Shut Up and Go Away

Most of you are no doubt familiar with Tom Friedman's infamous "Suck on this" moment on the now-defunct Charlie Rose Show in May of 2003.  

But but don't sleep on Rose leading Friedman off by confidently asserting, "Now that the war is over...":

At the time, this was the received wisdom of the Beltway Sages.  For example, here is David Brooks writing for Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard in 2003, practically endzone dancing with delight because now that Bush had been proven unequivocally right about everything, boy howdy were those dirty hippies gonna finally get what's coming to them.

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces 

Mass destruction of mistaken ideas. 

APR 28, 2003

... Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are... 

Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

The magic of this piece of persiflage -- and all such super-patriot Salacious B. Crumb caterwauling...

...by all your favorite Neocon pundits back in the day -- is not merely that it got everything wrong, but that it got everything perfectly backwards.  

It's the GOP base/Tea Party/MAGA meatheads that grew more vociferous.  Even President Obama trying to clean up the ruin they left in their wake, and asking nothing more than everyone help out and meet in the middle did not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of the Left (and all the usual fascist scapegoats) is all that is left of Right. 

And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their MAGA rallies, their podcasts, their Hate Radio and their Fox News garbage. They will still have a huge influence over the Republican party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to sane, normal humans who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

And there was never any  magic "Aha!" moment that brought their Neocon dream palaces down.  None of them ever missed a meal.  Most of the got promotions and book deals. No matter how far Democrats extend themselves and offer compromise after compromise to repair the damage the GOP has done to this country, no day will come when Republican politicians, pundits and the base of the party turn around and say, "We were wrong. The Left was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. 

Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The Right's lies and conspiracy theories will get progressively stupider, as the ghouls and grifters who spread them get progressively richer.  And they will backtrack, and reverse themselves again and again. 

They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact...

...they rejected...

...only days before...

2011 video of Trump is going viral after Iran attack:

"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective."pic.twitter.com/QR9v3h0hdo

— Joe Rogan Podcast News (@joeroganhq) February 28, 2026

No Half Measures

Gallows Schadenfreude (™)

Definition:  Enjoying a hearty laugh at someone else's adversity or tribulation even as you stand up there on the windy gibbet.

I was moved to coin this term when I heard -- and not for the first time -- the recently-former Republicans and MSNOW employees at The Bulwark shaking their fist at the heavens and insisting that "billionaires who care about America" need to step the fuck up and fund a new media that can push back against Conservative media and the Republican-controlled legacy media.  

Oh how carefully they avoiding saying that Liberal billionaires need to step up and fund a genuinely Liberal media.  

From a December 31, 2025 Bulwark podcast:  

Sarah Longwell:  What do we do about an entirely consolidated media system that has been built around Trump's allies? 

Jonathan Last (with a smirk):  Why Sarah, what do we do? 

Longwell:  We have to build new things. We have to be the ones, like, where are the patriotic billionaires?  Like, Bezos acted like a patriotic billionaire and then sold out to Trump and gave him the [Washington] Post. The [Washington] Post is a shell of itself. We're going to have to build entirely new media ecosystems and billionaires who care about America are going to have to step up and start helping to both build and and bring back these media. 

Tim Miller:  We probably need to regulate them too. 

As most of you know, Liberals have been writing about the awfulness of the legacy media forever -- shouting it from our little blogs for more than 20 years, and talking about it for decades before that.  So imagine my gallows schadenfreude when I heard these former Republicans -- who popped into existence five minutes ago and were immediately lavished with the kind of daily, unalloyed support of the "liberal" media that is beyond the wildest dreams of OG Liberal bloggers and podcasters -- suddenly noticing that the legacy media sucks, then breathlessly announcing it to the world as if they think they've just discovered radium, and then insisting that patriotic billionaire damn well need to step up and take action.  

Except based on their performance to date, if they did ever find a djinn bottle on the beach and wish for the independent media of their dreams to be conjured into existence, it's pretty clear what kind of "independent" media they would ask for.  

An awesome Sensible, Center-Right new/old media -- a retro-media, if you will -- where no one talks about the state of the GOP before Trump.  Where it would perpetually be 2013: a spiritual recreation of Sally Quinn's tight circle of parlor austerity trolls of days gone by, but this time with emojis.  Where George Will would once again be the fount of all wisdom, and David Brooks would once again be free to roam the land, concocting imaginary bright futures for an imaginary Republican party. (From Brooks in 2013)

A Second G.O.P. 

