...Even The Police Began To Sit Up And Take Notice.

 

Some professional journalism types are just now starting to play catch-up, bless their hearts.

To demonstrate this phenomenon, we first have to do some of that No Fair Remembering Stuff.

This is an excerpt from WHYY Boston's Philadelphia's* PBS station, from December of 2014.  And it is recounting events going back to 2001 and 2002:

But the thing is, Dick Cheney always Knows. 

 

His brand is blind certitude – “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” “We will in fact be greeted as liberators,” and the rest of his greatest hits – yet Meet the Press continues to indulge him. Which brings me to yesterday’s most groan-worthy moment.

At one point, host Chuck Todd asked Cheney whether he has any regrets about toppling Saddam Hussein. Cheney naturally said no, because Hussein “had previously had twice nuclear programs going. He produced and used weapons of mass destruction. And he had a ten-year relationship with Al Qaeda.” (Italics are mine.)

For more than a decade on Meet the Press, Cheney has been peddling variations of that lie – the lie that Hussein plotted 9/11 with Al Qaeda – in order to justify the ruinous invasion of Iraq. And he’s still doing it. And his hosts are still letting him get away with it.

Most notoriously, in December 2001 and in September 2002, Cheney said on the show that it was “pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had met in Prague with a Saddam secret agent “several months before the attack.” Actually, it had not been confirmed. As the bipartisan 9/11 Commission reported in 2004, the Atta-Hussein connection had been nothing more than a rumor.

The 9/11 Commission said that Al Qaeda and the Hussein regime had occasionally communicated over the years, but “we have seen no evidence that these contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen any evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

Three years later, in 2007, a report by the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command reached the same conclusion. There was ” no ‘smoking gun’ between Saddam’s Iraq and Al Qaeda,” the defense analysts wrote, because Saddam and Al Qaeda didn’t trust each other. “To the fundamentalist leadership of Al Qaeda, Saddam represented the worst kind of  ‘apostate’ regime. A secular police state well practiced in suppressing internal challenges.”

If a “liberal” media outpost like Meet the Press persists in putting Cheney on the air, the least it should do is fact-check him by quoting the 9/11 Commission and the Pentagon report. Giving him free rein to lie yet again – in support of a long-discredited war rationale – is arguably far worse than giving him the mic to make the case for torture.

Put a pin in the these statements: "'liberal' media outpost like Meet the Press" and "the least it should do is fact-check him".  A big pin.

Early on it came to be known to anyone who was paying attention that the venerable Meet the Press was, in fact, Dick Cheney's favorite place to put his lies into the public record because they never pushed back.  

From The LA Times, February 12, 2007:

Those of us who get a kick out of watching Tim Russert every Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” are feeling a little hangdog these days. We always thought Big Russ Jr. was tough on the powerful. Now we learn that to some Washington media types on both the right and the left, he’s just a tool for the powerful.

What’s occasioned this perceptual turnabout is, of course, the perjury and obstruction trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, where Russert wrapped up two days of testimony last week. Libby says the NBC newsman fed him the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, who is at the center of the trial. Russert says he didn’t.

To ordinary viewers, though, whatever transpired during Libby’s phone call to Russert back in 2003 couldn’t be as jarring as what the trial has unearthed about Washington’s deeply cynical attitude toward “Meet the Press,” a venerable, 60-year-old staple of network TV and the No. 1-rated Sunday news talk show.

A former Cheney press aide testified last month that she pushed to get the vice president on Russert’s show to bat down negative news because it was “our best format,” a program where political handlers can “control the message.”

We now rejoin the present-day, already in progress...

This is from Margaret Sullivan who, some of you may know, is the former media columnist for The Washington Post, and the fifth public editor of The New York Times and the first woman to hold the position. In that role, she reported directly to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. as the "readers' representative".

From her newsletter yesterday.

As Donald Trump continued his chaotic and destructive march through a second term, the New York Times had a few choice words for what he’s doing, as they promoted an audio offering.

Ready?

“Trump’s New Charm Offensive.” I posted the full headline on social media, asking “Really, NYT?” and one respondent said she was so upset when she saw it earlier that day, she canceled her subscription over it.

That seems extreme since the Times has done a lot of very good reporting in recent weeks. But the headline does seem quite unhinged from reality, and it makes me wonder why no one stopped to question or change it. It represents the soft-focus presentation we see all too often that may well be an intentional business strategy on the part of the Times — everybody invited in to the big tent.

Here’s another over a David Sanger piece about how Trump’s policies supposedly would restore America’s manufacturing economy. (Sanger is excellent and deeply experienced, and the piece itself — mostly about Trump’s tariffs — is well reported.) The headline: “Trump’s Big Bet: Americans Will Tolerate Economic Downturn to Restore Manufacturing.”

As one Times reader aptly commented: “The headline here is misleading — none of Trump’s current policies will do anything to bring back manufacturing (quite the opposite) so treating Trump’s hypothesis as even remotely plausible is a massive disservice.” Here’s a gift version of the article; judge for yourself, and do scan the scathing comments.

Why does The Times too often normalize Trump like this, even now? Readers, your thoughts? Let me know. I have some theories, hinted at above and probably to be further developed in a separate post.

Ms. Sullivan was a journalist at the Post and the Times for decades, as well as the the public editor at the Times, which gave her daily one-on-one contact with the Times' publisher, so why in the name of Breslin and Royko is she asking her readers for their "thoughts" on the motives behind the Times' publishing this drivel?  

