Gods Die.

 

"And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered." -- Neil Gaiman

Slowly, grindingly the hydraulic pressure of reality drive Never Trumpers -- who still openly despise Liberals -- to adopt the Liberal critiques of the party and movement to which the dedicated their entire adult lives and which, in the end, drove them out.  

No wonder they still despise us.

Burn The Lifeboats

Jerry's Kids Redux

A couple of days ago I put up a post reminding whoever reads this blog that the Republican party's dependence on Conservative Evangelical scumbags like Jerry Falwell, Jr. (which I dubbed "Christopaths" 18 years ago and, by God, I'm gonna keep using it until it catches on and makes me as rich as "dumpster fire" made me!) did not, in fact, begin in 2016.  That the unholy union between unslakable Republican ambition and God-bothering grifters like Jerry Falwell, Sr. goes way, way back to the days of Ronald Reagan.  

Yes, I know it began before that, so please don't inundate me with  "Well, technically..."s or "You forgot about..."s.  Let's just stipulate, here and now, that you're all very clever and know many thing and move on, shall we?

What brings me back to Falwell this morning is a story and a podcast.

The story is the one about Watergate and John Dean at a point when Nixon was already up to his ass in the coverup, and Dean came to him to warn him about there being "a cancer on the presidency".  

Well, yeah, but the cancer on the presidency was the president, so good luck with that.  

Nixon then asked Dean to take all his notes and go away to Camp David and prepare for him a full report on this Watergate matter, and then come back and submit that report to Nixon.  Dean went to Camp David and started work, but quickly figured out that any such report would have to include Dean's own involvement.  And, not being an idiot, Dean also figured out that, once he submitted the report to Nixon, Nixon would claim that this was the Very First Time he was hearing about this matter!  Then he'd hang the whole thing around Dean's neck and make him the fall guy.  That was when Dean decamped from Camp David and went to go see the the senate Watergate investigators.  He had a story to tell.  

I mention this story because, since the rise of Trump, the "My God!  This is the first I am hearing about this!" lie has become a staple on  pretty much every Never Trump thing.

You're telling me that there's racism going on!?  In the Party of Lincoln?!  

Shut the front door!  How did this happen!!

You're telling me that the clowns on Conservative talk radio have just been making shit up to scare the rubes? That it's been a bad influence on society?!?  

OMG how did this happen!!

I'm shocked -- shocked! -- I see a noble enterprise like Fox News slowly turning into a right-wing propaganda machine since Trump was elected.  

Remember the Good Old Days, when it was awesome?

Just yesterday, Resistance Hero Rick Wilson stashed his Confederate Flag/"The South Shall Rise Again" cooler out of sight long enough land to squarely on my "No Fair Remembering Stuff" podcast corner dressed up as Mr. "Holy shit!  You mean the Republican Party has been full of Republicans all along!!" guy.  

I wrote it up here, and I swear I thought I was through with this, at least for the weekend.

But, of course, the Never Trump war on history never ends.  And so, this morning, over my whiskey and cornflakes...  

...Charlie Sykes, listening in wide-eared wonder to the stunning revelation that the Republican party was actually in bed with the Christopaths...even before Donald Trump was elected!! 

Sykes:  ..and of course the whole Trump era, and you have this, again, this extraordinary line where you say, "I couldn't help but wonder if the plot twist to the story of American conservative Christianity was that what we thought was the Shire was Mordor all along."

Moore:  It's kind of like watching The Sixth Sense or some other M. Night Shyamalan movie for the second time because then you can see how all of these things fit together that previously... I mean my gut would say to me, what's going on? I mean Glenn Beck is doing the restoring honor message on the National Mall in 2010?   And you have a lot of my fellow evangelicals saying this is preaching the gospel.  But I would think, yeah, this is just an anomaly.  It's something that's on the fringe.  And then later we turn around and see it's not fringe at all. And I think maybe the... the moment that... that became clearest to me was October 7th, 2016. I remember the day when the Access Hollywood tape was released...

It goes on like that.  Sykes obsessing that, since Trump the Christopaths have really lost their way.

Moore (responding as if he had just personally decrypted this from the Mayan codex) that, actually, the Christopaths influence on the Republican party may extend back into the mists of...The Before Time.

The following is not actual dialogue from the podcast..

Sykes:  You're shitting me!

Moore:  I am not.  There is evidence of Christopaths having a lot of clout within the GOP even before Trump came down the escalator.

Sykes:  But I've been involved at the highest levels of the Republican party and Conservative media for decades?  How could I have possibly missed this?

Moore:  We all missed it, Charlie.  They were so stealthy, these Christopaths.  So subtle and sneaky and silent.  They were like fucking ninjas!  Invisible all this time and then, whamo!  Suddenly they're everywhere!  

By now, none of this surprises me.  After all, 18 years ago, based on what was plainly obvious all around us, I wrote a parable about where this Republican/Christopath alliance was headed. And 18 years later, I wouldn't change a word.

All I'm listening for now is the next phase of this by-now familiar "My God!  This is the first I am hearing about this!" dodge.  Specifically, the sound of some prominent Never Trumper groping around in the dark looking for any way -- any way at all -- that they can plausibly blame this on us dirty, godless Liberals.

Burn The Lifeboats

There. Is. No. Tea. Party: The Epilogue Continues

Funny story.  True story.

Once upon a time, about a fucking decade ago...

...millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done for the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat of 1,000 suns.  In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.

But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.

But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.

