If you have eyes to see with and ears to hear, you have no doubt noticed the
media making a big deal of the 10 year anniversary of Donald Trump's June
16, 2015 journey down an escalator and into the hearts of the Republican
base.
Trump Has Us On His Golden Escalator to Hell—But There is a Way Off
Fox News:
Flashback: 10 years since Trump's golden escalator ride
‘The Five’ co-hosts recount President Donald Trump’s first election,
his game-changing rise in politics and already ‘fascinating’ second
term.
The Washington Examiner:
A decade of MAGA: How Trump’s golden escalator ride changed America
At the time, right down the line, all the Very Serious People and every
Republican who would go on to be a Never Trumpers regarded the whole idea of
Trump running for president as a goof. A joke. A jape. A
stunt. Burlesque. The notion of this jumped-up real estate
buffoon and reality teevee guy running for, well, anything was seen as a
clown on his way to the inevitable banana peel.
But there was a tiny contingent of us dirty hippies (who had long since been dispatched to media Coventry for the unforgivable sin of being right about the Right when everyone else had been wrong) who looked at Trump and saw the genuine threat he represented.
It's not that I had any special, inside dope about the way Trump had operated in the New York real estate market, or in the New York media market, or on reality teevee. I didn't. What I did have was a lifetime of up-close-and-personal exposure the Republican base, and could see with my own two eyes the terrible trajectory they had already been on for decades: a trajectory which both the legacy media and elite Conservative media categorically refused to believe existed at all.
And so, on June 18, 2015 -- two days after Trump announced -- I wrote this, which you are encouraged to send along to your favorite Never Trumper who still insists that no one could possibly have seen Trump coming, or what geniuses they are because they and only they caught wind of what a colossal ass-ache Trump might develop into. You are especially encouraged to send this along to your favorite Never Trump who is constantly moaning that we Liberals are potty-mouthed idiots who have no inkling what's really going on, or what is at stake.
From me, June 18, 2015:
The Premium Leads
In case you missed it, Squint and the Meat Puppet handed the MSNBC camera over to Donald Trump this morning for a relaxing, 30-minute handjob. While Trump rambled lazily from one pinnacle of bullshit and narcissism to the next, Morning Joe crack house regulars Mark Halperin (Glenn Beck's favorite mainstream media enabler) and the pickled remains of Mike Barnacle looked on, smirking and giggling. All that it lacked to complete the creepy, peep-show effect were trench-coats and bad lighting.
But of course, the story of the Trump candidacy has very little to do with Donald Trump.
As I wrote a few years ago, the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.
In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.
They are the GOP's premium leads, but however abundant and renewable a resource the Conservative meatheads may be, come Presidential election time, there is never enough room at the trough for every rapacious Republican hog. This is why every few years we have these Little Red State Fundy moments; that delicate time when the knives come out and the various species of Conservative con men start cutting each other's balls over who gets to pluck the wingnut pigeons...
...while trying desperately not to call attention to the fact that their entire political system depends on pandering to the army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps which the GOP has worked so long and hard to cultivate.
Fortunately for the Right, now that the "respectable" media has as much to lose by cracking out of turn as Hate Radio and Fox News, we can all look forward to another campaign season of the American mainstream media looking stoically the other way.
End of sobering sojourn into the twilight of the Before Time.
A few days ago I noticed that all three of these Clinton-era three hobgoblins were top trending on Twitter and I had to double-check to make sure it wasn't 1995.
Nope. Still 2020. Damn.
So put a pin in that and lets jump back in time a little more than 26 centuries to talk for a minute about history's most famous lesbian -- Sappho of Lesbos -- who was, during her time, one of the most popular and prolific lyric poets in ancient Greece. Statues were erected in her honor. Solon and Plato gave stirring speeches to her genius. She was considered Homer's equal, and frequently referred to simply as "The Poetess", just as Homer was "The Poet".
And yet today almost nothing is known of her life and of the 10,000 lines of her poetry -- which was widely read in antiquity -- only a few fragments survive.
