Professional Left Podcast Episode 959: The 16th Anniversary Show

"All cruelty springs from weakness." --  Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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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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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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Professional Left Podcast Episode 956: 2025 In Review, Part 3 (of 3)

"All the pieces matter." --  Detective Lester Freamon, The Wire

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We Have Aways Been At War With Christmas

From me, 20 years ago, in the Haloscan days.  Also the pre-YouTube days, so I have swapped out a long-dead link to a web page with an MP3 (miracle!) for a video.

Back when we were trying to construct salient political and media critiques from bearskins and stone knives.

Mithras, you magnificent bastard! 

 

I read your book!

General George S. Santa whips up the 101st Chairborne-Again before dispatching them into the trenches to lay waste to Liberals in the name of the Prince of Peace…

(And if you're so inclined, you can click here to get the full, Sensurround Effect of this fiery rhetoric…)

Be seated.

I want you to remember that no bastard ever won the War for Christmas by dying for his dogma. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his dogma.

Men, all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the War for Christmas is a lot of horse dung. Fundymericans, traditionally, love to fight for Jesus. All real Fundymericans love the sting of battle.

When you were kids you all admired the champion draft deferrer, the biggest rich kid, John Birch, and the guy whose daddy could hire the toughest boxer. Fundymericans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser…except for the whole War of Northern Aggression thing.

And the Jim Crow thing.

And the “Segregation Now” thing.

And the “Loving vs. Virginia” thing.

But other than that, Fundymericans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Fundymericans have never lost and will never lose a war…and Vietnam does NOT count because it was only a “police action” and not a Real War like the War on Christmas. And anyway, we coulda won – were on the verge of winning – when we were betraaaayed by Cronkite and Jane Fonda and the dirty hippies.

Anyhoo, the very thought of losing is hateful to Fundymericans. As is the thought of Tolerance. And Science. And Causality. And Compromise. And every other religion in the history of the Universe.

Now, a Chairborne-Again army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality and “thinking for yourself” and “asking questions of the Dear Leader” stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Washington Post don't know anything more about real battle than they do about the why fornicating and terrorism are both caused by feminists, queers, teaching Evolution in the public schools and the ACLU.

Now we have the finest food, Chick Tracts, the best hair, and the most extremely heterosexual men in the world. You know, by God I...I actually pity those poor bastards we're going up against, by God, I do. We're not just going to shoot these Liberal “Good Will Towards Men” bastards; we're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of Santa’s Sleigh. We're going to murder those lousy “Tolerant”, “Turn the other check” bastards by the Hanukah Bushel.

Now, some of you boys, I know are wondering whether or not you'll chickenhawk out under fire. Don't worry about that.

I can assure you that you will, just like your fathers and grandfathers before you.

That is, if this were an actual “war” war. Then we’d just send poor Negros, Spics and hillbillies off to do our fighting for us.

But this is just some faked-up Holiday Hatred extruded by knee-biters like Bill O'Reilly to keep the stoopids distracted and divided, facing the wrong direction, and screaming wrong slogans so they won’t notice how routinely and ineptly Dear Leader’s Administration lies to them and fucks them over.

The Liberals are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood in the name of the Redeemer. Shoot them in the belly for the sake of the Lamb of God. When you put your hand into a bunch of Nondenominational “Holiday” goo that a moment before was your best friend's Manger Scene, you'll know what to do!

Now there's another thing I want you to remember: I don't want to get any messages that we are holding our position. We're not holding anything. Let the Liberals do that. We are advancing constantly and we're not interested into holding onto anything except the enemy.

To celebrate the fake birthday of the King of Kings, we're going to hold onto him by the nose and we're going to kick him in the ass. In the name of the Son of the Living God, we're going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we're going to go through him like mouthbreathers through a WalMart on double-coupon day!

Now, there's one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back to you Mommy’s Basement, and you may thank God for it. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you what did you do in the great Operation Eternal Clusterfuck in Iraq?

You can proudly say, "Well, first I called everyone that didn't support the Dear Leader a traitor and a coward. Then I cowered under the bed like a little bitch while far better men and women than I went off to bleed and die to cover the margin call on my Dear Leader's stupid, reckless gamble. Then I re-elected him! Then I went out and spit on a dirty Jew to commemorate the fake birthday of my Lord and Savior."

Alright, now you sons-a-bitches, you know how I feel. I will be proud to lead you wonderful fucktards into a completely faked-up, Potemkin battle anytime, anywhere.

Like, say, Easter.

That's all.

Burn The Lifeboats

 

Professional Left Podcast Episode 955: 2025 In Review, Part 2

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." --  Aldous Huxley

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 954: 2025 In Review, Part 1

"“The past is never dead. It's not even past." --  William Faulkner

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The Botchelorette

From NBC:

Judge dismisses cases against James Comey and Letitia James after finding prosecutor was unlawfully appointed

Lindsey Halligan was appointed after President Donald Trump urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute the former FBI director and New York attorney general.

From Slate:

It Turns Out Lindsey Halligan Was a Fake Prosecutor All Along

From The Daily Beast:  

Trump Beauty Queen Humiliated as Judge Dismisses Cases Against His Enemies

A federal judge ruled the appointment of interim U.S. attorney Lindsey Halligan was illegal.

As Sam Spade said, voice dripping with sarcasm, to the gunsel Wilmer in "The Maltese Falcon" after Spade humiliated and disarmed him, "Come on. This will put you in solid with your boss."

