Showing posts with label Lee Atwater Sews Socks That Smell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lee Atwater Sews Socks That Smell. Show all posts

Thursday, July 17, 2025

Professional Left Podcast Episode 918: Welcome To Stupid Watergate Summer


"By disgracing and degrading the presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream." -- Hunter S. Thompson

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Wednesday, March 05, 2025

Once Upon a Time in America...

 ...there were Republicans who would stand up to a criminal president even if he was the leader of their own party.   Even if they had agreed with him and campaigned with him and perhaps even owed their seat in Congress to him.  Even if it pissed off their constituents.  Even if their mommy told them not to.  That is was their duty to loyally stand by their man!

I know, I know.  That's crazy talk.  Bigfoot talk.   Or a bedtime story for very small children who still believe in Santa Claus and The New York Times.  But it's true I tellz ya!  I was there! I saw it on my teevee, in living color.    

This is a bit of the speech by congressman Larry Hogan, Sr. of Maryland's 5th Congressional District, who was moved nearly to tears by Nixon's lies and betrayal. He was the first and only Republican to vote for all three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon:


This is a key moment from this speech.  Hogan is angry.  Bereft:

The President didn’t, in righteous indignation, rise up and say, ‘Get out of here. You are in the office of the President of the United States. How can you talk about blackmail and bribery and keeping witnesses silent?’ . . . And then throw them out of his office and pick up the phone and call the Department of Justice and tell them there is obstruction of justice going on. But my President didn’t do that. He sat there, and he worked and worked to try to cover this thing up so it wouldn’t come to light.

And this was Hogan at a press conference:

The evidence convinces me that my President has lied repeatedly, deceiving public officials and the American people. Instead of cooperating with prosecutors and investigators, as he said publicly, he concealed and covered up evidence, and coached witnesses so that their testimony would show things that really were not true… he praised and rewarded those who he knew had committed perjury. He actively participated in an extended and extensive conspiracy to obstruct justice.

And there was Republican Congressman M. Caldwell Butler, who was a loyal Nixon man, but who did not hesitate to use the "S"-word -- shame -- when describing Nixon and Watergate. 

  

The Alert Listener will notice that when Representative Butler called Watergate "our shame", he was not referring to "Both Sides" or "politicians in Washington" or "congress" or any of the other lazy, cowardly elisions the legacy media and Independent/Centrist goofballs always uses to pretend that some colossal Republican atrocity is somehow everybody's fault.

Nope.

Representative Butler is explicitly referring to the "Republican in the White House", and anyone affiliated with the Republican party.

Nixon was a petty, paranoid, vindictive man who Americans thought, in more innocent times, had tested the upper limits of how much corruption, criminality and treason an American president could indulge in beneath the cloak of executive power and secrecy before the free press and the co-equal branches of government yanked him off his pedestal and drove him from office.

But compared to what Trump has been doing, openly and with the thunderous approval of the entire Republican party, Nixon was a piker.  Nixon was a saint.  Nixon would have been Diogenes' last stop when he took up his lamp and went walking the Earth looking for one honest man.  

And compared to the grovelers, fascists, imbeciles and lunatics that make up the Republican congressional majorities of today, the median 1974 Republican congressional knuckle dragger is Franklin Roosevelt.  Is John Lewis.  Is Eugene Fucking Debs.  

 In other words, they are exactly who we told you they were.  


Burn The Lifeboats

Sunday, April 21, 2024

Nice Job Google!

Google AI Javert just flagged an +18 year old post of mine with a "Sensitive Content Warning".

Damn. 

Almost got away with it. 


I Am The Liberal Media


Monday, June 06, 2016

The Amazing Helicopter Halperin Makes Lee Atwater Completely Disappear



If you're of a certain age, you vividly remember the infamous "Willie Horton" ad. Back in 1988, as George H. W. Bush's presidential campaign was going up in flames, he put the job of winning him the presidency and running the Republican National Committee into the hands of this guy:


And Atwater delivered. He did indeed "strip the bark off the little bastard" (Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis) and made "Willie Horton his running mate". He made George H. W. Bush president, taught his two eager proteges -- Dubya Bush and Karl Rove -- all the tricks of his filthy trade, and poisoned the heart of the Party of Lincoln beyond repair.

