The Dogmas of the Quiet Past

I was pleased and proud to have this man as my president.  Pleased and proud to have his family as our First Family.  I was proud to vote for him for senator once and for president twice.  I was proud to have been one of the panelists who vetted him when he was still a relatively obscure state senator during his ultimately failed primary bid for the U.S. House of Representatives against incumbent Bobby Rush. In fact, I still have my ticket stub from his "Barack the Vote" fundraiser.  

However, as pleased and proud as I was to have Barack Obama as my president, it is also worth remembering the environment in which Obama governed, including taking a moment to remember much furious shit we Obama supporters took from our "allies" on the left.  In case you'd forgotten, here's a sample from a now-deadlinked post on Common Dreams from May, 2013.  I have an archive full of this stuff: 

When Obama finally declares martial law and announces the new Fascist States of American, O-bots like Maddow will eagerly put on their Nazi armbands -- cute little pastel hope & change swastikas, of course -- and join the goose-stepping parade. She's nothing but a propagandist and has absolutely no scruples whatsoever, just like the corporation that pays her, just like the "commander-in-chief" she props up with her lies and half-truths...

That kind of rhetoric was not unusual at the time: over-the-top rage from the whole Conservative media machine and from the dirtbag Left.  And in that environment, the Obama administration constituted a grand social experiment in offering the Republican party base -- which had been trained by Republican leadership and Conservative media to automatically loathe Democrats with an almost unhinged ferocity -- a different option.  Offering them compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect, as well as policies that materially benefited them.

And that grand social experiment failed spectacularly.  Which is why it is worth our time and attention to diagnose why that experiment failed.  But to do that we'd have to journey into the past further back than 2016, which is something that pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" almost all categorically refuse to do. 

That is because to examine the state of our union prior to 2016 makes the pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" either look like arrogant idiots whose opinions should never be trusted again...or ambitious fools who were complicit in creating the ideal conditions for a monster like Trump to emerge...or both.  And since pundits, the consulting class and our Never Trump "allies" now dominate any media conversation about politics, that once again leaves it to dirty, disreputable outsiders like us to do the work of explaining why everything went to hell.  

To start with, President Barack Obama might as well have been built in a Centrist/Moderate/Both Siderist lab by the New York Times editorial board. He was everything the pundits and the consultant class said would be the "solve" for what was dividing America. 

This is from me 16 years ago, in 2010:

For his entire adult life, Barack Obama has succeeded by offering himself as the perfect midpoint between others. As a mathematical function, not a leader. As an averaging equation, not a true believer.

Since he showed up on the political radar, he has marketed himself relentlessly as

Half black and half white...
Half American urbanite, half world-citizen...
Half wonk, half preacher...
Half Harvard Yard, half Back o' the Yards...
Half red and half blue...

And this bone-deep reflex -- plus his formidable intellect and ability to rise to the rhetorical occasion -- would have prepared him perfectly for the Presidency...if this were 1960.

But it is not 1960 -- nor is he dealing with Harvard Conservatives pals or Springfield Republican pols -- and being a results-agnostic "process guy" when the process is utterly broken no longer works.

Instead, the ideologically-lockstepping Right led by Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers have found in Obama their perfect patsy: the Democrat who seems constitutionally incapable of counter-punching, who can only feel comfortable while suspended between two opposing positions and who will, therefore, find a compromise between opposites even when he has to invent wholly fictional opposing views to which he can cede half the playing field.

In order to avoid wasting his presidency, squandering the opportunity we have given him, and letting the country spiral into a permanent corporate feudal pest-hole, Barack Obama must do the hardest thing of all: he must exceed his design specifications. This is not unprecedented, but like Franklin Roosevelt the capitalist-turned-social-Democrat or Abraham Lincoln the compromiser-turned-Emancipator, Obama must let go of a central pillar of his identity and embrace the brutal fact that our modern house divided against itself cannot stand.

That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

That we will become all one thing, or all the other.

And that this is your fight, President Obama.

This burden has fallen to you: it cannot be shirked and cannot be delegated.

If you take up this challenge, millions of us will have your back, Mr. President.

But if you cannot summon the inner strength to evolve past your reflexive need to compromise with people who want to destroy you, then we are all well and truly fucked.

Because in 2008, Democrats took a chance on an outsider conjured out of their best hopes, but by 2010 it was clear to anyone with eyes to see that the Republican party and Conservative media were too far gone to be saved.  That by now there was too much power and too much profit trafficking in racism and conspiracy mongering and hatred for them to change.  That they viewed compromise, thoughtfulness, dignity and respect as weakness, and Obama as a patsy for continuing to offer calm, civility and concessions over and over again.  

That what the nation needed in that moment was a president who took to the bully pulpit every day to beat the shit out of GOP in the Truman style:

“I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.” 

And to go after the working men and women who voted against their own interests in the same manner:

But that never happened.  And the reaction from Republicans to this decent, honorable, thoughtful man who begged them to work with him solve our common problems was an eight-year-long, racist primal scream and the to nominate and elect the personification of their most dangerously ignorant, racist fears. 

The King of the Birthers. 

Then they renominated him again in 2020.

Then, when he lost, they attempted a coup to overthrow the government, and spent the next four years screaming that the election had been stolen.

Then they renominated him yet again in 2024, re-elected him, and here we are.  And by now it should be plain enough for even the punditocracy to see that the problem was never Trump.  The problem has always been the bigots and imbeciles of the Republican base who manifested Trump, and the Conservative media which continues to belt-feed the most lurid red-meat lies to that base, which eagerly gobbles it up and asks for seconds.   

So, to quote another president from Illinois whose presidential library and museum are also here, 

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it...

 And to repeat what I shamelessly stole from Lincoln 16 years ago and modified to fit our times:

That we cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

That we will become all one thing, or all the other.

 

Burn The Lifeboats

You Liberals Don't Seem To Appreciate How Hard It Was Leaving The Klan

Not only did all my Klan brothers turn their backs on me, I also lost my steady gig on the Hate Speech Podcast Network.  Now how am I supposed to afford the monthlies on my private skate park, fortified party venue, and large production studio?

And you know what?  All the people whose lives I ruined aren't even saying "Thank You"!  They refuse to welcome me with open arms and set me up with a comparable gig on the Anti Hate Speech Podcast Network in gratitude for all I've sacrificed.

So much for the tolerant, forgiving Left!  Turns out they're just as mean and intolerant as the Klan!

Maybe I'll just refuse to vote for anyone from now on!  That'll show 'em!

Burn The Lifeboats

Shut Up and Go Away

Most of you are no doubt familiar with Tom Friedman's infamous "Suck on this" moment on the now-defunct Charlie Rose Show in May of 2003.  

But but don't sleep on Rose leading Friedman off by confidently asserting, "Now that the war is over...":

At the time, this was the received wisdom of the Beltway Sages.  For example, here is David Brooks writing for Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard in 2003, practically endzone dancing with delight because now that Bush had been proven unequivocally right about everything, boy howdy were those dirty hippies gonna finally get what's coming to them.

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces 

Mass destruction of mistaken ideas. 

APR 28, 2003

... Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are... 

Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

The magic of this piece of persiflage -- and all such super-patriot Salacious B. Crumb caterwauling...

