A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cancel Culture

There is no concatenation of caveats, provisos, conditions, stipulations, reservations, qualifications, and conditional phrases you can deploy to, ahem, bulwark your editorial decision to give Butcher Bill Kristol a platform from which to mouth off about war in the middle east.  On that subject, his mouth should have long ago been (metaphorically) filled with salt and sewn shut forever.

And it all began back in 2014 when the then-barely-post-pubescent executive producer of "This Week" , Jonathan Greenberger, took it upon himself to pluck Kristol from the rubble of his many, many catastrophically bad public opinions and rehabilitate his professional reputation.  

[Fun fact:  In 2024, Greenberger left ABC News to become... wait for it... 

Jonathan Greenberger To Depart As ABC News D.C. Bureau Chief For Role At Politico

Jonathan Greenberger is departing ABC News, where he has been Washington, D.C. bureau chief, for a new job as executive vice president of Politico. Greenberger will start in his new position on April 22 [2024]

...because of course.]

Join me now in this brief jog down memory lane.

Given Kristol's very long and very public record of being pretty much wrong about everything (from the WaPo) --

Bill Kristol knows his predictions have been bad but he’s going to keep making them

...
“With Kristol what I love are not so much the big, grand predictions that are always wrong, but the smaller ones that really demonstrate how poor his actual grasp of politics is,” says Alex Pareene, the editor of Gawker, one of Kristol’s regular tormentors. “He is sort of ideologically motivated to make certain ridiculous claims — Iraq will be a huge success, Romney will win — and even his ‘peak Trump’ predictions are based on the fact that he can’t abide the ongoing rejection of his entire ethos by Republican voters. But it’s when he makes claims that are just wrong but not motivated by the advancement of his worldview . . . that we see just how bad he is at his ostensible job.”

-- at no point in the past 20 years have any of the many corporate media drones who have chosen to hire him (and his idiot son-in-law, Matthew Continetti) ever been vindicated in that decision (from Politico in 2014)

Bill Kristol joins ABC News

Bill Kristol, the editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard, has joined ABC News as a contributor, "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos announced on Sunday.
...

The agreement, one source said, includes regular appearances on the Sunday show, as well as special events and other political-relaed events. But there's also a window that allows him to do other shows on cable television.
...
Jonathan Greenberger, executive producer of "This Week," said in a statement Kristol is "an original thinker" that will make their team stronger:

“Bill makes our outstanding team of contributors and analysts even stronger. He’s an original thinker with a unique perspective on the political and cultural landscape, and we look forward to hearing his voice on the 'This Week' roundtable on a regular basis."

Furthermore, at no point in the last two decades has Kristol been exonerated of the years he spent strutting across the American media stage, blood-drunk and smirking, confidently insisting that not only could unleashing hell on Earth in Iraq “have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East” and that it would be a “two-month war, not an eight-year war” but that inflicting Kristol-brand democracy on Middle Eastern countries at the point of an American sword was something we should be doing a lot more.

So how, you may fairly ask, is Butcher's Bill Kristol still abroad in the land?...

What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who were this very loudly dead fucking wrong about everything got to keep their place in elite media circles and get to go right on being courted for their opinions on subjects about which they should shut their holes forever? 

What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who were actually right about everything continue to be treated as pariahs, and told to sit down and shut up because it's rude and unproductive to, y'know, remember stuff?

Funny old world.

I Am The Liberal Media.

Soliciting Bill Kristol’s Opinion About Going to War in the Middle East...

...is like bringing the Sackler Family in to consult on the opioid epidemic.  

If there is one subject on which Bloody Bill should volunteer to shut his hole until the end of time, it's this one.

And yet... from The New York Times:

Some of the same neoconservatives who pushed for the war in Iraq are now pushing for war with Iran. “You’ve got to go to war with the president you have,” said William Kristol, a Never Trumper and editor at large of The Bulwark who was a prominent advocate of war with Iraq. “If you really think that Iran can’t have nuclear weapons, we have a chance to try to finish the job.”

Maybe Kristol thinks it's funny to deliberately echo Donald Rumsfeld from 21 years ago --

You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. 

-- when he shrugged off the troops' concerns that the criminal incompetence of the Bush administration meant that they had been sent into battle with the wrong equipment and were now having to garbage-pick discarded ballistic glass to up-armor their vehicles. 

Because maybe Kristol really is the sociopath we always thought he was.  

And if your argument for not only letting him into our tent, but standing down as he and other Never Trumpers colonized what little was left of the "Liberal" media and elbowing actual Liberals out of the public discourse goes something like this -- 

“You’ve got to go to political war with the sociopaths you have,”

-- then please show yourself to the exit.  

 

I Am The Liberal Media.

Professional Left Podcast Episode #805: No Fair Remembering The Friedman Unit

“"On this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there's been a certain amount of, frankly, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."” -- Bill Kristol, April 1, 2003

Links:  

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Sarah Palin Walked So Donald Trump Could Run

I suppose you could consider this a teaser or a trailer for the No Fair Remembering Stuff podcast we just did on the subject of Sarah Palin.  She was the Republican's party's beta-test version of Donald Trump, and the thing is, pretty much all of your recently-former Republican Never Trump heroes knew exactly why she was so appealing to the base.  

Long before Donald Trump, they knew that the center of gravity in their party had shifted from Buckley/Romney/Bush to Limbaugh/Hannity/Gingrich.  

Bill Kristol said as much in an October 27, 2009 Washington Post column.

A good time to be a conservative

Bien-pensant conservative elites and establishment-friendly Republican big shots yearn for a more moderate, temperate and sophisticated Republican Party. It's not likely to happen. And probably just as well...

