Friday, July 16, 2021

David Brooks and the Suborbital Right

Weekly Standard cover, October 2001

From Space.Com
Suborbital flight, in contrast [to orbital flight], requires much lower speeds. A suborbital rocket doesn't have the power to achieve orbit. Instead, it will fly up to a certain height that depends on its speed, and then come back down once its engines are shut off... At the top of their flight arc, passengers in a suborbital vehicle will still achieve a few minutes of weightlessness. They are, in fact, falling back toward Earth, but they are experiencing freefall, similar to an airplane completing parabolic maneuvers to simulate zero gravity.

During the Trump Years, altogether too many people who should have known better -- should have learned from the rapid Conservative recovery and retrenchment after the collapse of the Bush Administration -- became possessed of the belief that some of the more genteel, respectable, mainstream peddlers of Conservative drivel might have at last figured out that it was the flaws of American Conservatism itself that paved the way for Trump.  That without the diligent work of decades belt-feeding red meat to bigots and imbeciles (because that was the only way to whip up enough of an electoral mob to enact the Conservative agenda) --

-- there would never have been the rich soil of paranoia and rage on the Right from which a Trump could grow.  

That without the diligent work of decades relentlessly demonizing the Left for warning that playing footsie with fascism and white supremacy would lead to disaster, the malignant trajectory of the Right might have been diagnosed and arrested long before it became depraved enough to nominate, elect, and then re-nominated a monster like Trump. 

But that never happened, because even the most genteel, respectable, mainstream peddlers of Conservative drivel are still Conservatives and are incapable of facing the terrible truth that all that they have always held to be true is false, and that those shiftless, mooching, woke, America-hating, terrorist-loving Liberals were right about the Right all along.  

And because facing this terrible truth is beyond them, they take refuge in their own versions of what I referred to as David Brooks' Great Project 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.

Sure, the Trump administration was depraved and grotesque and many respectable, mainstream peddlers of Conservative drivel said so out loud.  And, yes, for a few, giddy years they called a Republican president a shithead, and rendered their garments and crushed their pearls demanding to know when the "real" Republicans and the "real" Conservatives would show up to save them.

But all that amounted to was a few, fleeting moments of ideological weightlessness before they began falling back to Earth.  Because in the end no Republican calamity will ever terrifying enough or crushing enough to lift them out of the deep gravity well of their own ideology.  

And so, this week in my local paper, we saw an avatar of the far-right Illinois Policy Institute named Scott Reeder, being given column inches to preach the gospel of the Evils of the Extremes on Both Sides, with nary a mention of Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell or the 01/06 Republican Insurrection or the Big Lie or the history of the GOP ("It's Brookses All The Way Down").

At the national level, this week we also saw Andrew Sullivan returning to exactly where he was 20 years ago -- ranting that the real danger to America was the decadent coastal elitist Left.  This time around, Mr. Sullivan's rant took the form of a Wake Up White People! Substack screed that was first reprinted in The New York Post and then re-reprinted on the Fox News site.  And once again, in Mr. Sullivan's telling, Donald Trump, the Insurrection, the Big Lie and the entire history of the GOP have simply vanished.  Instead, starting in 2015, all of our nation's problems have been caused by the ruthless and all-powerful woke Left forcing decent, God-fearing', real Murricans into a corner ("Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says: The Adventure Continues").

And today we find confirmation Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has fully returned to pre-Trump status as the Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Brooks was back to preaching that The Extremes on Both Sides were destoyin The Truth.  As I wrote then ("Every Weary River of David Brooks' Prose..."):

[David Brooks has returned to his] decaying cathedral of empty platitudes and false equivalence where, somehow, the Donald Trump and the entire Republican base, and "Some students at elite schools" are both such equally  dangerous threats to democracy that they need to be presented side-by-side in the same paragraph:

But Donald Trump doesn’t get away with lies because his followers flunked Epistemology 101. He gets away with his lies because he tells stories of dispossession that feel true to many of them. Some students at elite schools aren’t censorious and intolerant because they lack analytic skills. They feel entrapped by moral order that feels unsafe and unjust.

Where Conservatives and Progressives are just two equally poisonous sides of the same America-smashing cudgel:

Part of the blame goes to conservatives who try to whitewash history. Part goes to progressives who tell such a negative version of history that it destroys patriotism. 

