The Moderate Republican, Centrist and Independent's Lament

First they enacted Nixon's racist Southern Strategy
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they welcomed White Conservative Fundamentalists into the party's inner circle
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they embraced Hate Radio, Fox News and the whole Conservative propaganda grievance machine
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they adopted the politics of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove and Lee Atwater
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they cheered on the War in Iraq and used it to demonize all opposition 
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they put on stupid hats, called themselves a "Tea Party" and had an eight-year-long racist primal scream because Democrats elected a black guy
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they put on different stupid hats, called themselves "MAGA," and nominated and elected the King of the Birthers.
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they nominated the King of the Birthers again
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they tried to overthrow the government when the King of the Birthers lost
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then they brought him back and elected him again
And I did not speak out
Because I'm not "political".

Then the King of the Birthers looted the treasury, put armed masked goons in the streets to intimidate and murder American citizens, launched a disastrous war for no explicable reason, torched our alliances, and generally fucked this country up almost beyond repair

But somehow none of that is my fault

Because I'm not "political".

Burn The Lifeboats

Once Everyone is a "Centrist Independent"...

...will we all get along?  

Will all of our dreams will come true?

In what is the stupidest claptrap I've read so far this month, Mr. Gary Cosby Jr. in the Tuscaloosa News seems to think that's the direction things are heading in.  That can't make up their fucking minds if their life depended on it and former Republicans who don't want to take shit for it "independent" voters are the most powerful voting bloc of all .  Because, as you all know, all "independents" are all "independent" for the same reasons, right?

To be clear, Mr. Gary Cosby Jr. is not breaking new ground in being stupid.  No brave new worlds of stupid are being discovered here.   Instead, this Temu Tom Nichols has swept up every extant stupid cliche about "Independents" and the Extremes on Both Side, and heaped them into a big ol' pile of stupid that is impressive in its own right.  

It reads as an extended Onion parody.  But it's not.  It's real.   More than real.  Super-real.  As if every asinine New York Times editorial on the subject dating back to when the world was young had been compacted into a single mighty ziggurat of stupid that rises so high above the dribbling of workaday pundits that it pierces some hitherto unbreachable barrier and enters into some noumenal realm of stupidity perfected.

As you read this, keep in mind it was written in the 21st century, not the 20th.  In February of 2026, not February of 1996.  I have helpfully emphasized the bits to which you should pay special attention, and will follow it up with a callback to a thing I wrote during The Before Time.

Independent voters increase as party extremism rises 

President Donald Trump’s approval rating continues to fall with 60% of Americans now disapproving of him and only 39% approving, according to a story published by USA Today. While this spells trouble for Trump’s controversial agenda, both Republicans and Democrats are in trouble as both parties bleed voters. 

Roca News, an independent online source, reported that a record number of American voters are identifying themselves as independents. Gallup polling indicated that 45% of voters now classify themselves as independent. Twenty-four percent said they were Republican, and equally, 24% said they were Democrats. 

Roca said the trend was growing because many young voters refuse to register as either Democrats or Republicans as they seek to maintain political independence. This growing voter bloc, positioned in the political center, is now the most powerful group of voters in America. 

While the number of independents is impressive, the numbers I found most enlightening were the 24s. Both major parties only have 24% of registered voters each. This spells trouble with a capital “T” for both parties. 

Extremism in both traditional parties is driving away voters. I can tell you that, although I had always voted Republican before Donald Trump took over the party, I will not do so again, not as long as Trump and his philosophy dominate the party. 

I have little desire to vote Democrat, except for the purpose of ending what I see as a festering tyranny in the Republican Party.  Apparently, a growing number of voters feel as I do. This means that both parties must have independent voters swing their way to win elections. When so many voters are situated in the middle, astute political operatives will refocus their party to reach them, or someone will form a third party positioned in the political center. 

I never believed for a moment that a second Trump term could be this bad. I was wrong. It is far worse, far more extreme, than my darkest fears painted it. Maybe I am not alone. Maybe there is a huge number of Americans who feel as I do. Maybe, despite the Trump administration pressuring states to redraw their voting maps to favor Republicans, enough of us exist to, in the classic American political ideal, throw the bums out at the midterm elections. 

When Barack Obama was president, there were many issues on which I completely disagreed with him. There were some issues I found on which I did agree with him. That is pretty normal. It is rare for a president, or any political leader, to be so egregiously bad that I couldn’t find something to like or agree with him or her about. 

In Trump’s first term, I gave him full marks for having a good economy right up until the 2020 global pandemic shut down the entire world economy for months. Had the pandemic not hit, I believe Trump would have been easily reelected. As it happened, the pandemic exposed him as a truly ineffective leader and an incompetent crisis manager.

The problem for voters like me is obvious. The right has drifted too far to the extreme right, and the left has drifted too far to the extreme left. We have lost our ability to carry on civil discourse and, as a result, we have lost the ability to compromise for the common good. 

This big independent voting bloc gives me hope for a better political future for the nation. If this group of voters finds a unifying candidate in the center, we might see the first independent president in a coming election cycle.

While an independent in the White House is unlikely, the power of this group of voters could well draw both parties back into a more reasonable position and balance. That might be even more important than forming a third party. 

Extremism kills democracy. We must rein in the country’s political parties soon, immediately, if we have any hope of saving this nation’s position as the world’s most stable democracy. Perhaps even more important, we must bring these parties back toward the center to ensure freedom and civil rights for everyone in the population. 

Oh Gary, Gary, Gary.  Of course you've always voted Republican.  Your whole column screams that, because right at the top you say that "Donald Trump took over the party" which is simply not true.  In fact, it is exactly backwards.   Your party dropped trou, grabbed ankles, waved its rosy red ass around and begged Trump to take it, body and soul.  They did this because the base of your party is largely made up of bigots and imbeciles, and Trump spoke to them in their native language.  The language of hate and grievance and dire conspiracies.  The language of Limbaugh, Levin, Hannity, Beck, Ingraham, O'Reilly.  

