As you all know, in 2022 I launched the Tesseract Grift Party which rejected the false divisions of all states of matter, energy and politics!
We weren't Left.
And weren't Right.
But also we weren't Forward.
And not Behind.
Instead, the Tesseract party pledged to be fully present in all four dimensions and at all quantum states.
We sought to avoid the partisanship of the Left, Right and Forward parties by recognizing that, at the subatomic level, all of us are equal.
And that's where true reform must begin: at the quantum level.
Well, that didn't go over like the house on fire my advisors thought it would, so we went back to the drafting table and are reworking the party platform so we can
Regulate sound levels across all streaming and broadcast platforms so that
it doesn't jump wildly every god damn time you change the
channel.
If citizens over 55 or 62 or 65 will continue to be referred to as "Senior
Citizens", then citizens under 55 or 62 or 65 will now officially be
referred to as "Junior Citizens".
Any Democratic office holder, candidate for office, influencer, loudmouth or
"ally" who uses any variation of the phrase "this isn't a partisan issue" or
"this isn't about left or right" gets tased in the taint.
Any Democratic office holder, candidate for office, influencer, loudmouth or
"ally" who insists that we drop the issue of Donald Trump's massive coverup
of his dead best friend's child sex trafficking network in favor of "kitchen
table issues" will be required to spend six hours sitting at the kitchen
table of a MAGA simpleton and listen respectfully to them yawp about Obama
and treason and Crooked Hillary and Joe Biden how eggs now cost 9 cents a
dozen and gas is virtually free and 202 was rigged and Donald Trump was sent
by Jesus.
Medicare for all, legal weed, legal abortions and all the rest of the good stuff.
More to come and thank you for your attention to this matter.
... for every cheapjack, hustlebuck Third Party grifter.
So I am moved to wonder if he would be open to throwing a few million in my direction for my
very own Third Party effort. Because I have all the buzzwords! I
promise all the things! All I lack is a few million in seed money.
Our Tesseract party rejects the false divisions of all states of matter, energy and politics!
We're not Left.
And we're not Right.
But we're also not Forward.
And not Behind.
Instead, our Tesseract party is fully present in all four dimensions and at all quantum states.
Our party avoids the partisanship of the Left, Right and Forward parties by
recognizing that, at the subatomic level, all of us are equal.
And that's where true reform must begin: at the quantum
level.
And what quantum level policies and reforms are we proposing to bring Real
Change to our broken politics?
This is where we at the Tesseract party are truly revolutionary, because
we dare to take a superpositioning approach to all policy and reform
development. (h/t Andy Birss@1957AJB)
Our proprietary Tesseractarian development methodology begins by recognizing that all policies and
all reforms exist in all possible quantum states simultaneously,
and are therefore unknowable and unobservable. And they will remain
there, as a cloud of probabilities, until a team of Tesseractarian quantum political experts have poll-tested all of them at at the same time, at which point we anticipate that actual
policies and reforms may or may not precipitate out of this cloud of infinite
possible outcomes.
Then we send in a second team of Tesseractarian
quantum political experts who will test each policy and reform to determine
whether or not it can be safely observed by the public!
But our revolutionary Tesseractarian development methodology can't work
without you! We need your passion! Your energy! Your
unwavering commitment to never taking any position on anything! And most
importantly, your money!
We have a variety of sponsorship levels available, from Photon and Gluon
to Boson and Higgs-Boson, but all contributions at any level are
welcome.
The Tesseract Party: Literally, a new dimension in politics! (h/t Charles Evans @cme7677)
The Tesseract Party: Solving Tomorrow's Problems Yesterday!
Well lookie who The New York Times hauled out of the rubble of his
wife, Nancy Jacobson's, No Labels scam! That useless sack of tainted pork
scrapple, Mark Fucking Penn.
I kinda thought he and his wife would have been buried alongside Joe
Lieberman, as was done with the servants of the pharaohs of old. Y'know, it's not too
late...
And the Times' didn't just salvage him. They loaned him the
above-the-fold Sunday guest essay space to use as a political sniper's nest to
tell Biden and the Democrats what we're doing wrong.
Spoiler:
We're too liberal! Gotta be more Centristy! Like [checks notes] No
Labels!
...if Very Serious People (most of whom have been on the board of No Labels at one time or another)
had taken the obvious threat that No Labels posed seriously back when I warned
them it was a bad idea that they would all come to regret.
There’s no path to victory for a third-party candidate.
And. There. Never. Has. Been.
The article continues:
With a rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump almost set
in stone, it’s time to put a farce to rest: The notion that a
third-party candidate could actually win the presidency in 2024.
The idea that a “unity ticket” featuring a Republican and a Democrat
could somehow produce a nominee with “a clear path to victory” is worse
than a political fiction. The group behind it, No Labels, is pushing a
dangerous lie that would simply serve to put Trump back in the White
House.
No Labels floats the possibility of a coalition government or Congress
selecting the president in 2024
The group, which is trying to mount a third-party presidential campaign,
could block a major party nominee from winning the Electoral College
outright.