...by all your favorite Neocon pundits back in the day -- is not merely that it got everything wrong, but that it got everything perfectly backwards.  

It's the GOP base/Tea Party/MAGA meatheads that grew more vociferous.  Even President Obama trying to clean up the ruin they left in their wake, and asking nothing more than everyone help out and meet in the middle did not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of the Left (and all the usual fascist scapegoats) is all that is left of Right. 

And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their MAGA rallies, their podcasts, their Hate Radio and their Fox News garbage. They will still have a huge influence over the Republican party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to sane, normal humans who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

And there was never any  magic "Aha!" moment that brought their Neocon dream palaces down.  None of them ever missed a meal.  Most of the got promotions and book deals. No matter how far Democrats extend themselves and offer compromise after compromise to repair the damage the GOP has done to this country, no day will come when Republican politicians, pundits and the base of the party turn around and say, "We were wrong. The Left was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. 

Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The Right's lies and conspiracy theories will get progressively stupider, as the ghouls and grifters who spread them get progressively richer.  And they will backtrack, and reverse themselves again and again. 

They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact...

...they rejected...

...only days before...

2011 video of Trump is going viral after Iran attack:

"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective."pic.twitter.com/QR9v3h0hdo

— Joe Rogan Podcast News (@joeroganhq) February 28, 2026

No Half Measures

H.R. Is Quickly Coming To Mean "Honors Rendered"

Panegyric the right way and you can go back to your desk.  Do it wrong, or disagree, and H.R. will help you pack your shit and show you to the door.

From CBS News:

Multiple firings

A number of employees in a range of industries, as well as in academia, are finding themselves in hot water over remarks they made about Kirk's death or his political beliefs. 

PHNX Sports, an online sports news site focused on Arizona, announced the firing of reporter Gerald Bourguet after he said on social media on Wednesday, in a since-deleted post, that "Refusing to mourn a life devoted to that cause is not the same thing as celebrating gun violence."

"Truly don't care if you think it's insensitive or poor timing to decline to respect an evil man who died," he added.

Bourguet declined to comment when reached by CBS News.

MSNBC said it cut ties with analyst Matthew Dowd after he said in an on-air conversation that Kirk had pushed incendiary speech and that "hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions." In a public statement, Comcast accused Dowd of making "an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event." 

"That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but, ultimately, with respect. We need to do better," Comcast executives said.  

Dowd, the former chief strategist for Republican President George W. Bush, apologized in a Substack post on Friday, saying he hadn't meant to imply Kirk was to blame for the violence that killed him, the AP reported. But Dowd, a long-time political analyst at ABC News before joining MSNBC in 2022, also accused the network of caving to pressure to fire him. 

"The right wing media mob ginned up, went after me on a plethora of platforms, and MSNBC reacted to that mob," he wrote on Substack. "Even though most at MSNBC knew my words were being misconstrued, the timing of my words forgotten ... and that I apologized for any miscommunication on my part, I was terminated by the end of the day."

Also in the media industry, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said in a Substack post Monday that the company dismissed her last week after she spoke out "against political violence, racial double standards, and America's apathy toward guns," noting that she only referred to Kirk once in a separate social media post. 

A spokesperson for the Washington Post declined to comment to CBS News on personnel matters...

Reminds me of nothing so much as the CEO United Way hard-sell that I used to run across back in my days working in the private sector.  The question was never "if", but always "How much?".  Sometimes it was strongly implied, sometimes it was more explicit, but always it was clear what was expected of you if you wanted to keep your job.  

Probably time to remind the what it means to work in an "at will" state.  

The answer may surprise you!

I Am The Liberal Media

David Neiwert Would Like a Word

"There are very few places besides The Bulwark that have been committed to sounding the alarm about right-wing domestic terrorism, about Trump and the MAGA movement and their... and the kind of violent tendencies that he's stoking."  -- Tim Miller, The Bulwark podcast, September 12, 2025

"Sacajawea carried a baby on her back all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And somewhere, that baby thinks he discovered America." -- Bert Cooper, Mad Men.

And Tim Miller is that baby.  

If I looked for a month I don't think I could find a clearer or more succinct example of how completely the Never Trumpers have erased the long history of the Left's critique of the Right than Tim Miller's offhand, self-congratulatory remark about "sounding the alarm".   

Hundreds of Liberal writers and bloggers were sounding the alarm about the dangerous trajectory of the Republican Party back when Tim Miller was bopping through the halls of Regis Jesuit High School rocking out to Ricky Martin and Jamiroquai.  But because the existence of a vast body of urgent, accurate, detailed pre-Trump analysis of the trajectory of the Republican Party would fuck up Never Trumper claims that, A) no one coulda seen this coming and, B) they and only they were the first and boldest humans to ever stand athwart the GOP's Pretty Hate Machine and shout stop...all of those millions of words spilled by Liberals in the deeply unpopular cause of warning the nation about where Republican madness was taking us is just ... disappeared.  

Gone. 

Bulldozed down the Memory Hole and paved over.

And so, in aid of once again transgressing conservatism's #1 rule -- No Fair Remembering Stuff -- here's a little history for whoever at The Bulwark has the duty of monitoring this little blog 'o mine on the downlow.

From Wikipedia:

David Neiwert is an American freelance journalist and blogger. He received the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000 for a domestic terrorism series he produced for MSNBC's website. Neiwert has concentrated in part on extremism in the Northwest.

...He went to work at MSNBC in 1996 as a writer-producer, where he continued through late 2000. Since then, he has focused on writing books and producing his blog Orcinus, which tends to report on the crossover between the mainstream and the far right.

The Northwest Progressive Institute named its annual awards to the region's best liberal bloggers after Neiwert. He edited the political blog Crooks And Liars from 2008 to 2012. As of 2018, Neiwert worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center as their Pacific Northwest correspondent.

In January 2019, Neiwert left the SPLC blog Hatewatch to join Daily Kos as a correspondent...

And speaking of the SPLC, also from Wikipedia:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, it is known for its legal cases against white supremacist groups, for its classification of hate groups and other extremist organizations, and for promoting tolerance education programs.: 1500  The SPLC was founded by Morris Dees, Joseph J. Levin Jr., and Julian Bond in 1971 as a civil rights law firm in Montgomery.

Since the 2000s, the SPLC's classification and listings of hate groups (organizations that "attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics") and anti-government extremists have been widely relied upon by academic and media sources...

You may also remember that, way back during Before Time, the Department of Homeland Security published a report entitled, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment”.  Which, if you were on the left and had been paying any attention at all to American politics for the past few decades, came as no surprise.  

And if you were on the Right, it was an occasion to completely freak out and set the howling dogs of conservative media on those DHS commies who concocted this obvious Lefty propaganda.  Here's a sample:

Michelle Malkin:  “One of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I'd ever read out of DHS.” (Newsweek)

Also Michelle Malkin: “A piece of crap report that serves as a sweeping indictment of conservatives.”  (CBS News)

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH): “To characterize men and women returning home after defending our country as potential terrorists is offensive and unacceptable.” 

