

BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): I think both candidates have to realize this, that if on the left, if Joe Biden listens to the squad, he loses. And I think if Donald Trump listens to Matt Gaetz and Steve Bannon he loses. They have to understand that most of the people are not on the extremes, and that if you can understand that you are going to win. The first one to understand that, and does what they think they should do, and not what the extremists are bullying them to do, is going to be successful.

Remember kids, Both Sides Don't.

Pass it on.

I Am The Liberal Media

Thousands and Thousands and Thousands

Here's a exciting gladiatorial contest that the whole family would enjoy, except that it'll never happen.

The graphic above represents the spectrum of Republican party/Conservative movement as it existed around 2016.

On the left is Joe "Joey Muskets" Walsh.  Failed, one-term congressman from Illinois and blustering, shoutycracker MAGA Trump guy until late 2017/early 2018 who we call "Joey Muskets" because he was forever grabbin' his musket and rushing off to fight on the barricades of whatever wingnut idiocy was hot shit that week. 

Grab your musket.
Sign the pledge.
Join the revolution.href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MAGA?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MAGAhttps://t.co/cYLt7Vn0Ah

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) December 6, 2017

On the right is Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times about whom I have written on this blog once or twice :-)

If there exists a noumenal ideal of the smug, clueless, Beltway fraud, it's Mr. David Brooks. who despite being profoundly wrong about everything all the time has nonetheless built himself a very lucrative and influential cottage industry feeding Both Siderist bullshit to wealthy, cosseted ideological shut-ins.

For his entire career, David Brooks has maintained that bellicose goofs like Joey Muskets either did not exist at all, or were nothing but an admittedly loud but teeny tiny irrelevant fringe of his Republican party.

For Joey Muskets, Brooks was just the sort of RINO squish Beltway quisling who was always collaborating with the Libtards to deny real Murrican patriots their FREEDUMB!!

Both are men.  Both are white.  Both are on their second marriages.  Both are 62 years old as of this writing.  Both claim to be "Conservative" whatever the hell that means anymore.  Both make some or all of their living as professional opinion-havers on various media platforms.  And, of interest to us today, both of them base their claim to a place in the media spotlight on their own, special signature insight into the hearts and minds and souls of "the people".  

Especially "voter" people.  

Very especially Republican voter people.   Thousand and thousands of Republican voter people.  

Here's just a couple of such claims made by Joey Muskets:

I hear from thousands of GOP base voters every day. Here’s the thing:

Tucker Carlson spent this past week making the case for autocracy over democracy. And while you & I are rightly disgusted by this, the GOP base isn’t. Because Tucker Carlson speaks for the GOP base.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) August 7, 2021

Unlike most of you on this website, I engage with thousands of GOP base voters every day. So maybe my vantage point is really skewed. But I’m telling you, these voters live in a COMPLETELY different reality. I don’t think most CNN/MSNBC types sufficiently get this. It’s real bad. https://t.co/iP9YT4DMBP

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) July 29, 2021

And, in diametric opposition, here is David Brooks last night on the PBS News Hour responding to Jack Posobiec at CPAC saying "We're here to overthrow [democracy] completely. We didn't get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here." then holding up a cross and saying "Replace it with this."

Brooks:  Yes, it's meant to be — I mean, there's a game right-wing commentators of that sort play.  They get — they say something that offends the left, and then they could say, oh, the left hates me. And then they get popular in their own crowd, and so it's a form of performance art to shock the bourgeoisie.

And I take it with utmost cynicism, that they are just trying to get attention, and this kind of humor is, shock the left. And then I have owned the libs. So I think it's like, crass, stupid. 

Do I think it represents the thousands of Trump voters I have interviewed? 

No, none of them would talk like that.  They're all serious people who have serious views that I happen to disagree with, but they're not like that kind of guy at CPAC.

With Brooks, it's the Tea Party all over again.  Brooks' career is defined by a truly superhuman refusal to see his Republican party and his Conservative movement as they truly are.  Which is why, back in 2010, he turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that the Tea Baggers were all the salt of the Earth and not even a little bit racist.  

Even when the turn of events became so tectonic that they brought all of his bullshit crashing down,  briefly prying his eyes open and moving him to swear to his employers that he would do better and get out of his bubble and touch indians and see the mountains and the valleys and the whole rest of that song -- 

-- at his earliest opportunity he snapped right back to being "Both Sides Do It" David because he is psychologically and professionally incapable of being anything else.

