Old School/New School

Today we're making a quick stop at the Before Time to visit the early days of the Liberal blogosphere.

 In and out, nobody gets hurt, OK? 

To begin, it's critical to understand that, as cutting and as harsh as our prose might have been, all in all, the Liberal blogosphere was and is a fundamentally optimistic enterprise.  A belief that we were not doomed.  That the future could be better, and that it was worth fighting for.

First and foremost, it was about creating community with a "You're not crazy, I see it too" ethos.  Back in the depths of the Bush regime, it felt as if a political apocalypse had happened right in our back yard:  something so bad and so surreal that words frequently failed.  And we were the ones slowly scanning the short wave radio bands in search of other survivors.  At the time this was only possible through the blogs because, then as now, the Beltway media was dedicated to the proposition that we were crazy, that there was nothing to see here, so let's move along shall we.   

But the hoped-for secondary effect of the blogs was a stubborn, Quixotic faith in something fundamental about the American people.  

Or at least most of the American people.  

Or at least a bare  majority of the American people.  Something that would be enough to beat the howling, brain-rotted Fox News zombie horde, if...

If people were presented with the facts of the case.  If they could be shown, unequivocally, that  Republican policies had fucked them over but good.  That whatever opinion they had of the Democrats, Dems were, by every metric, vastly better for the public than the GOP.  

It was towards those complacent, habitually fence-straddling Mopes in the Middle that much of our energies were directed.  And there was a moment as the Bush regime was collapsing when we had the momentum of events and history at our backs.  The Liberal blogosphere of the Before Time felt a little like the energy Hunter Thompson describe in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. 

This, but angrier.  

The feeling that, just maybe, together, we could outshout the narcotizing effect of the "Both Sides Do It" Beltway press and Sunday Shows had on the Mopes in the Middle.   If we could pry their eyes open for just a moment -- force them to see what was really happening to their country in their name...

But it was a vain hope.  

Perhaps, with 1000 times the media reach and firepower that the Liberal blogosphere had at its peak, we might have been able to pull it off.  But by then the Republican base was hopelessly addicted to its own rage and racism and the lies Fox News and Hate Radio fed them every day.

And the Mopes in the Middle vastly preferred lolling in a tepid pool of Both Sides Do It goo to a cold shower of facts.  Then as now, they don't know.  They don't wanna know.  And they get very angry if you try to make them know.    

All available evidence shows that the only force that can pry them out of their False Equivalence Goo Spa and spur them in the general direction of productive (if fleeting) civic engagement is having the metaphorical red-hot poker of Republican corruption and catastrophe shoved straight up their metaphorical collective asses.  

Or, to put it a little less graphically,  the only time they can be moved to action is when economic and social pain affects them personally and profoundly.  Then and only then can they be moved to lumber out of their comforting goo bath to go stumbling into the world looking for scapegoats.  

Which, in itself, can be either good news for democracy, or bad news.  Because once they are roused to action, the Mopes in the Middle are none too picky about who they blame for what has happened to them: they're as likely to hold trans people, Mexicans and Democrats responsible for their reduced circumstances as they are fascists, Republican looters and degenerates, and evil billionaires.    

And any grifter running against "the system" or "the duopoly" or "politicians in Washington" will always have the inside track with these idiots.

We of what is left of the Liberal blogosphere will go right on writing.  Some of us also podcast now or are frequent podcast/radio guests, so we'll go on with that as well because trying to make sense of the world and sharing it with others is why we do what we do.  And there is intrinsic value in that.  Every "I never thought of it from that perspective" or "Once you put it that way it started to make sense" or "I thought I was the only one" we get from readers or listeners is worth its weight in gold.  

Of course, we'll gratefully take the gold too, but you get what I'm saying.  

However, for the time being, I think many of us have lost much of our faith in both the utility of persuasion and in most of the American people.  It is a loss that many of us are grieving.  

From the Stay Human - Shape Tomorrow Substack

There’s a grief I don’t see named anywhere. It belongs specifically to people who are older, who have fought long and hard, who still care deeply — and who are now watching the possibility of a better future slip away at the exact moment their own capacity is slowing down. And not just a better future for themselves, but for the younger generations they love so dearly. Mad and sad at the same time. Carrying decades of investment in institutions and movements and people, and watching all of it under threat and being torn down.

No Half Measures

This World Was Never Meant For One

As beautiful as you.

It's rumor at this point, but oh my (from Mediaite):

Meet The Press Reportedly in Jeopardy as NBC Looks to Cut Back DC Bureau

As we head into 2014, the fate of the longest-running news program on television is starting to look uncertain. According to a new report from the New York Post’s Claire Atkinson, NBC News chief Deborah Turness is looking to make some major cutbacks at the network’s Washington D.C. bureau, where Meet The Press is produced.

Atkinson quotes one unnamed executive as saying, “Instead of getting better, NBC News has been getting worse [since Turness arrived earlier this year.] It’s a mess.” In October, the reporter cited rumors about Morning Joe’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski adding Meet The Press hosting duties to their already full 15 hours a week on MSNBC.

Meet The Press, which used to be the perennial first place finisher on Sunday mornings over ABC’s This Week and CBS’ Face The Nation, fell to a 21-year low over the summer and has been coming in third place behind those two show for much of 2013.

...

 Dear Ms. Turness,

Give me a week and I can fix "Meet the Press".  Seriously, send me a check for what David Gregory makes in one week and I will fix your flagship show.