I Am The Liberal Media

Uniformity Is Not a Blessing

Enough of this "Dems in disarray" nonsense.

Democrats are no more in disarray than your Thanksgiving dinner is in disarray.    No one will look at our table with all the different dishes for different tastes – turkey and vegan "turkey" and my world famous mashed potatoes and stuffing and vegan mac & cheese and cranberry sauce and roasted brussels sprouts – and think, oh my God, we’re doomed!  We’re going to starve because it’s not all one thing, it’s a bunch of different things, and some people might want Tofurkey and taters, and some might want turkey and cranberry cause … and everyone loves sandwiches made from leftovers the next day.  

  It is a straitjacket, and we have a party tent big enough for Zohran Mamdani and Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, which is also big enough for Sharon Owens and Dorcey Applyrs, who were just elected the first black mayors of Syracuse and Albany.

But you know who is not welcome at our table?

Creeps like Illinois' own Mary "Nazi" Miller, whose reaction to Tuesday’s Blue Tsunami was this

Democrats have made it crystal clear: they'll block pay and assistance for struggling American families unless taxpayer-funded healthcare is handed to illegal aliens. 

Fuck You Mary Miller.

And as long as we're on the subject of Nazis, let's talk about about this story in Wired:

The GOP Civil War Over Nick Fuentes Has Just Begun

Tucker Carlson’s friendly interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes has led to a major reckoning in the Republican party.

Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist known for his deeply antisemitic, racist, and misogynist worldview, just might be tearing the Republican party apart.

The schism was triggered last Tuesday when former Fox News host Tucker Carlson released an in-depth interview with Fuentes, the leader of the so-called America First movement who has denied the Holocaust, praised Hitler, and shared deeply misogynistic views.

During the interview, Fuentes waxed antisemitic about the threat apparently posed by “organized Jewry” in America, while Carlson slammed figures like Senator Ted Cruz and former president George W. Bush as being “Christian Zionists” who have been ”seized by this brain virus.” Carlson was criticized by, among others, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee for giving Fuentes a platform, and the argument kicked into overdrive after Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, a high-profile conservative think tank, condemned those attacking Carlson as a "venomous coalition.”

“Tucker Carlson remains and always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation,” Roberts said in a video posted to X on Thursday.  

Then came the reaction, which was hilarious.  Not "funny, ha, ha" because none of what these degenerates are doing to our country is funny in that way, but rather in the grotesque comedy way.  

But even this was not the most hilarious reaction of all.  We'll get to that presently/

This was Ted Cruz speaking before the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas last Thursday, hours after Roberts’ video was released:

In the last six months, I've seen more antisemitism on the right than I have in my entire life.  If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you’re a coward and you are complicit in that evil.

Senator Mitch McConnell, wrote on X that conservatives are not obliged “to carry water for antisemites and apologists for America-hating autocrats.” Except, of course, that's exactly what McConnell has been doing his entire career.

John Podhoretz wrote on X  “My mother was a Heritage board member for 40 years.  You have befouled her, you rancid wretch of an amoeba.” 

He then deleted the post a few days later, presumably because he thought better of reminding everyone what a dangerous nut job mommy Midge Decter actually was. 

Depending on which pundit rag you read, Ben Shapiro either "slams" or "blasts" Tucker Carlson as a "intellectual coward" for coddling Nick Fuentes.  

From the Jerusalem Post:

'A conspiratorial Right is rising' in America, Ben Shapiro tells 'Post'

US political commentator Ben Shapiro in candid conversation with The Jerusalem Post: 'You get a lot more likes and clicks if you are promoting an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish agenda.'

And depending on which link you click on Mark Levin either "Slams" or "Calls Out" Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes at the Republican Jewish Convention on November 1st.  

Which is the sort of absurdly selective outrage from a mob of professional bigots, hate mongers and conspiracy peddlers not seen since Blazing Saddles hit movie theaters decades ago.

Then came the inevitable backlash to the backlash, which, again, just keeps publicly escalating the dark, absurdist comedy that is the Republican party.  Again from Wired:

“Excellent statement my friend. Proud to stand with you and Heritage,” Eric Teetsel, the CEO of the Center for Renewing America, which is a conservative think tank founded by Project 2025 architect and current director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought. 

And then further down, there is this masterpiece, which almost makes it worth getting up in the morning  

“This is the common ground we need to rescue our republic,” prominent podcaster Bret Weinstein wrote in response to Roberts’ post. “Attempting to police thought, speech, and association is anti-American, and will only deepen our divisions.”

Oh the indignity!  Oh outrage at this thought-policing!    

So much for the Tolerant Right!

This is the end state of a Republican party which has been playing this game for our entire adult lives.  And what makes it such a rich and terrible comedy is how this dynamic keeps repeating itself.

You begin with a base of bigots and imbeciles, who are driven to the polls in election after election by the rage and racism fed to them by Conservative media.  And yet, in election after election, instead of Smashing and Crushing and Wiping Out the scourge of minorities and liberals and feminists and immigrants and LGBTQ+ people who they've been told over and over again are the root of all evil...  the Republicans they elect keep compromising and doing deals.