This week he's in the same pulpit, preaching the same sermon, but this time has decided to wade straight into the one subject above all others that he should be barred for life from ever mentioning again.  From The New York Times:

For most of the past century, human dignity had a friend — the United States of America. We are a deeply flawed and error-prone nation, like any other, but America helped defeat fascism and communism and helped set the context for European peace, Asian prosperity and the spread of democracy.

Then came Iraq and Afghanistan, and America lost faith in itself and its global role — like a pitcher who has been shelled and no longer has confidence in his own stuff...

Yeah, you read that right.

This guy.



This fucking guy -- who was the Managing Editor of this now-defunct hippy-punching and war-porn rag when they ran this cover 19 years ago --

-- is actually gearing up to lecture Americans on the importance of staying in Afghanistan forever.  

But first comes the obligatory detour to you-know-where (emphasis added):

On the left, many now reject the idea that America can be or is a global champion of democracy, and they find phrases like “the indispensable nation” or the “last best hope of the earth” ridiculous.  On the right the wall-building caucus has given up on the idea that the rest of the world is even worth engaging...

What follows is just, well, wow.  Brooks' Great Project on stilts.  Inconvenient history rewritten.  American foreign policy reduced to single stupid and dangerously wrong baseball analogy.  And a profession of befuddlement that the Left has no appetite for Republican foreign policy debacles that men like David Brooks are always eager to champion, but not so eager to put their children on the firing line.  

I guess what befuddles me most is the behavior of the American left. I get why Donald Trump and other American authoritarians would be ambivalent about America’s role in the world. They were always suspicious of the progressive package that America has helped to promote.

But every day I see progressives defending women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice at home and yet championing a foreign policy that cedes power to the Taliban, Hamas and other reactionary forces abroad.

I'm not sure, but I think David Brooks just told Joe Biden that he should not just roll out the full might of armed forces of the United States to "defend women's rights L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice" here in the Land of the Free, but that we should keep the military on that task for as many decades as are necessary, at whatever cost in blood and treasure that may be required, to completely destroy the Republican party and establish a working democracy here in American.

 As the kids on the internet say, shocking if true.

But I suspect that Mr. Brooks isn't saying that at all.  I suspect that since his Republican party is now a   of bigots and imbeciles that no longer cares what David Brooks says about anything, he is actually trying, in his own painfully hamfisted way, to guilt us Liberals -- the same people he spent the bulk of his career slagging as decadent America-hating children, scheming academics, parochial morons and deluded hippies -- into backing his stillborn Neocon dreams of global American military hegemony. 

The good news is that, as of this writing Mr. Brooks is being thoroughly dragged, ass-backwards through the cactus patch that is Twitter.  

The disheartening news is that what wrote about Mr. Brooks more than 16 years ago --

It seem very clear to me that BoBo is many laughably obtuse things, but BoBo Don't Surf. He isn't simply misguided and there is little chance that he's ever going to see the light and change his mind: he reasons backwards from his ideology into his limp diatribes, instead of forward from the facts to a reasonable conclusion.

Instead (and in answer to those questions) I believe Brooks is a serious, committed Wingnut middleman -- sort of the Fundamentalist's pet PBS Mennonite -- which IMHO is much more dangerous than a fully outed DeLay.

Brooks' job is to sell the poison to the Center: to reassure the Moderates and “Reagan Democrats” and to coax the Undecideds into the Windowless Fundy Panel Truck by dandying their evil up in perfumed NYT-speak, and since the battle for the future of the country takes places in the middle, these wingnuts-in-sheeps-clothing are the ones that deserve extra-special beatings.

The good news is, BoBo obviously doesn't know he's an idjit. Instead, he thinks he's tricksey, which is why he keeps obligingly waddling into the thresher blades.

-- I could have written today with just a minor tweak or two.  

Because, except in a few, rare cases, Conservatives are fundamentally incapable of change.


Burn The Lifeboats

Thursday, July 15, 2021

Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says: The Adventure Continues

One year ago, America's most prominent White, gay, Catholic, Tory, Conservative, Libertarian phrenologist added to the long list of things he has quit by announcing that he was quitting New York Magazine because not enough people would sit at his table in the company cafeteria.  From The Guardian:

Anti-Trump British journalist quits New York Magazine in 'woke' row

Conservative columnist claims staff no longer want to associate with him because of his attacks on critical theory

Or maybe it was a decision mutually decided upon.  From CNN:

Longtime columnist and blogger Andrew Sullivan resigns from New York magazine

Columnist and blogger Andrew Sullivan is leaving New York magazine, his professional home since 2016, he announced Tuesday.