Obviously, many Republicans and conservatives -- and lots of moderates and independents -- will be grateful to Mitch McConnell if he can stop ObamaCare, and to Jon Kyl if he can induce the president to embrace a stronger foreign policy. But it's unlikely that the minority party in Congress will be the source of bold new conservative leadership over the next three years. Even if Republicans pick up the House in 2010, the party's big ideas and themes for the 2012 presidential race will probably not emanate from Capitol Hill.

The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties. Some will lament this -- but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots...

The lesson activists around the country will take from this is that a vigorous, even if somewhat irritated, conservative/populist message seems to be more effective in revitalizing the Republican Party than an attempt to accommodate the wishes of liberal media elites.

So the GOP is likely, for the foreseeable future, to be of a conservative mind and in a populist mood. In American politics, there are worse things to be.

They knew.  

They fucking well knew which way things were going.  

And they had no ethical qualms about the lies, the racism, the batshit conspiracies or the rising tide of insanity inside their own party.  As long as Conservative media and their fellow travelers in the mainstream media could diffuse, deflect and "Both Sides" them out of responsibility for what their party was doing, they were fine with all of it.  As long as they could focus the rage of the mob they had made on to you and me and the Kenyan Usurper -- as long as they could prod the monster they had made into pulling their political plow where they wanted it to go -- they were perfectly content to let things keep getting worse and worse.  

Until the day when Donald Trump took their mob away from them by speaking directly to the mob in the mob's native language and promising to make good on all the promises that the Republican establishment had made to them to get their votes, and had reneged on over and over again.  Only then did all of these Never Trump Heroes pretend to suddenly  notice that something was terribly wrong with their Republican party.  Only then did they all suddenly become interested in democracy and fairness and facts.  

But in the interim. even after Sarah Palin pulled back the mask and showed the world the leering, lunatic mob that was the foundation of their party, as soon as McCain and Palin crashed and burned in 2008, party and media elites grabbed hold of that mask with both hands and, with all their collective might, yanked it back into place.  

Don't worry, Murrica!  You didn't see what you just saw!  You didn't hear what you just heard!  Everything is fine.  Just a little glitch.  Just a little turbulence.  But Sober, Sensible Professionals are on the job and everything will be smoothed out in a jiffy.  

Every party in opposition goes a little crazy. For Republicans in the early Obama era, insanity took the form of the Sarah Palin spasm. Veteran politicos took the former Alaska governor seriously as a national figure. Republican primary voters nominated the likes of Todd Akin, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. Glenn Beck seemed important enough to hold a big rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

Fortunately, serious parties eventually pull back from the fever swamps. That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party.  It has re-established itself as the nation’s dominant governing party...

During the primary season, groups like the Chamber of Commerce chased away or defeated renegade conservatives and opened the way for the triumph of this sort of institutional conservative...

The new Republican establishment is different from the old one. It is more conservative. It’s shaped more by the ideas of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the American Enterprise Institute than it is by the mores of the country club. But, at least judging by the postelection comments coming from all corners, it does believe in politics, in legislating, in compromise.

During the Palin spasm, Republicans seemed to detest the craft of governing. Hothouse flowers like Senator Ted Cruz preferred telegenic confrontation to compromise and legislation.

But current party leaders are talking about incremental progress, finding areas where they can get bipartisan support: on trade, corporate taxes, the XL oil pipeline, the medical devices tax, patent reform, maybe even tax reform generally.

Republicans are also talking about restoring the traditional practices of the House and Senate. Let individual members introduce bills. Let those bills work through the committee structure and get votes. Pass budgets on time and according to the rules.

If the party is to fully detoxify its image, something will have to pass next year. Midwestern Republican governors will have to develop a compelling governing model. And the volcanic effusions of the Palin era will have to look like 1970s neckties — inexplicable oddities from another age.

That was David Brooks, in a New York Times op-ed titled  "The Governing Party", from November 6, 2014.

For context, that David Brooks Remain Calm, All is Well! horseshit --

-- was written a full two and a half years after Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published their devastating analysis of the state of American politics and the Republican party.  Excerpted from Mann and Ornstein in the Washington Post, April 27, 2012:

Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges....

In the end, while the press can make certain political choices understandable, it is up to voters to decide. If they can punish ideological extremism at the polls and look skeptically upon candidates who profess to reject all dialogue and bargaining with opponents, then an insurgent outlier party will have some impetus to return to the center. Otherwise, our politics will get worse before it gets better. 

For further context, David Brooks' Remain Calm, All is Well! horseshit was written just seven months before Donald Trump – the King of the Birthers – announced that he was running for president.  

Because rather than making every effort to figure out what the hell had gone so drastically wrong inside the Republican party, all those Sober, Sensible Professionals who were gonna fix this little glitch spent all their time and energy making sure no such diagnostics were ever performed.  Because, as I've already mentioned, they fucking well knew what was going on and were instead singularly focused on making sure that no one else knew.  

But of course, lots of other people knew what was happening because it was happening out in public all over the country.  In fact, you'd have to twist yourself into a pandimensional pretzel to deny seeing what was going on inside the rapidly unhinging Republican madhouse, which is exactly what Conservative media and the Beltway media did.  And what they are still doing today.  

As to the people wo could see what was happening and wrote about it every day?  We were mocked and dismissed as crackpots and alarmists.  We made media pariahs.  And that, too, is still going on today.  

In 2008, pundits called what had gone wrong with the Republican Party “Palinism”, just as they had called the same disease “Trumpism” after Palin,  “Delayism” before Palin, and “Gingrichism” before Tom DeLay.

