Professional Left Podcast Episode 963: It's The End of the World [Order] As We Know It

"Madness in great ones must not unwatched go." 

--  Bill Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

• 
  

Professional Left Podcast Episode 962: This Time It's Different.

"Never give your real name." --  Hunter S. Thompson

• 
  

It Took Decades of Work and Billion of Dollars --

-- to cultivate a political base that are not only reliably meatbag-stupid enough to believe shit like this --

-- and dismiss facts like this --

The chart every Democrat should be using on a daily basis--real wages after passage of Tax Reform Act of 1986. pic.twitter.com/QirmFddwkK

— Bruce Bartlett (@BruceBartlett) November 2, 2017

-- but are so willfully meatbag-stupid that they will obediently ignore the rubble of one Republican catastrophe after another and the stinking carcass of one old, debunked bold-face Fox News/Hate Radio lie after another while happily flitting on to the new ridiculous, bold-face Fox News/Hate Radio lie...

...and then to the next..and to the next...and to the next...believing the same liars over and over again...year after year year...

So if you still cling to the fantasy that this mob's rampage through our democracy can be stopped with sweet reason and by waving facts around you have completely missed the point of the the last 25 years. 

In fact, the plan to create this mob of reprogrammable meatbags worked so well that the latest generation of barely-literate Conservative propagandists no longer need to strain their limited vocabularies and room temp IQs to make up new, batshit crazy conspiracies to keep the base distracted.

These days can just haul any old, long-debunked slander out of storage (from the NYT, June, 2005)

Rove Criticizes Liberals on 9/11

...

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble."

...

Mr. Rove also said American armed forces overseas were in more jeopardy as a result of remarks last week by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who compared American mistreatment of detainees to the acts of "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others."

"Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year?" Mr. Rove asked. "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

...

-- slop it into the Conservative News Puke Funnel (today, from future Fox News tell-all pop-up book author Tomi Lahren) --

Liberals will tell you feelings are more important than national security. Enough. https://t.co/gH2f5qUKmN

— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) November 2, 2017

-- and the base will line up twelve deep to gorge themselves.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

The People's Front of Republicanism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— With Friends (@crooked_friends) September 29, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

So here we go...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And of course, inevitably, this...

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

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

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

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

I have now kept my promise.

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

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

Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Steele, Patient Zero

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

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

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

From TPM in 2010:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How amazing!

You see, RDD appears in many forms.

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

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

What are ya, ignernt!

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

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

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

Oh, and the Kenyan Usurper.

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

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

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

And Hillary Clinton, of course.

Who is kissing cousins with Lucifer.

And should be locked up.

Obviously.

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

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

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

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

Trump owns them all now.

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

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Crazy Old Bigot Fires Up The Bush-Off Machine*

From the WaPo:

Cliven Bundy has officially left the Republican Party herd

BY PHILIP BUMP May 27 at 2:16 pm 

Rancher Cliven Bundy, who you may remember from American politics circa April 2014, has officially left the Republican Party...

Because amazingly, scrapin' them "Bush/Cheney '04", "McCain/Palin '08" and "Romney/Galt '12" bumper-stickers off'n your truck and declarin' that you're really an Independent -- wheee!haaaaw! -- still continues to completely bamboozle a lot of the expensively accoutered children and PR flacks who call themselves "journalists".

*(If you are not familiar with the Bush-Off Machine, I commend this post from 2010 to your attention.)

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 

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

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.

Strategic Forgettery Defined

For some reason, Mr. Sullivan has obligingly stuck a pin in the map to indicate the exact spot where his wants his readers to believe his Glorious Imaginary Conservative Movement went off the rails: the moment when his own, relentless, doublethinkful Strategic Forgettery begins.

"At what point do we decide that a political system has become decadent?"

EJ Dionne takes the Weiner "scandal" as the moment he realized we were late imperial Rome. PM Carpenter takes the Bush vs Gore Supreme Court ruling. Personally, I think it was some moment between the Congress's assent to torture in 2006 and when Sarah Palin was selected as a serious vice-presidential nominee in 2008.

Any thoughts?

Sure.

Lots of thoughts.

Which I have often shared with Mr. Sullivan open-letter-style.

For years.

