For My Birthday I Got a Very Fine Bottle of Scotch and a Poisoned Chalice Out Of Which To Drink It

This could either be a very long post or a very short post, depending on my energy level.  I'm still fighting the crud, so my energy level is pretty low, but it would be ungallant of me and give you wonderful readers short shrift if, after all your decades of support and encouragement, I just wrote "I fucking told you so" over and over again several hundred times before taking to my bed once again to sleep and dream of better timelines.

So here goes.

Some of you may remember just after the end of the Before Time when your humble scrivener made many of my Liberal allies cranky by suggesting that, just perhaps, we should be a bit more selective about the terms under which lifelong Republican operatives and arsonists who had spent their professional lives making a living hating us and convincing voters that we were the Devil incarnate ... were welcomed into the fold.

After all, as was true with the Iraq War after it became clear that it was going to be the worst foreign policy catastrophe in modern American history, the moment Trump began running away with the GOP nomination in 2015/2016 was a moment when the Left held clear and unassailable title to the moral and political high ground.  Because the Left had been right about the Right all along, and now, tragically, the evidence of this was irrefutable.  

At this point can I just stipulate, for the court, that I wrote many, many posts about how this was the time for Liberals to leverage the collective power of our moral and political high ground to start bending the sclerotic media in our direction.  To tell the story, accurately and in detail, of how the Republican party had come to be the whelping box of monsters it had become.  It was the time to bring the full might of our righteous rhetoric to bear.  For example.  

What happened? A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Trump used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division...

Pretty fierce, eh?  Except, sadly, I didn't find that on the blog of some disreputable Liberal, and the subject wasn't Trump.  That was written by James Carville's wife, Mary Matalin, in the pages of The National Review in 2012.  And the subject was Barack Obama.

What happened? A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Obama used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division...

And for her sins was she hectored by David Brooks and Tom Nichols for her wildly over-the-top, inflammatory language?  Banished to the outer darkness by the legacy media?

Of course not.  Because, kids, this is how even the "respectable" Right talked about Obama and Democrats and Liberal all the time, every day.  For her sins Matalin founded and served as Editor-in-Chief for Threshold Editions, a conservative publishing imprint at Simon & Schuster.   She was a frequent guest on the Sunday Shows until, I presume, she became so unbearable to look at that she risked turning the audience to stone.  She and hubby run quite the cottage industry of opinion-having, pimping for various corporate interests, etc.  

And all the way back in 2012, Brother Charlie Pierce was asking all the right questions:

Before we examine matters in detail, however, we should ask ourselves the most fundamental question of all?

Why?

Why does any television network put Mary Matalin on the air any more? (The same, it should be noted, can be said about her husband, but at least he had a book to shill earlier this year.) She is not entertaining. She is not funny. She is not particularly bright. She certainly isn't in any way informative. She's just a nasty, bitter old piece of work who spent eight years supplying fresh earth for the coffin in which Dick Cheney sleeps during the daylight hours, Ann Coulter without the cocktail dress and the lunatic's performance skills. (Of course, some select people just love Matalin's act. Some people also believe Play-Doh is a food group. Put The Gateway Pundit — aka The Dumbest Man on the Internet — in front of a computer for 30 minutes and you get a guy sticking pencils in his ears for 30 minutes.) So, she gets on there and insinuates that Paul Krugman is a liar, and the whole panel erupts, not over that, but because Krugman intimated that the elite press corps had failed to call out Willard Romney for the truly remarkable liar he's become. After everybody agreed that Krugman was just wrong, wrong, wrong, about all those nice people with whom everybody has dinner in D.C., we really got down to it over the issue of zombie-eyed granny-starving and the Republican ticket..

And getting back to the present, we have the general answer to the specific question of "Why"?  And the answer is because the legacy media is a racket.  A money making racket that wears a journalism mask because that makes doing the business of the racket easier.  