I guess you never noticed.  Which, I guess makes you one of the not-very-bright ones.  So cool beans you snagged yourself a White Guy DEI position at your local paper!

See, we over here on the left understand quite well what it means when guys like you go about stomping and fuming about  The Extremes on Both Sides, because we have been dealing with clowns like you our entire adult lives.   You -- a member of the Party of Personal Responsibility -- cannot accept that your side is the fucking problem and that you are, in a very real way, personally responsible for your side being the fucking problem.  Such a thought would fry your circuits right down to the motherboard, so you conjure out of thin air an Extreme Left to counterbalance the very real and very fascist Extreme Right, then stamp your feet and insist that you're actually the Sensible Ambassador from a nonexistent Sensible Center, and if only everyone would drop what they're doing and meet you there... 

As to all the rest of the yadda yadda about Independents and The Extremes on Both Sides and the Glorious Center, I guess the news hasn't filtered all the way down to Tuscaloosa yet that that particular stick of Bubble-Yum lost its flavor about 20 years ago, even though grifters like Third Way, The Purple Project, No Labels, Country Over Party, and Forward have succeeded in bilking wealthy, credulous idiots out of their coin by feeding them wishful codswallop like this.  

And seeing as how you're from Alabama, I'm quite surprised that you are unfamiliar with the most successful third party bid in American history, seeing as how the candidate was a governor of your state, and ran for president using language that was very nearly identical to the language you used in your column.  That's right, it was George Wallace, and you can read all about it here, "More Adventures in Third Party History: Today, The Most Successful Third Party in Modern American Politics" if you are interested.

We also did a whole podcast on the subject which people can still listen to here.  

Now it's time for the PSA in which I remind readers of a fun word, coined by Kurt Vonnegut his 1963 satirical novel "Cat's Cradle" , which I used all the way back in November of 2009 when David Fucking Brooks wrote almost exactly the came column as yours for almost exactly the same craven reasons.  

From The "Independent" Granfalloon, November 08, 2009:

Nobody knows what “independents” want, because “independent” as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":

"...a proud and meaningless association of human beings"

Because “independent” can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.

I Am The Liberal Media

For My Birthday I Got a Very Fine Bottle of Scotch and a Poisoned Chalice Out Of Which To Drink It

This could either be a very long post or a very short post, depending on my energy level.  I'm still fighting the crud, so my energy level is pretty low, but it would be ungallant of me and give you wonderful readers short shrift if, after all your decades of support and encouragement, I just wrote "I fucking told you so" over and over again several hundred times before taking to my bed once again to sleep and dream of better timelines.

So here goes.

Some of you may remember just after the end of the Before Time when your humble scrivener made many of my Liberal allies cranky by suggesting that, just perhaps, we should be a bit more selective about the terms under which lifelong Republican operatives and arsonists who had spent their professional lives making a living hating us and convincing voters that we were the Devil incarnate ... were welcomed into the fold.

After all, as was true with the Iraq War after it became clear that it was going to be the worst foreign policy catastrophe in modern American history, the moment Trump began running away with the GOP nomination in 2015/2016 was a moment when the Left held clear and unassailable title to the moral and political high ground.  Because the Left had been right about the Right all along, and now, tragically, the evidence of this was irrefutable.  

At this point can I just stipulate, for the court, that I wrote many, many posts about how this was the time for Liberals to leverage the collective power of our moral and political high ground to start bending the sclerotic media in our direction.  To tell the story, accurately and in detail, of how the Republican party had come to be the whelping box of monsters it had become.  It was the time to bring the full might of our righteous rhetoric to bear.  For example.  

What happened? A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Trump used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division...

Pretty fierce, eh?  Except, sadly, I didn't find that on the blog of some disreputable Liberal, and the subject wasn't Trump.  That was written by James Carville's wife, Mary Matalin, in the pages of The National Review in 2012.  And the subject was Barack Obama.

What happened? A political narcissistic sociopath leveraged fear and ignorance with a campaign marked by mendacity and malice rather than a mandate for resurgence and reform. Instead of using his high office to articulate a vision for our future, Obama used it as a vehicle for character assassination, replete with unrelenting and destructive distortion, derision, and division...

And for her sins was she hectored by David Brooks and Tom Nichols for her wildly over-the-top, inflammatory language?  Banished to the outer darkness by the legacy media?

Of course not.  Because, kids, this is how even the "respectable" Right talked about Obama and Democrats and Liberal all the time, every day.  For her sins Matalin founded and served as Editor-in-Chief for Threshold Editions, a conservative publishing imprint at Simon & Schuster.   She was a frequent guest on the Sunday Shows until, I presume, she became so unbearable to look at that she risked turning the audience to stone.  She and hubby run quite the cottage industry of opinion-having, pimping for various corporate interests, etc.  

And all the way back in 2012, Brother Charlie Pierce was asking all the right questions:

Before we examine matters in detail, however, we should ask ourselves the most fundamental question of all?

Why?

Why does any television network put Mary Matalin on the air any more? (The same, it should be noted, can be said about her husband, but at least he had a book to shill earlier this year.) She is not entertaining. She is not funny. She is not particularly bright. She certainly isn't in any way informative. She's just a nasty, bitter old piece of work who spent eight years supplying fresh earth for the coffin in which Dick Cheney sleeps during the daylight hours, Ann Coulter without the cocktail dress and the lunatic's performance skills. (Of course, some select people just love Matalin's act. Some people also believe Play-Doh is a food group. Put The Gateway Pundit — aka The Dumbest Man on the Internet — in front of a computer for 30 minutes and you get a guy sticking pencils in his ears for 30 minutes.) So, she gets on there and insinuates that Paul Krugman is a liar, and the whole panel erupts, not over that, but because Krugman intimated that the elite press corps had failed to call out Willard Romney for the truly remarkable liar he's become. After everybody agreed that Krugman was just wrong, wrong, wrong, about all those nice people with whom everybody has dinner in D.C., we really got down to it over the issue of zombie-eyed granny-starving and the Republican ticket..

