Yeeeee Haaaaw!

I Am The Liberal Media.

...But the Democrats.

Every pundit, every time.

I Am The Liberal Media.

Professional Left Podcast Episode 982: Failure To Launch

"I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it" -- Arthur C. Clarke

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Hey, Hey, JDV! How Many Dead for Fox TV?

"He died in the suffocating embrace of Lyndon Johnson.” -- How historians later described Hubert Humphrey -- trapped by his fealty to Johnson and unable to break free from a war that was sinking them both.

Given that, this might be the savviest act of evil Iranian regime genius in Trump's Iran Debacle so far.  From The Daily Beast:

Iran Gives Trump an Ultimatum on JD Vance

Iranian officials are refusing to talk to Trump’s top negotiators.

Iran said it is done dealing with the two emissaries President Donald Trump has tasked with leading negotiations in the Middle East.

The country, which Trump began striking over three weeks ago, is not keen on any more attempts at negotiations with Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, or Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both of whom were leading the nuclear negotiations with Iran before the war.

Iran now says it will only engage in negotiations with Vice President JD Vance, according to a report in The Guardian...

Yes, Witkoff and Kushner are the worst possible humans to trust with any serious negotiating about anything, but that aside, Vance's utter hollowness and ravenous ambition are not exactly state secrets, and so far he's been as AWOL from this catastrophe as a Trump vice-president can be.  But come the day he is forced to become the public face of Trump's doomed war for oil, it won't matter how much eyeliner he smears on or how purdy he talks to the MAGA mouth-breathers.

In 1968, the #1 reason that made Humphrey non-viable was the fact that he was Lyndon Johnson's vice president.  It didn't matter where he'd stood on Vietnam before that, and it didn't matter how good a liberal he was on any other issue. In the end the only thing that mattered was that the Democratic Party was deeply divided and he was the war criminal's veep.

Which was a tragedy, the fallout from which we are still living with today.   

But as a lesson of history, it's impossible not to note that requiring Vance to publicly lash himself to the plummeting albatross of Trump's doomed war for oil may not just "Humphrey" his chances in 2028, but why not dream bigger than that?  Pretty soon MAGA zombies are gonna be starving for scapegoats, and Vance is tailor-made for the role.  With a little luck, this could bury Vance's ambitions under the rubble of Trump's corruption, failures and treason for the rest of his life.

I Am The Liberal Media.

The Strait of Arrakis

"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." -- Paul Muad'Dib, Dune, 1965

You Dune fans out there have probably noticed that the "power to destroy a thing" threat which Iran -- a nation governed by religious fanatics -- has now credibly leveled against the United States and Israel over the Strait of Hormuz is exactly the same threat that Paul Muad'Dib leveled at the rest of the Empire in Dune.  If you fuck with us, we will destroy this thing.   We will strangle it and then your empire will fall because your whole empire -- all trade, all medicine, all mobility -- depends on the product of this ancient place that you've been exploiting and abusing and messing with for generations.  

So welcome to the early premiere of Dune, III, but not in theaters in December.  This version of Dune is coming to our homes, our highway, our grocery stores, our schools, and our medical facilities right now courtesy of  Donald Trump, who, on a whim, decided to fuck with one of the places on this Earth that he should have left the fuck alone.

So, how did we get here?

Well, there are really two and only two theories of the case about the rise of Donald Trump.

First is that Trump swept in overnight as if by magic.  He just showed up, did some hoodoo and bamboozled 70 million United States citizens into voting for him.  Boom! Just like *that* he hoodwinked everybody.  First, handily sweeping aside all 723 of his Republican opponents in 2016  primaries, locking up the nomination early, and then proceeding on to win the general election due to the electoral college being massively tilted in favor of small states full of enough bigots and imbeciles to do the job.  

That's theory #1.

Theory #2 goes like this.

The rise of a monster like Trump was a long time coming down a long, and terrible road along which the Republican party has been marching for a generation.  Maybe two generations.  Either way, a very long time.   And eventually all the kindling, and all the oily rags, and all the barrels of toxic hate and bigotry and arrogant ignorance --  all the highly volatile poisons the GOP had been tinkering and toying with for decades -- finally came back to bite 'em.  

