Fire At The Giant Scary Font Factory...

...has disrupted production at A-List political podcasts on both coasts.  

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the publisher of a notable podcast with over a million subscribers told us they became concerned when they learned that a fire had spread to the wing of the factory that manufactures Scary Yellow and Yellow-Orange Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, and Comparative Adjectives, as well as what industry insiders call "Urgent Paintbrush Underlines" and "You Should Be Panicking" exclamation points.

At first, however, the publisher remained optimistic.

"I figured we could get by with ordinary black-and-white boldface Jump Scare font until the factory was back up and running."

However, once word came across the wire that the factory was a total loss and would take months to rebuild, the publisher's mood darkened considerably.  The losses include Concerned Red Arrows, Shocked Open-Mouth Reaction Faces. Even the shed where emergency backup "DESTROYS", "SLAMS", "EXPOSED", "DEVASTATING", "STUNNING", "BRUTAL", "TERRIFYING", "MUST WATCH" and "EVERYTHING CHANGED" were stored was, uh, DESTROYED.

"We might as well shutter the place and hit the beach for the rest of the summer," they said mournfully. "It's hitting us all pretty hard, but before we lock down the office until the Fall, we'll make sure are network is protected with... NordVPN ™.  After that, I know we could all use a good night's sleep on a Caspar Mattress ™, and probably a little BetterHelp ™ therapy.  Then it's off to the beach for me, with a Magic Spoon ™ beach snack in one hand and an Audible ™ beach read in the other!"

I Am The Liberal Media

And The Golden Calf Award Goes To...

Mike Johnson: Tonight we have created a new award. We are going to do something we've never done before. We will honor him with a new award. He is the first ever recipient of the America first award. That is this beautiful golden statue here, appropriate for the golden era.

[image or embed]

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) March 25, 2026 at 6:44 PM

In case you are unfamiliar with the reference, or just enjoy watching the great Edward G. Robinson make a three-course meal out of the scenery.

 

Burn The Lifeboats

Area Man Wakes From 55-Year Doctrinal Coma

Discovery can be hard.  Sometimes it takes a lifetime.

I, for one, am in awe of people who have made discoveries about the universe, whether it's something eye-popping like finding a new exoplanet, or something more subtle, like a new species no one had ever cataloged before.  

And then there are the no-less worthy discoveries made by people about themselves.  Who have perhaps stumbled upon a personal epiphany or, as is often the case, done the hard and painful work of achieving a deeper understanding of why they do what they do.

And then there are people who are just full of shit.  Who lay claim to suddenly discovering something about their world which was not just staring them in the face all along, but was a subject about which they had been hailed as an expert.  A paid, professional expert.

Imagine a master carpenter who claims decades of experience, one day picking up a saw and demanding to know, "A device for literally cutting wood?  What unnatural deviltry it this?!?"

Imagine a board-certified podiatrist with 25 years of experience suddenly proclaiming, "Oh my God, you mean there are five toes on the average human foot?  What the fuck did that happen?" 

Which brings us a column by David French published just a few days ago in The New York Times, where, inexplicably, Mr. French now has a job for life writing about "law, culture, religion, and armed conflict."

I've mentioned Mr. French before on this blog. 

Outside of wingnut circles of self-admiration, most normal people may have first heard of him when he was Bill Kristol’s Never Trump fantasy league choice to run for President in 2016. Because voting for Hillary was just too icky.

Mr. French used to be a writer at America's oldest journal of white supremacy, The National Review, where he used his position to advance his many odious opinions, which all grew out of his hardcore, Conservative Evangelical "Christianity".   But, as happened back in those days, Mr. French ran afoul of the MAGA right on the issue of Donald Trump, they ran him right out of there.  How fortunate for him that he also had so many friends in the "liberal" media, that a job was almost immediately found for him at The New York Times.

Because of course it was

However, before they could bring him on board, Mr. French had to hastily "rethink" some of him more medieval beliefs about woman  and gays and so forth so that he could meet the minimum requirements for reputational rehabilitation by the Beltway media.   Then, on to the Times!  After which a slot was found for him at The Bulwark, and an occasional chair was found for him on cable news.  

Because of course they were.  

Anyway, this week, The New York Time's new, in-house expert on religion wrote a long column which began with this headline:

The Day My Old Church Canceled Me Was a Very Sad Day 

There followed a very long column about how shocked, stunned (pardon me while I make a quick trip to my pocket Roget's) astonished, bewildered, dismayed, floored and , yes, even flabbergasted that his Conservative evangelical church was full of...Conservative evangelicals all along!

Just as he and the rest of his Never Trumper friend were dumbfounded, overcome and, yes, even stupefied t discover that their Republicans Party was, y'know...

Here's a small snip of that long column:

This week, the leaders of the Presbyterian Church in America will gather in Richmond, Va., for their annual General Assembly. The Presbyterian Church in America is a small, theologically conservative Christian denomination that was my family’s church home for more than 15 years.

It just canceled me.

I am now deemed too divisive to speak to a gathering of Christians who share my faith. I was scheduled to speak about the challenges of dealing with toxic polarization, but I was considered too polarizing.

I was originally invited to join three other panelists on the topic of “how to be supportive of your pastor and church leaders in a polarized political year.” One of the reasons I was invited was precisely that I’ve been the target of intense attacks online and in real life.

The instant my participation was announced, those attacks started up again. There were misleading essays, vicious tweets, letters and even a parody song directed at the denomination and at me. The message was clear: Get him off the stage.