...It’s probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It’s smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast. It’s smarter to build a new division that is different the way the Westin is different than the Sheraton...

The second G.O.P. wouldn’t be based on the Encroachment Story. It would be based on the idea that America is being hit simultaneously by two crises, which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles Murray crisis. 

A media where, for the greater good -- 

-- Liberals who insist on writing about the Before Time or the idiocy of the new/old Brahmans of this brave, new retro-media would be kept safely away from the microphones, just as they were in days of old (both are deadlinks, so don't bother.)

BooMan weighs in:

David Brooks: Stupid as a Boiled Ham
by BooMan
Tue Jan 29th, 2013 at 09:42:45 AM EST

You knew that at one point David Brooks would suffer enough cognitive dissonance to lead him to make a permanent break with the Republican Party. That day has not yet come. Instead, because his paycheck depends on his willingness to ignore all cognitive dissonance, Brooks has today decided to advocate the creation of a second Republican Party. This party won't be based in the South or the Mormon Mountain West. It won't be completely paranoid about the ever-growing encroachment of the Nanny State. Possibly, it won't be bug-eyed nuts about Sharia Law and Latinos who behead white people in the Arizona desert...

Shakes sticks a fork in it:

The GOP isn't even honest about who they are when they're navel-gazing. Americans expect politicians to lie to us, but we expect them at least not to lie to themselves.

However, for the time being...

I Am The Liberal Media

Anniversaries Can Sneak Up On You

For example, a friend emailed me an update on some awfulness that went down on Morning Joe and I suddenly realized that just a few days from now will mark the one year anniversary of the day I stopped paying any attention to what Squint and the Meat Puppet had to say about anything.

Or, with a couple of rare exceptions, pretty much anything any of Comcast's on-air employees or their rotating casts of recently former Republicans have to say about anything.  If the legacy media has sent me one clear, unambiguous message over the past decade it's that they don't care about my issues at all.  They're not speaking to me and the wise and seasoned voices I would like to hear represented somewhere in media are almost nowhere to be found on cable news.

Elsewhere, the Scott Jennings/Abby Philips reboot of "Hannity and Colmes" is tedious and repetitive.  A cartoon where nothing fundamental ever changes.  His lying smirk will be there until they close the place down, and no amount of faux "calling him out" or "showing him up" will change the fact that this is just Konflict Kabuki designed to keep eyes on the babble box between dick pill commercials.

And the appointment of a right wing despoiler like Bari Weiss to gut CBS coupled with Norah O'Donnell's rolling over and giving up in the face of Trump's torrent of lies on 60 Minutes was sad.  Inevitable, but sad.  Like watching the end of Poltergeist --

-- a haunted, cursed place finally collapsing and imploding into nothing.

Taken all in all, it's somber portrait a dying wasteland, but considering my wife and I do this every day for a living, you know what?   I'm not one jot less informed or aware than I was before going on the cable news wagon.  

Amazing what the power of "I don't care" can do.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Looks Like Greta Susteren Might Have To Take a Pay Cut...

...along with the rest of the brigands, quislings and fascists who work at Newsmax.

From NBC:

Newsmax to pay $67M to settle defamation lawsuit from voting machine company
The settlement averts what promised to be a high-profile trial.

The conservative cable news channel Newsmax will pay $67 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by the voting machine company Dominion over baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, according to a new regulatory filing.

The settlement averts what promised to be a high-profile trial.

Newsmax and Dominion Voting Systems agreed to the settlement on Friday, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The payments will be made in three installments by January 2027, the filing said.

“We are pleased to have settled this matter,” a Dominion spokesperson said in response to a request for comment...

Who knows?  Employees might even be facing unpaid furlough days in their future,  just like we in management had to take when I worked for the City of Chicago and times got lean. 

So, is that the end of the story?

Of course not.

Watch as the Newsmax spokesnazi predictably invokes the Magic Conjure Words which the legacy media itself created long ago and invested with the power absolve themselves of their own crimes against truth and journalism.  With emphasis added just for kicks.

In a statement, Newsmax said it “believed it was critically important for the American people to hear both sides of the election disputes that arose in 2020.”

“We stand by our coverage as fair, balanced, and conducted within professional standards of journalism,” the company added in part.

Where did this wretched hive of scum and villainy learn to invoke the legacy media's own "Expelliarmus!" to disarm and deflect?

From, among others, the good, gray pages of The New York Times.

Will this break Newsmax and show them the error of their ways?  

Of course not.  

