Yesterday They Were Just Two German Clerks

 Today they're the "Honored Dead".

-- Rick Blaine, Casablanca

This morning on the Comcastrati Network, respected Conservative thinker and Wrongest Man in America, Bill Kristol, rhapsodized with respected Conservative broadcaster and Very Big Liar, Joe Scarborough, about the Good Old Days when the Breitbart's Mausoleum For The Chronically Unemployable (h/t Charlie Pierce) was a trusted and legitimate news outlet.

Y'know, before they were overrun with haters and morons like this shitbag:

From Politico:

Kristol wryly suggests new name for Breitbart News

By NICK GASS 08/17/16 08:15 AM EDT

"Right Wing Intolerant Mean-Spirited News" does not quite roll off the tongue like Breitbart News. But that's what Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol would have the conservative organization, whose top executive temporarily stepped down Wednesday to lead Donald Trump's campaign, renamed.

During an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Kristol lamented that the conservative news organization has become something other than what its late founder Andrew Breitbart intended.

"I knew Andrew well, and he was a troublemaker. But he was a good-hearted person who would not have—I mean, I hate the fact that that it’s called Breitbart News," Kristol remarked...

"It's unfortunate that we're all sitting around talking about Breitbart. It's a disservice to Andrew's memory," Kristol said, while remarking that the website, under Bannon, has been "pretty successful" from "a business point of view."

But, Kristol added, "someone should go look at all the things they've said."...

Here's the video (h/t Crooks & Liars):

I'm going to have to sit with this remark by Bill Kristol -- "someone should go look at all the things they've said" -- for a long time.  

At least until my uncontrollable crazylaugh stops.

Because if the Dirty Liberal blogosphere could be said to have served one, overarching mission since the beginning of recorded blogger history, it has been to jump up and down, waving our arms, saying "Fuck!", and trying mightily and ineffectually to get members of the Beltway media to just please for fuck's sake "go look at all the things" -- the terrible, horrible, no-good, lying things -- their colleagues get away with saying every single fucking day.  (See also: Every damn thing I have ever written.)

Corollarily, if the entire Beltway media establishment could be said to obey one, all-encompassing commandment with Borg-like single-mindedness, it is to make absolutely god damn sure that no one within the Beltway media ever, ever, ever starts tugging on the "someone should go look at all the things they've said" thread.

Because the Beltway media is a confederacy of con men -- a sodality of hacks -- each dependent on all the others not to bring up the fact that this is all a puppet show being run for the profit of corporate interests at the expense of our democracy.  And if anyone with any real clout and access to a really substantial audience ever started to actually "look at all the things they've said" (See, "The Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks") the unstoppable cataract of recriminations and mass firings that would soon follow -- starting with parasites like Bill Kristol and Joe Scarborough -- would wipe them all out.

Which is why there is safeguard after safeguard in place to make sure that never happens.

On the video you can see every single person on this panel working in frantic unison to separate themselves and their party and the Fake Tea Party the invented to get their off their party off the hook for the being hateful morons who spent eight years cheering for Bush...

...from "Trumpism", which they all swear on the lives of their children was invented out of whole cloth at the Breitbart website in 2010.

No Joe.  It's not "Trumpism".  It's good, old-fashioned, filthy, hateful, fact-averse "Republicanism" from crotch to crown.  And you damn well know it, because you and all of your depraved pals have damn well prospered by it for 20 years.  

Professional Left Podcast #85

"There are only three ways to deal with a blackmailer.
You can pay him and pay him and pay him until you’re penniless.
Or you can call the police yourself and let your secret be known to the world.
Or you can kill him."

-- Edward G. Robinson, "The Woman in the Window"

Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic at the ProLeft website and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget, our archives are available for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

Da' money goes here:

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Reports from the Ghost Town:



On “Face the Nation” Bob Schieffer has some Democrats on to tell us about some "election" that all the kids are talking about. Bernie Sanders is one of them (along with Ed Rendell and Bill Richardson) and while I like Bernie, I must assume that his presence at the Mouse Circus means that all 27,115 people specified by the Constitution to precede him in the Talking Heads Line of Succession have all simultaneously met with fates too grim to mention.

Very sad.


“Meet the Press” took back seat to golf.

So, basically, no difference.


On “Fox News Sunday” The Republiteabagger (Rand Paul) and Democratic (Jack Conway) Senate candidates from the retrograde state of Kentucky tried to out-sprint each other running away from Cap-and-Trade.

When it came to worker safety, however, Conway thinks that perhaps miners should not die in coal mines in huge numbers and that the regulations which protect their lives are a good thing.

Paul, on the other hand, appears to believe that such regulations make Capitalist Jesus cry, and the blood of honest laborers makes coal fires burn a little brighter and cheerier.

So there you go.

On a side note, I am still waiting for some reporter somewhere to ask even one of the Ayn Rand whelplings who are now running for office in deeply red, fundamentalist states their opinion of the fact that their High Priestess was a hard-core, pro-abortion-during-any-trimester.

“…by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives."