So to keep getting them to the polls and to keep them watching and listening, the rhetorical hysteria has to keep ratcheting up.  Hillary is running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza joint.  Also, she murdered Vince Foster.  Obama's a Kenyan Commie sleeper cell who's gonna kick down your door and take your guns!  Also Solyndra!!!  And Bengghaaazi!

But they don’t call it a race to the bottom for nothing, because it is a race.  Remember how Fox freaked out over Newsmax gaining on them after the 2020 election?  

From the Poynter news service, November, 2020:

Should Fox News be worried about Trump supporters turning to Newsmax?

 The network has become a favorite of President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, while he occasionally claims Fox News isn't what it used to be.

…So is there anything to all this? Is Newsmax actually making a dent? Well, this is true: Fox News’ ratings for certain time slots have dipped a bit since the election, while Newsmax has seen flashes of ratings success. For example, it had a night last week when more than a million people were watching. To be clear, that’s like a third of those who are watching Fox News on a typical night, but it’s quite the leap for a network that very recently was drawing fewer than 60,000 viewers a night.

Newsmax has become comfort food for staunch Trump supporters because it shamelessly promotes baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud. For the moment, Newsmax might be causing a bit of a headache for Fox News.  

And do you remember why the MAGA morons were mad at Fox?  Because, for once, Fox didn't lie to them.  

Fox reported the 2020 Arizona results correctly, and MAGA threw a temper tantrum because that meant Trump was going to lose.  Fox told them stuff they didn’t want to hear, which violates the sacred compact they have with their viewers, and the MAGA base went shopping for another propaganda network who would tell them bigger and better lies.

And everyone involved re-learned what they all already knew:  you’ve gotta keep the base happy and the only way to do that is to lie to them all the time about everything.  

So ... the caravans are coming!  Children are having sex change operations at recess!  They're eating the dogs and cats!  

But rhetoric isn't enough.  The base demands someone who will publicly crush, troll and humiliate their enemies in tangible ways that make those enemies cry.  And they want that someone to promise them... everything.  They want their Dear Leader to make all their dreams come true.  Cheap gas.  Cheap groceries.  Great jobs.  Great health care.  Free IVF.  

And above all, in the name of Freedom, they want someone who will empower them to be the horrible, ignorant, loudmouth racists in public that they've always been in private.

They wanted the freedom to speak bluntly, loudly and proudly about everyone they hated, in exactly the same way US government propaganda talked about the Japanese during World War II.  Sinister.  Barbaric.  Subhuman.   Killing machines who should be wiped out wholesale.  

Demonization without any limits because this was war.  

This, to MAGA morons, is what “freedom of speech” means, except eventually World War II came to an end.  There was a formal surrender and, 15 years later, Toyota was starting to sell cars in America.    

But there is no practical end to the war that MAGA is fighting, because they’re at war with the future.  They're at war with progress and tolerance and science.  And as their forever war on the future drags on and on, the list of enemies they need to blame gets longer, and the rhetoric they use to attack those enemies gets uglier.  

And so every time the fascist party lurches further Right to feed the base’s addiction to enemies and conspiracy, it alienates a few more loyal party members because that was the line they told themselves they’d never cross. 

But the minute they try to police the speech of the ever-more-openly-Nazi Right, they become The Thought Police, and all of their own outspoken defense of LGBTQ+ hatespeech, or racist hatespeech, or xenophobic hatespeech or misogynist hatespeech gets thrown right back in their faces.   I thought we were all about freedom, but Rafael Edward Cruz over here wants to DEI Thought Police us about the Jews!  

So much for the tolerant Right!

And once again the ratchet is cranked one notch further towards the insane abyss… because the MAGA mob is always hungry and needs feeding.

All that being said, the most sublime reaction of all came from over in Never Trump land.  

You may remember that once the Republican base handed the keys over to Donald Trump, a handful of lifelong, loyal party members got themselves run out of the place and were promptly given jobs in the legacy media and tens of millions of dollars worth of media support for their startup, Never Trump websites.  

And almost without exception their alibis were identical:  This was all a total shock!  No one could have predicted the party base would spontaneously turn into brainwashed, racist zombies who would elect a monster like Trump.  All of us Good Republicans were taken completely by surprise.  If only there had been some kind of warning.  

And all of us who had been involved in politics since early days and writing about what was going on with the GOP and the media for decades stood as one and yelled as loud as we could, You lying assholes! You built this thing.  How dare you pretend you never knew.  Your only job was to know what was going on inside your own party. You were the people who made a living feeding red meat to the base, and we could all see it because  it was all happening right out in the open.  Limbaugh.  Gingrich.  Fox News.  Falwell.  All of it.

But they got away with it, because way too many Liberals were willing to let them off the hook scot-free, and because the complicit legacy media needed camera-savvy people who could explain Trump without talking about the 50-year-long trajectory that led to Trump.

And now that the Ben Shapiros and Mark Levins of the Right are pretending to be shocked and horrified to learn that there are raging antisemites in their ranks, you’ll never guess what those same Never Trumpers – who swore they never knew that their party was full of bigots and lunatics – are saying now.

They’re saying “You lying assholes! You built this thing.  How dare you pretend you never knew.  You were the people feeding red meat and conspiracy theories to the base.  And we could all see it because  it was all happening right out in the open.”

And if that isn’t high comedy, I don’t know what is.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Make It So

I Am The Liberal Media

Bret Bug Is Afraid.

The title of Bret "Bug" Stephens New York Times garbage yesterday was a question.

