UPDATE: Thank you all for the guesses. No, I didn't write this in the 1980s or 1990s, because while I did think such things and say such things, blogging didn't exist then. Nor did I write this in 2001 - 2003 because I didn't start blogging until early 2005, which is when I did blog this: October 25, 2005.
18 years ago.
In lieu of an umpteenth vivisection of the Sunday Shows to reveal how godawful they are --
Biden hasn’t handled Hunter’s case at all. What is Chuck Todd even talking about? pic.twitter.com/xkeksW4so7
— John Aravosis 🇺🇸🇬🇷🏳️🌈 ex-verif’d (@aravosis) August 13, 2023
-- and how godawful they have always been, today -- if you're up for it -- a little one-question quiz the likes of which I guarantee you will never see in The New York Times.
Ready?
Go.
If I told you I had written the following...
This morning, rolling along... full of dying flu virus, I almost felt the
meekest, most theoretical peek of pity for the poor Moderate Republican
coming on.
Not, of course, the Fundy CHUDS who shame the good name of Christ with
every breath they draw.
Not the three-toed, chittering Failed Men
who make up the vast George Wallace wing of that Party...
But for the
Mods...[because in a few] short years, the Moderates have lived to become
everything they detest. Every word of clucking reproach they yelped in
snickering glee during the [previous Democratic administration] has gotten caught up in the [following Republican administration] Treason
Cyclotron, sped up to light-speed, and is now coming screaming back at them
like a sack of radioactive axe-heads.
Their worst nightmare is in
the process of coming true, big as a mountain in stilettos, carrying a
sledgehammer in one hand and a 40-foot-long straight razor in the other, and
there is not shit all they can do about it. Because everything they believed
or touted or crowed about or tried to rub in our faces is in the process of
coming down around their ears.
Every. Single. Thing.
...and this...
The leaders
who swore to them it was all holy and justified ... are
outed as a Confederacy of traitors and liars and fools.
Their pet
media, nothing but perambulating pustules, refilled with hate and mendacity
every night by White House messengers.
That they
have never been anything to the GOP but chumps:
little sacs of cash and votes and “mandate” to be squeezed dry with impunity,
because Moderates are basically beat-down whores who will always go wriggling
back to their abusers.
But now it’s not one thing that’s melting
down; it’s everything. The serial cons that have kept the grubby Mods
goggle-eyed and heroin-loyal are all falling apart simultaneously and there’s
nothing but decibels left in the Shiny Object Bag to keep them from noticing
the awful truth.
That their Leaders are traitors.
Their
heroes are liars.
Their dogma is a joke.
Their President is a feeble-minded creep who has fucked up everything he has ever touched.
It’s
as if their mothers suddenly ripped of rubber masks and have shown themselves
to be the spree killers they’ve always been.
...and this...
How terrifying that
must be. I mean, I’m wrong about a lot of
stuff...but everything?
Every God Damned Thing?
And worse – so very much worse – not only were they utterly wrong
about everyfuckingthing, but the Evil Liberals were right all along.
The
big picture. The fussy details. The arithmetic. The real, racist heart of the
GOP. The various myriad, casual betrayals by the ... White House.
All of it.
The Liberals were right, and the Moderates had been given
no fewer than 30 years of warning that this is precisely where their idiocy
would land us.
I can’t even imagine how it must feel to know at
some level that your whole world is a farce, and your whole belief system is a Ponzi Scheme run on you by thugs who never gave a shit about you, or your
family or your dearest peon dreams.
... after counting the tree rings, and checking the carbon dating, when - within a year or two -- would you guess I had written it?
Answer in comments or on Twitter or wherever. And then meditate on why our Never Trump allies really, really don't want to hear a mumbling word from us Dirty Disreputables of the Left.
These days you can't throw yourself down a flight of stairs without landing in the front row of the ongoing comic opera that is The People's Front of Republicanism as they belligerently insist that the Republican People's Front aren't real Republicans.
From Michael Gerson's disquisition in The Washington Poston the rise of Roy Moore which acts as if Moore had just precipitated out of thin air instead of -- just like Trump -- being the perfectly logical and predictable destination of Mr. Gerson's Republican party based on where it has been plainly going for the past 40 years --
No, Moore is not really a theonomist. The boundaries of his worldview, it turns out, almost exactly coincide with those of the Breitbart agenda. Moore’s study of divine law has led him, in the end, to the shabby, third-rate gospel of Stephen K. Bannon.
I listened very carefully. I made many notes. And I reached several conclusions.