No the real story is how massively well-funded and coordinated this lie was by Fox News and all the usual loathsome creatures of the Right (Media Matters has a sampling of Fox News' wall-to-wall barrage of "These are just plain folks rising spontaneously up again the Evil Gummit!" propaganda here.) The real story was how quickly and cravenly the "respectable" media went along with this transparent hoax.  In Washington D.C., David Brooks turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that they were the salt of the Earth,  In Chicago, the local PBS affiliate went all-in with the "We've never even paid attention to politics before" teabagger line of bullshit, failing to do even the most minimal research to find out who they were actually interviewing and what their actual political affiliations really were.  Even the "liberal" New York Times could only manage a tepid, he said/she said, Both Siderist take on this "tea party" thing in which some people say it's a real movement full of awesome, while others say it's just ten square acres of Koch-funded AstroTurf, so who really knows?

And the only people straight up calling bullshit on the whole scam?

Surprise!  Those dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically NOT a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam... 

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

So here we are, a decade later.

And now that everything we dirty, disreputable Liberals had long since warned about has long since come to pass,  what story do I find running away with social media morning?  (From the WaPo)

“It turns out a lot of them were not in favor of limiting the size of government, they were just opposed to the president at the time,” said [Justin] Amash, who helped found the tea party-aligned House Freedom Caucus. “The tea party is largely gone. It was replaced with nationalism and protectionism and the general philosophy of the party now under Trump.”

Yet another Republican being elevated to the rank of Patriot Hero First Class by bravely noticing that his Republican party was full of Republicans all along.

So my question is, how the hell can I get myself graded on that curve?

Behold, a Tip Jar!

My Name Is a Killing Word

I must say that I was very excited to learn just yesterday that I have Mystic Weirding Powers.

It's true.

I really thought that this "weirding" business was just a clever device Frank Herbert made up to move the plot along, and frankly, as a shitty Libtard blogger for the past 13 years, up until now there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever that I had ever had any influence on anyone's opinion of anything.

But now, quite suddenly, I learn that all it will take for Democrats to lose in the Fall is a few posts from me casting a critical eye on the good faith of our freshly minted (and apparently incredibly fragile) Never Trump besties. 

All it will take is a few posts from me posing a few very simple, blunt questions to our new True Conservative allies on a topic about which they have been only too happy lecture us endlessly for the past 30 years -- Personal Responsibility -- and somehow we're all fuuucked.

It is extremely important to win November's elections and the elections in 2020. When @JoeNBC is criticizing the people who we are trying to defeat now and in the future, it only helps Trump to attack Trump's critics based on what may be their past mistakes. #CircularFiringSquad https://t.co/v82qgY7ATo

— RonSupportsYou (@RonSupportsYou) July 9, 2018

My name is a killing word.

Fear me. 

Or hit my tip jar. 

Either way works for me.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

The People's Front of Republicanism

Another in my long-running series on Republican Detachment Disorder.

These days you can't throw yourself down a flight of stairs without landing in the front row of the ongoing comic opera that is The People's Front of Republicanism as they belligerently insist that the Republican People's Front aren't real Republicans.

From Michael Gerson's disquisition in The Washington Post on the rise of Roy Moore which acts as if Moore had just precipitated out of thin air instead of -- just like Trump -- being the perfectly logical and predictable destination of Mr. Gerson's Republican party based on where it has been plainly going for the past 40 years --

No, Moore is not really a theonomist. The boundaries of his worldview, it turns out, almost exactly coincide with those of the Breitbart agenda. Moore’s study of divine law has led him, in the end, to the shabby, third-rate gospel of Stephen K. Bannon.

-- to the going's on at my own state capitol --

McCann: Rauner Is ‘Not A Real Republican’: A local lawmaker isn’t just criticizing Governor Bruce… https://t.co/t7Hke6BUXV #DependOnUs

— 94.7 & 970 WMAY (@NewsTalkWMAY) September 29, 2017

-- it is clear that the "No True Scotsman" protocol is in effect party-wide.

I even listened to the latest episode of "With Friends Like These" to see if  the assertion made to me by Ana Marie Cox was actually true:

Listen to the episode, I think you’ll find I don’t let him off the hook.

— With Friends (@crooked_friends) September 29, 2017

I listened very carefully.  I made many notes.   And I reached several conclusions.

First, upspeaking the end of your sentences a couple of times to indicate a slightly increasing level of dubiety does not rise to the level of not letting Mr. Steele off the hook.  Not even close.

Second, if you think slightly upspeaking the end of a couple of sentences actually means you are holding a Republican accountable for the nonsense they're peddling,  maybe that explains why we Liberals lose so goddamn much.

Third, according to Mr. Steele, the reason he is a Republican is that, back in 1977, while living in a home with a dynamite mom (I have a dynamite mom too, so at least we have that in common) and pictures of JFK, MLK and Jesus on the wall, he researched the party and discovered that Harriet Tubman was pretty cool.  So he decided that he wanted to join the Republican party...as it existed in 1893.

Beyond that, the simple, irreducible truth is that Mr. Steele has made a very comfortable life for himself fronting for a party of racists, con men, theocrats, gun nuts, xenophobes, imbeciles, misogynists, demagogues and assorted other malfunctioning humans and he will go right on doing so as long as A) the checks clear and, B) he can continue to hold himself suspended in a dissociative state of denial, dissembling and dismissal.

So here we go...

Like virtually every other Republican I know, Mr. Steele hides the indefensible absurdity of his political position behind a welter of vainglorious bullshit (rush transcript from Ms. Cox's podcast) --

Steele:  I've run into the racism.  I've dealt with the bullshit.  All that.  But I also look at what I have been able to do in the party.  I also look at what I have been able to accomplish.  And the voice that I can try to represent on some critical issues at critical times.