No Labels, the organization attempting to assemble a third-party
presidential unity ticket, is openly floating the prospect of a
“coalition government” forming after the 2024 election if no candidate
reaches the 270 Electoral College votes necessary to win the White
House.
The state's newest political party will select a nominee behind closed
doors in hopes of forming a centrist coalition.
Womp, womp!
And then, because there's apparently an endless supply of wealthy trolls out
there lining up to be separated from their money... from
The New York Times,
January 10, 2024:
A Super PAC Forms to Support No Labels
Officials with the group said they had $2 million in initial
commitments but expect up to $300 million if there’s a “viable”
ticket.
Ryan Clancy, the chief strategist for No Labels, said, “If we offer our
line to a unity presidential ticket, it will need a lot of support to
rally voters, and it looks like New Leaders 2024 will be well positioned
to provide it.
A political group intending to support a presidential candidate run by
the group No Labels plans to file paperwork with the Federal Election
Commission on Wednesday, with a handful of Republican and Democratic
strategists as advisers.
The group, New Leaders ’24 political action committee, expects a No
Labels ticket to materialize this year. No Labels has said it would
mount a campaign if President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump
are their parties’ nominees, in a rematch of the 2020 campaign that is
increasingly likely.
The group will be advised by Rob Stutzman, a Republican and former
deputy chief of staff to Arnold Schwarzenegger during his governorship
as well as an adviser for Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign.
Kathleen Shanahan, a Republican and former chief of staff to Jeb Bush
during his governorship, will be the chief executive, and Andrew
Fishman, whom the group identified as a Democrat and who has a business
background, will serve as treasurer, Mr. Stutzman said.
Officials said they had $2 million in initial commitments, but they
expect up to $300 million if there’s a “viable” ticket...
Dead Center -- Political Cowardice Now Has Its Own "Movement"!
In case you ever idled away an afternoon screwing around with your old
political chemistry set/fantasy football league lineups and wondering
what would happen if you took a bunch of Republican primary losers
(Charlie Christ)...added in a goonbag of out-of-work and out-of-favor
former Republican speechwriters and campaign button-men (David Frum/John
Avlon/Mark McKinnon)...the last of the politically arteriosclerotic
insider DLC goofs who aren't already drawing paychecks under the Obama
Administration's "Former Clinton White House Full Employment Project"
(Nancy Jacobson aka. Mrs. Mark Penn)...Republican minor teevee
celebrities (Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough)...
...and David Fucking Brooks?
And then sprinkled the resulting crime against nature with an assload of
money (because there are always, always endless assloads of money
available for any horrible idea that reinforces Villager
sensibilities)?...
Polls and focus groups make clear that a No Labels ticket would only serve to help re-elect Trump.
by
Sarah Longwell
SEN. JOE MANCHIN’S ANNOUNCEMENT last week that he won’t seek re-election to the Senate and will instead finish his term “traveling the country and speaking out to see if there is interest in building a movement to mobilize the middle” sure makes it sound as if he’s considering an independent presidential bid, likely with the organization No Labels.
If anyone were the target audience for No Labels’s $70 million gambit to recruit and run a “unity” third-party ticket with a moderate Republican (possibly former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan) and moderate Democrat (likely Manchin), it would be me, a proud Never Trump Republican and moderate squish.
But after conducting hundreds of focus groups with voters across the political spectrum, it’s clear to me that a unity ticket in 2024 isn’t just fantastical; it’s dangerous. A centrist unity ticket appeals to exactly one demographic: swing voters who will decide the outcome of the 2024 election...
Here's a fun bit ot trivia.
Back when Ms. Longwell was a Republicans lobbyist and managing director of the American Beverage Institute which...
"...lobbies on behalf of the alcohol industry, such as by arguing that the risks of drunk driving have been exaggerated and laws that have been adopted to reduce it are ineffective or inappropriate and opposing the lowering of the blood alcohol concentration limit for Driving Under the Influence (DUI) in Utah. According to Berman, 'Sarah always had a knife in her teeth'."
...I was writing posts warning about the No Labels scam.
In fact, next month will be the 13th anniversary of this post I wrote warning about the No Labels scam two days after it introduced itself back in 2010:
Dead Center
Political Cowardice Now Has Its Own "Movement"!
And oh my, didn't the savvy D.C. elite roll out the red carpet for them.
Back then, taking a position against against No Labels was like taking a position against the Iraq War before it went tits up, or taking a position against the poisonous Both Sides Do It lie before slow, constant pressure from readers of this blog (bless you) and listeners to The Professional Left podcast (bless you) and the rise of Donald Trump (which the Both Sides Do It lie facilitated) made it into a punchline.
Mind you, the Both Sides Do It lie remains an ongoing problem. It's clear that unless the social and professional equivalent of a bazooka in not kept firmly pressed to the head of the mainstream media every fucking day, they will automatically snap back like memory plastic to their original, craven Both Siderist shape.
So here's the bad news for Ms. Longwell.
The time to stop No Labels from becoming a dagger at the throat of our democracy was 13 years ago, back when "moderate squishes" like you were creaming themselves over the idea that a mighty Third Party oak could take root in the fictional Centrist soil between the bomb-throwing, racist, obstructionist Limbaugh/Tea Bagger/McConnell Right and the...?
