When In Danger Or In Doubt...

...sprint like hell for the Both Sides redoubt.  

Watch closely as Ross Cardinal Douthat recycles the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz "Team B" ruse as a meaty thumb on the scale justify his Both Sides Do It drivel :

Progressivism in the last 10 years has pursued increasingly radical measures through complex, indirect and bureaucratic means, using state power subtly to reshape private institutions and creating systems that feel repressive without necessarily having an identifiable repressor in chief — McCarthyisms without McCarthy, you might say.

Over the same period, populism has consistently rallied around charismatic outsider politicians who attack the existing political class as hopelessly compromised and claim to have a mandate to sweep away any rule or norm that impedes their agenda... 

Those devilishly sinister Liberals strike again!

Somehow managing to be radical...yet indirect.

Repressive...yet subtle to the point of invisibility.

Steering movement of sweeping power and cruel intentions...with no leaders or chains of command or any other form or visible coordination.  

Which, if you are unfamiliar, are some of the hallmarks of every other imaginary bogeyman that clowns like Douthat have conjured out of thin air to justify their despicable opinions.  

In the 1980's it was the decrepit and dying Soviet Union that the neocons fitted out with brand new seven league boots, invisible super-weapons and inhumanly implacable purpose in order to rise to power.  This is from Thom Hartmann’s piece “Hyping Terror for Fun, Profit — And Power” (Global Policy Forum / Common Dreams), published December 7, 2004.

Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of powerful new Soviet WMDs were unproven - they said the lack of proof proved that undetectable weapons existed - they nonetheless used their charges to push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan administration.

But, trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet WMDs.

Not only do we now know that the Soviets didn't have any new and impressive WMDs, but we also now know that they were, in fact, decaying from within, ripe for collapse any time, regardless of what the US did - just as the CIA (and anybody who visited Soviet states - as I had - during that time could easily predict). The Soviet economic and political system wasn't working, and their military was disintegrating.

With the fall of the USSR, the Neocons of the 1990s were stuck trying to make Bill Clinton into the Greatest Threat The Republic Has Ever Faced.  If you remember those days, you remember that lord knows they tried their best and spent a fortune on it, but in retrospect pretty much everyone who went big on the Impeachment of Bill Clinton ended up looking like a raving idiot.  

And having spent so much time and money on something so petty and trivial, as the Bush Administration took power, the neoconservatives found themselves with a seemingly insoluble political problem.  As I wrote back in 2009:

...

After conspiring to bring about two of the most destructive events in modern American history -- the impeachment of a US President over trivia, and the probable theft of the subsequent Presidential election -- to what God could Republicans possibly pray that their eight years of insanity, venom and violence "might be wholly blotted out?”

On 09/11/01, their dark miracle came winging its way out of a clear, blue sky...

In the 2000's, Saddam Hussein provided these same Merchants of Fear with the all-purpose bogeyman against whom all real Murricans were required to stand united.  Because, and I quote:

“The area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”

That was Donald Rumsfeld on ABC News' "This Week" on March 30, 2003.

And when it all blew up in his face, Rumsfeld did what all Conservatives do when their lies collapse.  He just fucking lied about it.

And so, once again, as the Right found itself without an imaginary external threat sufficient to bind the MAGA morons to their Dear Leader, they invented all those terrifying immigrant caravans which always seemed to appear right around election time, and disappear after the election was over.

Mexico.  Wall.  Rapists.  Taking your jobs.  Stealing your heath care.  It was in all the papers.  

But once the engines of Republican fascism start to gear up for another round of outrageous lies, censorship and brute repression, more lies are needed.  Gotta keep the squishes and wobblers on side, using the same, reliable Big Lie that Conservatives always retreat to once things start to get insane and bloody.

The Both Sides Do It lie.  

And that's where mopes like Douthat come in handy.  Because Douthat doesn't need to pretend that the repressive fascism that his party is rolling out doesn't exist.  He just has to pretend that the Left is just as bad.  And to do it, all he has to do is as a few bricks to the mighty ziggurat of lies, slander and poisonous conspiracy-mongering about the Left which the Right has spent the last 50 years building, and which is now in full bloom all around us every day.   

And Douthat does this by using his New York Times real estate just like Rummy used his appearance on ABC News' "This Week" 22 years ago.

By declaring that knows where the invisible Liberal Repression WMD's are.

They're in the area around Harvard and MSNBC and east, west, south and north somewhat.

I Am The Liberal Media