Today, with a few clicks of the mouse from anywhere on the planet I could have a dozen different translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey shipped to my home, so how exactly did Sappho's work suddenly all but vanish from history during 9th century?
One story holds that her collected works were put to the torch by leaders of the Catholic Church because they disapproved of her morals. A more likely and less dramatic (but no less devastating) explanation is that copying manuscripts was hard work that used up a lot of papyrus, and the celibate, male, Catholic monks who were charged with preserving the written works on antiquity decided that the brilliant work of a long-dead lesbian poetess was not worth recording and passing along to future generations.
Because history is not a law of nature.
History is not physics. History is not plumbing.
And history is definitely not your Mommy.
History is not here to break up your stupid fights or clean up your messes. It's not history's job to comfort you with promises of retroactively balancing the scales of justice decades from now. History is not here to tell you that you're wonderful when the world knows you're not. History is not here to comfort you with fairy tales about how, in the larger scheme of things, all the shit you did really wasn't so bad when the world knows it was.
Pick whichever quote you like --
"History is a set of lies agreed upon." -- Napoleon Bonaparte.
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." -- Winston Churchill.
"They got a name for the winners in the world. I want a name when I lose." -- Steely Dan.
-- but it all comes down to the same thing. "History" is what gets passed along. "History" is whatever those with the power to interpret events and stamp their interpretation as "Official" chose it to be. "History" is a brutal, never-ending barroom brawl over who gets to decide what really happened and why it really happened.
And right now the American political media is doing what they have always done in the face of existential threats to our democracy which they helped to create: expending enormous institutional energies to make sure that history lets them and their friends and fellow travelers off the hook.
Consider this chummy tribunal of well-paid, media insiders warning that naughty people may be laughing now, but the Righteous Judgement of History will definitely come for them and boy howdy are they gonna be sorry!
Rush transcript, with emphasis added:
MIKE BARNACLE: Everything we're talking about, Parnas, Pompeo, Pence, Trump, all of this is being recorded by an element among us called history. In terms of history, the snap of a finger. The behavior of the Republicans in the united states senator in 1974, it's literally a first.
So my question to you, and to you, too, Rick, is what has happened to the institution, not just the Republicans, but specifically now in the Senate Republicans, what has happened to our institutions is Trump slowly altering things, maybe forever in this country?
RICK WILSON: I wouldn't say slowly.
[OFF CAMERA] Hope not.
RICK WILSON: Barnacle, I would say he's altered them profoundly and swiftly. The idea of standing up for your state or your district for a Republican particularly is gone. You're judged only if you're loyal to Trump or not. That's the only scoring system in the Republican party. And he has reduced Washington to this corrupt and sort of corrupted environment. Sort of corrupted environment.
KURT BARDELLA: I think about being not just history like 1974, but their own history. I remember when he was investigating Benghazi. He put out a report saying security is a priority and the administration failed, that's why we're doing the investigation, that's why we are investigating Hillary Clinton. Where is that Mike Pompeo now when someone's security, an ambassador's, has been compromised? Where is Jim Jordan who was on that committee? All these Republicans turned away from their own history, it wasn't that long ago. It was six years ago they were doing this.
SCARBOROUGH: As a "Morning Joe" contributor, give our viewers a firsthand look back to what it was like when it was Republicans that were investigating Barack Obama. The hypocrisy is staggering.
BARDELLA: It is so different. I was thinking about the interview last night with Parnas. If something like that was going on when we were in charge of Congress, we would have had a subpoena out that night, wouldn't have waited until the next day. During that interview you would have breaking news, House Republican Darrell Issa subpoenas for testimony. When anything happened that hinted of potential scandal or impropriety with Obama, Republicans were the first to issue subpoenas, have hearings, do closed-door depositions, things they rail about now, they were a big fan of closed-door depositions when they were the majority, it is complete hypocrisy, seeing a different standard. Frankly, we never had close to the volume of evidence that we have now when we were going after them.