But the truth is, the problem with the modern Republican party has always been that it’s full of Republicans.

The problem with the modern Republican party is “Republicanism”.

If you want more on the subject of Sarah Palin and the trajectory of the Republican party, we did an hour on the subject available for free over at The Professional Left website.

For the record, this was the 797th episode of The Professional Left podcast since we launched 14 years ago.  Which, you must admit, is a lot of ad-free content.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Consulting Bill Kristol on Foreign Policy...

...is not the flex the Bulwarkians think it is.

I Am The Liberal Media

It Was 20 Years Ago Today...

In case you'd forgotten, February 15, 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of the largest protest marches in history.  From Wikipedia:

On 15 February 2003, a coordinated day of protests was held across the world in which people in more than 600 cities expressed opposition to the imminent Iraq War. It was part of a series of protests and political events that had begun in 2002 and continued as the invasion, war, and occupation took place. The day was described by social movement researchers as "the largest protest event in human history".

According to BBC News, between six and ten million people took part in protests in up to sixty countries over the weekend of 15 and 16 February.

The largest protests took place in Europe. The one in Rome involved around three million people, and is listed in the 2004 Guinness Book of World Records as the largest anti-war rally in history. Madrid hosted the second largest rally with more than 1.5 million people protesting the invasion of Iraq; Mainland China was the only major region not to see any protests on that day, but small demonstrations, attended mainly by foreign students, were seen later.

It didn't change a thing.

Bush and Cheney went right ahead and bulldozed the nation into catastrophe.  The mainstream media rolled right over.  And all of today's Never Trump media darlings were still gung-ho Neocons, with all-access passes to pretty much any teevee, radio and the op-ed platform they pleased, from which they slandering us as American-hating, terrorist loving scum.

It was a time when Republican Party, the Conservative movement and the mainstream media jointely declared open season on Liberals 

In case you'd forgotten.

This Is Why We Burn The Lifeboats

A Very Special No Fair Remembering Stuff Birthday Fundraiser: They Knew. They All Knew.

(Me on my 6th birthday, some numbers of years ago, in another country.)

This year, for my birthday fundraiser and in honor of the "No Fair Remembering Stuff" mission statement of this joint, I've gone down to the cellar and uncorked a rare and special vintage for you.

A rich and full-bodied post I bottled 13 years ago this week, and which has aged either wonderfully or terribly depending on your perspective.

I laid it down as a hedge against the day when the raging shitpile of bigots and imbeciles that is the modern Republican Party would finally kick the doors off the basement lab where Serious and Sensible Conservatives (and their collaborators in the mainstream media) had been hiding them and begin to rampage across the land in plain view of the general public.

As hedge against the day when those same Serious and Sensible Conservatives (and their collaborators in the mainstream media) would swear on the bones of Saint Ronald Reagan that they had no idea that there even was a basement lab, much less what kind of monsters were being cooked up therein.  That the rise of Trump and discovery that the GOP base was a deranged mob of bigots and imbeciles had been a completely unforeseeable tragedy -- a spontaneous disaster in which they played no part and for which the shared no blame.

Except, nah.

From October 27, 2009, this is "Nobody Left But The Crazies".

 

File Under Gresham's Corollary: "Bad crazy drives out everybody.".

From MediaMatters:

Kristol: GOP's future "center of gravity" lies with Beck, Limbaugh

October 27, 2009 8:05 am ET by Media Matters staff

From William Kristol's October 27 Washington Post column:

Obviously, many Republicans and conservatives -- and lots of moderates and independents -- will be grateful to Mitch McConnell if he can stop ObamaCare, and to Jon Kyl if he can induce the president to embrace a stronger foreign policy. But it's unlikely that the minority party in Congress will be the source of bold new conservative leadership over the next three years. Even if Republicans pick up the House in 2010, the party's big ideas and themes for the 2012 presidential race will probably not emanate from Capitol Hill. 

The center of gravity, I suspect, will instead lie with individuals such as Palin and Huckabee and Gingrich, media personalities like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and activists at town halls and tea parties. Some will lament this -- but over the past year, as those voices have dominated, conservatism has done pretty well in the body politic, and Republicans have narrowed the gap with Democrats in test ballots.

Kristol began working out years ago what the last, few fusspot remnants of the Old GOP seem to only now be dimly perceiving: that there is absolutely nothing left inside the Party of Lincoln but crazy, and if you want to hang onto those sweet-sweet “Conservative pundit” paydays, you’d better cozy up to the rabid Cheney Regime Dead-Enders most ricky-tick.

Of course this will remain an ongoing, toxic disaster for the country until the cultural backwash that is the Party of God is universally repudiated, stamped with a fluorescent HazMat symbol big enough to be visible from orbit, and buried under a mile of electoral concrete (I have said elsewhere and only half in jest that President Obama's biggest job will turn out to be saving the GOP from itself.)

But as a freelance ontologist (“Will Visualization Information For Food’), I appreciate the 30 years of dedicated effort it took for Hate Radio charlatans, Christopathic multimedia colporteurs, FoxNews harlequins and all of their various elected finger puppets to gather together the nation’s bigots, yahoos and moral imbeciles under one political roof.

So way to go Rush! UR doin’ it rite!

And for no additional charge, here's let me pour you a sipper of this mellow dessert wine I laid down just a few days earlier, on October 23, 2009.  In this post I noted that George Will -- yes that George Will -- had taken up his quill to write an ooey-gooey love-letter to Minnesota's Craziest Political Escapee, Michele Bachmann.

Yes that Michele Bachmann.