And that’s what the conference organizers chose to do. They didn’t just cancel me. They canceled the entire panel. But the reason was obvious: My presence would raise concerns about the peace and unity of the church. ... 

This is where you all should feel free to make up whatever "Come of Jesus moment" joke suits you and share it in the comments if you like.

As a rebuttal witness to, I call to the stand Ms. Diana Butler Bass, who, according to her author’s CV:  

...has had a conflicted relationship with evangelicalism over the last several decades. Early in her career, she was fired from the evangelical Westmont College, blacklisted, and ignored after she challenged traditional beliefs. She has written extensively about progressive Christianity ever since, and is the author of eight books, including Grounded: Finding God in the World—A Spiritual Revolution and, most recently, Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks. 

And this, from The Chautauquan Daily,  is a very short version of the circumstances of her firing:

Bass was fired from her dream job for doing nothing wrong.

At the time she was working as a theology professor at an evangelical Christian college. Bass said the president of the university told her: “You’re an amazing student and an amazing scholar. I’m literally just firing you because you don’t fit here.”

So, without further ado, take it away Ms. Bass (via excerpted from Twitter):

So, David French has “never seen anything like it” when his evangelical church turned on him?

Welcome to my life for the last 30 years.

THIS IS WHAT EVANGELICALS DO. Always. They cancel people.

It just takes privileged conservative guys a while to notice I guess.

He literally just said “there are churches where you can’t be a Democrat.”

THIS HAS BEEN HAPPENING FOR 30 years. Geez. He didn’t know this????? There are millions of people who have experienced this. Evangelicalism has ruined so many lives.

Also, maybe he should memorize that Niemoller quote: “First they came….”

Finally, I’m all for Prodigal Sons and deathbed conversions. If, however, your job is public commentary on religion, you shouldn’t be so clueless. 

Maddening, isn’t it?  

Until they kicked him in the metaphorical teeth and tossed his ass out of his own church, David French somehow never noticed that his cult was a nest of bigoted, hateful vipers.  And it allegedly caught him completely by surprise when his church reacted exactly as anyone who wasn’t in that particular cult could have told him they would react.

Dead-wrong all along about religion? 

And about politics?

So of course The New York Times was gonna hand David French some of the most valuable real estate in journalism so he could write about both on the Sulzberger's payroll..

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode #811: No Fair Remembering Face-Eating Evangelicals

“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are dumb enough to take the literally.” -- John Dominic Crossan

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Professional Left Podcast Episode #755: No Fair Remembering The End of The World

“Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. ”  --  Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

 

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Supplemental material here:

Mr. Republican

Since the beginning of recorded history, Republicans have always faced the same problem: putting an affable, camera-ready mask on their horrendous, barbaric policies.  

For decades they solved this problem with what I think of as the Two Face Solution.  While their raging racists on Hate Radio and Fox News got the meathead base all fired up and ready to vote to roll back the Enlightenment -- 

-- their tapioca-bland Beltway apologists would spread the gospel in the nations respectable newspapers and Sunday morning public interest shows and PBS and NPR and so forth that we should all ignore the the Conservative bigots bellowing at 120 decibels on mass media from coast-to-coast.

That wasn't the real Republican party.  

Those weren't real Conservatives.  

Real Conservatives cared about high-minded concepts like Laffer Curves and Cat-Food Commissions and implementing a flat-tax system in Iraq --

-- not grubby, bloody-minded gossip about Vince Foster and Bill Clinton the drug kingpin and flag-pins and birth certificates.

Long after leading Republicans made it explicitly clear that the reason they managed to take power in 1994 was Rush Limbaugh and Hate Radio (from The New York Times, December 12, 1994) -- 

The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November.

Mr. Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the class as its members tonight finished a three-day orientation here sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Empower America, two conservative Washington research organizations.

Barbara Cubin, an incoming freshman from Wyoming, told Mr. Limbaugh that because 74 percent of the nation's newspapers had endorsed Democrats, "talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide." On behalf of the women in the class, she gave him a plaque that said, "Rush Was Right." He also received a pin like the ones the freshmen wore, saying, "Majority Maker."

"Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those are the people who elected the new Congress," he said...

-- the elite, teevee-friendly Conservatives who dominated (and still dominate) the "respectable" media continued to hand-wave away any suggestion that any of the filthy, bomb-throwing garbage that was vomiting from right-wing radio and television was anything other than a fringe sideshow.  Or that the increasingly deranged mob that watched and listened to such tripe were anything other than a tiny fraction of the otherwise sane, sensible and patriotic Republican base.

And anyway, as bad as that tiny minority of right-wing blowhards were, wasn't the Left always worse?

Of course, for those of us who were not members of the complicit mainstream media and who were actually paying attention, what was going on inside the GOP was both obvious and terrifying.  If you're interested in my credentials, here's a link to what I was writing about the fate and future of the GOP +18 years ago: "Little Red State Fundy sez..."  

But that's the point, isn't it?  The general public (the Great Wad, as my friend Harlan Ellison used to refer to them) doesn't pay any attention to any of this.  They don't want to be bothered with politics:  99% of the time, to them politics is nothing but a confusion of loud, garbled voices shouting in a room down the hall.  They have no fucking idea who is saying what about anything: they just want Both Sides to pipe down so they can watch The Voice or football or whatever.  

This was the status quo...right up until Trump ripped the last shreds of the Respectable Republican mask off the GOP and showed the world the Republican's true. leering, bug-eyed-crazy face,  And the mainstream media hates this brave new world of out-and-proud madmen and cowards running the Party of Lincoln because as long as the GOP keeps waving its syphilitic political dick around in public, it's hard for them (not impossible, but definitely a strain) to continue writing the "Democrats in Disarray" and "The Extremes on Both Sides" fairy tales that are their stock-in-trade.