And getting back to the present, we have the general answer to the specific question of "Why"?  And the answer is because the legacy media is a racket.  A money making racket that wears a journalism mask because that makes doing the business of the racket easier.  

Which, in turn, finally puts paid to the idea that there was ever any hope of leveraging the Left's moment of collective moral and political superiority into forcing a real reckoning for what has happened to our American political system and the legacy media.  Because to do so, the legacy media would have had to put the metaphorical shotgun in its own mouth and emptied both barrels.  Admit that they were deeply complicit in the rise of the fascist Right and that the actively suppressed honest criticism from the Left.  That they put proven liars, frauds and grifters on teevee and let them get away with murder decade after decade because it was profitable and good for ratings.  That to truly bring to book the malefactors who brought us to where we are today, they would have had to implicate every major network, every national newspaper, and the entire Republican party from the very top all the way to the grass roots.

And that was never going to happen.  

But even knowing that, we should have tried harder.    Instead of flinging themselves like drunk prom dates and every kinda-sorta former Republican who called Trump a shithead, the Left should have demanded much, much more from the handful of refugees from the GOP who showed up at our door.  Should have insisted on confession, repentance, contrition and atonement.  Then and only then can come absolution.

But way too many of my fellow Liberals were way too horny to get to the "forgive and the forget" part so they let Never Trumper skip all that.  The granted them what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called, in a different context and a different time, "cheap grace".  

Back in 2020, I took a look into what our future would probably look like now that we had handed what little media clout we had over to people who spent their careers making a living shitting on us.  It was through a glass and darkly, but I think I got the gist just about right.

...So, having seen the nightmare consequence of letting Republican off the hook once before -- of letting them lie about their own past and their own complicity while standing in the ruins they left in their wake -- it seemed inconceivable to me that for the sake of some transient, feel-good validation, the Liberal establishment would make exactly the same mistake again.

That having once again slogged our way to the undisputed moral and political high ground, the Liberal establishment would decided to give it away to Rick Wilson and Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt and Joe Walsh.

But they did, because, as I have already mentioned, nobody listens to dirty Liberal bloggers, especially those who have the bad taste to keep remembering embarrassing things in public.

So, since no one is listening anyway, let me tell you what our collective future probably looks like.

As the Lincoln Project become the ascendant, anti-Trump voice in the American political media, prepare for more and more of your allies (who also happen to be members of that same professional media ecosystem) to get more and more irritated at anyone who keeps asking really basic questions about, say, Rick Wilson's very recent past.  You know, the same sorts of basic questions -- What did you do before this?  Why did you leave?  Have you ever done bad stuff?  Can we talk to your former employer? -- that my stepdaughter had to answer to work at McDonald's.

Prepare to see the George W. Bush Administration mostly redeemed.  Come on, he did some good stuff!  And he's such an affable, god-fearin' man.  And that whole Iraq thing, well there is plenty of blame to go around and a lot of it was Cheney.  Really, ol' Dubya gets a bad rap.

Prepare to see the Sensible Center relocated to somewhere well to the right of Joe Scarborough, with the spectrum of Serious and Legitimate political opinions which will be permitted on cable teevee to range from David Brooks and Bill Kristol on one side, to Joe Walsh and Tom Cotton on the other.  And once again, you and I and all of our inconvenient questions and encyclopedic memory of the past will vanish completely, because just like last time, what will go down in the books as "history" will depend entirely on who controls the cameras and where they are pointing them.

And (if you will allow me a brief aside) this is what  cracks me up about all the "We need them now but we'll dump them later" progressives I run into on social media.  And so to them I ask the following:  Who exactly is this "we" that will dump the Lincoln Project once "we" are done with them?  Did "we" suddenly inherit an ownership stake in The New York Times?  Are "we" now on the executive boards of NBC and CNN and NPR and did I just miss it?  And if "we" suddenly have it within our power to decide who gets camera time and who gets axed, how come "we" can't get Chuck Todd fired?  Or Bret Stephens?  Or Joe Scarborough?

Hell, "we" can't even summon the collective firepower to get Meet the Press to stop putting Hugh Fucking Hewitt on the air, so enough with this "We'll get 'em tomorrow" piffle.   Because the Liberal establishment is already busy trading that tomorrow away because for some reason they cannot get it through their heads that these outcast and unrepentant Republican torpedoes and henchmen are using them -- standing on their shoulders and embezzling their credibility -- and not the other way around...

I went on to speculate about our future "when the Trump regime is decapitated" which you may mock me for, or chalk it up to my youthful naivete.  I underestimated the utter depravity of the GOP's fascist heart by about 10%, and overestimated the median intelligence of the average voter by about the same. 

Sorry about that.

But that part about the relocation of the Sensible Center?  While some of the details were exaggerated for effect/screenplay sale (sad.  never happened.) now that the New Bible of the Very Serious People is a 60-page election postmortem report  titled “Deciding to Win" I feel quite justified in saying, yep, the Centrist Shadows ability to return to Z'ha'Dum was a direct and predictable (and predicted!) result of letting Never Trumpers own the public media space that rightfully should have been ours.  

The Signs and Portents were all there for anyone to read.

And the result?  

From The American Prospect:

Voters Did Not Understand the Stakes in 2024

Now, the buyer’s remorse for last year’s election is clear.

