Best of 2018?

I dunno.  None of them are going to win a Sidney Award -- certainly not the rare Sidney Doble -- but a lot of people read 'em and passed 'em around like dirty postcards, so I guess that's something...

1. The Candidate Who Has Fallen Under the Weight of Her Stone
2. Never Turn Your Back on a Never Trumper
3. The Madness of Mercy
4. This Week on "Tone Cop!": Bret Stephens
5. Magic Ruralism (tm)
6. Today In Both Sides Do It: Advice From The New York Times On The Proper Use Of "Fuck"

This was the year I launched a new publication which, if I could just keep the smirk off my face and play it straight, bids fair to make me rich as Croesus:

This was the year when Mr. Glenn Greenwald took his mad fighting skillz to his new home at Fox News --

-- while most of his Spleenwald Horde and his celebrity hangers-on (who had spent years making quite merry slagging the shit out of Landru critics like me for not being Of The Body) suddenly got reeeal quiet.


And this year Mr. David Brooks completely shook off his brief, post-2016 election flirtation with introspection and came roaring back with columns of such pure, Brooksian Pecksniffery that they will surely be studied by Historians of Tomorrow:

• David Brooks and the Triumphant Return of "Conservatism Cannot Fail"
• David Brooks: The Triumphant Return of "Team B"
• David Brooks: Moral Idiocy Incarnate
• David Brooks is Sean Hannity. Really.
• David Brooks: Because Every Political Catastrophe Needs a Sanctimonious Equivocator

Happy 2019 everyone!

Behold, a Tip Jar!

David Brooks Says Trump's "Sabotage and Fuck You" EO Might Turn Out Great For Everybody

Every now and then a nondescript little man from Wingnut Central Command shows up at Mr. David Brooks' door to remind him that it is time once again to renew his Conservative credentials.  It is a brief but critical ritual upon which Mr. Brooks' entire professional life literally depends.  After all,  it isn't the word "American" or "author" or "political and cultural commentator" in his CV that The New York Times shells out crazy money to slap on it's op-ed page every week:

David Brooks is a conservative American author as well as political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times.

It's the word "conservative" they're renting.  It is the word "conservative" which has given Mr. Brooks entree to the  corridors of power, gigs on NPR, PBS and NBC, book contracts and a job-for-life at the NYT which pays for Mr. Brooks' various hearths and homes and travels and book tours.

So every now and then he needs to get his "conservative" card punched again.  And of course, given the nature of Conservatism, this means he needs to say something horrible and blatantly untrue in some public forum somewhere.  This time around, the forum was The News Hour, and the horrible and blatantly untrue thing was this:

...

On health care, they are dismantling it. There will be a period of disruption. But what was interesting to me about the CBO analysis of what they’re doing, after this period of disruption, there will be more people insured, not less. So it won’t look like Obamacare, but as the markets respond, there is a possibility that more people will be insured.

And so it’s not a simple, oh, we’re just tearing everything apart

Mr. Brooks lives on another planet and no one on his world wants for necessities of life.  No one in his social circle will ever be affected personally by anything Donald Trump does (except for those yummy yummy tax cuts for the wealthy) and so there is no need for Mr. Brooks to trouble himself by learn anything about how, say, insurance works.  For those of you with longer memories, you might recall how remarkably similar this sounds to Mr. Brooks' equally blase approach to the policies of the last Ambulatory  Fuckup Generator that his party installed in the White House.

Behold the inerrant economic wisdom of Mr. David Fucking Brooks!

David Brooks from March 2001

Yes, There Is a New Economy

...

In other words, if you wade through the economic literature, it's hard not to agree with the Cleveland Fed's Jerry Jordan: We are living at a once-in-a-generation moment of economic opportunity. As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?

David Brooks, September 2001

The New Stupid Party

LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of excellence that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime.