-- and Both Siderist nonsense in which, again, like virtually ever fucking Republican in Christendom, he keeps attributing distinctly Republican malice and depravity to "Congress" and "politicians" and "the voters" and "the people" and "us" and "the country".

And, conversely, Mr. Steele inclusively absorbs distinctly non-Republican actions and attitudes into the category of things "we" are doing.

"We" had this march on Washington. "We" elected a black president.  And so "we" dumbed ourselves down about being post-racial, and "we" don't want to talk about "it".  

Not since "A Rose for Emily" has the second-person plural voice worked this hard:

Steele: This is what happened to Hillary and the Democrats. They were so concerned with the polls and the statistics and "the country" was, like, we're not feelin' her.  We're not feelin' that.  We're not over here where you think we are. 

See, according to Mr. Steele, polls don't count and numbers are meaningless because "real people" lie to pollsters all the time.  In fact, black people will vote in large numbers to cut their own economic throats "just to fuck with you."  Because Political Correctness!

But what about factors like the GOP's massive, coordinated, well-financed program of voter suppression?

Steele:  You say voter suppression on the Republican side.  I say voter control on the Democratic side.  It works on Both Sides. I'm beyond excuse-making.  I want to get to why things don't work the way we want it to work.

And of course, inevitably, this...

Steele: The president is much more of a Democrat than he is a Republican.  He's not a Republican. He's certainly not a Conservative.

It went on and on like that, most of so howlingly, predictably preposterous in all the ways that all Republican Detachment Disorderlies are howlingly, predictably preposterous these days that any of it could have been easily knocked to bits and vivisected, live, on-stage, if that had been Ms. Cox's goal.  

But Mr. Steele is a dear friend of hers.  The man she called for coffee and consolation the day after President Stupid was elected.  So she let one slow pitch after another glide over the plate untouched.

I promised Ms. Cox (whose podcast I listen to fairly regularly even though she doesn't listen to mine)  to hear her out before critiquing her efforts.

I have now kept my promise.

In summary, my opinion of Mr. Steele was not budged one iota from where it was back in the Olden Days when Lower Manhattanite would make mock of Mr. Steele's hi-larious hijinks.  

Not one iota from when I wrote this one year ago:

Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Steele, Patient Zero

While some scientists believe that Republican Detachment Disorder is a Trump-era affliction, in fact, the RDD pre-dates the rise of Il Douche by many years.

For example, back in 2010, between excursions to bondage-themed strip clubs and lecturing George Stephanopoulos that government jobs aren't real jobs, Michael Steele -- the RNC's "Break Glass in Case the Democrats Elect a Black Guy" desperation-hire -- was faced with a vexing demographic problem:  98% of African-Americans hated the Republican party.

And like his predecessor (Ken Mehlman, a closeted, self-loathing gay American who fronted for the virulently anti-gay party) Mr. Steele (a self-loathing African-American who fronted for the racist party.  Are you noticing a pattern?) was forced by the existence of well-documented historical fact (man, those were the days) to acknowledge the existence of something called "The Southern Strategy".

From TPM in 2010:

Steele: African-Americans 'Really Don't Have A Reason' To Vote GOP

Appearing Tuesday at DePaul University in Chicago, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said that the Republican Party has not given African-Americans a reason to vote for them.

"You really don't have a reason to, to be honest -- we haven't done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True," said Steele, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Steele said how the Republican party had been founded as a pro-civil rights party, with Frederick Douglass among its early members. However, Steele explained, the Republican Party has alienated those voters: "For the last 40-plus years we had a 'Southern Strategy' that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South...

However, Mr. Steele quickly added that the GOP's racism had ended long before his time:

...Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, 'Bubba' went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton."

And yet based on the long, grim-faced sad I just saw Mr. Steele having on MSNBC this morning (no video available yet), like herpes, all of the seething racism that powers the GOP and somehow magically disappeared during Mr. Steele's time as a party leader...

...has magically reappeared now that he has left!

How amazing!

You see, RDD appears in many forms.

Sometimes it is of the relapsing/remitting Michael Steele variety in which party loyalty (and unhinged Liberals bashing) appears and disappears depending on who is footing the bill.

Sometimes it a mass pandemic event like the "Tea Party" in which millions of life-long Republican racists who were eager to get a jump on hating the Kenyan Usurper from Day One without having to answer a lot of embarrassing questions about all the shit they had been talking for the previous eight years, all burned their "Bush/Cheney 04" lawn signs, put on funny hats and swore on the lives of their children that they had never even heard of Dubya.  Just look at their fucking tee-shirts!  These good ol' boys are obviously Constitutional Conservative Christian Libertarian Independent Patriots, so why would you come 'round here callin' 'em Re-publicans.

What are ya, ignernt!

See like all Republican cowards tragically afflicted with RDD, the madness into which the GOP has been steadily descending for the last 40 years is never, ever about them.  Never about the things they said and did, the abominations they countenanced, the beasts they helped tinker together and turn loose.

The blame is always laid at the feet of some other group of irresponsible Republican elites waaaay over there.

Some other group of craven Republican bigots who let us all down.

Oh, and the Kenyan Usurper.

Who pals around with terrorists and works tirelessly to destroy Murrica.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is accusing President Obama of intentionally weakening America at home and abroad. 

“It’s now abundantly clear: Barack Obama has deliberately weakened America,” Rubio said early Monday during a speech on national security at the American Legion in Hooksett, N.H.

And Hillary Clinton, of course.

Who is kissing cousins with Lucifer.