Since Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump last year, various Democratic elected officials, think tanks, and strategists have been frantically attempting to find some magic political formula that will allow the party to beat Republicans once more.

The latest version comes from a new big donor–backed strategist group called Welcome, and it’s titled “Deciding to Win.” The advice, surprise surprise, is that Democrats should punch the left—abandon progressive policy like Medicare for All, stop talking about LGBTQ people and climate change, and focus on milquetoast kitchen-table issues. It’s the same thing we’ve already seen a hundred times this year.

But I happen to have some other polling, provided exclusively to the Prospect by Data for Progress, that sheds a different light on what Democrats should have done. To sum up, a large majority of American voters are greatly dissatisfied with the state of things, most especially the economy. It turns out that median voters were catastrophically misled about the stakes of the election last year. Addressing that problem is a prerequisite for any messaging to break through, regardless of content...

From The New Republic:

...This is the seemingly immutable advantage that Trump and the Republicans have over Democrats. It’s not that they have a better grasp of the values of some mythical heartland America. (They really don’t. This is the party that routinely attacks Disney and football. There is no cultural rake that they do not habitually step on.) Their advantage is that they spent decades building their own constellation of conservative propaganda outlets, and then they went out and purchased most of the mainstream outlets as well. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the LA Times. Larry Ellison’s son owns CBS, and is preparing a bid to purchase CNN. Ellison will also soon own a major share of TikTok. Elon Musk turned Twitter into X and filled it with rightwing propaganda.

In reality, Democratic politicians and Kamala Harris specifically talked little if at all about climate change and trans rights in 2024—and spoke constantly about “kitchen table issues.” WelcomePAC’s formula for success is precisely what Democrats tried. It failed. WelcomePAC’s only answer is “well try it some more.”

The problem isn’t that “Deciding to Win” lacks data: The authors present plenty of data showing how voters’ perceptions of the two parties has changed since 2012. For example, in 2013, 51 percent of voters said the Democratic Party is “out of touch.” Today, that number has risen to 70 percent. Voters, when surveyed, list the economy as their top issue, and tell pollsters that the Democratic Party prioritizes other issues. But the authors don’t adequately probe what might be driving the data. It’s not that Democratic Party leadership has become too substantively radical, that’s for sure. And meanwhile the authors insist that the Republican Party has moderated on issues like abortion rights since 2012, which is plainly false. What happened was Republicans stopped talking so loudly about their proposals for a national abortion ban after they overturned Roe v Wade and it became a looming possibility. That’s not policy moderation; It’s measurement error. 

I cannot help but imagine what the media and political landscape would look like today if, at crucial moments, wealthy Liberals, Democratic donors and media corporations lavished just a fraction of the promotion, limelight and resources on Liberals who had been right about the Right all along as they did on recently-former Republican who still really can't stand us and have a huge financial and professional stake in keeping any discussion of the Before Times the hell off the table.

Might not have changed a thing.  On the other hand, I could  easily imagine a scenario where that the authors of “Deciding to Win" felt compelled to allow for a minority report addendum authored by, say, Digby Parton or Bob Cesca or David Corn or my wife, instead of passing the entire thing off as the indisputable consensus of the only people who are worth hearing from.  

Burn the Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 943: But Democrats Must Move To The Center!

“"...the centre cannot hold." -- W. B. Yeats

• 
  

These Fucking People

 

It's Both Siderist "Centrists" all the way down.

I Am The Liberal Media

</

With Allies Like These...

 

They just can't quit their dream of turning my party into a Joe Manchin joint, where any former Bush administration goofball or war criminal would feel perfectly comfortable coming in, kicking their shoes off, putting their feet up and ordering us lowly Liberals to fetch 'em beer and a sammich.  

Because really, what else are we good for?

And don't kid yourself.  There's plenty of money out there for that project, and that money is bankrolling plenty of Centrist Democrats who think this is a terrific idea.

lol new clown car just rolled up

[image or embed]

— Oliver Willis (@owillis.bsky.social) September 17, 2025 at 8:05 AM

Fun postscript:  I posted this to Facebook and it was immediately taken down. 

Second postscript: Hey, look where Ol' King Coal cropped up next!

Manchin: President Trump is the person who can basically bring us together… And I'm really hoping, I believe in him, I believe he can do that… pic.twitter.com/vuhIJuvMdW

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 19, 2025

I Am The Liberal Media

But if We Didn’t Know, It Was Because We Didn’t Want to Know.

The title of this post is a quote from the 1961 movie "Judgment at Nuremberg". It is spoken by the character Ernst Janning played by Burt Lancaster.  This was the curse he laid on himself, on his co-defendants, and on all Germans who ignored the rise of Hitler.  

Meanwhile, back here in 2025 --  

They keep publishing exactly what they’re doing www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/u...

[image or embed]

— Molly Jong-Fast (@mollyjongfast.bsky.social) May 18, 2025 at 6:49 AM

-- on hears all all kinds of bitching and whining about Democrats that all come down to, "Why oh why didn't those feckless Democrats warn...?  Why didn't the Democrats message better...?"

Except...

There were hundreds of videos like these all over all legacy media and all social media platforms..  Ads.  Speeches.  Pressers.  There was ample warning.  There was abundant messaging.  

And now?  From The Washington Post:

Trump won these independent voters. Now some are souring on his second term.

Unaffiliated voters are starting to turn against Trump and his disruptive agenda, demonstrating political risks for the president and his party.

Independent voter Lisa Kirk voted for Donald Trump in 2016 in the hope he would run the country like a business. She cast her ballot for Trump again last fall as he promised to lower prices.

Then his tariffs threatened to tank the economy. Kirk tried not to check her 401(k) this month as the stock market sank. Last week, she wondered aloud to her husband if she should take the hit and withdraw funds: “If we’re going to go into a recession,” she said, “I might lose it all.”