Matt Lewis : “This is almost unbelievable. The message is simple: If you are a conservative, you might be dangerous…” (Townhall)  

Resistance hero Bill Kristol dismissed it as “Juvenile.”  (Salon)

Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.): “I am disturbed and personally offended by the Department of Homeland Security's view that returning military veterans and gun owners are likely to commit terrorist acts.”  (PolitiFact) 

Lance Fairchok: “The Homeland Security Assessment targeting mainstream conservatism was amateurish, poorly written and its logic absurdly shallow.” (American Thinker)

Richard Thompson:  “This is not an intelligence report but a diatribe against those who oppose the policies of the Obama administration. It is a declaration of war against the American people and our constitution.” (Thomas More Law Center)

Although they should have expected it, defenders of DHS's findings were still caught flat-footed by the Right's coordinated and aggressive attacks, pointing out that the report was basically just ... math.  The findings were nothing more or less than a narrative explanation of statistics collected by law enforcement and run through spreadsheets and charts and such.  From Daryl Johnson (former DHS analyst) in WIRED: “It was an extremely frustrating time, to see conservatives and media folks taking the report out of context and misinterpreting it.” 

Shoulda asked literally any Liberal bloggers, Daryl.  We coulda warned you that this is always the way the Right reacts to facts it disapproves of.  It's why they lost their mind when Barack Obama was elected.  It's why they nominated Donald Trump three times, and elected him twice.

So, what poisonous fruit was born out of the Right's massed attack on DHS's pre-Trump warning about "Rightwing Extremism"?

From ABC News, January 6, 2022:

DHS official whose early warning about militias was rebuffed speaks out about Jan. 6

More than ten years ago, a report written by a Department of Homeland Security official warning about the resurgence of right-wing extremism caused outrage among conservatives and some veterans groups across the country.

Titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," the report was met with harsh criticism from officials including then-House Minority Leader John Boehner, who accused the agency of not focusing on the "real threats," like Islamist terrorism.

The internal study singled out white supremacists and warned that veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan could be targeted for recruitment by right-wing extremists. But due to the ensuing political backlash, the DHS caved to pressure and dismantled the unit that had published the report -- and all work connected to analyzing and tracking the rise of violent right-wing extremism was halted.

Now, on the anniversary of the day that right-wing militia members helped storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Daryl Johnson, the DHS official who wrote the report, says he and his team could "have repelled against the growth and the radicalization of [extremist] movements."

"We could've helped stem the tide and growth," Johnson told ABC News in an interview for the new ABC News documentary "Homegrown: Standoff to Rebellion," which charts the rise of the anti-government movements at the center of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol...

Johnson said the formation of groups and movements like the Tea Party "serve as a breeding ground and a recruitment pool for more hardline extremists" like the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, dozens of whose members were present on Jan.6.

"These two movements started getting more organized as their membership grew," said Johnson, "and they started actively participating in protest activity, organizing rallies."...

Johnson's DHS report, which was leaked to conservative media, was meant for law enforcement so they could "be prepared for the threat within," Johnson explained.

"And just like a disease or something of harm in our own bodies, this threat metastasized over time," said Johnson. "Year after year, the cancer and the virus spread within the body of America, to the point where we're now in a critical life-or-death situation."

In April, a Washington Post analysis of data compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies revealed a growing threat from homegrown terrorism, with right-wing extremist attacks and plots "greatly eclipsing those from the far left and causing more death."

And that’s the bitter irony. 

Long before The Bulwark rebranded clear-eyed observation and common sense as some kind of uniquely Never Trumper superpower of insight and bravery, Liberals, journalists, watchdog groups, and even DHS itself were documenting, warning, and pleading with America to take right-wing extremism seriously. Those warnings were mocked, buried, or attacked until the threat metastasized into the open violence of January 6th. 

So when Tim Miller congratulates The Bulwark for “sounding the alarm,” what he’s really doing is standing on the rubble of a memory hole his own movement dug -- pretending to discover a country that others had already mapped, at great cost, long before he ever showed up.

I Am The Liberal Media

One if by Land. Two if by Sea. Three if by Hate Radio and Fox News Teevee.

As most of you already know, thanks to his ability to squint really hard and conjure mirages into mountains, and daydreams into deliverers, decade after decade, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has complied an unbroken record of manifesting, out of thin air, one Republican savior after another and one rising Conservative reform "movement" after another.

Of course they're always juuuust around the corner, "deep in the bowels of the G.O.P" or laboring industriously but anonymously away in statehouses, but always on the verge of springing into action. And thanks to Brooks' insider knowledge and special powers of observation, over and over again he has confidently reassured his readers that salvation was definitely heading our way at speed, so ignore those Liberal crackpots and alarmists in the steeple of the Old North Church, shouting and hooting and waving three lanterns.

(You remember the Longfellow poem, right? One if by land.  Two if by sea.  Three if by Hate Radio and Fox News teevee...)

Down through the decades as the danger from the Right very publicly loomed ever closer, the legacy media's message never changed:  Don't you little people worry your little heads about any of that noise, because the Conservative Establishment (whose spokesmodels found a welcoming home on every channel and in every newspaper) has got this!

By 2009, David Brooks' Republican party was already doomed to eventually become the instrument of some monster or another.  It was a roiling shitpile of bigots and imbeciles finishing out their first year of what would be an uninterrupted, eight-year-long hysterical racist primal scream: their reaction to the Democrats electing a Centrist Eisenhower Republican named Barack Obama who wasted his entire first term and much of his second trying to reach out to a mob of angry, racist lunatics who would have none of it, but which the Conservative Establishment kept insisting did not exist.

From his vantage point comfortably ensconced in the Acela Corridor quiet car,  Brooks remained willfully oblivious to all of it, leading a legacy media cottage industry dedicated to looking right past what was obviously happening right in front of them, and instead focusing on a series of Conservatives saviors who were just over the horizon and therefor invisible to mere mortals

Instead...

 

Serious people.  

Quiet conversations.  

"austerity brigades".  Heh.

Even as the Rough Beast -- the end-product of decades of Conservatives handing their politics and media over to monsters like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater and on and on and on -- slouched towards Election Day to be born, this avatar of the legacy media refused to behold what he had helped to create

Brooks, September 2015 with emphasis added for entertainment purposes:

The outsiders are about to slide. Trump’s Don Rickles act wears thin. His ego may be galaxy-sized, but his policy ignorance is a void that overspills the known universe. He’s the Wizard of Oz. When the bluster curtain falls down, what’s left is pathetic...

Instead, the party will veer on a course midway between outsider and establishment. It will probably end up with some hybrid candidate — sharp of tongue, gifted in self-expression and yet still anchored in the world of reality...

That’s where Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio come in. So far, Fiorina has looked like the most impressive candidate. She has a genius for creating signature moments. (“If you want to stump a Democrat, ask them to name an accomplishment of Mrs. Clinton’s.”) But her spotty record at Hewlett-Packard probably means she can’t start at the top of the ticket.

Dig this coo-coo diagnosis of Little Marco: 

Rubio is young and thus uncorrupted, and he is a genius at relating policy depth in a way that is personal. He has clarity of mind and can sum up a complex subject — Russia, the Middle East — in a way that is comprehensible but not oversimplified.

This debate was one moment in time, but you can see the vectors of where this campaign is headed. This is no longer Bob Dole’s or George H.W. Bush’s G.O.P. But it’s not going to completely lose its mind, either.