And should be locked up.

Obviously.

There are no more party insiders or outsiders or victims or naifs on the Right any more.

There are only those who long ago walked away from Omelas or refused to live there in the first place, and those who stayed and profited because deep down they either do not care about the bigotry and sadism that powers their party, or they just plain revel in it.

On the Right there are only collaborators, co-conspirators and quislings now, and as Brother Charlie Pierce notes, Trump bought them all at fire-sale prices:

Last Night Chris Christie Had the Living Definition of a Shit-Eating Grin on His Face

Trump owns them all now.

CLEVELAND, OHIO—Once the deed was done, and folks were filtering out to celebrate the elevation of He, Trump to the toppermost of the poppermost of the Republican Party, it was time for the Volksgerichtshof portion of the festivities. One after another, the establishment pols came rolling out to pledge their undying fealty to the new boss. I'm surprised that He, Trump let them keep their belts on so their pants wouldn't fall down...

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Knockin' On Satan's Door

Mama take this badge from me

I can't use it anymore

It's getting dark too dark to see

Feels like I'm knockin' on Satan's door..

One more Villager insider suddenly notices shit Liberals have been saying all along.

From The Washington Post:

This Harvard study is a powerful indictment of the media’s role in Donald Trump’s rise

By Chris Cillizza June 14 at 3:04 PM

I've written repeatedly — and self-righteously — about my belief that  ascribing the rise of Donald Trump in the Republican primary race to media complicity is ridiculous. And I believed every word.

But, a new study by Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University casts serious doubts on my position as it documents not only the outsized coverage Trump received — from TV and digital media — in the early days of his campaign but also how overwhelmingly positive that coverage was.

Let's go through a few of the most important findings from the study, which is based on "an analysis of thousands of news statements by CBS, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post" during 2015...

Let's not, shall we?  Because we here on the dirty, disreputable Left all fucking well know where this is going...

First comes the weakest "we-uh"culpa the WaPo lawyers will allow.

It's hard for me to look at the Shorenstein Center study and conclude anything other than that the media played a larger role in the rise of Trump than I previously believed.

Then comes every disclaimer in the toy box:

What I won't say is that we — as a media collective or The Washington Post in particular — let Trump off easy. We didn't. We wrote lots and lots of items digging into his proposals...

And I totally reject the various conspiracy theories about Trump's press coverage — the most common of which comes from Republicans and goes like this: "You guys handed Trump the nomination because you knew he'd be the easiest one for Hillary Clinton to beat."

Why did Trump get an outsized level of attention for someone in his polling place at the start of the race? A few things:

1. His celebrity. He is the first genuine celebrity of our reality TV age to run for president...

2. His approach. Journalists are biased in favor of good stories and quotable candidates...

3. His rise. The media may have helped Trump get off the ground. But once it became clear he was moving up, he became the story in a way that any fast-mover — Howard Dean in 2004, Mike Huckabee in 2008, etc. — does...

Followed by the grudging, obligatory promise to do better next time. Maybe even join up with David Brooks, drivin; around the country, solvin' journalism crimes and havin' adventures!  In the Journalism Mystery Machine! Which never seems to actually make it out of the driveway!

Still. For those of you who screamed when I wrote that the media bore no culpability in Trump's rise, you had it right. I'll try to do better next time.

Meanwhile, several pages away in the same publication, life-long Republican and writer of opinions, Kathleen Parker, is shocked!shocked! that Republican presidential nominee Donald Caligula Trump would stoop to demonizing the media!

First, we haul the by-now-well-worn fainting couch to the center of the stage and position it just right to show Ms. Parker's good side...

...
While Clinton spoke against anti-Muslim rhetoric, Trump leapt into the darkness with all four feet, snarling at President Obama’s lack of passion in addressing the Orlando slaughter and condemning him for refusing to use the words “radical Islamic terrorism” in identifying the enemy.

These charges are familiar enough, but this time Trump went a step further, suggesting that Obama resign from office and, conspiratorially, that there’s more going on than we know. Defaulting to his customary template, Trump shifted responsibility for these thoughts to “people.”

“Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind,” Trump said Monday on Fox News.

“And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”

And who are these people who can’t believe “it”? Trump’s Twitter followers? The tiny voices in his head?...

Oh!  Oh!  I know!  Call on me!  "These people", Ms. Parker, are the base of your fucking party. There are millions and millions of them.  They are bigoted and irredeemably stupid and they have very openly been calling this president an unAmerican traitor who pals around with terrorists since before he took the oath of office:

In fact, it is so weird that you don't seem to know who "these people" are because a whole bunch of these very people ate you alive eight years ago when you suggested that, just maybe, calling the president-elect an unAmerican traitor was just a wee bit beyond the pale (from Firedoglake)

Kathleen Parker Shocked To Find Her Party’s Full Of “Vicious”, “Threatening”, Delusional Wingnuts

By: Blue Texan Wednesday October 1, 2008

Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.
...
"After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

And she knows vicious. Here's Parker in 2003, on the Democratic presidential candidates:

Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot."

Suck it up, Kathleen. You've been tossing red meat to a caged rabid animal for two decades. No sympathy when it finally bites you.
Now, she whines:

...when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.

I'm truly speechless...

Ms. Parker has lived by this particular sword a good long time,  Helped forge it.  Honed it.  Made a career wielding it with a fearsome glee.

Now she cannot fucking fathom why her newspaper is being stabbed with it by the Republican nominee for president of the United States.

Now everybody be quiet -- cell phones off and no flash photography -- because Ms. Parkers Big Moment is here.

