Yesterday They Were Just Two German Clerks

 Today they're the "Honored Dead".

-- Rick Blaine, Casablanca

This morning on the Comcastrati Network, respected Conservative thinker and Wrongest Man in America, Bill Kristol, rhapsodized with respected Conservative broadcaster and Very Big Liar, Joe Scarborough, about the Good Old Days when the Breitbart's Mausoleum For The Chronically Unemployable (h/t Charlie Pierce) was a trusted and legitimate news outlet.

Y'know, before they were overrun with haters and morons like this shitbag:

From Politico:

Kristol wryly suggests new name for Breitbart News

By NICK GASS 08/17/16 08:15 AM EDT

"Right Wing Intolerant Mean-Spirited News" does not quite roll off the tongue like Breitbart News. But that's what Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol would have the conservative organization, whose top executive temporarily stepped down Wednesday to lead Donald Trump's campaign, renamed.

During an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Kristol lamented that the conservative news organization has become something other than what its late founder Andrew Breitbart intended.

"I knew Andrew well, and he was a troublemaker. But he was a good-hearted person who would not have—I mean, I hate the fact that that it’s called Breitbart News," Kristol remarked...

"It's unfortunate that we're all sitting around talking about Breitbart. It's a disservice to Andrew's memory," Kristol said, while remarking that the website, under Bannon, has been "pretty successful" from "a business point of view."

But, Kristol added, "someone should go look at all the things they've said."...

Here's the video (h/t Crooks & Liars):

I'm going to have to sit with this remark by Bill Kristol -- "someone should go look at all the things they've said" -- for a long time.  

At least until my uncontrollable crazylaugh stops.

Because if the Dirty Liberal blogosphere could be said to have served one, overarching mission since the beginning of recorded blogger history, it has been to jump up and down, waving our arms, saying "Fuck!", and trying mightily and ineffectually to get members of the Beltway media to just please for fuck's sake "go look at all the things" -- the terrible, horrible, no-good, lying things -- their colleagues get away with saying every single fucking day.  (See also: Every damn thing I have ever written.)

Corollarily, if the entire Beltway media establishment could be said to obey one, all-encompassing commandment with Borg-like single-mindedness, it is to make absolutely god damn sure that no one within the Beltway media ever, ever, ever starts tugging on the "someone should go look at all the things they've said" thread.

Because the Beltway media is a confederacy of con men -- a sodality of hacks -- each dependent on all the others not to bring up the fact that this is all a puppet show being run for the profit of corporate interests at the expense of our democracy.  And if anyone with any real clout and access to a really substantial audience ever started to actually "look at all the things they've said" (See, "The Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks") the unstoppable cataract of recriminations and mass firings that would soon follow -- starting with parasites like Bill Kristol and Joe Scarborough -- would wipe them all out.

Which is why there is safeguard after safeguard in place to make sure that never happens.

On the video you can see every single person on this panel working in frantic unison to separate themselves and their party and the Fake Tea Party the invented to get their off their party off the hook for the being hateful morons who spent eight years cheering for Bush...

...from "Trumpism", which they all swear on the lives of their children was invented out of whole cloth at the Breitbart website in 2010.

No Joe.  It's not "Trumpism".  It's good, old-fashioned, filthy, hateful, fact-averse "Republicanism" from crotch to crown.  And you damn well know it, because you and all of your depraved pals have damn well prospered by it for 20 years.  

Ever Since I Shelved the "Driftington Post" Project

("Synthesizing the Narrative of a Generation!") I have found it almost impossible to even thumb through the great, sloppy midden pile of nipple slips, diet tips, tabloid sleaze, purloined excellence, occasional articles of genuine interest and, generally, the murmur of the New Age hipster end of the Davos wading pool talking to itself that HuffPo has become.

Arianna's House of Games was, is, and ever shall be an exercise in raw capitalist scammery dressed up in the best fair-market cotton Che tee-shirt money can buy, and once I had satisfied my morbid curiosity -- once I learned exactly how the simple, mechanical aggregation magic trick worked by doing it for a couple of weeks and once I had sussed out the 25 or so words which are in constant, Batman-Splat!-Pow!-Zowie! rotation inside the headline extruding algorithm -- I lost interest.

