Professional Left Podcast Episode 986: AmeriKKKan Gothic

"Like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich, they should never let him get away with that, they was just asking for trouble."  --  Peter Clemenza, The Godfather

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Trump The Uniter

I Am The Liberal Media

And on His Headstone Shall Read These, His Final Words: “...But the Democrats”

Whenever you hear Never Trumpers musing about the good old days of the Before Time, it sounds like something between Greek myth and a road company production of Camelot.   Heroes and giants walking the Earth.  Mighty deeds being done by mighty men.  The snow never slushed upon the hillside, and by 9 p.m. the moonlight was required to appear.

And so forth.

And I'm sure that many of them do remember it that way, seeing as they weren't the ones being slandered and demonized every day by the Conservative Media Hate Machine.   They were, in fact, the ones who were profiting handsomely from the Hate Machine.  But as I warned 20 fucking years ago... 

And yet to build this electoral dynamo the Republican Party has had to completely sell out any vestige of principles or soul it once had for dominion over the divided and bitter land it has created. And because of that, there is no “Plan B” if you are a GOP candidate for national office.

Your Party Masters have burned your bridges and salted the Earth behind you, and now there is nothing left for you to do but desperately tunnel deeper into the Hell you have built for yourself.

Which is why John McCain now publicly grovels and kisses the poxy asses of the men who service and steer the Pretty Hate Machine indifferently past the bodies of the dead and dying of NOLA, and gleefully down the blood-tarred, bone-macadamed streets of Iraq. Men who went right after his family -- his wife and children -- and his honorable national service without a second thought when it suited their despicable purposes.

Because the Pretty Hate Machine does not come with a conscience, and it now casts its depraved shadow over their entire Party.

And over the entire nation that Party has seized.

And over the entire world that Party has polluted.

It has become all Means and no Ends but More Power, and as with all power, it comes with a steep price...

Well, the GOP's 2008 candidate for president, John McCain, is gone now.  His daughter married one of the Hate Machine's operating engineers and has disappeared down the MAGA rat hole.  And his 2008 running mate -- Sarah Palin, the Scintilla from Wasilla, MAGA 1.0 -- had her bullshit libel suit thrown out and was a big, big Trump supporter until he went all AI Jebus and now appears to have joined the crowded field of third tier wingnut influencers slow-fast walking to the pier to look for a lifeboat.  

Safe to say, John McCain's political legacy in is ashes.  

But what of the next sterling man of character that was offered up to the general public as a candidate for president?  Their 2012 candidate, Willard "Mittens" Romney?  

You remember him, right?   

He's the guy who was gonna herd the MAGA mob safely back into the corporate/neocon pen.  I wrote a whole thing about it back when it was a thing ("Hokum's Heroes") whence I salvaged these rare curios from that now nearly-forgotten past.

For now at least Mitt Romney has become the leader of the Republican Resistance to Trump.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) January 2, 2019

Watching David Frum explain how Mitt “is setting up rendezvous with destiny” by being the poltroon he’s always been is peak punditry.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) January 3, 2019

"What Mitt Romney said" was "so profoundly important"

It created "a breaking point from this mind-trap that a lot of Republicans" are in - fmr. RNC Chair @MichaelSteele pic.twitter.com/HM4CmIRFUo

— TheBeat w/Ari Melber (@TheBeatWithAri) January 2, 2019

Yeah, it turned out they were just as wrong about Mittens as they were about everything else, which is why after that last, humiliating display of hilarious political naivete, no one ever heard from David Frum, or Bill Kristol, or Michael Steele ever again :-)

"So why bring him up now?" you ask.

Fair question. 

It's because, speaking of things said and done 20 years ago, this week is the 20th anniversary of then-governor Mitt Romney signing Romneycare into law in Massachusetts, and The Bulwark sent Jonathan Cohn to, well, not "interview" him really.  To just nod and transcribe whatever the Great Man said.

And oh my goodness, does Mittens show himself to be every bit the clueless, obsolete, Republican cipher we lefties knew him to be back when all your favorite Never Trumpers were, well, trumpeting his praises and hailing him as the savior of the Republican party.  

A "savior" who has been assembled out of spare parts salvaged from all their previous failures.  Because in the interview, Romney happily parrots just about every MAGA culture war lie on the checklist --

Romney:  I think today it's the culture stupid. I think, my own view is Democrats have staked out some positions -- or a number of Democrats have -- that don't make a lot of sense to everyday Americans. Defund the police.  It's like are you kidding? You think that's going to sell in cities? Defund the police. Uh biological males competing in girl sports. Like that doesn't make any sense at all. uh open borders, people flooding into the country, people saying, "What in the world are you doing?" Democrats were doing some absolutely, in my opinion, just crazy stuff, right?  And that caused a lot of everyday Americans to say, you know, I used to be a Democrat, but I can't put up with that stuff. And they became they became Republicans. And uh and I mean, I think the Democratic Party is in a world of hurt uh in part because of their posture on so many of these social issues.