...
In a normal world, Trump would be booed off the stage. Instead, he is applauded (by some) for adding The Post to his list of journalistic organs denied access to his campaign.

The applause is disheartening, and is evidence that newspapers are little understood or appreciated. This is owing in part to a few notorious fabricators, who were duly punished, as well as a vast array of alternative news sources. But mostly to blame for the demonization of the media broadly are faux news media outlets, Republicans and their cohorts.

For decades now, conservative news sources, many of which are aggregators dependent upon the mainstream media for their bread and butter, have joined radio hosts in blasting traditional news sources. Kill the messenger is their operating principle. Republicans who benefit from this portrayal of the media tender their silence in errant gratitude...

And with a dramatic "thump". Ms. Parker hits the fainting couch like a pro and, like Blue Texan eight years ago, I am speechless.

When Ms. Parker says "faux news", she means Fox News -- an entire, multi-billion dollar Conservative media empire built explicitly around "killing the messenger" and calling people like me a traitor, all day, every day.

When she says "their cohorts" she means the entire, enabling Beltway establishment who rolled over for the GOP strategy of working the refs long ago:

And when she says "Republicans" she means people like Ms. Kathleen Parker.

Because demonizing the media as a tool of the Sekrit Liberal Conspiracy to Destroy Murrica has been the central pillar of Republican white grievance politics since Mr. Parker was in diapers, rubbing strained carrots in her hair.  It was a fully-operational GOP mainstay when William Safire was teaching Spiro Agnew how to say "Nattering nabobs of negativism" and when a young Pat Buchanan was just a barefoot lad, sittin' by the creek, reading "A Child's Golden Book Of Aryan Master Race Theory" and dreaming his big dreams.

And yet only now that Donald Trump has pulled this ancient and filthy sword from the wingnut stone and been declared the King Of All Teabaggers by overwhelming acclamation has Ms. Parker deigned to notice how far into darkness she and the rest of her cohorts have led us:

Mama put my pens in the ground

I shouldn't use them anymore

That cold black cloud is comin' down

Feels like I'm knockin' on Satan's door...

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to D'Souza

Recently, Andrew Sullivan was moved to criticize Dinesh D’Souza with language boosted straight outta Liberal Central Command.

D’Souza once believed in making serious arguments for a more conservative view of the world. It’s telling about his own evolution – and the degeneration of public discourse in America – that he has largely given that up in favor of really lucrative propaganda designed to monetize the polarized red state masses. He’s another example of the power of the right-wing media-industrial complex. Its ability to reward its propagandists with fantastic monetary awards without any need to engage critics has transformed conservatism in this country – for the gridlocked, ideological worse.

Sullivan's late-life discovery that Dirty Liberals have been right (over and over and over again) all along about the truly loathsome nature of his beloved Conservatism has had the incredibly amusing side-effect of driving Sully into an ideological St. Vitus' Dance every time he has to gavotte and skitter around that hugely inconvenient fact.

And while he now camps out on his own little ideological Principality of Sealand, smoking weed and extolling the virtues of Imaginary Libertarianism every bit as energetically as he used to preach the gospel of Imaginary Conservatism, like everyone else for whom it is economically and psychologically impossible to admit the scary truth at the heart of our crippling political dysfunction, Mr. Sullivan regularly plays the Both Sides game every bit as hard as David Gregory or Mark Halperin or Harold Ford Junior ever did.

This time around, during his critique of the D'hack D'Souza, Mr. Sullivan felt it was necessary to prop up his Both Siderist cred by pausing every few minutes to gratuitously punch Michael Moore in the face over and over again:

The Michael Moore Of The Right?

In an interview conducted as he awaits sentencing for violating campaign-finance law, Dinesh D’Souza reveals the inspiration behind the “documentaries” he’s produced, such as 2016: Obama’s America (trailer above) and America: Imagine the World Without Her:

I went back and watched Roger and Me, which I think is [Michael Moore's] best film. It’s got an interesting premise: General Motors closes down a big auto plant that his dad happened to work at, and he’s going to go find the CEO of General Motors and demand to know why. Now, it fails intellectually, because there is an obvious reason why General Motors might want to close that plant—i.e., it’s not making money. And one possible reason it’s not making money is General Motors has been paying people like his dad way too much and can make cars much cheaper in North Carolina or other countries. You can’t proceed without confronting that argument. But Michael Moore’s presumption is that the CEO of General Motors, Roger Smith, is just a mean guy who wants to deprive working people of their livelihood. So intellectually, it’s ridiculous.

But visually, cinematically, narratively, it works. This clownish Michael Moore showing up everywhere, the cops in dogged pursuit. All of that works. What Michael Moore understands is that a movie traffics in the language of emotion. The intellect is subordinate to that.

On the Obama question, D’Souza is actually copying Moore’s intellectually ridiculous oeuvre.

He starts, as Moore does, with a crude reductionist idea of a public figure – Obama as seeking revenge on a colonial America – undergirded by nothing but D’Souza’s own pop-psychologizing of Obama’s relationship with his own father. Everything else needed to explain the actions of a center-left president (who has waged more wars in more places than most American presidents) is moot. For D’Souza, a crude narrative of racial revenge is all that’s really necessary to understand the Obama presidency – and he then simply adds layer upon layer to this caricature, which feeds paranoia and conspiracy theories and glib ideology as powerfully as Moore once did...

