Gallows Schadenfreude (™)

Definition:  Enjoying a hearty laugh at someone else's adversity or tribulation even as you stand up there on the windy gibbet.

I was moved to coin this term when I heard -- and not for the first time -- the recently-former Republicans and MSNOW employees at The Bulwark shaking their fist at the heavens and insisting that "billionaires who care about America" need to step the fuck up and fund a new media that can push back against Conservative media and the Republican-controlled legacy media.  

Oh how carefully they avoiding saying that Liberal billionaires need to step up and fund a genuinely Liberal media.  

From a December 31, 2025 Bulwark podcast:  

Sarah Longwell:  What do we do about an entirely consolidated media system that has been built around Trump's allies? 

Jonathan Last (with a smirk):  Why Sarah, what do we do? 

Longwell:  We have to build new things. We have to be the ones, like, where are the patriotic billionaires?  Like, Bezos acted like a patriotic billionaire and then sold out to Trump and gave him the [Washington] Post. The [Washington] Post is a shell of itself. We're going to have to build entirely new media ecosystems and billionaires who care about America are going to have to step up and start helping to both build and and bring back these media. 

Tim Miller:  We probably need to regulate them too. 

As most of you know, Liberals have been writing about the awfulness of the legacy media forever -- shouting it from our little blogs for more than 20 years, and talking about it for decades before that.  So imagine my gallows schadenfreude when I heard these former Republicans -- who popped into existence five minutes ago and were immediately lavished with the kind of daily, unalloyed support of the "liberal" media that is beyond the wildest dreams of OG Liberal bloggers and podcasters -- suddenly noticing that the legacy media sucks, then breathlessly announcing it to the world as if they think they've just discovered radium, and then insisting that patriotic billionaire damn well need to step up and take action.  

Except based on their performance to date, if they did ever find a djinn bottle on the beach and wish for the independent media of their dreams to be conjured into existence, it's pretty clear what kind of "independent" media they would ask for.  

An awesome Sensible, Center-Right new/old media -- a retro-media, if you will -- where no one talks about the state of the GOP before Trump.  Where it would perpetually be 2013: a spiritual recreation of Sally Quinn's tight circle of parlor austerity trolls of days gone by, but this time with emojis.  Where George Will would once again be the fount of all wisdom, and David Brooks would once again be free to roam the land, concocting imaginary bright futures for an imaginary Republican party. (From Brooks in 2013)

A Second G.O.P. 

...It’s probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It’s smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast. It’s smarter to build a new division that is different the way the Westin is different than the Sheraton...

The second G.O.P. wouldn’t be based on the Encroachment Story. It would be based on the idea that America is being hit simultaneously by two crises, which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles Murray crisis. 

A media where, for the greater good -- 

-- Liberals who insist on writing about the Before Time or the idiocy of the new/old Brahmans of this brave, new retro-media would be kept safely away from the microphones, just as they were in days of old (both are deadlinks, so don't bother.)

BooMan weighs in:

David Brooks: Stupid as a Boiled Ham
by BooMan
Tue Jan 29th, 2013 at 09:42:45 AM EST

You knew that at one point David Brooks would suffer enough cognitive dissonance to lead him to make a permanent break with the Republican Party. That day has not yet come. Instead, because his paycheck depends on his willingness to ignore all cognitive dissonance, Brooks has today decided to advocate the creation of a second Republican Party. This party won't be based in the South or the Mormon Mountain West. It won't be completely paranoid about the ever-growing encroachment of the Nanny State. Possibly, it won't be bug-eyed nuts about Sharia Law and Latinos who behead white people in the Arizona desert...

Shakes sticks a fork in it:

The GOP isn't even honest about who they are when they're navel-gazing. Americans expect politicians to lie to us, but we expect them at least not to lie to themselves.

However, for the time being...

I Am The Liberal Media