How the fuck would they know?  Also, Liberal bloggers have already spent more than 20 year theorizing why the Times and the rest of the legacy media are so addicted to Both Siderist bullshit, and are so prone to going soft and belly-up when confronted with belligerent Republican fuckery,

So instead coyly trying to crowdsource speculation about a question to which, as a former member of the Times' inner circle, you should damn well already know, why don't you tell us in plain, clear language why Sulzberger is doing this?  Or engage in that, y'know, journalism thing and do what none of the rest of us have the standing to pull off: call Sulzberger directly and ask him?

Meanwhile, over in the March 6, 2025 edition of The Contrarian, former CNN employee Josh Levs says "fact checks" are too little too late: "What we need in America is a truth countermovement." 

Why all those Trump fact checks are too little too late

Many Americans distrust the media, largely because false claims have gone unchallenged for so long.

In the latest episode of my podcast They Stand Corrected, which fact checks the news, I looked at the Sunday political talk shows. By the time I pieced through the transcript for just one of those shows, I found more uncorrected misstatements of fact than I could cover in a single episode. 

First, put another pin in this sentence: "By the time I pieced through the transcript for just one of those shows, I found more uncorrected misstatements of fact than I could cover in a single episode."  Another big pin.  We shall revisit it later.  

Second, wowzers!  

You mean the crown jewels of American political reportage were riddled with uncorrected lies?  

Tell me more!

For example, on a recent Meet the Press, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said, “What Oklahomans want is to make sure that we get rid of the waste and fraud inside the federal government. And that's exactly what the president has done. They've already identified billions, billions of dollars of waste and fraud for the taxpayers.”

Host Kristen Welker mentioned that “they haven't provided proof of fraud.” But Mullin’s claim about all that alleged “waste” went uncorrected, even as he repeated it. “Within only four short weeks, we've already identified over fifty-five billion dollars of waste and fraud,” he insisted. That's not true. At the time of the interview, there was already proof that “DOGE,” the Department of Government Efficiency, had no clue what it was doing. Viewers wouldn’t know this.

Mullin was also asked about protests across the country and in his home state. “The chair of the DNC, Ken Martin, openly admitted on MSNBC just yesterday that they were manufacturing these protests,” he insisted. “They were bussing in armies to manufacture these protests.” None of this is true. But NBC’s Meet the Press let that claim go.

Meanwhile, CBS’ Face the Nation interviewed Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Trump’s request. “We've had, you know, close to a million-and-a-half deaths” in the Ukraine war, he claimed. No. Trump and his team have thrown around figures like that, but none of the figures available about Russia’s war on Ukraine shows casualty counts anywhere near that high. But no one watching that interview would know.

When I bring up this problem to news executives, they often respond with some version of, “Well, it's live. How are we supposed to fact check everything?” That's faulty thinking. Who says all this has to be live? What if news agencies—shocking idea—pre-recorded interviews and only aired them with fact checks?

And the solution?

What we need in America is a truth countermovement: a national demand for the media to cut through disinformation and deliver only the truth, always.

Until then, Americans will all too often be left freezing in a blizzard, drenched by a firehose, or under fire amid a blitzkrieg. And unscrupulous leaders will continue to wreak havoc through shameless lying.

I must now reveal a terrible truth about myself.  For the better part of two decades I ran a feature on my little blog out here in the middle of Middle America called "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" or "Sunday's Mouse Circus"  or "Voice of Empire".  I got bored every few years and changed the name.  

Anyway, every Sunday I wrote out a long deconstruction of most of the network Sunday Shows.  I started doing this back at Castle Driftglass in Chicago, before I had cable or any "Pause" or "Rewind" capacity.  This was before YouTube had video clips up for reference (Hell, practically before YouTube existed) and before transcripts were readily available.  

I watched as many as I could manage, live, on over-the-air broadcast teevee, remote in-hand, clicking back and forth between them all, or as many as I could stand, and transcribing as fast as I could, or at least extracting the gist and presenting it in my own, uh, style.

Here's a sample.  From me in January of 2006.  And, yes, that's 19 years ago...

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Through an ass darkly…”

Wherein the GOP demonstrate their “Pre-1776” mindset.

Two quick-and-dirty highlights right up front that had me worried about my mental health.

Consider…

On Fox….in his ongoing fit of “Everybody Does It!”, Dirty-Jack was-a-bipartisan-pimp compulsive onanism, Chris Wallace frantically Abramoff’s himself all over his guest’s clean, Progressive suit, followed by an interview a coupla “Young Guns of the GOP”.

(Last week it was three Republican “reformers” that had squeegeed enough Dirty Jack Wank off their faces for us to see their lyin’ eyes and, forming a Papa, Mama and Baby Bear GOP Denial Kickline, managed to force their mouths to say the words “GOP Reformers” without that chemical cocktail that supersized The Joker’s pie-hole in “Batman”.

The contest, last week and this, is now how far and how fast can you distance yourself from Abramoff, and how many times can you repeat a variation of the phrase “bipartisan scandal”.

Abramoff? Never met the man.

Jack Abramoff? Never heard of him.

Lifelong-GOP-powerbroke-and-my-son’s-godfather, Jack Abramoff??? Why, he doesn’t even really exist. He’s just a Neocon Kaiser Soze we dreamed up; a myth to scare little Republicans.

As twas prophesied, they shall deny him three times before the cock crows. And Andy Sullivan wasn’t even on the Matthews’ Show this week.)

And then, on NBC – this week as last -- Chris Matthews doodles “George + Chris 4ever!!!” all over his Sunday Morning spiral-notebook, and openly pines and sighs for his Strong Man President to Rhett Butler him up the stairs, into the Lincoln Bedroom, for some rough, fascist sex that will finally make a real woman out of him...

FYI, the post goes on and on, covering most of the Sunday Shows.  For context, at this point George W. Bush's little over-by-Christmas Iraqi adventure was a full-on clusterfuck and now everyone could see it.  Which made all the usual Conservative pundits (who has spent the last few years giddily shitting all over us Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving Liberals on these very same shows) very uncomfortable.  