But every now and then I drop back over just to see

Today, for example, I stopped by.

First thing I noticed was that Rupert Murdoch's trophy wife -- Wendi Deng Murdoch -- had been given a choice piece of real estate atop the front page to promote her first movie.

Oh boy!

The word "lao tong," once holding a historic meaning, now had a modern and relevant definition for me. In fact, even before we launched the production process, I found my amazing family of lao tongs rallying around me. These connections kept me feeling brave. The wonderful writer Amy Tan introduced me to Lisa See's novel. Without Amy's friendship, I would never have been inspired to start this project. My great friend Florence Sloan joined as my supportive and strong producing partner and together we found ourselves lucky enough to...

Something something Wayne Wang.
Something something impressive figures from Silicon Valley.
Something something the mayor of San Francisco.
Something something my good friend Willow Bay.
Something something actress Bing Bing Li.
Something something Lisa See.
Something something Diane von Furstenberg.
Something something Nicole Kidman.
Something something Diana Taylor.
Something something Ivanka Trump.
Something something Ben Kingsley.
Something something Deb Lee Jackman.
Something something Senator Chris Dodd.

Something something.

Or, as President Jed Bartlet once said, "It's nice when we can do something for prostitutes once in a while, isnt it?"

Because, yes, we are talking about the trophy wife of that Rupert Murdock.

Perhaps I will drop by the Huffington Post for a few seconds again.

In three months.

Or seven.

Or sixteen.

If You Love Conservatism, Let it Go.

If it returns, it was always yours.

Or something.

You know, whenever Andrew Sullivan drops a few too many tabs of Rancho Reagan Shinola and goes all maudlin and squishy and mystical over the great, untrammeled Conservatism that Never Was of his youth, and how these kids today with their crazy hair and Toby Keith music have gone and ruined it all...

Left, Right And Time
29 Mar 2011 10:10 am

I suffer, it seems, from an affliction that bedevils many. I now find myself largely opposed to most Republicans and in favor of a Democratic president as an even tempered pragmatist. But I have not reimagined myself as a leftist. Others have, of course, but I wince a little every time. Take the issue of taxes - and you see where the right-left paradigm is totally insufficient to the occasion.

Income tax rates are now lower than they were under Ronald Reagan and far lower than they were under Eisenhower. And yet it has become a Norquistian non-negotiable that no taxes can be raised at all on anyone, let alone the beneficiaries of the last thirty years - and those who differ must be "leftists" - even when the US is facing debt of historic and dangerous proportions. Someone advocating what Eisenhower was perfectly comfortable with would be regarded by the Republican right today as a communist. And yet, of course, Eisenhower was emphatically not a Communist, whatever the John Birch society believed.
...

I cannot help but be reminded of this delightful 1998 item from "The Onion"

Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?

By Bruce Heffernan
October 28, 1998

Look, I'm not a hateful person or anything–I believe we should all live and let live. But lately, I've been having a real problem with these homosexuals. You see, just about wherever I go these days, one of them approaches me and starts sucking my cock.

Take last Sunday, for instance, when I casually struck up a conversation with this guy in the health-club locker room. Nothing fruity, just a couple of fellas talking about their workout routines while enjoying a nice hot shower. The guy looked like a real man's man, too–big biceps, meaty thighs, thick neck. He didn't seem the least bit gay. At least not until he started sucking my cock, that is.

Where does this queer get the nerve to suck my cock? Did I look gay to him? Was I wearing a pink feather boa without realizing it? I don't recall the phrase, "Suck my cock" entering the conversation, and I don't have a sign around my neck that reads, "Please, You Homosexuals, Suck My Cock."

I've got nothing against homosexuals. Let them be free to do their gay thing in peace, I say. But when they start sucking my cock, then I've got a real problem.

Then there was the time I was hiking through the woods and came across a rugged-looking, blond-haired man in his early 30s. He seemed straight enough to me while we were bathing in that mountain stream, but, before you know it, he's sucking my cock!

What is it with these homos?
...