Asked what she thought of Trump’s second term, the 60-year-old Home Depot employee began with a long pause. “Ummm …”

“Economically, he’s not the same person,” she said of Trump.

Independent voters are starting to sour on Trump and his disruptive agenda...

Independent voters can go take a flying fuck at the moooooon.

But what about every legacy media outlet's other favorite group.  Those darn Centrists.  You know, those weak-willed, dim-witted goobers who will walk 1,000 miles to find a fence to straddle.

From New York Magazine, September 9, 2024 (with emphasis added):

Believe It or Not, Many Voters Think Trump Is a Moderate

...Since the Trump campaign is deploying massive resources on convincing voters that she is a “radical leftist” or even a “Marxist” or a “communist,” the Harris campaign is working overtime (as most strikingly reflected in her relentlessly centrist DNC acceptance speech) to develop crowd-pleasing and swing-voter-reassuring messages and policy priorities.

But they have another problem that will complicate their task, as reflected in another Times-Siena question:

Do you think Donald Trump is too conservative, not conservative enough, or not too far either way?

Only 32 percent of likely voters say Trump is “too conservative,” while 49 percent say he is “not too far either way.” 48 percent of self-identified independents are in that “not too far either way” category, as are 25 percent of Democrats. So believe it or not, at this moment, and even before Team Trump spends a half-billion dollars or so smearing Harris as dangerously leftist, it’s the 45th president who is the perceived centrist in the race. That’s exactly what public-opinion researchers discerned in 2016, mostly because Trump jettisoned unpopular conservative positions favoring Social Security and Medicare privatization, free trade, and “forever wars” while Hillary Clinton suffered from decades of conservative attacks on her. Trump is in a position to replay that comparison if Harris lets him get away with it.

To anyone paying attention to the issues, the idea that there is anything “centrist” about Donald Trump is beyond preposterous...

And that is exactly the point.  It is preposterous to continue treating these people with kid-gloves: as creatures who are so delicate and fragile that to refer to them as anything more bluntly descriptive than "low-information voters" would shatter them and drive them away forever. With a decade of evidence laying right there at their feet, Independents and Centrists helped a mush-brained fascist and all of his creepy, sadistic, stupid and deranged henchmen back in office, so how much further away do you think they could be driven?

With a decade of evidence laying right there at their feet, if they didn't know, it was because they didn't want to know.  

And that doesn't make them low-information voters.

That makes them something much, much worse. 

I Am The Liberal Media

What Is Dead May Never Die

How It Started...  a post from me from 15 years ago -- three days after the odious "No Labels" scam was conjured into existence.

Note the title.

Dead Center: Political Cowardice Now Has Its Own "Movement"!

Yay!

In case you ever idled away an afternoon screwing around with your old political chemistry set/fantasy football league lineups and wondering what would happen if you took a bunch of Republican primary losers (Charlie Christ)...added in a goonbag of out-of-work and out-of-favor former Republican speechwriters and campaign button-men (David Frum/John Avlon/Mark McKinnon)...the last of the politically arteriosclerotic insider DLC goofs who aren't already drawing paychecks under the Obama Administration's "Former Clinton White House Full Employment Project" (Nancy Jacobson aka. Mrs. Mark Penn)...Republican minor teevee celebrities (Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough)...

...and David Fucking Brooks?

And then sprinkled the resulting crime against nature with an assload of money (because there are always, always endless assloads of money available for any horrible idea that reinforces Villager sensibilities)?

What you get crawling out of the Petri dish are things like the autotuned, content-free, sugar-coma-inducing horror that is --

... the "No Labels Anthem"

But nothing we did not expect, right?

I mean, ever since the Republican Base ducked out on paying the tab for a generation of being loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything by putting on funny hats, screaming about liberty and calling themselves "The Tea Party", their sleazy Centrist enablers have been seething with jealously. Quite suddenly the monster they built didn't need them anymore and the skeevy hustlers who had helped create the Racist/ Corporatist/ Dominionist Confederacy on the bones of the New Deal and the grave of the American Dream found themselves cast out and looking for their next meal ticket.

Preferably a meal ticket under a banner that -- like "Tea Party -- wouldn't keep bringing up their horribly inconvenient past as the sleazy, enabling hustlers.

Hey, kids! I have an idea! Lets peel those the icky, damning labels off of everything and -- presto! -- there is magically no longer any difference between rat poison and apple sauce!

Can I haz my million dollars now?...

 

How it's going...15 years later,

From the AP.  Note the title:

Former Sen. Joe Manchin is working on a memoir. ‘Dead Center’ is scheduled for September

Former Sen. Joe Manchin has a memoir coming out in September, what the self-styled maverick from West Virginia calls his “declaration of independence from the extremes on both sides.”

St. Martin’s Press announced Tuesday that Manchin’s “Dead Center: In Defense of Common Sense” will be released Sept. 16.

Manchin, 77, announced last year he wouldn’t seek re-election after serving in the Senate since 2010 and becoming the rare Democrat to win in a state which otherwise votes for Republicans by wide margins. Manchin had long branded himself as a moderate beholden to no ideology and would often chastise Democrats or upend legislation when Senate Democrats held a tiny majority during the presidency of fellow party member Joe Biden.

Last summer, Manchin left the Democrats altogether and identified as an independent, although he continued to caucus with his former party. In a statement issued through St. Martin’s, he said that “Dead Center” was a “declaration of independence” and a handbook for governing...

Because, as I wrote 15 years ago, there are always, always endless assloads of money available for any horrible idea that reinforces Villager sensibilities.

And what is dead may never die.

Burn The Lifeboats

Centrism's back baby! And Michael Steele's Got It!

