Please forgive my Google Translate French. I can practically hear Madame
Alfille wagging her finger at me and scolding me for wasting my time on debate
and track in high school when I should have joined her French club.
Alas, I am poorly made, and this was the best French translation I could come
up with for, "Wouldn't Piss On You If You Were On Fire. And You
Are On Fire."
Trump’s panicked plea goes largely ignored by world leaders: 'No country
stepped forward’
President Donald Trump issued a plea Saturday to several countries in the
hopes that they would “send ships” to a major shipping route off the coast
of Iran to help the United States’ war effort against the Middle East
nation, a plea that as of Sunday afternoon appeared to go largely
ignored
In response to the U.S.-Israeli joint military siege launched late last
month, Iran has vowed to attack any sea vessels aligned with the United
States and its allies that attempt to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a
major shipping route through which 20% of the world’s oil trade flows. As
a result, oil prices have skyrocketed, reportedly sparking panic within
the Trump administration.
“Hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are
affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so
that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has
been totally decapitated,” Trump wrote in a social media post on Saturday.
Begging a community of nations -- which he has spent a decade shitting on --
to come and save his rapidly decomposing ass from a catastrophic war of choice
he launched with no plan and no warning is the most beta cuck thing I have
ever heard of.
And so far the silence from other nations is coming through loud and clear.
In Japanese:
Tatoe kimi ga moete ite mo, kimi ni shōben o kakeru koto sae shinai yo.
Soshite kimi wa ima, moete iru nda.
In Simplified Chinese:
Jiùsuàn nǐ húnshēn zháohuǒ, wǒ yě lǎndé sā pào niào jiù nǐ. Ér nǐ xiànzài
quèshí zhèng zháohuǒ ne.
In Korean:
Nega bultaoleugo iss-eodo ojum han bang-uldo an ssal geoya. geuleonde neon
jigeum bultago issjanh-a.
Welsh: Fyddech chi ddim yn Pissio Arnoch Pe Byddech Ar Dân. A Ti Ar Dân.
Cockney:
I wouldn’t ‘ave a slash on ya if ya was goin’ up like Guy Fawkes Night —
and look at ya, you’re already bleedin’ burnin’, ain’t ya
Even in Klingon: Vaj Dunay'Qo' meQlI'chugh vay'. 'ej bImeQlI'.
"Senator McCarthy's reckless and unfounded attempt to impugn my loyalty is just one more example of his typical tactic of attempting to tie up to Communism anyone who disagrees with him."-- Edward R. Murrow
Nobel prize committee please note that just as Trump's Epstein Filegate is
Stupid Watergate, so Trump's "Operation Blow Shit Up And Take The Oil" is just
Stupid Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Lie about the pretext, build up a huge military presence, start bombing (when
shit goes wrong and war crimes are committed, insist that it's all legal and/or blame underlings) ... (From Vox)
The twisted reason why Trump is bombing Venezuelan boats
For this administration, war crimes are a feature, not a bug.
In early September, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the US military to “kill everybody” aboard a speedboat in the Caribbean.
A missile then shattered the vessel and set its fragments ablaze. When the smoke cleared, US surveillance drones showed two people clinging to the smoldering wreckage. An admiral then ordered a second strike against these flailing survivors — an act that violated a wide array of international and domestic laws.
Or at least, this is what a recent report in the Washington Post alleges.
The Trump administration publicly insists that the Post’s account is “fake news.” In closed-door briefings with lawmakers, Pentagon officials have reportedly claimed that the second strike was not intended to kill survivors, but rather, to sink the boat so as to clear a navigation hazard for other vessels. Yet, the administration has refused to provide either the public or members of Congress with unedited video footage of the bombings...
... then, when everything is in place, in brazen act of unprovoked conquest, roll in heavy and attempt to seize
the nation's oil reserves.
Here is some footage documenting the "negotiations".
So the next time you see Vice President Couchfucker running his lying mouth --
BREAKING: JD Vance lies that there was a negotiated end to the Second World War. With who? Hitler killed himself in the bunker. Mussolini was overthrown. Two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Germany and Japan were occupied by allied forces. Read a book. pic.twitter.com/ZDdZfuw5Lc
— Trump Lie Tracker (Commentary) (@MAGALieTracker) August 24, 2025
-- perhaps gently advise him, in a fatherly sort of way, that if he is very,
very lucky, the worst that will happen to him once the Trump administration is
history is being paraded though the streets of
Washington D.C. alongside the rest to the traitors, head shaved, wearing a sandwich board
with "I Collaborated" written in big, red letters, front and back.