Wait a minute?
Remind me again who the equally vicious, intractable, hate-mongering Left had put into office as the "Extremes on the Left" counterpoint to the bomb-throwing, racist, obstructionist Limbaugh/Tea Bagger/McConnell Right?
Oh that's right.
It was this guy.
A guy who could have been assembled in a No Labels Perfect Candidate laboratory had in not been for the fact that No Labels was nothing but bullshit from Day One.
And all of us crackpot, alarmist Liberals who live out here in the Real World and aren't drunk on D.C. Both Siderist popskull could see it.
You see, Ms. Longwell, No Labels was never anything but the physical and financial manifestation of the lie you on the Right and craven D.C. Centrist dupes (who -- spoiler! -- all now appear to be contributors at The Bulwark) kept telling yourself so you could go right on supporting the bomb-throwing, racist, obstructionist Limbaugh/Tea Bagger/McConnell Right and still sleep at night.
And now it's almost certainly too late. Those comforting Both Siderist fairy tales all of you told yourselves year after year so that you could stomach working for evil men have grown fangs and claws don't care what you think anymore.
“Renner, I must tell you of a creature of legend.”
“Say on.” Renner’s image dialed for coffee. Coffee and stories, they went
together.
“We will call him Crazy Eddie, if you like. He is a... he is like me,
sometimes, and he is a Brown, an idiot savant tinker, sometimes. Always he
does the wrong things for excellent reasons. He does the same things over and
over, and they always bring disaster, and he never learns.”
There were small sounds of whispering in MacArthur’s wardroom. Renner’s
image said, “For instance?”
Renner’s Motie’s image paused to think. It said, “When a city has grown
so overlarge and crowded that it is in immediate danger of collapse . . . when
food and clean water flow into the city at a rate just sufficient to feed
every mouth, and every hand must work constantly to keep it that way. . . when
all transportation is involved in moving vital supplies, and none is left over
to move people out of the city should the need arise . . . then it is that
Crazy Eddie leads the movers of garbage out on strike for better working
conditions.”
- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell (1974) "The Mote in God's Eye"
See also, "West, Cornel", "Yang, Andrew", "Labels, No".
Way back during the Before Time one subject that I wrote about frequently was
how Elite Conservative Tastemakers like David Brooks and David Frum were
struggling to disown the paranoid, racist ogre party that they had labored for
so many decades to bring into the world.
Mr. Frum, more comically, decided instead to pretend that the person
most responsible for the Giant Pig Party Implosion at the end of the
Empire...was the Reasonable-to-a-Fault Democratic President! Because he [Obama] has so far failed to put Frum's Republican
Party down like the sick animal that it is, and failed to clean up the
toxic partisan sewer that David Frum helped create..despite Mr. Frum and
every other Conservative douchebag in America being warned to beware
just exactly these consequences for the last 30 years by two generations
of Liberals...
And since the Rise of Trump I've written I-don't-know how many scores
(hundreds?) of posts about how, once Trump was elected, so many of the
architects of the modern Conservatives movement and the modern Republican
party had dashed for their ideological finger bowls and bidets to wash their
doughy, pink hands and their lying asses of any responsibility for his rise to
power.
It was a fluke! It was magic! It was Hillary's fault! It
was, somehow, the Liberals fault. Their party ran out of gas. They
had a flat tire. And so forth.
And you know what? It worked.
Thanks to the power of their friends and fellow travelers in the media, they
barely never missed a meal as they seamlessly morphed from bleating about
Barack The Kenyan Usurper and the vile socialist Left on op-ed pages and
wingnut radio...
...to scolding Dems on op-ed pages and on MSNBC for not understanding what a
grave, existential threat Trump really was, which is why Dems should step
aside and let them run the show.
Well, this here post today is about those same clout-protected goofs are now
disowning an entirely different litter of their monstrous
whelplings: Elite Both Siderists.
Oh noes!
It begins with The Bulwark's Mona Charen using her podcast to hand-wring over
what No Labels is up to:
Charen Let's turn now to a threat to all of the foregoing
because I want to talk a little bit about third parties.
Charen: We are seeing stories that, for example, Joe Manchin
the Democratic senator from West Virginia -- a state that went for Trump by
about y'know 90 percent or whatever -- but in any case he is going to New
Hampshire next week to do a forum hosted by No Labels. And also in
attendance will be Joseph Lieberman former Senator, former North Carolina
Governor Pat McCrory, former Congressman Fred Upton, and former Congressman
Joe Cunningham. All people who, y'know, two Democrats two Republicans
but everybody you know is sort of more in the center of the political
spectrum. And y'know, nobody understands more than people who
participate in this podcast the appeal of moderation.
Translation: We have all been worshipping at the altar of the Fake
Sensible Center for as long as any of us can remember.
Make a note of that: it'll be important later.
Charen: But this is arguably very dangerous in a year, 2024,
when we still face the threat of the y'know, Orange Lunatic being returned
to office.