Last week the Congressional Budget Office came out with a budget forecast. The report immediately got submerged in a chatterstorm about whether Congress or the White House would dip into something called the Social Security trust fund, but the essential facts are these: The CBO economists estimated that the federal government will run a surplus of about $150 billion in 2001. That’s a lower surplus than the CBO estimated a few months ago, before the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge. But even in these adverse circumstances, the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006.

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund...

I could go on at much greater length,  but since I already have, I see no reason to repeat the exercise.  It is sufficient to say that even the most cursory glance at Mr. Brooks actual record as a Conservative Public Intellectual shows three things.

First,  judging by any objective standard, Mr. Brooks is a colossal failure at Having Opinions about Things.

Second, given his long record of failure at Having Opinions about Things, by any objective standards, it is insane that he continues to reap lavish financial rewards and peer-group respect that are clearly unrelated in any way to his actual job performance.

Third, no one talks about it. Seriously.  Other than a few asshole Libtard bloggers in flyover country, no one talks about this.  And the conspicuous uniformity with which no one talks about this is what makes it so damn eerie [See "The Adventure of Silver Blaze"

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."]

And the reason for this is, I think, really very simple.

The corporations who run our media don't give a shit about any of this stuff.  Truth?  Falsity? Depravity?  The casual, sadistic infliction of harm on millions of Americans?  It does not affect them at all.  Just grist for the media mill.  What they do care about, deeply, is controlling the narrative.  Specifically, the narrative that Both Sides are to blame for every problem.  And so, to keep selling that corrosive and patently ridiculous narrative, they need Reasonable Conservatives they can plug into any medium.  They need reliable deacons of the  High and Holy Church of Both Siderism who can hit their marks and deliver the doxology of their toxic faith on any platform.

In other words, the need people exactly like Mr. David Brooks.

And to be of value to them, they need for him to keep that magical, golden word in his CV -- "conservative" -- active and up-to-date. 

And to do that, every now and then Mr. Brooks has to sally forth into the world and assert something that blatantly awful and wrong and astonishingly ignorant. 

And this he has now done.

Mission Accomplished, Mr. Brooks.

Mission Accomplished.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Empty Suit, Stuffed With Money

I did not mean today to become a book report on the state of the Chicago Political Insider's Club, but this story was too tasty to pass up.


From the invaluable Better Government Association:

Ex-City Colleges Chief Gets “A+” in Personal Finance
By Patrick Rehkamp/BGA

As graduation rates were bottoming out at the City Colleges of Chicago in 2009, then-Chancellor Wayne Watson was cashing out. Big time.

The Better Government Association previously reported Watson was paid more than $500,000 in unused sick and vacation time when he retired from the taxpayer-funded community-college system three years ago.

The BGA recently learned that Watson’s out-the-door compensation was richer than previously known, totaling as much as $800,000, according to public records and interviews.

On top of roughly $537,000 in sick- and vacation-day payouts, Watson also was given an exit bonus of $124,615, according to City Colleges records recently obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act.

What’s more, City Colleges is providing him with free health care coverage for life – costing the system more than $22,000 to date in premiums and reimbursements – and a life insurance policy that he was allowed to cash out for $112,602, records show.

Watson, now president of Chicago State University, wouldn’t say whether he exercised the right to convert the policy to cash. ...

But this much is known: the exit bonus was signed by the City Colleges’ then-board chairman, Jim Tyree, in July 2009, the month before Watson retired, records show.

Tyree died in March 2011. (At the time, he was a co-owner of the Chicago Sun-Times, and chairman and CEO of Mesirow Financial.)

None of the current City Colleges board members were with City Colleges at the time the bonus was agreed upon.

Terry Newman, a close friend of former Mayor Richard M. Daley, was the City Colleges’ board secretary at the time. Through a spokeswoman, Newman said "as he recalls there was no discussion about this or any negotiation about his payout . . . that would have been a discussion and negotiation between the chairman and chancellor."*

Regardless, compensation experts consulted by the BGA said such perks – an exit bonus and a life insurance payout – are relatively rare in the private sector, and are rarer still in the public realm.

