I Did Try To Warn You

When a handful of Republican media hatchet men, ad makers and pundits showed up at the door of the Democratic party, shocked and shivering, having been run out of the fascist party they helped to create, I thought, "Fine.  Great.  First step, apologize.  You were wrong.  Catastrophically.  We were right.  Be fucking grownups and own up to it.  Then grab a beer and step to the back of the line.  There's plenty of thankless, dirty work that needs doing."

Then I took a short nap, and when I woke up, they weren't at the back of the line.  

They were at the front of the line.

And the line was now closed.  

But the most darkly hilariously part of this entire farce was this: Now that Never Trumpers had become the issuers of indulgences and bouncers at the doors of media acceptability, they started demanding apologies and atonements from any new Republicans who showed up at the door looking for some of that sweet, sweet legacy media spotlight.

They had knocked together a couple of websites where they sounded exactly -- and I mean exactly -- like the Liberal bloggers of yesteryear.  

 The same Liberal bloggers they used to mock as alarmist crackpots.  

But unlike us Liberal bloggers, who were almost universally ignored and shit upon by the legacy media, every one of these recently-former Republicans were suddenly in heavy and glowing media rotation everywhere.  MSNBC was gifting them tens of millions of dollars in free publicity every year.  They were being offered their pick of op-ed gigs at leading publications.  Book deals followed.  A pop-up advertising shop that soaked credulous Liberals for tens of millions of actual dollars and delivered absolutely nothing but scandal after scandal.   And on and on.

And all of these treasures and privileges laid at their feet for literally doing nothing more than, almost overnight, transforming themselves into Brand New Media Creatures, who had no pasts and who spoke and wrote exactly like Liberal bloggers circa 2006.  

Except amid all the posts and podcasts and the blizzard of free promotion from the legacy media, there was never a hint that actual Liberals even existed, much less had been right all along.  Instead, these recently-former Republicans continued using Liberal straw men exactly as they had always done back when Team Evil was paying them: as punching bags and sourced of mockery.  

No apologies were forthcoming for being the co-authors of the ruin which their former party was inflicting in the country.   No acknowledgment that history prior to 2016 existed at all.  Instead, there was a great dealing of moaning and bitching about how they had been right all along, and how awful it was that no one had believed them. 

And while all of this was going on -- while credulous Liberals were enraptured to hear former Republicans calling Donald Trump a naughty bad man -- a few lonely, Liberal voices in the wilderness  were annoying everyone with warnings likes these.  [Note:  Since I left Twitter and deleted my account, none of my original Tweets still exist in their original form.  However, a number of them, such as this one, have been preserved in plain text form since I embedded them in my blog.]

Donald Trump exists to normalize Bill Kristol. After Trump, cable news "debates" will be between Charlie Sykes/Rick Wilson/National Review on one side, Eric Bolling/Hugh Hewitt/Breitbart on the other, "moderated" by Joe Scarborough. Liberals will vanish altogether.

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) November 15, 2018

Now that the Never Trumper colonization of the media is complete, and actual Liberals have all but vanished, here are a list of major themes that run through the "Liberal" media.

• The major event of George W. Bush's administration was PEPFAR.   There were also a buncha other minors items that aren't even worth mentioning.

• George W. Bush's name is now "myformerbosswhateveryouthinkofhim"

• The major event of Joe Biden's administration was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was a terrible idea and ruined America's reputation forever.   There were also a buncha other minors items that aren't even worth mentioning.  Biden is old and he is pretty much entirely responsible for destroying Murrica.  

• Joe Biden's name is now "I know we promised we'd stop hating on Joe Biden but I just hate him so much." or "Joe Biden needs to stop trying to defend his legacy because I hate him so much."

• We'd like to welcome former rabid, hard Right Evangelical gay-bashing, Liberal hater, David French, to the op-ed page of The New York Times.  

• We'd like to welcome former RNC Chair, Michael Steele to our Very Large Never Trump media company.

• We bid a fond farewell to former RNC Chair, Michael Steele, who will be leaving our Very Large Never Trump media company for his own show on MSNBC.

• Our guest once again is once and future political superstar Adam Kinzinger.

• Our guest once again is the American hero who very nearly single-handedly saved the disastrous Harris campaign, Liz Cheney.

[Side note:  Ever wonder how these pinheads got it stuck in their brains that Democrats are evil, baby-murdering monsters?