Do Dumb Ideas Ever Die?

A question we will defintely answer by the end of this post.

But to begin with, you need to understand that for the average Both Siderist hack, sometimes it can be a real grind trying to scare up something on deadline vaguely lefty to wave around to prove that Both Sides yadda yadda.  

Usually it involves waterboarding statistics until they scream and pass out and give the average Both Siderist hack something to fill up the empty page.  

Or, lacking any handy torturable bar-charts. the average Both Siderist hack will just make some shit up.  For example, Tom Friedman's fleet of magic cab drivers who always have just the right words in just the right order to pad out his drivel.  Or David Brooks' legendary [I kid you not] "Joey Tabula Rasa]" -- a patriotic Murrican teenage golem that Brooks brought to life by stuffing his own opinions in its mouth.  

Then there's Bret "Bug" Stephens, who doesn't even bother.  And really, why should he?  After all, the House of Sulzberger has given him a job for life and obviously doesn't give a shit what he writes as long as it fills up a column once a week.

So to the table today Stephens hauls the 800 pound gorilla of ruinously bad ideas, Donald J. Trump.  And from Trump's Conservative Cornucopia of Catastrophe, Stephens pulls out these two solid bricks of unalloyed stupid.

Trade protectionism? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s showed us the worldwide economic ruin to which that could lead. Government stakes in private enterprise, like the Trump administration’s recent equity stake in Intel?...

America First? The slogan of Charles Lindbergh and other pre-World War II isolationists should have been buried forever on Dec. 7, 1941. Instead, it emerged from its grave some 75 years later. 

Although there are several dozen (hundred?  thousand?) more ruinously bad ideas I would have used to begin to build my case that Trump is the worst president in American history by several orders of magnitude, Ok, fine.  It's Stephens' column.  Let him pick.

Ah, but remember,  Stephens is, above all things, a very lazy Both Siderist hack and a piss-poor writer, and so, in the very next paragraph, comes the inevitable...

But it isn’t just the Trump administration that is reawakening the moral and intellectual zombies of the past. Everywhere one looks there are policy necromancers.

Really?  Everywhere?  Like...where, for example.  What political organization could possible manifest as much ruthless abuse of political power,  open corruption, and sneering contempt for democracy as would be required to balance out a "Both Sides" formula with Trump on the other side?

You'll never guess.  

Not in a million years.

Ready?

The platform of the national Democratic Socialists of America calls for a...

Yep.  The DSA, which experienced "significant growth" over the past few years and now has nearly 80,000 members.

By way of comparison Donald Trump got...

...62,985,106 votes in 2016.

...74,223,975 votes in 2020.

...77,302,580 votes in 2024.

Ok, fine, but even with a number that tiny, maybe the DSA fielded a flashy newcomer in 2024.  Someone who was still an outsider, but showed themselves to be enough of a third-party threat to the Established Order sufficient for Stephens to make this otherwise ridiculous comparison.  Y'know, like Wallace in '68.  A spoiler and damn-near king-maker.  The unreconstructed racist who inspired Nixon and his henchmen to cook up their infamous Southern Strategy.

Except Wallace fielded nearly 10 million votes in 1968 and at it's peak, with every member accounted for, the DSA could only field 0.81% of what Wallace got more than half a century ago.

Yikes!

Still, just for kicks, guess who the DSA did run for president in 2024?

No one.  

Because the DSA is not a political party.  From Wikipedia:

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is a political nonprofit organization, not a political party with a ballot line. DSA members and endorsees usually run as members of the Democratic Party, and occasionally with the Green Party, Working Families Party, or as independents

Looking worse and worse for Bret Bug, but since we've come all this way, Ok, who did the DSA endorse for president in 2024?  Did they get enough icky socialism on Kamala Harris to cost her the election?  Is that the threat, Bret?!?

From the DSA Statement on the Presidential Race,  November 4, 2024:

Workers deserve more than Trump vs. Harris. 

Every four years, working people are faced with the same “choices” for president: a conservative Democrat, a deranged Republican, and a gallery of self-promotional minor party candidates. For many people, voting doesn’t seem worth the effort.

If re-elected, Donald Trump would be a terror on the working class. As described in “Project 2025,” the extreme right wants to consolidate power under a Trump presidency through the expansion of authoritarian executive action. He would aim to repress fundamental democratic rights, stoke violence and discrimination against immigrants and trans people, and throw into chaos essential federal regulations on labor, corporate profit, and the environment. His administration would also want to target organizations like DSA for repression.

Harris is not the alternative we deserve...

This choice is why so many people are rejecting the two major parties and are hungry for a political alternative.

Many of our members are committed to defeating Trump and will vote tactically to that end. Others are committed to rejecting the human horrors and hollow principles Harris represents, so they will vote for a third-party candidate or leave their ballot blank...

Well that worked out just great for everyone didn't it!  

But maybe the DSA has become some kind of super-secret threat to the Established Order by sneaking in though the side door of politics.  

Like, say, as the mouthpieces of a young, charismatic Democrat on the rise?

Like, say, AOC?!?!

From City & State New York, July 12, 2024

The real story behind DSA’s decision to unendorse AOC

Well fuck me.  A pipsqueak political organization with some fine ideas and some bad ideas, and no appreciable political clout, no presence in the presidential cosmos, and it isn't even a political party.  So, at this point you may be asking yourself, why oh why did Stephens bring this weak-as-Methodist-coffee nonsense to a Both Sides Do It shot contest?

