It's Stupids All The Way Down

Rep. Mary Miller says that "climate change is a sham": "God controls the climate because he controls the sun and the sun controls the weather, primarily." pic.twitter.com/xXnFOaSmJI

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) April 10, 2025

No Half Measures

A Modest Proposal: Abolish Gay Marriage Immediately. *

* [Prologue:  If you have never read Jonathan Swift's excellent 1729 satire "A Modest Proposal" please understand that this missive of mine is delivered in that spirit. Onward.]

Sure, abolishing gay marriage may sound "controversial:, but hear me out.

The one thing the Centrist Big Brains and Never Trumpers with media platforms all seem to agree on is that Democrats lost because something something "culture".  They're all very careful never to explain  exactly what "culture" means, but they are all very clear that Democrats must dump the words and the people and who make "Americans" feel icky.

Example.

This is Bill Galston, nearly 80, completely out of touch reality and very hard to listen to since literally every third word out of his mouth is "y'know" on the Never Trump Beg to Differ podcast:

...the [Democratic] party is going to have to go through a hard process of dumping overboard the ballast that threatened to sink the ship.

This is Sam Harris, smug contrarian asshole who has been driven right 'round the bend by trans stuff, on the Never Trump Bulwark podcast.

The Democratic party is a... is a this very rigged, uh, Rube Goldberg device of death.  Which is just, y'know, rigged to destroy, to... to cancel the reputation of anyone who touches the wrong gear or lever.  And, uh, we have to... we have to tear it down to the studs. I mean it's just like this... is there... Actually has to be a purge of the activist class in Democratic politics. Otherwise, y'know, this... no one we put forward will be electable.

All lines on the pundit electoral map converge here:  Democrats have to go all-in on peeling off some of the cow-dumb mouthbreathers who make up the margins in these very close elections. The goofs who have no idea how anything works, what anyone stands for, who pay zero attention to the news and who broke late for Trump this year by a wide margin.  

You know, the clueless mopes Jay Leno used to interview during his "Jaywalking" bit. 

The cast of Idiocracy.   

The Kallikaks.  

America's ambulatory, unprocessed Soylent Green.

We who remember All in The Family need to stop mentally shaking our heads ruefully at the millions of Archie Bunkers who now control this country, and instead bend every oar in the service of convincing at least some of those racist dum-dums to vote Democratic.  

Because, for you Robocop fans out there, the Great Wad (as my friend, the late Harlan Ellison used to call them) does not admire the bespectacled kid working a night shift at a filling station while studying plane geometry:     

They Great Wad hates that guy.  Instead, they admire the asshole on the motorcycle who mocks the idea of being a "college boy" and takes what he wants by force.  

Those are the ones we need to somehow bamboozle into the Big Tent.  And believe me, I understand how uncomfortable this might make some of you. In fact, way back five minutes ago I wrote a lot about madness of credulous Liberals, who had been right all along, to allow themselves to be shoved into a corner (again) and control over the public conversation about what the hell had happened to the GOP ceded to the likes of recently-former Republicans like Rick Wilson and Charlie Sykes and Matthew Dowd and Joe Scarborough.  

Ceded without the slightest hint of genuine confession or repentance or atonement.  Ceded without any acknowledgment that we Liberals even existed, except as wild-eyed straw men impeding the fortunes of this new "Pro-Democracy Alliance" the Never Trumpers were somehow now in charge of.  As this tiny handful of recently-former Republicans began to completely colonize the print and teevee media, I was told, repeatedly and in no uncertain terms, to sit down and shut up.

For God's Sake, driftglass, don't you realize that the Fate of American Democracy was at stake! 

[Fun Fact: Turns out that handing whatever was left of the "Liberal" media over to a bunch of recently-former Republicans accomplished nothing.  And yet there they still are.  Still useless, still wrong, and still telling us what to do.] 

So believe me when I tell you that I well understand your revulsion at the idea of pandering to meatheads for votes, but for God's Sake, don't you realize that the Fate of American Democracy is at stake! 

And keep in mind that the attitudes of the bigots and imbeciles are set in concrete, so you can forget about changing them or persuading them with "facts".  They're completely immune to that.  Instead, just like Republicans, we need to focus on a few their odious prejudices and deranged conspiracy theories and pretend like hell that, A) we agree with them, B) they are very smart for believing what they believe, and C) we promise to make whatever they're mad at go away.

Also keep in mind, they have the memory of a mayfly, so it doesn't matter if we actually deliver on those promises.  This is a great big hammer that foolish Democrats keep leaving in the tool box.  In the New Politics, it only matters that the meatbags think you delivered on your promises.  Donald Trump built a couple of shitty miles of his stupid wall, Mexico laughed at the thought that they were going to pay for any of it, and yet the meatbags think it was a huge success.

After all, if God hadn't wanted them to be greased, fleeced and decreased, She would not have made them chumps.  Seen that way, not scamming them may even be sacrilegious.  

We'd be doing it to Save American Democracy.  And is there a nobler cause to be found in this broken old world?

But we have a lot of catching up to do, since Republicans have already picked the Hate shelves nearly clean, which is no surprise since they've been at it for so long that Hate has become the sole binding force that keeps their volatile coalition of bigots, imbeciles, gun nuts, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, christopaths and grifters together.  

Consider that, with Barack Obama, Democrats offered the Right a compassionate, polymath, scandal-free constitutional law professor.  A family man with family values.  With a strong, beautiful wife and amazing kids.  A man who wanted to roll up his sleeves and help America get back on it's feet.  And who obsessively tacked to the ever-shifting Fake Center in hopes of finding partners in fixing America's real problems on the other side.

What the hell were we thinking!?  And a woman of color?  That's twice as bad!

This is not what Republicans want in a black person.  They do not want someone they have to look up to.  Who is in charge of things.  Or funny.  Or smart.  Or competent.  Or articulate.  No, no, no.  Republican want a black man who knows his fucking place.  Republicans don't want black folks gone; they want them servile and deferential.  Bowing low to white power like they did back in the good old days.  