Here, preserved in the digital amber of my blog archives, was just such a moment on "This Week...".  From the same January, 2006 post.

[George] Will unpacks his wee soapbox, clambers atop it, and says, sure, we can bomb the crap out of Iran and knock it back ten years or so.

But, Will asks, “Then what?”

“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask bef…”

And in that perfect little jewel of a moment you could positively smell Karl Rove tickling the joystick that controls the high-voltage, barbed wire cock-ring that the GOP keeps wrapped around the withered sac of its pet journalists.

George unwrapped his lips from around the words he was just about to say like a man stung in the gums by a wasp the size of an Escalade. He then quickly shifted gears and began nattering on about Admiral Yamamoto telling the Japanese high command that, sure, he could attack the U.S. fleet and run wild in the Pacific for a “year and a day.”

…but “Then What?”

Of course the statement Will was verging on making before Karl the Klown jolted him back to goodthinkfulness was this:

“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask…before we invaded Iraq.”

But of course, that’s kind of a sore subject; one that the Stalinist Right has striven mightily to stomp down the ol’ Memory Hole and piss away into the mists of forgotten myth and lore.

Because, of course, people did ask that question before Dubya rolled our children into Iraq to be slaughtered behind his PNAC fantasies and petroleum dream, didn’t they George?

Millions and millions and millions of people asked that very question.

Very Loudly.

They were called Democrats, George.

And your Party called them unAmerican, remember George?

And even the Democrats who supported the invasion of Iraq –- and there were many of them -- made it very clear that they were not giving your President a blank check.

The Dem’s made it abundantly clear that there needed to be concrete, convincing evidence of an imminent threat. Evidence of WMDs delivered by inspectors on the ground. Evidence of some linkage to 9/11.

They demanded that enough troops be used to get the job done. And they insisted on a clear exit strategy.

And your President mumbled, “Yeah…Ok…whatever”, blew off every warning and caution, grabbed the keys to the car and drove it right off the fucking cliff, didn't he George?

And the Democrats who had made the epic mistake of trusting a dim little creep like George Bush to behave responsibly with the national Credit Card?

Your Party called them weak and cowardly, remember George?

Funny how you seem the effortlessly remember, oh, say, every stray stat surrounding Cal Koonce’s ERA, but can’t seem to remember these rather vitally important, life-and-death facts about your Party and President, isn’t is George?...

Once again, back in present day, someone needs to tell former CNN employee Josh Levs that my stuff is not unique.  A lot of other Liberal bloggers and podcasters were doing this too, and some still are.  We didn't just "[piece] through the transcript for just one of those shows" one time: collectively we deconstructed all of the shows, every Sunday, for decades.

And you know what, Josh?  It didn't make the slightest difference.  In fact, all of those shows just kept getting exponentially worse.  

So Josh, when you say "What we need in America is a truth countermovement." I don't know whether to laugh or cry or simply reply,  you mean like... Liberal bloggers and podcasters?

Because we're already out here, Josh, promiscuously violating the legacy media rules about not remembering inconvenient things every day,

And we've been doing it for decades.

*Thanks Alert Readers for the catch!

I Am The Liberal Media

Anatomy of a New York Times Endorsement

I Am The Liberal Media

Hiring Policies and Procedures

Last post I told you the next post would be about the hiring practices at The New York Times.  So here we go.

In the course of my checked life and misspent youth, I have held many jobs.  From stock boy at a Sears store which no longer exists, to a software developer during the pioneering days of the commercial internet for an insurance company which no longer exists, to a senior executive at a City of Chicago department which no longer exists.  

Hey, wait a tic.  Am I sensing some sort of...pattern here?

Nah.  Probably nothing.  

Anyway, lots of jobs doing lots of things.  

Now take a deep breath because here comes a long paragraph.  

But in all of my many and varied professional experiences, which included both getting hired and hiring others, and getting sacked and sacking others, I have never, in my life, been at a workplace, humble or grand, at which a someone had been hired with great fanfare on the basis of their claim to have a very specific and unique kind of expertise ... then were paid a lot of money for that very specific and unique kind of expertise ... then they publicly confess that they have no such expertise and, in fact, had never had any idea what they were talking about ... and were nonetheless retained by their employers in that very prestigious position.   

Resume padding?  Sure.  Seen it.

Sketchy references? Yes, I have been a friend's "Vandelay Industries".

But those are, on the whole, minor infractions.  Instead, imagine you're running a high-end restaurant and you hire a woman who says she did four years at The French Laundry as chef pâtissier.  Then you put her in the kitchen and tell her to make her magic, and an hour later you find her at her station, starting at a block of chocolate and a blob of dough.  The floor is littered with broken eggs, and she is  muttering, "I... I don't know what this is."

Or imagine the contractor you hired to build you a deck has shown up with a truck load of mulch, popcorn and a can opener, and he confides that he has, in fact, never joined two pieces of wood together in his life.  

Which brings me around to  the subject of The New York Times' most recent wingnut affirmative action hire:  David French.  I guess their pages weren't already larded with enough horrible Elite Conservatives Thought Pieces from David Brooks and Bret "Bug" Stephens and Stephens' ex-wife Pauline Paul and Ross Douthat, which is why Arthur Gregg Sulzberger drove the NYT labor van down to the National Review parking lot and David August French was the first one who jumped it.

French came laden with a deeply problematic past-- 

Just what we didn’t need: Another asshole @nytopinion columnist saying conservatives *discounting the Black experience* (!!) are no more extreme than lefty excess in trying to create inclusive environments on college campuses. Then denying he said so. https://t.co/XVGAz62Zxf pic.twitter.com/wip3f3fIWL

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) February 5, 2023

-- which he quickly "rethought" while in the NYT labor van en route to the paper's Op-Ed page.  So, one year ago, in January of 2023, there he was, up on the Times' Opinions masthead, announced with all the attendant fanfare.  