The discussion then widens out into a surprisingly transgressive act of
memory (for this group) in which they're finally far enough away in time to
admit that, yep, Ralph Nader cost Gore the 2000 election and stuck us with
George W. Bush.
And, yep, Jill Stein tipped enough voters in enough swing states to cost
Hillary Clinton the 2016 election and stick us with Trump.
And, yep, pretty much every reputable poll shows that, if No Labels makes
good on its threat to put up a third party challenger in a few swing states
(because there is no hope of any such candidate winning outright) it would
almost certainly pull enough votes from Biden to put the Republican candidate
-- probably Trump -- in the White House.
The whole thing becomes grimly hilarious to me when the entire panel of
political professionals professes to be utterly baffled as to why No Labels
would do such a thing.
I can tell them why, but they're not gonna listen. Because they never listen. So, onward!
Charen: And it isn't just No Labels. It's also Cornell West
running on the Green Party and People's Party ticket. So I'm going to
turn first to you Bill Galston. You were initially involved with No
Labels but you've since broken with them over this. So one thing I
want to tee this up a little bit is No Labels has promised to end its
efforts if polling shows that quote "Biden is way way out ahead against
Trump next spring". Bill isn't the problem that it could be very close and
therefore they could act as spoiler? I mean if Biden is way ahead
they're irrelevant anyway?
Galston: As some of the listeners to this podcast know I was
present at the creation of No Labels 13 years ago and I worked hard over
that period to promote the core mission of the organization which was to get
the two major parties to cooperate more frequently and effectively to pursue
the common good of the country as the American people defined the common
good of the country.
And just like that the actual history of the modern Republican
Party disappears like a fart in a firestorm..
All memory of the extended, berserk racist primal scream that the GOP was
engaged in 13 years ago in reaction to Democrats electing a reasonable,
cooperative, centrist Black man named Barack Obama is
just fucking gone.
Because the lie that conjured the No Labels scam into existence and that
Galstone and others like him were fully invested in -- the lie that our
politics is broken because both parties are so equally extreme and
intransigent that they require firm Sensible Centrist hand of carrion-pickers
like Joe Fucking Lieberman to force them to work together -- had long since
become the Beltway's state religion.
Make a note of that too: it'll be on the exam.
Galston: But I drew the line when it came to mounting an independent
bipartisan ticket in 2024 because I feared that such a ticket would draw a
lot more from potential Biden supporters than from potential Trump
supporters.
Too late fucko.
Galston: And recently a very well regarded Republican-leaning firm by
the name of Echelon Insights did a survey that added fuel to my fears
because it turned out...
And so forth, and so on, and, once again, too late fucko.
Galston: Which led me to write an article which I believe was just
posted on the Brookings website...
Wow. Such daring.
There follows some talk about the Green Party. Memories of Jill
Stein. The way the electoral college works. Nothing you don't
already know about. And then:
Charen: Noah [Smith] there's such a huuuge gulf
between the reasonable sounding things that people, for example,
associated with No Labels say and the reality that we face. So here's an
example. Joe Manchin said,
"It is clear that most Americans are exceedingly frustrated by the
growing divide in our political parties and toxic political rhetoric from
our elected leaders." And he goes on to say,
"Our political discourse is lacking engaged debates around Common Sense
solutions to solve the pressing issues facing our nation."
Unquote. Well, yes. I mean who can disagree with that.
driftglass: I can. 100%. But Mona ain't gonna call on
me so...
Charen: I understand lots of really well-meaning voters
can listen to that and think, "Wow that's exactly what this country
needs." But if the two major party candidates, y'know, were Bob Dole
and Bill Clinton and somebody said,
"You know I'm going to run a No Labels candidacy that y'know attempts to
bridge the divide,"
fine. But that's not where we are. I mean, again, it's an
existential threat that Donald Trump could get reelected.
driftglass: But of course, back during the 1990s, these sorts of
Conservative clowns were talking about the dire existential
threat posed by Bill Clinton, weren't they? I wrote whole, long thing about it
back in 2009 called
"Like a Virgin". Perhaps you've read it. For at least the last 30 years,
according to leading Conservatives, every Democratic president
has been a degenerate, America-hating wanna-be Pinochet who was definitely going
to be the End of the Republic.
Note that for the record.
Charen: And I am just...I'm gobsmacked that people don't see it
in those terms. And they're sort of "La, Dee, Dah" y'know,
let's consider this option of y'know third parties. And so on. What do
you think?
There follows Some discussion about FDR's support slipping slightly during
World War II which has no relevance whatsoever to this situation.
Then get ready, because this panel of elites is about to lean
hard on the "most Americans" bullshit.
Smith: I would put my money on Biden against Trump but I think
that not everybody sees Trump as an existential threat. Most people
think of Trump in the context of culture wars. Most people are still
thinking of trump in terms of BLM and crime and abortion and trans whatever
and you know whatever culture wars. That's how most people think about
politics in America, I believe.
Smith then explicitly makes the
"Ya gotta understand, people who are not us are basically barely literate
rubes"
argument.
Smith: We are elite media junkies who just read all the news
about what's going on in, like Ukraine and Asia and all this stuff, and
about what's going on in, like, industrial policy or whatnot,,.