And that's what they got in men like Michael Steele who happily groveled for Rush Limbaugh's approval because Mikey Mike knew his fucking place.  Like grinnin', clappin' Tim Scott who went so far as to marry his "Canadian girlfriend" for a shot at the highest office in the land, running in a party that never had any intention of giving it to him. And now they have Byron Donalds right out front, smiling and lying and happily eating all of Donald Trump's shit and asking for seconds, and  getting absolutely nothing in return.

No way we can match that.  

Republicans have also already stripped women of their basic civil rights, and most of the white ladies didn't care.  Didn't care that Trump was a rapist.  Didn't care that he was besties with Jeffrey Epstein.  Instead, what they know for damn sure and certain is that Obummer was a Kenyan mooslim, Hillary drinks baby's blood and had Vince Foster murdered, and Kalama Harris is tranny loving commie furriner just like her father!

So we can't compete with them for the incels, the bro-vote, or the self-loathing women.  And unless we run Tony Montana next time --

-- the male Latino voters who bailed this time -- because a woman's place is either decorative arm-candy or in the kitchen making dinner and in the bedroom making babies -- are unlikely to return. 

This election proved we can't compete with Republicans in demonizing Haitians or Puerto Ricans either.  

Republicans in Michigan and Pennsylvania showed they could run anti-semitic ads in one state, and anti-Muslim ads in another, and cash in on both, so they pretty much own hating both of those groups.

And no matter how frantically our Never Trumper and Centrist "allies" insist that it's not too late to get in on that slagging transexuals action, Republicans -- led by Failed Botox-and-taxidermy experiment, Nancy Mace -- own that now too.  

So who is left out there in the land of the free for us to target?  Some group that the bigots and imbeciles already hate enough for at least some of them to consider hooking up with the Dems next time?  The Irish?  Italians?  Canadians? 

Nope.  Sorry, but none of those get the blood boiling enough or fire enough berserk lightening into the amygdala to get the meatheads off their asses and to the polls for Democrats.

C'mon people, the answer is right there in front of us.  Who do the meatheads both hate and about whom (and this is the important part) do they feel they're being cruelly oppressed by the Woke Mob and prevented from blabbing their hatred in public?

It's the Gays, stupid.  

You think these assholes have evolved on that subject in the 20 years since Matthew Dowd and Karl Rove used it to help get Dubya re-elected in 2004?  Are you high?  Once again, wake the fuck up: these mopes still haven't gotten over Appomattox Court House, April 9, 1865.

The New York Times, February 24, 2004

Bush Backs Ban in Constitution on Gay Marriage

 President Bush said today he supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, declaring that such a measure was the only way to protect the status of marriage between man and woman, which he called "the most fundamental institution of civilization."

In an announcement fraught with social, legal and political implications, Mr. Bush urged Congress to act on the amendment quickly and send it on to the state legislatures. Quick action is essential, he said, to bring clarity to the law and protect husband-and-wife marriages from a few "activist judges."

"The voice of the people must be heard," Mr. Bush said in a brief White House speech that Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, called an attempt to find "a wedge issue to divide the American people."...

Of course it was "a wedge issue to divide the American people."  In the New Politics, there are nothing but wedge issues, because the meatheads we need to win elections do not give one tiny shit about anything else.  

I tell you, out here in the Real World where I live, the meatheads are dying to go back being able to openly mock the "queers" and "fairies" and the "dykes".  Go back to telling "fag" jokes in  public without fear o censure or side-eyes from their fellow church goers, which is why Democrats must go after the Sodomites with as much zeal as we speak about climate change.  

And it'll be so easy.  Targeting gay school teachers.  Railing against Hollywood's Gay Agenda  ruining America.  And you know it's The Gays who are driving housing prices out of reach of real Americans.  And for gosh sakes, my kids can even enjoy watching Saw III without seeing commercials for gay couples doing laundry and pickout out furniture!  What about a spirited campaign to have Anita Bryant, Robert Mugabe and Phyllis Schlafly put on American postage stamps?  All the old triggers and stereotypes are still there, lurking just below the surface of oppressive Woke-enforced civility, and for once maybe we can beat the GOP at their own game.

And the first step is the abolition of gay marriage.  And we need to go all-in on this.  Some of us can get away with merely writing pseudo-scholarly contrarian articles in respected journals ala degenerate gambler Bill Bennett and high-class bigot William Buckley explaining how The Gays sap the moral strength of the nation.  This will not be a problem:  if the Times will publish Tom Cotton, they'll publish any filth as long as it draws flies.

Others will need to take a lower road: maybe going full Westboro Baptist Church -- waving the Bible and screaming about Leviticus -- if that's what it takes.  But we all need to get behind this thing and push.  

Or don't you care about Saving American Democracy?

Maybe we can even lure some of the  Log Cabin Republicans into our Big Tent -- they certainly seem self-loathing enough to go for it.

Now I am not blind to the hardship this will impose on The Gays (Note to self I: commission a focus group the find out if beating up on blind people would win us any votes in Pennsylvania.  Or hating handicapped people generally.  Note to self II: Especially people with mental disabilities -- the meatheads are nearly as thirsty to reintroduce "retard" into the MAGA out-'n-proud lexicon as they are "fag".) nor am I unsympathetic, but sacrifices must be made.  Remember, people, to impress the meatheads and get enough of 'em on our side to swing elections, purges must be done.  Ballast must be jettisoned.  

I understand that coming out loudly against gay marriage may disorient some people.  I, for one, will be saddened to see the marriages of prominent gays and lesbians like Pete Buttigieg, Tim Miller and Sara Longwell legally annulled and their children taken away, but what choice do we have?  

Personally, I enjoyed seeing Mayor Pete on Fox running rings around the hosts, and I'm sure that Miller and Longwell meant well when they insisted that the path to victory was for Dems to climb into bed with Liz Cheney, but let's look at the cold, hard facts.

Sending Mayor Pete to Fox News accomplished exactly nothing except impressing some liberals who were going to vote Democratic anyway.  And let's face it, the Never Trump "movement" has also accomplished exactly nothing except salvaging the careers and bank accounts of a handful of elite misfits who were run out of their own party gby the monster they created.