The NYT explained they brought him on as "[an] expert on the law, faith and politics" and praised him for his "factual and intellectual clarity" and "moral seriousness".  But mysteriously, the words "Republican" or "Conservative" are nowhere to be found in his official Times' C.V.

So, as you read the rest of this, keep in mind that French's factual clarity and political expertise are two of the specific skills which landed him at the Times.  

From David French, 1/25/2024:

Never Trumpers Never Had a Chance

By David French

And immediately I have a problem.  Literally any Liberal who writes about politics with "factual clarity" could have (and did) tell you this back in 2016.  So how is this breaking news for the Times' newest Conservative Thought Leader?

Ah well.  Moving on.

The Republican presidential primary is all but over.

We already know that.  Move on.

It’s déjà vu all over again. Since the moment Trump took the G.O.P. primary lead in 2015, he’s never relinquished his hold on the party.

We already know that.  Move on.

And since Trump’s hostile takeover and unexpected 2016 victory...

Hey dummy, it's not a "hostile takeover" if the party throws him the keys and begs him to drive.  Move on.

French then notes the many Democratic victories since the GOP gave itself over, body and soul, to the Umber Grifter.  

Then...

This is in part because while Democrats have been able to mobilize an effective anti-Trump opposition, conservative Never Trumpers — Republicans and former Republicans like me who have desperately tried to break Trump’s grip on the party — mostly failed.

Because as we have been telling you since two days after Trump came down the fucking escalator,  Trump is the Republican party.  He speaks to them in their mother tongue, because he is a manifestation of the rage and racism and resentment that Conservative media knocking-shops like [checks notes] Mr. French's former employers has spend decades feeding to the GOP base.

And then comes the kicker (with emphasis added):

It’s now clear to me that we never had a chance. And the reason is equally clear: We did not truly understand our own party.

No.  You didn't.  And I can only begin to imagine the enormous psychological resources that men like David French had to employ to hold themselves in a such a state of willful delusion about things that were happening right in front of them all along.  Such a state of willful delusion that they made their living, decade after decade, propagandizing tirelessly on behalf of a party and movement that existed only in their imaginations.   Lying to themselves so aggressively every day.  Having to shut their  eyes tighter and tighter to blot out the madness that was blossoming right there in their own garden so they could go on writing about the awful, amoral and dangerous Barack Obama and the Democrats.  

French then stops to light a candle at the shrine of St. Reagan, and swaddle himself in the fading, righteous warmth of the Good Old Days of the "disgraceful and unlawful" Bill Clinton.

Then...

No one would claim that every conservative had character ... but I refused to believe that the G.O.P. would broadly excuse, rationalize or defend a Bill Clinton in our midst.

Yes, in French's telling, Trump is "a Bill Clinton in our midst."   Fuck you.

Then...

I wasn’t just wrong; I was completely, embarrassingly wrong. The winds were shifting. I could sense it, but I didn’t fully understand it. Not until Trump made it all plain.

We warned you. 

Reviewing old essays by conservatives opposed to Trump, the most persistent complaint was simple: The man wasn’t a “real” conservative. At the same time, others among us remembered the Christian conservative outcry against Clinton’s infidelity, and believed that an argument about character would pull believers away from Trump’s grasp.

But no. 

When we told you, over and over again, that you were building an army of reprogrammable meatbags you would never be able to control, this is what we were talking about.

If animosity toward Democrats was the primary Republican value, even more than ideology or character, you can see how Never Trumpers were destined to fail. 

When you were warned over and over that you were building an Doomsday Machine with no "off" switch, and that it would destroy everything, this is what we were talking about:

The central problem is that when animosity toward Democrats is the primary value, any critique of Trump has to end the instant it’s perceived to help or signal agreement with Democrats.

 And finally:

I don’t regret my arguments against Trump. I’d make them again, and I will continue making them. I do ask myself how I missed the sheer extent of Republican anger. And I’m deeply, deeply grieved by the thought that I did anything in my life before Trump to contribute to that unrighteous rage.

I don't ask myself how people like French -- recently-former Republicans who have since colonized the "Liberal" media -- missed every single thing of importance that was happening right out in the open the whole time.  They were too busy making a living inventing scary stories about Liberals and feminists and people of color and Hillary and campus speech codes and LGBTQ+ people and The Kenyan Usurper and feeding those stories to the meatheads to notice or care about the long-term catastrophe they were courting.

What I do ask myself every day is why men like David French have been awarded the lucrative and prestigious jobs they have?  Because men like French didn't just passively miss everything: they spent their adult lives energetically working for Team Evil to build the Doomsday Machine that now threatens to destroy everything we value.  

It's great that French finally figured out what we Liberals figured out decades ago.  And that he feels really bad about not noticing it before now.

But what I ask myself every day is how such a person, who confesses to have been staggeringly wrong all along about the one fucking subject he was supposed to know better than almost anyone else got hired by The New York Times to write about that subject on the basis of his "factual and intellectual clarity" and "moral seriousness"?

And then I remember.  

There is a Club...

Burn The Lifeboats

Out Here in the Fields, I've Heard All Their Spiels...

That's why I do all of this blogging.

I don't need to fight
To prove I'm right.
I don't need to be forgiven...

This interaction pretty accurately reflects my experience over +30 years out in the Real World attempting to calmly reason with Republicans in my family, my community, my workplace and just out and about socially.