"Every conceivable standard of conduct, propriety, ethics and governance was
shattered by the Lincoln Project board."
-- Steve Schmidt, Lincoln Project co-founder.
Part of me thinks that, like Michelangelo contemplating a fresh slab of
marble, I should just circle the following Tweets for a year or two, looking
at every angle, contemplating them in all their perfection, and letting the
underlying truths emerge before picking up my hammer and chisel..
8/ the
@ProjectLincoln. Before the organization started
@TheRickWilson
set up a GO Fund me to make a movie 🎥 about Trump. He raised tens of
thousands of dollars 💵 and never made the movie. I asked him about it 500
times. No movie. I was not comfortable with this. It is a big
The reason
@ProjectLincoln
was able to extract millions from gullible liberals -- to say nothing of
the petty fraud and theft of Rick Wilson for this film -- is
@GoFundMe,
@JoyAnnReid,
@JoeNBC kept
endorsing and glorifying them, so liberals assumed they should keep giving
cash.
But I don't have a mountain demesne to which I can retreat because I'm
not a grifting douchebag who suckers credulous dopes out of their
cash.
Nor do have I a year or two to fiddlefuck around while I live off the interest
of the large pile of cash which the aforementioned credulous dopes have handed
me. There is no endowment or dark money war chest or internet
zillionaire benefactor. There are no cable news corporations who
incorporated me into their business plan and now invest millions in free
publicity every month to promote this little blog of mine.
That tip jar you see at the bottom of these posts? That's it.
But with that tip jar (and the permanently low profile this blog is going to
have until the day they drag me outta here) comes a certain freedom.
Here, I am at liberty to say pretty much whatever I want to say (within the
editorial limits I set for myself) knowing that, from time to time, I am going
to piss off a nontrivial percentage of my readers and my political
"allies".
Which is a fair bargain. And why, when I saw that not only was
grifting sleazebag (and former Liberal media darling) Steve Schmidt using
all of this words to vivisect the grifting sleazebags (and
former and current Liberal media darlings) of the Lincoln Project including
grifting sleazebag (and Liberal media darling) Rick Wilson...
...but that grifting Bolshi Freedom Troll (and former Liberal media
darling) Glenn Greenwald was using grifting sleazebag Steve Schmidt's words to
bludgeon the Lincoln Lads and the MSNBC whelping box that spawned them...
...well let's just say that I smiled.
Bitterly, but I smiled.
A lot.
I had all the feels, as the kids say, because this was the crossover "Why Do
Otherwise Intelligent People Keep Falling For This Shit" episode I never
expected.
And the fact that I had to go to a bottom-of-the-wingnut-barrel schlock shop
like Twitchy to retrieve this stuff (no link because fuck 'em) --
‘WORST con artists’: Glenn Greenwald takes a cue from Steve Schmidt
OUTING The Lincoln Project and DECIMATES Rick Wilson
-- because everyone involved in the story blocked me years ago for the high
crime of remembering their inconvenient pasts?
My smile just kept getting bigger.
You longtime readers can probably fill in the rest of the story, but for the
newer arrivals, our tale begins way back during the Obama administration, when
Bolshi Freedom Troll Glenn Greenwald was beloved by many on the Left and in the media because
Snowden and documents and Russia and "Obama is worse than Bush!" and it was in
all the papers, so you can read all about it somewhere else.
Or just rent the shitty movie.
Anyway, almost immediately after Greenwald became the World's Greatest
Journalist and before his internet sugar daddy cut him a check for a quarter
of a billion dollars, something about the many, bilious diatribes Greenwald
was cranking out on a daily basis began to stink.
Greenwald had a whole shelf
of ideological axes to grind and petty vengeances to enact, and now he had the
clout to do it. And he did. Insufferably. Incessantly.
He bent the truth with abandon and then broke it. Went to the Dudgeon Outlet Mall and bought the highest dudgeon he could find and used it at an indignation
decibel level that could knock satellites from their orbits to rail against
anyone who did not meet his standards of ideological and journalistic purity
-- standards which he himself freely and frequent broke.
And woe betide the poor fool who noticed and wrote about Spleenwald's lies and
hypocrisy.
Well dear readers, I was one of those benighted, woe betided fools, who saw
what was going on in plain sight, wrote about it, and got absolutely slagged
for it by my "allies".