First, upspeaking the end of your sentences a couple of times to indicate a slightly increasing level of dubiety does not rise to the level of not letting Mr. Steele off the hook. Not even close.
Second, if you think slightly upspeaking the end of a couple of sentences actually means you are holding a Republican accountable for the nonsense they're peddling, maybe that explains why we Liberals lose so goddamn much.
Third, according to Mr. Steele, the reason he is a Republican is that, back in 1977, while living in a home with a dynamite mom (I have a dynamite mom too, so at least we have that in common) and pictures of JFK, MLK and Jesus on the wall, he researched the party and discovered that Harriet Tubman was pretty cool. So he decided that he wanted to join the Republican party...as it existed in 1893.
Beyond that, the simple, irreducible truth is that Mr. Steele has made a very comfortable life for himself fronting for a party of racists, con men, theocrats, gun nuts, xenophobes, imbeciles, misogynists, demagogues and assorted other malfunctioning humans and he will go right on doing so as long as A) the checks clear and, B) he can continue to hold himself suspended in a dissociative state of denial, dissembling and dismissal.
So here we go...
Like virtually every other Republican I know, Mr. Steele hides the indefensible absurdity of his political position behind a welter of vainglorious bullshit (rush transcript from Ms. Cox's podcast) --
Steele: I've run into the racism. I've dealt with the bullshit. All that. But I also look at what I have been able to do in the party. I also look at what I have been able to accomplish. And the voice that I can try to represent on some critical issues at critical times.
-- and Both Siderist nonsense in which, again, like virtually ever fucking Republican in Christendom, he keeps attributing distinctly Republican malice and depravity to "Congress" and "politicians" and "the voters" and "the people" and "us" and "the country".
And, conversely, Mr. Steele inclusively absorbs distinctly non-Republican actions and attitudes into the category of things "we" are doing.
"We" had this march on Washington. "We" elected a black president. And so "we" dumbed ourselves down about being post-racial, and "we" don't want to talk about "it".
Not since "A Rose for Emily" has the second-person plural voice worked this hard:
Steele: This is what happened to Hillary and the Democrats. They were so concerned with the polls and the statistics and "the country" was, like, we're not feelin' her. We're not feelin' that. We're not over here where you think we are.
See, according to Mr. Steele, polls don't count and numbers are meaningless because "real people" lie to pollsters all the time. In fact, black people will vote in large numbers to cut their own economic throats "just to fuck with you." Because Political Correctness!
But what about factors like the GOP's massive, coordinated, well-financed program of voter suppression?
Steele: You say voter suppression on the Republican side. I say voter control on the Democratic side. It works on Both Sides. I'm beyond excuse-making. I want to get to why things don't work the way we want it to work.
And of course, inevitably, this...
Steele:The president is much more of a Democrat than he is a Republican. He's not a Republican. He's certainly not a Conservative.
It went on and on like that, most of so howlingly, predictably preposterous in all the ways that all Republican Detachment Disorderlies are howlingly, predictably preposterous these days that any of it could have been easily knocked to bits and vivisected, live, on-stage, if that had been Ms. Cox's goal.
But Mr. Steele is a dear friend of hers. The man she called for coffee and consolation the day after President Stupid was elected. So she let one slow pitch after another glide over the plate untouched.
In summary, my opinion of Mr. Steele was not budged one iota from where it was back in the Olden Days when Lower Manhattanite would make mock of Mr. Steele's hi-larious hijinks.
Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Steele, Patient Zero
While some scientists believe that Republican Detachment Disorder is a Trump-era affliction, in fact, the RDD pre-dates the rise of Il Douche by many years.
For example, back in 2010, between excursions to bondage-themed strip clubs and lecturing George Stephanopoulos that government jobs aren't real jobs, Michael Steele -- the RNC's "Break Glass in Case the Democrats Elect a Black Guy" desperation-hire -- was faced with a vexing demographic problem: 98% of African-Americans hated the Republican party.
And like his predecessor (Ken Mehlman, a closeted, self-loathing gay American who fronted for the virulently anti-gay party) Mr. Steele (a self-loathing African-American who fronted for the racist party. Are you noticing a pattern?) was forced by the existence of well-documented historical fact (man, those were the days) to acknowledge the existence of something called "The Southern Strategy".
Steele: African-Americans 'Really Don't Have A Reason' To Vote GOP
Appearing Tuesday at DePaul University in Chicago, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said that the Republican Party has not given African-Americans a reason to vote for them.