"Normally it doesn’t happen that way," said Paul Dorf, managing director of Compensation Resources, Inc., a New Jersey-based consulting firm.

Meanwhile, after the BGA inquired earlier this year about Watson’s sick- and vacation-time payday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered a crackdown on the perk for non-union employees at city-related agencies.

Annual sick-day payouts at CSU were curtailed even earlier – but not before Watson took advantage of the allowance and cashed out $13,000 in unused sick time in 2011, school officials indicated. ...

*(The alert reader will note the name "Terry Newman" and note that it shows up later in this post.  Drawing a line between these two points will count for 1/3 of your final grade)

Understand, this is not happening during budget surplus, high-cotton times at the City of Chicago, when virtually no one would notice or care.  Ever since Chicago gummint revenues took a nosedive in 2007/2008, the city has been frantically cutting, consolidating, early retiring, selling off, selling out, privatizing, re-organizing, re-re-organizing and re-re-re-organizing itself to safe money.


Well...cutting, consolidating and so forth all of those parts of city gummint that are not safe and snugly behind the clout-shield.  Because in Chicago, clout rules all things, 



which is why even as Da Mare mourned publicly about how sad-sad-sad it was that he had to slash the guts out of anything that was not clout-protected, behind closed doors he was cooking up one last scheme to sell off taxpayer assets for enough dough to prop up his bloated administration just long enough to take a victory lap, pass Go, cash in some of his political chips and dance away into legend.


It was not a pretty sight, with stories like (from the Chicago Reader)...

As Mayor Daley cashes in, ousted teacher gets cut off


By Ben Joravsky @joravben


Mayor Daley's had a great run over the last few weeks.


Since leaving office May 16, he has, let's see, landed a gig at the University of Chicago, where he'll have to "coordinate" a handful of lectures in exchange for a reported $100,000 a year.


That would be the same University of Chicago that last year was part of a development team receiving the OK for a $20 million handout from the mayor's good old tax increment financing honeypot to help build a hotel, retail, and office complex in blighted (ha, ha, ha) Hyde Park.


Daley also got a gig as a lawyer for Katten Muchin Rosenman, the firm that employs his best friend, Terry Newman, and racked up more than a million bucks in legal fees from advising the city on such privatization schemes as the parking meter lease deal.


Thanks a lot for that one, fellows.


Then there's the company the ex-mayor's reportedly launching with his son, Patrick, which will be seeking overseas investors for deals in Chicago. Not to mention his speaking engagements and prospective book deals.


As my colleague Mick Dumke put it, they're all steps in Daley's "ongoing privatization of himself."


Oh, wait, can't forget his pension—about $184,000 a year.


To paraphrase the great Johnnie Taylor, it might have been cheaper to keep him around.


In contrast, consider the case of Anthony Skokna, 56, who was unceremoniously dumped from his job as a history teacher at Marshall High School, just about two years shy of claiming any of his pension. He's been applying for jobs all over town, but no one will hire him, most likely because he's too old.


Before he went to Marshall, Skokna taught for eight years at a couple of Catholic high schools in Chicago. He says he might have closed out his career in the Catholic schools but he had a growing family (eight kids) and needed a higher-paying job. In the fall of 1992, he started at Marshall. "The city was so short of teachers, they hired a bunch of us," he says. "Different than today."


Actually, not so different. That teacher shortage was in part induced by a pension buyout plan the central office cooked up to induce hundreds of older teachers into retiring so they could be could be replaced with younger ones (like Skokna) who made less money.


If this were a novel, it would be called ironic.
...

...and this...

Arbitrator OKs CTA layoffs starting Sunday
February 3, 2010 6:09 PM

Labor unions at the CTA lost a challenge to the transit agency's plans to lay off more than 1,100 employees starting Sunday as part of major service cuts to reduce a budget deficit.

An arbitrator's ruling today against the unions means that the cuts -- an 18 percent reduction in bus service and 9 percent for trains -- will be implemented, barring any developments to erase a $95.6 million deficit that remains for 2010, transit officials said.