However repellent to Mr. Sullivan's very, very delicate sensibilities Michael Moore's guerrilla  tactics and directorial style may be, there is absolutely no denying that the range of subjects Mr. Moore has taken on -- the gutting of our manufacturing base and the razing of the American Middle Class for the short-term profit of a few at the top...a scathing indictment of our political system's unhinged overreaction to 9/11 and the Bush Regime's deliberate exploitation of that tragedy for political gain at a time when virtually everyone else with a megaphone including Andrew "Liberal Fifth Columnist" Sullivan was giddily stampeding in the opposite direction...the grotesque and destructive dysfunction of the for-profit boondoggle that we laughingly refer to as a "health care system" ...the fatal madness of our gun culture... Capitalism!...and so forth -- have all proven to be both on the side of the angels and the right side of history.

By way of contrast, Mr. D'Souza's subject matter -- that President Obama is driven by the ghosts of his African ancestors to destroy Murrica -- is the batshit twaddle of a minor demagogue who makes his living fluffing the paranoid conspiracy theories of the shallow end of the American gene pool.

Of course, Mr, Sullivan cannot see this, because Mr, Sullivan is part of the problem.

I Remain Manfully Committed to Decreasing My Insufferability Quotient

by temporarily suspending the conceit that I am right about some things and other people are wrong or are so late to the party that they should at least wipe their feet before heading for the keg.

I therefore leave it to other, meaner people to calculated exactly what level of irony-density we must have reached now that we have a Republican Senator crying his anonymous eyes out to the author of "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life" 

about how awful it is that his Party of Personal Responsibility has lost its fucking mind:

A Republican Senator Doubts His Party Can Govern
By Ramesh Ponnuru Oct 21, 2013 4:28 PM CT

It’s the day after Congress voted to fully reopen the federal government and raise the debt ceiling. The senator I’m meeting, who would fall roughly in the middle of the Senate’s Republicans if they were lined up by ideology, voted with the majority. “I’m being shredded by the Tea Party radio people today,” he says, although he doesn’t seem concerned about it. “That is what it is.”

His bigger concern: He doesn’t think that his party is ready to govern the country.

The Republicans who were in the public eye during the shutdown have generally been either the party’s top congressional leaders or its most vocal hard-liners. Most Republicans in Congress don’t fall into either category. This senator -- who requested anonymity so he could describe the party’s problems candidly -- is part of that less-high-profile contingent. My impression is that his views are widely shared within it.
...

The questions that his colleagues need to ask themselves, the senator says, are “What have we learned?” and “How do we not repeat this?” Most Republican senators, it seems to me, emerged from the shutdown fight with the same views they had going in. Those who thought it was a mistake found confirmation of their views in the party’s sagging poll numbers and lack of accomplishments; those who favored it thought it could have worked if the skeptics hadn’t sabotaged it.
...

It was very naughty for our political thought-leaders not to have warned untutored, dewy-eyed idealists like Senator Anonymous and Ramesh Ponnuru long ago that this sad pass was coming.

Sponsored Content: The Early Years

From Kevin Drum @ Mother Jones:

BuzzFeed and the Future of Advertising

...I'll bet 90 percent of [BuzzFeed's] readers never even notice their bylines.

And I'm pretty certain the folks at BuzzFeed know this perfectly well. They do everything they can to make advertising look staff-written, including in tone, style, and format, but leave themselves an out by putting corporate bylines on the ads and pretending that everyone will notice them. Hey, it says Sony Entertainment Network at the top! What more do you want?

I imagine this is a glimpse of our future. You have been warned.

The future?

Jay Rosen Thinks You Should Read More Matt Taibbi

Jay's right, although I have a small problem with classifying Mr. Taibbi as "underappreciated" as he now enjoys a regular gig at "The Rolling Stone" and "The Sideboob Journal Huffington Post" feels he has wide enough name recognition that they built an entire editorial atop one of Mr. Taibbi's 140-character jabs at David Brooks from The Twitter Machine --

"I have a serious question for David Brooks, who is hailing Romney's Bain record http://nyti.ms/NyEzQ4 . Do you know how private equity works?"

-- which, within 24 hours, had been retweeted (by my count) 155 times and "favorited" 53 times.


That's recognition.

On the other hand, Mr. Taibbi is pretty clearly on what appears to be permanent, double-secret Beltway probation after making David Gergen go Number Two in his pantaloons when he suggested on live teevee that teabaggers are many, many possums short of a stew (From "Rolling Stone"):

... 

Taibbi: To me, the main thing about the Tea Party is that they're just crazy. If somebody is able to bridge the gap with those voters, it seems to me they will have to be a little bit crazy too. That's part of the Tea Party's litmus test: "How far will you go?"

Gergen: I flatly reject the idea that Tea Partiers are crazy. They had some eccentric candidates, there's no question about that. But I think they represent a broad swath of the American electorate that elites dismiss to their peril.

Hart: I agree with David. When two out of five people who voted last night say they consider themselves supporters of the Tea Party, we make a huge mistake to suggest that they are some sort of small fringe group and do not represent anybody else.

Taibbi: I'm not saying that they're small or a fringe group.

Gergen: You just think they're all crazy.

Taibbi: I do.

Gergen: So you're arguing, Matt, that 40 percent of those who voted last night are crazy?

Taibbi: I interview these people. They're not basing their positions on the facts — they're completely uninterested in the facts. They're voting completely on what they see and hear on Fox News and afternoon talk radio, and that's enough for them.

Gergen: The great unwashed are uneducated, so therefore their views are really beneath serious conversation?

Taibbi: I'm not saying they're beneath serious conversation. I'm saying that these people vote without acting on the evidence.

Gergen: I find it stunning that the conversation has taken this turn. I disagree with the Tea Party on a number of issues, but it misreads who they are to dismiss them as some kind of uneducated know-nothings who have somehow seized power in the American electorate. It is elitist to its core. We would all be better off if we spent more time listening to each other rather than simply writing them off. 