At the NRA Convention someone told us that hammers are used to kill more people than guns. So we looked up the stats in front of them. pic.twitter.com/ju5R8Pqbvk

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) May 31, 2022

The conversations were more cordial back when it was just Rush Limbaugh on 1,000 radio stations telling them every day that Slick Willie, gays, Libtards, welfare queens and feminazis were to blame for their problems.  

Since then the tone has escalated to venomous, blustering, whiny hostility.

However the Dissociative Rebuttal Box Step they dance has never changed.

First, you need to understand how desperate Republicans are to validate their ludicrous beliefs by sticking it to some smarty-pants Liberal.  Sure, they get plenty of affirmation from their peer groups -- 

Longtime readers know that "The Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair" is my shorthand for inbred Conservative meatsticks who have wallowed in wingnut Hate Radio racist dung and Fox News Liberal Conspiracy claptrap for so long that is has become the quotidian argot of their wretched lives. It is their tavern-talk -- their worst, paranoid delusions, externalized, validated, tarted up as The Unvarnished Truth and then regurgitated back to them by ghouls and treason-mongers like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly... which are, in turn, passed around again like so many fish stories, getting bigger and wilder and truthier with iteration.

It is the shit they eagerly rub in their hair -- the shit which, year after year, they sculpt into ever more elaborate pompadours because everyone else in their dingy, lightless corner of Universe is doing it and they lost their sense of smell 40 years ago.

They preen over each other. They are happy in each other's company. They praise each other on the little, individual touches with which they have customized their Shitheap Toupees -- an extra layer of Benghaaaazi, perhaps, appliqued over something something the New Black Panther Party because ACORN!...

-- but telling off some know-it-all Lefty well, that's their tribe's idea  of heroically counting coup.  

Of course the flaw in their cunning strategy is that their dearly held beliefs are mostly stupid and the "facts" they brandish with such swagger are easily debunked nonsense.  

For example, from long before the rise of Trump and excavated from deep inside my civilian email archives comes this item which I believe can still be found in the collector's edition of the "Liberals Are The Real Racists" box set.  This was the iron-clad "proof" that Hillary Clinton had once gone in blackface to a party, because that's obviously a young Bill Clinton standing next to her.

Except, of course, it's not, which took me all of 90 seconds of basic internet searching to verify.

We now enter the Dramatic Re-Enactment portion of our show, because what follows is the distilled essence of virtually every such interaction I have ever had with goofs like this out here in the Real World.

The goof replies: Well that's Snopes.  Everybody knows Snopes is funded by ... George Soros!

And just like that the Dissociative Rebuttal Box Step box step has begun.  From this point forward, the goof will forget that he brought his shit to my door and not the other way around, and his replies will get progressively more pissed off and more defensive.  

Me:  Don't see what Soros has to do with anything since the Snopes article links to an original source, but OK, here's another source.  And another.  

Goof:  Yeah, but whatabout this other thing that also proved that Liberals Are The Real Racists.

Pause for 90 seconds while I debunk that too.  It goes on like this for a few more rounds.

Me, eventually:  Look, I've gotta ask, why do you keep believing the people who tell you these things?  They're clearly feeding you bullshit?  You're a smart guy, so what does it take for you to stop listening to them?

And then, out of the mouths of these stone-cold GOP culture warriors invariably comes the Beltway Acela Corridor voice of David Fucking Brooks.

Goof:   Y'know, both sides lie. Lefties are no better.  They're usually worse. 

Me:  Really? 

Goof:  Remember when Clinton said he wasn't fucking whatshername?  Remember when Obama said I could keep my doctor?  Huh!  Remember that!  And don't forget Benghaaaazi!

Fun fact:  These people, who will swear on the lives of their grandchildren that they can't remember or have no idea what heinous shit their own party was up to last week, or what they themselve swore they believed last year, all seem to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of every wildly overblown or outright fake Democratic "scandal" dating back to FDR.

And in just this short amount of time we have escalated from from "Gotcha now Libtard!  Here's the iron-clad proof that you're the real racists!"  to "Everyone's equally horrible and nothing matters so I refuse to feel bad about believing liars and voting for monsters".  

So, now I have to decide, do I really want to waste more of my precious time detailing the actual history of the Republican's Arkansas Project?  Or the actual policy details of the Affordable Care Act?  All the tangible good the ACA has done and the endless shitstorms the GOP unleashed to try to kill it?  

No I do not.  

Because I have already done some variation of this round-and-round literally hundreds of times under all sorts of conditions.  And what I have learned is that, in the end, goofs with the horrible ideas and who are are always betting with Chris Moneymaker confidence on their full-house of easily debunked bullshit will never budge a fucking inch.  

Because their mental morass of bluster and paranoia and performative hyper-patriotism and lies and racism is not something external to themselves that they can be coaxed out of.  It is who they are. 

Because a lifetime of experience has taught me that behind every lie and excuse there will be yet another lie and another excuse.  And another, and another, and another after that.  Because this is not a case of trying to gently and empathically steer someone away from a poor decision. Nope.  This is trying to talk an addict out of their addiction: an addict who will grab onto any tacitic, fling any excuse, to fight to the death to hang onto their addiction.

Well I don't know about you, but my patience and empathy pantry is now bare: emptied out by decades of escalating, gleeful GOP depravity, sadism, sedition and proudly willful ignorance.

And supply chain issues suggest that it will not be restocked any time in the foreseeable future. 

Burn The Lifeboats

This Was Beyond Embarrassing

I realize, now that MSNBC has gone all in on the Former Republican Reputation Rehab business, that every day from now until the crack of doom a big, comfy chair will be pulled out for one or more of the goofs who helped create the GOP monster factory that is the reason our democracy is now hanging by its fingernails.