The Great Wad hates it too.  All they want is to remain undisturbed by whatever's going on in politics.  To go back to sleep forever.  And should any political event threaten to rouse them from their civic stupor, they want to be able to hit the "Both Sides Do It" snooze button and fall right back into dreamland feeling smart.  And the current state of the Republican party makes that very hard.  Lord know the Great Wad is trying their damndest to ignore the Republican peril that is a knife to the throat of the country they still pretend to care about, but it's like trying to sleep through an earthquake that never stops.

But in the new Republican Speaker, Mike Johnson, the media, the Republican party and the Great Wad may have all found a temporary liniment to sooth their collective agonies: a new, affable, camera-ready mask for their horrendous, barbaric policies.  

A public presentation as mealy and inoffensive as David Brooks.  Behind which lurks a savage ideology straight out of the Dark Ages. 

From Politico:

‘He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule’

A Q&A with historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez on the Christian nationalist ideas that shaped House Speaker Mike Johnson.

From the Washington Post:

House Speaker Mike Johnson used faith in campaign against gay rights

From the AP:

New US House speaker tried to help overturn the 2020 election, raising concerns about the next one.

From the AP again:

Christian right cheers new House speaker, conservative evangelical Mike Johnson, as one of their own

Evangelical Christian conservatives have long had allies in top Republican leadership in Congress. But never before have they had one so thoroughly embedded in their movement as new House Speaker Mike Johnson, a longtime culture warrior in the courthouse, in the classroom and in Congress.

From Rolling Stone:

New House Speaker Blamed School Shootings on Teaching Evolution and Abortion

Mike Johnson is a Christian nationalist with extreme views on guns, reproductive rights, and more. He's now second in line for the presidency

From Bloomberg News:

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s First Big Bill Cuts Biden’s Climate Change Funding

From HuffPo:

New House Speaker Thinks Creationist Museum Is 'Pointing People To The Truth'

An ark replica with dinosaurs "is one way to bring people to this recognition ... that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events,” Mike Johnson said.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode #753

"My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally."  --  John Dominic Crossan

 

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Jerry's Kids Redux

A couple of days ago I put up a post reminding whoever reads this blog that the Republican party's dependence on Conservative Evangelical scumbags like Jerry Falwell, Jr. (which I dubbed "Christopaths" 18 years ago and, by God, I'm gonna keep using it until it catches on and makes me as rich as "dumpster fire" made me!) did not, in fact, begin in 2016.  That the unholy union between unslakable Republican ambition and God-bothering grifters like Jerry Falwell, Sr. goes way, way back to the days of Ronald Reagan.  

Yes, I know it began before that, so please don't inundate me with  "Well, technically..."s or "You forgot about..."s.  Let's just stipulate, here and now, that you're all very clever and know many thing and move on, shall we?

What brings me back to Falwell this morning is a story and a podcast.

The story is the one about Watergate and John Dean at a point when Nixon was already up to his ass in the coverup, and Dean came to him to warn him about there being "a cancer on the presidency".  

Well, yeah, but the cancer on the presidency was the president, so good luck with that.  

Nixon then asked Dean to take all his notes and go away to Camp David and prepare for him a full report on this Watergate matter, and then come back and submit that report to Nixon.  Dean went to Camp David and started work, but quickly figured out that any such report would have to include Dean's own involvement.  And, not being an idiot, Dean also figured out that, once he submitted the report to Nixon, Nixon would claim that this was the Very First Time he was hearing about this matter!  Then he'd hang the whole thing around Dean's neck and make him the fall guy.  That was when Dean decamped from Camp David and went to go see the the senate Watergate investigators.  He had a story to tell.  

I mention this story because, since the rise of Trump, the "My God!  This is the first I am hearing about this!" lie has become a staple on  pretty much every Never Trump thing.

You're telling me that there's racism going on!?  In the Party of Lincoln?!  

Shut the front door!  How did this happen!!

You're telling me that the clowns on Conservative talk radio have just been making shit up to scare the rubes? That it's been a bad influence on society?!?  

OMG how did this happen!!

I'm shocked -- shocked! -- I see a noble enterprise like Fox News slowly turning into a right-wing propaganda machine since Trump was elected.  

Remember the Good Old Days, when it was awesome?

Just yesterday, Resistance Hero Rick Wilson stashed his Confederate Flag/"The South Shall Rise Again" cooler out of sight long enough land to squarely on my "No Fair Remembering Stuff" podcast corner dressed up as Mr. "Holy shit!  You mean the Republican Party has been full of Republicans all along!!" guy.  

I wrote it up here, and I swear I thought I was through with this, at least for the weekend.

But, of course, the Never Trump war on history never ends.  And so, this morning, over my whiskey and cornflakes...  

...Charlie Sykes, listening in wide-eared wonder to the stunning revelation that the Republican party was actually in bed with the Christopaths...even before Donald Trump was elected!! 

Sykes:  ..and of course the whole Trump era, and you have this, again, this extraordinary line where you say, "I couldn't help but wonder if the plot twist to the story of American conservative Christianity was that what we thought was the Shire was Mordor all along."