CTA management has introduced more than $200 million in internal cuts and other cost savings, and it said the unions must agree to salary and other concessions to help erase the rest of the deficit and stave off the service cuts. The unions representing CTA bus and rail workers have so far refused, saying they made concessions in the past.

...and this.

Fitch downgrades Chicago bonds

Posted by Greg H. at 10/28/2010 3:48 PM CDT on Chicago Business
Chicago's bond rating has suffered another hit, this one from Fitch Ratings.

The New York-based firm on Thursday lowered its rating on $7 billion in outstanding general-obligation city debt to AA- from AA, particularly citing the city's increasing reliance on one-time revenues to fix its budget.

"While the economy remains broad and diverse, the city's financial position has weakened," Fitch wrote. Revenues have been hurt by high unemployment and above-average home foreclosures, while the city has reduced reserves from around $2 billion a couple of years ago to a projected $790 million by December.

Fitch applauded layoffs and other payroll trims implemented by outgoing Mayor Richard M. Daley, but added, "The ability to make further expenditure cuts to personnel is extremely limited" due to union contracts.

"Rising costs for public safety and the continued slow economic recovery will severely limit the city's ability to achieve structural balance without working (politically difficult) structural solutions," it said 

...and this...

Chicago Community College Budget Calls for Hundreds of Layoffs
Alex Keefe Jul. 29, 2010

Hundreds of non-teaching staff members could be laid off under the new budget proposal for Chicago's community college system.

Next year's budget for City Colleges of Chicago could fund 311 fewer positions, some through attrition.

But that could include 225 non-teacher layoffs.

Chancellor Cheryl Hyman they would affect administrators, as the district tries to consolidate some workers from its seven colleges.

...and this...

New Chicago Public Schools Budget: Layoffs, Furlough Days, And Larger Class Sizes To Make Ends Meet 

Chicago Sun-Times | Fran Spielman | 04/16/09

About 1,200 city school workers will receive layoff notices this week, and principals will begin sharing the budget pain via pay freezes and six furlough days, as Chicago Public Schools officials move today to plug their remaining $370 million deficit.

...and this....

Standard & Poor's lowers Chicago bonds

(Crain's) — The city of Chicago's general obligation bonds took a hit by Standard & Poor's, which lowered its long-term debt rating, citing ongoing budget strife.

The ratings agency assigned Chicago's general obligation debt an A+ rating, down one notch from AA-. It gave the same A+ rating — also lowered from AA- — to nearly $804 million in general obligation refunding and taxable project bonds.

S&P said in its report that the new rating "reflects our view of the city's ongoing structural imbalance and heavy reliance on non-recurring revenues to bridge its 2011 budget gap, including the use of most of its remaining reserves from the sale of its parking meters."

...and this...

Daley To Union: 1,600 City Lay Offs Unless Concessions Made

Chicago Sun-Times:

Mayor Daley will be forced to lay off up to 1,600 city employees -- none sworn police officers or firefighters -- unless organized labor agrees to another round of givebacks to wipe out a potential $300 million shortfall, union leaders were told this week.

...showing up with depressing regularity.


And just in case you thought the Machine stopped rolling just because it changed drivers, this is how Mare Rahm handles things (from yours truly, a year ago):

... 

Having already laid off thousands and still facing a $720 million deficit, the Completely-Broke-So-Don't-Even-Ask City of Chicago apparently stumbled across a windfall in the sofa cushions of the teacher's lounge of one of the many, many, many schools it has financially short-sheeted.

Guess what the New Mare did with it?

Brizard Set to Earn $250,000 as CPS CEO

by REBECCA VEVEA | May 25, 2011

Incoming Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard will officially begin work Thursday, after the outgoing Chicago Board of Education unanimously approved a one-month contract at its monthly meeting Wednesday. Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s hand-picked board will approve Brizard’s longer-term contract when it convenes in June.