Here is Mr. Will:

"... Some of her supposed excesses are, however, not merely defensible, they are admirable. For example, her June 9 statement on the House floor in which she spoke of "gangster government" has been viewed on the Internet about 2 million times. ..."

At the time I irresponsibly speculated that:

Will has come to terms with the fact that his Movement has now been swallowed whole by the yahoos and bigots that the GOP spent the last generation recruiting as foot soldiers. 

And if he wants to keep drawing a paycheck as "Conservative columnist, George Will" he'd better learn to cozy up to Unwashed Crazy.

Well it's 13 years later.  

George Will remains gainfully employed by the Washington Post where he still oozes bile onto its pages every week.

Without breaking stride, Bill Kristol has morphed from Trusted Fox News contributor and founder of .the Weekly Standard to Trusted MSNBC contributor and founder of The Bulwark  

And I'm still at this keyboard, pretty much every day, remembering things that men like Will and Kristol very much want everyone to forget.

I Am The Liberal Media

Three Headlines Outside Springfield, Illinois: October 16, 2021

First, let's look at the initial disaster.  The place where our modern democracy's containment system failed and allowed the Right's poison to contaminate everything.  For that we turn to the Los Angeles Times journalist who assays her profession over the past 30 years and asks, "Holy fuck, what have we done?"

Column: Why journalists are failing the public with ‘both-siderism’ in political coverage

by Jackie Calmes 

For years it was easy to cover “both sides” — Republicans and Democrats — as equally worthy, and blameworthy, partners in democracy...  

Now, when reporters or pundits use the words “both sides” in regard to some political problem, I stop reading or listening.

I started to chafe at false equivalence a quarter-century ago, as a congressional reporter amid Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution. One party — his — was demonstrably more responsible for the nasty divisiveness, government gridlock and norm-busting, yet journalistic pressure to produce seemingly “balanced” stories — pressure both ingrained and imposed by editors — prevented reporters from sufficiently reflecting the new truth.

By 2012, as President Obama dealt with the willful obstructionists, conspiracists and racists of an increasingly radicalized Republican Party, political scientists and long-respected Washington watchers Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein put the onus for the dysfunction squarely on the GOP in their provocative book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.” Significantly, they implicated journalists: “A balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon is a distortion of reality and a disservice to your consumers."...

 In other words, yep, the Left was right about the Right all along.

Second, we look at the freaks of nature that this poison created.  The three-eyed fish and seven headed goats and a small clique of  Elite Conserative mutant pundits who A) actively helped to create the disaster, but who B) have climbed over the the Left and, with the help of savvy Liberal media person, now stand on a big flat media rock slightly above the toxic Conservative sludge they unleashed, still pretending that they had nothing to do with any of it, still using their media platforms to shit all over everything you and I believe in, and still tsk-tsking, you guessed it, Both Sides!

From Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark:

The Problem with the “Red Dog Democrat” Thing

The spending. The wokeness. The repeal of the Hyde Amendment. I could go on…

These are difficult times for folks on the center-right, who’ve tried to join Democrats in a loose alliance to protect the Republic from Trumpism.

In fact, this odd coupling has proven to be more than a little awkward at times. Some on the left are willing to embrace Never Trump conservatives as allies, until they realize that some of them are actually… conservative.

There is also a pretty consistent drumbeat insisting that we all actually become Democrats — or at least vote straight ticket. Litmus tests are applied: it’s not enough to be pro-democracy, NTers are also expected to embrace the elements of the progressive agenda — from free community college, to abortion, rent moratoriums, police funding, transgenderism, CRT, social spending, and the candidacy of Greta Thunberg for sainthood.

Which serves as a companion piece to this podcast, the title of which --

Hi, @BulwarkOnline, and a hearty fuck you to your atavistic both-sidesing and your pernicious normalizing of Federalist Society fascists!@StarlingBuchan1 @SykesCharlie @BillKristol#BothSidesDont #BothSides pic.twitter.com/4pucJJYUno

— Airbag Moments 😷💉 Emotional Support Tardigrade (@airbagmoments) October 16, 2021

-- is self-explanatory.

Proving yet again that you can take the Bush Regime Dead Ender out of Fox News but you can't --  "the progressive agenda — from free community college, to abortion, rent moratoriums, police funding, transgenderism, CRT, social spending, and the candidacy of Greta Thunberg for sainthood" --  take the Fox News -- "The spending. The wokeness. The repeal of the Hyde Amendment" -- out of the Bush Regime Dead Ender.

And what do these entitled, myopic Bush Regime Dead Ender mutants want?  

They want what every brood of mutants want.  To reproduce.  To create more of their kind.  Except the ancestral spawning ground for their shitty ideas and slash-and-burn politics --  the Republican Party -- has been polluted beyond saving by the [irony alert!] metastasizing success of those very same shitty ideas and slash-and-burn politics.  

So where can these mutants lay their eggs now that they've made a desert out of their Conservative paradise?  

Obviously the only place left is in the belly of the only relatively sane national political party still standing.  

Which a question which Anand Giridharadas has been exploring, on and off, this year and our third headline in today's triptych:

Open discussion thread: Are Republican converts gentrifying the Democratic Party?

... 

The most fortunate refugees on earth are those defecting from the Republican Party. You see them on the news; you enjoyed their Lincoln Project ads; maybe you bought the book one wrote to cash in on telling the truth now that it was of scant use to us.

Politics is, as the saying goes, a game of addition. So, on one level, you want anyone you can get to abandon Team Tyranny and sign up for Team Democracy. But then it gets more complicated. Should these recent converts not only vote with you but also lead? Should they be the ones representing the pro-democratic position on television?..