"This will be my last week at New York Magazine," Sullivan tweeted. "I'm sad because the editors I worked with there are among the finest in the country, and I am immensely grateful to them for vastly improving my work. I'm also proud of the essays and columns I wrote at NYM - some of which will be published in a collection of my writing scheduled for next year."

New York editor in chief David Haskell confirmed Sullivan's resignation in a memo to staff obtained by CNN Business.

Haskell wrote that the decision for Sullivan and the magazine to "part ways was mutual."

"Andrew and I agreed that his editorial project and the magazine's, though overlapping in many ways, were no longer the right match for each other," Haskell said...

And although his parting column read as affectionate and wistful, it didn't take more than a New York Minute for him to turn around and come after his former colleagues with both barrels, nor did it take very long for the Very, Very Right to give ol' Andy the prodigal son treatment.  

For example here, from the unbalanced mind of Rod Dreher at The American Conservative.

Defending Andrew Sullivan

And here, from the very publicly disgraced pen of Kevin Williamson who now writes for America's most respected journal of white supremacy and who sees in Sullivan a fellow victim of [checks notes] free market capitalism:

Ritual Denunciation and the Mau-Mauing of the Former Magazine Editors

And as America's most prominent White, gay, Catholic, Tory, Conservative, Libertarian phrenologist has made it increasingly clear that his late-career goal is to anoint himself as the sole and absolute asshole-arbiter of all things historical and racial, so has his prominence among the denizens of the sewer dwelling Right grown.  

Which is how, in the space of one year, Mr. Sullivan's metaphysical home has traveled 3.8 miles South/South-East from the headquarters of New Yorker Magazine to the headquarters of The New York Post, where we find him this week, with his original column from the Post issuing Dire Warnings about yadda yadda yadda being reprinted by -- surprise! -- Fox News directly under a video of Critical Race Theory hysterics from CPAC :

Andrew Sullivan: It's bigger than CRT — radical ideologies transforming US

The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so

Brief aside: I hope in the course of your extensive reading you are not failing to notice that, in every article like this, all of American history began "five years or so" ago?

And woven between misspelled ads urging you to send money to wingnut grifters -- "CALLISTA AND NEWT GINGRICH: FIGHTING CRITICAL RACE THEORY – HERE'S WHO'S LEADING CHARGE ADN HOW YOU CAN HELP" -- and a Fox News video featuring Mike Lee warning that Race-Crazy!Libtards!Are!Coming!For!Your!Children! you will find what amounts to a full-on "Wake up white people!!" tirade against the the Left by Mr. Sullivan.

In Mr. Sullivan's telling, Donald Trump has completely disappeared from the discourse.  The racist Tea Party movement that prefigured him?  Gone.  The eight years of Republican obstruction, sedition and overtly racist shit like Birtherism that Trump rode to power? Gone.  The entire modern history of the Republican Party?  Gone.

And while, sure, some Republican stuff may be bad -- 

And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News-hyped campaign are well taken.

-- the real Big Bad is not Fox News or the GOP:

But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: Is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — against something that is right in front of our noses? 

What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of "white supremacy," which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

We all know who the real villains are don't we! 

The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.

 Oops.  Sorry.  My mistake.

That was Andrew Sullivan slagging the Left twenty years ago.

This is Andrew Sullivan slagging the Left two days ago:

We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any nonleft dissent, have had a "social justice reckoning" these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences. 

Sullivan sprinkles in an obligatory slap at his former friend:

The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations in The Atlantic and his subsequent, gut-wrenching memoir, "Between The World And Me." He combined the worldview and vocabulary of CRT with the vivid lived experience of his own biography. He is a beautifully gifted writer, and I am not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to.

A pinch of Reverend Wright for the old school wingnuts:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society...

And then, for dessert, Sullivan serves up the red meat:

Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Color-blindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.

We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown. It nearly lost the Democrats the last election. 

How ironic and hilarious that nothing screams late-stage British imperialism louder than the sight of America's most prominent White, gay, Catholic, Tory, Conservative, Libertarian phrenologist single-mindedly using every tool at his disposal to try to invade and colonize a conversation that threatens his hardwired belief in his own aristocratic superiority.  