Newsmax deals in lies, conspiracies, racism and rage the way a meth dealer deals in, well, meth.  It is an extremely profitable enterprise staffed and run by the kind sociopaths who have no qualms about wrecking the country as long as they make a buck.   

But just maybe it'll make 'em just the tiniest bit gun-shy next time, and these days I'm taking my wins where I find them.

I Am The Liberal Media

One if by Land. Two if by Sea. Three if by Hate Radio and Fox News Teevee.

As most of you already know, thanks to his ability to squint really hard and conjure mirages into mountains, and daydreams into deliverers, decade after decade, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has complied an unbroken record of manifesting, out of thin air, one Republican savior after another and one rising Conservative reform "movement" after another.

Of course they're always juuuust around the corner, "deep in the bowels of the G.O.P" or laboring industriously but anonymously away in statehouses, but always on the verge of springing into action. And thanks to Brooks' insider knowledge and special powers of observation, over and over again he has confidently reassured his readers that salvation was definitely heading our way at speed, so ignore those Liberal crackpots and alarmists in the steeple of the Old North Church, shouting and hooting and waving three lanterns.

(You remember the Longfellow poem, right? One if by land.  Two if by sea.  Three if by Hate Radio and Fox News teevee...)

Down through the decades as the danger from the Right very publicly loomed ever closer, the legacy media's message never changed:  Don't you little people worry your little heads about any of that noise, because the Conservative Establishment (whose spokesmodels found a welcoming home on every channel and in every newspaper) has got this!

By 2009, David Brooks' Republican party was already doomed to eventually become the instrument of some monster or another.  It was a roiling shitpile of bigots and imbeciles finishing out their first year of what would be an uninterrupted, eight-year-long hysterical racist primal scream: their reaction to the Democrats electing a Centrist Eisenhower Republican named Barack Obama who wasted his entire first term and much of his second trying to reach out to a mob of angry, racist lunatics who would have none of it, but which the Conservative Establishment kept insisting did not exist.

From his vantage point comfortably ensconced in the Acela Corridor quiet car,  Brooks remained willfully oblivious to all of it, leading a legacy media cottage industry dedicated to looking right past what was obviously happening right in front of them, and instead focusing on a series of Conservatives saviors who were just over the horizon and therefor invisible to mere mortals

Instead...

 

Serious people.  

Quiet conversations.  

"austerity brigades".  Heh.

Even as the Rough Beast -- the end-product of decades of Conservatives handing their politics and media over to monsters like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater and on and on and on -- slouched towards Election Day to be born, this avatar of the legacy media refused to behold what he had helped to create

Brooks, September 2015 with emphasis added for entertainment purposes:

The outsiders are about to slide. Trump’s Don Rickles act wears thin. His ego may be galaxy-sized, but his policy ignorance is a void that overspills the known universe. He’s the Wizard of Oz. When the bluster curtain falls down, what’s left is pathetic...

Instead, the party will veer on a course midway between outsider and establishment. It will probably end up with some hybrid candidate — sharp of tongue, gifted in self-expression and yet still anchored in the world of reality...

That’s where Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio come in. So far, Fiorina has looked like the most impressive candidate. She has a genius for creating signature moments. (“If you want to stump a Democrat, ask them to name an accomplishment of Mrs. Clinton’s.”) But her spotty record at Hewlett-Packard probably means she can’t start at the top of the ticket.

Dig this coo-coo diagnosis of Little Marco: 

Rubio is young and thus uncorrupted, and he is a genius at relating policy depth in a way that is personal. He has clarity of mind and can sum up a complex subject — Russia, the Middle East — in a way that is comprehensible but not oversimplified.

This debate was one moment in time, but you can see the vectors of where this campaign is headed. This is no longer Bob Dole’s or George H.W. Bush’s G.O.P. But it’s not going to completely lose its mind, either.

Narrator:  Brooks' Republican Party had, in fact, already completely lost its mind long ago.  

It’s going to be somewhat the same, but edgier and more renegade. Right now, Rubio, Fiorina and maybe Chris Christie are best positioned to occupy that space.

Sometimes the amount of money, time, energy and professional integrity that legacy media has been willing to burn through -- and is still burning through -- to keep people who wrong all along in the spotlight, and, as a corollary, the keep people who were inconveniently right all along the hell out of the  spotlight...takes my breath away.

Burn The Lifeboats

Elmo Just Broke the Most Sacred Rule of the Legacy Media AND Republican Politics AND Never Trumpers

🤨 https://t.co/DTdfJWydLS

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2025

Oh noes!  The richest asshole in the world has breached barrier that walls off the Before Time!