"You really don't have a reason to, to be honest -- we haven't done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True," said Steele, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
Steele said how the Republican party had been founded as a pro-civil rights party, with Frederick Douglass among its early members. However, Steele explained, the Republican Party has alienated those voters: "For the last 40-plus years we had a 'Southern Strategy' that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South...
However, Mr. Steele quickly added that the GOP's racism had ended long before his time:
...Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, 'Bubba' went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton."
And yet based on the long, grim-faced sad I just saw Mr. Steele having on MSNBC this morning (no video available yet), like herpes, all of the seething racism that powers the GOP and somehow magically disappeared during Mr. Steele's time as a party leader...
...has magically reappeared now that he has left!
How amazing!
You see, RDD appears in many forms.
Sometimes it is of the relapsing/remitting Michael Steele variety in which party loyalty (and unhinged Liberals bashing) appears and disappears depending on who is footing the bill.
Sometimes it a mass pandemic event like the "Tea Party" in which millions of life-long Republican racists who were eager to get a jump on hating the Kenyan Usurper from Day One without having to answer a lot of embarrassing questions about all the shit they had been talking for the previous eight years, all burned their "Bush/Cheney 04" lawn signs, put on funny hats and swore on the lives of their children that they had never even heard of Dubya. Just look at their fucking tee-shirts! These good ol' boys are obviously Constitutional Conservative Christian Libertarian Independent Patriots, so why would you come 'round here callin' 'em Re-publicans.
What are ya, ignernt!
See like all Republican cowards tragically afflicted with RDD, the madness into which the GOP has been steadily descending for the last 40 years is never, ever about them. Never about the things they said and did, the abominations they countenanced, the beasts they helped tinker together and turn loose.
The blame is always laid at the feet of some other group of irresponsible Republican elites waaaay over there.
Some other group of craven Republican bigots who let us all down.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is accusing President Obama of intentionally weakening America at home and abroad.
“It’s now abundantly clear: Barack Obama has deliberately weakened America,” Rubio said early Monday during a speech on national security at the American Legion in Hooksett, N.H.
On the Right there are only collaborators, co-conspirators and quislings now, and as Brother Charlie Pierce notes, Trump bought them all at fire-sale prices:
Last Night Chris Christie Had the Living Definition of a Shit-Eating Grin on His Face
Trump owns them all now.
CLEVELAND, OHIO—Once the deed was done, and folks were filtering out to celebrate the elevation of He, Trump to the toppermost of the poppermost of the Republican Party, it was time for the Volksgerichtshof portion of the festivities. One after another, the establishment pols came rolling out to pledge their undying fealty to the new boss. I'm surprised that He, Trump let them keep their belts on so their pants wouldn't fall down...
To understand what a mindless rabid, overwhelming, pandimensional clusterfuck Conservatism has become, it is not enough to simply critique the make and model of the vehicle they happened to be driving when they drove this country off the cliff. It is equally important to understand the road they were traveling, and all the warning signs they had to blow past to get to the cliff in the first place.
For example, at this point pretty much everyone knows that, once upon a time, True Conservative Andrew Sullivan was an even more fanatical Iraq War cheerleader than Don Rumsfeld. Mr. Sullivan -- who evangelizes the prudence, caution and skepticism of his hero Micheal Oakeshott -- hurled himself headlong into full "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Invading Iraq" mode and, like virtually every other Conservative talking head at that time, used his media platform to slash and slander Liberals like me. Called us dupes. Fifth columnists. You name it.
And then brutal Reality interceded, incinerating all the gauzy nonsense and bile-soaked bombast Conservatves had used to fence their terrible ideas off from criticism and exposing all the armchair Shuck and Awe warriors for frauds and poltroons and lunatics and profiteers they had always been.
Which is the moment that Modern Conservatism reached a genuinely cladogenic moment where the fitful equilibrium of the already-delusional Right was violently punctuated, splitting most of the into roughly two, distinct but related species. As I wrote back in 2008 ("The Dolt-Stoss ™ ") both halves of Conservatism still reflexively hate Dirty Hippies, both still lies easily and often about their past and both still believe their "clade" of Conservatism -- the only True Conservatism -- failed because of an act of monstrous betrayal.
True Conservative Alpha: The Denialists. The past never happened. They were never wrong. Fox News never lies. These are the Wolfowitzes and Kristols. This is your Crazy Uncle Liberty. This is the electoral backbone of the GOP whose grand plans only failed because they were stabbed in the back by nefarious Liberals, their RINO stooges and the media they secretly control. These are the ones who, as I wrote in 2008, "...turned to prayer, beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out.” (2 Maccabees. 12:42) These are the ones who threw themselves en masse into the Fabulous, Tea-Baggulous Bush-Off Machine the minute it rolled into town.