Narrator:  Brooks' Republican Party had, in fact, already completely lost its mind long ago.  

It’s going to be somewhat the same, but edgier and more renegade. Right now, Rubio, Fiorina and maybe Chris Christie are best positioned to occupy that space.

Sometimes the amount of money, time, energy and professional integrity that legacy media has been willing to burn through -- and is still burning through -- to keep people who wrong all along in the spotlight, and, as a corollary, the keep people who were inconveniently right all along the hell out of the  spotlight...takes my breath away.

Burn The Lifeboats

Lying Liars And The Shitheads Who Always Fall For Them

This "story" is currently being circulated on FaceBook.  Needless to say, it's all a pack of god damn lies. 

Like all such MAGA sucker bait, it's littered with all sorts of shiny garbage: unattributed quotes. leaks, whistleblowers, assertions of nonexistent evidence, and whispers of dark and terrible conspiracies lurking out there in the dark:

a bombshell discovery...

Elon Musk reportedly accessed an archived administrative interface...

...agitators hired to infiltrate and disrupt peaceful demonstrations. 

The “No Kings” protests, organized by a coalition of anti-authoritarian grassroots group...organizers now say the movement is being hijacked.

 According to leaked messages and whistleblower testimony...

...anonymous donors and shadowy intermediaries...

Security experts and movement leaders are sounding the alarm...

...said one protest coordinator, who asked to remain anonymous for safety reasons. “They want to frame Trump for the fallout, create a martyr, and fracture the movement from within.”

...a deeper question emerges: who benefits from destabilizing a democratic protest, and how far will they go to rewrite the narrative?

And even though it depends entirely on assertions of sleuthing by Elon Musk sheathed in a wad of computer doubletalk, there is no sign anywhere of any of it.  Not even on Elmo's own fascist shithole, where he has never shown any compunction about trafficking in all kinds of ridiculous lies.  

It was concocted by a wannabe Joe McCarthy allegedly named "Jonathan Gregory" who bills himself as "Digital Content Creator for the Trump Administration" and "@newsmax"?

The reason I'm posting this is because it is one of those events, like the birth of a star, that one rarely catches in its infancy.    We usually hear about the lies MAGA tells only after they've matured a little.  Gained a large enough following among the Garbage People  to be elevated to the status of NewsMax or Fox News fodder.  

But in this case, as Seaman Jones says in The Hunt For Red October, I'd say we hit a boomer coming out of the barn.   Because as of this writing, this bullshit exists in only two places where Google goes to look for things.

However, even though, as of this writing, this pack of lies has only been gestating for about eight hours, it has already found its way through the veins and capillaries of the Conservative media ecosystem and on to my local area social media, where it is being taken as gospel by area MAGA goofs.

Which is reason #87,454 why we here on the side of the angels really must stop deluding ourselves int believing that MAGA filth can be reasoned with, or in any way dealt with as sentient adult humans.   

I Am The Liberal Media.

And the Keynote Speaker at the Sangamon County Republican Lincoln Day Dinner This Year Is...

This guy.

Loves, loves, loves his warrior "brother" Whiskey Mango Hegseth.

What kind of guy is @PeteHegseth ? He’s the kind of guy that worked in an industry known for insecurity and undercutting your peers and decided to be the opposite.

From day one he could’ve looked at me as “another vet” trying to poach his opportunities, but without hesitation…

— Joey Jones (@Johnny_Joey) November 16, 2024

Loves, loves, loves Il Douche...

They said he was an unqualified and couldn’t do the the job.
They called him racist and a bigot.
They used salacious accusations that were proven false to attack his character.
They used his failed marriages to say his hates women.
They found a member of his family to use…

— Joey Jones (@Johnny_Joey) December 4, 2024

Despises Joe Biden...

If @JoeBiden threatened the Taliban the way he just threatened Americans who don’t want to wear a mask or get the vax he might have ended the war in Afghanistan.

— Joey Jones (@Johnny_Joey) September 9, 2021

You have disgraced our people and dishonored our sacrifice. You are a weak lying snake oil salesman and we see you. We see who you are now more than even. God have mercy on your soul, 50 years is a long time to lie, cheat and steal from your own people. @JoeBiden

— Joey Jones (@Johnny_Joey) August 31, 2021

And, just for fun, drops a big hint as to why Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney failed to flip Republican votes:

When you die OF OLD AGE you’ll be buried with Halliburton money. Your kids and grandkids will inherent Halliburton money. When you cry at night over means tweets, you’ll wipe your tears with Halliburton money. My friends in Arlington died earning Halliburton more money. https://t.co/m9lUJDOsgm

— Joey Jones (@Johnny_Joey) November 1, 2024

I'm sure he'll be a huge hit with the local meatheads.  After all, this is the big local Republican fundraiser, and donation and sponsorship options remain the same as last year when their keynote speaker was Trump's very own then-soon-to-be brownshirt deportation goon, Tom Homan.

The year before that the headliner was serial liar and David Plouffe's bestest podcast buddy, Kelleyanne Conway..

The year before that, it was Charlie Kirk, which I wrote about at the time.

And before Chuckles Kirk it was Candace Owens, which I also wrote about at the time

And before that it was Jason Chaffetz, one-time congressperson and Fox News troll who I believe now lives in Donald Trump's underwear drawer, which, yep, wrote about that one too.

The year before that it was Fox News in-house train-wreck/barfly,  Jeanine Pirro.  Wrote about that.

The year before that wingnut-network-job-hopper and H.R. Haldeman stunt-double, Corey Lewandowski.

The year before that, in 2016, it was none other than Fox News prime-time Gorgon and Keith Olbermann's former girlfriend, Laura Ingraham.
 
And on and on and on.

If you were ever curious about how we out here in the cornfields have been so consistently, dead-on accurate for decades with our predictions about the trajectory of the Republican Party, while our elite professional political media has been so repeatedly and catastrophically wrong about the GOP, it's really pretty simple.  Unlike our our elite professional political media, we actually live out here in the real world, chock-a-block with real Republicans who have never been shy about what they really believe.   

In fact, as I was writing up this obscenity last year, the Hugh Hewitt Show was playing on one of the two big radio station in the area.  He's on 9AM-12PM, Monday through Friday.  And if I didn't want to listen to Hewitt, I could always tune in to the other big radio station in the area where, at that moment, the Brian Kilmeade Show was playing.  He's on 9AM-11AM, Monday through Friday.  

Later in the day, on the first station, you get Sean Hannity followed by Mark Levin.  

Later in the day on the other station you get Dana Loesch followed by Erick Erickson 

The first station pads out it's weekend offerings with America First with Sebastian Gorka, The Larry Kudlow Show, Newsmax's own Chris Plante on the Chris Plante Show and, hilariously. The Weekend with Michael [Heckuva Job, Brownie] Brown.  Now that Gorka has been hired by the Trump regime to scare small children, I dunno is he's still on the air.

The second station takes its foot off the wingnut gas over the weekend with shows like American Family Farmer,  Let’s Talk Cosmetic Dentistry and The Jesus Christ Show, but it does find room late on Sunday night for Judge Jeanine Pirro.