Now that the MSNBC/Bulwark axis has completed the rehabilitation of Michael Steele and, after MSNBC race purge, given him one-third of his own weekday show, Steele is now firmly a member in good standing of that inner circle of recently-former Republicans who will control the direction of the last little corner of the "liberal" media on cable teevee.

And in his ad on The Bulwark for his own podcast, Steele gives us a hint about who he thinks the "liberal" media should be leaning towards:

Politics.  Culture.  You name it, we're talkin' about it.  And we're keeping 100% real right here on the Michael Steele podcast.  I'm Michael Steele.  I'm the host of the podcast. Each week I'm having conversations with political analysists, writers and activists who aren't afraid to shake things up.  A little bit like yours truly.  It doesn't matter if you're on the Left, the Right or somewhere in that strong Middle, this is the space you wanna be in...  

If I had to guess, as a complete outsider with no network contacts at all, but with a pretty good track record of making these sorts of predictions, I would guess this gives us a preview of where MSNBC is headed in the near future.  

Fact is, MSNBC is dying.  We'll, truth be told, cable news as a whole is dying, but MSNBC is leading the race to the cemetery.

From The Independent, December 18, 2024:

More bad news for MSNBC as they hemorrhage viewers and are now losing to NewsNation in weekend ratings battle

Amid plummeting ratings since Donald Trump’s election last month, several of the liberal cable news network’s programs on Saturday finished behind the centrist cable news upstart in the key 25-54 demographic.

From (so sorry) The New York Post, February 26, 2025:

‘Fox & Friends’ extends ratings lead as MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ loses nearly half its audience since election.

Thanks to a long series of stupid mistakes made by the network's stupid shot-callers, MSNBC has put itself in an impossible position.  

They don't want to lose whatever is left of their Liberal audience...

But they also refuse to sack Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough and his side piece and his menagerie of hacks, which is one of the major reasons liberals are staying away in droves...

Which means they very much need to attract replacement viewers so their ad rates don't drop to the point where only dick pill and prepper survival pack purveyors are willing to spend coin on advertising on MSNBC, because then it's back to six hours of LOCKDOWN! in the evenings...

But the chances of attracting any MAGA Republican viewers are slim to none, unless they pull a Newsome and start stunt-casting MAGA mopes like Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens.  Which will definitely drive away even more of their liberal viewers, because if I want to watch that trainwreck, I'll just wait until someone posts it on YouTube...

So, sooner or later,  the cable new shot-callers will once again begin listening to the siren's song of the same old snake oil salesmen peddling the same old nonsense about there being a vast and underserved audience of politically active and aware Centrists out there just over the horizon.  

And if the shot-callers just had the courage to lard their lineups with Third Way/No Labels/Country Over Party/Purple Project/Forward Party talking-heads, by jiminy, they could not only put on the best show this hick town has ever seen, but save the family farm to boot!

And that is where I believe MSNBC is headed.  

And it is for circumstances just such as this that, in the early 1600s the writer M. Day coined the expression "a fool's errand".

I Am The Liberal Media

March 2024 Jennifer Rubin Is Now Fully April 2012 Norm Ornstein

From The Brookings Institute, April 27, 2012:

Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem

[by] Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein

...

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition...

The Washington Post, yesterday:

Forget ‘polarization.’ It’s the GOP’s radicalization.

By Jennifer Rubin

The notion that the United States is “polarized” into two conflicting, equally stubborn and extreme camps infects much of the mainstream news coverage and everyday chatter about politics. Washington is “broken.” “Gridlock” is a problem. “No one goes out to dinner with someone on the other side.” Such mealy-mouthed language masks a stark dichotomy: Democrats have to move to the center to get bipartisan support; Republicans have become radicalized and unmovable.

This is not “polarization.” It is the authoritarian capture of much of the GOP by a right-wing movement bent on sowing chaos...

And this completes that particular circle.

Powerful and completely accurate @JRubinBlogger . Should be read by all journalists, especially editors, and reporters at the Post, the Times, AP and CNN. And points out how devious and pernicious is No Labels. https://t.co/yMOLXYnhRO

— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) March 10, 2024

Good to see Rubin catching up to where Norm was 12 years ago, and where the Left was decades ago, back when even whispering such thoughts was the darkest heresy.  However, ultimately none of this will matter very much.  

There just aren't any minds left to be persuaded on the Right.  And Centrists are just as pot-committed to their poisonous cult of Both Sides Do It as the Right are pot-committed to their Orange Rapist Fascist Daddy.  It's just that, in the case of pathological Centrists, virtually the entire mainstream news media are members of that cult, so they use their their position occupying the commanding heights of the normie media to camouflaged their weirdo fetish as "objective" and "normal". 

See also The New York Times every fucking day.

 

I Am The Liberal Media

Ten Unpleasant Facts About The American People

1.  Other than geographically, there is no such group as "The American People".  It is a mirage invented by pundits to elide the stark and irreconcilable differences between* various groups of Americans. 

2.  Republican Americans do not care about democracy.  At all.  They are motivated entirely by their fear of and rage over various imaginary boogieman that the Republican media has spent 30 years impanting in their tiny lizard brains.

3.  There are no "Centrists" or "Independents".  Instead there are millions and millions of mopes who want to sound smart when they talk about politics, but who are also conflict-averse cowards who would rather pull their own heads off than take sides.  Over anything.  Or bother to learn the details.  Of anything.  So they hide out in the "Both Side Do It" panic room, hoping that someone, somewhere will fix stuff and make everyone stop shouting.

4.  There are plenty of Republicans-in-hiding who call themselves Independents currently hiding out in the  "Both Side Do It" panic room too.

5.  Issues like fascism and voter suppression and civil rights and the fate of democracy and the future of the environment rarely penetrate the thick walls of the "Both Side Do It" panic room, but stuff that gets reported on local news or in the mainstream media (like crime or inflation) does get in.  Because when the price of milk goes up, panic room denizens see it but when the price of democracy goes up they ignore it.