True Conservative Beta: The Both Siders. There may have been some misjudgment in their past, but Teh Liberals were just as bad! Why quibble about whether or not they were wrong because Both Sides! Fox News may be bad, but so is MSNBC! This is virtually everyone else on the Right, from David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan to Joe Scarborough and David Gregory. (I would include links to my own writing here, but since I have done +2,000 posts on this subject in the last decade, I wouldn't know where to begin.)
Of course there is still a lot of ideological bed-hopping between these two emergent species. They hate each other, borrow from each other, make temporary alliances of mutual convenience with each other. One day, David Frum is writing like a Liberal blogger, the next he straps on his Neocon armor to go forth and do battle with The Dirty Hippie brigade. One day David Brooks is extolling the virtues of humility, prudence and self-reflection, and the next he is shamelessly slathering a tanker-truck full of White-Out all over American Conservative history to make it turn out the way he wants it to turn out.
Which brings us back to Andrew Sullivan, who was an early adopter of Beta True Conservatism. It has led him to walk back his earlier ebullience about the Iraq War and the Bush Administration (which has been a good thing) and wander around the cultural landscape, pointing at every shiny, pretty object that catches his attention and yelling "Claim!" in the name of his True Conservatism like a Hunter from The Walking Dead (which has been an embarrassing and hilarious thing):
Because while I'm always down for a good, Neocon ass-kicking, that act alone is merely a cursory crash site investigation, and not nearly sufficient to explain the warped, intellectual path down which True Conservatism has raced in order to reach the cliff from which it defenestration itself. For a tiny example of what I am talking about, I refer you to the evolving utility of the works of Conservative philosopher Leo Strauss -- the modern architect of the "Noble Lie" on which so much of True Conservatism depends -- as seen in the writings of Andrew Sullivan.
Back in 2003, as the rhetoric of the Neocon's blood-drunk conquistador orgy was reaching a crescendo across the land, Strauss was a Great Man. Period. And his keen and subtle work was being slandered by the paranoid and ignorant "academic Left" from {THE TRUTH ABOUT LEO STRAUSS)
The attempt of some who haven’t even read Strauss (let alone read him as carefully as he deserves) to smear his legacy and denigrate those who learned from him is a pathetic display of paranoia and ignorance. No wonder it goes down so well among some on the academic left. Paranoia and ignorance are their strong suits.
I’m not the only one to be struck by the difference between what Leo Strauss actually wrote and what some have inferred from it – both on the paranoid left and the triumphalist right.
I was taught by a "Straussian," have known many and read more, and I could never understand the idea how the great man could be reduced to some kind of secret guru to "neoconservatism". There’s a section in my forthcoming book that makes this point about the inherent skepticism, mischief and seriousness of Strauss as a thinker – qualities that make him particularly ill-suited for being a secret mastermind to anything, let alone a total transformation of American conservatism into something like its opposite...
-- but also believed that Strauss wasn't just not one of the causes of Conservatism's problems, but was a big part of it's cure:
Last year, I sat down and read (or re-read) several of Strauss’s longer works and saw in him not a rival to my own inspiration, Michael Oakeshott, but a very different, yet somehow kindred, spirit. Between them, they represent a skeptical conservatism that certainly doesn’t amount to anything like a defense of what conservatism or neoconservatism has morphed into in the last decade or so. In fact, it’s my contention that Oakeshott and Strauss are the best guides to where current conservatism has gone deeply, horribly wrong.
By 2012, Mr. Sullivan was beginning to suspect that Strauss and Oakeshott may not have been (Spoiler!) boon metaphysical companions and brothers by another philosophical mother:
But the real trouble, I'd argue, is with Strauss's 1930s-driven lack of faith in modernity, his insistence that unimpeachable truths (not insights, eternal truths) about human nature could be gleaned by close reading of ancient texts by a few in the elite, and his followers' need to disguise their disdain for democracy and religion (making them insufferable cynics). It was hard to find a Straussian scholar who wasn't obsessed with domestic politics and who wasn't a neoconservative, itching for a new war for freedom somewhere (emphasis added):
America, alas, didn't have a Burke or an Oakeshott to craft its conservative philosophy. It ended up with the work of a German Jewish exile, whose political didacticism was as pronounced as his philosophical inscrutability. The failure of American conservatism to come up with more than fundamentalist religion and gloriously noble foreign interventionism as its core policies (along with making government insolvent by pretending that lowering taxes increases revenue) might be seen as a consequence of this strange admixture.