Yeah, because Ukraine n' stuff and
economics or whatever is exactly how "we" literati talk.
But please, tell me more about the lumpen proles.
Smith: ...and then most people are just thinking, like,
"Well Trump, he hates the guys that I hate or that I think I hate even
though I've never met them, etc."
So I think that it's unsurprising given all those baseline factors that
Trump would have a decent amount of support most people are just pretty low
information. Takes them a long time to catch up and often they never
catch up. But that's democracy. If we want to keep Trump out of the
White House we can't just say that he's an existential threat for reasons
that we understand that the average person doesn't understand. We can
say that all we wantand we should for elite audiences, whatever, but for
regular folks we need to make a regular folks case that Trump is really
bad.
driftglass: There are 81,283,501 people who voted for
Biden/Harris in 2020 that would disagree. So, to be crystal clear,
by "regular folks", Noah Smith actually means "Republican meatheads".
Y'know, the base on which Charen and the others built their entire party.
Charen: Cathy [Young. Another Bulwark employee], no
question that you have to make a different case when you're presenting it to
a broad audience. But the thing that's frustrating me right now is
that the people who are endangering the next election -- or,let's say...
let's put it bluntly, the people who are threatening Biden's re-election,
which is all that stands between us and Trump arguably. I mean it's
not over -- he could still fail to get the nomination -- but let's just say
he looks likely to get the nomination. But these are elites!These people who are doing this are all elites. I mean Cornel West is an elite! Joe Manchin -- all the people associated with No Labels --
these are all elites who are who are playing a very dangerous game,
arguably.
Young: Yeah I really don't know what they're thinking
driftglass: Oh I do. I can tell you pretty much exactly
what they're thinking, which is the subject of this post towards which I am
slowly circling. But please, go on.
Young: And you know, before I go on to sort of speculate on that, I
have my own confession to make which is that I donated money to No Labels,
like, years ago when it was first founded.
I was young. I was drunk. Barry White was playing on the
Victrola...
Charen: That's totally fine! You don't have to say it
like it's a sin! I mean... I mean at the time Bill [Galston] was
involved.
And now we get to the nub of the matter.
Young: And I also wrote [inaudible] article. I wasn't involved
in it the way that Bill was but his involvement certainly was part of what
made me interested in the group. But yeah, it just seemed like, uh,
y'know this fresh voice against, y'know, rampant partisanship and I
certainly had no inkling that it could ever end up playing spoiler in an
election at a crucial moment.
Once again, this goof is talking about 2010 -- a year in which the GOP very
publicly lost its fucking mind because Democrats had elected a black guy -- as
an era of "rampant partisanship" because apparently that's how she remembers
it.
Which is exactly why we do the No Fair Remembering Stuff
podcast.
Because properly understanding the difference between what
actually happened during the Before Time and the Never Trumpers'
abridged, bleached-out, Disneyfied version of what happened is so
terribly important. Specifically, how knee-walking drunk on Both Sides
Do It popskull every future Never Trumper was during this
time. How frantic they all were to prop up their Republican party by
deflecting or diffusing every Republican atrocity with the shield of "But the
Democrats..."
How it was all on autopilot.
How the easy, lazy
"Both Sides Do It" lie became the state religion of the punditocracy and the
Beltway media.
Young: So yeah, I don't really understand the
irresponsibility. I can sort of understand in 2016 when a lot of
people, including myself, kind of thought well, y'know even if Trump does
get elected, y'know how bad can it be? Well I think
now we know exactly how bad it is. ... I think in
2016 a lot of people --
basically a lot of people on the Left -- took the view that,
ah well, it's all the same. It's the... the elites. The political
elites. It doesn't matter if that's Hillary Clinton or Trump, it's the
establishment.
Nope. This was indeed the opinion of a handful Greenwalds and Chapo Trap
House louts, but, as I documented ad nauseum in real time, the real vanguard of that message was this asshole. Then-ABC News'
chief political analyst, Matthew Dowd (on the right) --
- and, on the left, his partner in crimes-against-journalism The Sad Clown of
Centrism, Ron Fournier:
And, of course, there was David Brooks...and all the rest. Right down
the line.
All the Very Serious Elites, all singing from the same "Both Sides Do It"
hymnal.
But of course, that isn't how this Bulwark flunkey remembers it. She
remembers it as "basically a lot of people on the Left".
Bulwark flunkey continues:
Young: I mean can any sane person not even necessarily
left-of-center, but, y'know non-right-wing take that view? I don't
think so. I don't want to speculate on whether our democracy can
survive another round of trump but I'd certainly rather not take that
chance.
It goes on and on like that, and I've already inflicted more of this on you
than is polite, so the sum and substance is this: roughly between the time
that the Bush Administration went tits-up and the day Donald Trump was
elected, the entire punditocracy -- and especially the Conservative
punditocracy -- had to scramble to find some fig leaf -- some lie -- that was
not only big enough to cover their own callow and catastrophic complicity with
eight years of the worst presidency in modern history, but also big enough to
smother the rising Liberal netroots community who had, in fact, been right
about the Right all along.