And I realize that, because MSNBC has gone all in on the Former Republican Reputation Rehab business, none of these goof will ever be asked any substantive questions about their responsibility for the deep shit we are all in.  Instead they will simply appear as Athena leaping from the forehead of Zeus,  fully-formed, with no inconvenient past and speaking of the GOP using exactly the same language, cadence and inflection that, for 40 years, Liberal have been mocked, slandered and ignored for using.   

And while the reaction here at Castle Driftglass to the appearance of one of these goofs on our teevee machines is to quickly shut it off or change the channel, like iocaine powder -- 

-- over the past several years I've built up an immunity to Former Republicans having their crusty, bloody pasts whitewashed on "liberal" teevee, but (he hastened to add) only at the dosage level that MSNBC usually administers.

What I was not prepared for was Lawrence O'Donnell deciding for some inexplicable reason that it was time to deliver a video tongue bath to MSNBC's entire stable of these goofs.  It was so cringy and craven that it swamped my immunity to such things and momentary stunned me into immobility.  It has taken me this long to collect my meager wits and resume normal human activities like eating, sleeping and blogging about what utter shite the media has become.  

Mr. O'Donnell begins innocently enough:

O'DONNELL:   Around the early 1990s, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing fanatics decided to change the name of the Democratic Party; they changed it to 'the Democrat Party.' They thought that was really smart, "the Democrat Party". 

And then leaps us ahead 30 years with no mention of the events or actors of the intervening decades.  It was just Rush Limbaugh one minute, and the next...

O'DONNELL:   Republicans are no longer quite so fetishistic about their attachment to democracy. Instead of expressing their belief in democracy, Republicans now express their belief in stolen elections. 

Which is true, but, where is this headed? 

It's heading up the awkward on-ramp to where Mr. O'Donnell wants to take us:

O'DONNELL:   The Republican Party has always presented itself as the defender of traditional American values against an assault on those values by liberal Democrats. 

And Alphonse Capone always presented himself as a legitimate businessman.  So what?

O'DONNELL:  Michael Gerson may have been the single best Republican practitioner of that art of expressing American values as a speechwriter. Michael Gerson is an evangelical Christian who was the chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and the words that he gave to President Bush, who sometimes mangled those words, were among the most eloquent expressions of traditional American values. 

Well fuck me. Not only is this arrant horseshit, but it conspicuously ignores the substance of what Gerson spent decades defending and attacking.  I know this because I wrote a long, thoroughgoing post about it which got me blocked in some in the tonier precincts of the Beltway media, an "attaboy" from Brother Charlie Pierce and which was pretty much ignored by everyone else (except you lovely people.)  

And by "a long post" I mean it clocked in at just over 16,600 words.  Comprehensively long.  

So at this point it probably goes without saying that Mr. O'Donnell's opinions of the merits and morality of Michael Gerson diverge widely from my own.  Well, you're heard Mr. O'Donnell's, so here, from a small snippet from that 2019 post, are mine.

The Bonfire of the Sanities 

...Mr. Gerson has written this same stupid column many times before and has been roasted to a fare-thee-well by the internet every time, and nothing whatsoever has changed, and nothing whatsoever will change until Yahweh blows Fred Hiatt out of his saddle on the road to Damascus.

So really, why waste the pixels?

Instead, this time around, I found it much more personally interesting to use Mr. Gerson's saccharine droppings as a jumping off point to trace the Pecksniffian arc of his intellectual and moral bankruptcy.  Perhaps to get at the larger issue of why in the hell our media consistently fails our democracy so badly.

Our story begins with our nation struggling to dig out from the wreckage that the Dubya Administration left behind.  A failed and despicable administration -- the worst in American history until the rise of Donald Trump -- in which Michael Gerson, a deeply Conservative Catholic, served with unswerving loyalty, and to which he owes his position in the Can-Never-Be-Fired-No-Matter-How-Fucking-Wrong-They-Are Pundit Guild.

And from the very beginning, Mr. Gerson clearly loathed and resented Barack Obama and did not hesitate to use his Washington Post column to say so.  Which is no surprise.  Gerson is first, last, and always a Republican -- a Republican who, in 2008, stood in front of the dumpster fire that was the Dubya Administration doing what all Republicans were doing at the time: trying frantically to change the subject by lobbing anything they could at the Democrats who were running for the honor of cleaning up their fucking mess.

So Mr. Smoking Gun/Mushroom Cloud had no compunction about attacking the character of candidate Obama. According to Gerson,  Barack Obama was so "rootless, reactive and panicky" that he picked Joe Fucking Biden as his running mate.  I mean, how foolish was that, right?

And now, back to Mr. O'Donnell:

O'DONNELL:  Today in his column in the Washington Post Michael Gerson writes, "the GOP is a garbage scow of the corrupt, the seditious, and their enablers". 

And then we sail right over the cliff, with emphasis to mark the spot where I momentarily lost consciousness 

O'DONNELL: This is unprecedented in American political history, but by now we've grown used to it, that the most eloquent and lacerating and accurate descriptions of the Republican Party now come from the former leading lights of the Republican Party, intellectuals like George Will, speechwriters like Michael Gerson and Bill Kristol, presidential campaign strategists like Stuart Stevens and Steve Schmidt, and the list goes on and on...

So a couple of things.

First, the Alert Reader will note that every name on Mr. O'Donnell's Roll of Glory is either a fellow MSNBC employee, or has a guest and/or contributor contract with MSNBC. 

