Today In Lifeboat News: Jim Durkin.

From the Chicago Tribune today:

Former Illinois House GOP leader Jim Durkin endorses Democrat JB Pritzker over Republican Darren Bailey

Wowsers.  Not an Onion headline.  This actually happened. But if you're from here, the more you know, the less surprising it is.  

The Trib continues:

Accentuating the schisms that have helped make Republicans the superminority political party in Illinois, former Illinois House GOP leader Jim Durkin said he is endorsing Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker for a third term over Republican nominee Darren Bailey in the Nov. 3 general election.

“His campaign is going nowhere, and he’s on a foolish escapade,” Durkin said of Bailey, adding that the Republican governor nominee has “a delusional egomaniacal view of the world.”

Durkin’s refusal to support Bailey’s second consecutive bid against Pritzker is not surprising. But his public endorsement of the Democrat, in a video the governor’s campaign is scheduled to release Monday, marks a major break for Durkin, who still considers himself a Republican.

“I’ve worked with Pritzker, and I don’t agree with JB on a lot of things. But the fact is, he and I have worked together,” Durkin said. He cited Pritzker’s investment in infrastructure, the credit upgrades to steady the state’s finances and the governor’s support for “commonsense gun reforms.”

“I look at something that he (Pritzker) has done and this is nothing that Darren Bailey could ever, in his wildest dreams, if he was governor, would he ever be able to accomplish,” Durkin said. “We’ve got to shed Darren Bailey from the party and, I’m speaking for myself, but I am not going to throw away or waste a vote for governor this November, and that’s why I’m voting for JB Pritzker.”

For the record, Durkin is not some relic from the Before Time, forgotten by history.  

He was the Minority Leader of the Illinois House of Representatives from 2013 to 2023.  He was appointed to the Illinois House of Representatives on January 6, 1995, and served until 2002.  In 2006, he was appointed to the Illinois Senate to replace Judy Baar Topinka.  In 2000 he was state chairman for John McCain's presidential campaign in Illinois, and in 2007 he was Illinois co-chair and national legislative co-chair for McCain's second presidential campaign.  

After Illinois Republicans got stomped (again) in 2022, Durkin announced he would not be running for re-election. 

And then...

From the Chicago Sun-Times, November 11, 2022:

Man in the middle: Departing state House GOP Leader Durkin says Trump so ‘harmful’ to nation that RINO tag is ‘badge of honor’

In a no-holds barred interview with the Sun-Times — the 13th interview he gave on Thursday — Durkin rated the state’s last five governors, bashed former President Donald Trump and railed on the current climate of the state’s Republican Party.

He’s part of a vanishing breed in Illinois — a moderate Republican more interested in reaching across the aisle than giving the ruling Democrats the back of his hand.

But Western Springs Republican Jim Durkin is relinquishing his role as House minority leader, a largely thankless job as his party moved further to the right and the state moved further to the left.

And he said being called a RINO is a “badge of honor.”

That stands for “Republican in name only,” a taunt conservatives spit at moderates — and an idea that Durkin argues is killing his party.

All in all, I don't have much sympathy for Mr. Durkin, but I don't have a lot of enmity for him either.  

On the one hand, it looks like he's trying to make amends.  

On the other hand, not endorsing a doomed tomato can like Bailey, and endorsing Pritzker, who is going to beat Bailey like the proverbial rented mule, is a very low-risk investment in future political/media viability for a former Republican who sees no place for himself in the current Illinois GOP.

On the other hand, he did bail on his party and correctly identify the rot within it that starts at the very top.  And so far he hasn't tried to tell Democrats how to run our party, or insist that the only path forward is to move further to the right.

On the other hand, he waited until it looked like Trump was safely headed for the ash heap of history before discovering his inner dissident, and the Illinois Republican Party began losing its mind long before that.

Exhibit A, from The Illinois Times,  August 12, 2004:

Keyes to victory?

The Illinois Republican Party goes to extremes to find a Senate candidate

The new Illinois Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, Maryland activist Alan Keyes, may be most famous for his most liberal act: jumping into a mosh pit while Rage Against the Machine performed, body-surfing the crowd, and exchanging body slams with a spiky-haired teen as a means of getting filmmaker Michael Moore’s endorsement for president in 2000. As Moore put it, “We knew Alan Keyes was insane. We just didn’t know how insane until that moment.”

“Insane” is an adjective that voters may be hearing a lot in association with Keyes before Nov. 2. The reason: The opinionated candidate has a long record of far-right statements that have been largely overlooked. In the 1996 and 2000 Republican presidential contests, no candidate saw Keyes as a threat or wanted to risk criticizing an African American. Since then, Keyes has been a little-noticed commentator favored by the extreme right wing. That will soon change, and many of Keyes’ comments may shock the Republican moderates who grudgingly accepted him as their candidate.

