Professional Left Podcast Episode 958: MAGA Flip Flops On 'Forever Wars For Oil'

"War is a racket." --  Smedley D. Butler, retired United States Marine Corps major general and two-time Medal of Honor recipient

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The Piece President

Burn The Lifeboats

All The World's a MAGA Stage...

And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man 

in his time 

plays 

many

 

parts...

(Hat tip to derek guy for aggregating these.)

As I may have mentioned once or twice or several hundreds time before, they are all reprogrammable meatbags.   No point debating them or arguing with them or engaging with them for any reason.  

In fact, this was me in May of 2005.  From a post entitled "The Black Hole where the press used to be".  

For those of you doing the math at home, that was going on 26 21years ago,

And page-by-page it followed the same tired You-Must-Be-Shitting-Me Bush nomination playbook. Specifically, a lavish and mindless defense mounted by the infinitely reprogrammable Golem of the Religious Right: that Reliable Fucktard Militia, trained to hold themselves ferociously blind to facts of any kind – no matter how staggering -- that might conflict with the pronouncements of Dear Leader. Always painting anyone standing in their Shining Path as Christ-hating traitors at 100,000 decibels.

And as long as we've taken a swerve down memory lane, this is me from November of 2005:

These reprogrammable pinheads get their “facts” from Limbaugh, Hannity and Coulter…and fall apart like Santorum when asked to name Just One of these fiendish Liberal Overlords, and point to Just One of their “lies”. Where is the Liberal Fox News? Where is the Progressive CNN? The Lefty Hate Radio to balance out twenty years of Rightwing AM lies?

And to any student of modern history, doesn't this all sound frighteningly familiar?

The Christopaths believe we are living in the End Times, under siege on all sides by the forces of Darkness, and the Republican Party is the anointed agent of The Lord.

The bigots believe they are at war. That the Negroes and the Jews are in league with the Commie Liberals to steal their jobs and their country. That their glorious Jim Crow Nation can rise once again, and the Republican Party is the place where that Segregationist Reformation can begin.

The oligarchs laugh and laugh and fund the whole filthy mess so they can loot the Earth unmolested.

There is considerable overlap between these factions, but each of them have each been steeping in their own wholly delusional and poisonous mythology for so long that in a very real sense they are not capable to recognizing reality.

Even when reality comes home in body bags.

The burning Right Wing lust for Fascism – for a White Christian Military Strongman who will brutally enforce Fundamentalist ideals of Order and Decency by any means necessary -- has made more inroads, faster, under George Bush than I ever thought would happen in my lifetime and, no, it hasn’t arrived with jackboots and swastikas. It never will. As Huey Long famously said, "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag."

It will come swaggering across the deck of an aircraft carrier in a flight suit, looking straight into the cameras, and lying to the American Public.

But none of it is possible without the Moderates. Those I referred to as our own version of the Good German. Men and women who aid and abet and go along with it all because they want their fucking tax cuts and, in the end, they’d rather Rule in Hell than Serve in Heaven...

Never, ever let a Never Trumper lie to you that the base of their party went spontaneously fascist five minutes ago and that no one could have predicted it. 

Burn The Lifeboats

MAGA is a Genre

You want to know why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are?

Well, because I like you, I'll tell you.  And I do this in the full knowledge that none of this secret intel will leak to the savvy people because the savvy people do not read Liberal blogs.

Ready?

Ok...but first we have do a thing.  What the kids call a side-quest.  

You love Westerns, right?  Anyway, I do, so there we are. 

So, Westerns.  What defines a Western?  Well, even if you're not a professional deconstructor of films, if you watch enough Westerns from every era, you can see clear themes and commonalities, some of which remain fairly constant across time, and others which change and morph into something else entirely.  

For example, in early Westerns, the heroes and villains were mostly two-dimensional.  Often literally White Hats versus Black Hats.  Or White Hats versus The Savages.  But over time this changes.  For example, John Ford's landmark 1939 Western Stagecoach (The Canterbury Tales with Stetsons) is all about inverting social hierarchies, with John Wayne's Ringo Kid and Claire Trevor's Dallas characters -- the Outlaw and the Prostitute -- emerging as the heroes of the tale.

30 years later, in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, the recognizable tropes of the Western were mostly still there -- heroes, villains, hats, horses, guns, saloons, etc. -- but their meanings had all been scrambled.    The villain was no longer the Savages or the Black Hats, it was the crippled railroad baron.  The Black Hat gunslinger was now reduced to the status of a hireling: the henchman of capitalism.  