And all but one he has never replied to, so rather than further spending down my reserve stock Majyk Conjure Adjectives to recapitulate the my central thesis, allow me to swipe a chunk of my own work from days gone be to explain to Mr. Sullivan (who, I have it on good authority, does sneak a peak at what I am doing over here from time to time) exactly what my "thoughts" are on the subject,

And why?

Because as long as people like Mr. Sullivan continue to occupy strategic positions in our media ecosystem and as long as they continue to use that position to sell lies and snake oil for fun, status and profit every bit as energetically as Sarah Palin does, I will continue to stand on my tiny soapbox and yell about it from the rural exurbs of Bloggylvania.

Here then, a sliver of one such exercise from 2009:

"Here is a Revised List..."

"This is your captain speaking.
There is no need for panic...do not rush for the lifeboats ...
Women, children, Red Indians, spacemen
and a sort of idealized version of a gay Republican
expatriate Libertarianish papist Renaissance Man
(but definitely NOT a Liberal) first!"

(h/t Monty Python for the lingo, and Internet Weekly for the a time-saving graphic.)

...it turns out that virtually all of Mr. Sullivan's hard-won epiphanies amount to little more than the well-thumbed history and plainsong lore of our Fucked Up Modern Age as it has been long understood and passed down among those awful Liberals. And so when I see statements like this -- "Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not." -- what I see is a man who might want to distance himself from the appalling actions and despicable outcomes of his former allies, but still wants to continue honoring their idiotic parameters and debased vocabulary.

Yes, Mr. Sullivan, your objections emphatically do make you a "radical leftist", because in the hands of the shitkicker demagogues of the Right like Malkin, phrases like "radical leftist" have long since lost any meaning. They are just the pejorative-du-jour, pulled from a random grab-bag of Limbaugh-words -- socialist, elitist, feminist, Marxist, anti-American, compassionate, cut-and-run, surrender, Liberal, extremist, collectivist, queer, Communist, fascist, atheist, humanist, "New York", "San Francisco", “Chicago”, French, European -- that each used to have discrete and very different meanings, but are now bleated interchangeably by the Pig People and their overlords at anyone with a softer heart than Curtis LeMay and less imperial ambitions than Genghis Khan.

But then again, if Mr. Sullivan simply outed himself as a Liberal, he would instantly lose his place in the food-chain, wouldn’t he? Because like that microscopic number of self-loathing black Conservatives who make their daily bread by serving the interests of the Southern Bigot Party, more than any other single factor, it was always the sheer gawking, oddballness of the brazen self-delusion inherent in being the gay champion of the Christopath Homophobe Party that put Mr. Sullivan in the spotlight.

That was what gave him his unique and lucrative cache.

After all, Liberal gay political writers are a dime a dozen, and so in a strange way we find Andrew Sullivan locked in the same kind of mortal combat over labels -- and for exactly the same reasons -- as Roy Cohn's character in "Angels In America" as he adamantly insisted -- even as he was dying of AIDS -- that he was not a "ho-mo-sex-shall".


(Not Safe For Work)

Because, Cohn reasoned, homosexuals were nobodies; losers who had zero clout and “in 15 years cannot pass a pissant anti-discrimination bill from City Council.” And since Roy Cohn could get the President of the United States (or his wife) on the phone -- could take the man he was fucking to the White House and make Ronald Reagan smile at him and shakes his hand -- it therefore followed that Roy Cohn could not possibly be a homosexual.

That unlike every other person in his position on Earth, Roy Cohn was a heterosexual man, who fucked around with guys.

Likewise, even though Mr. Sullivan now, belatedly comes to believe much of what Liberals believe and finally deigns to notice a horde of grotesque truths about his Conservative Movement about which Liberals have been sounding the alarm for 30 years, Andrew Sullivan nonetheless looks us all straight in that eye and argues that he could not possibly be some mere Liberal.

Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.

Mr. Sullivan regularly receives such largess, therefore he must not be a Liberal.

He instead must be the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur.

Because if he is not something spontaneously-generated and utterly sui generis, then he is just another Lefty-Come-Very-Lately, showing up at our door at 3:00 A.M., 20 years late and trailing toxic baggage behind him like Halley's Comet.