...

But such an embargo suggests nothing more than run-of-the-mill Villager cowardice and fear, not a lack of appreciation.

Professional Left Podcast #115

“Now, I know all you folks are the right kinda parents.
I'm gonna be perfectly frank.
Would ya like to know what kinda conversation goes
On while they're loafin' around that Hall?
They're tryin' out Bevo, tryin' out cubebs,
Tryin' out Tailor Mades like Cigarette Feends!
And braggin' all about
How they're gonna cover up a tell-tale breath with Sen-Sen.
One fine night, they leave the pool hall,
Headin' for the dance at the Arm'ry!
Libertine men and Scarlet women!
And Rag-time, shameless music
That'll grab your son and your daughter
With the arms of a jungle animal instinct!
Mass-staria!
Friends, the idle brain is the devil's playground!"

-- Excerpt from President Santorum's Inaugural Address

Links:

• Lawrence O'Donnell on Santorum and the debate with conservatism


• Coming soon: Blog again theocracy -- Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Da' money goes here:

Parry Hotter

So, what are the Five Happiest Words you can read in the New York Times?

David Brooks is off today.

Slight typo though -- David Brooks is always off.

Meanwhile, K-Thug continues to vividly channel, um, well, me:

July 28, 2011
The Centrist Cop-Out

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.”
...


So what’s with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it’s coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it’s not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

Wow.

In case you didn't notice, Dr. Krugman crossed a very specific Rubicon here: he has just made the very public case for firing Tom Friedman and David Brooks -- just about as bluntly as the medium allows -- right there in the pages of the New York Times.

Suck on that,

Tommy-boy.

The Case for Digital Cremation

At least the comment sections.

Consider the case of legendary blogger Jon Swift (Al Weisel) who passed away in March of last year.

His lacerating, Badlands-dry wit is sorely missed by the entire Left blogosphere. What salts that wound unnecessarily is the fact that he died digitally intestate (so to speak) with his comment section open, and as time has passed and the "we'll miss you" comments tapered off, the place began filling up with this...

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And buried in the middle of it, this:

12/10/2010 12:58 AM

tigtog said...
I absolutely HATE seeing all these spam comments left as updates here on this post. Isn't there any way for somebody to look through his computer and find out his login details? Or any way for the family to contact Google and have the blog assigned to one of them so that they can enable moderation and delete all the spam?

It's heartbreaking to see Jon's legacy come to this.

This slow, silent accretion of small desecrations by mindless, life-mimicking devices is a genuinely new and sad thing: an army of automatons quietly overrunning some of the sites of our departed like something out of a Ray Bradbury short story.

I wrote about it here in 2005 --

The side-effects of a digital world

...
And I would drop by once in a great while and read the new posts. The sexual particulars were very much not my cuppa joe, but the writing was always good…until it veered sharply into despair. And then writing about life being painful and not worth the trouble appeared.

Then a rally.

And then the site “went dark”, and there have been no new posts since.

Ok, perhaps they just got bored or busy. Perhaps they changed their lives. Perhaps to move on they had to shed old haunts and habits like a skin. But I really don’t think so.

Now I wouldn’t have known this person had we passed on the street, and it’s highly unlikely we ever would have crossed paths in the analog world, but I came to admire their voice and while I have no way of knowing what actually happened (no email option on the site) my imagination can’t help but run out ahead of the facts and what I think probably happened saddened me.

However what makes it more than just another poignant story to me is the last time I checked, this dead site was not completely inert.

Spambots in their mindless, relentlessly insectile way were slowly filling it up with fake-cheerful salutations. Mechanically excreting ads and a sliver of text about “Really liking your blog” and then scuttling on.

For reasons I can’t quite explain I find that particular image thoroughly unnerving, and I am quite aware that the very same technology that's been a boon to my family made this scenario possible and delivered it into my head.

What a strange world it has become.

-- and it still unnerves me.

Of Robert E. Lee, Stephen Vincent Benét once wrote that "The heart, he kept locked away/ from all the picklocks of biographers.”

Now, in the age of Facebook, "the heart" is so routinely served up to biographers, celebrity teevee, tabloid rags and the wide, indifferent world on a bed of rice with a complimentary bottle of Dom that the very idea of privacy is starting to be treated as a mild perversion.

Now it appears that, down here in the grubby, transient, below-decks of the blogosphere, whatever legacy we may leave behind is much more in danger from the silverfish of spam.

If You Love Conservatism, Let it Go.

If it returns, it was always yours.

Or something.

You know, whenever Andrew Sullivan drops a few too many tabs of Rancho Reagan Shinola and goes all maudlin and squishy and mystical over the great, untrammeled Conservatism that Never Was of his youth, and how these kids today with their crazy hair and Toby Keith music have gone and ruined it all...

Left, Right And Time
29 Mar 2011 10:10 am

I suffer, it seems, from an affliction that bedevils many. I now find myself largely opposed to most Republicans and in favor of a Democratic president as an even tempered pragmatist. But I have not reimagined myself as a leftist. Others have, of course, but I wince a little every time. Take the issue of taxes - and you see where the right-left paradigm is totally insufficient to the occasion.

Income tax rates are now lower than they were under Ronald Reagan and far lower than they were under Eisenhower. And yet it has become a Norquistian non-negotiable that no taxes can be raised at all on anyone, let alone the beneficiaries of the last thirty years - and those who differ must be "leftists" - even when the US is facing debt of historic and dangerous proportions. Someone advocating what Eisenhower was perfectly comfortable with would be regarded by the Republican right today as a communist. And yet, of course, Eisenhower was emphatically not a Communist, whatever the John Birch society believed.
...