Moore:  It's kind of like watching The Sixth Sense or some other M. Night Shyamalan movie for the second time because then you can see how all of these things fit together that previously... I mean my gut would say to me, what's going on? I mean Glenn Beck is doing the restoring honor message on the National Mall in 2010?   And you have a lot of my fellow evangelicals saying this is preaching the gospel.  But I would think, yeah, this is just an anomaly.  It's something that's on the fringe.  And then later we turn around and see it's not fringe at all. And I think maybe the... the moment that... that became clearest to me was October 7th, 2016. I remember the day when the Access Hollywood tape was released...

It goes on like that.  Sykes obsessing that, since Trump the Christopaths have really lost their way.

Moore (responding as if he had just personally decrypted this from the Mayan codex) that, actually, the Christopaths influence on the Republican party may extend back into the mists of...The Before Time.

The following is not actual dialogue from the podcast..

Sykes:  You're shitting me!

Moore:  I am not.  There is evidence of Christopaths having a lot of clout within the GOP even before Trump came down the escalator.

Sykes:  But I've been involved at the highest levels of the Republican party and Conservative media for decades?  How could I have possibly missed this?

Moore:  We all missed it, Charlie.  They were so stealthy, these Christopaths.  So subtle and sneaky and silent.  They were like fucking ninjas!  Invisible all this time and then, whamo!  Suddenly they're everywhere!  

By now, none of this surprises me.  After all, 18 years ago, based on what was plainly obvious all around us, I wrote a parable about where this Republican/Christopath alliance was headed. And 18 years later, I wouldn't change a word.

All I'm listening for now is the next phase of this by-now familiar "My God!  This is the first I am hearing about this!" dodge.  Specifically, the sound of some prominent Never Trumper groping around in the dark looking for any way -- any way at all -- that they can plausibly blame this on us dirty, godless Liberals.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast #591

“A Cancel Culture so huge and omnipresent that it has become invisible."

-- driftglass, writer

Don't forget to visit our website -- http://www.proleftpod.com -- for all those sweet bells and whistles:  there are links to donate to our podcast work at that site, as well as links to our swingin' Zazzle merch store,  our respective blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Kittehs! and much more. Many thanks once again to @theologop for building it all for us!

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• The Savidge Reads YouTube Channel  
• Spring Book HiBearNation
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The Disownership Society

(h/t Alert Reader Patrick)
(h/t Commentor "JHB" for the title of this post)

If you look at the front page of the GOP's official website very carefully...or not very carefully...or just glance at it out of the window of a speeding car, you will see ads for "Reagan/Bush '84" coffee mugs, two, different pictures of Scary Hillary, a "Clinton Email Scandal" tab, a "Buy Some George H.W. Bush Socks!" tab, and so much more!

However as of this writing, what you will not see anywhere on the front page is Mr. Donald J. Trump.  No pictures.  No videos.  No Tweets.  No text.

Nothing. At. All.

Wow.

One can only imagine how very exciting the next meeting between Mr. Donald J. Trump and the online marketing team of "his" Republican party will be:

10 Years After: 2006 -- Dead Center

In the service of fundraising and nostalgia, I am using the occasion of my 10th blogiversary to bring some stuff out of the archives -- probably a few representational samples from each year. 

By 2006, the Bush Regime had moved past the point of wingnut bullshit equilibrium where it's myriad sins and impeachable crimes could be kept out of the spotlight by wishing or screaming or Roving them away.   And so, as BushCo continued collapsing along the fault lines of corruption, fascism and stupefying incompetence about which the Left had been warning for years, there began a mad scramble by the Very Serious People of Washington D.C. -- who had cheered on President Fiasco right down the line -- to distance themselves as fast as their Guccis and Ferragamos could carry them.

But immediately they ran into a seemingly irresolvable problem:  How could they possibly start criticizing the Bush Administration like Dirty Hippies, using a vocabulary expropriated from the Dirty Hippies, without acknowledging at some level that, yes, the Dirty Hippies had been right all along?

Vexing!

Fortunately, being in the making-shit-up business, they had a solution right on their doorstep.

The Very Serious People of Washington D.C. would buy ghost town called "Bipartisanship" -- a swath of barren ideological real estate which had been bombed to splinters by Republican Ronald Reagan, napalmed to ash by Republican Newt Gingrich and nuked from orbit by Republican Karl Rove -- and create a brand-new, Disneyfied theme-park called "Centrism".  They would repopulate it with...themselves!  Their watchword -- their shibboleth -- would be "Both Sided Are To Blame (Always, and for Everything)" and it would be the happiest place on Earth!

They'd have a mayor and rules of good conduct and leading citizens who would command the nation's teevee camera and ruthlessly frame every national conversation so that no Very Serious Person of Washington D.C. would ever lose their sweet, sweet gig, or have to ever admit that Liberals had ever been right about anything.

For you students of history, this column used a creature named "Ralph Reed" -- as odious a pile of lies and hellflesh as ever stank up a teevee green room -- as its jumping off point.  In case you were wondering which federal graybar hotel you might be able to write to Ralph in care of, worry not.  He was never brought up on charges! and now spends his days promoting wingnut Christopath candidates for higher office in the name of Almighty God, appearing on various Sunday Morning talk shows as one of the Very Serious People of Washington D.C. and unironically hawking books like, "Awakening: How America Can Turn From Moral and Economic Destruction Back to Greatness".

And so...

“What monsters would walk the streets, 

if men's faces


were as unfinished

as their souls.“ -- Quote by Eric Hoffer 

From The Department of Missing The Point

I feel, as an atheist, about people like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher the way that Christians must feel about Fred Phelps. Look, being an atheist means you don’t give a fuck about what anyone believes in. I don’t think any of it’s real, but you can go ahead and do it. I’m not trying to destroy religion. I just don’t care about it.