And who in the world would pay him to do his little dance then?

So long ago

So much lost along the way

This for those who never heard of Cuomo, or never heard him speak, or had no idea that the issues over which we now contend go back a long, long way.

But mostly, this is for those on the Right who, far, far too late, ran away from the Palinite freakshow that their Movement predictably devolved into and now comfort themselves with the big, soft lie that the evils of their Movement are some kind of aberration of recent vintage.

Fuck. You.

For all the good it will do, this is a reminder that some of us know damn -- and will never stop Saying Out Loud -- the ugly truth that you dare not ever admit in public: that the Movement you spent so many years helping to build was born corrupt and raised by monsters.

That you were warned at every step along the way that teetering on the edge of a fascist abyss with giggling, Bible-thumping sociopaths trying to shove us over the edge is exactly where your grotesque cult of Thatcher and Reagan would land us.

And now that we are all squatting in the ruins of the culture your Movement destroyed, how will you atone?

How will you atone?

Losing His Religion

Remember a hundred years ago -- or was it less than a month ago? -- when the latest batch of Wikileaks showed that the Iraqi "surge" was, in fact, a trick of the light?

A fraud and failure (From the "Daily Dish"):

Iraq Surge Fail Update

24 Oct 2010 07:21 pm

The Wikileaks doc-dump adds more light to debunking the myth of the surge. No one doubts that Petraeus' extra troops and shrewd bribery played a part in reducing sectarian violence of nightmarish levels. But the further we get away from that moment in time and the more we learn, the clearer it is that it was the internal dynamic of Iraq that created the lull:

A unique set of conditions had coalesced on the ground. The warring communities were exhausted from the frenzy of killing. Mixed neighborhoods and cities were largely cleansed. The militias, both Sunni and Shiite, long seen as defenders of their communities, had begun to cannibalize them, making local residents newly receptive to American overtures.

Civil wars have their own ghastly rhythms; and the war we pretended to control we never controlled. And we still don't. The violence was dropping fast before the surge was in place:

The single worst month for civilian deaths was December 2006, two months before the buildup’s first brigade arrived. Casualties dropped slightly in January. In February, when the first new brigade arrived, the recorded casualties dropped by a quarter, though it is the shortest month. Around that time, Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, decamped to Iran, perhaps fearing American troops. What the documents suggest strongly is that Iraqis themselves were looking for an escape from the orgy of sectarian killing made worse by the growth of ordinary, but still violent, crime.

There's no doubt that the US military were admirably able to take advantage of these internal dynamics. But the narrative that official Washington has tried to perpetrate - that the war was "ended" by more US troops - is simply untrue. The war was burning itself out before more troops arrived; the surge failed to use this lull to construct a multi-sectarian democratic government (which was its own criterion for success)
...

Considering that, when it comes to Bush's Iraqi Debacle, the Right has tamped down all criticism of their collective, bloody treasons, crimes and failures by continually screaming at the tops of their lungs about the singular awesomeness of The Surge, this revelation would certainly seem to constitute a Really Big Fucking Deal.

And yet, after a brief flutter of embarrassed rhubarbing, you never heard about it in the Mainstream Media again did you?

Ever wonder why?

Precisely because the Right has used it as a pointed stick to keep all criticism at bay for the last four years.

Precisely because it was the very last "See! We were right about something too!" lie the Right felt they could trot out in public and not have to Sharron-Angle-chicken-dash the Hell away from when whatever is left of the press starts asking questions. Something they felt they could brag about in the daylight and not be laughed at because Serious People in Serious Media would back them up.

And, most importantly, it was the last brick in the last load-bearing-wall in the great, wingnut, "Both sides do it" fortress. Without it, the whole. weak, wilty reed of Centrism has nothing but Glenn Beck spackle, Limbaugh beer farts and random, frantic secondary lies ("ACORN! Soros! Black Panther! Kenyan!") delivered at 300 decibels to hold it upright.

Not that this matters to most Conservatives, but to the last of the Brain Caste -- to moon-faced Quislings like David Fucking Brooks -- whose whole schtick is going on non-Fox media and appearing reasonable as he hammers home the Big Centrist Lie, it is terribly important.