Overnight I was no longer a Liberal in good
standing. I was a drooling, jackbooted fascist. A corporatist
shill. An "Obot". The blowback was swift, severe and
material...but I kept writing while a whole lot of much more connected Liberal
writers with steady gigs in the legacy media kept their heads down and said
little or nothing because it wasn't worth getting the Greenwald horde on their
asses.
Such are the perils and privileges of being an indy writer, beholden to
no one.
Then Glenn started heading off the deep, deep end in exactly the ways I
had predicted, and in a manner that his fan boys could no longer ignore.
Showing up on Fox News. Whoring for Tucker Carlson's White Power
Hour. Yucking it up with Laura Ingraham. And so forth. And
gradually his mob of avenging Purity Angels stopped showing up at my place and
calling me a Nazi.
Search the blog for "Greenwald" and you'll find all of it.
Not terribly much later, Donald Trump began his steady rise to power in the
Republican Party. And while
drooling, jackbooted, fascist "Obot"s crackpot Liberal
alarmists like me were warning that Trump was grotesque end product of decades
of Republican Southern Strategy politics come to claim his throne -- that he
was the GOP base made manifest -- all the savvy Conservative political
havers-of-opinions like David "It's Gonna Be Rubio!" Brooks and streetwise GOP
political arsonists-for-hire like Rick Wilson reassured the public that the
nomination and election of Donald Trump was utterly impossible.
Greetings, Donald Trump super fans. I am a member of the GOP
establishment. I’m writing to tell you that, no matter how much you wish
it otherwise, the Donald Trump candidacy is almost over.
Don’t be fooled by Trump’s double-digit lead in a new poll: He is not
going to win. He’s not going to win the primary. He’s not going to win the
general. He’s not going to win a third-party bid. Sure, he can damage the
GOP ticket badly enough to guarantee Hillary’s election, but he can’t win.
He’s too flawed, too liberal, too undisciplined and too afflicted with
verbal dysentery when even slightly provoked. He lacks the fundamental
presence and gravitas of a commander-in-chief.
Donald Trump is not running a real campaign. He is working the phones,
stirring the pot and using the media ecosystem to its fullest. Soon, the
bolder members of the field will follow Rick Perry, Marco Rubio and Jeb
Bush in making harder and more decisive strokes against him. Unlike Trump,
they’ll use real oppo, tested and targeted messages—ads built not just to
cut, but to kill. They’ll break his operational tempo, get inside his OODA
loop and turn his circus into a crispy ruin. It’s what real campaigns
do....
Even if it means (and it well may) that Hillary Clinton sits in the White
House, names 3 or 4 Supreme Court justices and lets Bill run around the
East Wing molesting the help, you’re going to teach the hated
Establishment a lesson by becoming Trump Super Fans, even if he runs as a
third party candidate and guarantees Her victory...
And just as they had been for decades about every other Republican atrocity,
all the Very Serious Conservative havers-of-opinions and all
the GOP political arsonists-turned-Never-Trumper and all the savvy
mainstream media political pundits were wrong, wrong, fuckity wrong about
Trump. They watched -- stunned and unbelieving -- as the racist base of
the Republican party that GOP leadership and media had so carefully cultivated
did exactly what we crackpot alarmist Liberals had been warning
for decades that they would eventually do: hoist a monster of their own making
up on their shoulders and carry him to the White House.
At this point in our story it is terribly important to step back and
contemplate how thoroughgoing the failure of institutional media and
Conservatives leadership had been up to the day Trump was elected. How
gleefully they had all jumped on the "But Her Emails" bash Hillary bandwagon
because they believed it was impossible for her to lose.
The point being that this was not the first catastrophic institutional failure
of the national media and Conservative elites. Far from it. In
fact, the savvy havers-of-opinions who were caught flat-footed by the rise of
Trump were pretty much the same savvy havers-of-opinions who were caught
flat-footed by the collapse of the Bush administration, and flat-footed by the
Fake Tea Party once they dropped their masks. Over and over again they
showed themselves to be so pot-committed to their reassuring fairy tales of
who they wished Republicans to be that they actively refused to see who
Republicans actually were until something big and scary kicked in their doors
and grabbed them by the throat.
And even then, it was unimaginable that they would turn for advice and council
to the one group of people who have actually been right about the Right all
along. The dirty hippies. Once again, the savvy havers-of-opinions
were so pot-committed to their campfire tall tales of Liberals as feckless
dopes and crackpot alarmists that it was institutionally inconceivable to them
that we dirty hippies might be able to explain how Trump came to
be.