6.  When panic room denizens are troubled, that's when 30 years of the mainstream media pushing the "Both Sides Do It" lie really pays big dividends.  Since panic room denizens are lazy and cowardly and don't care to know the details about war or pandemic or OPEC or supply chains or any of that complicated stuff, they will reach for the nearest, simplest, dumbest, wrongest "Both Sides Do It"-compatible answer.

7.  Republicans always have an ample supply of simple, dumb, wrong answers packaged and ready, and a massive propaganda machine which they spent +30 years building to bulldoze those simple, dumb, wrong answers into the mainstream media.  The mainstream media... which will reliably never challenge the stupidity and factual wrongness of whatever the Republicans are pushing.

8.  This leaves "Both Side Do It" panic room denizens with a simple, binary choice.  Since they are programmed to believe simple, dumb, wrong answers to things, they believe that there must be a magic button or a silver bullet that can solve whatever problems are vexing them.  And since Democrats in charge have refused to push the buttons and fire the silver bullets that would have simply and easily solved their problems, obviously they need to be put in check by Republicans.  Because "balance".  Because "bipartisanship".  I mean, since Both Sides are equally flawed, why not give the other team a shot?

9.  Once they have grabbed any of the levers of power, Republicans will immediately begin making everything much worse.  And no matter how much ground Democrats cede to Republicans in the name of "balance" and "bipartisanship", the fact that the more power Republicans grab the worse things always get is always explained away by the mainstream media and to the satisfaction of the "Both Side Do It" panic room denizens by blaming Democrats for not compromising even more.  

10.  Every now and then the sheer monstrousness of the GOP kicks the denizens of the "Both Side Do It" panic room in the throat so hard that they are momentarily shocked into noticing that Both Sides Don't.  This moment of semi-wakefulness is immediately counteracted by the mainstream media by reinforcing the walls of the "Both Side Do It" panic room and pointing out that some Liberal somewhere might be doing something naughty.  

*Thanks for the catch, James!

I Am The Liberal Media

Snarkeology 101: Both Siderism Like Strontium-90 In The Milk And The Triumphant Return of The Driftington Post

These days, playing the Both Sides Do It card is no longer the automatic win it was just a few years ago.  Yes, it's still with us like the chronic ideological disease it has always been, but the unalloyed deference to anyone who invokes it is not so omnipresent.  

To save what's left of his career, Matthew Dowd, the undisputed King of Both Siderism during the 2016 presidential campaign, has gone so far as to nuke his entire, damning Twitter archive full of gloating, pissy Both Siderism and automatically block anyone who brings up his very inconvenient past.  Pundits who, make no mistake, are still members of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It, now routinely couch their Both Siderism by prefacing their lie with "This is not one of those both sides do it things".  And even recently-former Republicans regularly roll their eyes at Both Sides-ism. 

Don't get me wrong.  It's still out there and it's still virulent, especially at the local level where fools, cowards, simpletons and Republicans still hide their foolishness or stupidity or cowardice or the rank evil of their party by aping the ersatz savviness of the pundits and waving off any Republican atrocity with, well, y'know, Both Sides   

But twasn't always so.  No sirree Bob.

Not so very long ago, attacking this Biggest of the Big Lies -- pointing out that it was the Big Lies that made all the other lies possible -- 

But the Pig People would be nothing but a minor nuisance -- a boil on the ass of democracy -- without their  Centrists who keep the "Both Sides Do It" spider hole well-furnished and open for business.  Pound for pound, Centrism is the biggest and most debilitating lie in American politics bar none.  It is the Big Lie that makes all the little lies possible, which is why I focus so hard on those who traffic in it.  They are the ones most vulnerable to and terrified of being called out in public.  They are the ones we must run out of the media on a rail.

-- was the darkest of heresies.  Merely whispering your doubts about Both Siderism, questioning whether it was a toxin that had poisoned our politics, was considered shameful and transgressive.

So just imagine the fate of those of us who shouted this heresy out loud.

Over and over again.

Decade after decade.

All of the following is from a two-week period, a decade ago, in September of 2012.

Fake Centrism: Democracy's Retrovirus:

On this blog, I have made the point thousands of times over the last seven years that Fake Centrism is our most dire and dangerous political problem.  Without a Fake Centrist narrative, Conservatives have no place to hide their lies, slander and depravity.  With a Fake Centrist narrative, there is no Conservative fraud or treason so large that the media will not* bury it under an avalanche of reflexive, "Both sides do it"-ism.

Fake Centrism is the retrovirus that is killing our democracy's capacity to defend itself from its internal enemies: it is the immune-system-destroying disease which allows every other kind of Hate Radio/Fox News opportunistic political malignancy to run wild through our body politic.  And man, once you start to notice how automatically every water-cooler Cicero and two-bit Tom Friedman uses  Fake Centrism  to prop up their lazy arguments, it's really creepy.

 The Big Lie of Centrism -- Like Strontium-90 In The Milk.

On the subject of "once you start to notice how automatically every water-cooler Cicero and two-bit Tom Friedman uses Fake Centrism to prop up their lazy arguments, it's really creepy", commenter Cliff helpfully passes along the following:

You know, I just ran across this the other day in a piece for the Creativity Post, titled "George Washington’s Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior":

"Both of our political parties have become openly uncivil toward each other and toward anyone or anything that disagrees with their programs. The televised debates focus on which candidate can hurt or dishonor the others the most. The winners are usually the most dishonest, unscrupulous and immoral of the lot and who have the most money to wage the most comprehensive “hate” campaigns."