And second, what the actual fuck Lawrence.  The most eloquent and lacerating and accurate descriptions of the Republican Party have been coming from the Left for decades now -- eloquent and lacerating and accurate descriptions of the Republican Party which have earned those Liberals nothing but the mockery and contempt from the Very Serious People of the Beltway media and people like [checks notes] George Will, Michael Gerson Bill Kristol, Stuart Stevens and Steve Schmidt, and the list goes on and on.  People who built an entire industry out of lying to the world about the state of their party and their movement -- swearing that the GOP was doing just fine and anyone who said otherwise was a crackpot alarmist.  People who, once it all blew up in their well-fed faces and it turned out the Left had been right about the Right all along, have contributed nothing original or meaningful to the national political conversation beyond plagiarizing the eloquent and lacerating and accurate observations and critiques of the same Liberals they had been dismissing as crackpot alarmists five minutes ago.

So you can fawn over the 1992 Cuban Olympic basketball team of MSNBC Green Room Conservative  pundits all you want, Lawrence, but deep down in your heart you fucking well know that if they were ever forced to go toe-to-toe, adjective-to-adjective with the Liberal Dream team they would get blown out in the first round 136-57.

Which is exactly MSNBC why will never allow any, actual eloquent and lacerating and accurate Liberal havers-of-opinions square off against any of their Green Room Conservative pundits.  Because it would be a slaughter.

O'DONNELL: ...including our first guest tonight Jennifer Rubin who writes...

Yep.  That's it.  I'm done.

O'DONNELL:  Leading off our discussion tonight, our Eddie Glaude, chair of the African-American Studies department at Princeton University, and Jennifer Rubin, a conservative opinion writer at "The Washington Post," and author of "Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump." Both are MSNBC contributors.

Done.  Done.  Done.

Burn The Lifeboats

No One Could Have Predicted...

File under: Put not your faith in Internet Princes (from HuffPo):

...

[Ken] Silverstein described a work environment at First Look that was "anything but functional," with a flawed editing system and “epic managerial incompetence.” Amid the slew of firings, hirings, promotions and demotions and with little guidance or support from management, Silverstein said employees felt "lost."

He writes:

What I observed was that the Omidyar-led management could not complete the simplest tasks—approving budgets or hires—without months of internal debate and apparent anguish. The Intercept didn’t even begin publishing until last February. (We weren’t supposed to call it “Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept” because a lot of other people worked there, including me for a bit, but everyone knew Glenn was the anchor of the project.) After a pause ordered by editor in chief John Cook to address its internal dysfunction, the site relaunched in July with a good, complicated story about how the NSA and the FBI had been monitoring a few Muslim-Americans in the United States. Yet I saw how difficult the story was to birth for its chief editor, John Cook, and he didn’t end up lasting long—before quitting and returning to Gawker.

Silverstein called the demise of Taibbi's Racket the "end of my journalism dream." It was like watching Omidyar’s team "kill their second baby," he writes -- the company invested substantial money and resources only to fire Racket's entire staff two days before Thanksgiving. 

"The fact that First Look hired so many talented people to create Racket, spent more than a million dollars on it, and in the end fired everyone before Racket ever published a single story must stand as one of the greatest squanderings of money and leadership ineptitude in modern journalism," he wrote.

...

This has all been moved miles above above my pay grade, but even a punk ass blogger like me can manage to both feel bad that so much was spent on so little, and deeply amused that Team Radical Transparency has apparently taken a vow of corporate silence regarding the Big Story of the shitstorm of egos and incompetence that is raging through their very own, very expensive back yard.

Apparently The New York Times Does Occasionally Sack People

From the NYT:

The New York Times Replaces Abramson as Executive Editor

By RAVI SOMAIYAMAY 14, 2014

Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The New York Times, is unexpectedly leaving the position and will be replaced by Dean Baquet, the managing editor of the newspaper, the company said on Wednesday.

In announcing the sudden switch to a stunned newsroom, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of the paper and the chairman of The New York Times Company, attributed it to “an issue with management in the newsroom.”

Ms. Abramson, 60, a former investigative correspondent and Washington editor who was appointed to lead the newsroom in 2011, was the first woman to serve in the top job...

The New Yorker has the gossipier version here:

...

Fellow-journalists and others scrambled to find out what had happened. Sulzberger had fired Abramson, and he did not try to hide that. In a speech to the newsroom on Wednesday afternoon, he said, “I chose to appoint a new leader of our newsroom because I believe that new leadership will improve some aspects …” Abramson chose not to attend the announcement, and not to pretend that she had volunteered to step down.

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect.

...

A third issue surfaced, too: Abramson was pushing to hire a deputy managing editor to oversee the digital side of the Times. She believed that she had the support of Sulzberger and Thompson to recruit this deputy, and her supporters say that the plan was for the person in this position to report to Baquet. Baquet is a popular and respected figure in the newsroom, and he had appeared, for the most part, to get along with Abramson. (I was told, however, that, at a recent dinner with Sulzberger, Baquet said he found her hard to work with.)

...

To: Mr. Dean Baquet
Re: Sacking people

Dear Mr. Baquet,

I have a list.

Sincerely,

driftglass

Until All That Was Left Were The Bones

Another newspaper takes it in the neck:

Layoffs at Star-Ledger, NJ.com, other Advance newspapers top 300

By Mark Mueller and Ted Sherman/The Star-Ledger

They gathered in knots inside and outside the state’s largest newspaper, trading information in subdued tones. Copy editors and advertising reps. Reporters and clerks. Veterans of three decades and 20-somethings new to the business.

The layoffs imposed at The Star-Ledger today cut across all departments, decimating some and taking substantial chunks out of others. In all, 167 staffers — one third of the newspaper’s non-unionized employees — will lose their jobs.

In a newsroom of 156 — including reporters, editors, photographers, videographers and support staff — 40 positions will be cut, including one job left vacant by the recent departure of a staff writer. Some 250 unionized employees are not affected.

...

Another 124 full- and part-time jobs were eliminated at the company’s weekly newspapers and at the dailies in Trenton, Easton, and South Jersey. At NJ.com, 15 of 77 employees were let go. The day’s toll across all Advance properties came to 306 layoffs.

