A Listener Sent Me This Vision of Hell

 

Paging Hieronymus Bosch, your brush and palette are needed.

But there is also a lesson to be learned here.   No matter how disgraced these media mollusks become, they continue to prop each other up.  Continue to huddle together for mutual aid and protection.  Because they know that if one of them gets a chance to get back to the Big Boy table, that person will immediately get a friendly reminder of the support they got from the rest of the mollusks when times were lean.

Then, since these creatures have very short memories when it comes to their inconvenient past but very long memories when it comes to every little slight from a colleague, debts will be repaid and redeemable IOUs collected by opening the door back back to the Big Boy table for fellow mollusks.

You see this happen every day across all media domains.  One week, Matthew Dowd is the Prince of Both Sides Do It at ABC News.  Then, after the intervention of his Bush regime pal Nicole Wallace, suddenly he is the Scourge of Both Siderism at MSNBC.  Ditto Steve Schmidt, who has torched his own career more than once and has been reclaimed from the professional scrap heap more than once, by the intervention of the aforementioned Nicole Wallace.

You might remember that Tim Miller once worked for the Pod Save lads until the, uh, unpleasantness.   But Tim had accumulated a lot of professional contacts, a lot of private phone numbers, and soon he was not only back in the spotlight with a steady gig at The Bulwark and a steady gig at MSNBC, but he and The Bulwark corporation and the Pod Save lads and their Crooked Media corporation appear to be all buddy-buddy now.  

Ever wonder why someone as someone as publicly, serially and catastrophically wrong as Bloody Bill Kristol keeps getting career mulligans?  It's because way back in the Before Time of 1994, a fiend from Australia named Rupert Murdoch wanted to create a high-end Conservative media outlet to be the respectable face of his infernal project, so he gave Kristol a very large sack of cash and told him to hop to.  

Murdoch's The Weekly Standard had a relatively tiny subscriber base and operated at a loss.  From Wikipedia.

In 2006, though the publication had never been profitable and reputedly lost more than a million dollars a year, News Corporation head Rupert Murdoch initially dismissed the idea of selling it.

But the size and profitability weren't the object of the exercise.  The point of the Standard was to wield influence and build a stable of hardcore Conservative writers.  By those measures, it was very successful.  From Wikipedia again:

The Standard was viewed as heavily influential during the administration of President George W. Bush (2001–2009), being called the in-flight magazine of Air Force One.[13] In 2003, although the magazine's circulation was only 55,000, Kristol said that "We have a funny relationship with the top tier of the administration. They very much keep us at arm's length, but Vice President Dick Cheney does send over someone to pick up 30 copies of the magazine every Monday."

And because the Standard was was influential and had friends deep inside Conservatism, Inc, it became a stepping stone to gigs in the elite Beltway media for myriad Conservative writers.  David Brooks would not exist as a fixed point in the media firmament with a have a New York Times job-for-life and if he had not been Bill Kristol's managing editor.  

And a quarter of a century after landing that Weekly Standard gig, we find Mr. Brooks and Bill Kristol's son-in-law on the road lecturing about the glories of Conservatism's past.

It is not well-remembered now, but Kristol himself also snagged a job at the Times while he was still the editor at the Standard.  But they sacked him a year later presumably because his writing was sloppy, dull and error-prone (a standard which the Times has long since abandoned completely.)

Before that, Time magazine had hired him.  And then sacked him after a year because, well, take a wild guess.

Over the years I've written a number of pieces about the gravity-defying career of Bloody Bill Kristol, such as Breaking: ABC Dumps Bill Kristol As It Deals With Sagging `This Week', and The Circle of Life and The Return Of The Man Who Hates Nepotism  

The point being that Kristol used the Big Sack of cash Rupert Murdoch gave him to create a web of favors and obligations among the many, many people who passed through the Weekly Standard on their way to bigger things, which is why he never has and never will miss a meal.  Because there is a mutual aid mentality among media mollusks like Cillizza and Schmidt, and among the dankest denizens of the present Conservative media, and among Conservative media outcasts like the Lincoln Lads and The Bulwark which simply does not exist on the Left.

And yet, if we are going to save ourselves, we must find a way to resurrect the same kind of unified, single-minded, Very Loud focus that liberal bloggers brought to bear during the Dubya administration.  Back when we endured years of being relentlessly mocked and slagged by the legacy media -- 

 -- and not-so-subtly threatened and demonized by the Right.  And this shouting into the void went on for quite some time until Reality finally had its way with the Bush administration and it all fell spectacularly apart.  That's when the media quislings began their mad dash for the Both Sides Do It lifeboats, and the Right hurriedly burned their Bush/Cheney lawn-signs, donned stupid hats, began  LARPing as some latter day incarnation of the Tea Party and swore they'd never even heard of George W. Bush.

Burn The Lifeboats