Who knows what inconvenient creepy crawlies might start slithering out?

I Am The Liberal Media

CBS Was Given the Choice Between War and Dishonor.

 "They chose dishonor, and they will have war." -- Winston Churchill, slightly altered.

From The New York Times:

Head of CBS News to Depart Amid Tensions With Trump

Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News and Stations, had allied herself with Bill Owens, the “60 Minutes” executive producer who recently resigned.

CBS News faced another shock wave on Monday after its president, Wendy McMahon, abruptly said that she would exit her post, the latest development in an ongoing showdown between the news division and President Trump.

Ms. McMahon, whose full title was president of CBS News and Stations, said in a memo that “it’s become clear the company and I do not agree on the path forward.”

Tensions between Ms. McMahon and CBS’s parent company, Paramount, have simmered for months, a period that Ms. McMahon described in her memo as “challenging.”

Paramount is in talks to settle a $20 billion lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump that accused “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing an interview last year with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Many legal experts have called the suit baseless, but Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, has said she favors settling the case. She is seeking the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to a Hollywood studio, Skydance...

I Am The Liberal Media

Ghosts Of The Before Time: April 13, 2005

I'll spare you the introductory paragraphs explaining the reason I'm running this limited series.  If you're interested, the link is here.  

Suffice it to say that, as I repost selections from my 20-year-old archives, perhaps you can understand my impatience with the many, many recently-former Republican who use their massive media platforms to insist that absolutely no one could have foreseen the dark places the GOP and the complicit media were headed.

So, typos and all, from April 13, 2005...

Here’s what a ship that has already sailed looks like 

Journalist worried: may find ourselves "on the wrong side of history."

This is by Nicholas Kristrof in today’s NYT. I have added a few comments.

Jim Taricani, a television journalist for an NBC station, was freed last weekend after four months of house arrest for refusing to reveal his sources. And Judith Miller of this newspaper and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine have been ordered to jail for up to 18 months for protecting their sources, although they remain free until their appeals run out.…

Dame Judith is still working over at your place, right? About so high...mousy hair? Ahmed Chalabi’s stenographer? Goes by the Title “Queen of All Iraq”? It was pretty scandalous. You must remember; it was in all the papers. Well, almost all.

Judges don't exactly decide cases based on public sentiment, but their decisions do reflect the values of their society. And in our society, public support for the news media has all but evaporated.

Oh it's much, much worse than that, and you have only yourselves to blame. A punk’s first punch is always a little hesitant, not knowing if you’ll hit back and, if you do, how much throw-weight your packing. Bullies are cowards and once upon a time it was the job of the Free Press to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”.

But you all never hit back when the thugs came. You flinched and cowered, and left us all at their mercy.

A recent report from the Pew Research Center, "Trends 2005," is painful to read. The report says that 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago. ...

Those of us in the press tend to get defensive about our dwindling credibility. We protest that we've been made scapegoats by partisan demagogues, particularly on the right, and I think that's true. But distrust for the news media, even if it's unfair, is the new reality - and we will have to work much, much harder to win back our credibility with the public.

Yes, you were scapegoated. You were kicked around like a soccer ball , and every time you came up for air you backed off instead of fighting back.

You wanna be thought of as crusading, then crusade. You want respect for your investigative savvy...then investigate.

In any case, it's not just right-wingers who distrust the media these days. The Pew Research Center found that while only 14 percent of Republicans believe all or most of what they read in The New York Times, even among Democrats the figure is only 31 percent. ...
...the one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on is that the news media are not trustworthy.

No pun intended, but this is news to you?! In your weird fetish to be “objective”, the Republicans learned the little trick that makes you dance like organ grinder monkeys. Whatever goofy-assed idea they came up with, you’d reflexively cede them half the distance between the truth and their goal.

There was a book I loved when I was a little driftglass called, “Half Magic” by Edgar Eager, about a talisman that granted the user exactly half of what they asked for. Wish to be ten times stronger that Lancelot, you’ll get five. Wish for a million in cash, you get 500K. In the Mainstream Media, the Right Wing of the Republican Party found their Half Magic Charm. And each time you met them halfway, they moved the goalposts another twenty yards again...and you jogged right on along behind them, ten yards at a time.

The “compromise” between the truth and a lie...is a lie. The “compromise” between science and superstition...is superstition. Now, would you care to guess what the compromise between tolerance and bigotry is? Between knowledge and ignorance? Between Ann Coulter and Paul Krugman?