So, I propose that PBS or NPR or the WWE bring these two mopes together in a televised, sanctioned Thunderdome of disputation to determine which of them has actually talked to thousands and thousands of Trump supporters, on what day and at which Ohio diner. 

The winner will be awarded the "True Conservative" belt, even though I have a very strong feeling the answers to those three questions are going to be "neither", "never" and "none".  

And you know what?  I won't even insist that, because it's my idea, I get to officiate.

Instead I will content myself with sitting up in the cheap seats.

Eating popcorn.

And rooting for injuries.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode #781: Three Hundred Fifty-Five Million Dollars

“I don't want any messages saying 'I'm holding my position.' We're not holding a goddamned thing. We're advancing constantly and we're not interested in holding anything except the enemy's balls. We're going to hold him by his balls and we're going to kick him in the ass; twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all the time. Our plan of operation is to advance and keep on advancing. We're going to go through the enemy like shit through a tinhorn.” -- George Patton

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

Since I Already Wrote About The Inevitable Re-Rehabilitation of Mark Halperin Back In 2019...

 ...after I wrote about his attempted rehabilitation in 2017 ... 

... I  see no reason to once again waste perfectly good adjectives re-re-rewriting it now. 

This is why we OG bloggers have archives.  So I'm just going to link to all of that old stuff below and you can visit it, or revisit it, or not as you see fit.

This week's inciting incident began with Halperin humping the leg of one of the worst human beings to ever disgrace this Land of the Free.

For my latest podcast, I talked with journalist Mark Halperin about his outlook for the 2024 election. @MarkHalperin https://t.co/suJmg7VmXB

— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) February 20, 2024

In which Halperin launches his latest "Hey, remember me? I used to be bigtime!" moneygrab:

He also discusses his new platform, 2WAY. 2WAY is a live video platform that allows participants to take part in informative and civil conversations online with people from across the political spectrum.

Which, based on his history as a creepy sexpest, he probably should have called "Live from his NewsMax cubicle stabbin' cabin, it's 3WAY With Mark Halperin".  It is an invitation?  A threat?  

Then, having lubed up his pundit street cred by taking a roll in the podcast hay with an even bigger degenerate than himself, Halperin was ready to slip back into the periphery of the Bright Lights of the Big City with...Morning Joe.  

Squint Scarborough prepped his unsuspecting viewers by telling them that he had personally "looked at a Democratic focus group last night as it was going on" and it was "so fascinating on so many fronts".

A focus group led by...Mark Halperin over at the very important-sounding "The Wide World of News" but which, it turns out, is just Halperin's shitty little blog on Substack. 

Some mornings the internet can be an unbearable hellscape, but bless my soul if the reaction to Joey Joe Joe Junior trying to Halperin-roofie his audience wasn't swift and clear.

Dozens and dozens of Tweets like this.

WTF. Morning Joe sneaks disgraced Mark Halperin onto the show to pull an Ezra Klein, talk with a screenload of white people about Biden stepping down (it's pure fantasy) and attacking Kamala Harris.

— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) February 21, 2024

Halperin had been a loyal housepet of the Morning Joe freakshow for years, and ever since he got sent to the media sexpest farm upstate, Squint and the Meat Puppet have tried over and over again to find a way to slip him back on the air.  One can only imagine the calls the Scarborough household gets at all hours from an increasingly desperate Halperin reminding them for the umpteenth time of what Great Friends they are, and How Much Value his creepy, robotic, always-tilting-Right presence brought to their show even though he didn't have to do it since he was Mr. Big Time Regular on Meet the Press.  

Also that the Iron Rule of the Beltway Media is that There is a Club, and that if all of us clowns and grifters don't stick together and cover for each other, The Club starts to lose cohesion and then we all go down.  

So, of you'd like to read a lot more about this awful person and the Beltway media crusade to rehabilitate him, here's the link.

And here's a link for those of you who may want to know why 75 powerful Democratic operatives were not interviewed for this post.

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode #780: No Fair Remembering The Clinton Surplus

“The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?”