To make the point absolutely clear -- that this was about the closing of the frontier and the end of the traditional Western -- Leone hired iconic American good guy actor Henry Fonda to play Frank, the murderous, amoral tool of capitalism.   

And sticking with Once Upon a Time in the West for just one more minute, the opening scene does what all great opening scenes do: it sets the tone for the rest of the tale.   In Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, the entire story is about a train that's due to arrive at...when?  When?  Don't go simple on me now, it's the title of the movie.  Four bad men -- Frank Miller and his backup singers -- are due to arrive in town at noon and they are out for revenge.  Everyone in town knows it,  and as the fateful hour approaches (the director keeps the audience apprised of the time by placing clocks in nearly every scene) the townspeople slowly desert their sheriff, leaving him to face the four bad men all alone.

Then, at last, the clocks strike twelve.

Once Upon a Time in the West completely inverts this.  Instead of an arrival by train being the event towards which all plot lines are moving, Once Upon a Time in the West starts with an arrival by train.

Instead of four bad men getting off the train and marching into town to hunt down the hero, three bad men are waiting at the train for the hero to arrive.  

To drive home the point that this movie was to be the end of the Western, Leone originally wanted the stars of his Dollars Trilogy --  Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach -- to play the three gunmen.  But they declined, so Leone cast Woody Strode, Jack Elam, and Al Mulock instead.

At this point I was going to go on a long thing about how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, but this isn't a movie review post, and if you didn't already know how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, well, I just feel sorry for you is all.

Obviously Once Upon a Time in the West wasn't the end of the Western genre, because the archetypes the genre developed are too sturdy and too firmly rooted in human nature to disappear.  And so, every year or two, someone comes along to mix and match the same elements in different way.  In Silverado you find a classic Western done very well, even ending in a gunfight in the street with the church behind our hero.  In Lonesome Dove, a sweeping epic.   In Quigley Down Under you get the Western in Australia.  In No Country For Old Men, you get the Western in the West Texas of 1980 because the Coen brothers love Westerns.

Is Unforgiven a Western?  Obviously.  But is Firefly a Western?  You bet.  It's whatchacall a "neo-Western", but c'mon.  

Is Justified?  Damn right it is.  

So what is all of this to do with Republicans and their MAGA headgear?

Well, since you asked, getting back to explaining why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are... don't go simple on me now, because it's the title of this post.   

MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a genre.  MAGA is a vibe.  

Which is why, when the savvy crowd sees Republican voters appear to casually and completely reverse what they swore were their bedrock beliefs (and then do it again... and again) the savvy crowd are flummoxed.   They have no theory to fit the facts, because they had always taken as gospel that what Republican mopes say they believe on any given day was something akin the hammer throw at a track and field event: momentum is built up, then released, and the hammer follows a straight tangent line from the point of that release.

But Republican voters do not behave that way.  At all.  Because the policies they'll swear by on a Monday because Sean Hannity said so... and then drop like first period French on Wednesday because Sean Hannity said so...are just props.   Just plot devices.  

This is why MAGA mopes not only don't give a shit that Trump lies constantly, they're thrilled by it.  Since, in the MAGA genre, everything is treated as a plot device that either advances the MAGA narrative, or threatens it, who cares whether an individual story element is true or not?

Now for a quick bit of genre hopping.  

You love Film Noir, right?  Well anyway, I do, so here we are again. When Howard Hawks was filming The Big Sleep, his writing team couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor.  So Hawks fired off a telegram to the author of the original novel, Raymond Chandler, asking him to clarify.  Here was their exchange.

Hawks:  "Who killed the chauffeur?" 

Chandler: "Dammit, I don't know either."

Even though the murder of Owen Taylor is central to the plot, Chandler didn't know or care who killed him because that wasn't the point of the novel. The Big Sleep is about atmosphere and characterization, not nailing down every detail, and since it didn't really matter who offed the chauffeur, Chandler didn't bother with it.  

From the MAGA perspective, asking whether or not this is true...

... or this is true ...

Trump repeats false claims that children are undergoing transgender surgery during the school day

Trump’s remarks escalated conservatives’ claims that educators are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender.

...or this is true ...

Trump:  “It’s a tremendous difference... We’re going to get the drug prices down… Not 30 or 40 percent… No, we’re going to get them down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent — numbers that are not even thought to be achievable… and it will be, you know, serious. It will be numbers that nobody can even imagine.”

... or the 10,000 other lies Trump has spewed are true is irrelevant.

As irrelevant as who killed Owen Taylor.   

Because all those lies are just plot devices designed to advance the MAGA narrative.  