It would also be institutionally dangerous to give the dirty hippies a
national platform because of our terrible habit of Remembering Inconvenient
Stuff.
It just wouldn't do to have some dirty hippie on a Sunday morning
Power Panel explaining that Trump was not a black swan event, but the
end-product of 50 years of cynical Republican political and media strategies
and a willingness on the part of a complicit national media --
including every sniveling fucker on this Power Panel -- to look
the other way or "Both Sides" every Republican act of depravity.
Nope, that wouldn't do. Wouldn't do at all. And since they control
the cameras, media corporations just cooked up a narrative that suited their
corporate interests. They bankrolled Trump voter whisperers like Salina
Zito to speak to them of "economic anxiety". They invented the entirely
new genre of journalistic fiction that one wag refers to as Magic Ruralism and dispatched their Zeitgeist
Action News vans to the interior of the American continent to interview Real
Murricans in diner after diner after diner after diner.
They also repurposed their existing assets.
Almost overnight Joe Scarborough went from being Trump Fluffer #1 to Mr. Trump
Truth Teller Guy #1 Who Had Never, Ever Been a Trump Supporter. We dirty
hippies bellowed our outrage as loudly as our tiny platforms would allow, but
when you're a celebrity (and you control the cameras) they let you do stuff
like that.
Almost overnight Bill Kristol went from being a smirking Conservative
ghoul and unreconstructed Iraq War pimp famous for being catastrophically
wrong about everything (Maddow on MSNBC in 2014), to rambling Uncle Billy, a valued MSNBC contributor who said mean
things about Trump, oh and by the way we're starting a new media company called
The Bulwark you should check it out!
Almost overnight Charlie Sykes went from being Wisconsin's Rush Limbaugh
to trusted MSNBC contributor and Man Who Is Perpetually Shocked At How The GOP
Completely Lost Its Mind Overnight, oh and by the way I'm part of a new media
company called The Bulwark you should check it out!
Almost overnight MSNBC became the preeminent Reputation Laundromat for outcast
Republicans and unemployed Conservative pundits, as long as they stuck
more-or-less to the same script. That the GOP had suddenly and
spontaneously lost its mind in 2016. That no one could have seen it
coming. And that none of the Conservatives who were now employees of
MSNBC were in any meaningful way responsible for what their party had
become.
If you were a Bush regime dead ender like Nicolle Wallace or Steve Schmidt, or
a friend of theirs like Matthew Dowd, or a fellow traveler like Michael
Steele, a place would be found for you in the budget and at the table.
And in this new order it wouldn't do to have some mouthy dirty hippie
confusing things by showing up with receipts.
Wouldn't do at all.
And once the dramatis personae had been cast and seats at the table
filled, the ritual among these very recently-former Republicans became a
contest to see who could outdo whom in calling Trump a shithead and calling
his "followers" racist morons without letting on that these were
the same racist morons that these recently-former Republicans had spent
their careers cultivating and exploiting.
A couple of people who excelled at calling Trump a shithead and calling his
"followers" racist morons were Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, who were
packaged and sold to cable news audiences as canny, street fighting campaign
veterans who knew how to win!win!win! despite the fact that their candidates
kept losing. Their candidates for president lost in 2008 and 2012, and
in the 2016 GOP primaries all of their show ponies got wiped out and glue
factoried.
But none of that mattered. Because despite the fact that Democrats
came roaring back in 2018, taking the House and the Senate thanks almost
entirely to Democratic women and minorities working their asses off and
organizing, the new mainstream media political fairy tale was that since
Democrats are irredeemably and
holistically bad at politics, and since Trump must be defeated, the republic was
dooooomed unless Democrats wisely stepped aside and let all of
these newly ascendant recently-former Republicans tell them how to run things.
These are the same recently-former Republicans who had by now -- surprise! --
colonized cable news and national newspapers, and built their own media
corporations like The Bulwark thanks to large infusions of cash from
wealthy benefactors and glowing saturation coverage by MSNBC. All of
which served only to amplify the message of
"Democrats have a sacred responsibility to the future of the nation to
immediately stop being Democrats and start aggressively courting
phantom independents and reasonable Republicans" until it just about drowned everything else out.