Burn The Lifeboats

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

To Mark The 96th Anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial*...

 

 ...the people of the great state of Tennessee have once again chosen to banish the Enlightenment from their state and embrace a medieval lifestyle of ignorance, superstition and disease.

Tennessee abandons vaccine outreach to minors — not just for COVID-19

The Tennessee Department of Health will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach – not just for coronavirus, but all diseases – amid pressure from Republican state lawmakers, according to an internal report and agency emails obtained by the Tennessean. If the health department must issue any information about vaccines, staff are instructed to strip the agency logo off the documents.

The health department will also stop all COVID-19 vaccine events on school property, despite holding at least one such event this month. The decisions to end vaccine outreach and school events come directly from Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey, the internal report states...

Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding.


Burn The Lifeboats


*Yep, the Scopes Trial took place in Tennessee nearly a century ago this month. And Scopes lost.  From Wikipedia:
The Scopes Trial, formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case in July 1925 in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.[1] The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant.

Tuesday, July 13, 2021

From the "So Desperate to Get Back on Fox You Can Smell It" Files: Megyn Kelly

 



Let's start, for reasons which will become clear, with this breaking news from 2016/17 via Wikipedia

On October 22, 2016, AT&T reached a deal to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion. The merger would bring Time Warner's properties under the same umbrella as AT&T's telecommunication holdings, including satellite provider DirecTV. The deal faced criticism for the possibility that AT&T could use Time Warner content as leverage to discriminate against or limit access to the content by competing providers.

On February 15, 2017, Time Warner shareholders approved the merger. On February 28, Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai refused to review the deal, leaving the review to the Department of Justice. On March 15, 2017, the merger was approved by the European Commission.[79] On August 22, 2017, the merger was approved by the Mexican ComisiĂłn Federal de Competencia. On September 5, 2017, the merger was approved by the Chilean FiscalĂ­a Nacional EconĂłmica.     

Yep.  Four years ago, the galaxy brains at telecom colossus AT&T decided to shell out more money than God to buy their way into the streaming media market by buying Time Warner.   

And yet, four years later...(from CNET, March 2021): 

AT&T to refocus on 5G as it unloads WarnerMedia

The telecom giant is shifting gears back to what it probably should have been concentrating on in the first place.

And this dynamic, on a much smaller scale, is the story of Megyn Kelly.  Because, like WarnerMedia, Kelly is a media property, willing cynically to buy and sell herself to the highest bidder based on the equally cynical interests of the media corporations who are willing to bid on that property.

And so, once Fox New's #1 customer made her continued employment at that racist shithole network untenable (Variety, September 2017) -- 

Megyn Kelly Says She Left Fox News Because of Trump

-- NBC swooped in to pick up her contract in what literally everyone except NBC president Andy Lack knew was a godawful idea.  But since NBC/MSNBC are driven by their relentless search --


-- for new ways to coax the Pig People into tuning in, in January of 2017...

NBC’s Hiring of Megyn Kelly Appears to Signal a Shift to the Right

After months of negotiations with a number of major networks, Fox News star Megyn Kelly announced on Tuesday that she is joining NBC News, where she will host a daytime TV show and a weekly feature program, as well as being involved in the network’s political coverage.

Kelly’s contract with Fox News isn’t officially up until July, but she began discussions in October with several broadcasters after a widely-reported tiff with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump boosted her public profile. It’s not clear what NBCUniversal will be paying her, but she was reportedly making $15 million a year at Fox...

And just like the AT&T/WarnerMedia deal, it quickly became obvious that this pricey shotgun marriage was doomed.  Because despite Kelly's patently faked enthusiasm for her new gig and her protestations that she "just wanting to do the news", you can take the blonde wingnut pit viper out of Fox, but you can't  take the Fox out of the blonde wingnut pit viper.  And so, a year and a half after buying Megyn Kelly, NBC let her out of her contract and let her keep the nearly $70M that Andy Lack had pissed away on what, let me repeat, literally everyone except NBC president Andy Lack knew was a terrible idea going in.  From NBC, October 2018:

Megyn Kelly walks away from NBC with the remainder of her $69M deal

The announcement comes months after negotiations over Kelly's contract following her termination for making derogatory racial comments.

Megyn Kelly and NBC News have agreed to terms under which the high-profile TV host will leave the company with the remainder of her $69 million contract, according to a source familiar with the agreement.