I don't see any easy solutions, but print, radio and television all need to take much bolder steps to reconnect with the public...

Oh goodie! Another journalist making with the sackcloth and ashes! Every few months, year after year after year, journalist/self-flagellates moan publically about how awful it’s getting and how Somebody should really Do Something! As predictable as Aldermanic indictments in Chicago in Spring. And yet year after year after year it gets worse.

We also need more diverse newsrooms. When America was struck by race riots in the late 1960's, major news organizations realized too late that their failure to hire black reporters had impaired their ability to cover America. In the same way, our failure to hire more red state evangelicals limits our understanding of and ability to cover America today.

What, you mean “Lou Grant” didn’t fix all of this stuff ?

You may have missed it, but “red state evangelicals” have their own media – its called Fox/CNN/AM Talk Radio. They have their own literature – it’s called The Left Behind series. They even have their own political party... and in case you haven’t noticed they run the country and they're coming for you with ropes and pitchforks. But hey, maybe if you just bend over a liiiittle further and waggle you bare ass just a liiiittle saucier, they wont leave so many bruises this time.

So, they are hardly underrepresented. Many of them are, however, downright nuts. It might help your credibility with the 69% of Democrats who think you’re irredeemably McGoo-myopic about Evangelicals already if you would pause to notice -- out loud and in print -- that Falwell, Robertson, Wildmont, Schafly, Dobson, DeLay are not “controversial” or “traditional” or “conservative”. They are hateful, bigoted theocrats who work diligently to pave over the Constitution and erect a State Religion in its place.

If one word can capture the public attitude toward American journalists, I'm afraid it's "arrogant." Not surprisingly, I think that charge is grossly unfair. But it's imperative that we respond to that charge - not by dismissing it, but by working far more diligently to reconnect with the public.

No, the word you are looking for is “irrelevant.” I ask my college classes what, if any, news they read. The results are terrifying. By huge margins they don’t even bother reading you any more at all. They know craven and compromise when they see it, and they’re not buying any anymore. Some do enjoy some of the talk shows...but only the ones that are amused by putting red and black ants in a jar and watching them tear each other apart.

Unless we can recover the public trust, our protests about reporters' going to jail will come across as self-serving whining. And we'll wake up one day to find ourselves on the wrong side of history.
...

Sorry, that day was in 1987 -- the day the Reagan administration invited the Fairness Doctrine over for a little lunch, took it down in the basement and shot it in the head.

When it upheld the Doctrine in 1969 U.S. Supreme Court said, in part, that, “It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.”

The rule use to be the primacy of the citizen, but then then came Reagan and his FCC Chair Mark S. Fowler. Formerly a broadcast industry lawyer, who made it crystal clear that he held in utter contempt the whole idea of broadcasters had a civic responsibility for their product or a responsibility for making sure the media was really “Fair and Balanced” in a was that served democratic debate.

That was the moment for you to make your Glorious Stand!

Fowler peddled the ludicrous doctrine that forcing people who were getting Crazy Rich using the public airwaves the make sure that both sides of important issues were heard would somehow actually stifle Free Speech, because if you knew you might have to let the other side get a word in edgewise, then you might be less inclined to shoot your mouth off.

And Jimney Christmas, you also might be less inclined to hit a guy you disagree with in the face with a snow-shovel if you know a cop might toss your ass in jail…and you might get sued out of your split-level ranch and into a packing crate on Lower Wacker Drive.

But as with every single aspect of the GOP agenda – from speech to ethics to impeachment – the Republicans have no interest in a “fair fight” or in a marketplace of ideas. They’re interested in WINNING and since the Republican party cannot win in a straight fight, winning means cheating. Or, rather, raping and razing the rules once they come to power so that they’re no longer bound by any recognizable concept of “fairness”.

In other words, why risk jail time pounding someone’s face to steak tartar, if you can just pass a law that you now have the legal right to beat him senseless whenever you fucking well feel like it…and HE’S the one who can be jailed or sued if he fights back?

But how does one get away with such villainy? I’m glad you asked. Enter Reliable Republican Judicial Stooges #1 and #2: Reagan appointees to the D.C. Circuit, Judge Robert “Baby Face” Bork and Judge Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia. Their 1986, 2–1 decision dodged around the whole question of the Constitutionality of the issue completely. By the interpretation of the nuanced use of ONE WORD (“under” instead of “by”) they declared that whole thing was an administrative matter, to be decided at the discretion of the FCC.