Brizard, who did not attend the meeting, will make $250,000 a year under a the resolution approved by the board — $15,000 more per year than he was earning as superintendent of the Rochester, N.Y. school system. It’s a $20,000 increase from the salary of the last full-time CPS CEO, Ron Huberman. Interim CEO Terry Mazany worked for a token salary of $1.
...

One of the iron rules of the Clout Club is that there is always plenty of money for whatever the Boss wants to spend money on.

Always.

Of course, in a city starved down to its last nickles, a story about throwing absurd, private sector, boom-era pay and perks at the outgoing chancellor of a deeply flawed and failing public institution doesn't make a damn bit of sense until you understand two things.


First, the city's clout system sometimes gets bottlenecked with hungry, hungry hippos: what Abraham Lincoln once refereed to as "too many pigs for the teats."  When this happens, the city college system provides a safe place away from prying eyes where the Machine can quietly dump its loyal, overpaid, surplus lieutenants (or, as one wag once put it, "for decades the ossified city college system has been used as the pasture out to which politically-connected friends have been put".)


And second, while Mr. Watson may have been a glad-handing empty suit, he was Mare Daley's glad-handing empty suit.  He presided discretely and faithfully over Hizzoner's unsanctified resting place for the politically undead and was compensated commensurate with his years of loyalty and discretion.

In other words, there is a Club.

And you are not in it.

As The Full Implication of Paul Ryan's

Port Moron Statement start to sink in.

Death of the Anti-Gonzo

The Washington Post's write-up is as good as any:

David Broder, 81, dies; set 'gold standard' for political journalism

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 10, 2011; 12:39 AM

David S. Broder, 81, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post and one of the most respected writers on national politics for four decades, died Wednesday at Capital Hospice in Arlington of complications from diabetes.

Mr. Broder was often called the dean of the Washington press corps - a nickname he earned in his late 30s in part for the clarity of his political analysis and the influence he wielded as a perceptive thinker on political trends in his books, articles and television appearances.
...

Mr. Broder had a "relentlessly centrist" philosophy about politics, the political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker magazine. Mr. Broder brooked little tolerance toward what he termed, in describing the action of 1960s militant antiwar activists, "confrontation politics, with its constant threat of violence and repression."
...

While there were many, many things David Broder loved -- centrism, politics, bi-partisanship, equidistanthood, divarication, bisect-uality, decussation -- one thing he really hated was hippies.

Those those damn, dirty, disrespectful fucking hippies.

He especially hated those fucking imaginary hippies: they were the sawdust and breadcrumb filler he kept heaping into his increasingly inedible journalistic meatloaf; the thumb he pressed down ever harder on the scales of his funny little rambles about America during his declining years (which encompassed all of the 21st Century and a big chunk of the end of the 20th) to artificially "balance out" the clear and horrifying fact that Party of Lincoln and Eisenhower that he had known as a barefoot lad growing up in the swampland of Chicago Heights was devolving into a billionaire-industrialist-funded mob of fundies, racists, imbeciles and sociopaths.

In fact, this fetish became so obsessive that, in the end, it became the great, tragic irony of David Broder's professional life. Because at last he simply could not bear to part with his fantasies about what he wished America to be and face the brutal realities of what America was actually becoming, David Broder -- this "Dean of the Washington press corps" -- totally missed out on covering the greatest story of his time; the utter collapse of the American news media and the mutation of the GOP from a political party into a dangerously fascistic cesspit of oligarchs, lunatics and rubes.

It was a story which his background and years of hard work had almost uniquely prepared him to cover, and one that was literally staring him in the face for much of the last 20 years.

And he completely fucking blew it.