When I look at this clutch of media insiders, I spy with my little eye ... one longtime aide to Darrel Issa and former member of the Breitbart goon squad ... one human husk and plagiarist who is now in charge of refilling the Morning Joe Both Sides Do It water cooler every day (or, it is rumored, he is whipped through the streets by Mika Brzezinski) ... one straight-up, life-long Republican ratfucker who found that credulous Liberals would give him more wealth and fame and influence than he ever dreamed possible if he called Donald Trump a shithead ... and two hosts who boost Donald Trump's campaign ointo orbit by giving him million of dollars in free publicity and soft-soap "interviews" on their teevee show.
And all of them have clearly escaped the the Righteous Judgement of History by a very wide margin.
Or consider the case of George Conway, who made his bones as a pro-cancer lawyer working for Big Tobacco and as one of the Republican goons who tried to blow up the Clinton presidency by any means necessary. Husband to Kellyanne Conway. Running buddies with Anne Coulter. And here he is now, cozy in his media sinecure, issuing dire warnings about how Righteous Judgement of History will surely come for naughty people in, oh, five or ten years...
"Republican senators need to look themselves in the mirror," @gtconway3d says, "and think of what it's going to be like 5 years from now, 10 years, what their legacies are going to be. This evidence is going to keep coming out. Truth has a way of coming out..." pic.twitter.com/V5yiPZWNLb
Or consider the case of a sweaty, bipedal rodent named Reince Priebus who, if the Righteous Judgement of History were actually a thing, would be spending the rest of his miserable life going door-to-door begging the forgiveness of the American people. But instead:
CBS hires Reince Priebus, whose firms work for the GOP, the Trump Organization, and lobbying clients
Reince Priebus is a Republican operative who is best-known for his humiliating tenure as President Donald Trump’s first White House chief of staff. Priebus now holds senior roles at affiliated lobbying and legal firms; his law firm is connected to the Trump Organization and has collected over $280,000 in fees from GOP campaign groups such as the Republican National Committee. Despite all that, CBS News announced on January 22 that the network has hired Priebus as a political analyst. He appeared on its coverage of the Senate impeachment trial, where he was the only political operative guest and his conflicts of interest went undisclosed...
Or consider that Ken Starr still walks the Earth and is solicited for his opinions.
Or consider all the time and money David Gregory and NBC spent making sure that Newt Gingrich's career was completely fenced off from the Righteous Judgement of History and his reputation was immediately rehabilitated every time he said or did something which should have gotten him run out of civilized society on a rail.
Or hell, just consider all the Bush Regime scutwork myrmidons -- creatures like David Frum, David Brooks, Michael Gerson, Bill Fucking Kristol, Peggy Noonan, Joe Scarborough, Marc Thiessen, Bretbug Stephens and Hugh Hewitt (and yes, I know the complete list is much longer) -- who walked away from the bloody and monstrous catastrophes they helped to author with nary a paper cut from the Righteous Judgement of History. Who, in fact, walked straight into promotions and tenured positions in the Beltway media where no one would dare to be rude enough to bring up their horrifically inconvenient past.
Appeals to the Judgement of History to balance the scales of justice at some point in the future are like appeals to an Almighty God to send bad people to hell. At best, they provide comfort to the powerless and oppressed. But at worst, they are the alibis of cowards who want to outsource the hard work of fixing shit here-and-now -- of holding monsters accountable here-and-now -- to imaginary people far in the future (who will apparently be very much better and wiser than we are), or to an all-powerful deity in the hereafter.
As for me, whenever I catch the antics of Bush Regime dead-enders yucking it up on cable teevee, or being paid to pass off their shopworn drivel as profundity in America's major newspapers, I wonder how anyone can continue to believe that eventually the Righteous Judgement of History will catch up with Conservative assholes.
Because as long as the Beltway media puts the full might of its "Strategic Forgettery" machinery behind helping these ghouls and grifters walk away from their crimes against journalism and democracy unscathed over and over again, the Righteous Judgement of History might as well give up and go pick blueberries for a living.