-- David "The Man Who Swore There Would Never Be Deficits Again" Brooks, 

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Dispensing an Unlimited Supply of Lies, Racism and Treason, 24/7/365

I Am The Liberal Media

A Solemn Promise From Me To You

You know, at the end of the day this is really just a small blog out here in the exurbs of media respectability.  Couple dozen or a few hundred readers a day, about which, after 19 years of doing this, I remain amazed and truly grateful.  

And our Professional Left podcast has a weekly listener total that's a mere fraction of The Bulwark's total haul.  And after 14 years, we are also truly grateful for each and every one of you.

We do not enjoy (and never will enjoy) the tens of millions dollars in free publicity and co-sponsorships from major cable news and print media outlets that made The Bulwark's huge listener base possible, so on behalf of our literal mom-and-pop media empire I can't promise you that we will ever be able to hire 30 staffers and production assistants and a dozen writers so that we can crank out three podcasts a day along with ten YouTube short and six newsletters, mostly telling you stuff you already know. 

Nor can we promise you that very soon not a day will go by when you will fail to see an employee of The Professional Left seated at an MSNBC Zoom panel, glaring back at you from your teevee, every hour on the hour.

Can't promise any of that.  

But what I can solemnly promise is that we will never, ever have Chris Fucking Cillizza on as an honored guest as we conduct the latest of twenty different thought experiments and gaming outs and bitch sessions and prattling claptrap roundtables about Joe Biden stepping aside.

Never, never, never, not ever.

And that is a driftglass promise from me to you.  

I Am The Liberal Media

In Which David Brooks Takes His Readers on Yet Another Blathering Meander Through The Crumbling Sepulcher of Both Siderism

Not so long ago I wrote a thing about the Very Serious Conservative Thinkers' obsession with "-isms", and that David Brooks has been the worst of them.

For decades, this has been Brooks' way of separating himself and his Imaginary Republican party and his Fairy Tale Conservative movement from the grim and grubby and racist realities of the actual Republican party and the actual Conservative movement.  In fact, this has been Mr. Brooks' Great Project, and if you are a longtime reader of this lil' blog out here in the exurbs of respectability you may have come across this description of Brooks' Great Project by some 100% unemployable Liberal degenerate several thousand posts ago:

...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.

In his mighty war against the encroachments of reality, deflecting Republican perfidy with a series of strategic -isms has been one of the Very Serious Conservative Pundits' signature moves.  When the outward sign if the inner rot of the Republican party was George W. Bush, the failure was not attributed Republicanism or Conservatism, but to Bushism.

When it was Tom DeLay, the problem was Delayism not Republicanism, not Conservatism.

Gingrich?  Gingrichism.

Palin?  Palinism.

See how this works?  It's nothing more than the "No True Scotsman" fallacy dressed up in a Reagan mask.

And so when it became clear that the Republican party was in the process of giving itself over, gladly and raucously, to Donald Trump, my lovely and talented wife planted her flag for all to see, because we knew this was coming.  

Don't You Dare Call It 'Trump-ism'

The Media is attempting to separate the Republican Party from Donald Trump. Who voted for him again?

And now we come to the core of David Brooks' professional and ideological problem, which, it turns out,  is actually pretty simple.  His party is dead.  It's been dead a good long while, as is the movement to which he devoted his entire life.  And the Republicans  with whom he shared political confidences have betrayed themselves as liars or cowards or traitors of some rancid slumgullion of all three.

But Brooks' whole job is being an expert on politics.  Specifically, Republican politics.  And not just just the surface stuff which any amaetur Liberal midwestern blogger can plainly see: the New York Times and the Atlantic and PBS and NPR and Yale and on and on and on ain't pay top dollar for those scraps.  Brooks is supposed to be the man with the skinny.  With a jug of the Pure Quill.  The man with exclusive access to the deep recesses of the Conservative soul: those mystic Republican secrets that lie hidden from us peons behind the polite chatter at exclusive Beltway cocktail parties.  

But if the party is dead, and there are no secrets, what then is the plan for our man Brooks?

Turns out the plan is a dull, endless cycle of Denial, Grief/Bargaining, Both Siderism, then back to Denial again and so forth.  On and on and on.  World without end.

Think of it this way.  Brooks is standing on a stage in a large auditorium.  The auditorium is full.  On the stage next to Brooks is a corpse on a table. A long-dead corpse that is stinking up the place.  And Brooks' job is to interpret on the corpse's activities to the audience as if the corpse were a lively, active, cunning person.  