This is the ambient radio environment out here in much of the real world -- the poison that Republicans out here in the real world are steeping in every day --  and it's been this way for going on 40 years now. 

And there is absolutely no fucking way to fail to notice it, unless your job as an elite political media professional is to deliberately fail to notice it.  

I Am The Liberal Media

 

 

Our New National Symbol

The Statue of Fealty.

Financed, built, installed and zealously defended by the Republican Party and its media collaborators.

Burn The Lifeboats

I Am So Confused

One hears a great deal these days about Democrats failing because we don't talk like "regular people".  

For example, here is John Fetterman being quoted by Fox News...which, in turn, is quoting The New York Times.  Which is all just super helpful.

Fetterman says Democrats lost male voters by being insulting, condescending

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., believes the Democratic Party has turned off male voters by being "insulting."

In a new interview with The New York Times, the lawmaker stated that liberals turned off male voters, who supported President-elect Donald Trump in droves. 

"Telling them that ‘I know better than you do,’ that’s not helpful," Fetterman said, characterizing what he saw as the party’s approach to courting men.

This genus of punditing is currently in vogue and to be found everywhere.  Like "Joe is too old!" and "But her emails" and 'Why won't Obama lead?" and "It's going to be Rubio!" and "Live, from this Ohio diner...", it's every two-bit opinion-haver's cheap and lazy way to fill column inches, but it leaves me very confuse.  So I'd appreciate it if someone would explain it to me.

Slowly.

Using little words.  

As if I were a Florida Republican.

First, well, this isn't really a question.  It's just that I can't help but notice how so many of the people hectoring non-specific "Democrat" and "Liberals" as being too snobby and condescending are themselves some of the most condescending humans extant.  Looking at you, panel of Mona Charen's "Beg to Differ" Bulwark podcast.  Looking at you, Ezra Klein, and the Time's op-ed page.  Looking at you, Pod Save kidz.  And Morning Joe has every flavor of condescension you could ever want.  The braying, talking-over-everyone condescension of Joey Scabs himself.  The mousy condescension of his sidekick.  And whole chorus of condescension from their regular panelists.

Second, I've also noticed how quickly you, John Fetterman, jumped from condemning "the Democratic party" to slagging nonspecific "liberals", and then back to "the party" again.  Put a pin in that: we'll get back to it.

Third, if arrogant and dismissive and outright repulsive language is so damn off-putting, John Fetterman, I gotta ask: have you ever actually heard how the Right talks about us America-hating, terrorist-loving, filthy, socialist, commie pedophile baby-killers?   Because it may surprise you!  Of course you may have missed it since they've only been talking about us this way, very openly, for the last 30-40 years.  

On the radio.  

On teevee. 

In print.  

On podcasts.  

Shall I go on?

So, fourth, why it's only condescending and off-putting when Democrats hit back?

Fifth, how is it every two-bit opinion-haver in Murrica is always very lavish condemning "the Democratic party"and/or "liberals" generally, but can never seem to get around to identifying any specific Democrat or liberal by name or title?   Who are these people, John Fetterman?  Where do they live?  What do they do for a living?  If you've got specific names and addresses, I'd be happy run over and tell them to cut it out.  Y'know, one condescending liberal to another?

Sixth and last, just exactly how does Slack Jawed Cletus from Sisterfuck, Arkansas know what the hell liberals are saying about him, or about anything, anyway?  Are there liberals with sound trucks rolling through the shitty, potholed streets of Sisterfuck, Arkansas, promiscuously shouting big words and smarty-pants phrases  like "epistemic" and "counterfactual" and "bounded rationality" and "disenthrall" just to make the locals feel stupid?  Are liberal women swarming the local pickup bars, quoting Bell Hooks and making fun of the male denizen's tiny penises? 

Or, as is 1000% more likely, Slack Jawed Cletus from Sisterfuck, Arkansas has never actually  encountered a real-life snooty, condescending liberal in the flesh.  But Cletus watches a lot of teevee.  NewsMax, mostly, with some Fox for Sean and Jesse and the hot ladies.  And when he's out on Cletus business, he listens to one of the three local station, all of which carry sports and Conservative talk.  

And all of the media Cletus has consumes all day long, every day, for decades, tells him that, out there somewhere, millions of uppity, condescending liberals are plotting against him and laughing at him behind his back.  

Cletus' media will include tiny snips of actual Democrats saying crazy, insulting things like "the 2020 election was not rigged" and "Donald Trump is a criminal" and "January 6th was an insurrection"  and "inflation is coming down" when everyone knows none of that is true!  And Cletus knows that everyone knows that none of this is true because all of it will be repeated over and over and over again, in different ways, on all the garbage propaganda Cletus gobbles up like Christmas ham.

Inevitably, the outraged bellowing from Sisterfuck, Arkansas will slop over into the legacy media and a fleet of Zeitgeist Media Action Vans will be dispatched from the East coast to interview a whole passel of Cletuses in a bunch of local diners.  From there, Cletus' down-to-earth, recited-by-rote wisdom will make its way into the comments of quotable, high-profile people who won't scold Cletus for being a dumbass who listens to liars, but will instead blame Democrats and liberals for being pompous and highfalutin.   

And the circle of life will once again be complete.

If you would like a blueprint of how this process works, including a complete list of materials and tools, just send $64 to the...  

Burn The Lifeboats Fund

Or you could just go here ("Joe Walsh and The Triumphant Return of Joey Tabula Rasa") to a post in which I wrote about a specific, traceable example of this phenomenon.  A fragment of a speech by Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm was taken wildly out of context by one conservative asshole.  It was passed upward through the Conservative media digestive system until it was allegedly overheard by one of Joe Walsh's many, nameless, imaginary just-plain-workin'-folk friends who, like Tom Friedman's many imaginary cab drivers, always just so happens to say exactly what Walsh wants to yell at Democrats about on any given day.

And on this particular day, Walsh transmogrified that entire daisy-chair of fiction, fake outrage and nonsense into yet another tirade about how out-of-touch Democrats are with the just plain regular American proletariats.  

In that post I break down that whole process, and you can go read it for yourself for free.  However, if you are inclined to send along $64 or more, I wouldn't think less of you.   

UPDATE:  Jim from the comments makes an important point.  When you consider the vast, empty expanse of all the things about which Cletus is dead-rat ignorant -- "Cletus doesn't know Trump is a convicted rapist. Cletus doesn't know Trump spent $160 million on NFL TV ads bashing TWO (that's right 2) trans prisoners who continued their transition treatments in prison following the TRUMP Administration's guidelines. Cletus also doesn't know Trump is convicted on 34 felony counts." and so forth -- how is it that Cletus doesn't know fuck all about anything, but is 100% for damn sure that some college professor out there at Hah-vahd spends all his days and nights cackling about Cletus not using the right pronouns.    

The Razors Are Moving

As longtime readers of this blog know, the easiest way to spot a bad faith Both Siderist hack in the wild is to peruse their work for the Both Siderist "razor in the apple".

OK, to be 100% fair the truly easiest way to spot a bad faith Both Siderist hack in the wild is to notice telltale signs like "Opinion columnist at The New York Times" or "host of Katy Tur Reports" or "Chris Cillizza" in their bio.  But the second easiest way to spot 'em is the quickscan their column or podcast or whatever to locate the inevitable Both Sides Do It"razor in the apple".  