It's all very sad, but sacrifices to the bigotry of the meatheads must be made.  Tribute to the paranoia of the meatheads must be paid.  After all, in this Kobayashi Maru moment, the Salvation of American Democracy hangs in the balance.  And how selfish and self-destructive it would be to value the civil rights of the few over the Salvation of American Democracy for the many.

Look, we probably won't actually have to do most of this.  Remember the thing about the MAGA memory being Etch-a-Sketch sketchy.  We'll just need to promise to do it, then publicly emmiserate the families of a few prominent gays, then declare victory over the Gay Agenda.  Republican voter are  morons.  They'll forget.

And if it should come to pass, after years of winning elections and successfully fundraising off of this stuff, that we must actually deliver on it, well, this Supreme Court is clearly ready and willing to ignore stare decisis, eradicate decades of precedent and strip away the civil rights of certain groups of American citizens.  And if that's not enough. that same Supreme Court has granted the office of the president godlike powers and immunity from everything, so we'd have that in our back pocket too.

As I said, this would all be very sad, but surely a small price to pay to Save American Democracy.

Update:  For the record, the graphic at the top of this post is not a parody.  It's an actual relic from a Conservative ad from 2005.

The ad was produced by USA Next, a conservative group that supports creating personal accounts within Social Security and has aggressively criticized the AARP, which disagrees about the Social Security reform.

More here:

In February 2005, USA Next hired the advertising agency behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that attacked 2004 presidential candidate John F. Kerry. The group gained instant notoriety late in that month when they placed an advertisement on several conservative web sites and blogs. This advertisement depicted a large red 'x' over a picture of a soldier and a large green check mark over a picture of a just-married homosexual couple.

 

No Half Measures

No Fair Remembering Stuff: Let Me Sleep On It, Baby, Baby...

I'm sure we all remember where were were a decade ago on this date when Meatloaf bestowed his "meandering" endorsement upon Willard "Mitt" Romney.

It was in all the papers.

From the WaPo:

Meat Loaf endorses Romney in Ohio

 In fact, you're humble scrivener wrote a little song about it.

Ahem.

Wingnut Base: Will you love me forever?

Mittens: Let me sleep on it.

Wingnut Base: Will you love me forever!!!!

Mittens: Let me sleep on it!!

It was a weird time. 

And anyone who had been paying any attention at all, could clearly see the monstrous trajectory the GOP had already been on for decades, how far gone the GOP already was.

I Am The Liberal Media

Democracy

Oh yeah.

Act Neutrally

With apologies to Buck Owens and his Buckaroos...

They're gonna put me on the talk shows

They're gonna make a big star out of me

'Cause I'm a fraud who's propped up by his cronies

And all I gotta do is act neutrally

Well, I'll bet you I'm a-gonna be a big star

Might win a Emmy, you can't never tell

The talk shows gonna make me a big star,

'Cause I can play the part so well!

Well, I know you'll sit and watch my talk show

Then I'll know that you will plainly see

The biggest tool that's ever hit the big time

And all I gotta do is act neutrally

I have this gig 'cause I'm propped up by my cronies

Got it by begging down on bended knee

I'll play the part but I won't need rehearsing

All I'll have to do is act neutrally

Well, I'll bet you I'm a-gonna be a big star

Might win an Emmy, you can't never tell

The talk show's gonna make me a big star,

'Cause I can play the part so well

Well, I hope you'll sit and watch my talk show

Then I'll know that you will plainly see

The biggest tool that's ever hit the news game

And all I gotta do is act neutrally

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Zero Days Between Lies

We have reached the moment where the predictable lies of the Right now come so fast and reflexively that they form a single, continuous, uninterrupted, steaming log of mendacity:

Republicans Respond to the Ukraine Crash by…Blaming President Obama

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL JULY 18, 2014 11:29 AM

The Gaza Strip is in flames, Israeli troops and tanks rolling in for what is certain to be a bloody military operation in which the region’s battered civilians will once again absorb most of the pain. Meanwhile governments around the world are scrambling to find out who shot down a Malaysian airliner in eastern Ukraine (probably Kremlin-backed secessionists) and why (probably by accident). There are thousands of questions to answer about this nightmare, which is a direct result of the fact that there are gangs of armed men fighting with powerful and dangerous weapons in one of the most volatile places in the world, where Russia bumps up against Western Europe.

So how do Senator John McCain, the self-styled expert on all things military, and Representative Peter King, the equally self-styled expert on national security, respond? By attacking President Obama.

...

Because they are now in so deep and are so utterly dependent on bullshit to save them from the righteous judgement of history, Conservatives can no longer afford to be honest with each other or with the outside world for even a moment.

And because of this, we are never going to bring down the Fox News/Hate Radio machine because no matter how hard we shell it with Reality because there are simply too many people in this country who would rather perish in hand-to-hand combat fighting over Climate Change or the IRS or Bill Ayers in the corridors of the Wingnutbunker than live in a world without Sean Hannity purring in their ear, telling them that their bigotry and paranoia are really godly and patriotic.

No this equation only changes by crippling the transmission belt that continues deliver Conservative lies to the general public, either straight up, in a clean suit of respectability, or gift-wrapped in thin veneer of "Both Sides Do It".

Until then we will remain marginalized shouters into a hostile abyss.

Cladogenesis and The Eternal Sunshine of the Conservative Mind

Dance Me To The End Of Strauss

To understand what a mindless rabid, overwhelming, pandimensional clusterfuck Conservatism has become, it is not enough to simply critique the make and model of the vehicle they happened to be driving when they drove this country off the cliff.  It is equally important to understand the road they were traveling, and all the warning signs they had to blow past to get to the cliff in the first place.

For example, at this point pretty much everyone knows that, once upon a time, True Conservative Andrew Sullivan was an even more fanatical Iraq War cheerleader than Don Rumsfeld.  Mr. Sullivan -- who evangelizes the prudence, caution and skepticism of his hero Micheal Oakeshott -- hurled himself headlong into full "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Invading Iraq" mode and, like virtually every other Conservative talking head at that time, used his media platform to slash and slander Liberals like me.  Called us dupes.  Fifth columnists.  You name it.