Unless, that is, you're goal is to continue appeasing your sponsors and personally enriching Mr. Gregory by using MTP as a dung wallow for every shit-slinging, Both Sider shill, lie-spouting Republican hack and Wall Street parasite who wants to roll one more re-retread of player-out Beltway drivel into my living room and sell it to me as the received wisdom of our culture's best and brightest.  

In which case you're fucked.

If not, drop me a line and a check: I've cleaned up worse midden piles than yours.

Yours in Christ,

driftglass

As The Full Implication of Paul Ryan's

Port Moron Statement start to sink in.

Blood Money for Billionaires

"And, for an instant she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human"

-- Count Zero (1986)

Blood Money for Billionaires.

This is the hill the Right was willing to die on.

Blood Money for Billionaires.

This was the issue over which the Party of God was willing to screw "...the least of these."

This was the issue over which the Party of Personal Responsibility was willing to hold America's unemployed hostage during the worst economic calamity since the Republican Great Depression.

This was the issue over which the "How fucking dare you question the Commander-in-Chief" Party was willing to endanger American lives and let a nuclear treaty with Russia rot just to make the Commander-in-Chief look weak.

And it worked: they got their Blood Money for Billionaires.

So, are they celebrating? Dancing little goose-stepping jigs?

Of course not.

They're bitching that their patriotic, deficit-warrior, Tea Party sensibilities were cruelly violated because the tax cuts did not go nearly far enough.

They're moaning that the weak-willed GOP was willing to give up one pfennig to subsidize the lazy, mooching lifestyles of unemployed losers.

And they're breathless awaiting Conservative Media Hero Andrew Breitbart's latest cinematic opus about Sinister Negroes, Reparations and Obama's Secret Radical Liberation Theology.

Or ACORN.

Or those evil Unions.

Or something.

Because it's always something,

We cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

We will become all one thing, or all the other.

A Scammer Darkly

Juan Williams...

...by day, straight-arrow member of a venerable institution fighting a rear-guard action against a sinister and secretive alliance that seeks to destroy civilization.

...by night, a fully-paid-up member of that sinister alliance.

And then one day he starts to lose his mind because a human being cannot exist in both worlds: cannot stay sane as a committed defender of society, while at the same time collaborating with those committed to obliterating that society.

Why does this sound so familiar?

Oh yeah. Because it is a novel by Philip K. Dick written 33 years ago called "A Scanner Darkly":


If Mr. Williams wanted to work a day job managing an IHOP, and a weekend gig making balloon animals at children's parties, no one would have given a damn. But instead, Mr. Williams wanted to make a living -- a very handsome living -- working for the NEWS and the ANTI-NEWS at the same time.

666 years before Dick, Dante Alighieri wrote about such people in Canto III of "The Inferno". They were the "trimmers" (as they later came to be called): those who are condemned to eternity in the Vestibule of Hell for spending their lives changing or modifying their positions or beliefs for reasons of expedience:

Inferno: Canto III

...
And I, who had my head with horror bound,
Said: "Master, what is this which now I hear?
What folk is this, which seems by pain so vanquished?"
And he to me: "This miserable mode
Maintain the melancholy souls of those
Who lived withouten infamy or praise.
Commingled are they with that caitiff choir
Of Angels, who have not rebellious been,
Nor faithful were to God, but were for self.
The heavens expelled them, not to be less fair;
Nor them the nethermore abyss receives,
For glory none the damned would have from them."
And I: "O Master, what so grievous is
To these, that maketh them lament so sore?"
He answered: "I will tell thee very briefly.
These have no longer any hope of death;
And this blind life of theirs is so debased,
They envious are of every other fate.
No fame of them the world permits to be;
Misericord and Justice both disdain them.
Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass."
...

Mr. Williams' real problem is not what he did or did not say; his real problem is that, after years of being permitted to romp around the American media paddock free and unfettered, he finally ran into one of the last intact sections of the rusty, run-down fence-line that once delineated the boundary between actual journalism and the farce of Fox News.

Because Fox News is not a news organization. It is -- quite openly and unapologetically -- the propaganda wing of the American fascist movement.

It is performance art on a global scale, designed to constantly push-push-push a radical political agenda and lie to the American people by extruding a hard-right-flavored news-looking product 24/7/365 directly into the skulls of the Republican Base.

Think about that for a minute: every single fucking day, the agenda for the entire media-political-economic engine of the last superpower on Earth is prodded along by a single corporation dedicated to perpetrating one, massive, toxic lie after another.

And everybody knows it.

That's the thing. That's what makes it so sickening; the simple, observable fact that, deep down, the Big Murdoch Lie Machine really fools no one at all but hardcore meatsticks of the Republican Party base. The rest of it -- its day-to-day operations -- is all kabuki, depending entirely on the consensual collusion of thousands of media bean-field hands like Mr. Williams who make their daily bread oiling the cogs of the terrible machine, and who, in turn, depend on the rage and savage ignorance of millions of bitter Pig People who will pay any price to have someone in a suit on teevee tell them that they're actually insightful patriots.

It is a great, reeking crack-house which pays Mr. Williams very well for deejaying in the living room. And because -- like far, far too many of his colleagues -- Mr. Williams clearly believes this is all just a game, he can see no reason why he shouldn't be able to work six days a week for a cut of FoxNews' crack-and-hooker trade, and then duck around the corner just in time to strap on a collar and make another few dollars preaching High Church Journalism from the pulpit at NPR.

But this is not an academic debate over journalistic methodology, Juan.

This is a war.

And in this war you have to pick a fucking side.

A Kitten

Because who doesn't luv 'em!