Because, dear reader, on an election night when all of Stephens' Republican ponies were not just losing, but were being Godfathered and glue factoried, for a bitter, talentless hack like Stephens and the ten or eleven bitter Conservative losers who still read him, "Socialist" is still a word to conjure with, especially when it's helpfully paired with "Democratic".  

It gives Stephens license to pad out the rest of his column with all the bogeymen of the Conservative-in-exile's nightmares.  “Bolivarian socialism", Jeremy Corbyn, Venezuela, French socialism, "Britain’s National Health" and a quote about “The trouble with socialism" from Margaret Thatcher.  

Are ya scared yet!  Huh!  Are ya!  Are ya!

Then back to other side of this absurd false equivalence to thump on the antisemitism of Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and the collapse of the Heritage Foundation...and we're done.  

So, let us return to the the title of Stephens' New York Times garbage yesterday.  The question:

Do Dumb Ideas Ever Die?

Well, since the House of Sulzberger is still paying him real American money to take these big, stanky dumps on their op-ed page, the answer is obviously a resounding:

 Not yet.

 

I Am The Liberal Media

Saturday Night He Was Downtown, Working For The FBI

Sitting in a nest of bad men
Whiskey bottles piling high...

Bootlegging boozer on the west side
Full of people who are doing wrong...

Meet John Barron, Sekrit FBI Guy!  

From the Rolling Stone, September 6, 2025:

‘What the Hell?’ House Speaker Confuses White House With Claim Trump Was an FBI Snitch 

Mike Johnson said the president was an informant against Jeffrey Epstein while still telling Republicans to vote against the release of the Epstein files

Or maybe not.  From The New Republic, two days later:

Mike Johnson Admits His Claim on Trump and Epstein Was Total Nonsense

The House speaker is suddenly changing his tune after a bizarre defense of Trump on the Epstein case.

And now, a visual representation of what happens when the new lies you're telling today to cover up the old lies you told yesterday have to, in turn, be walked back with even newer lies practically as they're leaving your mouth...

Burn the Lifeboats

On This Day in 1944, The Allies Successfully "Negotiated" The Liberation of Paris

Here is some footage documenting the "negotiations".

So the next time you see Vice President Couchfucker running his lying mouth --

BREAKING: JD Vance lies that there was a negotiated end to the Second World War. With who? Hitler killed himself in the bunker. Mussolini was overthrown. Two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Germany and Japan were occupied by allied forces. Read a book. pic.twitter.com/ZDdZfuw5Lc

— Trump Lie Tracker (Commentary) (@MAGALieTracker) August 24, 2025

-- perhaps gently advise him, in a fatherly sort of way, that if he is very, very lucky, the worst that will happen to him once the Trump administration is history is being paraded though the streets of Washington D.C. alongside the rest to the traitors, head shaved, wearing a sandwich board with "I Collaborated" written in big, red letters, front and back.  

No Half Measures

Adios White House

Hello Mango Manor.

"A low-rent whorehouse

Piss drunk on Goldschläger 

Puked in a bucket."  

-- an Oval Office haiku by driftglass

How darkly appropriate that one of the best descriptions of the Trump Administration came from Hunter Thompson long before there was a Trump Administration.

“The Circus-Circus Mar-a-Pedo is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich...”

No Half Measures

A Hundred Shells a Minute Until They Surrender

All Epstein, all the time.  

What Major General Alfred Terry and Rear Admiral David Porter did with shot and shell to take Fort Fisher in January 1865, we must do to the Trump administration with words, pictures, music, video, formal speeches, letters to the editor, protests, signs, buttons and votes in the House, the Senate and statehouses across the country.

Continuous, relentless bombardment.

No Half Measures

This Feels Like Winning

(h/t Crooks and Liars)

It's fair to say that, since we began this blogging journey together more than 20 years ago, there are two major themes on which this blog has focused more attention and expended more words than any others, Themes which we also carried over to The Professional Left Podcast more than 15 years.

And they are, false equivalence and memory.  Or, in our own parlance, "Both Sides Don't" and "No Fair Remembering Stuff".

So when I saw Republican scumbag Doug LaMalfa get shouted down when he tried to whip out the Both Sides Do It lie, in the heart of the reddest district in California (R+12) at the first town hall he's held in eight years... it felt like something important might finally be getting into the ground water of American politics.  

And, once the crowd had been calmed, when I heard one citizen yell "We'll never forget!" that gave me a little bit of hope that, just maybe, ordinary citizens might be unlimbering the greatest Liberal superpower of all, remembering stuff, and turning its awesome power against the American fascist party.  

No Half Measures

We Who Were Never Trump Long Before Trump

As you know, twenty years ago, before the Frankenstein's monster they'd built kicked the doors off the lab and came for them, most of your favorite Never Trumpers were either grinding out Weekly Standard paeans to the genius of George W. Bush and the idiocy of Liberals suggesting there would ever be deficits again, or they were fresh out of college and working as low-level gofers in the campaign of one Republican goof or another, or one Conservative think tank or another. 

None of this is disputed.  It isn't talked about by the legacy media or by Never Trumpers because it is hugely inconvenient, but when skipping very lightly down the byways of history, they don't pretend the past never happened, they just own up to a very highly expurgated and redacted version of the past.