This is settled, American political history, in the books and undisputed. But it is an American history which flies in the face the today's "Both Siderist" media fairy tales. An American history which absolutely wrecks the mandatory Beltway narrative that racism and bigotry are not, not, not a long-standing mainstays of modern Conservatism and the indispensable pillars of Republican electoral politics but instead are unfortunate anomalies which just glided down an escalator and into the Republican party, unbidden, one sunny day in June of 2015 -- fully formed and unrelated to anything that had gone before -- in the person of Donald J. Trump.

And so Mark Halperin -- in true, soulless Mark Halperin form -- takes the best speech that candidate Clinton has given to-date and (at the 1:08 mark of this video) uses it it to erase the horribly inconvenient reality of Lee Atwater from American political history.



"You think back to 1988.  George Herbert Walk Bush.  People thought his chances of winning were bad.  He was 17 points behind Michael Dukakis. He gave a convention speech well above a performance level people thought he could achieve and that pretty much did it. "
The greatest trick the Beltway media ever pulled is pretending that Republican racism did not exist before Trump.

And like that...



...Atwater is gone

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

On This 149th Anniversary Of Appomattox

CONS
"So no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves." 
-- Jim DeMint, former Republican Senator, current head of the odious Heritage Foundation, and committed lifetime hateful deranged bastard.
Here is your gentle reminder that a staggering number of American Conservatives have still not gotten the fuck over the "War of Northern Aggression" and that the entire modern Republican Party has been built on a strategy of pandering to people like Jim DeMint so relentlessly that they long ago turned the Party of Lincoln into the Party of Jefferson Davis.

Somewhere in a very deep circle of Hell, Lee Awtater is watching his GOP willing to eat itself alive rather than admit that Barack Obama is the legitimate leader of their country -- willing to nuke the economy and nominate outright, batshit lunatics rather that cooperate one iota with the black man in their White House -- and laughing:



Friday, October 28, 2011

Mr. Gilliard Would Like A Word With You


I guarantee you this planet-cracker from the late Steve Gilliard's archives is better and more timely that 4/5th of anything you were planning on reading today.

Sunday, March 13, 2005

...
This will not be for tender eyes or sensibilities.

Ok, when you have a team, people bring different things to it, but the goal is to fucking win. You don't get anywhere by cutting down your fucking teammates. You don't like Mike Moore and Move On, you bitch about them in a private e-mail, you don't run to those fucking bitches at the WSJ and proclaim them the problem. The only thing those assholes at the WSJ editorial page can do for a liberal is break their hands in a skiing accident and not work for a few weeks. That's the only help they can provide. Any asshole who runs to them to whine isn't on MY fucking team. They're out for their own fucking selves and realizing that doesn't take the genius a five year old uses in McDonalds.

A lot of people wanted to buy into the bullshit that the GOP was beating us like a trailer park wife. Well that's horseshit. Our problems is that our coaches suck. They not only don't know how to win, they act like they don't want to win. Yeah, yeah, Clinton won, but this is a different team playing a different fucking game. The public likes clear choices. You may hate George Bush, but you know where he stands, and that's why John McCain will NEVER be president. He's too many things to too many fucking people. And Hillary is marching down that same fucking road.

A lot of you blame John Kerry for losing. Well, that's also horseshit. Even Tucker fucking Carlson thought Kerry had in the bag. We fucked up by discounting the church offensive of Rove. That's where those votes came from. It wasn't any fucking Swift Boat either. They fucked up, according to Zogby, and people didn't believe them. But that was one fine magic trick, taking out Rather and neutralizing the draft dodging issue against a bona fide war hero. They played a better ground game. Did Kerry fuck up? Sure, but it wasn't about any vote fraud shit. That battle was lost when Ken Blackwell decided to play for the home team. Once he decided to Tom his way to popularity, that was a done deal, Diebold or no, wacky Bev Harris or no. Part of the problem is that Kerry was saddled with the same losers everyone else had to deal with. Coaches who can't fucking coach and try to win using the old playbook. They KNOW that playbook and hand our asses to us when we use it. They didn't want to win bad enough. They thought there were rules. Our old friend Hunter Thompson knew that politics had one set of rules, do anything to win which you can get away with. The fact that Kerry got close is a miracle, given the team he had.

But the real blame belongs in Congress. Anyone want to tell me how that wacko Tom Coburn is a Senator? It's like Theodore fucking Bilbo rose from the dead and took back his seat. He should have been carted off to await the rapture in a mental hospital.