Which, in turn, finally puts paid to the idea that there was ever any hope of leveraging the Left's moment of collective moral and political superiority into forcing a real reckoning for what has happened to our American political system and the legacy media.  Because to do so, the legacy media would have had to put the metaphorical shotgun in its own mouth and emptied both barrels.  Admit that they were deeply complicit in the rise of the fascist Right and that the actively suppressed honest criticism from the Left.  That they put proven liars, frauds and grifters on teevee and let them get away with murder decade after decade because it was profitable and good for ratings.  That to truly bring to book the malefactors who brought us to where we are today, they would have had to implicate every major network, every national newspaper, and the entire Republican party from the very top all the way to the grass roots.

And that was never going to happen.  

But even knowing that, we should have tried harder.    Instead of flinging themselves like drunk prom dates and every kinda-sorta former Republican who called Trump a shithead, the Left should have demanded much, much more from the handful of refugees from the GOP who showed up at our door.  Should have insisted on confession, repentance, contrition and atonement.  Then and only then can come absolution.

But way too many of my fellow Liberals were way too horny to get to the "forgive and the forget" part so they let Never Trumper skip all that.  The granted them what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called, in a different context and a different time, "cheap grace".  

Back in 2020, I took a look into what our future would probably look like now that we had handed what little media clout we had over to people who spent their careers making a living shitting on us.  It was through a glass and darkly, but I think I got the gist just about right.

...So, having seen the nightmare consequence of letting Republican off the hook once before -- of letting them lie about their own past and their own complicity while standing in the ruins they left in their wake -- it seemed inconceivable to me that for the sake of some transient, feel-good validation, the Liberal establishment would make exactly the same mistake again.

That having once again slogged our way to the undisputed moral and political high ground, the Liberal establishment would decided to give it away to Rick Wilson and Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt and Joe Walsh.

But they did, because, as I have already mentioned, nobody listens to dirty Liberal bloggers, especially those who have the bad taste to keep remembering embarrassing things in public.

So, since no one is listening anyway, let me tell you what our collective future probably looks like.

As the Lincoln Project become the ascendant, anti-Trump voice in the American political media, prepare for more and more of your allies (who also happen to be members of that same professional media ecosystem) to get more and more irritated at anyone who keeps asking really basic questions about, say, Rick Wilson's very recent past.  You know, the same sorts of basic questions -- What did you do before this?  Why did you leave?  Have you ever done bad stuff?  Can we talk to your former employer? -- that my stepdaughter had to answer to work at McDonald's.

Prepare to see the George W. Bush Administration mostly redeemed.  Come on, he did some good stuff!  And he's such an affable, god-fearin' man.  And that whole Iraq thing, well there is plenty of blame to go around and a lot of it was Cheney.  Really, ol' Dubya gets a bad rap.

Prepare to see the Sensible Center relocated to somewhere well to the right of Joe Scarborough, with the spectrum of Serious and Legitimate political opinions which will be permitted on cable teevee to range from David Brooks and Bill Kristol on one side, to Joe Walsh and Tom Cotton on the other.  And once again, you and I and all of our inconvenient questions and encyclopedic memory of the past will vanish completely, because just like last time, what will go down in the books as "history" will depend entirely on who controls the cameras and where they are pointing them.

And (if you will allow me a brief aside) this is what  cracks me up about all the "We need them now but we'll dump them later" progressives I run into on social media.  And so to them I ask the following:  Who exactly is this "we" that will dump the Lincoln Project once "we" are done with them?  Did "we" suddenly inherit an ownership stake in The New York Times?  Are "we" now on the executive boards of NBC and CNN and NPR and did I just miss it?  And if "we" suddenly have it within our power to decide who gets camera time and who gets axed, how come "we" can't get Chuck Todd fired?  Or Bret Stephens?  Or Joe Scarborough?

Hell, "we" can't even summon the collective firepower to get Meet the Press to stop putting Hugh Fucking Hewitt on the air, so enough with this "We'll get 'em tomorrow" piffle.   Because the Liberal establishment is already busy trading that tomorrow away because for some reason they cannot get it through their heads that these outcast and unrepentant Republican torpedoes and henchmen are using them -- standing on their shoulders and embezzling their credibility -- and not the other way around...