And so, having carefully prepared a rich, fertile loam of peril and the incessant negging of Democrats as
hapless fiddlefucks who don't know anything about the Real Murrica beyond Berkley
and Swope Park, a for-profit advertising agency
consisting of recently unemployed Republican shit-slingers, con men and
perverts was seeded, watered and fertilized by a cable teevee network which
was now dominated by the voices of recently-former Republicans.
And thus The Lincoln Project was born.
The Lincoln Lads specialized in shunting the vast sums of money they were raking in to
marketing and production companies owned by Lincoln Lad board members.
Out the other end of that pipeline came slick 30- and 60-second commercials
which called Donald Trump a lying scumbag and the "credulous boomer rubes" who
supported him stupid.
At this point I am obliged by Clio, the Muse of History to mention that at no point in
the entire lifespan of the Lincoln Project have any one any of the Lincoln Lads generated a original single idea or observation that Liberals hadn't already had and made over and
over and over again for decades. However, what we Liberal never had
during all of that time (and never will have) were cable news outlets and
major American newspapers willing to carry our often salty critiques of
the Republican party, every day, for years, for free.
We thundered and sermonized and parodied and discoursed as loudly as out tiny
platforms permitted. We said "fuck" a lot and spilled billions of pixels
over the course of decades but to no avail. We were (and are)
pariahs. Nobody wanted to hear it. Everyone wanted us alarmist
crackpots to STFU and go away.
Back-to-back, the Lincoln Project scores a glowing front-page article in
The New Yorker AND a their own segment on 60 minutes.
Just for
fun, let's take a look back at how Liberal bloggers were treated in 2006
for doing saying/exactly the same things.https://t.co/6VIdjny6d2
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico)
October 12, 2020
Then came Trump, and almost overnight MSNBC became the Recently Unemployed Bush
Regime Dead-Ender/Hate Radio talker/Weekly Standard Editor Full
Employment Project, which, in turn, gave birth to the Lincoln Project, which
MSNBC sold the shit out of as if they were dick pills or reverse mortgages.
There were endless glowing
interviews. Book promotions. Practically handing the mic over to
them week after week. Running their ads over and over again as "news".
For decades, the mainstream media Tone Police stomped the hell out of any
Liberal who tried to play hardball. Now, as we all watched in real time,
that same mainstream media fell all over itself giving the Lincoln Lads
tens of millions of dollars worth of free, flattering promotion.
Now put on your Imagination Hats and try to imagine a universe in which
actual Liberals
who had been right about the Right all along -- right about
the Right during all the years when the Lincoln Lads were being paid
princely sums to angry up the crazies in order to get Republican monsters
elected -- got that kind of sweetheart coverage from cable news and American
newspapers.
Imagine if...
...there were bidding wars over who would get to publish Digby's book, and endless
coverage of it in the media.
...instead of dying poor and in obscurity, the late Steve
Gilliard, who had Michael Steele's number from jump, had been given
the teevee pundit seat reserved for odious Mr. Steele.
...it was Eric Boehlert who had been chosen to host Meet the Press and it was Chuck Todd
who was hit by a train.
...it had been the Sexy Liberal crew
interviewed by 60 Minutes about their strategy for taking down Trump.
But none of that happened, and nothing like that will ever happen.
By contrast, the launch of the Lincoln Project was treated by the media as a cause for rejoicing on the scale somewhere between the development of the polio vaccine and the arrival
of the Mercury astronauts in New York City:
Finally, there is light at the end of this tunnel! Finally the
heroes we prayed for have come!
And the money poured into the Lincoln Lads' coffers. And out
came more ads calling Trump an asshole. And calling Susan Collins a
ditzy fuckface. And calling Lindsay Graham a gimp.
And in poured even more money.
And a few of us in what remains of the Liberal blogosphere digital world -- a very few of us -- started
looking around and asking, "What the actual fuck is going on?" Do you people know
who these goof are? What dregs of the racist Right they were palling
around in just five minutes ago? These guys built entire careers
calling you commie scum and electing ghouls to destroy everything you hold
dear. And these ads? They're not going to budge any Republican
votes. They're not going to "mess with Trump's head". All
they're doing is repeating back to you your own fantasies of rage and
revenge and getting right up in some fascist's grill and shouting "Fuck You!".
Jesus, Seka and Johnny "Wad" Holmes people, these ads are just political PornHub clips for Liberals. How
can you not see that?
But the people liked their political porn. They thirsted for it.
And so the cycle of porn, followed by free publicity for that porn on cable
news, followed by money continued. I wrote about it, over and over
again, in great detail, and the general reaction from my allies (such as it was) was that I
needed to shaddap and get with the program.