And then brutal Reality interceded, incinerating all the gauzy nonsense and bile-soaked bombast Conservatves had used to fence their terrible ideas off from criticism and exposing all the armchair Shuck and Awe warriors for frauds and poltroons and lunatics and profiteers they had always been.

Which is the moment that Modern Conservatism reached a genuinely cladogenic moment where the fitful equilibrium of the already-delusional Right was violently punctuated, splitting most of the into roughly two, distinct but related species.  As I wrote back in 2008 ("The Dolt-Stoss ™ ") both halves of Conservatism still reflexively hate Dirty Hippies, both still lies easily and often about their past and both still believe their "clade" of Conservatism -- the only True Conservatism -- failed because of an act of monstrous betrayal.

True Conservative Alpha:  The Denialists.  The past never happened.  They were never wrong.  Fox News never lies.  These are the Wolfowitzes and Kristols.  This is your Crazy Uncle Liberty.  This is the electoral backbone of the GOP whose grand plans only failed because they were stabbed in the back by nefarious Liberals, their RINO stooges and the media they secretly control.  These are the ones who, as I wrote in 2008, "...turned to prayer, beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out.”  (2 Maccabees. 12:42) These are the ones who threw themselves en masse into the Fabulous, Tea-Baggulous Bush-Off Machine the minute it rolled into town.

True Conservative Beta:  The Both Siders.  There may have been some misjudgment in their past, but  Teh Liberals were just as bad!  Why quibble about whether or not they were wrong because Both Sides!  Fox News may be bad, but so is MSNBC!  This is virtually everyone else on the Right, from David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan to Joe Scarborough and David Gregory.  (I would include links to my own writing here, but since I have done +2,000 posts on this subject in the last decade, I wouldn't know where to begin.)

Of course there is still a lot of ideological bed-hopping between these two emergent species.  They hate each other, borrow from each other, make temporary alliances of mutual convenience with each other.  One day, David Frum is writing like a Liberal blogger, the next he straps on his Neocon armor to go forth and do battle with The Dirty Hippie brigade.  One day David Brooks is extolling the virtues of humility, prudence and self-reflection, and the next he is shamelessly slathering a tanker-truck full of White-Out all over American Conservative history to make it turn out the way he wants it to turn out.

Which brings us back to Andrew Sullivan, who was an early adopter of Beta True Conservatism.  It has led him to walk back his earlier ebullience about the Iraq War and the Bush Administration (which has been a good thing) and wander around the cultural landscape, pointing at every shiny, pretty object that catches his attention and yelling "Claim!" in the name of his True Conservatism like a Hunter from The Walking Dead (which has been an embarrassing and hilarious thing):

Because while I'm always down for a good, Neocon ass-kicking, that act alone is merely a cursory crash site investigation, and not nearly sufficient to explain the warped, intellectual path down which True Conservatism has raced in order to reach the cliff from which it defenestration itself.  For a tiny example of what I am talking about, I refer you to the evolving utility of the works of Conservative philosopher Leo Strauss -- the modern architect of the "Noble Lie" on which so much of True Conservatism depends -- as seen in the writings of Andrew Sullivan.

Back in 2003, as the rhetoric of the Neocon's blood-drunk conquistador orgy was reaching a crescendo across the land, Strauss was a Great Man.  Period. And his keen and subtle work was being slandered by the paranoid and ignorant "academic Left" from {THE TRUTH ABOUT LEO STRAUSS)

The attempt of some who haven’t even read Strauss (let alone read him as carefully as he deserves) to smear his legacy and denigrate those who learned from him is a pathetic display of paranoia and ignorance. No wonder it goes down so well among some on the academic left. Paranoia and ignorance are their strong suits.

By 2006, as the wheels were clearly coming off of the Conservative Clown Car and Neocon rantings became ever louder and more unmoored from Reality, Strauss was suddenly the object of gross abuse...by Both Sides!

I’m not the only one to be struck by the difference between what Leo Strauss actually wrote and what some have inferred from it – both on the paranoid left and the triumphalist right. 

 -- and Mr. Sullivan was not only deeply confused about how anyone could possibly have misinterpreted Strauss so terribly --

 I was taught by a "Straussian," have known many and read more, and I could never understand the idea how the great man could be reduced to some kind of secret guru to "neoconservatism".  There’s a section in my forthcoming book that makes this point about the inherent skepticism, mischief and seriousness of Strauss as a thinker – qualities that make him particularly ill-suited for being a secret mastermind to anything, let alone a total transformation of American conservatism into something like its opposite...

-- but also believed that Strauss wasn't just not one of the causes of Conservatism's problems, but was a big part of it's cure:

Last year, I sat down and read (or re-read) several of Strauss’s longer works and saw in him not a rival to my own inspiration, Michael Oakeshott, but a very different, yet somehow kindred, spirit. Between them, they represent a skeptical conservatism that certainly doesn’t amount to anything like a defense of what conservatism or neoconservatism has morphed into in the last decade or so. In fact, it’s my contention that Oakeshott and Strauss are the best guides to where current conservatism has gone deeply, horribly wrong.

By 2012, Mr. Sullivan was beginning to suspect that Strauss and Oakeshott may not have been (Spoiler!) boon metaphysical companions and brothers by another philosophical mother:

But the real trouble, I'd argue, is with Strauss's 1930s-driven lack of faith in modernity, his insistence that unimpeachable truths (not insights, eternal truths) about human nature could be gleaned by close reading of ancient texts by a few in the elite, and his followers' need to disguise their disdain for democracy and religion (making them insufferable cynics). It was hard to find a Straussian scholar who wasn't obsessed with domestic politics and who wasn't a neoconservative, itching for a new war for freedom somewhere (emphasis added):

America, alas, didn't have a Burke or an Oakeshott to craft its conservative philosophy. It ended up with the work of a German Jewish exile, whose political didacticism was as pronounced as his philosophical inscrutability. The failure of American conservatism to come up with more than fundamentalist religion and gloriously noble foreign interventionism as its core policies (along with making government insolvent by pretending that lowering taxes increases revenue) might be seen as a consequence of this strange admixture.