So how exactly does a small clique of Conservative mutants who have defined themselves their entire adult lives by a sneering contempt for Democrats go about colonizing the Democratic Party?

Easy.

First, with the help of the Beltway Media, by continuing to go all-in on the core Both Siderist lie that Democrats are just as dangerously captive to some extreme wing of their party as the Republicans are.

And second, using the massive media presence they have been gifted, by hammering home, over and over again, that while our democracy may be in peril and that the only thing standing between us and 1,000 years of fascist darkness may be the Democratic Party, that the Democratic Party just isn't up to the job because it suffers from a dangerous overdose of Democrats!

And what is the only cure for what's wrong with the Democratic Party, and thus the only hope of saving democracy itself?

 An immediate and massive infusion of Sensible Centrism!

And just who exactly are America's only factory-certified representatives of Sensible Centrism?

You guessed it:

When you can't align with the people who equate mask mandates to Nazi Germany — or with people who get triggered by the Federalist Society — where does the Rational Center belong? Bill Kristol joins Charlie Sykes on today's podcast.

Burn The Lifeboats

What Somber Refection on 9/11 Twenty Years Later Would Be Complete Without...

On the grim anniversary of that terrible day, of course your friends at The Bulwark would tap Bloody Bill Kristol as their go-to guy.

The wrongest man in American politics who was never more savagely, ghoulishly wrong than he was in the wake of 9/11: an axiomatic truth which MSNBC used to be aware of once upon a time (h/t Crook & Liars)

And now, forty Friedman Units later?

 

Burn The Lifeboats

Kristolize

Verb:   To build an entire career as a media tycoon slagging the Left for pointing out that the GOP is an irredeemable shithole of bigots and imbeciles.  Then, after your party tosses you out on your ass, spend the twilight of your career being praised by your peers for noticing that the GOP may, in fact, be an irredeemable shithole of bigots and imbeciles.

No Half Measures

Your Bulwark Quote of the Day: "If You Had Told Me Ten Years Ago..."

Last week, The Bulwark co-founder Charlie Sykes was briefly sidelined by his reaction to his COVID shot, so his Bulwark co-conspirators Bill Kristol and Mona Charen filled in for him.  And boy howdy was the ersatz childlike incomprehsion of the Dry Drunk Republican mind when faced with what it has created ever on full display.  

One sentiment in particular stood out.

Kristol:  ...the failure of Republican elected officials and Conservative,  y'know, elites to stand up to the Big Lie... uh... and to stand up to Trump and Trumpism has been a huge problem.  Even the ones who haven't echoed it and... a lot have just... the failure to ... to, you say, to confront it when you have a real chance whether it's writing in the Wall Street Journal or... or speaking on the floor of the Senate or speaking at CPAC where you're going to get national attention, that's itself a huge problem.  It sort of implicitly suggests, well, it's a little... maybe these views are a little odd or a little off but they're not a serious problem.  But they are a serious problem.  Why do you think... I am sort of... this I've been struck by... I wouldn't... 

And here we go...

Kristol: ... if you had told me ten years ago,  y'know, the Republican Party could go in a pretty wacky direction and foreign policy could go Buchanan or Isolationist... it could go protectisty... it could go uh, y'know, I don't know, some really, y'know, flat tax or something like that... um even it could go... it would go very anti-immigration, I... all those...I wouldn't... I wouldn't have liked it.  I would have been surprised at how much it might have happened, y'know, I wouldn't have thought it would happen.  But I would have realized it  could  happen obviously -- you could see those strains very visibly.  

Translation:  Bloody Bill Kristol bloody well knew his party was nuts, but figured he and his elite cronies could still keep it safely lashed down in the laboratory and only take it out for walks on a short leash when they needed to win an election.  

Remember, that ten years ago, Bill Kristol was a very well-paid Fox News contributor who hewed closely to Team Evil's party line of always being on the attack, constantly slagging Liberals as America-hating monsters, and advancing whatever lies and conspiracy theories were on offer that week.  In 2008 Kristol was on Fox advising John McCain to forget all that stuff about the economy which no one understands anyway and go after "Liberal Democrat" Barack Obama hard on character.  Start beating the drum about Reverend Wright, Bill Ayrers, etc.  For example, here he is in 2011 in top, smarmy, smirking asshole form doing advance work for the glorious Republican plans for the reconstruction of Iraq health care alternative to Obamacare that never existed:

And here he is in a rare 2011 MSNBC drive-by explaining why it is silly and unreasonable to expect Conservatives to police their lunatics:

Well, since Mr. Kristol brought it up, just what exactly were those dirty, disreputable Liberals (who also turned out right about the Right all along) telling him ten years ago?

Ten years ago, Liberals were reminding people of the words of Steve Gilliard from an even earlier time of darkness under the regime of a Republican monster:

People say I'm optimistic. Fuck no. I know American history. Bush is a piker compared to the people who ran Mississippi in the 1950's. That was a police state, complete with secret police, disappearances and mob rule. Most American have forgotten that, but they shouldn't.

Bush's power came from our weakness and fear, we didn't protect what we should have when we should have. We gave him too much trust and he failed us all. Now, we have to reclaim it and that will not be easy. But is has to be done. Compared to the other challenges Americans have faced, it's not a massive thing, no one has to steal Tory land at gunpoint or dodge German bullets on Omaha Beach or face fire hoses and dogs, but it won't be easy either. But it needs to be done. And no matter how shitty it seems at any one moment, like reading the Times this morning, you don't get to lose heart. Why? Because if you can read this, you probably aren't doing that bad.