If you look, you will almost always find it.  It's both a ritual and a contractual obligation.  Like the Introductory Rites and Concluding Rites of a traditional Catholic Mass, the absence of a Both Siderist razor in the apple would be the shocking aberration, not its presence.  

And, in the case of Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times, for a while there I got to be eerily good at predicting what the subject of his next razor in the apple would be, and in which paragraph he would make that turn.  That I could do this magic trick -- predict the size, shape and subject of a Brooks column before it was published and tell you within a couple of column inches where he would inject the poison -- amazed my wife (no small thing) but, I think, also freaked her out a little.

But it wasn't really a magic trick.  It was just that Brooks is so utterly, utterly, utterly, utterly, predictably banal.  Like the press and die of a metal stamping machine that spits out 1,000 screwdrivers an hour, or the filling heads of a bottling machine, the whole reason for the existence of creatures like Brooks is to reliably hammer home exactly the same bullshit over and over again, decade after decade.

And here I am going to borrow a line which Brother Charlie Pierce used in a different context in his excellent Esquire column today:

We’ve wandered into a deranged political version of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, in which we are warned:

“Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.”

Interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable.

Yep.  That is indeed the pernicious labor of the professional Both Siderist, captured neatly in a phrase.

But I've noticed a change.  Interesting to me only, perhaps, but I've noticed that the Both Siderists seem to be burying their razors further and further down.  Even tacking it on to the tail end of whatever they're writing or saying as if, of yeah, I'm still required to tell this stupid lie aren't I?  So they toss it on the table practically as they're walking out the door.  I would speculate that it even feels like an act done with a sense of shame...but we all know that professional Both Siderists are untroubled by emotions like shame or guilt.

I'll give you two examples and you can judge for yourself.  Both from New York Times employees.  Both named "David".  One, a printed column, and the other, parting remarks on a podcast.

In The New York Times today, Mr. David Brooks opens his column by tripping over a fact that Liberals have been shouting about for decades

I had hoped this election would be a moment of national renewal. I had hoped that the Democrats could decisively defeat MAGA populism and send us down a new national path.

That’s clearly not going to happen. No matter who wins this election, it will be close, and this is still going to be an evenly and bitterly divided nation.

In retrospect, I think I was expecting too much of politics...

And as usual, we Liberals have warehouses full of receipts explaining in excruciating detail exactly how our country got to be this way.

Let me explain.  

No.  There is too much.  Let me summarize.

The deplorable state we are in is all down to David Brooks' former party -- the Republican Party -- which David Brooks swore in 2014 had "detoxified" itself, and David Brooks' conservative movement, which he has been swearing every few months since Christ was in short pants would be flowering into a full-on renaissance of awesomeness any minute now.

For more on this subject, try here: "In The Beginning..."

Brooks then takes his readers on a typical Brooksian "America: A Land of Contrasts" speed tour through the late 19th and early 20th centuries:

For example, the Settlement House movement, led by women like Jane Addams of Chicago...

moguls like J.P. Morgan...

Philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller...

By the time Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901...

Before finally arriving at the razor in the apple in the very past paragraph of this forgettable mishmash.

For a whole society to change, the people in the society have to want to change themselves. A smug, self-satisfied, “I am right” nation is going to be perennially stuck in place.

This is Brooks prescription for social change: everyone has to simultaneously agree to change all at once, and everyone [meaning Democrats] needs to stop going around claiming that we anti-fascists are right and that the fascists are wrong in that smug, self-satisfied way of ours. 

The other David is Mr. David French, also now of The New York Times, who had a long and not-particularly-interesting conversation with Mr. Tim Miller of the MSNBC Green room about...stuff.  Mostly about the intractability of the zombie Republican base.  About how creepy it is that absolutely nothing can or will budge them.  

Miller: It's just, to me, it's, like so obvious that if you see the Trump threat, like, why aren't there more of us?  Why are there so why are there so few of us? I guess that's my final question.  Do you do you have any clarity for me on that?

As you might imagine, I have many thoughts as to why this is so, which neither Mr. French nor Mr. Miller would want to hear, but that's not where we are going today.

So, as Miller and French are wrapping up, French is explaining that, as cynical as he is, he was surprised at the intensity of the backlash that was (and is) directed at him now that he has finally endorsed Kamala Harris (you may remember that French was one of those whiny Republican hard-cases who pissed away their vote in 2016 and 2020 by voting third-party.)

Which would have been an excellent place to stop.  

But Both Siderist can't stop, can they?  They have this kind of compulsive false-equivalence logorrhea 

And so...

French:  And I think Tim what we constantly underestimate, just because it's kind of hard to wrap our minds around, animosity at the level of intensity that we see.  We constantly underestimate the raw animosity that exists on the Republican side for Democrats and by the way on the Democratic side for Republicans.

Yes, even before Trump, French says, Both Sides hated each other.  

So where did all that anger on Both Sides come from?

French says, three or four times, that it's "negative polarization" which is defined as:

Whereas traditional partisanship involves supporting the policy positions of one's own party, its negative counterpart in turn means opposing those positions of a disliked party.

There's is not even a passing acknowledgment of the decades of labor men like David French poured into turning the Republican base into an army of reprogrammable meatbags whose reflexive response to the word "Democrat" is "Marxist!Commie!Socialist!Monster!"

Or, as Never Trumper Hero #1 Liz Cheney was describing us until about five minutes ago, baby-murdering filth who are "the face of pure evil":

Instead of correctly diagnosing what the fuck happened to the Republican party as the end product of a decades-long Republican campaign of calculated, premeditated and well-funded demonization of Democrats -- and Democratic reacting to the rise of this American fascist party by despising fascists as any patriot should -- French whisks all that inconvenient history away with the magic conjure words "negative polarization" which is a mysterious thing that apparently just happens.  You know, like an ill-timed fart at a funeral or the like the description of the wind from John, 3:8

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.

The Both Siderist razors on the apples are shifting location, kids.

But they are most definitely still there. 

I Am The Liberal Media

Even Stranger Wine: The Late Stage Teevee Brain

This is an excerpt from my late friend Harlan Ellison's introduction to his book Strange Wine: 

Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look so Terrific Yourself.

I used to know Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza. He was a wise and a kind man, and there are tens of dozens of people I would much rather see dead than Dan. One time, around lunch-break at Paramount, when I was goofing off on writing a treatment for a Joe Levine film that never got made, and Dan was resting his ass from some dumb horsey number he'd been reshooting all morning, we sat on the steps of the weathered saloon that probably in no way resembled any saloon that had ever existed in Virginia City, Nevada, and we talked about reality versus fantasy. The reality of getting up at five in the morning to get to the studio in time for makeup call and the reality of how bloody much FICA tax they took out of our paychecks and the reality of one of his kids being down with something or other . . . and the fantasy of not being Dan Blocker, but of being Hoss Cartwright.

And he told me a scary story. He laughed about it, but it was the laugh of butchers in a slaughterhouse who have to swing the mauls that brain the beeves; who then go home to wash the stink out of their hair from the spattering.