Ergo understanding which way the MAGA mob will jump next is not (and never had been) a matter of sifting through the mountain of self-contradicting bullshit that constitutes MAGA dogma.   This is what the savvy crowd always gets wrong.  

Understanding the wild oscillations of MAGA dogma only makes sense when you understand the Republicans mythos being served by those lies: a mythos that long pre-dates the rise of Trump. 

And it's really pretty simple.  As simple as the earliest Westerns.  Their world is a world of Black Hats and White Hats.  They -- white Conservative Christian nationalists and their fellow travelers-- are the White Hats and pretty much everyone else are the Black Hats.  

They're the real Americas.  They are "righteous" in the original meaning of that word: just, upright, and in accord with divine law.  And since, to MAGA, this is all self-evident -- that they and only they are properly aligned with God's moral order -- then it follows that whatever they feel to be true and good must be true and good.

Instead of "Cogito ergo sum" -- "I think therefore I am" -- the MAGA way is (pardon the rough Latin translation) "Sentio ergo est" -- "I feel therefore it is".  

It's a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking, where faith doesn't merely beat facts all day long, but facts that conflict with the One True Faith are the darkest heresy.  Something to be rooted out and destroyed. 

For decades Conservative media and Republican politicians have been making fortunes and winning elections reinforcing this mythos by feeding the base an endless supply of Black Hats to hate and vote against.  Liberals.  Mouthy women.  Brown people who don't know their place.  Urbanites.  The gays.  Immigrants.  Unions.  Trans people.  Pointy-headed intellectuals.  Government employees.  Hollywood.  "Rootless cosmopolitans".  Socialists.  You know the drill.  

And once the base came to accept as axiomatic that is was perpetually under siege by the Black Hats, everything became existential crisis.  Deficits were an existential crisis...then they weren't...then they were again...then they weren't again.  Every Democratic president was somehow illegitimate and also  simultaneously a feckless weakling, a jackbooted tyrant and the Worst President in History.  

Everything was a battle in a forever war for the survival of real America where the salvation of the nation was always hanging by a thread.   And gradually, the fascist "blood and soil" language that has been thrown around on Hate Radio since the 1980s -- constantly framing the press as the "enemy of the people", slandering any opposition as deranged parasites, speaking of the nation as something that needed cleansing and purification -- filtered up from the base, where it was the common tongue, and into Conservative teevee, Republican political ads, Conservative think tanks and publications and Republican politicians.  

And in that environment, what does it matter if what the Dear Leader says is true or not?  What does it matter if what fascist state media says is true or not?  Who cares if slander about eating the pets is racist bullshit?  Who cares if trans people are no threat to anyone?  The only thing that matters is the utility of the words coming out of the Dear Leader's mouth. And since us Black Hats are so dangerous -- "the face of pure evil" (Liz Cheney, 2019) -- any and all weapons and tactics are permitted.  

Which is why we can carefully pack up all our facts -- our mountains of irrefutable facts stretching back decades --  and lay them aside for another day, or for when we talk among ourselves.  Conservative media and Republican politicians worked very hard for many decades engineering a voting base for whom facts are irrelevant and anyone who tells them anything they don't want to hear is dismissed as treason and Fake News.  This how Conservative media and Republican politicians paved a road for Donald Trump to win the White House.

Did lies about Obama's birth certificate feel true to the racist Republican base?  Did lies about Somalis eating people's pets feel true to those same bigots 15 years later?  Did lies about cafeteria castrations feed the MAGA moron's hysteria about trans people?  Does the torrent of lies that Trump vomits out on a daily basis tickle MAGA's ganglia and reinforce their myths about apocalyptic struggle, heroism and destiny?  

Yes.  And in the end, to them, that's all that matters.  

Because MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a vibe.  MAGA is a genre in which it's just Black Hats versus White Hats, all day long.

And all those lies are the necessary story elements that move the plot along.  

I Am The Liberal Media

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

Professional Left Podcast Episode 957: Happy New Year

"We twa hae paidl’d in the burn, 

Frae morning sun till dine; 

But seas between us braid hae roar’d 

Sin’ auld lang syne." --  Robert Burns

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Just a Stop-The-Steal Town Girl On a Saturday Night

 

..She has danced into the danger zone
When the dancer becomes the dance

It can cut you like a knife, if the gift becomes the fire
On a wire between will and what will be

She's a maniac, maniac on the floor
And she's dancing like she's never danced before...

And being the #1 MAGA maniac on the House floor for five years has been a very profitable enterprise for Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose net worth went from a pre-Congressional total of around $700k to a soon-to-be-post-Congressional total of between $22.5 million and $25 million.  