-- slathered with a big ol' helping "Both Sides Do It".

Romney:  I think both parties have uh have sown the seeds of defeat uh in part by taking some positions which I think are out of the mainstream.

And: 

Romney:  I think at politics maybe more today even than them which is if it's an idea raised by a Republican Republicans like it. If it's idea raised by a Democrat um Republicans hate it and vice you know vice versa. 

And:

Cohn:  And what about the Republican party? Do you feel like that where they are?

Romney:  I mean do you feel like on immigration on there's a lot of policies where people would say, you know, they are extreme in their own way and does that well we're both parties are creating their own problems. 

Romney:  I think what the president did to secure our border is wisely uh done and very popular. I think some of the ICE uh actions throughout Minnesota and other places is seen by people as being unnecessarily brutal um and is and has hurt the president's popularity. Um, so some things I think the president has done that make a lot of sense that are politically attractive. Other things I think are more harmful. I look, I have a list of things where I agree with President Trump and it's a good long list. Then I have a list of things where I disagree with him, but I understand his logic and  say, you know, he may be right, I may be wrong. I'm not right on everything. 

Scary trans males in women's sports?  Check!  "Open borders"?  Check!  "Defund the police"?  Check.

If you want virtually any shitty MAGA talking point repeated by a bland technocrat loser, Romney's your man.  

Because Romney was never the cure for what ails the Trump Republican Party.  

Instead, Romney was just another respectable, Beltway-approved carrier of the disease that made the rise of Trump possible.   

And he still is. 

I Am The Liberal Media

The Art of the Deal With Sam Spade

For the purposes of this scene, Iran is Spade.

Trump is a much stupider, narcissistic version of Gutman.

The gunsel could be a much more favorable deal for Iran than they ever got from the Obama administration.  

And the Strait of Hormuz is the stuff dreams are made on.  

Yes, the are no characters here proxying for Israel, Russia, China or the Gulf states.  So sue me.  It's a 1941 film noir so the analogy will be imperfect, but simplified it works pretty well.  Trump has the guns, but Iran has the item he wants and they will not give it up without Trump meeting their terms. And, practically speaking, there is no way for Trump to force Iran to give up without making the whole situation catastrophically worse.  

Tell me why I'm wrong in the comments.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 985: 'The Cheaper The Crook...'

"I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble." -- Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon

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And Then, When No One Was Watching, Came This Remarkable Exchange

While everyone else (including me) was watching the Artemis II crew's bull's-eye splashdown, safely and successfully ending their historic mission, over in the pocket universe of PBS three relics of a bygone media age sat around a table asking, "What the fuck happened to our profession?"

 Geoff Bennett:

And, Jonathan, 61 percent of Americans, including 30 percent of Republicans, now say that President Trump has become erratic with age. That's according to a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll.

The press corps -- I guess we should hold up a mirror to ourselves. The press corps spent two years making President Biden's mental fitness, his acuity the story. Why isn't that same scrutiny now being applied to President Trump broadly?

Jonathan Capehart:

Yes. Yes, exactly.

That has been my question since -- excuse me -- since January 20 of last year. We, the press, spent a lot of time talking about President Biden and his age because he looked old. He moved slowly. He wasn't as vigorous and agile, supposedly, as the guy he pushed out of office and then the guy who was running against him.

And even little slips of the tongue were used to show, see, aha, he's not all there. He's losing his mind.

How does that compare to what we're going through right now? I wish people who have written books -- people who have gone on air talking about President Biden nonstop, where are they now? Where are those books now that we have a president who has given ample evidence, ample evidence that something is not right?

Where are the people who are standing up and saying, you know what, something needs to be done? And that goes back to some -- you were talking about the founders. They were prepared for something like this. What they weren't prepared for was the Article I branch just ceding all authority.

What they weren't prepared for were people from the president's own party willing to either turn a blind eye or enable him to run roughshod over the Constitution. Even when you have got him out there threatening annihilation of a civilization, even when he's started a war for no reason and the enemy is in a stronger position now than it was before he started this war of his own choosing?

At some point, Republicans writ large and those on Capitol Hill have to start standing up for the Article I prerogatives, but also start standing up for the country. I don't know how much longer we as a nation can withstand this. And I know the world is beyond done with us, but I think they're also frightened of us.