And in 1987, Dennis Patrick, Reagan’s new FCC chair, pulled the plug on it. Later that year, Reagan vetoed a bill that would have reinstated the doctrine, and in 1991 a movement to try again died why Bush 41 threatened veto.

And in 1988, Rush Limbaugh was off to the races.

For over 20 years, the Right Wing has gotten fat and rich and powerful running the same scam on you buffoons over and over again. No matter how batshit crazy their position is, you’ll concede half the stage, half the clock and give them the benefit of the doubt. Which give them an automatic victory. They showed up at the table with little more that bad-acid delusions, and now the control 50% of the battlefield because you defaulted it right into their laps.

And when you don’t completely capitulate to 100% of their insanity, they turn right around and feed that into their own Pravada Media as Further Proof of the evil left wing media conspiracy.

“Victim,” they shriek. “Anti-religious Bigot!” They rant this from the rooftops because of the tiny bit of sane ground you did not surrender...and you jellied eels dependably cave in even more.

And thus they have led you – and the rest of the nation you whose common interests you were supposed to be serving -- by these half measures, right into the foyer of your own slaughterhouse.

It’s really quite an amazing story. Too bad we don’t have a press anymore to report it.

End of April 13, 2005 repost.

Burn The Lifeboats

Relic of a Bygone Era

Today, the sentiment expressed in the promotional text on this poster for Warner Brothers' `1944 film, "Passage to Marseilles" is almost literally unimaginable: a mainstream movie company marketing its film to the general public on the explicit claim that it is every freedom-loving person's duty to fight fascism whatever the cost.

That was 1944, when patriotic Americans were fighting fascists, not 2025, as patriotic Americans watch in horror as tens of millions of our fellow citizens are either proudly showing themselves to be fascists, or cravenly capitulating to them.

Anyway, the text is a little hard to read, so here you go:

"PASSAGE TO MARSEILLE", starring Humphrey Bogart, is the story of an outcast ... forgotten by, but not forgetting, the land that banished him ... and of how jungle and shackles and mutiny could not stop him from going home.

Entertainment? Certainly! For entertainment is our business - a business in which Warner Brothers is a widely-recognized leader.

And that leadership is based on this Company's ability to make one picture satisfy two values!

One value is entertainment.

The other is best expressed in a long-standing Warner Bros. policy ... of producing films that will help to champion the basic freedoms of democracy.

You've seen that policy applied in "This Is The Army", "Air Force", "Princess O'Rourke", "Destination Tokyo", "Watch On The Rhine", "In Our Time", and many other Warner Bros. pictures

Be sure to see it again in "PASSAGE TO MARSEILLE", "THE ADVENTURES OF MARK TWAIN" "UNCERTAIN GLORY" and other Warner pictures soon to come! Then you'll know why the New York Times referred to this Company's "enviable record for combining good citizenship with good picture-making".

WARNER BROS.

JACK L WARNER, Executive Producer

A media corporation Selling a movie based on the fundamental virtue of killing Nazis... and winning praise from The New York Times for it's good citizenship?

What a concept!

Especially considering that, 81 years later,  media giant Netflix -- which streams some of Warner Brothers most popular movies -- is trying to sell the public on the virtue of not taking sides against fascists because, y'know, Both Sides.  

Both Sides Don't

Peter "Hot Dog Guy" Baker

For all of his dystopian rhetoric, by many traditional metrics, the America that Trump will inherit from Biden is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since Bush came into office in 2001. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/05/u...

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— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt.bsky.social) January 5, 2025 at 9:08 AM

Legacy media:  It's  condescending and elitist to go around telling the proles stuff they don't want to believe.  

Also legacy media:  Golly, these proles sure are clueless.  

Burn The Lifeboats

“Everyone Has Their Reasons.” -- Jean Renoir.

While we are not exactly seeing the Twilight of the Self-Righteous, Liberal-Scolding Centrists, it is interesting to note that, having seen their "Fly more flags, chant 'USA!' louder, snuggle up with Liz Cheney harder" prescription for what ails the Dems come to nothing, some of the Riders of the High Horse are heading for the exits.

From CNN:

Veteran Fox News anchor and Trump target Neil Cavuto signs off after 3 decades at network

I had one encounter with Cavuto back in 2006 at the international Biotech Conference in Chicago.  He was one of the keynote speakers and was a nasty, vicious little piece of work.  

Couldn't read the room for shit.  