Oh yeah.  Now I remember.  It was slander like this, repeated over and over, for decades:

Once again, no apologies.  No retractions.  Not even any acknowledgement that Liz Cheney's bloody fingerprints are all over the Republican doomsday machine that eventually spit her out of the party.  

Because apparently that's just too damn much to ask.  

Instead those who were the targets and victims of Cheney's slanders were told to sit down shut up and get over it.  

And for the record, this is the same Liz Cheney who, as a leader of the Republican party, voted against women being able to leave a state to seek reproductive health access elsewhere, voted against a bill that would require reporting white supremacists in the U.S. military, begged Democrats to vote for her in Wyoming and then swore that she would never vote for a Democrat.

End of side note.]

• Next up, highlights from our 565th consecutive focus group of Trump voters who think Democrats are baby-murdering Communists and that Donald Trump built the pyramids...and what Democrats must do to reach out to them!

• If Democrats ever want to win another election they have got to be more Centrist!

In 2007, if you wanted the base to take you seriously, you went to Chicago and walked a gauntlet of raucous, passionate, well-informed bloggers who had serious questions and expected thoughtful answers.  I know.  I was there.  

From The New York Times, August 5, 2007:

Democratic Candidates Spar at ‘Netroots’ Forum

All but one of the party’s candidates took a detour from their summertime routines of Iowa fairs and New Hampshire festivals to appear before the bloggers, a constituency that is rivaling the significance of party activists in early-voting states. The contenders answered questions on stage and adjourned for smaller sessions with the political enthusiasts whose online journals are influencing the race in new, broad ways...

The candidate forum served as the finale to a three-day assembly of the so-called netroots -- Internet meets grassroots -- that carried the feel of a mini-national political convention. Bloggers submitted questions, read by moderators, that included three categories: foreign policy, domestic affairs and philosophy and experience...

“What you have here is a bunch of micro-media outlets that connect to thousands upon thousands of people -- influential people,” said Baratunde Thurston, who writes a political blog in Boston. “The candidates would be foolish to miss out on an opportunity like this.”...

But now, "blogger"? What is "blogger"? 

If a Centrist goon with presidential aspirations like Rahm wants his rep shined up from a trusted source that'll increase his base appeal, he reports to The Bulwark for a flattering round of Wiffle ball.   

This is the state of things today, and I have no reason to believe it will change any time soon.  

However,  I also believe that at least one, lone crackpot alarmist dirty hippy blogger should put it on the record that, if credulous Liberals hadn't been so god damn willing to immediately hand over our hard-won moral authority to a handful of former Republicans who still really, really despise us, Rahm's road to the White House would not involve getting a foot massage from The Bulwark.  Instead, it would require him to field serious questions from the likes of Digby Parton,  Rick Perlstein, Josh Marshall, Brad Friedman, Bob Cesca, Nicole Sandler, Charlie Pierce, Marci Wheeler, Tengrain, Frangela, No More Mr. Nice Blog, Allison Hantschel,  Dan Froomkin, The Field Negro, Bleeding Heartland, Jay Rosen,  Progress Michigan, Hal Sparks, Blue Virginia,  Cliff Schecter, John Amato and the Crooks and Liars crew, my lovely wife, and on and on and on.

We still have an incredibly deep bench of smart, articulate, well-read Liberals, and don't try to tell me that The Rude Pundit putting the screws to Rahm Emanuel wouldn't be Must See Teevee.

Which is not to say that Never Trumpers would not have a place in my Better Universe.  Of course they would.  It'd be crazy to turn away able-bodies volunteers because, in any large organization, there's plenty of scutwork that needs doing and our Big Tent sometimes needs patching and vacuuming.  

For example, I think some of those Never Trumpers would make pretty good sidekicks to the featured Liberal talkers.   In fact, not so very long ago, before the Never Trumpers became a subsidiary of MSNBC and colonized the media, Tim Miller was the "cuck" sidekick of the Pod Save lads.

These days, the Pod Save lads are going out of their way to help repair Glenn Greenwald's image, rehabilitate Chuck Todd's reputation and give Jake Tapper an open mike to pimp his Biden bashing book, and The Bulwark is giving Rahm Fucking Emanuel a glow up.

Funny old world.

I Am The Liberal Media

Bubble, Bubble, Troll and Rubble

I recently had occasion to watch The Big Short again.   And get very angry all over again.  And once again get wistful over all that I and millions like me had lost because rich monsters and arrogant too-big-to-fail institutions and corrupt rating agencies and a complicit financial media conspired to use the United State housing market as a casino where they could make whatever crazy bet they wanted to, and use house money to do it.  