Being a good soldier I reassured my scolders and upbraiders that they had
nothing to worry about. That I had written on a wide variety of
subjects over the past 17 years, and however right I turned out to be in the
end, none of if had ever made the slightest difference and none of it had ever earned me one iota of credibility for the next time I started making
unpopular predictions. So they needn't be concerned that some nobody
blogger out here in the middle of Middle America pointing out that, say, the
Lincoln Project has a Rick Wilson problem will ruin everything and get Trump re-elected
Don't worry Susie, I have a long history of nobody listening to me, not
even my "allies" :-)
Until 4-5 years later.
And
then it's all "Holy shit, why didn't anyone warn us!"
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico)
June 18, 2020
But the doomsayers kept at it, warning me that jostling the Lincoln Lads'
elbows even slightly could mean the ruin of us all, and whether or not I was
actually right about the sleazoid character and histories of the Lincoln
Lads was beside the fucking point
because didn't I realize that American democracy was on the line! So if I wanted to remain a Liberal in good standing I had damn well
shut up and start clapping or Tinkerbell would be dead, dead, dead and it
would all be my fault!
Well, (he said, rounding the clubhouse turn) since I had already been
through this sort of thing with the Cult of Greenwald, this time around this "friendly fire" didn't really bug me. I kept right on writing and watched as all my initial predictions
about how these recently former Republican would leverage the existence of
Trump and the legitimate threat he posed into lucrative new media perches
for themselves --
Trump was sent by Satan to normalize Bill Kristol
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico)
August 16, 2017
-- from which they could virtually embargo any discussion of their own complicity
in building the GOP monster machine that made Trump possible in the first
place.
The Lincoln Lads moved fast, grabbing book deals extolling their electoral
genius (and calling Trump a shit head), setting themselves up as the sole arbiters of Who Shall Be Forgiven of Their Political Sins and Who Shall Be
Damned Forever ("Boom Times Are Coming to the Indulgence Factory") and
going international:
The Trump-taunting Lincoln Project Is Coming to Israel. But Not as
Liberal Saviors
Fresh from what fans consider their Never Trump triumph, the Lincoln
Project founders have a new mission: To help ditch Netanyahu. But you
might not like what happens next.
The media did its part as well. Before the smoke had cleared from the
2020 election, Brian Williams (Brian who?) was on the air throwing "Michael
Steele and the Lincoln Project" a victory parade.
Brian Williams is now telling America that Michael Steele and the
Lincoln Project should take a "well-deserved victory lap" for this
election.
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico)
November 5, 2020
Except, no.
Because for all their faunching and preening and all the unlimited and glowing free
media they were handed by virtually every media outlet, the Lincoln Project
amounted to nothing. Sure, they had built a
very profitable Liberal political porn site, but by
every electoral metric it was a failure. Trump's 2020 vote total was +10M higher than 2016, not
lower. Their main senatorial targets like Graham and Collins --
who the Lincoln Lads promised they would knock off without breaking a sweat -- both won handily and by much bigger margins than they had had in their
last elections.
If you needed a byline to tell you bitter truths, you could turn to the wise words of
Brother Charlie Pierce:
The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election
Never Trump conservatives are about as relevant to the actual election
results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party.
But credulous Liberals continued to defend these goofs because they had gotten in
too deep, which is what every con man bets on. Because they gave their
hearts and dollars away to grifters that their trusted Liberal teevee
network re-branded into heroes by putting them on the air practically every
day while banning any discussion of their sleazy pasts.
And what would it say about them -- about their faith in their own their
judgement -- if they were now forced to admit they were
not only wrong, but that they had been so easily scammed into carrying water
for and lining the pockets of a bunch of Republicans?
What would it say about them that the mouthy grouches who warned them
not to do it were right all along?
And yet, because reality doesn't care about our feelings, and because
beneath its glowing mainstream media façade, the Lincoln Project has
always been a rat's nest of cynical, profit-driven and just plain skeevy
Republican operatives, it came as no surprise to this tired, old blogger
that when it fell apart, it fell apart really fast.
First came the revelations of scandal. Then the attempts to cover up
the scandals and smear anyone who spoke out of school. Then the mass
resignations. And, of course, there was all of that grifting.
All of which
I documented here as it was happening.
