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.
(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.
Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over.Where has the anti-Trump energy gone?by Ross Barkan
Oh sweet summer child.
Mr. Barkan was a mere stripling lad of 13 back in 2003, so maybe he is unfamiliar with the early work of his most famous New York Times colleague: Mr. David Brooks. At the time Mr. Brooks was still being paid to stomp stupid (his word), crazy (his word) Liberals for Bloody Bill Kristol at the now-defunct Weekly Standard and was confidently making sneeringly belligerent declarations about a different resistance during a different struggle.
The war was over. The Good Guys had triumphed. Neoconservatism had been vindicated. And it was time for the resistance to crawl under a nearby porch and quietly die, or dry up and blow away or dissolve into laughably delusional absurdism (emphasis added.)
The Collapse of the Dream Palaces
By
David Brooks
April 28, 2003 4:00 am
Now that the war in Iraq is over, we’ll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami’s phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are...
My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.
In other words, there will be no magic “Aha!” moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam’s remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, “We were wrong. Bush was right.” They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war’s opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago...
Three days later, Bush was standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln giving his "Mission Accomplished" speech.
And the pundits swooooned.
This is all from a retrospective in The Huffington Post, May 1, 2008 (emphasis added):
Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a "hero" and boomed, "He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics." He added: "Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple."
PBS' Gwen Ifill said Bush was "part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan."
On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, "The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a -- on a carrier landing."
Bob Schieffer on CBS said: "As far as I'm concerned, that was one of the great pictures of all time." His guest, Joe Klein, responded: "Well, that was probably the coolest presidential image since Bill Pullman played the jet fighter pilot in the movie Independence Day. That was the first thing that came to mind for me."
Everyone agreed the Democrats and antiwar critics were now on the run.
Then, after getting his ass kicked by John Kerry in every debate and relying on one of the most savage slander-and-gay-bashing campaigns in modern history (engineered by Resistance Hero Matthew Dowd and Karl Rove, with a big assist from Fox News and the Swiftboat Scumbags), the incompetent, dry-drunk halfwit president won re-election in November of 2004.
And a thousand blogs were born.
Within a year, the Bush administration (defenestration?) started to fall apart in ways the Republican White House could no longer cover up and the Conservative media could no longer out-shout. It got so bad that by April of 2006, with Iraq now in complete, murderous chaos, the Bush White House felt it necessary to reassure everyone that Rummy was doing a heckuva job!
President Bush Expresses Full Support, Appreciation for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
Earlier today I spoke with Don Rumsfeld about ongoing military operations in the Global War on Terror. I reiterated my strong support for his leadership during this historic and challenging time for our Nation.
Bush Ousts Embattled Rumsfeld; Democrats Near Control of Senate
Ex-CIA Chief Robert Gates Nominated to Lead Pentagon
By this point, the blogs had focused so much resistance energy that they were able to help Ned Lamont kick the ass of incumbent senator and Iraq war pimp, Holy Joe Lieberman, in a free and fair Democratic primary.
This caused Ross Barkan's future New York Times colleague, David Brooks, to lose his fucking mind and accuse the "flamers" of the Liberal blogosphere of being the moral equivalent of corrupt Republican waterhead thug Tom DeLay in an infamous column about which I have written many times.
Sadly, with the energetic help of the Connecticut Republican party and many of the Democratic party's incumbent senators -- including, shamefully. then-Illinois senator, Barack Obama -- Lieberman managed to cook up a third party (the Connecticut for Lieberman Party) under whose banner he ran and won in the 2006 general election.
As you may recall, Joe Lieberman paid Obama back for his political largesse when he needed the mot back by (checks notes) stabbing Obama in the back on the Affordable Car Act.
Why Joe Lieberman is holding Barack Obama to ransom over healthcare
Democrats accuse Gore's former running mate of bitterness and vanity after he uses his deciding vote in Congress to water down president's reforms
So, getting back around to the original point of this post in a getting-back-around-to sort of way, let's finish up with the inimitable Rick Perlstein on the SuckerBorg site yesterday:
It's part of our cultural crisis that people have no compunctions about writing things off the top of their head without even a pretense of evaluating evidence.
Today New York Times Magazine ran just such an evidence-free wank, "Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over.
Where has the anti-Trump energy gone?"
Here is a picture of a standing-room-only meeting yesterday of Chicagoans taking in detailed instruction about how to document and respond to ICE raids. A picture of similar-sized crowd at a City Hall press conference of the people organizing against denuding Chicago's sanctuary city ordinance (we won, 39-11). And a picture two hundred people waiting in line for the drawing for seven spots to speak in the public comment at the City Council meeting.