We were continuing to doggedly report week after week after week what an utter midden pile of Republican bad ideas and bad faith the Sunday Morning Shows had become.

To get past the establishment guardians at the media gates by any means available and get word out that the GOP had become an existential threat we became podcasters.

We pointed out that the Right was the way it was because it has never gotten over losing the Civil War. 

That the GOP's worship of mad dog Capitalism was, y'know, a bad thing.   

We pleaded with Americans not to forget which party Who fought like wild animals to let poor women die to pay for tax cuts for the rich and to make their scumbag base happy.

We used stick figures and simple language to try to warn Bill Kristol that the base of his party was a mob of reprogrammable meatbags under the sway of a racist ghoul named Rush Limbaugh.  

We passed along portions of the single greatest post of 2010 -- Russell King's Open letter to conservatives -- 

...You're going to have to come up with a platform that isn't built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from your own; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more. But you have work to do even before you take on that task.

Your party -- the GOP -- and the conservative end of the American political spectrum have become irresponsible and irrational. Worse, it's tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred. Let me provide some examples -- by no means an exhaustive list -- of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.

-- and pointed out that despite the staggering size and depth of the proof Mr. King offered in support of his position, it had absolutely zero impact on thoughts or actions of Conservatives.  

It had gotten so bad that by 2011 even Andrew Sullivan had gotten tired of Kristol's act:

Bill Kristol's Mindset

Every now and again, the mask slips and we see what the neocon scion really cares about. Fiscal responsibility? Debt reduction? This was a man who barely mentioned the debt or spending under the fiscally ruinous Bush-Cheney years, and mocked those who did. And the reason is simple: this is a writer concerned solely about partisanship and power...

They can't even bother to disguise their rank cynicism and partisan tribalism any more. Their core objective in this Congress: what Mitch McConnell said.

Hell, as far back as the earliest days of the Liberal blogosphere -- 16 years ago -- we find your host going so far as using a children's bedtime stories to try to get through to the thick skulls of wingnut hobgoblins like Bill Kristol that something nightmarish had become dangerously unmoored and was running amok at the very heart of their party:

Little Red State Fundy sez... 

I picked a few examples from my own archives, but there are literally decades of writing -- tens of thousands of posts -- from all over the Liberal blogosphere making the same points over and over again.

And this from Crooks & Liars from 2014 is certainly worth your time:

Rachel Maddow Savages Bill Kristol, Ignores Liberal Blogs That Have Written About Him For Years

And yet in 2014 we still find Bill Kristol -- after he'd been sacked from Fox News and mere months before Donald Trump came oozing down the escalator and into the hearts of Fox Nation --  with that  Death's Head grimace still glued to his face, still touting Fox as fair, balanced, "real" news, still reflexively slagging Liberals as commie dupes, still trashing Obamacare as just another failed, Liberal job-killing, social engineering experiment gone horribly wrong and still shitting on MSNBC, the cable network that was soon become his employer.

So with all of that behind him -- the Left's history of sounding ever more dire warnings about the trajectory of the GOP and Kristol's ever more smug, condescending denialism that anything was wrong at all -- imagine my complete lack of surprise that Bill Kristol in 2021 is "a little amazed" at the willingness of his now-former party to "go just Authoritarian."

Kristol:  I am a little amazed by the willingness to go just Authoritarian.  To really go anti-democratic.

Charen: Yeah.

Kristol:  Both among the elites, but... and among the voters obviously. I mean the willingness to just take that extra step and this is why this Big Lie is somewhat different from the other Big Lies. By... the other lies -- the lies about immigration are damaging and then... and should be refuted -- but this is a Big Lie about the actual political system and constitutional system and is that... what... what I mean... has that surprised you too? I mean just I guess I thought there would be more... more attachment to the constitutional order, in some sense or other, and to, y'know, the political order that... of America against the... the Trumpist assault.

And what is there left to do but shake one's head in amazement when Mona Charen -- whose contributions to the sum total of human knowledge consist of three odious books, "Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got it Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First", "Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)" and "Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense" -- casually lets slip that she never had the slightest fucking clue what was really going on insidr her own party, right under her own nose ever as she was making her living mocking Liberals as credulous chumps.

Charen: Especially coming from a political party whose leaders are constantly beating their breasts about being constitutionalists, right?  That was their big selling point.  And, in fact, that was at least part of the supposed message of the Tea Party which, I now think, I vastly overestimated the sincerity of. Um, but they supposedly were, y'know, wanting to return to a more... um... an older version of the constitutional order and so forth.  And, uh, with their tri-cornered hats and whatnot, um yeah...

Finally, Bill Kristol obligingly lays out the two halves of the Dry Drunk Republican mind.

First, the obligatory self-congratulations for noticing the threat from inside their own party -- the threat they created and lied about -- 40 years too late.

Kristol: You know we all warned [that] four years of this would have would do damage back in 2015/2016 and I think it has done a lot of damage. 

Second, looking back with nostalgia and wishing the GOP could return to the good old days of...2014/2015.

Kristol: I guess that's what... and I think, therefore, these debates about what we're... what do we do now?  I think it would be great if the Republican Party could frankly come back to the Republican Party of 2014 or 15...

Have I mentioned recently that busted up lifeboat timbers make excellent kindling?

 

Burn The Lifeboats

How To Recognize Shambolic Wingnut Disasters From Quite a Long Way Away

Hey. look who's gettin' noticed on a regular basis these days!