And in the last few years, there’s a baseline of crazy from the right that the press has simply come to expect and accept, so the latest conspiracy theorizing or far-out idea from a candidate no longer strikes them as exceptional. Sure, there are exceptions: For instance, Republicans Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell both saw their candidacies derailed by their crazy or outsized statements. But their utterances were truly, deeply bizarre or comical, so they broke through.
But during this cycle, Republican crazy just hasn’t broken through at all. It’s almost as if the national press has just come to accept as normal the degree to which the GOP has moved dramatically to the right. At this point so many prominent Republicans have said insane things that after a while they go by with barely a notice. This is an era when a prominent Republican governor who wants to be president can muse about the possibility that his state might secede from the union, when the most popular radio host in the country suggests that liberals like Barack Obama want Ebola to come to America to punish us for slavery, and when the President of the United States had to show his birth certificate to prove that he isn’t a foreigner.
So ideological extremism and insane conspiracy theories from the right have been normalized. Which means that when another Republican candidate says something deranged, as long as it doesn’t offend a key swing constituency, reporters don’t think it’s disqualifying. And so it isn’t.
Having written about this phenomenon literally thousands of times practically since the day I started blogging and having talked and thought and read about it since long before that, let me say that this "looking with alarm" recognition that the media routinely enables Conservative madness and depravity is so far too little and so far too late as to be darkly amusing.
Yes, I appreciate Mr. Waldeman's work in The American Prospect. And, yes,on one level I get a tiny, childish surge of satisfaction at seeing this in a Major Murrica Newspaper . But the sad upshot is this: in 2014, one person in one column has caught up to what Liberal bloggers have been writing about for over a decade and what pre-blogging Dirty Hippies have been screaming about all during the political metastasization of the Moral Majority...and death of the Fairness Doctrine...the rise of Hate Radio and Fox News...the relentless Right Wing conspiracies against the Clintons...the impeachment of Bill Clinton over trivia...and so forth.
So it is indeed a fine thing to read "It’s almost as if the national press has just come to accept as normal the degree to which the GOP has moved dramatically to the right" in the Washington Post. But to read it in 2014 feels a lot like reading a headline asking "Is American Facing An Economic Depression?" in a major American newspaper...in 1938.
So far too little and so far too late as to be bleakly hilarious.
Seriously, I love you and your carbolic acid snark and witheringly clever commentors and all, but Jesus Sponge Tool Christ you suck at Photoshop.
And the thing is, this tragedy need not continue another day because there are really good graphic artists out there who would be glad to help you out.
Consider, for example, the case of Mr. Charles P. Pierce of Esquire magazine. When Charlie decided to commandeer the David Brooks beat, he too started off with sucky graphics because not everyone can be good at everything. Eventually, though, Mr. Pierce got someone to match well-crafted graphics with his writing and so by the time Mr. Pierce decided to commandeer the Sunday Morning beat, he had learned his lesson and started with some decent visual art right off the bat.
You have sterling and hard-won reputation for sparkling verbal brutality, Wonkette, so why do you keep poo-dipping it with graphics that look like
a visual ransom note hastily assembled in the back seat of a speeding car with blown shocks by someone with safety scissors, a pot of glue and a very severe case of DTs? First, why choose this photo at all? Outside of the circles you run in, Liz Cheney is virtually unknown and her face contains no obvious visual cues as to her identity, so why choose a photo of her that says nothing about who she is other than "I am a blonde lady standing in front of a brick wall and possibly moving my extensive Holly Hobby doll collection into my new office"? Second, really? Your just gonna take Dick Cheney's face, crop it with a pair of lawn shears and bolt it to some (as far as we know) anonymous blonde lady's profile? Really?
HORRIBLE DRAGON LADY LIZ CHENEY THINKS CZECHOSLOVAKIA IS STILL A THING
Before repeatedlyusing his deal with Satan to cheat death, former Vice President and It’s A Wonderful Life villainDick Cheney brought spawn into the world and it immediately began saying horrible things that are false and stupid...