-- Patton Oswalt, humorist

Amen to that.

I think it would be fair to say that, as America's foremost Brooksian observer and critic, I take second chair to no one when it comes to my belief that David Brooks = Everything that is bent and depraved about American political and cultural media.

And I am usually more than happy for the company when some fellow traveler shows up to help me walk the usually-pretty-lonely David Brooks beat.

That being said, having cataloged and written the book on all 103 different ways a writer can break down a David Brooks column, until today I was unaware that a 104th method existed.  And the reason I was unaware of its existence is that it never occurred to me that anyone would invent a way to lump me and my wife and my ex-wife and my Mom and most of the people I have ever worked with and David Brooks all together in the same category...and then go completely out of their way to try to alienate and insult everyone in that group, which presumably contains a substantial number of the people who the writer is trying to reach.

After which, ergo propter David Brooks.

Or something.

Here is what I'm talking about

David Brooks, religious clown: Debunking phony Godsplaining from the New York Times’ laziest columnist 

...

But what to make of Friedman and Kristof’s seemingly milquetoast colleague, David Brooks?  No shame attaches to him, though by publishing his pro-faith columns, he validates a stupendously (if surreptitiously) baleful Weltanschauung that should long ago have disappeared from our world.  ... That those who have shrugged off – or laughed away – the comically outlandish claims advanced by the Abrahamic creeds about our world and origins as a species are the ones with the explaining to do.  Should he not be called to account?

Yeah.  True.

For about a hundred other things.

None of which the author seems even vaguely aware of.

Maybe I've been outside the walls too long, but this?  Really?  

The author continues:

...

Moreover, Brooks’ recent Op-Ed, “Building Better Secularists,” leaves me no choice, or, better said, offers me an opportunity I cannot pass up for commentary.  “Building Better Secularists” is nothing less than an anti-religion writer’s dream come true, an essay remarkable for its utter and complete susceptibility to refutation and repudiation.  The title hints that Brooks intends to teach us godless folks a thing or two.  The result?  He succeeds only in beclowning himself by authoring a sanctimoniously gaseous tract that befits not America’s august Paper of Record, but a highbrow version of Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ End-is-Nigh rag...

...

The point is not than one or another religion is better or more correct, or more guilty or less guilty of producing “bad outcomes” such as the aforementioned, but that all are equally man-made, equally false, equally irrational, and equally capable of being used just as they have been used: as merciless ideologies of control and repression.  All this immediately renders null and void the credentials of any journalist who would preach faith-tainted advice about how to live to rationalists.

Brooks proceeds to list the challenges he demands be met if atheists are to prosper.  Each of these challenges he presents in contradistinction to its religious equivalent.

...

Let’s take them one by one...

No.  Let's not.

Let's instead say that, over the last 20 years, Mr. Brooks has become wealthy and powerful by being the wheel man for uncountable Conservative lies, slanders and acts of public policy mayhem.  His job has been to tear-ass all over the "respectable" media world in their getaway car, and to-date he has gotten away with it all of it.

Gotten away it.

Is getting away with it.

Will continue to get away with it.  And any other conjugation of "to get" you care to name.

Comes now Slate magazine writer Jeffrey Tayler, whose makes a living is calling people of faith (among other things_ dangerous, delusional and insane.  In other words, calling me and my wife (who is a far better person than me in every measurable way) dangerous, delusional and insane.

Far from bothering me, this amuses me immensely on various levels, but mostly it is of great comfort to me to know that Mr. Tayler is part of that long line of professional writers -- from Bloody Bill Kristol to David Brooks to Jonah Goldberg (who is also unnaturally attached to the word "beclown") to Jeffrey Tayler -- who pay their rent and provide for their loved ones by calling me and my wife stupid or demented or unAmerican.

Apparently I am the tent-pole which holds up America's political media and keeps it's scribblers employed.  Lord Jesus, whatever would they do without me?

But, OK, you wanna step up and try to take a bite out of the Most Insufferable Man in American Journalism, g'head.  

I'll be over here at the judge's table.  

Judging.

And if you moved past at a blur, what you would see is Mr. Tayler pulling David Brooks' getaway car over and reading him the riot act. Which, from a distance, looks like a fine thing.

But then you move in closer, and you notice that while Mr. Brooks has a metaphorical dead hooker hanging out of the trunk, 40 pounds of coke on the floor, a pile of pipe bombs and machine guns in the back seat and is driving a wreck riddled with bullet holes and painted with blood...

...what the author is really exercised about is the plastic Jesus on his dashboard.

And as a bonus to you the reader, after Mr. Tayler is done kicking the shit of that little plastic Jesus. Mr. Tayler would like you to line up for the same dressing down.  

Because even if you do not have a metaphorical body in your trunk, a garbage bag of blow in your lap and an armory of unlicensed firepower in your back seat, if you, sir or madam, happened to be driving back from church, or temple or synagogue then you are just as bad as David Fucking Brooks.

As I said, I find that funny as hell.  

Professional Left Podcast #270

Introduced once again by Kevin's video-for-the-ages

"Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in." .

-- Mark Twain, writer

Links:

• Obama promotes separation of church and state at prayer breakfast; RW goes cray-cray.
• David Brooks insults Blue Gal and all working religionists
• Stephen Fry on what he would say to God (LastWord) 
• Lawrence O'Donnell's hilariously elliptical coveage of Paul Ryan lying to Chuck Todd
• I've had it with Glenn Greenwald; tragedy trolling being an embargoed topic on the Left.