Submoronic, partisan hack -- and a mediocre one at that -- doesn't understand that the Constitution expressly provides for an impeachment process by Congress alone that is not identical in structure to a criminal or civil trial with petit jurors. Fancy that. Thanks for nothing. https://t.co/hdoAkM5oui

— David Simon (@AoDespair) February 11, 2021

Hewitt, you hollowed-out little fucksquib, you've crossed the only rubicon that truly matters here. In your transparent attempt to cater to the beshitted and bespittled deplorati who easily squee at any half-ass trope that imagines decadent and vile elites, you have wantonly... https://t.co/WkH52Rz3KP

— David Simon (@AoDespair) February 12, 2021

...the citizenry make a point of pausing in our routine of nightly intramural violence and disorder whenever we catch the scent of a true and enduring piece of shit edging over the city line, whereupon we close ranks and hunt that low fucker en masse, bag him live...

— David Simon (@AoDespair) February 12, 2021

...then barter him off in pieces for crack vials and bags of Utz crab chips. So, yes, you dumb scrotelicking welp of a mediawhore, stay where you are or keep hunting for me in West L.A. because Baltimore is not your speed, as facts and reality are not your domain.

— David Simon (@AoDespair) February 12, 2021

Not for nothin' but if I'd ever said anything like this I'd have been suspended from Twitter for three lifetimes, instead of just the one.  

Feels like my work here is about done. 

 And what work is that?

Spotting Shambolic Wingnut Disasters from quite a long way away.  Often while they're enjoying a profitable turn --

-- as Respected Thinkers --

-- on that Liberal cable teevee station --

-- that all the kids -- 

-- are talking about!  

Or, on any given Sunday, at the Gasbag Cavalcade on broadcast teevee's major networks.

Then, of course, comes the requisite amount of either being ignored or slagged for either focusing on irrelevancies or dredging up the past or saying terribly mean things about our new "allies" --

-- because ALL HANDS ON DECK and so forth.

Then, in the fullness of time, a few Bluechecks start to notice that some of the irrelevancies were maybe not so irrelevant after all, and that the past actually matters, and those goons and grifters that cable teevee packaged as friendly faces were not so friendly after all.  

Ah well.  

Speaking of goons and grifters who have been quietly phased out of the regular Liberal cable teevee  rotation, please don't worry that Hugh Hewitt in floating out there in the Hughniverse, friendless and alone, now that the mask is completely gone and we can all see him as the Cyborg Sent From the Future to Destroy America that he has always been.

Hugh is doing just fine and has plenty of company.

Here, for example, we find Hugh interviewing Matthew Continetti, another former MSNBC child star who followed the GOP slime trail a couple of stories down the rabbit hole and now write schlock for Commentary magazine.

Hugh Hewitt says the media should tell the public a major problem with the Senate impeachment trial, “victims ought never to be jurors.”

His guest replies: “The mob targeted the elected officials of the United States … There’s no way, I think, of getting out of that situation.” pic.twitter.com/l4us4N4Ovj

— Eric Kleefeld (@EricKleefeld) February 11, 2021

Quite a fall for Continetti who used to enjoy buddying up with fellow Conservatives around the Meet the Press campfire, secure in the knowledge that Chuck Todd was never in a million years going to ask him an inconvenient  question. 

Instead (and follow me here because this stacking of panels with Conservatives who are all deeply interconnect with each other, know each other and have worked for/with each other is the norm for Meet the Press) in this clip from 2018 we find Chuck Todd reading aloud from a column by ambulatory venom sac Rich Lowry, and asking Continetti, David Brooks and Eliana Johnson to react to it.

So here's the history.

Continetti worked as a research assistant for Rich Lowry before joining The Weekly Standard as an editorial assistant under Bill Kristol, and later as associate editor before moving on to work for Lowry at the National Review and starting his own wingnut welfare rag, the Washington Free Beacon.

David Brooks was the managing editor for the The Weekly Standard under Bill Kristol before landing a job-for-life at The New York Times.

And Eliana Johnson Johnson was Sean Hannity's producer at Fox News before going to work for Rich Lowry at the National Review.  She eventually moved on to become the editor-in-chief of, you probably guessed it, the Washington Free Beacon after Continetti left.

So how did a bland, dead-eyed cipher like Matthew Continetti get a leg up into this charmed wingnut welfare circle jerk to begin with?  Ah, I see I neglected to mention that Continetti is Bill Kristol's son-in-law.  

Bill Kristol, who lost The Weekly Standard due to the changing tastes of its readership, but gained The Bulwark. 

Bill Kristol, who has recently been promoted up from wingnut goon and grifter and back into the ranks of Respected Conservative Thinkers, and who can be seen on MSNBC pretty much any day of the week blabbing his opinions secure in the knowledge that none of the MSNBC hosts would ever in a million ask him an inconvenient question. 

Because ALL HANDS ON DECK and so forth.

And thus the circle of wingnut life is complete.

No Half Measures

The Past, Boy I Don't Know...

Respected MSNBC contributor and editor-at-large of The Bulwark, Bill Kristol, is deeply, deeply disappointed with his former street gang because every decent person knows, if you say some shit and it turns out to be wrong and people get hurt, you apologize for that shit.  

That's the minimum.

I know this because Bill Kristol was the featured guest on The Bulwark today and I heard him say it there   Let's listen in with some emphasis from me to draw your eye:

Kristol:  ...As I think any decent person would say, in a similar circumstance, "You know what... I... I... I didn't mean, of course,  for people to [inaudible] and storm the capital.  I meant, y'know let's have a legal process." I mean they can reinterpret their own words.  And "I'm very sorry if anyone misunderstood me and I apologize for the terrible things that happened for if I inadvertently contributed to them."