As I recall, he told the pharma execs in the room (big room, seated hundreds of us for dinner) that Liberals/Democrats were not just insufficiently appreciative of them, but that Liberals/Democrats were pissing in their hair and that they should withhold medication from Liberals/Democrats to teach us a lesson.

There was a little scattered applause, and a general sense of "Who the fuck invited this turd to our punchbowl?"  Cavuto apparently thought he was talking to room full of Fox News yahoos and not an international audience of venture capitalists looking to invest in stuff, tech firms looking for investors, and, generally, a crowd that was clearly confused by and hostile to the Bush administration's Conservative fundamentalist, anti-science, anti-stem cell agenda. 

From Axios:

David Axelrod ends "The Axe Files" podcast

I wanted this podcast to be one small antidote to the coarse nature of today's politics and social media culture that so often reduces people to negative caricatures and robs us of our common humanity," said Axelrod, a CNN senior political commentator, and founder of the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

"I step away for now because I need to make more time for the next chapter of my own story — for my great and blessedly growing family, for friends and new adventures. But, trust me, I'll miss these conversations and I'll miss you.  And I'm sure we'll meet again... But even without the Axe Files, let us continue to be seekers of each other's stories and penetrate the godawful silos that drive us apart."

Sure, David.  That's the real problem.  It's the "silos".  Those terrible, terrible "silos".

From The Bulwark:

The Final Beg to Differ

Mona [Charen] and the gang [Damon Linker, William Galston, and Linda Chavez] bid farewell to this format, discuss what will replace it, and offer a glimpse of future plans.

Before they turned mother's picture to the wall and got outta town, the consensus opinion among these fossils was that:

1. The Democratic Party needs a top-to-bottom gut rehab but,
2. No one is really sure what that should be. Except, 
3. It should involve Democrats getting a lot more "centristy"

Now they belong to the ages.

Matthew Dowd now apparently spends his days posting the birthdays and death days of various notable individuals on BlueSky.  I'm not kidding.  I'm also not sure if you can call this "quiet quitting" from a reputation rehab job at MSNBC that had devolved into a periodic drive-by slot in which he agrees with Nicole Wallace about whatever.  But now that Mr. Dowd is about to get an more massive dose of the "Disrupt the K'rupt Duopoly!" disruption which he so earnestly and aggressively worked for back in 2016, he seems to be looking to become part of the digital wallpaper.  At least until he and his feather-light "principles" can figure out which way and how hard the wind is blowing.

Bret "Bug" Stephens of The New York Times isn't quiet quitting.  Instead, being a thin-skinned, wrong-about-everything asshole and congenital coward, he is using his media real estate to loudly denounce his former Never Trumper brothers-in-arms.

Without ever having to suffer the slightest physical or professional inconvenient -- and certainly without being dragged down to Room 101 -- Stephens has reached the Orwellian “Do it to Julia! Not me!” stage of his conversion.   

Soon you will find him down in the NYT cafeteria, almost unconsciously tracing "2+2=5" with his finger in his butterscotch pudding.  Then it'll only be one more step until he tearfully realizes that everything is all right.  

His struggle is finished.  

He will have won the victory over himself. 

He will love Big Orange Brother.

As 2024 winds down and the country girds itself as best it can for a headlong tumble into the fascist abyss of a confederacy of dunces, it seems the Pod Save lads and the Bulwark lads are trying to form some sort of bro-lliance of privileged, white, out-of-power millennial MSNBC-adjacent coastal podcasters.   

So if, for some perverse reason, you happened to be in the market for a podcast where where a Pod Save lad and a Bulwark lad spend 10 minutes obsessing over the heath insurance CEO killing and warning us weak-minded Liberals that violence never resolves anything...

[Really? Never?]  

[Are we 100% sure about that?]

...followed by 15 minutes of slagging Joe Biden, boy howdy do have a podcast for you.

At the other end of the spectrum, one would never mistake Stephen's NYT colleague, Paul "The Shrill One" Krugman, for a bootless grifter or pissy Centrist scold.  But based on his output on SubStack, and reading between the lines of this farewell column in The New York Times, it seems clear that he had seen the future and it no longer involved trying to write while continuing to wear the Gray Lady's mildewed straightjacket.

The Chaos Monkeys Have Already Taken Over the Zoo 

The peddlers of misinformation are high on their own supply

Meanwhile, amid all the flux and uncertainty...

I Am The Liberal Media

But It’s Good That You’re Appointing Lunatics, Traitors and Criminals, Donald.