The DLC should be called the dumbass losing coaches. Al From couldn't coach his way out of a fucking paper bag. His day is done.

Here's the deal: Americans like the lives liberals gave them. There have been fundamentalists since 1740 and, like roaches, they pop up, fuck up a few things and scurry away. Rapture? Every century brings out those wackos. Left Behind is Star Wars for Bible thumpers. Fucking fiction. But what they don't like is our unwillingness to stand for something. The GOP has lied and bullshitted so many times, it's a miracle people can wipe their asses after listening to them.

And how do liberals react? Oh, Americans are sheep, let me move to Toronto, Bush is a fascist.

Which is just an excuse for cowardice. Conservatives don't say that shit in public, they act like they're protecting the poor while fucking them in the ass. They sure talked up Jesus during the election, and then fucked them good with tort reform and bankruptcy laws. They talked up the marrying faggots and then picked their pockets. The oldest hooker scam on the planet, get you thinking about your dick, while picking your pocket. Yet, how do we react, what do we do? Whine about Fox. Fuck Fox. Fox is for morons. Ignore fucking Fox, turn it into a fucking echo chamber. Thank God Bush decided to overplay his fucking hand.

The bankruptcy bill is a fuck up, a fuck up assisted by the party of the rich, which is, of course, bipartisan. And it will be such fodder for good news stories and legal challenges that they will regret passing it. But why did it pass? Because we let it slide and didn't demand a fight. Now we have to get the horse and put it back in the fucking barn. And praise God that Bush has always had a hardon for Social Security. If some dumbasses don't lose their nerve, Bush will ride this puppy to defeat, a brutal asskicking defeat. Stopping Bush is the ultimate validation of liberal idealism and its effectiveness, if people seize that and ram it up against the bullshit free market ideology they never bother to practice themselves., What the fuck does some think-tank asshole know about work. he spends his day bullshitting about ideas he'll never live under. I say give them some field experience. Max Boot thinks the military is so fucking great, well, there's a job in Iraq for his ass and the rest of the warmongering chickenhawk pussies who jerk off to big guns and use the Military channel as their porn. Milton Friedman would have been a communist if he had to live under his own ideology. he spouted that bullshit from a professor's desk in a country which granted generous social protections.

The simple fact is that the America we have today is the result of liberalism. You get to jerk off to Halle Berry and dream about Denzel Washington because of liberals. The idea that liberals are pussies is bullshit, bullshit that we help promote because we let these lunatics define us. Ann Coulter is a fucking nut job, but everyone treats her like she's sane.

And to all the liberals who would say:, we can't be like them, it doesn't matter what we do, I have a simple fucking reply: FUCK YOU.

Let me drop a little history lesson on you: the Blitzkrieg was effective when the Germans used it. It was brilliant. But you know the problem, they never had enough equipment or men to do it full out. Having been taught well, guess who did? The Russians. They not only had tanks and planes, but more of them, in more places. They chased the Germans with the venegence of the wronged. The Blitz in German hands got them to Moscow, in Russian hands, it got them to Berlin for 50 years.

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

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

The GOP workd the refs to the point that they shit themselves. It's time to do the same. Someone ought to be deconstructing David Brooks and sending out PR releases highlighting his fucking errors and sexism weekly. This is not a game to win on defense. Sulking about how things don't go your way gets in the way of making them go your way. You have to assume that they're against you and you have to hammer them. I don't care if they say they're liberal or not, their owners aren't. They're greedocrats.

Which is why as much as I respect Lauire Garrett, it's clear she suffers from newspaperitis. You can't make newspapers better. When they go, they go and don't come back. But you can make print better, you can use different tools. Anyone trying to save newspapers is trying to revive the dead. TV? TV is about money even more. If selling cat fur was a fad, TV would endorse it. Expect nothing from them that you do not fucking make them do.

Oh, and one final fucking point: if you are not with us, you are against us. If Al From wants to suck Wall Street cock, that's fine. If Hillary Clinton wants to make nice with Man on Dog Santorum, that's also fine. But if you step to us, try to blame us for your failures, we will stomp a fucking mudhole in your ass. The GOP wins because we didn't fucking fight back. Now? We fight. And if you don't want to fight to win, we're gonna make you sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. We won't be asking, either. This isn't the hippie left of peace and love. This is a left with money and balls and we're gonna fight. Fuck Peter Beinart and his neocon friends. Fucking asshole licking PNAC ass like a prison punk. Every time he goes on a show as a liberal, we should be calling the bookers, e-mailing them, saying he's not. We have to work the room, get to the editors and the show bookers and the people who run the machine. Not just bitch about how unfair it all is.