Reviewing Oakeshott on Rome and America by Gene Callahan, Kenneth B. McIntyre describes what keeps Oakeshott from accompanying fellow British philosophers into America’s intellectual canon:
[His] lack of influence among the movers and shakers of American political life should not be surprising,given Oakeshott’s insistence on the irrelevance of political philosophy to practical politics. As he once wrote, “reputable political behavior is not dependent upon sound or even coherent philosophy.” Such behavior is instead related to the concrete practical knowledge of an actual political tradition and what such a tradition intimates.
Oakeshott was skeptical of philosophers who meddled in practical affairs, insisting that he was not concerned with establishing “a seminary for training political hedge-preachers in some dim orthodoxy.”
Oakeshott was skeptical of philosophers who meddled in practical affairs, insisting that he was not concerned with establishing “a seminary for training political hedge-preachers in some dim orthodoxy.”
No, that was Leo Strauss’s metier. Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz are where you end up.
Which brings us to 2014, where we find Mr. Sullivan finally facing the terrible abyss where Strauss's principle of the Noble Lie inevitably led his acolytes, and where the term "Straussian" has become fully integrated into the scathing and 100%-indistinguishable-from-a-Dirty-Hippie vocabulary he now uses to describing the paranoid, ignorant Right:
I tend not to hold the somewhat conspiratorial view that followers of Leo Strauss, the guru of the neocon intelligentsia, actively believe in deceiving the American people in the pursuit of statecraft. Strauss argued that many critical texts in Western civilization were written with an esoteric teaching for the intelligent few, while presenting a less radical and palatable public doctrine for the masses. Hence the Straussian penchant for a noble lie – one that is good for the people to believe but which the elite knows is bullshit. Perhaps the classic example of this is the Straussian support for public religion, while the bulk of them are atheists. For them, religious faith is entirely instrumental – a way to lie your way to social order and cohesion.
In the case of the Iraq war, several untruths were told. Among them: there is no sectarianism in Iraq; it will cost next to nothing; it will be over in months; there are WMDs everywhere; Saddam and al Qaeda are joined at the hip. It’s hard to tell which of these untruths were sincerely believed by men like Wolfowitz and Kristol, longtime Straussians both, and which were a function of them not knowing anything about the country that was to be their text-book case of “creating reality”. But when a disgraced architect of that war goes on television to argue that the public needs to be told now that ISIS is al Qaeda, even though he knows that they are separate organizations with separate ambitions, I tend to withdraw whatever benefit of the doubt I give these men with the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands.
...
This is a rare moment in which a Straussian actually comes out and says: yes, we’re deliberately lying by conflating all sorts of different things in the Middle East – the Sunni-Shia divide; the hostility between ISIS and al Qaeda – in order to concoct a simple and terrifying message to the American people that will enable us to get into another war in order to advance our goals in the Middle East. Yes, we know this is a lie – just as our insinuation that Saddam and al Qaeda were in cahoots before 2003 was also a lie. But it’s a noble one, and that’s all that counts...
As I said, these two, main branches of post-Dubya Conservatism -- Denialists and Both Siders -- may contend mightily with each other, but they're really very much products of the same DNA and whelping box.
Both lean heavily on Imaginary Dirty Hippies to justify what they say and do.
Both have very sketchy relationships to those parts of American history that makes their academic theorizin' look stupid.
Both claim they were betraaaayed!
And -- most hilariously -- while neither Denialists nor Both Siders feel any compunction about telling as many "Nobles Lies" as necessary to get them though the night, both Denialists and Both Siders are also adamant that the other guy can't be a True Conservatives
'cause he doesn't smoke
The same brand of lie as me...
And finally, I suppose this is as good a place as any to belatedly ease into my June fundraiser, so if you are inclined to support work like this, here you go!
Meat Loaf endorses Romney in Ohio Posted by Philip Rucker on October 25, 2012 at 10:24 pm
DEFIANCE, Ohio – Meat Loaf bestowed a meandering endorsement upon Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney here Thursday night, making what the hard rock icon said was his first move on the political stage. The singer, who rose to fame in the 1970s with his power ballads, performed a short concert at a high school football stadium in Defiance to rally some 12,000 supporters before Romney came on stage to give a speech. Meat Loaf performed a few songs familiar to his most devoted fans; his most famous hit, “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That),” didn’t make the cut. And then, with dramatic flair and wearing a sparkly black ensemble, explained why he was getting behind Romney’s candidacy. ...