Now I don't think in all these cases it was so inadvertent, but that would be at least the minimal thing one would do 

I was trying to think about myself, or you, or anyone, y'know in a situation where you might have said something maybe a little bit heated.  In some moment some people, y'know, do something really pretty bad as a result -- not as a result of what one says but in accordance. Let's just say with what one says one feels terrible right? You say "That's not what I meant" and "I... I... I really I'm sorry and I... I... regret that.  I'm gonna be more careful in the future."

None of them... none of them have said that.

The alert reader might notice that apologies which are ask of our new Never Trump BFFs elicit a subtly different reaction than apologies which are demanded by our new Never Trump BFFs.

Kinda weird, innit?  

For example, does anyone remember the Iraq War?  Anyone? 

It was an ideologically-driven Bush Administration clusterfuck that Republicans lied us into and about which Bill Kristol had many very definite opinions, some of the best of which were almost lost to history.  But here, thanks to  Common Dreams are excerpts from a C-Span interview with Bill Kristol from March of 2003 which is such a farrago of smirking, jaw-dropping bullshit that you have to read to believe it:

I'm talking about Kristol's two-hour appearance on C-Span's Washington Journal on March 28, 2003, just nine days after the President launched his invasion of Iraq. No one remembers it today. You can't even fish it out of LexisNexis. It's not there. Yet it's a masterpiece, a double album of smarm, horrifying ignorance, and bald-faced deceit. While you've heard him play those instruments before, he never again reached such heights. It's a performance for the history books -- particularly that chapter about how the American Empire collapsed.lost-kristol-tapes

For our purposes today, I want to bring one particular quote to your attention.  It's at the very end where Kristol confidently declared that he would be glad to be held to a "moral standard" should all of his prediction and grand promises turn out to be dead wrong.

"The moral credentials of this war are strong. We'll see if we follow through. I agree with Mr. Ellsberg on this, if we're not serious about helping the Iraqi people rebuild their country and about helping promote decent democratic government in Iraq... it will be a much less morally satisfying and fully defensible war... I'm happy to be held to a moral standard. I ask that it be a serious moral standard."

Of course all of his prediction and grand promises did turn out to be horribly, lethally wrong.  And, of course, since making that promise Bill Kristol has never been held to any standard whatsoever because men like Bill Kristol are members of the Beltway Insiders Club whose prime directive is protecting the reputations and livelihoods of members of the Beltway Insiders Club.

This is why I have occasionally reacted with asperity (look it up) as my Liberal allies threw themselves at Bill Kristol and men like him drunk-prom-date-fashion because, yeah, sure, on the one hand there's his record of a lifetime spent gleefully in the service of evil, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, nations ruined and a treasury looted all while Kristol maintained a constant barrage of slander and smirking lies that just kept escalating precisely because Bill Kristol has never been held accountable for anything...

...but in the other hand, we can't hold him accountable now because Trump!  

Fine.  Fine.

So given Bill Kristol's very definite opinions now about how Republicans should apologize for encouraging "something really pretty bad",  how do you suppose Mr. Kristol would react should anyone suggest that he apologize for using using his privileged media position to relentlessly pimp the Iraq War and to ferociously attack anyone who opposed or criticized him ?

Well lucky for you, chum, you don't have to guess because here is pre-Trump Bill Kristol back in 2014 answering that very question:

Bill Kristol Snaps At Calls To Apologize For Iraq War Support

...

Despite his history of being wrong about Iraq, Kristol has nevertheless seen his media bookings rise in the wake of the spread of militant group ISIS. On Thursday, CNN’s Erin Burnett asked him about Reid’s tweet. Kristol, unsurprisingly, made it clear he was an unrepentant hawk.

“I’m not apologizing for something that I think was not wrong,” he said. “The war to remove Saddam was the right thing and necessary thing to do.”

“Apologies would be in order for the neoconservatives who banged the war drums so disastrously, Bill,” fellow guest Carl Bernstein chimed in.

“Hogwash!” Kristol replied. (Yes, he actually said “hogwash.”)

Here is post-Trump Bill Kristol less that two years ago reiterating his position:

Nope. I dislike quasi-Stalinist demands for apologies. I've defended and will defend my views on Iraq, and Syria, and Milosevic, and the Soviet Union, and more, as you defend yours. How about a real debate on U.S. foreign policy--I'll ask for no apologies!--on a campus this fall? https://t.co/AdC0CelINz

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 26, 2019

At this point I know perfectly well that the fight to hold men like Bill Kristol accountable is over. 

That it was over once MSNBC changed almost literally overnight from a network where Good Doctor Maddow was free to go on an extended "Why the fuck does a fucking always-wrong hack like Bill Fucking Kristol have a job anywhere opining about anything?"...

...to a network where Bill Kristol is now a serious and valued Conservative Big Thinker and contributor and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting him or one of his equally always-wrong Bulwark Buddies coming and going from one MSNBC program to the next.

I know that the outcome of this fight was foreordained by decisions made in corporate boardrooms by people who I will never know long before I put digits to keyboard to ask variations on the question, "Why does Bill Kristol have a job anywhere opining about anything?" 1000 times. 

Yet for some, mad reason I continue to believe that someone, somewhere should say these things, out loud and in public, despite the fact that so many of my "allies" wish I would please just shut the fuck up.  So to them I say, don't worry and be of good cheer.  I'm just a nobody Libtard blogger out here in the middle of Middle America.  Nobody listens to me anyway.  And if, by chance, it turns out that I wrong,  I'm happy to be held to a moral standard.

Just like Bill Kristol!

No Half Measures