What is disputed, aggressively, is that any of that has any bearing on the state of things as they are now.  That yesterday has any real connection to today, which is ludicrous on its face:  look into the mists of time at the George Wallace and Richard Nixon campaigns of 1968, and you will see Donald Trump's face leering bask at you.

What is also aggressively disputes is that, even if the past has some bearing on the present, there is no way anyone could possibly (to borrow a little phrasing from Bill Shakes)  "look into the seeds of time/ And say which grain will grow and which will not."  It is an article of faith among the that they are guiltless because no one could have seen the disaster that was coming, not even the savvy political savants who make of the Never Trump elite.

Except, at exactly the same time they were working hard to elect cranks, or cranking out political propaganda for the Bush administration about how swimmingly the Iraq war was going, a cohort of Liberal bloggers were not only diagnosing the bigoted and deadly impulses were raging through the heart of the GOP with astonishing accuracy, but also generously explaining in clear, simple language what exactly Republican leadership needed to do to stop the party's headlong plunge down the long, dark, fascist road that led to Donald Trump.  

All the signs were there, long ago, and this is the advice we offered to our Republican fellow citizens, free of charge, that would disenthrall them from the madness that was quickly overtaking them:

Kick [the bigots and monsters] out. It’s as simple as that.

Call out Republicans who use intolerance as just another tool in the get-out-the-vote toolbelt by name.

Repudiate them.

...quit pretending that racist policies are just falling unbidden out of the sky, and that you have no control over them. Quit pretending the behavior of Republican candidates has nothing to do with the Republican party.

But you have to actually do that shit, instead of trying to market reeking poison as yummy-yummy pecan pie and assuming the rest of the world is too stupid to notice. 

This is also why it is so fucking exhausting to hear people who absolutely know better but who's professional lives would be wrecked by admitting it, yammer on about how all this came upon us suddenly, spontaneously and with no warning in 2016.  

That's a lie.  And everyone who can remember past events beyond what they had for breakfast, knows it's a lie.

Because one of those Liberal bloggers who were giving very clear instructions about how to save the Republicans party from itself were was me.  And they were published on the blog twenty years ago.

From me, August 7, 2005:

“I was born a Poor Black Child.”

Is he kidding?

You decide.

Here’s a line from near the end of this article: “[Mehlman] also invoked his late grandfather, a Baltimore shopkeeper, who was a member of the NAACP."

Well if that’s not hard-currency street cred, well I just don’t know what is!

OTOH, I have a relative who, word has it, was the last man hanged for horse thievin’ in Montana. I also have one who’s an Evangelical Christian slightly to the Right of Ralph Reed. And there are some moonshiners, and rev’nuers, and teachers and drunks.

All of which means ab-so-lute-ly nothing...except that Kenny Mehlman’s grandfather would probably by deepy, deeply ashamed of him if he knew the kind of Gadarene Swine he was running with.

Read on...

GOP Plans More Outreach to Blacks, Mehlman Says
Goal Is to Broaden Party Base, Help Swing Future Races

ATLANTA -- Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman stood before a roomful of black journalists last week fielding pointed questions about his party's mostly shaky relationship with black voters.

Asked about the southern strategy that used race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once Democratic South, Mehlman acknowledged that Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions. But he pledged that such neglect is a thing of the past. "Our plan for 2006 and 2008 is to increase African American turnout," he said crisply.

Republican candidates who exploited racial resentments to solidify white support, he added, were simply wrong.

Unconvinced, one questioner asked whether President Bush was guilty of appealing to those very resentments when he appeared at South Carolina's Bob Jones University when his GOP primary campaign was listing in 2000, even though the fundamentalist Christian school banned interracial dating. Mehlman did not flinch -- but neither did he directly engage the question. Bush "has been a model" of how the GOP and blacks can "restore their historic bond," he said.

Distancing the party from its recent past and promising a more inclusive future has become a ritual for Mehlman since he became chairman of the GOP in January. It is part of an audacious bid to chip away at the Democratic Party's most loyal constituency: black voters.
...
Despite periodic Republican outreach efforts, nearly nine out of 10 blacks voted for Democratic presidential candidates over the past four decades.

But Bush's success in modestly increasing black support in battleground states such as Ohio with a culturally conservative message during the 2004 election caused some religious and cultural leaders to see an opportunity for the GOP to overcome its difficult history with black voters.

"I can't go to the party with Democrats right now because they are playing some strange music," said Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr., a registered Democrat and pastor of Hope Christian Church in College Park. Jackson said he opposes abortion rights and same-sex marriage.
...

Since conservative icon Barry M. Goldwater ran for president in 1964, Republican presidential candidates have, on average, captured less than 12 percent of the black vote, according to David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington research organization.

The problem he said, is that Republicans often are perceived as hostile to the concerns of black voters, whether it is affirmative action, the stubbornly high black unemployment rate or better funding for urban schools.
...
"The willingness to go after the black vote is the first big hurdle we had to overcome," Gillespie said. Now, he said, "there is a cultural barrier we have to overcome, in terms of the long-standing affiliation black voters have with the Democratic Party."
...
"There are some obvious signs that we are on the verge of a breakthrough when you look at what we have to do to be successful," said Michael Williams, a black Republican elected to the Texas Railroad Commission, a statewide energy board. "If we can just move to 20 or 25 percent of the African American vote, that is a cataclysmic change in vote count."
...
Often, Mehlman speaks in deeply personal terms. He told the black journalists that he views open housing, voting rights and civil rights bills passed in the 1960s as the most important laws of the 20th century. He also invoked his late grandfather, a Baltimore shopkeeper, who was a member of the NAACP.
...