He told me–and he said this happened all the time, not just in isolated cases–that he had been approached by a little old woman during one of his personal appearances at a rodeo, and the woman had said to him, dead seriously, "Now listen to me, Hoss: when you go home tonight, I want you to tell your daddy, Ben, to get rid of that Chinee fella who cooks for you all. What you need is to get yourself a good woman in there can cook up some decent food for you and your family."

So Dan said to her, very politely (because he was one of the most courteous people I've ever met), "Excuse me, ma'am, but my name is Dan Blocker. Hoss is just the character I play. When I go home I'll be going to my house in Los Angeles and my wife and children will be waiting."

And she went right on, just a bit affronted because she knew all that, what was the matter with him, did he think she was simple or something, "Yes, I know . . . but when you go back to the Ponderosa, you just tell your daddy Ben that I said . . . "

For her, fantasy and reality were one and the same...

Bonanza ran from September 12, 1959, to January 16, 1973.   That's 14 seasons and 431 episodes; the second longest running Western television series in U.S. network history.  It was also the first Western series televised in living color.  So, this conversation probably happened sometime in the mid- or late-1960s.   Back when teevee was still a magic box that brought you Three!Count!'Em!Three! networks to choose from.  When color teevee was still a rarity.  When Blocker would come into your home as Hoss Cartwright every week, year after year.   

You would have known who Hoss was and what he was about.

Another part of your brain would have also known who Walter Cronkite was and what he was about. He was serious. The news mattered. And however addled you might get, you'd never have mixed up the news of the day with life on the Ponderosa.  But somehow, through the magic of teevee, sometimes some element of that fictional drama on teevee would get to feeling familiar and real.  Especially if it was part of an ongoing drama that you spent time with over and over again for years.

Even though a part of that teevee brain knew it wasn't, it seemed like it was 

This was a principle theme of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.  

Mildred kicked at a book. “Books aren’t people. You read and I look around, but there isn’t anybody! . . . Now. . . my “family” is people. They tell me things; I laugh, they laugh! And the colours!”

 

The "family" she's referring to is the television program that's playing all day, every day on the walls of her "parlor".

Back to Ellison:

There was a woman who had the part of a home-wrecker on a daytime soap opera. One day as she was coming out of Lord & Taylor in New York, a viewer began bashing her with an umbrella, calling her filthy names and insisting she should leave that nice man and his wife alone!

One time during a college lecture, I idly mentioned that I had actually thought up all the words Leonard Nimoy had spoken as Mr. Spock on the sole Star Trek segment I had written; and a young man leaped up in the audience, in tears, and began screaming that I was a liar. He actually thought the actors were living those roles as they came across the tube.

The teevee brain is still with us, but in some incredibly toxic ways it has changed.  It has evolved to deal with 300 channels instead of three, and in the process, the teevee brain has, in a way, reversed the flow of credulity.  

Today, teevee viewers are used to seeing the same actor play many different parts in many different places.  No one is trying to arrest Bryan Cranston for cooking meth or Idris Elba for running a Baltimore drug empire, because [spoiler] A) both of the characters they played died in-series, and B) both actors (especially Elba) are well known for a variety of other standout roles.  

Similarly there is no confusion over who Julia Louis-Dreyfus is.  Or Edie Falco.  Or Danny DeVito.  They are talented professionals, who can put on a costume and inhabit a role that makes us laugh or cry or both. What we feel while we are being entertained is real, but by now the teevee brain knows that the actors are not the characters.  They're playing a part, and then they'll move on to the next part.  Different costume, different character, different feelings.  Then they'll move on once again.  Maybe a movie this time.  Maybe the stage.  

What the teevee brain now processes coming through the magic box is an overwhelming, kaleidoscopic tsunami of comedies, dramas, biopics, animation, docudramas, reality teevee, politics, westerns, news, science fiction, reruns, ancient aliens, cooking shows, bitchy housewives, wealth porn, porn porn, all stitched together with a million ads for better sex, sad dogs, happy dogs, eczema cures, floppy penis cures, baldness cures and Little Pills with Big Stories to Tell.

It's all just teevee.  

And the teevee brain has learned to expect performers to go from one role to the next, just as the sports brain has learned to expect that today's heel who pitches or QBs for our rival, might be tomorrow's hero when he's traded to our team and performs his miracles for us.  We'll cheer them when they play the hero, and boo them when they play the villain, but there are no world-ending stakes because it's all a game.  All just teevee.  And when they come through the magic box, the teevee brain accepts them for who they are now, not for who they were in their last series or when they wore a different number on their jersey.  

As I said, the teevee brain has reversed the flow of credulity: it now values how the performance makes it feel over whether or not the performance is strictly "real".

And the teevee brain doesn't care whether the person on the screen right now has ever been in anything else.  It is impossible to imagine watching, say, this season of Fargo with someone who rolls their eyes at Juno Temple's amazing performance because, "Who's she trying to fool?  Everybody knows that's Keely Whatshername from Ted Lasso.  I mean, she's not even American?!?  And OMG, that guy's not a sheriff.  That's Don Draper!" 

Now hold that thought in your mind while considering this story, which, if you're of a certain age, you might remember as making national news 26 years ago:

This is during the same period when when television networks began demanding that news division start showing a profit.  

From Nieman Reports, a quarter of a century ago:

The Transformation of Network News

How Profitability Has Moved Networks Out of Hard News

Twenty years ago, there was no network news “business.” The Big Three broadcast television networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—all covered news, but none generally made money doing so. Nor did they expect to turn a profit from news programming. They presented news programming for the prestige it would bring to their network, to satisfy the public-service requirements of Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, and more broadly so that they would be seen as good corporate citizens.

Back then, the networks earned enough money from entertainment programming that they could afford to run their news operations at a loss. And so they did. Former CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb recalls Owner and Chairman William Paley instructing news reporters at a meeting in the early 1960’s that they shouldn’t be concerned about costs. “I have Jack Benny to make money,” he told them.

It is no exaggeration to say that just about everything has changed since then. Today, ABC, CBS and NBC operate in a competitive environment in which most viewers have dozens of channels from which to choose. That has transformed not just TV news but the entire television industry. Those most severely threatened by the way the broadcast business operates are the Big Three. The ABC and CBS networks (now subsumed into larger corporate structures) are losing money, according to Wall Street analysts. NBC’s network profits are also falling sharply. Those who own these networks—Disney (ABC), CBS Inc. with its major stockholder, Mel Karmazin, and General Electric (NBC)—all demand that their news operations make money...

So that's what was happening to the news.  And it's no secret when the line separating "actor/entertainer" and "politician" began to collapse:

Conservative media figured this out the minute Reagan and his henchmen killed the Fairness Doctrine.  Radio and teevee were powerful tools for making listeners and viewers feel something, and that's exactly what Rush Limbaugh and all his imitators, and Fox News and all their imitators sold their customers.  Feelings.  

While Democrats were out there trying to sell policy solutions to actual problems,  Fox News was selling its customers rage and thinly-veiled racism.  Paranoia.  Patriotism.  Moral superiority.  Sexual arousal.  The vindictive joy of making Liberals cry.  And because the consumers of Conserative media were also the base of the Republican party, the language of Republican politics quickly became indistinguishable from the language of Fox News and Hate Radio. 