But now Madge has seen the edge of the mighty cataract over which her lunatic movement is about to plunge.  And with the low, animal cunning that brought her to the House in the first place, she has chosen to beat the rush and cut and run while the cuttin' and runnin' is good.

First, she selected a venerable and proven blueprint of "How To Build a Political Lifeboat".

Then CNN provided the lumber.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Gushes Over ‘Courageous Politician’ Marjorie Taylor Greene

Then The View helped her assemble all the structural elements.

Then 60 Minutes helped her plank the hull.

Also, in case you missed it, WSB-TV (Atlanta) assisted with installing the seats, oarlocks, and whatnot.

And just this very morning, The New York Fucking Times lent a hand by waterproofing the whole thing for her.  Then they let her christen it by giving her control of the headline.

‘I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump

This is a very long and mostly flattering profile that is a complete waste of your time.  Some stuff you already know.  Some stuff that's new.  But all of it lashed together by the same excuses floated by every Never Trumper since Day One of the Trump era.  Charlie Sykes, Tom Nichols, Adam Kinzinger, Bill Kristol, David Brooks, Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson...and on and on and on, including every Republican who has had their career rehabilitated by the MSNBC Reputation Laundromat. 

I didn't know.  I wasn't aware.  No one could have predicted.  I was misled.  And on and on.

From the Times' column:

...it began to dawn on her that when it came to the president

 ...realized that she had suddenly lost all appetite for vengeance

But perhaps even to her own surprise, Greene was not that person any longer. “Everyone’s like, ‘She’s changed,’” Greene said to me. “I haven’t changed my views. But I’ve matured. I’ve developed depth.” 

...she spoke longingly of the day when she could walk unnoticed into a restaurant or a grocery store.

I was just so naive.

Which, for some reason, puts me in mind of this from Rick in Casablanca:

Yes, it's very pretty. I heard a story once - as a matter of fact, I've heard a lot of stories in my time. They went along with the sound of a tinny piano playing in the parlor downstairs. "Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid," it always began.

Thus, with the same predictability as the rising of the sun, the legacy media has now furnished Madge with her very own lifeboat.

So lets wrap this thing up with a bit from something I wrote a few years ago, "Boom Times At The Absolution Factory Redux":

...Also the title of Sykes' Bulwark podcast today is:

Will Saletan: Welcome to the Resistance, Bill Barr

And so we arrive at the place where I warned we would end up and I never wanted to be.  Smack in the middle of Monty Python's The Visitors sketch.

First, Never Trumper Arthur Name ("Name by name but not by nature") bulldozes his way into the party and begins rearranging things to his liking.

Then the doorbell rings and...

Arthur Name: I'll get it.  That'll be friends of mine  I took the liberty of inviting them along.

And hey look!  It's Chris Christie!  And right behind him, Bill Barr!  

And so on, and so on, and so on.

And before you know it, we Democrats aren't calling the shots anymore.  In fact, we've become  unwelcome guests in our own fucking home because this is now the "Never Again Trump" Republican Reputation Rehabilitation and Normalization Project.

And if you Liberals have a problem with that, well then go ahead and scribble about it on your silly little blogs.  

There are still blogs, right?  

Because now that the American political media has been completely colonized by a handful of Never Trumpers, well golly kid, there doesn't seem to be any room left at the Adult's Table for whiny Liberal dissenters like you.

Or I suppose you could plead your case directly to those Never Trumpers who have colonized the media.  You could ask them why the Liberals who have actually been right about the Right all along -- who were right long before Bill Kristol told us it was OK -- have no place in the Never Trumper's own "We Told You So" Hall of Heroes.

Go ahead and ask them, and then watch what happens:

Burn The Lifeboats

I Have Detailed Files: Another David Brooks Adventure.

"As much as we lament the horror of what's happened over the last year, it's much more horrible than I anticipated, for people like me, we have to ask ourselves, what do we do to bring this about?" says David Brooks. https://to.pbs.org/3L9sXu2

[image or embed]

— PBS News (@pbsnews.org) December 26, 2025 at 9:30 PM

40 years too late Brooks is suddenly interested in asking, "What did people like me do to bring this about?"  

And since the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere, blogger like me have spilled millions of pixels answering this question in exhaustive detail.

Here's a short answer:

Which is why Liberal bloggers are still media pariahs, and we always will be, while Never Trumpers -- who are willing to spin comforting fairy tales and alibis for revered legacy media hacks like Brooks -- have quickly become successful and profitable legacy media darlings.  

I Am Liberal Media