The news comes after months of negotiations over parts of Kelly’s long-term contract following her removal in October from the 9 a.m. ET hour of NBC’s “Today.” Her morning show, “Megyn Kelly Today,” was cancelled after the anchor made comments about wearing blackface as part of a Halloween costume debate.

“The parties have resolved their differences, and Megyn Kelly is no longer an employee of NBC,” NBC said in a statement...

Because big media does not give the tiniest shit about our lives, our futures or the survival of our democracy.  Big media is a business, and as The New Yorker wrote in October 2018: 

NBC’s Firing of Megyn Kelly Is as Cynical as Her Hiring Was.

...
“There is no other way to put this, but I condemn [Megyn Kelly's blackface] remarks,” Andy Lack, the chairman of NBC news, said at a staff meeting this week. Lack has reason to cast the Kelly implosion as a moral crisis that he’s eager to fix. Since the revelations of Matt Lauer’s career of impunity at the “Today” show, and of the company’s failure to follow through with Ronan Farrow’s reporting on allegations against Harvey Weinstein, the chairman’s fitness has been cast in serious doubt. At Fox News, Kelly had provided a more stylish iteration of the network’s typically unhinged anti-black programming. Lack’s condemnation of her now hardly obscures the fact that her firing was decided by the same cynical market considerations that led him to hire her in the first place.

/Start  of brief driftglass aside

Just imagine what investing that $70M -- which is sofa change to media corporation the size of NBC -- in actual Liberal media might have done for our politics?  

Hell, just imagine what putting actual Liberals who had been right about the Right all along on the air instead of spamming audiences with an endless procession of Republican Bush Regime Dead Enders  all of whom swear they simultaneously discovered to their shock in 2016 that the Republican Party was full of Republicans, all of whom tell the most amazing lies about why they are not to blame for the state of the modern GOP, and all of whom clearly have not lost one iota of their seething contempt for you and me and everything we believe in.

End of brief driftglass aside/

And so, $69M dollars wealthier for failing spectacularly at her one job and released from her contractual obligation to  pretend she didn't hate every minute she spent working at NBC, Megyn Kelly was free to used her continued media presence to shit on her former colleagues.  Which isn't to say they don't deserve it, but still, classy with a "K" Megyn is (from The Daily Beast, December 2019):

Megyn Kelly Calls Out Former NBC Colleagues in New Interview

The ex-Fox News and NBC host appears to suggest that unlike her, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski are not real “journalists.”

Then, less than a year ago, Kelly decided that the world should not be forced to go without her voice for even one more day, which is how she decided to spend a chunk of her NBC please-go-away money to get into the exciting and extremely profitable world of...podcasting!   From The WSJ from September 2020.

Megyn Kelly Launches Into Podcasting With New Venture 
 
Former TV news star’s Devil May Care Media will begin releasing ‘The Megyn Kelly Show’ at the end of the month

Megyn Kelly is coming back on the air, but this time she’ll be podcasting.

The former TV news commentator and talk-show host’s new Devil May Care Media is slated to release the first episode of “The Megyn Kelly Show” at the end of the month. Ms. Kelly, 49 years old, whose most recent morning show with NBC News ended almost two years ago, is funding the venture herself.

“The No. 1 thing I wanted to do was control my own editorial,” Ms. Kelly said. “To not be doing anyone else’s bidding, not having the pressure of corporate overlords over me, that means one has to be entrepreneurial.”...

 And, of course, continue shitting on her former colleagues. From Forbes, last week:

Megyn Kelly: Working At NBC Wasn’t ‘Intellectually Stimulating’

It turns out even Megyn Kelly was confused by the transformation Megyn Kelly made in her move from Fox News to NBC. In an interview with Business Insider, the former Fox News Channel host said that her high profile jump from Fox to NBC resulted in a job that “wasn’t intellectually stimulating.”

"I had this soaring career at Fox that was great by any measure, but I was miserable at home. It was too stressful, too much time away from my family and my kids, and then I overcorrected at NBC by going too soft," Kelly told Insider...

 All of which, including her nakedly batshit remarks today, is this damaged media property's way of publicly hiking her skirt up high enough to let her former employers at Fox know that if they have the money, she has the time. 


Burn The Lifeboats

Monday, July 12, 2021

It's Brookses All The Way Down


Longtime readers know that from time to time I take a look at what our local Republican rag, The State Journal-Register, is up to because it's such a reliable barometer of what sells down here in Trump country among the paper's largely octogenarian, Conservative subscribership.  