And now, as foretold by your host (albeit through a glass and darkly) two
years ago --
I look forward to Matt Damon playing Rick Wilson and Ben Affleck
playing Steve Schmidt in an 8-part, Lincoln Project funded Showtime
series called "Saviors of the Republic".
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico)
October 27, 2020
-- ShowTime has indeed completed and is releasing a five-part documentary
about the collapse of the Lincoln Project.
Which, in turn, has
prompted Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt to leap into his own hīnayāna
and (as I said miles and miles ago at the beginning of this very long
post) use all of this words to paddle the hell away from the Lincoln Lads as fast as he
can.
Which, along with the documentary itself, is now getting all kinds of play
in all kinds of places:
Lincoln Project's Steve Schmidt blasts co-founders as unethical,
suggests disgraced group should disband
Schmidt says Showtime documentary on Lincoln Project shows 'some of
the most despicable and unethical behavior'
So how in the world did this dirty commie nobody Liberal blogger from the
middle of nowhere with no friends inside the media draw such an accurate
bead on the true nature of the Lincoln Lads from the start...
...while every voice in the mainstream media was singing paeans to them
and virtually all of my "allies" were telling me to shut up and sit down?
Well, let's answer that question by rephrasing it like this: How in the world could I have predicted that building a Super PAC out of
the timbers of old GOP pirate ships, selling it to a credulous public with tens of millions of
dollars worth of free publicity and enlisting "liberal" MSNBC to endorse
it, and then crewing it with Republican brigands, mercenaries.
marauders and cut-throats would lead to conflict, scheming, plunder and
betrayal?
Golly, I dunno. I guess I'm just a fooking genius. Fooking
psychic!
Either that, or maybe I just understood what was likely to happen when a
bunch of Republican mercenaries and con men were handed the keys to the
media, while at the same time credulous Liberal were told over and over
again by that same media that unless these grifters were given their
unswerving support democracy was doomed.
Understood it in the same way one can understand a simple, well-known chemical reaction. The
same way any high school chemistry teacher can tell you what will happen
if you drop metallic sodium into water.
This is the America where I grew up. These really were the terrifying debates political leaders and ideological lunatics used to have and I am not nostalgic for that aspect of that world in any way.
So I checked the e-mail again, and I can guarantee what's gonna happen. When I quote an e-mail asking me, "Why aren't you doing X?" then the, "Why aren't you doing Y?" crowd shows up, and the next crowd asks, "Why aren't you spending more time talking about what Obama's doing in Syria with ISIS and ISIL?" I'll tell you why. Because I don't think he even cares what he's doing!
This is an absolute joke. John Kerry gets up there and says absolutely inane things. He was taken to down by Bob Corker yesterday, sent Boxer shuttering away in tears. We got the sound bites coming up. Kerry doesn't know what he's talking about. Hagel doesn't know what he's talking about. The generals know what they're talking about, and they're actively being ignored.
This isn't about beating ISIS, is why.
This is all because Obama's poll numbers are falling.
I'm not gonna get roped into talking about this the way the soap opera writers demand that it be talked about. "Can this revive the Obama presidency?" Screw that! That's not what this is about. We're sending 3,000 troops to fight Ebola? We won't send 3,000 troops to protect our border! We won't send 3,000 troops there -- we won't admit that that's what we're doing -- to stop terrorists that want to wipe us out.
We're gonna send the Iraqi army and the Syrian army, who are supposedly somehow gonna become loyal to us? What the hell? It's stupid, folks. It is asinine. The generals know it's stupid, but they can't just out and say it. They're getting as close to try to tell everybody how literally wacko this is out actually saying it because they can't be insubordinate. But, for crying out loud, Barack Obama, commander-in-chief?
...The party that was primarily responsible for the years of grinding, bankrupting war, a descent into torture, and an evisceration of many core liberties is now regarded as superior to the man originally tasked with trying to recover from that experience. The political winds unleashed by a few disgusting videos and a blitzkrieg in the desert have swept all before them. And we now hear rhetoric from Democratic party leaders that sounds close to indistinguishable from Bush or Cheney.
Boss Limbaugh is, as always, absolutely consistent: all Liberals are Commies or Commie dupes and Obummer is our traitorous Kenyan Messiah, while all Conservatives are made of unalloyed patriotism...as long as they obediently toe the Limbaugh Party line. But in at least one important sense, America's Most Famous Gay Catholic ConservativeIndependent Libertarian Blogger is perfectly consistent. too Pick any day on the calendar in the last 15 years and you will probably find Andrew Sullivan hysterically overreacting to something.