In 2002, Keyes argued that the abortion issue should determine the outcome of every election. “This issue alone, which I believe dominates our moral decline as a people, should decide this and every election cycle,” he said. During a campaign appearance in Bedford, N.H., in 2000, Keyes asked a class of fifth-graders, most of whom were 10 years old, “If I were to lose my mind right now and pick one of you up and dash your head against the floor and kill you, would that be right?” He then went on to tell the children that some courts and politicians think it’s OK to murder 6-month-old children...

And with that, I'm all out of hands.  

Burn The Lifeboats

The Great MAGA Trucker Strike That Never Was

I got my COVID booster (my "Fauci Ouchy", as certain infantile public hand-jobbing Republican Congress critters referred to it) on Wednesday at the pharmacy department of a local grocery store (which I will never get used to), and other than my arm being a little sore the next day, I remain alive and unzombified.  

Which reminded me...

One occupational hazard of living inside the Right Wing Cinematic Universe is that, after a while, you start to believe the mob's hooting is power. That if enough people cheer loudly enough on Facebook, reality itself is obligated to bend the knee.  That if Ben Shapiro tweets it, if Newsmax panels it, if fifty YouTube patriots thumbnail it in red letters next to a picture of a screaming eagle, then the thing has already happened. Reality's only remaining job is to catch up.

Which brings us to the Great October 1st Trucker Strike of 2026. Remember that? Of course you don't. Nobody does. It was supposed to be huge.  50,000 truckers?  A 100,000 truckers?  A million?  

It was supposed to be something like the 1967 haulers strike:

7-Week Strike by Steel Haulers Spreads Disruption in Industry

Or, at the very least, the 1973 wildcat trucker strike protesting the OPEC oil crisis:

When Truckers Shut Down America to Protest Oil Prices—and Became Folk Heroes

The strike started when one driver, mad as hell about the OPEC oil crisis, turned off his engine and got on his CB radio.

You know, the nation's supply chains grinding to a halt. Empty shelves. Panic buying. And truckers in their MURRICA FIRST regalia being carried on the shoulders of a grateful nation.  The usual End Times porn led by faux folk heroes that has become the stock-in-trade of the right-wing media ecosystem. Day after day, the algorithm fed its addicts a steady diet of warnings and promises. This was going to show them. This was going to bring the country to its knees and prove who really keeps America running.

And then October 1 arrived.

And nothing happened.

Compare that to the People's Convoy of 2022. It was ridiculous, built on right-wing hysteria and nonsense. It was a rolling cosplay convention for people who desperately wanted to imagine themselves as the French Resistance while being interviewed by Fox News from the cab of a Peterbilt. But credit where it's due: they did understand politics as theater. They understood that television needs pictures, and that MAGA outrage always needs a slogan and a scapegoat. 

So they identified their villain, planned their route, and stuck to their script. They had Republican politicians embracing them and a conservative media machine eager to turn every traffic jam into the Second Coming of Lexington and Concord.

Most importantly, they knew who they were supposedly fighting. They were against vaccine mandates, mask mandates, government overreach, Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, George Soros, the World Economic Forum, and whatever else was on the grievance menu that week. The list was incoherent, but it was a list -- it told the cameras where to point, and the audience who to boo.

But the October strike promoters couldn't answer one very simple question:  Who exactly are you striking against?

Seriously. Who?

The President? Congress? Freight brokers? Oil companies? OPEC? Physics? Inflation? The invisible hand of the market that conservatives used to dearly, dearly love? A strike is a show of numerical strength designed to create leverage.  To exert pressure on somebody or some institution capable of granting concessions.   But the rationale for this stupid idea always dissolved into a cloud of hashtags and vibes, and YouTube monologues. The "movement" turned out to be nothing more than a tantrum being thrown by people who believed that if they yelled loud enough about how mad they were, somewhere, someone would do something.  

Because in this case, the only viable villain behind the trucker's suffering was...the Dear Leader.  And if the villain is the Dear Leader, and everyone knows it, but no one dares say it, well, that seems...problematic.   

The real lesson isn't about trucking. It's about the difference between attention and power.  Modern conservatism has become almost entirely dependent on fear-mongering as a substitute for organizing. A movement that once boasted about discipline and institutions now runs on engagement metrics, where every crisis is marketed like a summer blockbuster.  

The 2022 convoy attracted attention because it was designed to attract attention. It was a media event disguised as a political movement. The October 2026 strike failed to even clear that very low bar.  Its organizers appeared to believe that if enough influencers posted enough videos predicting a shutdown, the shutdown would simply materialize on schedule.