While Moral Hazard, the Irish setter owned for photo op purposes by New York Times columnist David Brooks, dozed soundly beneath the roulette table.  (h/t Brother Charlie Pierce.)

And I was struck by how many great, good and mediocre movies and teevee shows have been made about the Great Recession.  There is the aforementioned Big Short, Queen of Versailles, Too Big To Fail and The Last Days of Lehman Brothers. 

There are movies that were "inspired by" the collapse, or set inside the Great Recession Extended Universe like Margin Call, 99 Homes and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

There are also lots of documentaries like  Inside Job, Plunder, The Flaw, Inside Lehman Brothers, Money for Nothing and Capitalism: A Love Story.

There's even a very bad action/revenge flick called Assault on Wall Street

So if you were an average person who had been asleep since the 1990s and wanted to know what in the hell actually happened to the boring, predictable, rock-solid American housing market in 2000s that nearly caused a Second Dark Age, you've got your pick of source material, from the sublime Bird and Fortune --

-- to the excellent --

-- to the "meh" --

-- to this tasteless, paint-by-numbers hackery:

Point being, if it is knowledge you seek, it's readily available, in easy-to-digest form, right there at your fingertips.

Now let's consider the other malignant bubble that nearly destroyed -- and may yet destroy -- the country.  The Republican Party.  Which, if you ponder on it for a minute, has a lot in common with the housing crisis.  

Specifically, the GOP is to American politics what Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) were to the housing market before the housing market went tits up.  

First, there was a general, unspoken understanding among inside players that a certain percentage of the Republican Party base was, uh, problematic, to say the least. Bigots, imbeciles, lunatics, grifters, gun nuts, homophobes, etc.

Second, it turns out that the political equivalent of the ratings agencies -- the mainstream media -- who were supposed to be the system's impartial arbiters and referees had zero incentive to actually look under the GOP's hood and see what madness was boiling right below the surface.  Quite the contrary, the media had every financial and professional incentive to continue the mark the GOP as a rock-solid, AAA  political party decades after the underlying elements of the party -- the base and the Conservative media and key GOP leaders and all of the Very Serious People with important jobs at major newspapers and teevee networks -- had gone to shit.

Nobody in the media was was going to nuke their reputation or risk all that insider access by siding with those America-hating, terrorist-loving Libtards who were jumping up and down screaming that something had gone very, very wrong with the GOP. That it was getting exponentially worse because the underlying individual political currency on which the media should have been rating the Republican party -- Republican voters -- was completely toxic.

And once the GOP's internal rot became too putrid to hide, the political ratings agencies simply switched from pretending that the GOP was doing just fine to pretending that, no matter how fucked-in-the-head the GOP might be, there was no better place to invest your vote.  

After all, don't all the Very Serious People who manufacture the Wisdom of the Political Market agree that Democrats are somehow always just as bad.  Probably even worse!  So if you were freaked out by what's happening in the GOP, really the only sensible and serious alternative was for you to take your vote and invest in exotic Third Party vaporware.   Maybe Evan McMullin!  Or David French.  Or just write in "Ronald Reagan" which will not only give you a nice, warm, self-righteous glow but which, by some alchemy that the average human could not understand, will something something Disrupt the K'rupt Duopoly fer sure!

Then this happened.

And you know the rest.

But you know what?  It all ended kinda like the housing crisis ended too, didn't it?

The corrupt rating agencies -- the mainstream media -- are still pretty much intact, with all the same hacks and quislings still employed at all the same jobs.

The dogshit GOP -- who are still packed to the rafters with the same bigots and imbeciles and lunatics that have always been there -- is still intact, still being treated as a serious political party by the corrupt rating agencies.

The cynical rage and hate brokers -- the men who fucking well knew the base was insane and continued to work to bundle them up in order to get GOP scum elected -- have, by and large, done pretty well too.  Some of them are still with the old firm and still getting paid.  Others -- like the Never Trumpers who got run out of the party -- just set up shop across the street, selling "OMG Can You Believe How Fucking Crazy The Post-Trump GOP Has Become!!!" stock to eager buyers in the mainstream media.

And nowhere except in what little remains of the Liberal blogosphere, or on a few Liberal podcasts here and there, will you hear anyone breaking down the long-term, underlying causes of the implosion of the GOP the way all those movies explained the implosion of the housing market.  

No Academy Award nominated films.

No films "inspired" by the actual history of the modern Republican party.  