-- so why not take another minute or two to think about what you want your pic to convey? Why not look around Teh Internet for raw materials that tell the story you want to tell? Here, for example, are my own efforts that I created as an instructional aid just for this post. It took me about 15 minutes to locate the pics I wanted and another 40 minutes to build the thing. I worked it up on my creaky 7-year-old laptop with its creaky 7-year-old version of Photoshop and jittery mouse, and I would have gotten it posted lot faster had I not gotten enamored of these two photos first
and burned 45 minutes trying to make them work (the end result was, in my modest opinion, several hundred times better than what you posted but still wasn't up to my standards so I pitched it.)
The first step to getting better, Wonkette, is admitting you are powerless over sucking at Photoshop. Counselors are standing by.
One of the listeners to "The Professional Left" has written us with some feedback. Since he gave us permission to use his email complete and unexpurgated, here it is:
Subject: Feedback from a real liberal.
Hello - I looked up and listened completely to the two most recent episodes you have posted. I agreed completely with your politics however I will NOT be listening to you any more because the male podcaster cannot and will not stop cussing and using F-bombs. You may do that all you like but let me therefore tell you not just something but several things as a podcaster myself and a former reporter on television.
1. HOW DARE you call yourself a professional. You aren't. Professional podcasters don't do this. Ever. Period.
2. The reason they don't do this is it shows ACTIVE DISRESPECT for ANYONE listening. Didn't your MOTHER teach you not to swear in public? Whether she or your dad did or not, I'm sure teachers did along the way and this just shows what a loser you are out of the gate. Also did it not occur to you that liberals might have kids nearby? So you want to teach their kids cuss words? You are putting out a PUBLIC product...kids listen.
3. It distracts from your message and does it a disservice. You might think your GUTTER MOUTH gives you a common touch, but no, not really. It just makes people wish they were there to punch you.
4. It also makes me infuriated that you are putting yourself out there as an example of how liberals are or should be. I would correctly be humiliated if listening to your show with a conservative objecting to you as a low grade degenerate and I'd have to agree.
5. If you aren't going to change the name of your show to the guttermouth left, at least be PROFESSIONAL podcasters and bleep him or edit his f bombs out and AGAIN, RESPECT your listeners. I am certain you have lost MANY other listeners because of this and will continue to and you should be ashamed of putting this otherwise good message in an unfit filthy package on the internet.
6. There is NO WAY IN HELL you deserve any money for this obscene, low grade production, so STOP ASKING.
And yes by all means read my FULL UNEDITED email in context on your show you foul mouth piece of crap I'd love to hear you defend that behavior and discredit yourself EVEN MORE than you already have.
Quite Sincerely,
...
First, for those not familiar with how The Internet works, here is link to an explanation of the "Not Safe For Work" warning with which we begin every episode of "The Professional Left":
Typically, the NSFW tag is used in e-mail, videos, and on interactive discussion areas (such as Internet forums, blogs, or community websites) to mark URLs or hyperlinks which contain material such as pornography or profanity, which the viewer may not want to be seen accessing in a public or formal setting such as at work.
Second, when choosing to enjoy recorded or transmitted words or music which they also may not wish to share with those around them, many humans use "headphones". Here is a link to a search engine called "Google" which may help you to find some reasonably priced "headphones" which can either be purchased in your local area or which can be ordered through the mail.
Cussin’: Turns out it’s like Water for Mutha@&$!#ing Chocolate!
...
This is about ownership and responsibility.
Because you, personally, own the entire English language.
Every motherfucking word of it.
And so do I. So do we all. And every day we raze it, build it, break it and birth it, because it is a living thing.
It is our inalienable birthright, and will be our most versatile legacy to little fuckers not yet born, but as with driving the Big Rigs, or operating a band saw with your toes, the tool itself demands a certain level of responsibility and respect.
When used correctly, language not only feels like a mouthful of velvet rubies and chocolate mousse, it can reformat the world, heal a scalded heart, and get her to shed those pesky pants!