I cannot help but be reminded of this delightful 1998 item from "The Onion"

Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?

By Bruce Heffernan
October 28, 1998

Look, I'm not a hateful person or anything–I believe we should all live and let live. But lately, I've been having a real problem with these homosexuals. You see, just about wherever I go these days, one of them approaches me and starts sucking my cock.

Take last Sunday, for instance, when I casually struck up a conversation with this guy in the health-club locker room. Nothing fruity, just a couple of fellas talking about their workout routines while enjoying a nice hot shower. The guy looked like a real man's man, too–big biceps, meaty thighs, thick neck. He didn't seem the least bit gay. At least not until he started sucking my cock, that is.

Where does this queer get the nerve to suck my cock? Did I look gay to him? Was I wearing a pink feather boa without realizing it? I don't recall the phrase, "Suck my cock" entering the conversation, and I don't have a sign around my neck that reads, "Please, You Homosexuals, Suck My Cock."

I've got nothing against homosexuals. Let them be free to do their gay thing in peace, I say. But when they start sucking my cock, then I've got a real problem.

Then there was the time I was hiking through the woods and came across a rugged-looking, blond-haired man in his early 30s. He seemed straight enough to me while we were bathing in that mountain stream, but, before you know it, he's sucking my cock!

What is it with these homos?
...

See, this thing of it is -- the thing that Mr. Sullivan will never admit to himself or his readers -- is that he does not owe his long and successful career to being a "real" Conservative.

He owes it to being a Gay Conservative. A token. A front-man. Mr. Outside. A "roper", in the parlance of the confidence game.

It is a subject on which I have touched before:

The Trajectory of Falling Objects

...
The Modern GOP, as is now painfully clear, has always been the furious white guy party. The Jebus party. The gun-fetish party. And the all-of-them-riding-the-short-bus-to-school-together Party.

Not exactly an appetizing bill of electoral fare -- certainly not the kind of people you’d ever trust to baby-sit your Constitution -– but fortunately the Party of God was also the Party of Money, and so the GOP did what any hagged out failure with a ton of cash would do: it went out and bought itself some credibility!

It bought itself a whole religion, complete with satellites and universities. It bought institutes and governments. It underwrote think tanks and teevee networks. Book publishers and spokesmodels. Coast-to-coast radio coverage and “serious thinkers”.

And it bought itself a teevee-friendly veneer of diversity.

What the Right needed was a light coating of urbane respectability to buy them enough time and access to destroy the country.

And it was people like Sullivan who happily lent it to them.

On the Left, the technical term for a gay or minority political writer is…writer.

But on the Right, the technical term is “celebrity”, which meant as long as people like Sullivan were onstage doing their dancing Conservative monkey act, the Party of God could point to them and say “See, we’re not haters” to the press.

And as long as the con game played itself out, times were good in Tokenville, high-paying gigs were plentiful.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but without the word “Conservative” tacked to their resumes, people like Andrew Sullivan, Kathleen Parker, David Brooks and a growing nest of “Obamacons” would all have had to go looking for honest work a very long time ago.

And so Sullivan miraculously managed to miss the moral dumpster fire that was the Conservative movement as it burned cheerily away in his own back yard year after year after year…

…until the day that Conservatism’s Brand Identification started to fall faster than Port A Potty stock the day after scientists figure out how to turn shit into gold.

Which leaves the Apostates with a serious cash-flow problem.
...

Without the "conservative" bit, Mr. Sullivan is just another anti-DOMA, pro-pot, gay Gen-Xer clipping articles out of the local Penny Saver and writing occasional paeans to Obama. And according to the one million Liberal anti-DOMA, pro-pot, Penny-Saver-article-clipping, Obama-paean-writing gay bloggers I know, the ROI on that gig is slightly less per annum than what you can dig out of the sofa cushions of the average community college teacher's lounge, and certainly not enough to launch anyone to the top of Mt. Beast.

And so, Mr Sullivan finds himself trapped in a odd sort of Hell of his own making: a cramped little Malebolge of the Deceivers where, in order to continue to enjoy the fruits of being the Gay Conservative, he is compelled to continually undermine the credibility of everything else he writes by ritually and publicly polishing the turd of Conservatism's Once and Future greatness over and over and over again.

...
For the Palinites, the lie is that history began on January 20, 2009, when the Black Guy became president; for the Sullivanites, the lie is that history began in 2003, when George W. Bush apparently snuck into Ronald Reagan's crypt and peed on the Great Man's mortal remains.

Because every bit as much as any Birther flake or Death Panel stooge -- every bit as much as Sarah Palin -- Andrew " Reagan-Thatcher pragmatic Christian Tory" Sullivan hangs onto his position and paycheck only by tirelessly hawking his own brand of discredited, self-absolving, self-deluding revisionist bullshit ("Bush Betrayed 'Real' Conservatism"). Mr. Sullivan dresses his crackpottery up by nudging the time-line back a little bit, but the object is the same: to exempt himself from the same, harsh judgment he wants to lavish on the Palinites by excusing himself from the much larger and more destructive crime of helping to create the environment in which moral monsters like the Palinites could flourish.

And because Mr. Sullivan builds his critique of the Palinites on fundamentally corrupt ground, his observations of them not only come across as deeply dishonest, but also loudly and unintentionally hilarious.

Tomorrow, when I hold my breath and balance my checkbook, I might well find the whole sham infuriating.

But today I just find it pitiable.