And by 2013, Mr. Sullivan was divvying up the same Conservative territory between Oakeshott and Strauss that he had been uniting under them just a few years earlier.,  Guess who got the verdant farmland and who got the buzzard-shit covered wasteland in that deal?  (emphasis added):

Reviewing Oakeshott on Rome and America by Gene Callahan, Kenneth B. McIntyre describes what keeps Oakeshott from accompanying fellow British philosophers into America’s intellectual canon:

[His] lack of influence among the movers and shakers of American political life should not be surprising,given Oakeshott’s insistence on the irrelevance of political philosophy to practical politics. As he once wrote, “reputable political behavior is not dependent upon sound or even coherent philosophy.” Such behavior is instead related to the concrete practical knowledge of an actual political tradition and what such a tradition intimates. Oakeshott was skeptical of philosophers who meddled in practical affairs, insisting that he was not concerned with establishing “a seminary for training political hedge-preachers in some dim orthodoxy.” Oakeshott was skeptical of philosophers who meddled in practical affairs, insisting that he was not concerned with establishing “a seminary for training political hedge-preachers in some dim orthodoxy.”

No, that was Leo Strauss’s metier. Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz are where you end up.

Which brings us to 2014, where we find Mr. Sullivan finally facing the terrible abyss where Strauss's principle of the Noble Lie inevitably led his acolytes, and where the term "Straussian" has become fully integrated into the scathing and 100%-indistinguishable-from-a-Dirty-Hippie vocabulary he now uses to describing the paranoid, ignorant Right:

I tend not to hold the somewhat conspiratorial view that followers of Leo Strauss, the guru of the neocon intelligentsia, actively believe in deceiving the American people in the pursuit of statecraft. Strauss argued that many critical texts in Western civilization were written with an esoteric teaching for the intelligent few, while presenting a less radical and palatable public doctrine for the masses. Hence the Straussian penchant for a noble lie – one that is good for the people to believe but which the elite knows is bullshit. Perhaps the classic example of this is the Straussian support for public religion, while the bulk of them are atheists. For them, religious faith is entirely instrumental – a way to lie your way to social order and cohesion.

In the case of the Iraq war, several untruths were told. Among them: there is no sectarianism in Iraq; it will cost next to nothing; it will be over in months; there are WMDs everywhere; Saddam and al Qaeda are joined at the hip. It’s hard to tell which of these untruths were sincerely believed by men like Wolfowitz and Kristol, longtime Straussians both, and which were a function of them not knowing anything about the country that was to be their text-book case of “creating reality”. But when a disgraced architect of that war goes on television to argue that the public needs to be told now that ISIS is al Qaeda, even though he knows that they are separate organizations with separate ambitions, I tend to withdraw whatever benefit of the doubt I give these men with the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands.

...

This is a rare moment in which a Straussian actually comes out and says: yes, we’re deliberately lying by conflating all sorts of different things in the Middle East – the Sunni-Shia divide; the hostility between ISIS and al Qaeda – in order to concoct a simple and terrifying message to the American people that will enable us to get into another war in order to advance our goals in the Middle East. Yes, we know this is a lie – just as our insinuation that Saddam and al Qaeda were in cahoots before 2003 was also a lie. But it’s a noble one, and that’s all that counts...

As I said, these two, main branches of post-Dubya Conservatism -- Denialists and Both Siders -- may contend mightily with each other, but they're really very much products of the same DNA and whelping box. 

Both lean heavily on Imaginary Dirty Hippies to justify what they say and do.  

Both have very sketchy relationships to those parts of American history that makes their academic theorizin' look stupid.

Both claim they were betraaaayed!

And -- most hilariously -- while neither Denialists nor Both Siders feel any compunction about telling as many "Nobles Lies" as necessary to get them though the night, both Denialists and Both Siders are also adamant that the other guy can't be a True Conservatives
'cause he doesn't smoke
The same brand of lie as me...

And finally, I suppose this is as good a place as any to belatedly ease into my June fundraiser, so if you are inclined to support work like this, here you go!

Thanks,

driftglass

Weary Hooker Predicts Demand For Blowjobs To End Soon

The Professional Left Redux: "Prophecy is a Tough Buck" edition.

Almost two years, we at The Professional Left predicted that Tina Brown's next act of media-vampirism would be a magazine called "Cover", which would consist of nothing but a one-page cover (engineered to stir up fake controversy) and ads.

Two years later, judge for yourself how close we came:

Tina Brown, who edited New Yorker and Newsweek, doesn’t read magazines anymore 

Bhavya Dore, Hindustan Times  Bambolim, Goa, November 08, 2013

First Published: 21:29 IST(8/11/2013)

“The digital explosion has been so explosive,” said Brown, responding to a question on the state of journalism, during her session on Friday, “there isn’t a single place where the digital thing is a profit thing. The disruption hasn’t brought a business model.”

The British journalist who helmed among the best-known American magazines, bringing equal parts unique style and controversy to her jobs, no longer reads magazines herself.

“The habit has gone,” she said, later speaking to reporters.

And the written word is possibly, slowly going too, she told the audience during her session.

“I think you can have more satisfaction from live conversations,” she said, adding we were “going back to oral culture where the written word will be less relevant.”

...

I suppose if one has built a career on the theory that the magnificent language of Shelley and Keats and Joyce and Poe and Shakespeare and Dickenson and Faulkner and Carver was bequeathed to you merely as means for scamming people into giving you money, eventually one gets tired of it glaring back at you with such scorn and reproval.

Sponsored Content: The Early Years

From Kevin Drum @ Mother Jones:

BuzzFeed and the Future of Advertising

...I'll bet 90 percent of [BuzzFeed's] readers never even notice their bylines.

And I'm pretty certain the folks at BuzzFeed know this perfectly well. They do everything they can to make advertising look staff-written, including in tone, style, and format, but leave themselves an out by putting corporate bylines on the ads and pretending that everyone will notice them. Hey, it says Sony Entertainment Network at the top! What more do you want?

I imagine this is a glimpse of our future. You have been warned.

The future?

Ever Since I Shelved the "Driftington Post" Project

("Synthesizing the Narrative of a Generation!") I have found it almost impossible to even thumb through the great, sloppy midden pile of nipple slips, diet tips, tabloid sleaze, purloined excellence, occasional articles of genuine interest and, generally, the murmur of the New Age hipster end of the Davos wading pool talking to itself that HuffPo has become.