Jonathan Swift: " It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom." Folly, truly: a piece like that performs a ritual of innocence among agenda-setting elite political journalists by evading its own agency: it says something that is not so; but, saying it, may help make it so.
There is energy to spare out here in the Real World.
It's just that at the moment, much of it is scattered by grief and shock and fear, so has not yet gathered itself into a siege engine capable of smashing the American Fascist Party to smithereens.
Not yet.
“This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
Remember how, after the Nazis used tanks, bombers and submarines in their war of global conquest, the Allies decided not to use tanks or bombers or submarines or any of that stuff because using the weapons of the enemy to defeat the enemy was, y'know, rude and uncivilized?
Yeah.
Me neither.
Remember how, after Eisenhower and friends stomped the shit out of the Nazis, and Naziism was outlawed in Germany and we put the judges who enabled the Nazis on trial and we rewrote the German constitution to put unions on an equal footing with management, Americans were so appalled at his behavior that they sent Eisenhower packing the minute he retired from the military?
Yeah.
Me neither.
So here's my one suggestion for Democrats running for office, past present and future.
Ready?
For fuck's sake stop promising to "unite" the country.
Not only is this is completely impossible, but you look like an idiot when you try because it gives other people -- people who hate you and want to destroy you -- the power force you to fail.
It's like...promising you won't let me shoot my own dick off. Then -- haha! -- I shoot my own dick off just to fucking spite you. Sure, now I'm dickless and bleeding, but no matter. The question the media won't be asking is,"Jesus, man, why did you shoot your own dick off?"
Oh my no.
The only questions the media will be asking over and over again is why you didn't stop me. And if I do get any legacy media play at all, I'll just stand there, dickless, bleeding, pretending to look forlorn, looking into the camera, saying tearfully, "But he promised he wouldn't let this happen! He promised!!!"
Once the trap is sprung you are free to bitch and complain all you want about how this was all a setup, and how they did it deliberately. And guess what? The media will laugh at you as a trifling amature, because of course it was all a setup. Of course it was deliberate. They wanted to destroy you. They made it very, very clear that this was their goal, our loud and in public many times. And by giving your enemies the power to make you break your promise, you hand them the means to do it, while you're forced stand by. Impotent. Powerless to stop it.
Who's dickless now?
So you succumb. Maybe you can salvage this situation and still Unite The People if you just offer compromise after compromise, all in good faith of course. Breaking off bigger and bigger pieces of the promises you made to the people who actually support you, and feeding those pieces to the ghouls who hate you. You try to appeal to their innate sense of decadency. Remind them that we're all here to solve our common problems and serve the American people.
This is madness.
They have no sense of decency, and neither do the bigots and imbeciles who elected them. Their only "common problem" is you, ya' baby-killing commie bastard. And the only thing they want to "serve" is your ass up on a silver platter with a side order of Liberal tears to the shrieking, capering mob of meatheads who voted them into office in the first place.
And the icing on the cake? The more you talk of all the noble plans you have to make their lives better, the louder they'll mock and condemn you as a condescending college soy-boy Death Paneler talking down to the regular folk. Just who the hell do you think you are?
Hey dum-dum, you don't win elections running on hope and joy and a bright shared future. If you're very lucky, that might keep you the voters you've already got. And you also don't win elections by paying the Lincoln Project tens of millions of dollars to cut ads which are nothing but political PornHub for credulous progressives because -- Hell Ya! -- it's finally telling "the people" what a monster Trump is! Duh! Of course he's a monster. Republican voters know he's a monster. That's why they love him. That's why they vote for them.
Because do you know what you never hear Republicans talking about? Our bright, shared future. You don't hear them running their mouths about hope and joy. Fuck no. They talk exclusively about fear and paranoia and enemies. Foreign enemies and the enemies within. About how you and your hordes of foreigner rapists and trannies and smug, sinister college-educated bureaucrats have stolen the future of all right-thinking Murricans, and how they're going to kick some ass, break some heads and take Murrica's future back for all right-thinking Murricans.
If Democrats want to win, they're going to have learn how to scare the living shit out of the millions of stupids who are forever meandering around in the political "center" waiting for someone to tell them what to think. I have some thoughts of the subject for anyone who'd like to pay me an unholy amount of money for my insights, but for now I'd recommend watching Moneyball 10 or 12 times and taking to heart the lessons it teaches.