But more than anything else, he super-duper-especially hated it when those dang, dirty, disrespectful, imaginary hippies moved into that nice White House at the center his little town and fucked everything up with. From Taylor Marsh:

...David Broder represented commentary that is the worst of insider Washington D.C. thinking and an elitism, a leading member of Sally Quinn’s clan, which meant he was an original member of the Clinton hater club and helped churn the anti-Clinton fervor with gusto.
Sally Quinn’s infamous “In Washington, That Letdown Feeling” captured the insider feelings about the Pres. Clinton after the Lewinsky affair broke:

“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”
[...] “The judgment is harsher in Washington,” says The Post’s Broder. “We don’t like being lied to.”

Nothing annoyed the Washington elite more than the hicks from the sticks, Bill and Hillary Clinton. After Ronald Reagan, the Arkansans were see as interlopers. To understand Washington that’s where you have to begin.
Broder turned Pres. Clinton’s moral failings inside out and made it all about them, the D.C. community who considered Washington a small town.
...

If Hunter Thompson's coverage of politics in 1972 was (according to George McGovern's 1972 campaign manager, Frank Mankiewicz) "the least factual, but the most accurate" of all the correspondents, the award for being "the most factual, but the least accurate" correspondent of his generation must go to David Broder.

The eponymous Father of High Broderism (from the Urban Dictionary)

The worship of bipartisanship for its own sake, combined with a fake "pox on both their houses" attitude. The main goal is the establishment of a permanent ruling class of Washington insiders, our betters who know better. It is their rough agenda which is sold as "centrism" even when it has no actual relationship with the political center in a meaningful way. The establishment of an aristocratic class in America.

and its staunchest Fidei Defensor (from Rick Perlstein)

...
Richard Nixon ran the most secretive presidential campaign in national history—even making reporters sit in rooms far from the crowds and watch his events on closed-circuit TV. George McGovern made Nixon's secretiveness a major focus of his campaign—begging Nixon every day to debate him. And yet somehow Broder recollects a situation of equivalence. I think it shows how his mind works—and why our political press corps is so badly broken.

David Broder sired and suckled an entire generation of well-heeled, well-connected, establishmentarian insider merchants of Beltway Common Wisdom who have made a massively profitable cottage industry out of displacing honest reportage in favor of passing around empty "process" stories, vapid D.C. gossip tricked out in somber political rhetoric and the status and style updates of Very Serious People like Tennessee Williams' proverbial "dirty postcard".

And the glue that holds the whole ugly, toxic scam together is the relentless, reflexive, completely-dishonest buffering of any and all Republican crimes, treasons, hypocrisies and obscenities...of any kind...in any context...in any venue...on any given day of the week...with the Broderite mantra of "...but the Liberals": a habit so ingrained b y now in the Villager Hive Mind that the Center-Right Shill Factory known as Politico could not help but go out of its way to take a gratuitous swipe at the dirty fucking hippies in the middle of their eulogy to Mr. Broder (emphasis mine):

Broder, who grew up in Chicago and was a graduate of the University of Chicago, revered the political process and admired those he saw as rational voices focused on achieving results. That sometimes opened him up to criticism from ideologues on the left, who saw him as the epitome of conventional, inside-the-Beltway wisdom. But he also earned respect from prominent politicians on both sides of the aisle, many of whom released statements soon after news of his death was announced Wednesday.

Sorry, Politico, but however much of a legend his hard, on-the-ground, sandal-leather reporting on what the Average Roman thought about the first Punic War ("Hiero II of Syracuse shoulda listened to his general onna ground!") may be, David Broder's lasting legacy is ultimately a tragic one.

For against the tide of imaginary of dirty hippies who were forever plotting to mess up his lawn, and in the name of an idolatrous worship of the God of Fake Objectivity, the Dean of the Washington press corps' most enduring contribution to his profession has been as the Patient Zero of a lethal strain of syphilitic Villager Centrism which may be more responsible than any other single factor in all-but wiping out anything resembling honest national political journalism in America.

And that is the definition of tragedy.

UPDATE: Welcome Vanity Fair readers and many thanks to the matchless James "The Enforcer" Wolcott for pointing you in my direction.

Journalist's Rejection of Strong Ideology

Insufficient to disprove ideological bias to some.