At some point one is compelled to ask, do Republican’s all collectively suffer from that “Memento” neurological disorder?

Do they simply lack the ability to form any new memories past, oh, 1952?

You hear Gingrich daubing his piggy-eyes and decrying the lack of civility in public discourse... apparently hoping that the rest of us are so politically A.D.D. and distracted by shiny objects as the average Republican that we’ll all forget that it was Newt! (with his GOPAC Little Red Book) who worked tirelessly to make using a specific, approved list of hatespeech words and phrases to personally vilify and destroy opponents as routine a Republican tactic as the jerking off into the Confederate Flag.

You hear the Republicans categorically refusing the discuss the Downing Street Memo, the complete collapse of the casus belli for the war in Iraq, the rampant corruption and looting and terrorist recruiting windfalls that war has led to...not because any of it lacks the whiff of High Crimes for which the GOP are always anxious to persecute others (even when they have to make it up) , but because all of that happened five minutes ago.

And you hear Ken Mehlman anxious to market Lincoln to the masses while at the same time very pointedly ignoring the fact that the unreconstructed lineal descendants of the same traitors who went to war again Lincoln’s United States over their right to keep human beings as chattel...these despicable Jeff Davis worshippin’, American Swastika flyin’ chuds now run the political party for which Ken Mehlman is the hired spokesmodel?

Poor, poor Republicans.

They’ve got this, uh, “Negro” problem.

Which, to be brutally candid, comes down to this: Can’t live with ‘em, and can’t lynch ‘em anymore.

And there is a certain, weird synchronicity between the card Ken Mehlman is trying to palm, and the current Intelligent Design nonsense, and basically the whole rest of the Republican Agenda.

Specifically, that to believe a single word that comes out of their lying Gin Holes you have to step way, waaaaay over the “open minded”-line and smack into I-Drink-Gasoline blind-assed, brain-damaged petro-snockered not to notice the veritable Forest Primeval of Big, Ugly Truths about the GOP that tower over the whole party, positively striking anyone who is not a congenital idiot hip and thigh, cheek and chin.

As wretched a sliver of toenail fungus as Ken Mehlman is, I would have given him good marks for identifying the problem -- “Republican candidates who exploited racial resentments to solidify white support, he added, were simply wrong.” – if he didn’t turn right around and try to pretend that Bush did not use appeals to intolerance (specifically his speech at Bob Jones) as a routine party of the GOP Southern Strategy.

Distancing yourself from your past because you have actually changed your wicked ways and atoned for your sins is one thing: trying to distance yourself for what you did FIVE MINUTES AGO, while you are still spattered with the fresh blood of your crimes, is ludicrous and insulting and the hallmark of drunks and sociopaths.

See Ken, it is not a few, isolated Republican Candidates in some misty past that exploited hate to snag elected office: that is the Republican Party. That is your playbook. This is how you win, and to hear the spokesminion of the GOP whinge on with a wink-an-a-nod about how he is “Shocked, shocked to learn that Gambling is going on inside the GOP,” while his pockets are stuffed to overflowing with electoral ill-gotten gains would be cartoon-laughable if it weren’t also so grotesquely insulting.

You want to show you’re serious?

Kick them out, Ken. It’s as simple as that.

C’mon, Ken: 2004 shows what Republicans do when they’re deadly serious. Crack open the GOP piggy-bank and hire a top-shelf marketing firm run a couple of hundred Swiftboat”-strong ads against the haters in your party. Call out Republicans who use intolerance as just another tool in the get-out-the-vote toolbelt by name.

Repudiate them.

Which leads me to ask, believe it or not, What do the 2004 Elections and Ohio’s surprise insurgent candidacy of Paul Hackett have in common?

Numbers. Stats. The little thingies under the !@#$%^&*() symbols on your keyboard that makes a Quant Jock’s heart sing, baby!

2004 was the GOP maxing out their Douchebag Credit Card. 2004 was them spending every last bit of energy and cunning to pick the shelves clean of every last racist, gay basher, and Christopath, under optimal conditions, during a time of war, with the Commander-in-Chief (when he wasn’t getting that all-important beauty sleep down in Rancho Jim Beam) was personally out stumping, deploying the whole, vast resources of the Executive Office to tell people that if your didn’t vote Buch/Cheney...terrorists would kill your children.

And he only won by 100,000 votes in Ohio.

One can disagree about the honesty of those numbers, or the means used to get them, but you can’t ignore the fact that, running flat-out, afterburners WIDE open, leaving no reservoir of slime untapped – with the wind roaring at their back -- the All Powerful GOP came thiiiis close to losing it all.

Like the parasitic organisms that they are, they have ridden their Segregation Hobby Horse as far as they can, and it’s still not enough. It’s still not a reliable source of nutrients. They need more. They need a “nest egg”.

The problem, of course, is that if the day ever dawned that the Jeff Davis Dance Party ever started making serious, concrete efforts at rapprochement with the African American Community, AND started backing up the weak reeds of Kenny’s words with actual action, the Dixiecrats -- who form that solid, I-doesn’t-matter-how-much-you-piss-in-our-faces, cancerous heart of the GOP -- would bail.