I went on to speculate about our future "when the Trump regime is decapitated" which you may mock me for, or chalk it up to my youthful naivete.  I underestimated the utter depravity of the GOP's fascist heart by about 10%, and overestimated the median intelligence of the average voter by about the same. 

Sorry about that.

But that part about the relocation of the Sensible Center?  While some of the details were exaggerated for effect/screenplay sale (sad.  never happened.) now that the New Bible of the Very Serious People is a 60-page election postmortem report  titled “Deciding to Win" I feel quite justified in saying, yep, the Centrist Shadows ability to return to Z'ha'Dum was a direct and predictable (and predicted!) result of letting Never Trumpers own the public media space that rightfully should have been ours.  

The Signs and Portents were all there for anyone to read.

And the result?  

From The American Prospect:

Voters Did Not Understand the Stakes in 2024

Now, the buyer’s remorse for last year’s election is clear.

Since Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump last year, various Democratic elected officials, think tanks, and strategists have been frantically attempting to find some magic political formula that will allow the party to beat Republicans once more.

The latest version comes from a new big donor–backed strategist group called Welcome, and it’s titled “Deciding to Win.” The advice, surprise surprise, is that Democrats should punch the left—abandon progressive policy like Medicare for All, stop talking about LGBTQ people and climate change, and focus on milquetoast kitchen-table issues. It’s the same thing we’ve already seen a hundred times this year.

But I happen to have some other polling, provided exclusively to the Prospect by Data for Progress, that sheds a different light on what Democrats should have done. To sum up, a large majority of American voters are greatly dissatisfied with the state of things, most especially the economy. It turns out that median voters were catastrophically misled about the stakes of the election last year. Addressing that problem is a prerequisite for any messaging to break through, regardless of content...

From The New Republic:

...This is the seemingly immutable advantage that Trump and the Republicans have over Democrats. It’s not that they have a better grasp of the values of some mythical heartland America. (They really don’t. This is the party that routinely attacks Disney and football. There is no cultural rake that they do not habitually step on.) Their advantage is that they spent decades building their own constellation of conservative propaganda outlets, and then they went out and purchased most of the mainstream outlets as well. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the LA Times. Larry Ellison’s son owns CBS, and is preparing a bid to purchase CNN. Ellison will also soon own a major share of TikTok. Elon Musk turned Twitter into X and filled it with rightwing propaganda.

In reality, Democratic politicians and Kamala Harris specifically talked little if at all about climate change and trans rights in 2024—and spoke constantly about “kitchen table issues.” WelcomePAC’s formula for success is precisely what Democrats tried. It failed. WelcomePAC’s only answer is “well try it some more.”

The problem isn’t that “Deciding to Win” lacks data: The authors present plenty of data showing how voters’ perceptions of the two parties has changed since 2012. For example, in 2013, 51 percent of voters said the Democratic Party is “out of touch.” Today, that number has risen to 70 percent. Voters, when surveyed, list the economy as their top issue, and tell pollsters that the Democratic Party prioritizes other issues. But the authors don’t adequately probe what might be driving the data. It’s not that Democratic Party leadership has become too substantively radical, that’s for sure. And meanwhile the authors insist that the Republican Party has moderated on issues like abortion rights since 2012, which is plainly false. What happened was Republicans stopped talking so loudly about their proposals for a national abortion ban after they overturned Roe v Wade and it became a looming possibility. That’s not policy moderation; It’s measurement error. 

I cannot help but imagine what the media and political landscape would look like today if, at crucial moments, wealthy Liberals, Democratic donors and media corporations lavished just a fraction of the promotion, limelight and resources on Liberals who had been right about the Right all along as they did on recently-former Republican who still really can't stand us and have a huge financial and professional stake in keeping any discussion of the Before Times the hell off the table.

Might not have changed a thing.  On the other hand, I could  easily imagine a scenario where that the authors of “Deciding to Win" felt compelled to allow for a minority report addendum authored by, say, Digby Parton or Bob Cesca or David Corn or my wife, instead of passing the entire thing off as the indisputable consensus of the only people who are worth hearing from.  

Burn the Lifeboats