Because it isn't unfair. It's life. It's only unfair if we sit around with our dicks in our hands doing nothing. You want to change this country, you change it. You change the terms of debate, how it's debated and who gets to debate. And you stop whining how it's all against us. In 1972, a lunatic like Rick Santorum wouldn't have gotten on Firing Line, much less the US Senate. Now, we have to do what they did, but meaner, faster, harder. The Germans started with the Stuka, but it was the Sturmovik which ruled the skies at the end of the day. The GOP may have started this fight, but we'll be the ones to finish it, if we have the will to.

From Santorum to Neocons, from the Wall Street fuckers to Occupy the Newsroom, from the Quislings inside our perimeters to call for a weekly deconstruction of the lies of David Fucking Brooks...it's all there.

It was damn good advice six and a half years ago.

It still is.
...

Saturday, September 03, 2011

Jon Stewart was wrong


On the advisability of not pacing your rage.

Before it plunges down the wingnut memory hole forever, let us pause to recall that the absolute batshit berserker rage against the Kenyan Usurper is not something of recent vintage, nor was it something that was "caused" by anything President Obama ever said or did.

As evidenced by this little bit of history from just 10 weeks after President Obama was sworn in, the unhinged hatred on the Right was "caused" by the mere fact that a Black man with a (D) after his name got elected President by a solid majority.

Period.

From the moment his hand touched the Bible (you do remember he took the oath twice, right?) to President Limbaugh ordering his faithful manservant John Boehner to throw an historically unprecedented hissy fit over the scheduling of a joint session of Congress, every Republican tantrum -- Every. Single. One. -- has been nothing more than various means to the end of undoing the results of the 2008 election.

From Birtherism to Death Panels, the Modern Conservative agenda in the Age of Obama has been nothing but reckless swine and calculating traitors grabbing whatever heavy object they could lay their hands on and heaving it into traffic, hoping to cause a wreck.

In other words, a relentless, national program of premeditated sabotage at a time of war and national economic emergency.

And don't even get me started on their fucking governors.

If Bush had actually done his job and killed Osama bin Laden, the Right would have cleared room for him on Mt. Rushmore. If Bush had killed bin Laden and helped take down Gaddahfi? Over a single summer? Fuck, the Right would this minute be carving his face on the Moon.

President Obama -- whatever his flaws -- has done these things -- things that the Right would have found admirable in any other person on any other day -- but since it's Obama, it's...gone. Vanished. Revised, trivialized and miraculous transmogrified into a Christopath coloring book in which Bush actually kills bin Laden.

Instead we have the Right -- lavishly funded by the fascist industrialists and Fox News propagandists who are so close to their dream of pure oligarchy they can taste it -- holding poor people hostage to tax cuts for billionaires, threatening to blow up the world economy unless they get 100% of everything they want, putting holds on everything it couldn't filibuster, swearing public allegiance to lunatics and Dark Ages superstition.

Because you know what? Jon Stewart was wrong. For the Right, going jaw-dropping, over-the-top, foaming apeshit and staying apeshit actually worked just fine. And as long as no Democrat of the First Water is willing to call them out as the depraved thugs that they are (and as long as no major media outlet is willing to tell this story honestly) it will continue to work, because the Right has gone the Brownshirt Dolchstoss myth one better: pre-loading a fully-articulated "We were betrayed by internal enemies!" fantasy into the tiny, mushy brains of their orc army in advance of the global economic Reichstag Fire they themselves are clearly desperate to ignite.

In February, 2009 I wrote this:
After leading us -- limping and wounded -- away from the precipice of economic disaster, over the next eight years President Obama's hardest job is going to be the reclamation and rehabilitating of a gibbering, toxic scrumfuck called the Republican Party.
In this, I was as wrong as Jon Stewart: if the last two years have demonstrated anything beyond any doubt, it is that that the GOP is rotted from the soul on out and beyond redemption.

I am also keenly aware that the last time these people were allowed to get this absolutely dug-in/fuck-you-crazy it took the entire Union Army to stop them from destroying this country.