Arianna's House of Games was, is, and ever shall be an exercise in raw capitalist scammery dressed up in the best fair-market cotton Che tee-shirt money can buy, and once I had satisfied my morbid curiosity -- once I learned exactly how the simple, mechanical aggregation magic trick worked by doing it for a couple of weeks and once I had sussed out the 25 or so words which are in constant, Batman-Splat!-Pow!-Zowie! rotation inside the headline extruding algorithm -- I lost interest.

But every now and then I drop back over just to see

Today, for example, I stopped by.

First thing I noticed was that Rupert Murdoch's trophy wife -- Wendi Deng Murdoch -- had been given a choice piece of real estate atop the front page to promote her first movie.

Oh boy!

The word "lao tong," once holding a historic meaning, now had a modern and relevant definition for me. In fact, even before we launched the production process, I found my amazing family of lao tongs rallying around me. These connections kept me feeling brave. The wonderful writer Amy Tan introduced me to Lisa See's novel. Without Amy's friendship, I would never have been inspired to start this project. My great friend Florence Sloan joined as my supportive and strong producing partner and together we found ourselves lucky enough to...

Something something Wayne Wang.
Something something impressive figures from Silicon Valley.
Something something the mayor of San Francisco.
Something something my good friend Willow Bay.
Something something actress Bing Bing Li.
Something something Lisa See.
Something something Diane von Furstenberg.
Something something Nicole Kidman.
Something something Diana Taylor.
Something something Ivanka Trump.
Something something Ben Kingsley.
Something something Deb Lee Jackman.
Something something Senator Chris Dodd.

Something something.

Or, as President Jed Bartlet once said, "It's nice when we can do something for prostitutes once in a while, isnt it?"

Because, yes, we are talking about the trophy wife of that Rupert Murdock.

Perhaps I will drop by the Huffington Post for a few seconds again.

In three months.

Or seven.

Or sixteen.

An Age of Miracles and Wonders

Over in the Better Universe, where the United States is not knee-walking drunk on raw, Randite capitalist popskull, the idea that we now have it within our power to use the devices born of our ingenuity and imagination to meet the needs and ease the burdens of every citizen would not be considered an economic tragedy.

It would be heralded as a humanitarian miracle.

And if we had achieved it at a time when replacing the dirty, planet-crippling fuel that drives this amazing engine with clean and almost-indefinitely renewable alternatives is within our reach?

Over in the Better Universe, we would be out in the fucking streets singing every day and kissing strangers because the an Age of Miracles and Wonders would be at hand.

With the millions of human labors hours freed up from the need to live lives devoted to little but slouching after an ever-receding buck, our grade schools and high schools could become state-of-the-art palaces, and our colleges could be filled with lifetime learners, not trainees making a grim slog towards the last few Middle Class life preservers, while desperately trying not to pile up so much debt that they sink the minute they hit the water.

But here, in this Universe, its one more story of doom and despair on the financial pages of one of capitalism's journals-of-record:

It’s Man vs. Machine and Man Is Losing

By Kathleen Madigan

In the man-versus-machine competition, machine is winning. And it’s not just Watson beating humans on “Jeopardy.”

Since the recession ended, businesses had increased their real spending on equipment and software by a strong 26%, while they have added almost nothing to their payrolls.

In August, new orders and shipments of “capex goods” — defined as nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft — increased by 1.1% and 2.8%, respectively. In the same month, private payrolls (adjusted for the Verizon strike) edged up a mere 62,000.

For all the talk of uncertainty, the increase in orders is a sign that companies are optimistic about the future. After all, no executive would expand production facilities if he or she thought customer demand was about to stagnate.

In addition, the gain in shipments — up by nearly a 19% annual rate so far this quarter — suggests at least a modest gain in gross domestic product. After the shipment numbers were released, economists at J.P. Morgan raised their estimate for third-quarter real GDP growth to 1.5% from a previous 1.0%.

You can’t fault companies for investing in new machinery rather than hiring new workers. As two news reports detail, labor costs are rising, a function of both private and public pressures.

First, employers face a jump in health insurance costs. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported a 9% average increase in the premiums paid by employers this year. The average yearly cost to cover a family hit a record $15,073, up sharply from $13,770 in 2010.

Second, companies must deal with higher taxes to replenish state unemployment-benefit coffers. According to Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, employers will get hit by higher tax bills as many states have to pay back Washington for benefit money borrowed during the recession.

In comparison to these rising labor bills, the wholesale cost of capital goods is up 1.6% over the past year.

The man-vs-machine situation, however, presents a huge negative to the outlook. In an economy based on consumer spending, the lack of jobs and income growth means consumers can’t spend.
...

And here, in this Universe, as the technology that could be used to improve the human condition gets better, the economic violence gets more brutal:

"Imagine you've spent three years in law school, two more years clerking, and the last decade trying to make partner—and now here comes a machine that can do much of your $400-per-hour job faster, and for a fraction of the cost. What do you do now?"

As this continues, the machine-ethos (working around the clock at little cost with zero benefits as the optimal condition of labor) becomes, in fact, incompatible with the Middle Class, nobility-of-work ethos (work hard, ply your craft, earn a decent living, advance your condition.)

However the political utility of continuing to pretend that mass unemployment/underemployment is the largely the result of a failure of character of "those people" will continue, because the alternative is too frightening to consider.

In case you were wondering, yes, science fiction got there a long, long ago. A few examples:

The Day the Icicle Works Closed

Door into Summer

The Midas Plague

The Space Merchants.

Stand on Zanzibar

"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman.

One consolation: Someday, as I prepare for another lashing winter by relining my GE Chinese refrigerator box on Lower Wacker Drive with discarded copies of the Robot Wall Street Journal ("Robot NASDAQ 111110100 reaches record high!") I will amuse myself by watching the hordes of stunned, now-unemployed lesser dukes and duchesses of drown-the-Evil-Gummint capitalism descending on the the country's now-boarded-up Employment Offices ("Closed indefinitely by order of President Perry and U.S. Austerity Council Chief Paul Ryan") looking for help and finding only

less than friendly "Fuck You, Loser" Kiosks.