No documentaries.

Not even any shitty action/revenge flicks.  

Because the Very Serious People who manufacture the Wisdom of the Political Market still still believe the Republican Party must be propped up by wishful thinking and fairy tales at any cost.  

Because the Very Serious People who manufacture the Wisdom of the Political Market still regard that monstrous, corrupt, deranged institution that is still quite capable of taking down the entire country as Too Big to Fail. 

No Fair Remembering Stuff

With All The Penetrating Insight (UPDATE)

that we have come to expect from "Newsweek, Tina Brown turns her magazine's front cover over to the "conservative-leaning Independent" Andrew Sullivan who explains how Both Sides Do It!

"The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong."

 Wowsers!

Sounds like a nightmare; a Universe where every position is carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue.

This place where no one but America's leading gay Catholic Tory -- frolicking across the few lonely yards of heroic middle ground on his Isle of Reasonableness -- is capable of seeing this bright, burning truth.

"While the left is less unhinged in its critique, it is just as likely to miss the screen for the pixels.

Wowsers again! And Zounds, also too!

Actually...before we go any further...I have a little confession to make.

I cheated just a little bit here.

Rather that waiting for the Muse of Blogging to convert the existence of Mr. Sullivan's "Newsweek" column into the spark of inspiration, the preceding paragraphs were created by me dipping into my own archives.  Instead of taking a long walk in the still woods or staring into a contemplative fire while sipping poteen from a Mason jar like real writers are supposed to do, I fell back on a couple of recall exercises from my writing group days and dredged up a few sentences that still hang on to the inside of my skull by their nails, mashing together two older posts -- this one about David Brooks and this one about Thomas Friedman -- both of which were written 2005.

The truth is, I could have easily gleaned a hundred such sentences from any of the the hundred of thousands of words I have strung together on the same subjects over seven years since I began blogging, because all Mr. Sullivan is doing is reconfiguring the same, tired Centrist retread which I am heartily sick and tired of seeing in print anywhere.

The bitter truth of our current situation is actually very simple:

1. The Right is an unholy, unsalvageable mess.  It is too far gone, too beholden to its fascist elements and too fucking dangerous to be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.


2. For years, Liberals have been just about the only people who have had the balls to say that the Right is an unholy, unsalvageable mess out loud and in all kinds of weather.  For example, in the darkest days of the Bush Administration we continued to say it out loud even as Conservatives like Andrew Sullivan were turning a buck calling us unAmerican, freedom-hating Fifth columnists.


3. No matter how many times Liberals turn out to be right in fact, our media/industrial complex will never permit it to be acknowledged in public.  Too much money is riding on the Big Scam that the Left and the Right are both equally wrong, so Never.  Ever.  Ever. 

The core of virtually every Liberal critique of Obama Administration comes straight from this reality.

So does the stridency of some of our voices.

Because we are getting very tired of always being right and never being heeded.  Tired of being lied about. Tired of being slandered.  But mostly of all we are completely done with lazy, Centrist panderers (a disturbing number of whom are still fresh from being kicked out of the Conservative clown car) getting away with poxing the houses of both those who lie loudly...and those who loudly call out the liars as liars.

The fact is that the modern "Left" forms a rich, complex and interesting caravan of allied interests which, on any given day, can run from Noam Chomsky to John Cole, cut across a bean field to pick up Digby, swing onto a frontage road to let Susie Bright hop aboard and make a quick stop at a steel mill to hook up with Leo Gerard before barreling down Route 66 where Al Franken and Dan Savage are both thumbing their way across America.  But since Centrism is where the money is, Mr. Sullivan can only claim the title of King of that particular dung-heap by compressing the totality of the rich, complex and interesting Liberal critique into a single, convenient monovocal monolithic fiction -- the "truly deluded" Left -- which he can then pair off against the very ugly, very real bugfuck crazy Right.

This is why, for all his bellyaching, Mr. Sullivan never actually identifies a single, "deluded" Liberal by name.  Because in this fairly tale, Liberals don't need actual names.  Instead, various disembodied Liberal abstractions collectively called "They" float around doing unreasonable things:

"They rail against..."

"They decry..."

"They despair..."

They "...projected onto Obama absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country..."

On the other hand, to build this particular iteration of the Centrist thesis, Mr. Sullivan has no trouble finding plenty of names to name among the the first tier leaders of the Right.  Mr. Sullivan indicts the participants in the "Republican debates" as being among the ringleaders of the wingnut mob.  Willard Romney is singled out by name several times --

"[The Affordable Care Act] is not, as Romney insists, a one-model, top-down prescription...".