So first Brooks pokes the corpse with a long stick.  The he breaks into the political equivalent of the Dead Parrot sketch.

See!  It moved!   It moved!  It's not dead.  It was just shagged out from a prolonged bout of Palinism, but it's fine now.  In fact, I predict it's going to leap up from that table and launch an awesome Conservative renaissance any minute now.

And the audience waits...and waits...and then the corpse's leg falls off.  Rotten.  Full of worms.

Then Mr. Brooks comes over all shocked and confused.   The Grief/Bargaining begins.

This happened most notably after Donald Trump nearly swept the field on Republican Super Tuesday in 2016 after David Brooks, political expert, had assured everyone that such a thing was impossible. 

 Brooks spent his next New York Times column practically begging his bosses not to fire him for being a clueless hump.   He also went on the now long-defunct Charlie Rose Show and repeated most of his mea culpa there.  Of course, since that show is long gone, your average blog might only have a dim and distant memory of this.  But being a recovering pedant on the subject, I watched the whole damn thing and transcribe the relevant portions, so here you are.  

Brooks:  I messed up big time in not knowing Trump was coming.  And so when something like that happens  you take a look at yourself and you think "What did I miss about America?"  And...I'm...too much in the Acela corridor.  I've gotta get out.  That's one thing.  …  Believe me, I travel every week, but I'm at a college here...so I'm always within the bubble.  And so I've gotta get out.  But then the other thing is, like, I've achieved way more career success than I ever thought I would, so it's time to take some chances on the spiritual realm, on the personal -- the emotional realm...

But because he absolutely cannot help himself, just 20 minutes later Brooks was already making the transition from Grief and Bargaining, to Both Siderism, explaining that, really, Barack Obama is the one who set the tone for all this acrimony because Obama refused to compromise with David Brooks’ Republican Party:

Brooks:  I think what Barack Obama taught us, it's not enough to be a skilled politician. He came in wanting to transcend every line you could imagine and create a governing majority. But his policies that he came in with were orthodox Democratic policies. So you have to have a set of policies that cuts across lines.  That's a little from column A and a little from column B.

At this point, Rose and Brooks both damn well knew they’re lying, but to the Beltway media maintaining the “Blame Both Sides” lie is always and forever more important than the facts.   

So back in 2016, Brooks found out the Republican party was -- OMG!! -- full of Republicans…traveled around the country like Albert Brooks in Lost in America, touching Indians and gaining wisdom…and came back transformed and, finally, able to see the Republicans party clearly.

Right?

Nah!

This is from Brooks is trolling me again, just last week when he once again re-re-rediscovered the Republican party!

I thought I was beyond shockable, but this week has been profoundly shocking for me. I spent the bulk of my adult life on the right-wing side of things, generally rooting for the Republican Party, because I thought that party best served America. People like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump chased me out of the Republican orbit (gradually and then all at once), but I have still held out the hope that my many friends on the right are kind of like an occupied country. They have to mouth the Trumpian prejudices to survive in this era, but somewhere deep inside, the party of Reagan still lives in their souls.

And then came the inevitable smug, condescension:

My progressive readers are now thinking: Have you not been paying attention? Donald Trump has owned this party for years. If he told them to kill the immigration compromise because he needed a campaign issue, they were going to kill that proposal.

To which I respond: I don’t think you quite understand what just happened...

So, having once again shockingly re-re-re-rediscovered the fundamental toxicity of the Republican party (even as more of its decomposing limbs plopped loudly to the floor in front of God an everybody), and having dismissed those of us who have actually been right about the Right all along as insufficiently savvy to "understand what just happened", where do you suppose Mr. Brooks goes next?

If you guessed that he dove right back into his Both Siderist Happy Place, because I entitled this post "In Which David Brooks Takes His Readers On Yet Another Blathering Meander Through The  Crumbling Sepulcher of Both Siderism", well aren't you the clever one!  Because, yep, that is exactly where Mr. Brooks has gone. 

Except now Brooks goes one step further.

Having tried and failed miserably to deploy the "-ism" of Trumpism to quarantine the Very Bad Awful Donald Trump (and the actual Republican base... and virtually every Republican elected official)  from Brooks' Awesome Imaginary Republican Party, Brooks is now, believe it or not, trying to morph Trumpism into something that would be acceptable at those exclusive Beltway cocktail parties by quarantining Trumpism ... from Trump.  