(By the way, in addition to clearing this post off my desk, you may also take this as a small example of why writing on the subject need not be drab, trite and awful.)

The Fuck-Saw Junior

The Future Official Sexual Condiment of the Best Fucking Political Team on TeeVee!

From Politico:

RedState sells 'endorsement' [UPDATED]

The endorsement of Erick Erickson, the founder of the conservative blog RedState and a CNN contributor is for sale as part of an advertising package, according to an email circulated by an account executive for The Human Events Group -Eagle Publishing, which recently purchased the site.

"Erick Erickson's reputation along with his rising profile, combine to make RedState the most influential conservative blog on Capitol Hill and across America," writes the account executive, Chris McIntyre, in a form email forwarded to POLITICO by two surprised conservatives. "Why not put Erick's influence to work for your organization?"
...

Why not indeed?

The Fuck-Saw Junior -- Asshole tested...

...Asshole approved!

Order now!

Unregulated Capitalism Gone Wild

Destroyed the work economy and eviscerated public service union pensions.

Period. Full-stop.

The Republican Capitalism-Gone-Wild Solution?

Double-down and keep kicking working people in the gut until they spit up blood, agree to throw away their children's future and beg to work for sub-minimum wage.

And how long has this Kult of the Kochsuckers been lighting votive candles at the altar of Unregulated Capitalism-Gone-Wild?

A long...

"Regulation -- which is based on force and fear -- undermines the moral base of business."

-- Alan Greenspan, "The Objectivist Newsletter", 1963

...Long...

"In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen."

-- Ayn Rand, 1961 Ford Hall Forum lecture

...Long...

"One of the most widespread delusions of our age is the belief that the American worker owes his high standard of living to unions and to "humanitarian" labor legislation."

-- Nathanial Branden, "Common Fallacies About Capitalism", 1962*

* ("..former student and one-time romantic partner of novelist Ayn Rand, Branden had a prominent role in promoting Rand's philosophy, Objectivism.)

...Long...

"If you want to gauge collectivist's theory's distance from reality, ask yourself: by what inconceivable standard can it be claimed that the broadcast airwaves are the property of some illiterate sharecropper who will never be able to grasp the concept of electronics, or some hillbilly whose engineering capacity is not quite sufficient to cope with a corn liquor still -- and that broadcasting, the product of an incalculable amount of scientific genius, is to be ruled by such owners?
...

"There is only one solution to this problem and it has to start at its base: nothing less will do. The airways should be turned over to private ownership. The only way to do it now is to sell radio and television frequencies over to the highest bidders...-- and thus put an end to the gruesome fiction of 'public property'."

Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist Newsletter", April 1964

...Long...

"In a mixed economy, every government action is a direct threat to some men and an indirect threat to all. Every government interference in the economy consists of giving unearned benefits, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others. By what criterion of justice is a consensus-government guided? By the size of its gang."

-- Ayn Rand, 1961 Ford Hall Forum lecture

...Time.

"Should citizens have their wealth expropriated to support an educational system which they may or may not sanction, and to pay for the education of children who are not their own? To anyone who understands and is consistently committed to the principles of individual rights, the answer is clearly: No."

-- Nathanial Branden, 1963

For anyone who cares to look, moldering away in the yellowing pages of Ayn Rand's lesser works the entire ideological infrastructure of the Modern Right is laid bare.

Of course, unlike Heaven's Gate or Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple (which disappeared once the madness of their founders was fully unfurled), by appealing to rich sociopaths and rich-sociopath-wannabees, the Randite Cult is specifically engineered to be a for-profit enterprise and so it goes on and on (Believe me, if the Branch Davidians had had the foresight to make their insanity capitalist-friendly, today, instead of being vaguely remembered as "that nut who set himself and his followers on fire", David Koresh would have his own show on Fox.)

And so, as with other corporate-friendly cults such as Scientology and Mormonism, the well-heeled heirs of the franchise have worked very hard to quietly paper over the many dingbat ravings of its founder that got wired into their Holy Scripture, but it's all there: the totalizing ideology where "More unregulated capitalism" is the absolute answer to any and every question; the constant, whiny chant of aggrieved victimhood; the short, furious, declarative, Manichean paragraphs -- one after another after another -- stating quite bluntly that any tax for any reason is slavery, anyone not on your side is morally equivalent to a Nazi or a Soviet Communist, and that any compromise on anything is treason.

Business is inherently moral because all business is conducted on the basis of honesty and integrity.

Any government not exclusively devoted to protecting your property is illegitimate and based on extortion.

Monopolies never happen.

Trusts were uniformly good.

Government causes all economic depressions.

The American continent was empty and unowned by anyone until American industrialists arrived.

Industrial child labor was noble.

Before private property rights, there was no Civilization.
...

This is the base metal from which all Modern Conservative alloys are manufactured. Add misogyny, xenophobia, "...and the Negroes" and you have Limbaughism. Blend in a massive dose of recycled Bircher crackpot conspiracy mongering and you have Glenn Beck. Squirt it into a Baby Jebus-shaped injection mold and you have the anti-science, anti-evolution, anti-choice Christian Conservatives.

Then dumb the whole mess down about 70% and stick it into a pair of fuck-me pumps and you have Sarah Palin.

Of course, as is the case with virtually every other issue, Randites get the on-the-ground realities of the moderns industrial economic exactly backwards. Go into any thriving modern manufacturing company and you're not going to find John Galt in the back room tinkering together (out of nothing but spare parts and fictional Objectivist genius) a magical engine that pulls electricity out of the air (after which it is immediately expropriated by The Evil Gummint to power its sinister Contraptions That Make Your Kids Into Gay Socialists.)

Rather, you will find a small business -- say 50 to 100 people -- in its second or third generation, using very expensive, computer-controlled machines they bought from the American distributor of a profitable company headquartered in Switzerland or German or Some Other Loathsome Socialist Hellhole. In the back, you will probably find people with engineering degrees, sweating over some problem, or working on 3-D models of some part or another that they are specing out or improving upon.