You see, like most local newspapers, SJ-R is hanging on by a thread.  They've lost their competent editors, their professional photographers, their most knowledgeable and longest-serving reporters, their building and, when they sold out to GateHouse, whatever was left of their autonomy.  They're down to a handful of pages a day -- mostly sports, obits and ads -- so hanging onto those remaining octogenarian, Conservative subscribers is a matter of life-and-death for them.  Which is why it's  so very instructive to see what they leave in and what they leave out.

And today, for reasons that I will later reveal with a flourish, I'm going to first talk a little bit about paper's  rules regarding publishing the opinions of ordinary citizens versus publishing the opinions of Guest Columnists.  Ordinary citizens can write what they want (some stuff is "discouraged") under their real name and have a 250 word limit.  Guest columnists must submit "at least 350 words; 550-600 words max." and "should be about relevant and timely topics and should contribute to the local, state or national discourse".  Guest columns must also include a head-shot and a tag line.  

But here is the crucial difference.   Ordinary citizens are limited to one submission every 30 days, with no guarantee that anything of theirs will ever be printed.  And I know for a fact that there are a group of dedicated local wingnuts who submit every month and then immediately start the 30-day countdown clock.  On the other hand, there is no limit to how often a guest columnist can be published, which brings us to SJ-R guest columnist Mr. Scott Reeder, who find his way into the pages of the SJ-R much more frequently than once every 30 days,  and whose tag line reads as follows:

Scott Reeder is a veteran statehouse journalist. He works as a freelance reporter in the Springfield area.

So just some guy, right?  Someone of no particular political or ideological credential, who reported from the statehouse for awhile and now puts his stuff around on a freelance basis.  And who, this week, used his easy access to the pages of the SJ-R to bring to its readers' attention the single gravest problem plaguing America politics today:  The Extremes on Both Sides!!

 And I guarantee you that if you squint your eyes even slightly, you will not be able to distinguish between this column by Mr. Scott Reeder and every single fucking column Mr. David Brooks has written for The New York Times over the nearly 20 years he has been cranking out Both Siderist gruel for the Sulzberger family.

Break out your electron microscope and scan Mr. Reeder's words down to the quantum level and you will not find even a hint that Donald Trump was ever president or that just six months ago Republicans attempted to violently overthrow the  United State government, and came within a hair's breadth of succeeding.  You will find no mention of Newt Gingrich or Jerry Falwell or Fox News or Hate Radio or monsters like Ann Coulter who were (are still?) syndicated in the SJ-R, or Candace Owens who the county GOP paid to come here just last month to whip up rage and open up the wallets of local Republican bigots and imbeciles.

None of that history exists in Mr. Reeder's telling.

Instead he finds refuge in the same, shameful and grossly dishonest Both Siderist panic room that most mainstream media Conservatives hide out in these days, whether they're nationally-known hacks like Mr. David Brooks, or merely local embarrassments like Mr. Scott Reeder.  And so, in Mr. Reeder's telling, it's not a deranged GOP that's the problem.  It's all that darn complaining!

Complaining needs to end, listening needs to begin

This is followed by a short and wildly inaccurate reimaging of why the Senate has become Mitch McConnell's killing room floor.  Because, ya stupid Libtard, it's supposed to be that way, so shaddap.

So, what complaint do we hear expressed continually on social media? That the Senate doesn’t equally represent the American people.

That’s certainly true. But, then again, it never was supposed to.

Then, with all the subtlety of a hyena in a hot tub, comes the inevitable, Brooksian razor in the apple:

Instead of griping about it, we need to ask: Why after 233 years is it an issue now?

The short answer is our political parties have failed us. Diversity of thought has evaporated from both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Ideological litmus tests have become more important than legislative effectiveness among party leaders.

And just like *that* the entire modern history of the GOP -- from the rise of Nixon's Southern Strategy, to Reagan's racist invocation of Welfare Queens to Falwell and Gingrich and Hate Radio and Fox, to the eight year Republican obstructionist primal scream of Birtherism and Death Panels in reaction to Democrats nominating and electing exactly to sort of open-handed, compromise-prone Centrist that goofs like Mr. Reeder pretend to lionize -- all of it vanishes in a cloud of revisionist once-upon-a-times. 

Once upon a time, the world’s greatest deliberative body was full of people like Romney and Manchin...