David Brooks is the architect of the Right's Asshat Panic Room, and the ridiculously handsome compensation he pulls down for spinning this pie-plate longer and more implacably that almost anyone else depends entirely on having at least this one, concrete example of Both Sideism.

In 2008, Bobo led the way:

The Bush Paradox

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: June 24, 2008
...
But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

And from relieved, Rightwing warbloggers:

NYT's David Brooks Admits: Bush Was Right About the Iraq Surge

It is becoming obvious even to many on the left that the Iraq surge has worked.

George W. Bush was right. The Americans who elected George W. Bush as their commander in chief, or who at least gave him the benefit of the doubt in wartime, were right.

John McCain was right, too.

Barack Obama was, and still is, wrong.

...to the Villager's favorite Useful Idiots:

Surge Protection
Posted by Joe Klein Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at 10:35 am

I think David Brooks has it essentially right here about Bush's stubborness--as opposed to his knowledge of strategy or tactics or the situation on the ground in Iraq--as the reason why he made the correct choice on Iraq in late 2006. But, as Brooks says, history is complicated--and the current reduction in violence in Iraq was a combination of many factors.

As for me, I happily acknowledge that I was wrong about the surge.
...

...to the entire Mainstream Media establishment...

ABC’s World News aired a series of reports (6/19/08, 6/21/08, 6/23/08, 6/25/08, 7/8/08) emphasizing the progress in Iraq. And as NBC host Chris Matthews remarked (Chris Matthews Show, 7/6/08), “The surge’s success has been a point of honor for McCain.”

...
When CNN correspondent Candy Crowley observed (6/29/08) that “while few would argue about the success of the so-called surge in Iraq, there’s no shortage of criticism about the political progress there,” she apparently forgot that by definition a successful “surge” was supposed to usher in political progress. Most media analysis, though, left out the political dimension altogether, as when NBC anchor Brian Williams asked Obama (7/24/08), “Is it not time to say that the surge you opposed has worked?” When ABC correspondent Terry McCarthy (7/31/08) examined the decline in U.S. troop deaths, he stated flatly: “The turning point was the surge.” Fox pundit Fred Barnes’ judgment that the troop increase “turned Iraq heading into a stable, democratic country” (Fox Special Report, 7/9/08) was only an exaggerated version of what had essentially become a media truism.

...all the other baby ducks dutifully toed the new Party Line, because it was no longer merely a foreign policy question.

It was salvation.

For the Right, it was something they could finally shove into those fucking Liberal's elitist faces! After gleefully ignoring every warning from the Left...after swaggering along behind Dubya and his band of criminals and sociopaths as they plunged down the Rabbit Hole...and after seeing it all blow up in their cow-dumb faces in bloody, public and spectacular fashion, they finally, finally had something they could hide behind. Something, somewhere in the whole wide world they could point to and say "See! Y'all ain't so smart!"

For the Center, it was manna from Heaven. It was literally the only fact on Earth they could point to to affirmation the core tenet of their bullshit "both side are always equally wrong about stuff" cult.

From the L.A. Times, June 26, 2008:

...Obama gets credit for opposing a war whose initial goal -- protecting the world from weapons of mass destruction -- turned out to be an illusion. Shouldn't he have to account for opposing the surge, which has enhanced the safety of Iraqis and American GIs?

And they could do it because clowns like David Fucking Brooks used the occasion to give them explicit permission to charge back into the culture war:

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

Lying about the facts and history to create utterly false equivalents has been David Brooks stock-in-trade since forever, and the myth of the irrefutable success of George Bush's Iraq Surge has become the single, largest crutch on which his entire collective "Both Sideism" fraud now leans.

From June 24, 2010:

...
The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. Many conservatives declare that Barack Obama is a Muslim because it feels so good to say so. Many liberals would never ask themselves why they were so wrong about the surge in Iraq while George Bush was so right. The question is too uncomfortable.

David Brooks continues to be a high priest in the temple of a god he knows damn well is a complete fake. But the high priesting business pays really well, and if there is one thing Neoconservatives get good at early, it is knowingly lying to the rubes in pursuit of their own, private agenda:


Which is why I doubt you will hear much above the fold about the very inconvenient failure of The Iraq Surge ever again.

Center Ably Defended

Extremes on both sides criticized.