Many of these engineers are graduated of some of America's finest public colleges, and were put through school in part thanks to your tax dollars. Most got to work that day thanks to roads your taxes paid for, or public transit systems your tax dollars subsidizes. A couple are out sick, but thanks to the worker's rights some union fought and died for 60 years ago, they can take those days off and avoid infecting the rest of their colleagues without fear of losing their job.

It is also a fair bet that their illness wasn't caused by waste water or toxic byproducts from the production process at their factory: thanks to government regulation and regular testing, the water they buy from the local provider (usually are very generous rates) is nearly as clean leaving the plant as it was when it was piped in. In fact, the plant is mostly clean, well-lighted and overall about as pleasant a place to earn a blue collar living as one could ask for.

Elsewhere you will find highly paid line workers programming the machines, tending and tweaking them according to a formalized process (borrowed from Toyota or Nissan or a company from Some Other Loathsome Socialist Hellhole) that maximizes the efficient use of the Very Expensive machines, and noting where things can be improved. Some of these workers are members of unions and some are not. Most of them are 50 or older and looking forward to retirement. Often they work in teams in areas called "cells" where they will work on several machines making several different parts at once.

Much of what this thriving modern manufacturing company does has been forced on them by overseas competition, especially from China: competition which steals their ideas, their patents and sometimes whole factories, and then puts them back into production halfway around the world using cheap (and sometimes slave) labor; which manipulates currency unfairly; which imposes massive tariffs and grossly distorts the market.

None of this is fair, of course, because the real capitalists -- the transnational corporations that write the rules -- don't want "fair trade". They want "free trade" which, in the end, simply means a winner-take-all world where he who has the most money wins.

At the other end of the spectrum -- at the consumer end -- our thriving modern manufacturing company is also feeling the pinch because a long time ago a group of people called "Conservatives" started preaching the "Fuck Everyone But Me" gospel of the absolute goodness of greed and the absolute virtue of being utterly self-centered. Which all seemed like a pretty fine idea to many of the owners of the manufacturing companies back in the day, because it meant that they now had an ideological justification for busting unions, slashing payroll and stopping expensive investments in training and new equipment.

Unfortunately, their consumers were in the back pews of the very same "Fuck Everyone But Me" cathedral, and their takeaway was:

"Fuck loyalty and screw this 'Buy American' crap."

But what about your neighbors?

"Caring about others is the root of all evil."

But what about the good of your country?

"Sounds like collectivist Socialist thinking to me. Look, if I can get my TV, food. clothes, coat hooks, dry wall, children's toys and whatever else for 11 cents cheaper from some industrial 3rd World forced labor plantation, why shouldn't I?"

Are you sure you're gonna like where this road leads?

"Of course! As a Noble Wealth Producer, I know that my great job at Maytag will never, ever go away! And if fucking over the American worker to save a few bucks is good enough for the Noble Wealth Producers at GE, it's good enough for me!"

Oopsie.

See, the proles were never supposed to catch on to this dodge, but once they did, things started to spiral downward very quickly and the proverbial rope that Lenin once warned that Capitalism would one day sell to its own executioners was suddenly around the neck of the American Dream.

And so we come to the present day, and the on-the-ground realities of a typical thriving modern American manufacturing company -- with its aging workforce, modern, complex equipment and team-based structure -- fighting to stay alive against some forces created by its own folly, and some which are too big and powerful for it to control.

And what do we find they need more than anything else?

A few hundred copies of "Atlas Shrugged" perhaps?

Um, no.

See, since the skills involved in keeping the company profitable are no longer static, more than anything else they need a steady supply of well-trained workers to take the place of those who are coming up on retirement, and a means by which to retrain their existing workers every few years. And since there is no way in Hell these companies can afford to maintain their own standing training facility, staff and equipment (all of which must be constantly upgraded to keep up with rest of the industry) what they need more than anything else are excellent public schools. Grade schools, high schools, trade schools and community colleges. Schools that not only teach the technical material you will need to run one of these company's million-dollar machines without destroying it, but the ability to read, to do math and to work with others on a team.

Schools that must compensate their teachers well enough with Evil Taxes Extorted From Noble Wealth Producers to be able to attract and keep people who can accomplish this difficult feat day after day after day.

I could cite similar examples from other public institutions and other vital sectors of the economy all fucking day long, but this is just a free blog and not my Great American Novel, so lets just say that, absent strong and mutually respectful and mutual beneficial public/private/labor/management arrangements, the economic pillars that prop up the American Middle Class will be gone within my lifetime and the nation you and I once knew will cease to exist and be replaced by a Two Class feudalism of transnational corporations and their retinue of wingnut welfare think tanks, teevee networks and paid political employees...and peons.

Which, based on the evidence found in the original gospels of Branden, Greenspan and Rand, has clearly been the Conservative plan all along.

There Will Be Blood

MSNBC suspends Keith Olbermann for making three, completely legal campaign contributions.

No. Really. (And thanks, MSNBC! I honestly, I never thought I'd have occasion to use this graphic again.)

BREAKING: As a matter of conscience, Chris Hayes will not be subbing for KO.

Meanwhile, over on Fox News, in part 15,877 of their Patriotic Special Tribute to The Greatest Country God Ever Created, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck both drop trou and take a simultaneous dump on a voodoo doll of Barack Obama while singing "Horst-Wessel-Lied".

One of the more hilariously odd things

to show up in my email in the last nine days.

I mean I knew someone was following me...

The Great Preacharound

Now that "Come from behind but only after you're married" Teabagger Loony Christine O'Donnell has actually-really-truly won the Republican Senate primary in Delaware -- there is, at last, officially No Sex in the Campaign Room.

None.

It's a bold strategy.

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"While usually supportive of much of the content produced at this site, I believe your recent treatment of a highly-publicized, controversial issue left a great deal to be desired and did not fairly represent other views and/or fully include facts from other sources which may have somewhat mitigated the opinion you expressed.
..."

But another reader writes:

"...
While I often disagree with the content produced at this site, I found myself in agreement with you about your recent treatment of a highly-publicized, controversial issue. Despite my past misgivings I found this change refreshing and positive."