See, this thing of it is -- the thing that Mr. Sullivan will never admit to himself or his readers -- is that he does not owe his long and successful career to being a "real" Conservative.

He owes it to being a Gay Conservative. A token. A front-man. Mr. Outside. A "roper", in the parlance of the confidence game.

It is a subject on which I have touched before:

The Trajectory of Falling Objects

...
The Modern GOP, as is now painfully clear, has always been the furious white guy party. The Jebus party. The gun-fetish party. And the all-of-them-riding-the-short-bus-to-school-together Party.

Not exactly an appetizing bill of electoral fare -- certainly not the kind of people you’d ever trust to baby-sit your Constitution -– but fortunately the Party of God was also the Party of Money, and so the GOP did what any hagged out failure with a ton of cash would do: it went out and bought itself some credibility!

It bought itself a whole religion, complete with satellites and universities. It bought institutes and governments. It underwrote think tanks and teevee networks. Book publishers and spokesmodels. Coast-to-coast radio coverage and “serious thinkers”.

And it bought itself a teevee-friendly veneer of diversity.

What the Right needed was a light coating of urbane respectability to buy them enough time and access to destroy the country.

And it was people like Sullivan who happily lent it to them.

On the Left, the technical term for a gay or minority political writer is…writer.

But on the Right, the technical term is “celebrity”, which meant as long as people like Sullivan were onstage doing their dancing Conservative monkey act, the Party of God could point to them and say “See, we’re not haters” to the press.

And as long as the con game played itself out, times were good in Tokenville, high-paying gigs were plentiful.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but without the word “Conservative” tacked to their resumes, people like Andrew Sullivan, Kathleen Parker, David Brooks and a growing nest of “Obamacons” would all have had to go looking for honest work a very long time ago.

And so Sullivan miraculously managed to miss the moral dumpster fire that was the Conservative movement as it burned cheerily away in his own back yard year after year after year…

…until the day that Conservatism’s Brand Identification started to fall faster than Port A Potty stock the day after scientists figure out how to turn shit into gold.

Which leaves the Apostates with a serious cash-flow problem.
...

Without the "conservative" bit, Mr. Sullivan is just another anti-DOMA, pro-pot, gay Gen-Xer clipping articles out of the local Penny Saver and writing occasional paeans to Obama. And according to the one million Liberal anti-DOMA, pro-pot, Penny-Saver-article-clipping, Obama-paean-writing gay bloggers I know, the ROI on that gig is slightly less per annum than what you can dig out of the sofa cushions of the average community college teacher's lounge, and certainly not enough to launch anyone to the top of Mt. Beast.

And so, Mr Sullivan finds himself trapped in a odd sort of Hell of his own making: a cramped little Malebolge of the Deceivers where, in order to continue to enjoy the fruits of being the Gay Conservative, he is compelled to continually undermine the credibility of everything else he writes by ritually and publicly polishing the turd of Conservatism's Once and Future greatness over and over and over again.

...
For the Palinites, the lie is that history began on January 20, 2009, when the Black Guy became president; for the Sullivanites, the lie is that history began in 2003, when George W. Bush apparently snuck into Ronald Reagan's crypt and peed on the Great Man's mortal remains.

Because every bit as much as any Birther flake or Death Panel stooge -- every bit as much as Sarah Palin -- Andrew " Reagan-Thatcher pragmatic Christian Tory" Sullivan hangs onto his position and paycheck only by tirelessly hawking his own brand of discredited, self-absolving, self-deluding revisionist bullshit ("Bush Betrayed 'Real' Conservatism"). Mr. Sullivan dresses his crackpottery up by nudging the time-line back a little bit, but the object is the same: to exempt himself from the same, harsh judgment he wants to lavish on the Palinites by excusing himself from the much larger and more destructive crime of helping to create the environment in which moral monsters like the Palinites could flourish.

And because Mr. Sullivan builds his critique of the Palinites on fundamentally corrupt ground, his observations of them not only come across as deeply dishonest, but also loudly and unintentionally hilarious.

Tomorrow, when I hold my breath and balance my checkbook, I might well find the whole sham infuriating.

But today I just find it pitiable.

Doggies

Sometimes they bite, but that is not always a bad thing.