1. How this has fuck-all to do with creativity, I have no idea.
2. The author uses the list to whine about what big meanie heads our politicians have become

Of all the places to come across centrist bullshit. They could at least have the decency to confine it to the news sites. 

Once you start listening for it, you cannot help but notice how the Big Lie of Centrism has seeped into everything and now shows up everywhere. 

  

And on.   The Big Lie of Centrism -- Like Strontium-90 In The Milk, Continued. 

And on:  The Big Lie of Centrism -- Like Strontium-90 In The Milk, Continued Again

A million posts have been written by a thousand bloggers debunking the Fake Centrist equivalence using every instrument in our orchestra, from methodical deconstruction  to operatic swearing.

None of it works, because aging Villager clowns like Ted Koppel will never put themselves across the table from people who will press the one question for which there is no rebuttal:

And what if you're wrong? 

What if the actual history of the rise of Hate Radio and Fox News and Regnery Press and on and on exactly parallels the craven, capitulating, Broderite fail, fail, fail of your Mainstream Media?

What if the simple, sad truth of the matter is that your "objective" corporate media was simply, hideously unfit to cope with an aggressive, coordinated and sustained siege from a mob of well-funded demagogues and liars (Hunter Thompson from The Atlantic, 1997):

MH: How will history remember Bill Clinton?

HST: I don't know about history. I don't get any satisfaction out of the old traditional journalist's view -- "I just covered the story. I just gave it a balanced view." Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon. How can you be objective about Clinton?

MH: Objective journalism is why politics have been corrupt for so long? 

HST: If you consider the great journalists in history, you don't see too many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don't quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective.

MH: If you found yourself teaching a journalism course -- Dr. Thompson's Journalism 101 -- what would you tell students who were looking to go about covering stories? 

HST: You offering me a job? Shit. Well, I wouldn't do it, I guess. It's not important to me that I teach journalism classes.

MH: But if you did, what would your reading list be? 

HST: Oh, I'd start off with Henry Fielding. I would read writers. You know, I would read Conrad, Hemingway, people who use words. That's really what it's about. It's about using words to achieve an end. And the Book of Revelation. I still read the Book of Revelation when I need to get cranked up about language. I would teach Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times. All the journalists who are known, really, have been that way because they were subjective.

I think the trick is that you have to use words well enough so that these nickel-and-dimers who come around bitching about being objective or the advertisers don't like it are rendered helpless by the fact that it's good. That's the way people have triumphed over conventional wisdom in journalism. 

It was the relentless fail, fail, fail of your Mainstream Media, Mr. Koppel, more than any other factor, which left our democracy staked out like a goat at a watering hole, wide open to the predations of monsters like Rove and Limbaugh, DeLay and Coulter, Cheney and Hannity...

And Trump.

And on:  The Big Lie of Centrism -- Like Strontium-90 In The Milk, Contd Yet Again.

It's everywhere:

Political Independents: The Future of Politics? 

by John Avlon Sep 23, 2012 

They've been both relentlessly courted and politically sidelines for years. But two new books show how voters who reject both Democrats and Republicans can become a force.  

In the final stretch of this play-to-the-base presidential election, it is strange to say that the 40 percent of Americans who identify as independent are currently close to an afterthought. With so few undecided voters left, even most independents have chosen sides by now. 

But some day this election is going to end, and if the next president and the next Congress hope to break through the hyperpartisan stalemate, they are going to have to find ways to appeal to the largest and fastest-growing segment of the American electorate.

Edwards details prescriptions for each of these problems: primarily election reform, including open primaries and redistricting reform and congressional reform, including filibuster reform. (Some of these proposals dovetail with suggestions made in the “Making Congress Work” plan developed by No Labels, a group Edwards and I helped cofound with fellow Daily Beast columnist Mark McKinnon and Nancy Jacobson)...

Sigh.

I frankly cannot see the other side of this river of offal.  It runs as deep and wide as the mighty Mississippi and carries so much freight for awful, lazy and cowardly people that I can't imagine the corporations who own our media will allow it to be dredged without a fight.

But what else can we do?

What immortal hand or eye/ 

Can reframe this fearful symmetry?

Not a Liberal hand, certainly.

Not a Liberal eye.

Because as long as Liberals are not permitted to exist anywhere within our national political conversation except as strawmen and cartoon characters, there will never be a spare nickel in the system for anyone who stands athwart this nonsense and shouts "bullshit".

As the Hunter Thompson interview reminds us, the plague of Both Siderism in American political reportage has spanned the millenia.  It's the engine that drives a mighty, multi-billion dollar machine that smooshes anything that would stand against it.  Which made it all the more dispiriting trying to pound home the same point that no one wanted to hear over and over again on a platform so tiny that maybe no one listening it at all.  

In fact, a few of you might recall that, just to relieve the mind-numbing barrage of Both Siderism which rained down on us every day from every direction, 12 years ago I very briefly spun off a parody blog called "The Driftington Post" --

-- in which I had planned to toss off short, chirpy, vapid "Some Say a Thing, But Others Say the Opposite" posts about the evils of partisanship -- 

Partisanship Decried.

-- in the voice of the endless parade of Both Siderist opportunists and scuttlefish over the decades who have all but destroyed our ability to speak honestly about our national problems.

[Fun Fact: The Driftington post above links of a now-dead-and-gone article from The American Conservative that was entitled, "Can The Tea Party Deliver?"]

Now flash forward 12 years and you can, perhaps, imagine my reaction to the most recent crew of Both Siderist grifters launching, with great fanfare and national media coverage. this latest political scam which is literally nothing but a big ol' slab of moldy Both Siderism --

-- served up like Elmer Gantry selling salvation to the rubes.

On the other hand. looking back at where we were 10 years ago in this long, uphill slog, it's fair to say that you and I have made some actual progress.   

 And I do find some comfort in that.

I Am The Liberal Media