..."On foreign policy, the right-wing critiques have been the most unhinged. Romney accuses the president of apologizing for America, and others all but accuse him of treason and appeasement. "

"That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe..."

..."Mitt Romney accuses the president of making the recession worse, of wanting to turn America into a European welfare state, of not believing in opportunity or free enterprise, of having no understanding of the real economy, and of apologizing for America and appeasing our enemies. According to Romney, Obama is a mortal threat to “the soul” of America and an empty suit who couldn’t run a business, let alone a country."

-- as are Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh, in this paragraph --

"And it is this Republican intransigence—from the 2009 declaration by Rush Limbaugh that he wants Obama “to fail” to the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s admission that his primary objective is denying Obama a second term—that has been truly responsible for the deadlock. "

-- which distinguishes itself by being followed by what may be the single, funniest sentence in the whole article:

"And the only way out of that deadlock is an electoral rout of the GOP, since the language of victory and defeat seems to be the only thing it understands."

Funny, because Mr. Sullivan seems to have somehow forget that the GOP has already been handed not one but two such "electoral routs", in 2006 and 2008.

And the results of those historic, back-to-back electoral beatdowns?  The Right did not to sober up, did not get together and kick the bigots and the lunatics to the curb, because the bigots and the lunatics are the Right.  Instead they did the exact opposite, ratcheting up the ragetalk, doubling-down on the crazy and running their bugfuck conspiracy factories around the clock.

And you know what? It worked!

Whee!

It worked because the Right greeted the dawn of the Age of Obama with a collective scream of primal rage and terror which has not merely not diminished one decibel since the day he took the oath of office, but has actually doubled and re-doubled with his every action and every word.

It worked because while Liberals were begging the Obama Administration to take the implacable hostility and hostage-taking contempt of the Right as a serious threat to the country, the Administration chose instead to follow through on their brilliant Reasonable Centrist Plan to win the Right over by treating them like long-lost lodge brothers from whom they had become estranged over some silly, Thanksgiving dinner misunderstanding that happened so long ago that no one could remember the details.

Chose, in other words, to ignore all those shrill Liberals who were warning them that they were walking nekkid into a Category Five wingnut wilding and heed exactly the same kind of happy Centrist horseshit advice that goofs like David Brooks, Mark Halperin and Andrew Sullivan all wallow in.

The Right, of course, could not fucking believe their luck. Crippled and bleeding from a thousand self-inflicted wounds, they were allowed to reconstituted their Party using its ugliest, most deranged, most racist elements.

Allowed to strap tri-corner hats into the pointy heads of their howling mob, stuff them into Koch Brother-funded buses which drove them off to Fox News-sponsored events and into political re-branding history.

Allowed to traffic in the worst kind of white supremacist sludge.

Allowed to lie and lie and lie and lie.

And allowed to do it all virtually unmolested by the White House and the mainstream media because nobody wanted to hurt their fee-fees by pointing out that they were completely out of their fucking minds.

Actually, there was one group -- the Liberals -- who understood very clearly what horrors were squirming around inside the GOP's fake Tea Party chrysalis. Liberals, who had just worked themselves to a frazzle getting Barack Obama elected, and had great hopes for the transformational mandate their newly-elected President had won.

Liberals, who began warning their newly-minted President early on that by not taking these fuckers seriously,

   

his Administration was making the biggest mistake 

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of its young political life, and putting at risk every one of the critical reforms it said it believed in.

Liberals, who for their troubles were given the red-headed stepchild treatment; walked firmly over to the political children's table and told to sit quietly while the grownups hashed everything out.

Liberals who Mr. Sullivan  now dings in his "Newsweek" cover story as "truly deluded" for

"...projecting unrealistic fantasies onto a candidate who never pledged a liberal revolution."

Because, yeah, where in the world would we have ever gotten a crazy ideas like that?



As one of the millions of non-deluded Liberals who Andrew Sullivan simply refuses to believe actually exists, I am not pissed off because this Administration failed to live up to any "...absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country..."  as I am well out of puberty and know better than to look for heroes and saviors in politics.

I am, on the other hand, very pissed off that this Administration has failed on its own terms.  This Administration brushed past Liberal complaints by countering that the gravity of the times and circumstance require them to be hard-headed, real-world pragmatists, and yet during their first 2.5 years in office they have consistently and disastrously failed in the first duty of hard-headed, real-world pragmatism -- to accept and act on the irrefutable evidence which is pounding you over the head every fucking day.  