I wonder what it will take this time?

Thursday, August 18, 2011

And With That


A "movement" was born...

From the NYT:

Crashing the Tea Party
By DAVID E. CAMPBELL and ROBERT D. PUTNAM

...
Our analysis casts doubt on the Tea Party’s “origin story.” Early on, Tea Partiers were often described as nonpartisan political neophytes. Actually, the Tea Party’s supporters today were highly partisan Republicans long before the Tea Party was born, and were more likely than others to have contacted government officials. In fact, past Republican affiliation is the single strongest predictor of Tea Party support today.

What’s more, contrary to some accounts, the Tea Party is not a creature of the Great Recession. Many Americans have suffered in the last four years, but they are no more likely than anyone else to support the Tea Party. And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics.
...

And once again, the only people stupid, corrupt, oblivious or just plain damnfool enough to buy yet another transparently obvious Republican Big Lie were the people who rule our elite Imperial not.




UPDATE: Nothing better crystallized the Serious-Person-Fart-Rebreathing-Bell-Jar mentality than this exchange between Devid Gergen (adviser to Presidents "On Both Sides" and former occupant of the Reasonable Republican Chair on "The News Hour" [currently being warmed by the Godawful David Fucking Brooks]) and Matt Taibbi (scruffy, Unserious Outsider who says "fuck sometimes", names names, and does the kind of actual, Honest-to-Royko reporting that David Gergen cannot even comprehend) from 2010:

Gergen: If it were not for the extra boost of enthusiasm the Tea Party provided, I imagine the Republicans would have won only 40 to 50 seats, instead of the 60-plus they gained. But the Tea Party also makes it harder in the future for Republicans to maintain a coherent party. Matt is right that they will have a large voice in the nomination process in 2012. But one cannot discount that someone could arise, as Reagan did in the past, who can bridge the differences within the party and keep people united.

Taibbi: To me, the main thing about the Tea Party is that they're just crazy. If somebody is able to bridge the gap with those voters, it seems to me they will have to be a little bit crazy too. That's part of the Tea Party's litmus test: "How far will you go?"

Gergen: I flatly reject the idea that Tea Partiers are crazy. They had some eccentric candidates, there's no question about that. But I think they represent a broad swath of the American electorate that elites dismiss to their peril.

Hart: I agree with David. When two out of five people who voted last night say they consider themselves supporters of the Tea Party, we make a huge mistake to suggest that they are some sort of small fringe group and do not represent anybody else.

Taibbi: I'm not saying that they're small or a fringe group.

Gergen: You just think they're all crazy.

Taibbi: I do.

Gergen: So you're arguing, Matt, that 40 percent of those who voted last night are crazy?

Taibbi: I interview these people. They're not basing their positions on the facts — they're completely uninterested in the facts. They're voting completely on what they see and hear on Fox News and afternoon talk radio, and that's enough for them.

Gergen: The great unwashed are uneducated, so therefore their views are really beneath serious conversation?

Taibbi: I'm not saying they're beneath serious conversation. I'm saying that these people vote without acting on the evidence.

Gergen: I find it stunning that the conversation has taken this turn. I disagree with the Tea Party on a number of issues, but it misreads who they are to dismiss them as some kind of uneducated know-nothings who have somehow seized power in the American electorate. It is elitist to its core. We would all be better off if we spent more time listening to each other rather than simply writing them off.

Two years later, Taibbi and the Dirty Fucking Hippies are once again proven right and the Very Serious Gergenites are once again proven to be dead wrong.

Any bets that Gergen will get his Sage Insider ticket lifted over this?

Over anything?

Ever?

Of course not.

Because long ago at the heart of the American Empire, "properly vetted and researched" stopped meaning much beyond that which has been passed to you under the Men's Room stall partition at Bistor Bis on "Matt Drudge" letterhead.

At the heart of our falling Empire, if you side with the Villagers, any amount of incompetence, contempt for the facts and just jaw-dropping fuckuppery will be instantly forgiven and forgotten: side against them, and unless you are very lucky and very good, the tiniest slip -- even no slip at all -- means your career will killed as as dead as Dillinger.

Friday, October 29, 2010

Your Friday Podcast


Special Halloween Undead Zombie Lee Atwater Edition.

Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget you can listen to our archives for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

"First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys."

-- Ray Bradbury


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