Da' money goes here:

Caddying For The Dalai Lama

It continues to appear as though I am much more widely read on the DL than my traffic, comments, link rate, employment prospects and contributions would indicate.

Me, from Monday morning:

On Meet the Press, White Soul Brother Number One -- David Brooks -- was joined by the profoundly crazy Ben Carson to have a National Conversation About Race ™ because who better...

 Brother Charlie Pierce from Tuesday morning:

SOUL BROTHER NUMBER ONE: MISTER DAVID BROOKS ON RACE

By Charles P. Pierce on December 2, 2014

As the proud owner of a stack of rejection letters tall enough to be able to ride the Full Throttle roller-coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain unescorted, I get it that sometimes there simply is no market for what one writes.

So if there really were no market for what I write or how I write it, I'd understand.

But clearly there is.

So after a decade of writing into the abyss I have to conclude that it's me, personally, who for some reason is unwelcome at the grown-up table.

Well, so be it.

On the plus side, it is my understanding that when I die, on my deathbed, I will receive total consciousness.

So I got that going for me.

Which is nice.

Noted Science Guy Continues To Be Completely Flummoxed By Human Nature

From The New Republic:

Thanks to Bill Nye, Creationists Raised Enough Money to Build an Anti-Science Theme Park

The science guy won a debate—and subsidized the enemy

BY JERRY A. COYNE

I’m not saying “I told you so” (in fact I am, of course), but the main upshot of the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate appears to have tipped the final balance in favor of Ham.

The debate, as you’ll recall, was held in Kentucky’s Creation Museum, was on the validity of creationism as a model of biological origins and diversity, and the proceeds from the DVDs went to Ham and other creationists.

Now, according to the Guardian and other venues, Ham has announced that proceeds from the debate have apparently revived the dormant “Ark Park” project, which will contain a “life-sized” replica of Noah’s Ark.

This is precisely what I predicted in a pre-debate post on January 5, “Ark Park near collapse; will Bill Nye help finance it?”...

Mr. Coyne goes on to report Bill Nye's reaction to having walked right past all the big, neon, "Danger!  Do Not Enter!" signs and straight into his role in Ken Ham's fundraising scheme as --

,,,“heartbroken and sickened for the Commonwealth of Kentucky” after learning that the project would move forward. [Nye] said the ark would eventually draw more attention to the beliefs of Ham’s ministry, which preaches that the Bible’s creation story is a true account, and as a result, “voters and taxpayers in Kentucky will eventually see that this is not in their best interest.”

-- because some Liberals are really stupid like that.

And in the name of "debate" or "engagement" or "fairness" some Liberals will go right on being stupid like that.  They simply cannot wrap their heads around the fact that the Right is not interested in debating them. That the Right no longer even recognizes the concept of "debate" anymore.  To Conservatives, a "debate" is just another venue for another round of whoop de poo flinging and laughing at those po', dumb Libruls who keep flying into the same fucking bug zapper over and over again.

For more on this story, we turn to the late Steve Gilliard from January of 2005:

...There's a tendency for liberals to try and be fair, to consider other viewpoints, so we get baited by them in debates on terms that they set. I'm going to act on the following: I don't care what conservatives think. The NRO Corner thinks I'm a racist, I don't care, their opinions on race are meaningless.

Instacracker doesn't like what I say?

That's the purpose of the exercise.

I want conservatives to read this site and come away steaming. I don't want them to think they will like a word I will say here. I don't want them to think I will consider their opinions or viewpoints. I want them to think: boy he doesn't like conservatives and really, really doesn't care what we say.

I'm tired of people acting like these people can be reasoned with or talked to. They don't want to talk, they want to drive us away into a corner and ridicule our ideas.

I'm not writing to make conservatives happy. I want them to hate my opinions.

I'm not interested in debating them.

I want to stop them.

And for even more, we turn to the late Steve Gilliard from March of 2005 (emphasis added):

...The Bible Thumpers will always be with us, and after a while, people get sick of them. They did in the 20's and they will now. The GOP has one fucking thing holding them together, power. In 2007, a lot of fiscal conservatives are going to find their nominees for president are a high grade of wacko, like Rick Santorum. People who are too crazy to win, but because the Jesus freaks control the GOP street game, they will have to decide what to do. Just like we listened to Jim Carville four years too long, the GOP will curse the name of Karl Rove for letting the Jesus freaks think the GOP is God's Own Party. Personally, I plan on handing them anvils and watching the fucking bubbles hit the surface.

And about the media: subvert it where you can, provide alternatives when you can't. We have to challenge them when they are wrong. We can't let them get away with bullshit and then whine about it. And we have to start picking friends and enemies. No law says you have to talk to the Weekly Standard or NRO and I wouldn't bother. Let them say what they want, racist thugs, the lot of them. We don't have to make their job easier.

The GOP worked the refs to the point that they shit themselves. It's time to do the same. Someone ought to be deconstructing David Brooks and sending out PR releases highlighting his fucking errors and sexism weekly. This is not a game to win on defense...

As to that list bit, Steve, all I can say is, I've been trying.

Almost since the day you kicked me out of your comment section and I started this blog.

Right on through the end of The News Blog.  Through the rise and fall of The Group News Blog.  Through the rise and fall of The Fighting Liberals.

And I'll go right on trying awhile longer.

But after nine years, as far as I can tell, while a few of my peers are now playing my ragtime, ain't nobody upstairs listening.

Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd. - Extended Play

"Like David Brooks, I feel whip-sawed a lot of the time."