Used incompetently it is an embarrassment. A rusting dumpster in a reeking alley behind which the ignorant, the bigoted and the irrational believe they can pass out, occluded from scrutiny in shit-stained imbecile safety, but which turns out, by dawn's early light, to be a mini-bus full of liberals with digital cameras.
....
In the end, the second most dishonorable and demeaning thing you can do to this fine, fierce, sinewy, blunt, flensing bazooka you have been granted is to cower in the corner, making a mighty, scowling fortress out of your “Impactfuls”, “Synergies”, “Paradigms” and the other 181 officially approved units of lifeless bizzpeak buzztwaddle.
The most insulting thing is demanding that others do likewise.
Last, here is Malcolm Tucker, putting me to shame. It's not safe for work.
"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:
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.
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.
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 "...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,
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."
Before it plunges down the wingnut memory hole forever, let us pause to recall that the absolute batshit berserker rage against the Kenyan Usurper is not something of recent vintage, nor was it something that was "caused" by anything President Obama ever said or did.
As evidenced by this little bit of history from just 10 weeks after President Obama was sworn in, the unhinged hatred on the Right was "caused" by the mere fact that a Black man with a (D) after his name got elected President by a solid majority.
Period.
From the moment his hand touched the Bible (you do remember he took the oath twice, right?) to President Limbaugh ordering his faithful manservant John Boehner to throw an historically unprecedented hissy fit over the scheduling of a joint session of Congress, every Republican tantrum -- Every. Single. One. -- has been nothing more than various means to the end of undoing the results of the 2008 election.
From Birtherism to Death Panels, the Modern Conservative agenda in the Age of Obama has been nothing but reckless swine and calculating traitors grabbing whatever heavy object they could lay their hands on and heaving it into traffic, hoping to cause a wreck.
In other words, a relentless, national program of premeditated sabotage at a time of war and national economic emergency.
And don't even get me started on their fucking governors.
If Bush had actually done his job and killed Osama bin Laden, the Right would have cleared room for him on Mt. Rushmore. If Bush had killed bin Laden and helped take down Gaddahfi? Over a single summer? Fuck, the Right would this minute be carving his face on the Moon.
President Obama -- whatever his flaws -- has done these things -- things that the Right would have found admirable in any other person on any other day -- but since it's Obama, it's...gone. Vanished. Revised, trivialized and miraculous transmogrified into a Christopath coloring book in which Bush actually kills bin Laden.
Instead we have the Right -- lavishly funded by the fascist industrialists and Fox News propagandists who are so close to their dream of pure oligarchy they can taste it -- holding poor people hostage to tax cuts for billionaires, threatening to blow up the world economy unless they get 100% of everything they want, putting holds on everything it couldn't filibuster, swearing public allegiance to lunatics and Dark Ages superstition.
Because you know what? Jon Stewart was wrong. For the Right, going jaw-dropping, over-the-top, foaming apeshit and staying apeshit actually worked just fine. And as long as no Democrat of the First Water is willing to call them out as the depraved thugs that they are (and as long as no major media outlet is willing to tell this story honestly) it will continue to work, because the Right has gone the Brownshirt Dolchstoss myth one better: pre-loading a fully-articulated "We were betrayed by internal enemies!" fantasy into the tiny, mushy brains of their orc army in advance of the global economic Reichstag Fire they themselves are clearly desperate to ignite.
After leading us -- limping and wounded -- away from the precipice of economic disaster, over the next eight years President Obama's hardest job is going to be the reclamation and rehabilitating of a gibbering, toxic scrumfuck called the Republican Party.
In this, I was as wrong as Jon Stewart: if the last two years have demonstrated anything beyond any doubt, it is that that the GOP is rotted from the soul on out and beyond redemption.
I am also keenly aware that the last time these people were allowed to get this absolutely dug-in/fuck-you-crazy it took the entire Union Army to stop them from destroying this country.
Two, correctional-facility-based questions bookended the Mouse Circus today: one asked and one unasked.
Asked: Why the Hell weren't prisoners being held on Riker's Island evacuated?
Unasked: Why the Hell isn't Richard Bruce Cheney and most of the rest of his Republican politico-criminal enterprise rotting away the rest of their lives in federal prison?