So instead of an honest accounting of where we are and how we got here, we are left with this:

We have a deadlocked Senate because some leaders in both parties have stopped trying to serve significant portions of the American people.

The problem isn’t how the Senate has been set up for the past 230 years: it’s political elites unwilling to listen to potential constituents whom they disagree with.

So how is it that "veteran statehouse journalist" has such garbage opinions and has been given a safe space at the city's only daily newspaper from whence to spread his garbage opinions?

Well, it turns out that ol' Scott isn't just any veteran statehouse journalist.  He's a veteran of the propaganda arm of the Illinois Policy Institute, your one-stop Illinois hellmouth for all things Wingnut/Libertarian.  The IPI is a model of how massively well-funded, interlocking Conservative groups operating at the state level manage to spend, bulldoze and otherwise worm their tentacles in everything --

-- and Scott Reeder was the guy they hired to build the Illinois News Network and buy a radio network in order to create a reliable a feeder system for pumping Wingnut/Libertarian stories into local newspapers and websites.  

Local newspapers and websites which, because they were slashing their own in-house talent at a breakneck pace to please shareholders and were therefor starved for content, were only too happy to take whatever professionally produced propaganda the Illinois News Network provided.

From the SJ-R in 2015:

Illinois News Network buying Illinois Radio Network

The Illinois News Network, a media arm of the Illinois Policy Institute, is acquiring the Illinois Radio Network, which has reporters in Springfield and Chicago and provides news reports to stations throughout the state, including WTAX-AM in Springfield.

“We are thrilled to have Illinois Radio Network becoming a part of INN,” said John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, in a news release. “Both organizations have a history of promoting transparency and accountability in government. And we look forward to continuing that fine tradition.”

IRN is being acquired from Saga Communications Inc., which will continue to own WTAX and other Capitol Radio Group stations in Springfield.

Mike Lawrence, a longtime Statehouse reporter who became former GOP Gov. Jim Edgar’s press secretary and is retired from being director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, called the sale an “unfortunate development.”

“The Illinois Policy Institute ... is a group that has a very definite ideological agenda, and I would be surprised if it did anything else other than to advance that agenda through its newly acquired operation,” Lawrence said.

And here is where spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a network of interlocking wingnut think tanks, policy shops, lobbying outfits and media outlets pays off.   Because the Right is inherently racist, aggressively paranoid and ruinously destructive, over and over again professional, lifestyle Conservatives like Mr. Reeder find themselves faced with the problem of justifying remaining a professional, lifestyle Conservative in the face of overwhelming evidence that the Right is deranged, toxic monster with a knife pressed to the throat to our democracy -- a deranged, toxic monster which they spent years helping to create.  

And since they are financially, psychologically and emotionally incapable admitting that all they have ever believed has been proven horribly wrong over and over and over again, thanks to that lavishly funded interlocking series of wingnut think tanks, policy shops, lobbying outfits and media outlets, they are all able to find refuge in the crumbling-but-still-formidable Temple of Both Sides Do It with all the other hacks.  Where, using all of their powers and all of their skills and their access to the media, they can wish, wish, wish away  indefensible pasts and drag the local, state and national political conversation away from the fact that the GOP is the problem and back to poisonous drivel like this:

The problem isn’t how the Senate has been set up for the past 230 years: it’s political elites unwilling to listen to potential constituents whom they disagree with.



Burn The Lifeboats

Friday, July 09, 2021

Professional Left Podcast #606

"The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led"  
-- Edgar Allan Poe, writer



Don't forget to visit our website -- http://www.proleftpod.com -- for all those sweet bells and whistles:  there are links to donate to our podcast work at that site, as well as links to our swingin' Zazzle merch store,  our respective blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Kittehs! and much more. Many thanks once again to @theologop for building it all for us!

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Thursday, July 08, 2021

I Know You've All Been Wondering, "Hey, Whatever Happened to..."

...Bill Kristol's dopey son-in-law, Matthew Continetti?"  

Because, Christ on a Chyron, that guy used to be everywhere.

But now that The Weekly Slander Standard is long-dead and his daddy-in-law has been forced to seek shelter at MSNBC's Bush Regime Dead-Ender Reputation Laundromat, whither Continetti, who took  the opposite course: chasing the pro-Trump dollar way down the rabbit hole, but not quite far enough that Fox News or ONAN OANN would give him a seat?