The Obama Administration's signal failure was not how it handled single payer or Guantanamo Bay: its signal failure was its blithe obliviousness to just how bottomless the fanatical hatred of Right really was.

They failed because when faced with the reality of an intractable opposition of bleating, bloody-minded, knives-out lunatics, this Administration simply refused to believe that it could not charm or compromise or Centrism their way to victory.    Instead of facing reality, they chose the siren's song of the Reasonable Centrist who told them that the one, sure-fire formula for success was to meet every obstacle by shoving the nearest Liberal principle out the airlock in the name of bipartisanship, taking whatever crumbs the Right might offer in return and declaring victory.

Except compromise didn't work.  In fact, it emboldened their enemies.  Hey, that's not good!  What should we do about that?

Well, according to every clever, highly-paid Reasonable Centrist, when compromise with people who are now saying openly that they hate you and want to destroy you fails, the only solution is....more compromise!

After which follows another month or two under a fire-hose of relentless lies and slander.
Another weekend of wall-to-all news coverage of Pig People jammed into some Ramada Inn ballroom waving birth certificates and ranting about Obama's secret Communist plot to sell American out to the Taliban.

And more calls for even greater and more spectacular compromise by those clever, highly-paid Reasonable Centrists who those "deluded" Liberals are by now pleading with you to notice haven't been right even once so far.

But you soldier on, rinsing and repeating and cheered along by those Reasonable Centrists again and again, right down that gently downward-sloping Reasonable Centrist Road that finally led to Democrats running away from their own President's most significant accomplishment -- the Affordable Care Act -- and directly into the chain saw that was the 2010 election.

A loss which the Reasonable Centrists all agreed should be met by the Obama Administration with an immediate and aggressive campaign of compromise and appeasement.

But having their asses handed to them in 2010 seems to have had a...bracing...effect on the Obama White House, and for the last several month they appear to have finally decided to do what those "deluded" Liberals have been begging them to do all along: take on the Right directly.

This has had a number of side effects, including the vastly entertaining spectacle of David Brooks -- the Alpha Male of the cult of Reasonable Centrism -- completely losing his shit and melting down in a weepy, screamy, public breakup hissy fit --

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

...
So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach.

It has gone back, as an appreciative Ezra Klein of The Washington Post conceded, to politics as usual. The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful!
...

The president’s goal in 2012, I suggested, would be to try to paint himself as the moderate bipartisan grownup, and dismiss the Republicans as extreme, intransigent, and hyper-ideological.

Based on the actual details of the deficit plan that the administration just released, though, I would like to retract that analysis. Between the size, scope and design of the tax increases and the skimpiness of the entitlement reforms (nothing on Social Security, minimal tinkering on Medicare), it seems that the president will be running for re-election as Nancy Pelosi instead.
...

-- which, in the history of weepy, screamy, public breakup hissy fits, may be second only to Rob Gordon's legendary act of rain-whipped relationship seppuku in "High Fidelity".

And so we end where we began.

With a punditocracy still competing to see who can be this week's King of the Centrist dung-heap, in a country which cannot continue to survive half Fox and half free.

UPDATE:  I was on a live chat forum with Mr. Sullivan this afternoon.  I pointed out that to make his case for equivalence between the Right and Left, he cites several specific examples by name (Romney, McConnell and Limbaugh) of reckless, deluded behavior by several prominent/powerful Republicans/Conservatives but no such examples by Liberals, who are simply noted as "They" doing this and that.

I asked him to support his thesis by naming specific examples of comparably reckless, deluded behavior by Liberals as prominent/powerful as Romney, McConnell and Limbaugh.

I waited and waited but received no answer, although I did learn that:

"...Palin's tweet made me come in my pants. I write what I think is true. I don't give a damn about "reputation." If I'm wrong I correct or re-think. Once a writer worries about these things, he's like an actor watching the audience. In my opinion, far too many journalists worry about their reputation."

and

"... I adore Ron Paul - for his courage, his candor, his extraordinary success in shifting our debate on critical questions of foreign policy and debt and freedom..."

and

[Regarding how often Mr. Sullivan has talked to Barack Obama] "Three times over four years. Only once one-on-one on the phone. The last time I saw him was before the Inauguration. I like to keep my distance. I didn't interview him for this piece."

So there's that.

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.

President's Speech on Iraq

Sure to reassure some; disappoint others.