-- Andrew Sullivan

Mysteriously, nowhere in his post does Mr. Sullivan get to the real meat of Our Mr. Brooks' assay:

...
I’m not going to pass my own comprehensive judgment on this here. I’ll just say that my conversations reaffirm my conviction that Obama is a pragmatic liberal who cares about fiscal sustainability, who has been willing to compromise for its sake, but who has not offered anything close to a sufficient program to avoid a debt crisis.


But we have a campaign in front of us. If the president is truly committed to a strategy for progressive fiscal stability, as Bill Clinton was, he’ll make that the center of his campaign. He’ll earn a mandate. He’ll win over independents who want fiscal discipline but worry about the way Republicans get there.
...

Perhaps bookmarking a dictionary on the page where the word "mandate" is found and then heaving it directly into at Our Mr. Brooks' moon-face would startle him into remembering that Barack Obama has already won just such an election with just such a mandate.

This was followed by a complete, public, psychotic break on the part of Our Mr. Brooks' Republican Party, during which all of the incoherent, bigoted rage and seething paranoia about which the Dirty Hippies had ringing the alarum bells for 40 years came boiling to the surface.

This roaring outflow of unalloyed, berserk, conspiracy mongering obstructionism surprised no one in the known Universe....except for skeevy Centrism peddlers like Our Mr. Brooks who (after a brief flirtation with a GOP re-branding scheme canned "the Tea Party") did what such cowards always does: demand a swift and immediate capitulation to the wingnut mob in the name of almighty Centrism.

Standing in an empty bar, surrounded by Imaginary Centrists, talking to an Imaginary Reasonable Conservative Bartender who echos back to Bobo his every fraudulent fantasy, David Brooks reveals that he has finally decided to abandon reality altogether, crawl back into Ronald Reagan’s leathery, cowboy man-uterus and seal the entrance behind him. Snippets lifted from "The Government War" in the NYT:

"In these columns I try to give voice to a philosophy you might call progressive conservatism. " ...

"This general philosophy puts me to the left of where the Republican Party is now, and to the right of the Democratic Party. It puts me in that silly spot on the political map, the center, or a step to the right of it." ...

"One of the odd features of the Democratic Party is its inability to learn what politics is about. It’s not about winning arguments. It’s about deciding which arguments you are going to have. In the first year of the Obama administration, the Democrats, either wittingly or unwittingly, decided to put the big government-versus-small government debate at the center of American life.

"Just as America was leaving the culture war and the war war, the Democrats thrust it back into the government war, only this time nastier and with higher stakes." ...

"This produced the Tea Party Movement — a characteristically raw but authentically American revolt led by members of the yeoman enterprising class." ...

"The Democrats have become the government party and the Republicans are the small government party. The stale, old debate is back with a fury."

When compromise predictably failed (because the GOP program was never about governance but about destroying that damned n*gger in their White House), Our Mr. Brooks once again did what did what such Centrist cowards always do: demanded more compromise.  And more.  And then more.  And still more.  And always, always, always it is the Left (which by now is where the Center-Right was 30 years ago) that must give in to the Pig People, however ludicrous and destructive their demands may be.

And when the Obama Administration finally got it at least part-way through their heads that compromise was never going to work and stopped playing that game, Our Mr. Brooks once again responded with complete, abject, sniveling Centrist predictability by throwing a public tantrum over how big a sucker he had been for every believing that Barack Obama was a Serious Person (from "The Man Who Mistook His President for a Hat"):

Do you really want to hurt me
Do you really want to make me cry
Precious kisses, words that burn me
Lovers never ask you why

So Our Mr. Brooks is "a sap"

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

...
So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach.

It has gone back, as an appreciative Ezra Klein of The Washington Post conceded, to politics as usual. The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful!
...

because he wanted President Obama to stay in Centrist Neverland, playing Very Serious Moderate Pirate games with him and Tinkerbell

...

After you double-check with the good people at Merriam-Webster to make sure no one secretly changed the definition of "whipsawed" to "public fraud who is routinely beaten to atoms by his betters every time he opens his mouth to say anything about history, politics or math" take a moment to let the perfection of Mr. Sullivan's little, suck-up Centrist koan sink in.

Can't Someone Else Do It?

So what does the three-oranges-for-a-buck sale down at da Jewel have to do with the slow death of Wikipedia?

Funny you should ask.

From Gawker:

Wikipedia Is Slowly Dying

Jimmy Wales, the iconoclastic founder of Wikipedia, made a troubling announcement at the seventh annual Wikipedia conference: Nobody wants to edit Wikipedia anymore. Is Wikipedia going to shrivel up and fade away?

Wales told the AP that the number of Wikipedia editors is slowly dwindling. "We are not replenishing our ranks," he said, "it is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important." According to Wales a lot of the core Wikipedians have simply aged out, got married and found that they have better things to do with their time. Previous rumors of Wikipedias demise have focused on a lack of any new stuff to add; but this seems like a real existential threat.
...

And Twitter and Facebook have sucked up all the cognitive surplus younger internet users might have once devoted to building up Wikipedia and shattered it into a million fleeting hashtags.
...

We have a cherished saying in my family: "Let's you and him fight."

Which, translated, is our way of recognizing-with-an-Ozark-laugh that the world is full of people who have lots of good ideas about how other people should spend their abundant "spare time".

What's happening with Wikipedia is not a web phenomenon: it's just the latest manifestation of same something-for-nothing shell game played by every two-bit Alexander the Great I (and probably you) have ever worked for.

