When God Closes a McDonald's...

...He/She/They/Shai-Hulud opens a Taco Bell.

Mysterious are the ways of the Lord.

Driftglass Says Relax

Best of 2018?

I dunno.  None of them are going to win a Sidney Award -- certainly not the rare Sidney Doble -- but a lot of people read 'em and passed 'em around like dirty postcards, so I guess that's something...

1. The Candidate Who Has Fallen Under the Weight of Her Stone
2. Never Turn Your Back on a Never Trumper
3. The Madness of Mercy
4. This Week on "Tone Cop!": Bret Stephens
5. Magic Ruralism (tm)
6. Today In Both Sides Do It: Advice From The New York Times On The Proper Use Of "Fuck"

This was the year I launched a new publication which, if I could just keep the smirk off my face and play it straight, bids fair to make me rich as Croesus:

This was the year when Mr. Glenn Greenwald took his mad fighting skillz to his new home at Fox News --

-- while most of his Spleenwald Horde and his celebrity hangers-on (who had spent years making quite merry slagging the shit out of Landru critics like me for not being Of The Body) suddenly got reeeal quiet.


And this year Mr. David Brooks completely shook off his brief, post-2016 election flirtation with introspection and came roaring back with columns of such pure, Brooksian Pecksniffery that they will surely be studied by Historians of Tomorrow:

• David Brooks and the Triumphant Return of "Conservatism Cannot Fail"
• David Brooks: The Triumphant Return of "Team B"
• David Brooks: Moral Idiocy Incarnate
• David Brooks is Sean Hannity. Really.
• David Brooks: Because Every Political Catastrophe Needs a Sanctimonious Equivocator

Happy 2019 everyone!

Behold, a Tip Jar!

David Brooks Says Trump's "Sabotage and Fuck You" EO Might Turn Out Great For Everybody

Every now and then a nondescript little man from Wingnut Central Command shows up at Mr. David Brooks' door to remind him that it is time once again to renew his Conservative credentials.  It is a brief but critical ritual upon which Mr. Brooks' entire professional life literally depends.  After all,  it isn't the word "American" or "author" or "political and cultural commentator" in his CV that The New York Times shells out crazy money to slap on it's op-ed page every week:

David Brooks is a conservative American author as well as political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times.

It's the word "conservative" they're renting.  It is the word "conservative" which has given Mr. Brooks entree to the  corridors of power, gigs on NPR, PBS and NBC, book contracts and a job-for-life at the NYT which pays for Mr. Brooks' various hearths and homes and travels and book tours.

So every now and then he needs to get his "conservative" card punched again.  And of course, given the nature of Conservatism, this means he needs to say something horrible and blatantly untrue in some public forum somewhere.  This time around, the forum was The News Hour, and the horrible and blatantly untrue thing was this:

...

On health care, they are dismantling it. There will be a period of disruption. But what was interesting to me about the CBO analysis of what they’re doing, after this period of disruption, there will be more people insured, not less. So it won’t look like Obamacare, but as the markets respond, there is a possibility that more people will be insured.

And so it’s not a simple, oh, we’re just tearing everything apart

Mr. Brooks lives on another planet and no one on his world wants for necessities of life.  No one in his social circle will ever be affected personally by anything Donald Trump does (except for those yummy yummy tax cuts for the wealthy) and so there is no need for Mr. Brooks to trouble himself by learn anything about how, say, insurance works.  For those of you with longer memories, you might recall how remarkably similar this sounds to Mr. Brooks' equally blase approach to the policies of the last Ambulatory  Fuckup Generator that his party installed in the White House.

Behold the inerrant economic wisdom of Mr. David Fucking Brooks!

David Brooks from March 2001

Yes, There Is a New Economy

...

In other words, if you wade through the economic literature, it's hard not to agree with the Cleveland Fed's Jerry Jordan: We are living at a once-in-a-generation moment of economic opportunity. As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?

David Brooks, September 2001

The New Stupid Party

LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of excellence that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime.

Last week the Congressional Budget Office came out with a budget forecast. The report immediately got submerged in a chatterstorm about whether Congress or the White House would dip into something called the Social Security trust fund, but the essential facts are these: The CBO economists estimated that the federal government will run a surplus of about $150 billion in 2001. That’s a lower surplus than the CBO estimated a few months ago, before the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge. But even in these adverse circumstances, the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006.