David Brooks:

I wouldn't say that we in the mainstream media have been exactly pro-Trump Cheering section. I mean, our business model is bashing Trump. We know we can get clicks and ratings if we bash Trump enough. So we do it over and over and over and again, without having anything interesting to say half the time.

And, by the way, if we did do everything we could, it wouldn't -- it wouldn't make a difference. The people who need to be persuaded are not persuaded by us. We have been doing this since 2015. And so I'm not totally persuaded it would make a huge difference if we challenged his age and mental acuity, because we have been doing it morally for 10 years.

So, to summarize, in this creaky, ancient ritual, as the moderator, Bennet, is constrained to never state an opinion about anything.  If a meteor smacked into the studio during taping, his contractually obligated response would be, "Some people say that a meteor has just crashed through our ceiling.  What, if any, are the political implications?"  

The other participants, one supposedly "Right" and the other putatively "Left" then engage in a civil exchange in which David Brooks says something absurd or ridiculous or false on its face, and the other party is required by the rules of this kabuki to never raise their voice or call into question Mr. Brooks' honesty or integrity.   

Thus the illusion of a free press operating in an open marketplace of ideas is maintained for the eleven people who still watch this routinized diorama.

However, on any given Friday there are theoretically an unlimited number of questions that could be posed by the moderator.  And usually those questions are designed to be very...beige. Tepid.  Bland, poorly seasoned potato salad at the barbecue, served up so as not to raise the blood pressure of the eleven senior citizens for whom this is Friday evening must-see teevee.  But this time the question was about the media itself.  Specifically -- and swaddled in carefully neutral tones -- about how the media has catastrophically failed us all.  

To be clear, according to the arcane rules under which this ritual operates, Mr. Capehart could not come right out and say, "Fuck you Jake Tapper."  But he might as well have.  Also taking pains to specify that the Republican party is the problem is always appreciated.

Of course, finishing with "At some point, Republicans writ large and those on Capitol Hill have to start standing up for..." yadda yadda is just sheer wish-casting nonsense.  The GOP Capehart dreams of is long dead and its zombie corpse is trying to drag the rest of us into the grave with it.

But the real prize here is the bitter, post-facto nihilism of David Brooks.  

As Judd Legum amply documents here...

Manufacturing a political crisis
...

But while Hur's views about Biden's memory were worth mentioning, the media instead treated Hur's amateur medical judgments as a political crisis for Biden and an existential threat to his reelection campaign. But the actual threat to Biden's political prospects is the deluge of negative media coverage based on Hur's conjecture. A Popular Information analysis found that just three major papers — the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — collectively published 81 articles about Hur's assessment of Biden's memory in the four days following the release of Hur's report. Incidents that raised questions about former President Trump's mental state received far less coverage by the same outlets.

Overall, The New York Times published 30 stories about Biden's alleged memory issues between February 7 and February 10. Over those four days, the story was covered by 24 reporters (some of whom filed multiple stories), four opinion columnists, and the New York Times Editorial Board.

Hur's report legally clearing Biden was described in the New York Times as "a political disaster," "a political nightmare," "a new political crisis," and "a political mess." The paper said the report inflicted "searing political damage," placed "Mr. Biden’s advanced age… back at the center of America’s political conversation," and constituted "a gift" to Republicans. And that's just what was included in purportedly objective "news" reports. After Hur's report, New York Times opinion columnists with no medical credentials said Biden showed "signs of senescence" and suggested he was sliding "into dementia." Another said Hur's report proved "Biden should not be running for re-election" and blamed Biden's mental state for "the emboldenment of America’s rivals." The New York Times Editorial Board described the report ominously as "a dark moment for Mr. Biden’s presidency."

Only one of those stories mentioned a key fact: Hur is completely unqualified to render a judgment on Biden's mental capacity.

...and Margaret Sullivan documents here...

The media's circular logic and destructive obsession with Biden's age

Yes, it's fast becoming the 2024 version of the media's obsession with Hillary's emails

The New York Times was, of course, just asking questions.

Why, oh why, do Joe Biden’s age, memory failures and gaffes seem to hurt him so much more than Donald Trump’s age, memory failures and gaffes hurt him?

These questions were being pondered in the most influential real estate in all of media: a front-page news article, above the fold, on Sunday. (Even in this digital age, that print front page, especially on Sunday, packs a punch.)

The sub-headline summarized the issue: “Biden Is Hurt by Flubs More Than Trump Is.”

And the article stated: “While Mr. Biden, 81, has been dogged by doubts and concerns about his advancing years from voters, Mr. Trump, who is 77, has not felt the same blowback.”

“Dogged by,” you say? Who, exactly, is doing the dogging?