In Newark, the losses cast a pall through The Star-Ledger building as employees learned their fates. Among the newsroom casualties: the remaining full-time business staff and multiple positions in sports, features, photos and news.

"It’s been a gut-wrenching day for the entire staff, and an obviously devastating one for those who have been laid off," said Amy Ellis Nutt, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2011 and who remains with the paper. "We saw this coming for some time, but you’re never fully prepared. The sad fact is, when all is said and done, The Star-Ledger will be much diminished for the loss of so many of our colleagues."

...

Most people I know in the writing game who manage to keep body and soul together does so by writing under a profitable brand they established +30 years ago, or through the largess of a patron, whether that be a spouse working full-time to pay the bills, or a full-time tenured teaching gig which allows lots of paid free time to write, or some unholy pact with the New York Times that makes it possible to crank out bilge and afford a mansion.  Just about everyone else has pulled up stakes and getting out.

At the same moment in history, there is an infinite amount of money sloshing around in political universe for slashing and burning and for creating swill like this:

Are There No Workhouses?

The New York Times tells a sadly familiar story

...

It has been a painful slide. A five-year spell of unemployment has slowly scrubbed away nearly every vestige of Ms. Barrington-Ward’s middle-class life. She is a 53-year-old college graduate who worked steadily for three decades. She is now broke and homeless.

Ms. Barrington-Ward describes it as “my journey through hell.” She was laid off from an administrative position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008; she had earned about $50,000 that year. With the recession spurring employers to dump hundreds of thousands of workers a month and the unemployment rate climbing to the double digits, she found that no matter the number of résumés she sent out — she stopped counting in the thousands — she could not find work.

“I’ve been turned down from McDonald’s because I was told I was too articulate,” she says. “I got denied a job scrubbing toilets because I didn’t speak Spanish and turned away from a laundromat because I was ‘too pretty.’ I’ve also been told point-blank to my face, ‘We don’t hire the unemployed.’ And the two times I got real interest from a prospective employer, the credit check ended it immediately.”

For Ms. Barrington-Ward, joblessness itself has become a trap, an impediment to finding a job. Economists see it the same way, concerned that joblessness lasting more than six months is a major factor preventing people from getting rehired, with potentially grave consequences for tens of millions of Americans.

The long-term jobless, after all, tend to be in poorer health, and to have higher rates of suicide and strained family relations. Even the children of the long-term unemployed see lower earnings down the road.

The consequences are grave for the country, too: lost production, increased social spending, decreased tax revenue and slower growth. Policy makers and academics are now asking whether an improving economy might absorb those workers in time to prevent long-term economic damage.

“I don’t think we know the answer,” said Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. “But right now, I think everybody’s worst fears are coming true, as far as we can tell.”

Soon after we first talked in October, Ms. Barrington-Ward left her sister’s house in Ohio, where she had crashed for six weeks, and went back to Boston and filed her bankruptcy paperwork. She contacted a headhunter. “I’ve got to get a job,” she said. “I just have to.” She had two job interviews lined up and her fingers crossed.

Long-term joblessness — the kind that Ms. Barrington-Ward and about four million others are experiencing — is now one of the defining realities of the American work force.

...

Except for gender and being homeless, Ms. Barrington-Ward's story is nearly identical to my own, right down to our ages.

When Ms. Barrington-Ward and I got on the Big Career Escalator years ago, we believed certain things to be true because we could see them in operation all around us.  Usually, honest labor had value.  Tangible value.  So did persistence.  So did excellence. And even if you were kneecapped by bad breaks or bad times or bad people, after you got banged up and bounced downhill once or twice, you got up again and worked your way back into the labor force.

Of course you could get a job -- a real job -- if you set your mind to it.   

Of course you could.

But while we were very busy working those hard, long hours -- while we were excelling at what we did -- someone set fire to all the rules and burned all the maps.  

Suddenly, no, you cannot get back into the workforce.  

No, we will not tell you why.  

Try as hard was you like.  Beat your brains out until it finally becomes clear that you will never have a full-time job with bennies again.

Never.

Never.  Ever.

That's the new reality: the quiet, lethal, zombie apocalypse no one prepared you for and which swarms over you and takes you down by sheer weight of numbers.  Which, by the way, leads us to the other ironic difference between Ms. Barrington-Ward's situation and my own: the fact that my last full-time job was helping people exactly like Ms. Barrington-Ward find work.  

I spent a long time building a righteous portfolio as a economic development and labor force expert.  Over the years I helped thousands of people find work, either directly by helping them think through their options, rework their resumes, learn interviewing skills and find internships and training, or indirectly by setting up and funding programs to get unemployed people like Ms. Barrington-Ward back into decent sustainable work.

I worked with the whole, sad rainbow of the unemployed:  kids in tough neighborhoods, young adults without prospects, ex-offenders, single mothers, and the suddenly and unexpectedly jobless like Ms. Barrington-Ward.

So like the physician who gets a bleak medical diagnosis, I am intimately versed enough in the arcanum of labor market data to be in a unique position to understand just how bad things are and how bad they are likely to remain for years to come.

My former profession has blessed me with the knowledge that there really are ways to solve the problem of long-term unemployment and underemployment that would give the millions like Ms. Barrington-Ward back their dignity and economic autonomy.

My understanding of political reality has cursed me with the knowledge that as long as we live in a culture that treats poverty and unemployment as signs of moral depravity, none of those solutions has a prayer of being realized.

Good luck to you, Ms. Barrington-Ward.

Good luck to all the Ms. Barrington-Wards, everywhere.

Weary Hooker Predicts Demand For Blowjobs To End Soon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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