-- Ayn Rand, "A Last Survey — Part I", The Ayn Rand Letter Vol. IV, No. 2, 1975.

, atheist

who thought that Bible-beaters were every bit as evil and dangerous as the imaginary “collectivist/Marxist” Left which America’s staggeringly ignorant Right fetishistically blames for every one of their problems.

Later...

...Brit Hume continues to opine that the Obama White House is some kind of Radical Liberal Icarus that flew too close to the Marxist sun and will now be brought low.

...Mara Liasson was sure that, after the election, Barack Obama will have to “adopt a Clinton model” and Pivot To The Center.

...Bill Kristol noted that President Obama is quietly getting rid of all the clever “smart-alecky” people who “knew it all", like Rahm Emanuel. In fact, Kristol believes that Rahm running for Mayor of Chicago is just some kind of cover story and that if you “Googled Rahm Emanuel” you’d probably find that he had never even mentioned Chicago before now.

I assume that Kristol made this an assertion because, as a FoxNews employee, he could not be bothered to type all 12 letters (space included) in "Rahm Emanuel” into Google and hit "Enter" to find out if what he just pulled out of his lying, Neocon ass happened to be true or not. Like everyone else at FoxPAC (h/t Keith Olbermann) Kristol long ago abandoned the cramped, unhappy, left-biased world of “facts” to dive completely into the spacious and profitable art of Conservative reportorial scatomancey: pooping into a teacup, swirling it around and around until the letters “Liberals Hate America” begin to form, and “reporting” it as truth.


On “This Week” Christiane Amanpour did a town hall meeting on "Islam: A Bunch of Scary Brown People Out to Kill Us All...or not?"

I only caught a little of it, just enough to learn that Sharia Law, is (according to Billy Graham's weird, creepy kid) on the verge of taking over Christian Murrica (I guess Reverend Doctor Franklin Graham believes that his Omnipotent Cloud-Sitting Old Bearded Guy God is kind of a pussy to let that happen in an overwhelmingly Christian-identifying nation) and which, according to my typically Murrican Christian understanding of such things, I am led to understand works something like I this:

Or maybe that's "Burke's Law"?

Which, as I remember it, was part of a massive conspiracy to bury Murrica under a ten-foot layer of Aaron Spelling teevee shows and stunt our collective IQs to the point where we started taking the goofy opinions of teevee preachers seriously.

Hey, speaking of whackjob Jebus-hucksters, I also saw Gary Bauer -- the Fundy's own Snarling Christopath Gnome -- Quantum Leap in from 1987 to more-or-less hijack the conversation from the audience, calling all the way back to his glory days as a failed Republican Presidential candidate and card-carrying member of the Moral Majority to point out that Christians never rioted over Andres Serrano ("Piss Christ").

Brief, driftglass aside --

Man, the 80s never get old for these people.

And so strange that all of these Good Conservative Christians can seem capable of effortlessly remembering every little slight -- real or imagined, and in fucking molecular detail -- that has ever happened to them since the Hippies Lost Vietnam ...while at the same time forgetting vast and inconveniently bloody, incompetent, criminal and treasonous swaths of the depraved history of their Conservative Movement and Republican Party?

Something about straining at gnats and swallowing camels would probably be appropriate here.

It would also probably be appropriate to mention here that I am in possession of some video footage of New York Times columnist David Brooks lying rather spectacularly about his own past in exactly this manner: footage that I'm pretty sure no one else has and around which I will be wrapping some words and posting in the next day or two.

So Watch This Space...

-- end brief, driftglass aside.

Sure, Conservative American extremists might occasionally blow up a building or two in the name of Wingnut Jesus or the Turner Diaries, but the vicious little twats in the Christopath leadership caste have gotten smart enough to realize that it doesn;t need to waste its human cannon fodder like that.

They didn't call their ignorant armies to riot over offensive art because, like Teh Gay, uppity women who want to control their own bodies, the ACLU, Liberals and various scary brown people, they immediately recognized that this obscure piece of bad art could at least temporarily join the pantheon of Greatest Fucking Things Evah: another upgrade to that Bottomless Wingnut Outrage ATM that can be milked for tens of billions of dollars worth of ratings, contributions and votes apparently f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

One truly uplifting moment was the speech by Donna Marsh O'Connor (who lost her daughter in the 9/11 attacks) near the end of the town hall meeting about her sadness over how this did not seem "like an American conversation at all". How deeply the anti-Muslim Right violates the spirit of the America that they claim to love so much every time they open their hateful pie-holes. How consumed by rage and completely blinded to their own hypocrisy they are, and how little they seem to care.

I'm sure the video will be up soon.

In the meantime, its Sunday. Time to enjoy a cartoon. Hey how about the triumphantly brilliant "Right Wing Radio Duck" (h/t Gene)

which I'm sure will be available until the inevitable legions of Disney lawyers drop from the sky.


Also too, for anyone who is interested, I will be Live!Live!Live! on Kink on Tap this evening, Sunday, October 3rd at 8 PM Eastern, 5 PM Pacific.

Clothing optional.

Wanker of the Month

James Fenimore Cooper