And thus the Both Sides Do It lie, that had been kicking around for decades,
was elevated to the status of the official state religion by both the political media
and the Republican Party who found, in the Both Sides Do It lie,
the perfect cover from which they could metaphorically lob cinder blocks into
traffic with impunity.
The lie was so suffocating and so profitable that its evangels swallowed the
media whole. From my local newspaper every day, to NPR, to
Meet the Press, to cable news it was everywhere, all the time. It
was so ubiquitous that those who ate and breathed the lie for a living never
noticed that they were creating an entire ecosystem in which
nothing but the automatic blaming of every Republican atrocity to Both Sides
could survive.
And in that ecosystem there grew monsters.
Elite monsters who spread like black fungus into every damp corner of every
commercial political media platform, every think tank, every advisory group,
the C-suites of corporations and universities -- succeeding precisely
because they were incapable formulating any political or cultural thoughts
outside of the Both Sides Do It matrix.
So when Mona Charen moans --
But these are elites!These people who are doing this are all elites. I mean Cornel West is an elite! Joe Manchin -- all the people associated with No Labels -- these are all elites who are who are playing a very dangerous
game, arguably.
-- and Cathy Young replies --
Yeah I really don't know what they're thinking.
--that is what I find so grimly amusing.
Because congratulation, Ms. Charen. By dint of the sheer, endless,
sanctimonious repetition of the toxic Both Sides Do It lie on every media
platform for decades, you and those like you gave birth to this litter of
horribles who are just as incapable of imagining a world where
only one side is to blame for Republican malevolence...as Republican
base voters are incapable of imagining a world in which -- holy shit! -- they
have been grossly wrong all along.
In both cases such a revelation is a thing to be feared and guarded against at
any cost because it would mean completely unwinding their persona and
(horrors!) admitting that the Left had been right.
And in the case of elite Both Siderist monsters the pathology is worse because
of how professionally successful most of these monster are.
Thanks to
ample bank accounts and the professional protections they enjoy, there is no
personal threat to their freedoms or their livelihoods great
enough to make them give up their insane Olympian perspective. Cornel
West is 70 years old and currently holds the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at the
Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. Joe Manchin is a 75-year-old
United States Senator with eight cars, eleven houses, two yachts and a net
worth in the $18M range. The executive board of No Labels is top-heavy
with wealthy insiders, and awash in an ocean of dark money. And if,
thanks to their monkeywrenching, Donald Trump were to squeak back into the
White House in 2024 and terminate the American experiment, I am absolutely sure ot
two things.
First, none of these clowns would be materially affected in any way.
Second, all of these clowns would instantly and automatically blame Both Sides.
No Labels -- the
Ratcheting-The-Overton-Window-Ever-Rightward-By-Blathering-About-Centrism
patent medicine show that has been soaking up money from credulous idiots
since 2010 (and
about which I have been writing since two days after they launched) -- began finally setting off alarms among some of those credulous
idiots this year when it decided to play presidential kingmaker by threatening
to use its $70M, dark-money slush fund to run a third party ticket in enough
swing states to siphon off enough votes to virtually guarantee the re-election
of Donald Trump.
And now they have named their price for taking their gun out of the
mouth of Lady Liberty.
From (sigh) Politico:
No Labels likely to back off third party bid if DeSantis emerges as GOP
nominee
This is one of the moves I've been waiting for. It pairs perfectly with
David Brooks' burying his razor-in-the-apple halfway down his sad bastard,
coulda-woulda-shoulda, love-ya-but-not-now-my-wife-might-find-out column about
No Labels, that begins thusly:
I’ve long been a fan of No Labels, the organization that works to reduce
political polarization and Washington gridlock. I spoke at its launch
event in 2010. I’ve admired the Problem Solvers Caucus, a No
Labels-inspired effort that brings Republicans and Democrats in Congress
together to craft bipartisan legislation. Last September, when No Labels
wanted to go public with its latest project, I was happy to use my column
to introduce it to people.
And continues thusly:
Personally, I have a lot of sympathy for the No Labels effort. I’ve
longed for a party that would revive the moderate strain in American
politics exemplified by Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore
Roosevelt, John McCain and contemporaries like Michael Bloomberg.
But concludes, in Brooks' sad bastard way, that now is not the time for a
third party challenger that would almost certainly put Trump back in the Oval
Office.
Because Trump is unacceptable.
So far so good.
But then we find out that, for Brooks, Trump and Trump alone is
unacceptable. But the smarter, more cold-blooded, more cynical fascist
to Trump's immediate right named Ron DeSantis?
If the 2024 election was Bernie Sanders versus Ron DeSantis, I’d support
the No Labels effort 1,000 percent. An independent candidate would bring
this moderate tradition into the 21st century, and if Sanders or DeSantis
ended up winning, his agenda might not be my cup of tea, but I could live
with him.
I am deliberately (and, I must say, heroically) skipping over all of Brooks'
noxious, standard-issue Beltway drivel about "moderation" and
"polarization" because I've already written (no kidding) thousands of posts
about that very subject.