To be given a gift like the Romney 47 percent video is a rare event in national politics. To get it in the fall of an election should have made an Obama victory all but assured.
But Obama threw it all back in his supporters’ faces, reacting to their enthusiasm and record donations with a performance so execrable, so lazy, so feckless, and so vain it was almost a dare not to vote for him. What he has to do now is so nail these next two debates, so obliterate Romney in both, that he can claw his way back to victory. But if he manages just evenly-matched debates, let alone another Romney win, he’s a goner...
How well I remember back when Alec Baldwin Must Be Destroyed, but leave Phil Robertson alone!
... I’d much rather have dinner with Phil Robertson than Alec Baldwin. Engaging fundamentalists on this subject is one of my favorite activities. And I’d much sooner engage than condemn.
I wonder where that engage-don't-condemn spirit has gone now that Mr. Robertson has signed onto the Christopath version of the ISIS "join or die" policy?
Honestly I have known popper-snorting teacup poodles who were less prone to instant and sustained freakouts that Mr. Sullivan. But he writes about weed and beards and the Pope 'n stuff, so shine on you crazy diamond. And anyway we're all much too busy to dwell on any of' the foofaraw's of yesteryear, because right now We're Going To War With Iraq!
Just like Dick Cheney! Except, of course, that is not exactly true, is it? Look, there are 101 reason to think going back into Iraq for any reason is a deeply stupid idea. Perhaps terrible -- period -- or perhaps just the least terrible of all the terrible options which are available to us thanks to the Bush Administration's decision to kick the hinges off the Middle East's Pandora's box because WMD and Freedumb! And there is another, entirely different list of reasons why it is a terrible idea to further erode the by-now-quaint-and-virtually-defunct 18th century notion that Going To War is a thing that Congress is supposed to do. Or debate. Or signal its preferences using a series of nods and eye-blinks if the normal processes are too rigorous for it to rouse itself from political catatonia. Or in some way just do something other than running the fuck away from the job we elected them to do. And that's the thing -- debating and deciding on the lethal and costly matter of war and peace is the the very minimum we should reasonably expect from our elected officials, and yet time after time too many of them take the coward's way out. Also, for the record, if you are of the opinion that the United States military is for defensive use only and should never be deployed anywhere on Earth for any reason other than defending Unites States territory, treaty obligations and citizens, well that is a perfectly honorable position. I would strongly disagree, for some of the same reasons that Howard Dean cites here, but I would respect anyone who holds firm to that position regardless of circumstances.
But having listened to President Obama, I haven't heard any of the blunderbuss-of-lies approach that characterized Bush's Operation Clusterfuck. There is no fictional enemy this time: ISIS is not currently a threat to the United States, but it is real and evil and aggressive. There is no talk of a home-by-Christmas cakewalk this time, There is no one suggesting that Iraqi oil revenues will pay for it this time, There is no White House being run by oil executives this time, drooling at the the thought of the revenue to be ransacked from a country they and their cronies carved up long before 9/11 ever happened. There is no one standing up for torture and secret prisons this time. There is no one -- no one -- suggesting that this problem can be solved by colums of American tanks or battalions of American soldiers. And then, of course, there is this:
Iraq's prime minister says no to foreign troops
...
Al-Abadi, a Shiite lawmaker who faces the enormous task of trying to hold Iraq together as a vast array of forces threaten to rip it apart, welcomed the emerging international effort, but stressed that he sees no need for other nations to send troops to help fight ISIS.
"Not only is it not necessary," he said, "We don't want them. We won't allow them. Full stop."
Al-Abadi's comments provided a sharp rebuttal to remarks a day earlier by the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee that American ground troops may be needed to battle ISIS forces in the Middle East if Obama's current strategy fails.
"The only contribution the American forces or the international coalition is going to help us with is from the sky," al-Abadi said. "We are not giving any blank check to the international coalition to hit any target in Iraq."
...
It's a hard thing to look at chaos sweeping the region and reconcile ourselves to the fact that, while this is our mess, it is not our fight. For what it's worth, I believe that the policy of the United States should be to lend the sovereign government of Iraq whatever reasonable assistance it asks for, but otherwise stay the Hell out. And for what it's worth, while I believe that President Obama's policy in Iraq will, at best, be slow and frustrating and costly and damaging to the Constitution and, in the end, may fail, I do not detect any Neville Chamberlain in it, just as I see no Dick Cheney there.