It is the fantasy on which turned just about every executive staff session I was ever dragooned into attending into a meeting of all-quarterbacks and no wide-receivers where every wild, dumb idea was flung blindly down-field to no one at all -- in the passive "someone really should move the building two feet to the left!" voice -- by organizational deadwood who later tell their loved ones what heroes they had been that day.

It is the fantasy that allows elected goofs get away with promising that if gummint were just "run like a business" everything would be fine. (Which is bullshit. Most gummint -- most lousy gummint -- is run exactly like a lousy business: idiots on top who got there because or their last names or their college roommates, making far too much money than they are worth by loading up the men and women who actually till the soil and tread the grain [so to speak] with more work than they can possible accomplish [the goof on top didn't get there by telling the public "No"]...and then bitching about their general laziness and clockwatchery, or outsourcing the whole deal to some third party for a quick buck.)

It is the fantasy that has turned unpaid interns into unwitting scabs, and WalMart into an American success story instead of something foul and feudal about which we should be heartily ashamed.

It is the ancient Faustian bargain of the slaveholder – an army of uncomplaining servants created by, oh, let’s say “Providence” to provide the privileged with an endless stream of luxuries at bargain basement prices, and around which mankind has historically erected all manner of depraved theologies explaining why those who do the work should not enjoy the fruits of their labor, but should content themselves sitting on the porch, singin' spirituals.

As I wrote back in 2006:

Live Free or Buy

[Tom Friedman] also treads as lightly as a chubby mouse in a catnip bomber-jacket navigating the main floor of the Lion House just around sup-sup-sup-suppertime, because far too much of his personal well-being is staked to his main gig -- delivering ten-year-old platitudes about globalization to twenty-years-out-of-date, Conservative CEOs. Rich, white men with Republican rock-ribs, who adore George Bush and have voted straight GOP-ticket since they were old enough to golf in ugly pants.

Men who live in First Class – sometimes, to be clear and fair, through dint of long hours and hard work, which are traits to be admired – and have deluded themselves into believing that they can outsource the rivets and steel that hold the plane together, the engines that make it go and the flight crew that navigates it safely though the storm…and yet somehow they will be able to fly on in comfort forever, fueled by consultants and canny financial valuation trickery.

Friedman catches such men as the last of their employees plummet wholesale Earthward, as they sit in the skeletal airframe of their once-proud ships and the deathly cold wind of 30,000 feet is whistling though their ass-cracks and he advises that, perhaps, Steps Of Some Kind Should Be Taken.
...

We may or may not be able to educate our way out of the corner we’re in, but to even attempt to do so, we first have to come squarely to terms with who we are, what we are, and how we really got here.

To do that, consider this, which is one of my favorite quotes from Charlie Chaplin.
“The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.”

That is the dirty truth and true root of our problem; We have become the saddest thing Charlie Chaplin could imagine.

“We have become used to luxury.”

Those $.99 chicken fingers? The $12 bumper-to-bumper, inside-and-out car-wash? The three-oranges-for-a-buck sale down at the Jewel?

These are, all of them, luxury items, created not by a band of rugged Libertarians hewing agricultural and technological miracles out of the living rock, but made possible by an ocean of cheap labor, federal subsidies and a continent rich beyond the dreams of Avarice in natural resources.

What we’re all about (and always have been) is manufacturing what, for most of human history, has been luxury goods, selling them cheap and living fat off the margins. There is nothing at all wrong with making a living doing this, except that in the long run, every race will go to the cleverest, and right now our problem is that we don’t believe that.

We are drowning in our own mythos of Sunshine, Freedom and Manifest Destiny.

We have take a fatal dose of our own Exceptionalism propaganda and have internalized down to our tubby little toesies the belief that God Almighty wants us to live in opulence.

That God wants gas prices to be low.
...

In 1861 the South was prosperous specifically because of the forced labor of four million brown people who were reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

In 2006, America is prosperous specifically because of the peonage-cheap, illegal labor of twelve million brown people who are reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

We tolerate with a wink-and-a-nudge a system that simultataneously criminalizes a labor force of twelve million to keep them underground and terrified, and then carefully extracts their labor for pennies.

Any social policy which doesn’t confront immigration on those terms will fail and fail badly because, in the end, we really only have two choices: Either a renegotiation of the social contract to pay working people a living wage, or an open recognition that we will forever rely more and more on cheaper and cheaper labor to remain spoiled and Holy.

So far we have chosen neither. We have chosen to burn through our collective inheritance of wealth and prestige to make foolish choices, set foolish policies, wage foolish wars, without having to feel any pain. Like crack-heads, we have stolen from our parents and mooched from our children enough fast, high-interest cash to allow us to trundle along in a state of oblivious Eloi-ness where we don’t have to make any hard decisions and our God-Given Right to Comfort and Ease keeps us from asking too many tough questions about where all this Free Lunch is actually coming from.

But Physics and Economics are brutal loan-sharks and we can’t all live forever on borrowed money, no matter how successful certain individuals like Dubya have been at doing just that.
...

I use Wikipedia for the occasional fast quote or summary here and there. I appreciate its convenience, just as I appreciate the convenience of free-of-charge services like YouTube and Blogger and gmail.

But I do not own them, and if they went away tomorrow I would find other tools with which to do my thing.

"Crowdsourcing", "cognitive surplus" and suchlike have never been anything but webslang for Homer J. Simpson's famous campaign slogan: "Can't someone else do it?"

And if you build your business, your ideology or your nation like "a foolish man who built his house on the sand" don't come crying to me when the rain comes and washes it all away.