From  Brooks today:

I think I detest Donald Trump as much as the next guy, but Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach; the need to preserve social cohesion amid mass migration; the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.

See, Trump the man is bad, but Trumpism versus Liberalism?  Well that's a horse of a different color!

The struggle against Trump the man is a good-versus-bad struggle between democracy and narcissistic authoritarianism, but the struggle between liberalism and Trumpian populism is a wrestling match over how to balance legitimate concerns.

As always, Brooks ducks the question of how these "legitimate concerns" of "Trumpian populism" are actually manifesting themselves in, say, the actual Republican party by hand-waving away the manifest corruption and incompetence and racism and derangement of the Republican party by blaming "Congress":

America is economically thriving but politically dysfunctional. We have the material, technological and military resources to remain the world’s leading superpower, but the current Congress is unable to make decisions about basic issues, like how to fix the immigration system or what role we should play in the world.

What do we have to do to rectify this situation? Well, a lot of things, but one of them is this: More of us have to embrace an idea, a way of thinking that is fundamental to being a citizen in a democracy.

That idea is known as value pluralism...

Then Brooks explains how terrible "monists" are using the examples of Maxists and Nazis:

Berlin had a word for people who think there is one right solution to our problems and that therefore we must do whatever is necessary in order to impose it: monists. Berlin was born in pre-revolutionary Russia and came of age in the 1930s, when two monist philosophies were on the march, Marxism and fascism. They claimed to be all-explaining ideologies that promised an ultimate end to political problems.

And...you can see where this is going, right? (with a little emphasis added.)

Today, monism takes the form of those on the left or right who see all political conflicts as good and evil fights between the oppressors and the oppressed. The left describes these conflicts as the colonizer versus the colonized. The Trumpian right describes these conflicts as the coastal elites, globalists or cultural Marxists. But both sides hold up the illusion that we can solve our problems if we just crush the bad people.

So if the Left and the Right are both equally bad as Marxists and Nazis were equally bad, who are the good guys?  Where are the heroes who will save us from the Extremes on Both Sides?  

Yes, once again, it's David Fucking Brooks and the Sensible Center to the rescue!

We pluralists resist that kind of Manichaean moralism. We begin with the premise that most political factions in a democratic society are trying to pursue some good end. The right question is not who is good or evil. The right question is what balance do we need to strike in these circumstances?

So, having bullshitted his way through the collapse of the Bush regime, and an eight-year Republican racist primal scream during the Obama administration, and the four-year near-death of our democracy under Trump, and three years of Joe Biden trying to hold this country together with his bare hands...Brooks is still exactly the same duplicitous, Pecksniffian, sanctimonious asshole he was 18 years ago.

Because Brooks' column today is literally nothing more than a slight reworking of the tantrum he threw back in 2006 when his very good friend and fellow Iraq War pimp, Joe Lieberman, lost fair and square to Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Democratic senatorial primary.  

Brooks has swapped "monists" for "DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party" and "pluralists" for "The McCain-Lieberman Party", but other than that...

The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency. 

The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.

But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.

The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country comes before party, that in politics a little passion energizes but unmarshaled passion corrupts, and that more people want to vote for civility than for venom...

 And thus it shall always be at The New York Times.

World without end.

Amen

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode #779: The Jon Stewart Blowback

“Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive and don't ever apologize for anything.” -- Harry S. Truman

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Professional Left Podcast Episode #778: No Fair Remembering The 1965 Watts Uprising

“At a street corner meeting in Watts when the riots were over, an unemployed youth of about twenty said to me, "We won." I asked him: "How have you won? Homes have been destroyed, Negroes are lying dead in the streets, the stores from which you buy food and clothes are destroyed, and people are bringing you relief." His reply was significant: "We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us. The police chief never came here before; the mayor always stayed uptown. We made them come." Clearly it was no accident that the riots proceeded along an almost direct path to City Hall.... This is hardly a description of a Negro community that has run amok. The largest number of arrests were for looting—not for arson or shooting. Most of the people involved were not habitual thieves; they were members of a deprived group who seized a chance to possess things that all the dinning affluence of Los Angeles had never given them.”

-- Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

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