All of which, we have irresponsibly speculated on this blog, must have made for some vivid Thanksgiving table conversation at the Kristol household:

Now on his uppers and dependent on the largess of credulous Liberals (who he still clearly loathes), in his 67th year, Bloody Bill Kristol, friend to presidents and architect of wars, find himself reduced to doing piecework like some drudge in a 19th century garment factory, cranking out one "OMG, the GOP is dead-dead-dead and deserves it!" piece every few days just to keep himself in wine and electricity.

Meanwhile, Kristol's idiot son-in-law. Matthew Continetti finds himself in even worse shape, broke and living in his father-in-law's basement, where he and his increasingly estranged wife bed down each night among moldering copies of The War Over Iraq: Beyond Baghdad and The Project for a New American Century while a giant portrait of the founder of the Kristol Nepotism Dynasty, Irving Kristol, glowers down at him.  

The old man's will decreed that there be at least one such portrait in every room so he could keep a stern eye on his legacy even from beyond this vale of tears, and everywhere Continetti goes, Kristol the Elder's eyes seem to follow him accusingly.  He can almost hear him whispering "Failure!  Failure!" even into his fitful dreams.

Because "failure" is the right and proper word.  

Before Trump and COVID, Continetti's throwaway Conservative rag, The Washington Free Beacon, and his presence in the mainstream media were held aloft by his proximity to his father-in-law's media clout.  But once Bill Kristol was tossed out of his own magazine and forced to crash on Charlie Sykes' couch and dance for Liberal dimes, the value of that clout was drastically reduced.  

Suddenly fewer and fewer people felt obliged to listen to a professional-Palin-apologist wax tragic over the cruel treatment Conservatives suffer at the hands of those devil Liberals (who were now keeping daddy-in-law off the dole) or, really, what the founder of The Washington Free Beacon thought about much of anything at all...

So for a talentless hack who was used to regular turns on Meet the Press but who now finds himself  stranded in the limbo between not being quite Trump-ass-kissy enough to be welcomed onto Maria Bartiromo's wingnut playhouse and not being anti-Trump enough to be invited to laugh at Brian Williams' stale jokes on MSNBC, what's left?  Has Continetti finally gone out and gotten honest work doing something other than flacking for assholes and carping about how awful Democrats are?

Of course not.  

Continetti's main activity these days seems to be penning "Democrats in Disarray" drivel like this (no link to the article because fuck 'em) --

The Veep From ‘Veep’

Kamala Harris can’t fix her office, much less the border

President Joe Biden has a problem, and her name is Kamala Harris. The vice president has become a comic figure in today’s Washington — a politician given to missteps and unforced errors who inspires neither loyalty nor trust within her inner circle. She might have been Biden’s safest pick for running mate. But now she’s a liability for both the president and the Democratic Party...

-- for the godawful National Review and then immediately cross-posting the same article at the godforsaken Washington Free Beacon.

Remember, this is by the same mope whose entrĂ©e into the national media was a via 240 pages of wingnut welfare schlock entitled "The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star" -- published by Penguin's in-house Conservative imprint, Sentinel HC, championing the "charm, ambition, natural political talent, and passion for conservative values" of the Scintilla from Wasilla.  

So you can stop worrying about Matthew Continetti.  Between his family connections, his resident fellowship at the odious American Enterprise Institute and his regular gig cranking out instantly forgettable Conservatives spackle for America's most respected journal of white supremacy, he'll be fine.   Because the wingnut welfare trough is plenty big enough to afford to keep a deep bench of even the dullest, third-tier Conservative hacks on tap indefinitely.


Burn The Lifeboats

Wednesday, July 07, 2021

Memes Like Old Times

The Donald Trump Empty Podium Show, MSNBC, February 2016.

The Donald Trump Empty Podium Show, Fox News, July 2021.

A few things have changed.

MSNBC seems to have at least temporarily rid itself of the habit of rushing to cover Trump every time he opens his bibble spigot.  And this time around, Trump has tricked out the stage with pathetic, faux-White House props.  

But it's still the same, lumbering slab of orange derangement making everyone wait around until he decided to show up and start saying crazy shit to get attention.  

And still getting it.


Burn The Lifeboats

David Brooks and the Suborbital Right

Weekly Standard cover, October 2001 From Space.Com Suborbital flight, in contrast [to orbital flight], requires much lower ...