Maybe the Times and other major media outlets ought to look in the mirror.

CNN, meanwhile, was running this chyron: “Is Biden’s Age Now a Bigger Problem Than Trump’s Indictments?” A panel gave this question every due consideration, and then some.

And then there was the rundown of Times opinion offerings — one piece after another, all in a neat row, about Biden’s age and memory.

...The New York Times led the pack of "Biden is old" legacy media jackals trying to kneecap the 2024 Biden campaign, at a time when Mr. Brooks was the apex op-ed writer at that publication.

Also Margaret Sullivan's comparison was spot-on: "Biden is old" did become the 2024 version of the media's obsession with Hillary's emails.

And, as long-time readers may recall, Mr. Brooks was also the apex op-ed writer at The New York Times as it led the pack of "But her emails" legacy media jackals trying to kneecap the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.  First, when it looked like Bernie Sanders might win the Democratic nomination, Brooks cranked out 700 words of drivel "Both Sidesing" Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.  And when Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, Brooks immediately pivoted, cranking out 700 words of drivel "Both Sidesing" Hillary and Trump (see "David Brooks: Both Siderism Is a Farce that Gives Us Meaning").

And this was not a one-off.   After the Bush regime collapsed and all of Brooks' Neocon National Greatness dreams died with it, Brooks spent the rest of his career literally doing nothing but vomiting out one column of Both Sides garbage after another on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

And now that the mask has dropped and the beating heart of Brooks' former party has shown itself to be the fascist monster Liberals warned that it was?  

Now that it is unequivocally clear that the media's "Both Sides" fetish is what helped keep MAGA bigots and imbeciles on-side, and lowered the bar far enough for America's feckless, clueless "Undecides" and "Independents" to vote to put the worst person in the world back in the White House?

After all that, where does Mr. Brooks land?

First, he renders his profession down to what clowns like Brooks have made of it: the crass pursuit of "clicks and ratings".

Second, and most pathetically of all, he reduces his entire, toxic career to a giant shrug emoji.  Claiming as his alibi for his poisonous career choices that none of it made any difference.  That even if clowns like Brooks had actually tried harder, it wouldn't have matter.

And, by the way, if we did do everything we could, it wouldn't -- it wouldn't make a difference. The people who need to be persuaded are not persuaded by us. 

This is a lie so immense that it's genuinely hard to quantify.  

Sure, the MAGA zombies are unpersuadable, but that's because they're wired that way.  Their impregnable ignorance?  Their impervious bigotry.  Son, those were features, not bugs.  These MAGA zombies were drawn into the party precisely because they found a welcome home there.  Their ignorance was flattered.  Their intolerance was praised as patriotism.  They became the GOP's reliably reprogrammable meatbags, in a process that unfolded over decades right in front of David Brooks -- America's most ubiquitous public "intellectual" -- who went right on pretending that everything was fine and/or that Both Sides were equally awful.  

But as for the "Both Sides Do It" media cult that Brooks piloted?  Take it from someone who has been documenting its deleterious effects on our politics for 21 years, that has been wildly successful.  

We may never know how many millions of wobbly Republicans who were having doubts about the GOP were persuaded to stay on Team Evil because they believed the Both Sides lie.  And we may never know how many additional millions of those feckless, clueless "Undecide" and "Independent" voters -- people who actually watch things like PBS and Meet the Press and read publications like The New York Times and believe what they see and read -- cast their ballot for the worst people in the world or pissed their vote away on doomed third-party candidates because scum like Brooks spent a professional lifetime telling them that it didn't matter because speech codes at Cornell University were somehow as bad and dangerous as an armed insurrection waged against the United States government.   

But we can say with confidence that the Both Sides lie has been incredibly persuasive.  That it has helped determine the outcome of critical elections.  And that it has done real and permanent damage to this country.

And for his sins, Mr. David Brooks has been lured away from the Times by The Atlantic, where he will spend his declining years cranking out the same drivel as always, but instead of being paid a princely sum to perform his little dance twice a week,  The Atlantic appears to be happy paying him a princely sum to do his thing once every few months.

Funny old world.

I Am The Liberal Media

As an Actual Third Rate Podcaster...

... I deeply resent being left off of President Shit-His-Pants von Epstein-Files' roll of honor.

On the other hand, I look forward to the time in the near future when Alex Jones, Madge Greene, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson and/or Candance Owens show up as honored guests at The Bulwark while we Liberals are told, once again, to shut up and sit down because those First Rate Podcasters are now in charge of who gets into The Club and who gets to kick rocks.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 984: War On Hiatus Due To Bad Ratings

"War Is a Racket." -- retired United States Marine Corps Major General, Smedley D. Butler

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