They had been using that poisonous alloy of focused hatred and stupidity and derangement to smite Democrats and win elections, and using the same logic that tobacco companies had used for decades: of course, we know the product we're selling is dangerous, highly addictive, and often lethal, but it's also incredibly profitable.   So we're going to go right on selling it because there is no way in this Land of the Free, that we're ever going to have to pay a price for how we make our money.      

And right down the line, the craftiest minds at every high-brow Conservative media platform and the savviest political operatives in the GOP -- even with examples like Golem, and Frankenstein, and The Sorcerers Apprentice, and all of human history right at their fingertips -- showed themselves to be utterly incapable of imagining that the doomsday machine they had built out of rage, racism and belligerent ignorance might one day be turned against them.  

For the record, this is what I wrote 36 hours after Donald Trump oozed down the Golden Escalator back in June of 2015:

In case you missed it, Squint and the Meat Puppet handed the MSNBC camera over to Donald Trump this morning for a relaxing, 30-minute handjob. While Trump rambled lazily from one pinnacle of bullshit and narcissism to the next, Morning Joe crack-house regulars Mark Halperin (Glenn Beck's favorite mainstream media enabler) and the pickled remains of Mike Barnacle looked on, smirking and giggling. All that it lacked to complete the creepy, peep-show effect were trench-coats and bad lighting.

But of course, the story of the Trump candidacy has very little to do with Donald Trump. 

As I wrote a few years ago, the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.  

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

They are the GOP's premium leads, but however abundant and renewable a resource the Conservative meatheads may be, come Presidential election time, there is never enough room at the trough for every rapacious Republican hog.  This is why every few years we have these Little Red State Fundy moments; that delicate time when the knives come out and the various species of Conservative con men start cutting each other's balls over who gets to pluck the wingnut pigeons...

...while trying desperately not to call attention to the fact that their entire political system depends on pandering to the army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps which the GOP has worked so long and hard to cultivate.

Fortunately for the Right, now that the "respectable" media has as much to lose by cracking out of turn as Hate Radio and Fox News, we can all look forward to another campaign season of the American mainstream media looking stoically the other way.

Seems like theory #2 actually fits the facts like a bespoke Savile Row suit, while theory #1 looks more and more like a tiny, tattered fig leaf trying to cover a mountain of shame, complicity and bad faith.  

So a sensible person might well ask themselves, "Why the hell do the Never Trumpers and the legacy media still cling to theory #1 like a drunk clinging to an empty jug?"

And I might well answer that person, "You know, that's a helluva good question.  The next time you're within shouting distance, why don't you ask them, because they ain't taking my calls."

I Am The Liberal Media.

Professional Left Podcast Episode 981: Build Back Better

"A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men cannot get out." -- Saul Bellow

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Today My Blog Turns 21

So charge your glasses and raise a toast to a better future.

As always, the tip jar and comment section are open.

Let Burning Lifeboats Light the Way to a Better Tomorrow

The Wheels on the Bus Go Thump-Thump-Thump...

Behold as Everyman Joe Rogan cuts the MAGA meatheads loose because they're dorks and weirdos and idiots.

Sure sounds a lot like "deplorables" to me.

Joe Rogan says that he wants nothing to do with MAGA because it’s become a movement of dorks and weirdos… which is ridiculous, because it’s always been a movement of dorks and weirdos and he was just pretending otherwise to get cheap engagement in 2024. pic.twitter.com/9wRchBX6gJ

— Mike Nellis (@MikeNellis) March 27, 2026

At the rate MAGA grifters and Republican officeholders are scrambling to throw each other under the bus, I'm sorely tempted to add a weekly "Under The Bus With Driftglass and Bluegal" to the Professional Left's portfolio of offerings.  We'd camp out down there above the axels and document the losers who are getting got and who got 'em.

Maybe, as they whiz past and into oblivion, we hand them each a little card that says "You had it coming."

Because brother, they all have it coming.  

Burn The Lifeboats