Interred beneath the vast, complicit media silence between the implications of these two questions is where you will find most everything that is wrong with the United States in this Year of Our Lord 2011.
Which is why, rather that daring to look Evil in the eye and asking "Why?", everyone instead settled into their comfortable media roles, giggled and whispering uncomfortably about how little regard cyborg and unindicted-war-criminal Cheney had for anyone that stood in his way, and how really, really unapologetic Vice President Sociopath is for anything.
As if this were some kind of surprise.
Also David Fucking Brooks was on teevee to basically re-read his Friday New York Times column verbatim.
Nice work if you can get it.
Our Mr. Brooks' reveals to a stunned nation that his Republican Party is now completely captive to a mob of bigots and yahoos who think Ned Beatty shore has a purdy mouth!
For those of you keeping score out there, these are the same people that Our Mr. Brooks has spend most of his career ignoring, preferring instead to measure out his life's teaspoons of bile onto Dirty Fucking Hippies whenever the opportunity presents itself do so in complete safety:
"In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion -- that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed--but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis."
All of which only served to leave a depressed and distracted America with one more unanswered question:
Hurricane Irene: Good for John McCain...or great for John McCain?
You have now seen Sunday's Mouse Circus, except for the Fox News bit, which I understand was like bobbing for turds in a barrel of molten lead.
As an added bonus, J. Michael Straczynski explains in one minute and twenty seconds one quick way to begin to unfuck our
... The budget has some fine features. I’ll soon be writing a column about how many of its provisions are better than anything the Republican Party is proposing. But it is laughably inadequate compared with the fiscal problems before us.
In 2012, the only year this budget controls, the president would actually increase the deficit with more spending. Roughly two-thirds of the alleged savings would nominally kick in after 2016. The budget imagines that $328 billion in financing for transportation projects will magically appear. While ignoring tax reform, it lards up the tax code with another layer of special preferences. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculates that $780 billion of the proposed deficit cuts are politically dubious.
The budget gets a lot of little things right, but it squanders the opening created by the debt commission. It fails to touch the big programs or ask for any shared sacrifice from the American people.
To which I have to say only this: I am not interested in anything any Republican or Conservative has to say about debt or deficits or "shared" sacrifice.
Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever again.
You are the Party that inherited surpluses from Bill Clinton and pissed them away.
You are the Party that ran two wars on a credit card.
You are the Party that ran two wars on a credit card...while cutting taxes.
You are the Party that only learned how to spell d-e-f-i-c-i-t ten seconds after the Black Democrat was inaugurated.
You are the Party that held medical care for 9/11 first responders hostage so that you could ram through one more round of giveaways to billionaires.
America's Leading Conservative Public Intellectual continues:
Two explanations are commonly offered to explain why the White House decided to kick the can down the road. Some analysts say the Democrats are trying for a repeat of 1995: Do nothing on the deficit; goad the Republicans into announcing entitlement cutbacks and then savage them on the campaign trail for cutting off granny.I don’t believe this is in the president’s head. It would be morally reprehensible to bankrupt the nation for the sake of a campaign theme. Obama is not that sort of person.
I agree that it would be "morally reprehensible to bankrupt the nation for the sake of a campaign theme". Of course, what America's Leading Conservative Public Intellectual conveniently fails to note here is that deliberately "bankrupt[ing] the nation" as a means to achieving its ideological goals of wiping out the middle class and rolling back the New Deal is exactly what America's Leading Conservative Public Intellectual's own political party has been doing for the last 3o years.
From Common Dreams:
Two Santa Clauses or How The Republican Party Has Conned America for Thirty Years
by Thom Hartmann
... By 1974, Jude Wanniski had had enough. The Democrats got to play Santa Claus when they passed out Social Security and Unemployment checks – both programs of the New Deal – as well as when their "big government" projects like roads, bridges, and highways were built giving a healthy union paycheck to construction workers. They kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for things, which didn't seem to have much effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up, in fact), and that made them seem like a party of Robin Hoods, taking from the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class. Americans loved it. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections.