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund...

I could go on at much greater length,  but since I already have, I see no reason to repeat the exercise.  It is sufficient to say that even the most cursory glance at Mr. Brooks actual record as a Conservative Public Intellectual shows three things.

First,  judging by any objective standard, Mr. Brooks is a colossal failure at Having Opinions about Things.

Second, given his long record of failure at Having Opinions about Things, by any objective standards, it is insane that he continues to reap lavish financial rewards and peer-group respect that are clearly unrelated in any way to his actual job performance.

Third, no one talks about it. Seriously.  Other than a few asshole Libtard bloggers in flyover country, no one talks about this.  And the conspicuous uniformity with which no one talks about this is what makes it so damn eerie [See "The Adventure of Silver Blaze"

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."]

And the reason for this is, I think, really very simple.

The corporations who run our media don't give a shit about any of this stuff.  Truth?  Falsity? Depravity?  The casual, sadistic infliction of harm on millions of Americans?  It does not affect them at all.  Just grist for the media mill.  What they do care about, deeply, is controlling the narrative.  Specifically, the narrative that Both Sides are to blame for every problem.  And so, to keep selling that corrosive and patently ridiculous narrative, they need Reasonable Conservatives they can plug into any medium.  They need reliable deacons of the  High and Holy Church of Both Siderism who can hit their marks and deliver the doxology of their toxic faith on any platform.

In other words, the need people exactly like Mr. David Brooks.

And to be of value to them, they need for him to keep that magical, golden word in his CV -- "conservative" -- active and up-to-date. 

And to do that, every now and then Mr. Brooks has to sally forth into the world and assert something that blatantly awful and wrong and astonishingly ignorant. 

And this he has now done.

Mission Accomplished, Mr. Brooks.

Mission Accomplished.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

From The Department of Burying The Lede

Found 1,900 paragraphs deep in this Politico article on the fall of Salon:

...

It seems there is a sense of urgency about Salon’s future. Hambrecht is in his early 80s, and Warnock is 75. Because Salon has run deficits for almost every quarter since it was founded, the company has relied on regular interest-free cash advances from Warnock, chairman of Salon’s board, and Hambrecht, a board member. From Salon’s founding until the end of 2015, the most recent data available, Warnock and Hambrecht have given the company nearly $20 million in cash advances, and Warnock also personally guaranteed a $1 million line of credit.

“You have two founders who are aging who were writing six-figures checks every year to cover operating costs,” one person close to the company said.

If Salon’s continued existence remains dependent on them, the company could be in a precarious position...

Beauty didn't kill the Beast.

Airplanes killed the Beast.

Also always, always follow the money.

The Patient Capital Of Crazy

This is Warner Todd Huston.  The one on the left.

Longtime readers will be somewhat familiar with his work from posts I have occasionally done over the years like "Big Red Todd and the Monsters".

Mr. Huston's oeuvre is repackaging wingnut talking points and pooping them out like little paving stones on the road to Hell. And at this job he is very persistent. He just chugs along, rain or shine, diligently reprocessing the bottom of the RWNJ birdcage into content for a variety of Conservative sites you have known and been alternately amused and repulsed by during your sojourn through these here internets:

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com,  StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDailyReview.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany's Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

Huston has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. Huston's work has appeared on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Neil Bortz, and Michael Savage. He has appeared on the G. Gordon Liddy show, many times on Chicago's WGN 720AM, and dozens of local shows from coast to coast, and many blogtalk radio shows.

Mr. Huston has appeared on local TV news to discuss his writing, has been a guest on Fox Business Network, CNN's blogger lunch, and has appeared on Breitbart TV's B-Team show.

Warner is also the editor of the Midwest Editor for RedCounty.com and has a blog on the Tribune-Owned ChicagoNow.com website. He is a well known writer on Illinois politics.

He has also written for Liberty Ink Magazine, several history magazines and appears in the book "Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture"which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Mr. Huston's work has also appeared in several College Textbooks...

Keep that in mind.