Instead, let's focus on the fact that Sanders isn't running for
president, but DeSantis is, and strip-down Brooks' claptrap accordingly:
...if ... DeSantis ended up winning, his agenda might not be my cup of tea,
but I could live with him.
This leads straight to the Big Lie that Never Trumpers have been telling
themselves and everyone else from the very beginning about the relationship
between Trump and the GOP, and especially the GOP base. So let's
talk about that for a minute.
Never Trumpers need the Trump origin story to go something like
this.
Ahem.
Up until 2016, the GOP was doing great. They had (in David Brooks' own
words) "detoxified" their "brand" and were now a perfectly normal political
party. The base were noble, Burke-quotin', balanced-budget-lovin' yeomen
laborers. Salt of the Earth! And Republican elected officials were
sharp-eyed superpatriots who were on the verge of stamping out the dirty
commie menace from the Left and our Kenyan Usurper leader once and for
all. There was nothin' but upside -- nothin' blue sky and peach pie
ahead.
Then, suddenly and without warning, Donald Trump showed up and unleashed some
hitherto unknown form of dark magic, which somehow managed to instantly
ensorcelle those tens of millions of noble, Burke-quotin',
balanced-budget-lovin' yeomen laborers and turn them into a zombie army of
bigots and imbeciles who actually believed what they were watching on Fox
News. And if Fox wouldn't deliver the goods, they'd lurch on over the
OAN or Newsmax or Stormfront Action News.
And -- horrors! -- the power of the mighty sorcery that Trump wielded also
extended to Republican officeholders, turning those sharp-eyed superpatriots
who could quote chapter and verse from the Bible and Bill
Bennett's Book of Virtues into slavering myrmidons who climbed all over
each other to see who could be the most obsequious Trump asskisser.
It is important to understand why, in the Never Trumper's Trump origin story,
Trump's takeover of their political party almost overnight must be explained
away as a unique and inexplicable work of dark sorcery, which means that Trump
must be a unique and irreproducible threat. Because
any other explanation for the ease with which Trump took the
nomination and earned the dog-loyalty of the GOP base involves looking past
2016 and into the decades that preceded him. Decades during which
these Never Trumpers were just, standard-issue, scumbag
Republicans. Decades during which -- despite repeated warnings
that they were setting loose terrible forces that they could never control
-- these Never Trumpers eagerly fell to the task of building a
compliant, reprogrammable political party of bigots and imbeciles that would
turn out to be the perfect feeding ground for a monster like Trump.
...As I wrote a few years ago,the brain-caste of the GOP spent 40 years and
billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid,
racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering
the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any
information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved
Benghaaaazi goo.
In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the
Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect
feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more
bombastic the better.
And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to
Ann Coulter
and the
Washington Free Beacon
and the
Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by
flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.
Walk into any Liberal diner in Murrica -- especially Liberal diners in deep, red
areas -- and ask "When did the GOP lose their fucking minds?" and you'll likely
get a variety of answers from "Fucking Goldwater" to
"Fucking Nixon and his Southern Strategy" to
"Fucking Lee Atwater" to "The rise of fucking Hate Radio" to
"Newt Fucking Gingrich". But no Liberal anywhere (who is not on the
payroll of, say, The Bulwark or the Niskanen Center") would tell you
"Yeah, it all happened magically overnight in 2016".
Because that is patently absurd.
And yet that's basically the explicit or implied answer you will get from
virtually every Never Trumper.
So why is their bullshit fairy tale about Donald Trump's Chaos Magic now the
received wisdom of the Beltway media, while our clear, fact-based
"Jesus, Mary and William Shirer,
all you have to do is fucking look at the trajectory the GOP has
been on for the past 50 years"
explanation nowhere to be found?
Simple.
They're on teevee every goddamn day and we're not.
That's the difference between all those Liberals who dare to remember the
Before Time and all those Never Trumpers who refuse to. They're
enjoying hundreds of millions of dollars in free publicity by the Beltway
media for their various media enterprises, and while we're standing on the
metaphorical street corner every day, speaking truth to the empty air and
passing the hat the buy groceries and gas.
And what have the Never Trumpers -- who have been wrong about everything
since forever -- done with this massive boon they have been handed?
Brick by brick, they and their allies in the Beltway media have been
building a big, thick wall across 2016, behind which they have concretized
their ridiculous Trump origin myth into the established and accepted History
of Our Times. Week after week they are offered up by the Beltway media as savvy experts who must be deferred to because Dems are idiots and only the unique, penetrating genius of, say, the Lincoln Project can save us from [checks notes] the hellbeast they created and then failed to stop so utterly that they got run out of their own party.
And if Trump is a uniquely existential threat, then prying him off the neck
of the GOP like a carbuncle should solve the problem, right?
Right?
Then all of those Never Trumpers who still clearly loathe us Liberals but
who have been been dependent on largess of what little remains of the
"Liberal" media can get on with the exciting work of remaking the GOP
exactly as it was before Trump.
The way it was back in 2015.
This is why Charlie "I Will Never Forgive Chris Christie" Sykes has begun
the Christie reputation rehab project.