... Wanniski decided to turn the classical world of economics – which had operated on this simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years – on its head. In 1974 he invented a new phrase – "supply side economics" – and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn't because people had money and wanted to buy things with it but, instead, because things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money. The more things there were, the faster the economy would grow.
At the same time, Arthur Laffer was taking that equation a step further. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would go up!
Neither concept made any sense – and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies – but together they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness.
Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to suggest that he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, that those tax cuts would cause them to take their surplus money and build factories or import large quantities of cheap stuff from low-labor countries, and that the more stuff there was supplying the economy the faster it would grow. George Herbert Walker Bush – like most Republicans of the time – was horrified. Ronald Reagan was suggesting "Voodoo Economics," said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski's supply-side and Laffer's tax-cut theories would throw the nation into such deep debt that we'd ultimately crash into another Republican Great Depression.
But Wanniski had been doing his homework on how to sell supply-side economics. In 1976, he rolled out to the hard-right insiders in the Republican Party his "Two Santa Clauses" theory, which would enable the Republicans to take power in America for the next thirty years.
Democrats, he said, had been able to be "Santa Clauses" by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Republicans could do that, too – spending could actually increase. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people's taxes! For working people it would only be a small token – a few hundred dollars a year on average – but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. The rich, in turn, would use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus increasing supply and stimulating the economy. And that growth in the economy would mean that the people still paying taxes would pay more because they were earning more.
There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They'd have to be anti-Santas by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.
When Reagan rolled out Supply Side Economics in the early 80s, dramatically cutting taxes while exploding (mostly military) spending, there was a moment when it seemed to Wanniski and Laffer that all was lost. The budget deficit exploded and the country fell into a deep recession – the worst since the Great Depression – and Republicans nationwide held their collective breath. But David Stockman came up with a great new theory about what was going on – they were "starving the beast" of government by running up such huge deficits that Democrats would never, ever in the future be able to talk again about national health care or improving Social Security – and this so pleased Alan Greenspan, the Fed Chairman, that he opened the spigots of the Fed, dropping interest rates and buying government bonds, producing a nice, healthy goose to the economy. Greenspan further counseled Reagan to dramatically increase taxes on people earning under $37,800 a year by increasing the Social Security (FICA/payroll) tax, and then let the government borrow those newfound hundreds of billions of dollars off-the-books to make the deficit look better than it was.
Reagan, Greenspan, Winniski, and Laffer took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today. They and George HW Bush ran up more debt in eight years than every president in history, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined. Surely this would both starve the beast and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.
And that's just how it turned out. Bill Clinton, who had run on an FDR-like platform of a "new covenant" with the American people that would strengthen the institutions of the New Deal, strengthen labor, and institute a national health care system, found himself in a box. A few weeks before his inauguration, Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin sat him down and told him the facts of life: he was going to have to raise taxes and cut the size of government. Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous programs, declaring an "end to welfare as we know it" and, in his second inaugural address, an "end to the era of big government." He was the anti-Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as Republican politicians campaigned on a platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases. ...
To reiterate, I am not interested in anything any Republican or Conservative has to say about debt or deficits or "shared" sacrifice.
Not now.
Not tomorrow.
Not ever again.
And least of all the fatuous, deceit-encrusted cluckings of America's Leading Conservative Public Intellectual.
Well that was fast! MSNBC president Phil Griffin announced Sunday night that "Countdown" host Keith Olbermann will return to the air on Tuesday. The announcement comes just two days after he was suspended "indefinitely" for contributing to three 2010 candidates without prior consent from the network.
"After several days of deliberation and discussion, I have determined that suspending Keith through and including Monday night's program is an appropriate punishment for his violation of our policy," Griffin said in a statement. "We look forward to having him back on the air Tuesday night." ...
Two days?
Hell, I've had erections that lasted longer.
Welcome back and all, KO, but now what am I supposed to do with two warehouses full of "Lean Forward" parody posters?