Well, yesterday Ol' Warner got kinda famous outside of the precincts that corner of Crazytown where he plies his trade.  You see, the cult Warner works for spends half its time shrieking about President Obama being the antichrist because of whatever he did yesterday, and the other half of its time all twitchy and amped and hair-trigger ready to go absolutely apeshit over whatever President Obama does tomorrow.  And it literally no longer matters what the President actually does or does not do -- whatever he has for breakfast tomorrow, that thing will be spell the Death of Freedumb and Our Glorious Republic unless we act to defeat this tyrant now!now!now!

Rinse and repeat.
Forever and ever.
You know the drill.

Well, as a professional spreader of conspiracies and amplifier of  bullshit, Warner sorta forgot that he's not actually very bright or capable of distinguishing between the scent of Chanel No. 5 and his own refried Limbaugh farts.  And what with all the copying and pasting and bitching and keening, he kinda got way out over his skis and fucked massively up.  And that fuckup sailed right through the wingnutosphere like ebola through a human centipede before anyone bothered to notice that is was indeed a fuckup.

Which is how got all over the Liberal side of the internet, starting with TPM and spreading outward through the radio, through Esquire and onto the MSNBC teevee machine:

Breitbart Issues Best Correction Since Forever

I generally don't like harping on other outlets' errors or the always mortifying process of issuing a correction. It's a mix of 'there but for the grace of God' and, in this case, look at the source. But I think here we may have perhaps the best 'correction' in the long storied history of 'corrections', especially ones stemming from errors no remotely careful journalist ever would have made in the first place.
As noted a bit earlier, on Saturday Breitbart published an exclusive pointing out that President Obama's Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch was part of the team that defended President Clinton during the Whitewater investigation - not a bad little scooplet. Only it wasn't the same Loretta Lynch, which kind of takes the punch out of the story.
Breitbart then issued a 'correction'. But like I said, it's a correction for the ages.

As you can see, the headline and the entire article is intact, replete with various references to Lynch's time in the early 90s defending the Clintons. There's a little "[Corrected]" tacked on to the headline, even though the headline stays the same. And that's it.
Until you get all the way down to the bottom of the piece.

The best I can say in defense of this comical 'correction' is that it would be challenging to amend the piece in light of the categorical collapse of the article's central assertion. I mean, how do you correct it? I guess you just don't? Which is pretty much what they did here.

But here's the thing.  If I had to bet the rent money, I would bet that this won't harm Ol' Warner's career one little bit.  Sure, he'll get banged around by the Liberal Media for a day or two, but all that means is a promotion from dreckslinger to full-on Conservative Martyr (3rd Class).

And that is the point.

One of the main reasons obviously insane Conservatives win at election time is that they are willing to invest in and cultivate third-tier ideological button men like Ol' Warner.  Willing to invest in their movement's communication infrastructure and and human capital -- materially supporting them, patiently, year after year after year -- until even a plodding goof like Ol' Warner has a steady audience and a resume that would look pretty impressive if you had no fucking idea what you were looking at.

On the Left, there is nothing like this.  Nor are there any plans to develop anything like this anytime soon.

And that is a big part of why we lose.

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.

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.

Sneak Preview of Rahmses' Address

to City Council.



Steve Rhodes has Our New Hizzoner's grueling first day itinerary over at The Beachwood.

Sample:

The Beachwood Guide To Rahm's Inauguration Day
An Exclusive Report

4:30 a.m.: Rahm wakes wife and proclaims "I am the mayor of Chicago, bitch!"

5 a.m.: A naked Rahm confronts patrons in the East Bank Club who are afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes on.

5:30 a.m.: Rahm back home for a breakfast of coal, metal shards, asbestos flakes and milk.

6 a.m.: Rahm is chauffered downtown in a used presidential limo he got Obama to drag out of storage. The vehicle will be known as I'm Number One.
6:30 a.m.: Rahm meets with senior staff, informs them to never write anything down.

7 a.m.: Rahm meets with Mayor Daley, who gives him the nuclear codes and the telephone number for the guy who did the Xs at Meigs Field.

7:30 a.m.: Rahm meets with religious leaders and tells them to tend to the needs of the fucking poor because he's got his hands full with "real people."
...

Go read the rest here.

So let it be written
So let it me done.


And yes, I absolutely will be beating the Hell out of that line for the next 4-to-22 years.

Partisanship Decried.

Some wonder if anything can be done?