It's why Brooks would lay out in print (albeit in the most weasel-worded way
possible) that, yeah, he'd be cool with a President DeSantis.
It's why Never Trumpers are endlessly reading goat entrails and parsing poll
numbers to figure out what percentage of the GOP base and which GOP office
holders they can rope in to help put them back in the driver's seat...and
how much heinous, unforgivable shit they'll have forgive to get what they
want: a return to power with their record of shitting on Liberals
more-or-less still intact.
And it's why the Conservative front ground called "No Labels" is willing to
lay down its arms if the GOP is willing to clear the field for Ron
DeSantis.
Except, of course, all of this is exactly backwards.
Trump is not the problem. The voters that elected him are the problem.
And those voters will not accept a candidate who is not built from at
least 85% authorized Trump components. They want Trump's cruelty and
giddy malice, but without the Tweets, and they will not accept a candidate
who does not reflect and amplify the decades of madness that the GOP and
Conservative media pumped into their skulls. They will not accept a
candidate who doesn't understand that the poison that comes vomiting out of
Newsmax every day is gospel, and Owning The Libs is a mandate from the
Almighty.
Yes, Trump is a unique existential threat the same way that the atomic bomb
was a uniquely terrifying threat...until that asshole Edward Teller invented
the hydrogen bomb.
Trump isn't Hell. Trump is the anteroom of Hell.
And if you peek through the door in the main hall you can see row after row
of Trump wannabes ready and eager to incinerate the Constitution if that'll
make Liberals cry.
A group of House Democrats with ties to No Labels is turning on the
centrist group after it attacked one of their founding members.
On Tuesday, No Labels texted people who live in the district of Rep. Brad
Schneider (D-Ill.), criticizing the congressman for scoffing at their idea
for a unity presidential ticket and claiming it could result in Donald
Trump’s return to the presidency.
In its message, No Labels said it was “alarmed to learn that your U.S.
Rep. Brad Schneider recently attacked the notion that you should have more
choices in the 2024 presidential election.” They called Schneider “out of
step” with his voters.
The missive did not go over well with Schneider, who is a member of the
Problem Solvers Caucus that No Labels helped start on the Hill.
“No Labels’ attacks are the kind of division the country needs less of
right now, and it’s a betrayal of every moderate and every problem solver
in Congress,” Schneider said in a statement to POLITICO. “I helped form
the Problem Solvers Caucus six years ago to reach across the aisle and
find common ground, not to abandon my principles. I am as committed today
as I’ve always been to the principles that reflect the values and
priorities of my district, and to reaching across the aisle for the good
of our country.”
Schneider was quickly joined by other members of the Problem Solvers
Caucus in chastising No Labels for attacking one of their own and pushing
a unity ticket.
“No Labels is wasting time, energy, and money on a bizarre effort that
confuses and divides voters, and has one obvious outcome — reelecting
Donald Trump as President,” said Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) in a
statement. “Now, the organization has decided to go one step further and
attack a decent, well-respected, and hardworking member of the bipartisan
Problem Solvers Caucus for the apparent sin of calling them out on their
bogus plan.”..
"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." -- George Orwell
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Good lord. Latest “No Labels” scam, tricking Mainers into switching party
registration. Who will save innocent voters from Mark Penn and Nancy
Jacobson (the owners of No Labels)???.
https://t.co/PBk5DxOwvx
In case you ever idled away an afternoon screwing around with your old political chemistry set/fantasy football league lineups and wondering what would happen if you took a bunch of Republican primary losers (Charlie Christ)...added in a goonbag of out-of-work and out-of-favor former Republican speechwriters and campaign button-men (David Frum/John Avlon/Mark McKinnon)...the last of the politically arteriosclerotic insider DLC goofs who aren't already drawing paychecks under the Obama Administration's "Former Clinton White House Full Employment Project" (Nancy Jacobson aka. Mrs. Mark Penn)...Republican minor teevee celebrities (Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough)...
...and David Fucking Brooks?
And then sprinkled the resulting crime against nature with an assload of money (because there are always, always endless assloads of money available for any horrible idea that reinforces Villager sensibilities)?
What you get crawling out of the Petri dish are things like the autotuned, content-free, sugar-coma-inducing horror that is --
I mean, ever since the Republican Base ducked out on paying the tab for a generation of being loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything by putting on funny hats, screaming about liberty and calling themselves "The Tea Party", their sleazy Centrist enablers have been seething with jealously. Quite suddenly the monster they built didn't need them anymore and the skeevy hustlers who had helped create the Racist/Corporatist/Dominionist Confederacy on the bones of the New Deal and the grave of the American Dream found themselves cast out and looking for their next meal ticket.
Preferably a meal ticket under a banner that -- like "Tea Party -- wouldn't keep bringing up their horribly inconvenient past as the sleazy, enabling hustlers.
Hey, kids! I have an idea! Lets peel those the icky, damning labels off of everything and -- presto! -- there is magically no longer any difference between rat poison and apple sauce!
Can I haz my million dollars now?
...
It goes on like that. I've also run periodic updates on the many costume changed this scam has gone through over the years until it reached its present state.