And the Republican Party would collapse overnight.

However, for no additional charge, I will let the Kenny-bunk-mate in on a little secret: If ever the Republican Party were to actually bother to disinter the Rosetta Stone of its Original Values and act on them, they and I would have a lot to talk about.

Step away from the Dominionists and bigots and the traitors who ginned up ruinous war, and start talking about Old School conservative principles – good stewardship of the environment (instead of shitting on Science because facts are inconvenient), sane fiscal discipline (instead penury of peons and tax-cuts forever for the richest humans who ever lived) and not trying to ram some wretched perversion of Christianity down everyone else’s throat – and there is room to have a discussion.

Here’s another, small idea.

Go over the website of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies – one of the organizations cited in the article – and actually read this quote from their front page:

“Blacks depend on the Social Security System (OASDI) more than whites. 37% of black seniors depend exclusively on Social Security for their income, compared to 18% of white seniors." Black workers are also nearly twice as likely to collect disability insurance payments (4.2%) as whites (2.8%), and proportionately more black children receive survivor benefits (21.6%) than are in the general population (15.2%).”

And then stop trying to gutfuck Social Security.

Walk the Talk, Ken, and quit pretending that racist policies are just falling unbidden out of the sky, and that you have no control over them. Quit pretending the behavior of Republican candidates has nothing to do with the Republican party.

But you have to actually do that shit, instead of trying to market reeking poison as yummy-yummy pecan pie and assuming the rest of the world is too stupid to notice.

Until them you’re just a mumbling fraud, trying to pick a few pockets with blood-slick hands and hoping no one will notice.

Until then, CUE...

Ken Mehlman, holding the GOP in his clammy hands.

Priest: Ken Francis Mehlman -- do you renounce Dixiecrats?

Ken: I do renounce him.

Priest: And all their works?

Ken: I do renounce them.

Priest: And all their pomps?

Ken: I do renounce them.


Uhhh, then again...



...maybe not so much.


Still, Godfather, that whole “McCain has a black baby” thing?

Worked like a fucking charm.

So you've got that going for you.

End of 2005 repost.

No Half Measures

Trump Preps The Epstein Files For Limited Release

From Newsweek:

Donald Trump's Name in Jeffrey Epstein Files Redacted by FBI: Report

Lincoln once said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

I'm sure Trump's ham-fisted, panic-sweat-soaked shenanigans will continue to fool most of MAGA idiots because the Republican base has always been the "some of the people" who can be fooled all of the time.

Burn The Lifeboats

Elon Musk 2025 is...

...Andrew Yang 2020...

...No Labels 2010 ("Dead Center") ...

...Matthew Dowd 2016 ("So, Four Years Later, How's That Whole "Disrupt The K'rupt Duopoly!" Thing Working Out?") ...

...Ralph Nader 2000...

...George Wallace, 1968...

..Jill Stein, every fucking time:

All of these the spawn of the biggest lie in American politics.  The lie whose ubiquity has done more to warp American politics than any other.  The Big Lies that makes all the smaller lies possible.  And because I'm rather tired today, in lieu of brand new words the explain that Big Lie, I'm gonna drop in excerpt from eight years ago and take my wife out to lunch at a local diner.  

From "The Great White Party".

...

Because even as they they stood in the ruins of the Republican Bush Administration -- even as they watched the Republican Congress labor single-mindedly to lie, slander and sabotage the Obama Administration's Herculean efforts to clean up the ruins of the Republican Bush Administration and get us back on our feet -- nothing could override the frantic-junkie desperation of the Beltway brain caste to go right on pretending that Both Sides Do It.

And they're rich. 

And influential. 

And their bosses are rich and influential.  And the lobbyists with whom they crossbreed are rich and influential.  And the teevee networks that deliver their lies to millions and who depend on never offending anyone are crazy rich and influential.  And the Republican moles posing as "Independents" who knew god damn well that "Both Siderism" is the Big Lie that keeps the Right propped up are rich and influential.  

Which is why there has always been a shit-ton of money and job security available to any unprincipled hack willing to help the Beltway prop up it's foundational Big Lie of Both Sides Do It.

On the other hand, there is no profit or prestige to be found in telling the truth about the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It, for the same reason there is no profit or prestige in telling the Mayor of the "a coastal town in southern Norway" and Chairman of the Baths' Committee that the town's very lucrative spa is making people sick.

...

Peter Stockmann. —for his own family, as I was saying, as well as for the town he lives in.

Dr. Stockmann. It is I who have the real good of the town at heart! I want to lay bare the defects that sooner or later must come to the light of day. I will show whether I love my native town.

Peter Stockmann. You, who in your blind obstinacy want to cut off the most important source of the town's welfare?

Dr. Stockmann. The source is poisoned, man! Are you mad? We are making our living by retailing filth and corruption! The whole of our flourishing municipal life derives its sustenance from a lie!

Peter Stockmann. All imagination—or something even worse. The man who can throw out such offensive insinuations about his native town must be an enemy to our community.

... 

In Elon's case, he has hit Stage Five of the Seven Stages of Wingnut Grift.

Stage 1:  Completely clueless.

Stage 2: Buying into ludicrous MAGA/QAnon conspiracy theories about why things are fucked.

Stage 3:  Finding out the Right played you for a chump.

Stage 4:  Blame Both Sides.

Stage 5:  Third Party!!!

No Half Measures