From The New York Times, December 12, 1994:

Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh

...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...

At this point the trajectory was clear.  As traditional news networks became more and more focused on entertaining and soothing their viewers rather than alienating them with information that made them uncomfortable, the Republican party devolved further and further into a for-profit division of Conservative Media, Inc. incorporated.  

Tony Snow could go from having his own show on Fox News and being the primary guest host of Rush Limbaugh's radio program, to being George W. Bush's press secretary and no one said "boo".

Karl Rove could go from being "Bush's Brain" in the White House ...  to Wall Street Journal contributor and Fox News political analyst ... to advisor to Donald Trump's 2020 presidential campaign, without breaking stride.  

And as the language that brought the Republican customers into the tent and kept them there -- the language of  rage, racism and paranoia -- was amped up and up and up, the mainstream media kept increasing the dosage of the anesthetizing language it uses to hang onto its customers.  Over and over again, mainstream news customers are told that there is nothing to be alarmed about.  That whatever noise you might be hearing on the Right, it's just a kooky fringe, which is loud but mostly harmless, and just as loud and just as mostly harmless as the kooky fringe on the Left.  And you all are safe from all that mishegoss here beneath the sheltering bower of the Sensible Center.

And anyway, it's all just teevee.  There's nothing dangerous going on here.  No need to raise an alarm.  It's just actors changing costumes.  Everyone knows the four walls of our democracy are solid and eternal.  Everyone know the inerrant, Capraesque wisdom of the American people will always kick in during the third act and save the day, so nothing really really bad can happen here.  Things might get weird every now and then, but the stakes aren't really real life or death, so remain calm and keep shopping.  

And this dynamic goes on and on until we arrive at a place where the entire Republican party can go very publicly insane and plunge right off the cliff into out-and-out fascism...while the Great Middle of America still can't decide whether to go with Biden or Trump, because aren't both parties pretty much the same?

Never doubt that the people at the helms of the media corporations and the political party that brought us to this precipice began this project decades ago with very definite agendas in mind.  Eliminating taxes on the wealthy.  Deregulating everything.  Gutting social programs.  And for the leaders of  Conservative Media Inc., turning the Republican base into a zombie army of reprogrammable meatbags who would believe any nonsense that was shit into their skulls as long as it made them feel righteous or furious or giddy began as nothing more as a means to those ends.  

But now -- as we on the Left warned them over and over again would happen -- the leaders of  Conservative Media Inc. have lost control of the monster they made.  Now, feeding the insatiable, junkie-hunger of that rage-drunk mob has become an end in itself.  It's either feed the monster, or lose your seat in congress.  

Feed the monster, or watch your audience share drop as the mob finds someone else to tell them what they want to hear.  

Feed the monster, or they'll come for your family.   From The Washington Post:

The role of violent threats in Trump’s GOP reign, according to Republicans

Tim Alberta is out with his latest must-read this week — a profile of freshman Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.). Meijer joined Congress just days before the Capitol insurrection and almost immediately jeopardized his political career by supporting Donald Trump’s impeachment

It’s a must-read, but a tough read. That’s because it describes an exceedingly ugly situation: one in which lawmakers are disregarding private principle in their votes and often doing so out of literal fear. Not only does Meijer describe members who advocated for invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office later voting against impeachment, but he cites fears of physical violence directly impacting such votes...

This is the late stage teevee brain of the MAGA mob.  Completely immune to facts.  Lost to reason.  Unmoored from their own past.   Moved to action entirely by the ganglia-twitching trigger-words they get from the magic box.  

Meanwhile, bathed in the soothing, narcotic hum of Both Siderism, the late stage teevee brain of the mainstream media customer is barely aware that any of this is happening.  And if it is, well it can't possibly be as bad as all that...because...uh...Both Sides Both Sides Both Sides.

And finally, let's not forget that late stage teevee brain is what makes it possible for "liberal" MSNBC to run a full-time reputation laundromat for a whole menagerie of current and recently-former Republican scumbags.  For example, does anyone doubt that, sooner or later, Steve Schmidt's old friend Nicole Wallace will find a way to get his mendacious, grifting ass readmitted yet again into the circle of the Heroes of the Resistance?  Just like she has already done?   Twice?

Remember, Schmidt was the GOP mercenary that put Sarah Palin into our lives.

Boo!

But then he Came to Jebus and started calling Trump a poopy head on MSNBC, and almost as one, Liberals on social media threw themselves at him like a drunk prom date.  

Yay!

He loves us!  He says all these beautiful things that no one else says!  OMG, let me get my checkbook and how much should I make it out for?

And my oh my didn't these same credulous dopes loudly and angrily scold those few of us that could not fucking believe they were falling for this guy.

Then he threw all those pretty words out the window for a Howard Schultz payday.

Boo!  

He said he loved us?  How could he have betrayed us like that?  

But Howard Schultz show eventually closed down and once again Steve Schmidt found himself "at liberty" as the vaudevillians used to say.  

And so, once more through the MSNBC Reputation Rehab Laundry and...he's back baby!  

Yay!

Spinning all those beautiful words.  Saying things that no one else has the guts to say!  OMG, do you prefer Venmo or PayPal!!

And once again, I'm over here in my little corner of the internet wondering how the hell are these otherwise intelligent mopes falling for this con man again?

Then Schmidt threw all those pretty words out the window for a Dean Philips payday.

Boo!  

He said he loved us?  How could he have betrayed us like this?

Schmidt could do this, because Shmidt understands late stage teevee brain.  He was a performer, playing the role of Hero of the Resistance.  The pay was good.  The hours were good.  The reviews were good.  Then he got offered a better part as Howard Schultz's political consultant.  Six weeks.  No heavy lifting.  And when that show closed, Schmidt changed back into his Hero of the Resistance costume at MSNBC.

And the late stage teevee brain was willing to go along with it because, really, it's just teevee.  So whatever parts he had played before in any other teevee drama, what did that matter?  At that moment Steve Schmidt was giving the audience the feels it craved, and that's all that mattered.

You can go right down the line at CNN and at MSNBC and watch this happening.  Joe Scarborough. Bill Kristol.  Matthew Dowd.  Michael Steele, who will now be given his own weekend show.   Liz Cheney was a performer who worked for the political division of Conservative Media, Inc. and when she played that part she repeated the horrifying, unforgivable lies about Democrats.  

Now Cheney is this month's hot property on the not-Fox News cable news and book circuit, and she's playing that part by spilling the beans about what went on behind closed door while she was the third most powerful person in the GOP.

This is why it doesn't really surprised me when I see someone like Chris Cuomo saying trash like this:

Chris Cuomo: “I don’t think there’s any greater risk to America with [Trump] than with Biden."

I didn't realize Chris Cuomo is such a moron. A second Trump term would be 1000 times worse than the first. pic.twitter.com/uVL7pzGO3Y

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 1, 2023

Cuomo is a media creature and he understands the various species of late stage teevee brain.  He knows that, in the long run, whatever outrageous garbage he spews today to hang into the spotlight a minute longer, it won't be a barrier to being welcomed back into the media insider club tomorrow.  A change of costume and a new script and he'll be right back in the good graces of enough credulous chumps to make it worth his while.  

After all, it's just teevee.

I Am The Liberal Media