Wingnut Base: Will you love me forever?
Mittens: Let me sleep on it. Wingnut Base: Will you love me forever!!!!
Mittens: Let me sleep on it!! I think we all remember how this ends...
"What did you do in the Great War against the Middle Class?", consider how many millions of your fellow citizens for whom the only honest answer can be:
...by day, straight-arrow member of a venerable institution fighting a rear-guard action against a sinister and secretive alliance that seeks to destroy civilization.
...by night, a fully-paid-up member of that sinister alliance.
And then one day he starts to lose his mind because a human being cannot exist in both worlds: cannot stay sane as a committed defender of society, while at the same time collaborating with those committed to obliterating that society.
Why does this sound so familiar?
Oh yeah. Because it is a novel by Philip K. Dick written 33 years ago called "A Scanner Darkly":
If Mr. Williams wanted to work a day job managing an IHOP, and a weekend gig making balloon animals at children's parties, no one would have given a damn. But instead, Mr. Williams wanted to make a living -- a very handsome living -- working for the NEWS and the ANTI-NEWS at the same time.
666 years before Dick, Dante Alighieri wrote about such people in Canto III of "The Inferno". They were the "trimmers" (as they later came to be called): those who are condemned to eternity in the Vestibule of Hell for spending their lives changing or modifying their positions or beliefs for reasons of expedience:
... And I, who had my head with horror bound, Said: "Master, what is this which now I hear? What folk is this, which seems by pain so vanquished?" And he to me: "This miserable mode Maintain the melancholy souls of those Who lived withouten infamy or praise. Commingled are they with that caitiff choir Of Angels, who have not rebellious been, Nor faithful were to God, but were for self. The heavens expelled them, not to be less fair; Nor them the nethermore abyss receives, For glory none the damned would have from them." And I: "O Master, what so grievous is To these, that maketh them lament so sore?" He answered: "I will tell thee very briefly. These have no longer any hope of death; And this blind life of theirs is so debased, They envious are of every other fate. No fame of them the world permits to be; Misericord and Justice both disdain them. Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass." ...
Mr. Williams' real problem is not what he did or did not say; his real problem is that, after years of being permitted to romp around the American media paddock free and unfettered, he finally ran into one of the last intact sections of the rusty, run-down fence-line that once delineated the boundary between actual journalism and the farce of Fox News.
Because Fox News is not a news organization. It is -- quite openly and unapologetically -- the propaganda wing of the American fascist movement.
It is performance art on a global scale, designed to constantly push-push-push a radical political agenda and lie to the American people by extruding a hard-right-flavored news-looking product 24/7/365 directly into the skulls of the Republican Base.
Think about that for a minute: every single fucking day, the agenda for the entire media-political-economic engine of the last superpower on Earth is prodded along by a single corporation dedicated to perpetrating one, massive, toxic lie after another.
And everybody knows it.
That's the thing. That's what makes it so sickening; the simple, observable fact that, deep down, the Big Murdoch Lie Machine really fools no one at all but hardcore meatsticks of the Republican Party base. The rest of it -- its day-to-day operations -- is all kabuki, depending entirely on the consensual collusion of thousands of media bean-field hands like Mr. Williams who make their daily bread oiling the cogs of the terrible machine, and who, in turn, depend on the rage and savage ignorance of millions of bitter Pig People who will pay any price to have someone in a suit on teevee tell them that they're actually insightful patriots.
It is a great, reeking crack-house which pays Mr. Williams very well for deejaying in the living room. And because -- like far, far too many of his colleagues -- Mr. Williams clearly believes this is all just a game, he can see no reason why he shouldn't be able to work six days a week for a cut of FoxNews' crack-and-hooker trade, and then duck around the corner just in time to strap on a collar and make another few dollars preaching High Church Journalism from the pulpit at NPR.
But this is not an academic debate over journalistic methodology, Juan.
"While usually supportive of much of the content produced at this site, I believe your recent treatment of a highly-publicized, controversial issue left a great deal to be desired and did not fairly represent other views and/or fully include facts from other sources which may have somewhat mitigated the opinion you expressed. ..."
But another reader writes:
"... While I often disagree with the content produced at this site, I found myself in agreement with you about your recent treatment of a highly-publicized, controversial issue. Despite my past misgivings I found this change refreshing and positive."