But what they got was a wet fart in a kiddie pool. Freight continued rolling along. Stores remained open. And somewhere in the vast digital landfill of abandoned right-wing prophecies, beside the red wave that never came, the indictments that never came, the arrests that never came, and the secret evidence that never appeared, now rests the Great October 1st Trucker Strike of 2026.

And now a fun fact for any science fiction fans who made it this far.

Robert Heinlein's classic short story "The Roads Must Roll" was first published in June of 1940 and is frequently cited as identifying the major elements of possible future labor disruptions based on logistics and the nation's critical transportation infrastructure.  Specifically, how an entire economy that comes to depend on, in Heinlein's story, a highly interconnected network of massive, 100-mph moving sidewalks means that system becomes extremely vulnerable to disruption, and its strategic workers come to have enormous leverage.  

So, for your entertainment, I bring you the 1950 "Dimension X" radio adaptation of "The Roads Must Roll".   Enjoy.

Keep 'Em Rolling But Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1027: Fair Weather Fiends

"I am the Senate."  --  Sheev Palpatine, Revenge of the Sith.

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The Autocrat's Most Reliable Autopen

No Half Measures

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1026: They Won't Say The "R" Word?

"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people."  --  William Butler Yeats.

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The Barbering of Memory

One of the things Republicans clearly understand much better than Democrats is that politics is not just about laws and budgets and tax rates. It's also about shaping the past. About memory. About who gets remembered and who gets forgotten. About whose names get carved into stone, bolted onto airports, and slapped across every highway exit sign in America until future generations can barely remember a time when it wasn't there, which is why Grover Norquist spent years pushing his project to put Ronald Reagan's name on damn near everything that wasn't nailed down.

His goal was to have some landmark, building, road, bridge, school, or monument named after Reagan in every one of America's 3,141 counties. Hence Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the Ronald Reagan Turnpike, the Ronald Reagan Federal Building, and the Ronald Reagan Memorial Whatever-The-Hell. The point wasn't commemoration. The point was colonization.

Because that's what monuments are for.

And before some tote-bag Centrist starts hyperventilating about how monuments are merely expressions of civic pride, let's remember when and why most Confederate monuments went up. Not immediately after the Civil War. Not as spontaneous expressions of grief from bereaved widows. The great boom in Confederate monument construction came decades later, during the rise of Jim Crow, and then again during the Civil Rights era. They were not messages from the dead to the living. They were messages from the living to the living. They were giant bronze and marble "Fuck You!" billboards announcing who was in charge and who was expected to stay in their place.

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

Trump's obsession with naming, renaming, branding, rebranding, gold-plating and self-memorializing isn't just some eccentric personality quirk. It's part of the same tradition. Every building renamed. Every institution bent to his will. Every historical marker rewritten. Every federal program that had his brand slapped on it without even changing the font.  The point is to create the illusion of permanence. To make his movement seem inevitable.  To not just make his fascist movement a permanent part of the American political landscape, but to turn it into landscape itself, making future generations assume that all of this was always here and always would be.

The Romans had a name for the opposite process: Damnatio Memoriae. The condemnation of memory. When a tyrant fell -- through causes natural and otherwise -- if they were unpopular or there was political hay to be made damning their memory, then their statues came down, or their names and dates were chiseled off monuments and scraped from coins. Not because people suddenly forgot who the tyrant was, but because the public square isn't neutral and it isn't eternal.  

Every monument is making an argument, and every brass plate on every bench and building is an editorial. These are votes being cast in favor of a particular version of history. So if one generation has the authority to fill the landscape with propaganda, the next generation has exactly the same authority to haul it to the dump.

So, if the Trump administration can rename, redesignate, reclassify and reinvent public spaces to flatter the Dear Leader, another administration -- a Democratic administration -- can undo it.  Hell, who's to say that, in the name of "national security", a future administration couldn't seize Mar-a-Lago, compensate whichever of Trump's shell companies owns it one dollar as a fair market estimate of the value of a toxic shithole owned by the worst president in history, then turn it into a COVID Memorial Park.

If that's the future, Democrats need to come ready to play hardball.  Not to memory hole the record of the worst president in history, but to preserve the memory forever -- in parks, and statues, and piles of roped-off rubble -- that he was the worst president in history, that his collaborators in Congress and the media did betray this country, and that, driving all of it, was a mob of MAGA bigots and imbeciles.

Burn The Lifeboats

Get Serious...

...or get off the boat.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1025: Panic At The Grift Shop

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary."  --  Edgar Allan Poe

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