It's real good. 

And tomorrow - tomorrow's going to be a real good day!

IYKYK.

Burn The Lifeboats

I Am So Confused

One hears a great deal these days about Democrats failing because we don't talk like "regular people".  

For example, here is John Fetterman being quoted by Fox News...which, in turn, is quoting The New York Times.  Which is all just super helpful.

Fetterman says Democrats lost male voters by being insulting, condescending

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., believes the Democratic Party has turned off male voters by being "insulting."

In a new interview with The New York Times, the lawmaker stated that liberals turned off male voters, who supported President-elect Donald Trump in droves. 

"Telling them that ‘I know better than you do,’ that’s not helpful," Fetterman said, characterizing what he saw as the party’s approach to courting men.

This genus of punditing is currently in vogue and to be found everywhere.  Like "Joe is too old!" and "But her emails" and 'Why won't Obama lead?" and "It's going to be Rubio!" and "Live, from this Ohio diner...", it's every two-bit opinion-haver's cheap and lazy way to fill column inches, but it leaves me very confuse.  So I'd appreciate it if someone would explain it to me.

Slowly.

Using little words.  

As if I were a Florida Republican.

First, well, this isn't really a question.  It's just that I can't help but notice how so many of the people hectoring non-specific "Democrat" and "Liberals" as being too snobby and condescending are themselves some of the most condescending humans extant.  Looking at you, panel of Mona Charen's "Beg to Differ" Bulwark podcast.  Looking at you, Ezra Klein, and the Time's op-ed page.  Looking at you, Pod Save kidz.  And Morning Joe has every flavor of condescension you could ever want.  The braying, talking-over-everyone condescension of Joey Scabs himself.  The mousy condescension of his sidekick.  And whole chorus of condescension from their regular panelists.

Second, I've also noticed how quickly you, John Fetterman, jumped from condemning "the Democratic party" to slagging nonspecific "liberals", and then back to "the party" again.  Put a pin in that: we'll get back to it.

Third, if arrogant and dismissive and outright repulsive language is so damn off-putting, John Fetterman, I gotta ask: have you ever actually heard how the Right talks about us America-hating, terrorist-loving, filthy, socialist, commie pedophile baby-killers?   Because it may surprise you!  Of course you may have missed it since they've only been talking about us this way, very openly, for the last 30-40 years.  

On the radio.  

On teevee. 

In print.  

On podcasts.  

Shall I go on?

So, fourth, why it's only condescending and off-putting when Democrats hit back?

Fifth, how is it every two-bit opinion-haver in Murrica is always very lavish condemning "the Democratic party"and/or "liberals" generally, but can never seem to get around to identifying any specific Democrat or liberal by name or title?   Who are these people, John Fetterman?  Where do they live?  What do they do for a living?  If you've got specific names and addresses, I'd be happy run over and tell them to cut it out.  Y'know, one condescending liberal to another?

Sixth and last, just exactly how does Slack Jawed Cletus from Sisterfuck, Arkansas know what the hell liberals are saying about him, or about anything, anyway?  Are there liberals with sound trucks rolling through the shitty, potholed streets of Sisterfuck, Arkansas, promiscuously shouting big words and smarty-pants phrases  like "epistemic" and "counterfactual" and "bounded rationality" and "disenthrall" just to make the locals feel stupid?  Are liberal women swarming the local pickup bars, quoting Bell Hooks and making fun of the male denizen's tiny penises? 

Or, as is 1000% more likely, Slack Jawed Cletus from Sisterfuck, Arkansas has never actually  encountered a real-life snooty, condescending liberal in the flesh.  But Cletus watches a lot of teevee.  NewsMax, mostly, with some Fox for Sean and Jesse and the hot ladies.  And when he's out on Cletus business, he listens to one of the three local station, all of which carry sports and Conservative talk.  

And all of the media Cletus has consumes all day long, every day, for decades, tells him that, out there somewhere, millions of uppity, condescending liberals are plotting against him and laughing at him behind his back.  

Cletus' media will include tiny snips of actual Democrats saying crazy, insulting things like "the 2020 election was not rigged" and "Donald Trump is a criminal" and "January 6th was an insurrection"  and "inflation is coming down" when everyone knows none of that is true!  And Cletus knows that everyone knows that none of this is true because all of it will be repeated over and over and over again, in different ways, on all the garbage propaganda Cletus gobbles up like Christmas ham.

Inevitably, the outraged bellowing from Sisterfuck, Arkansas will slop over into the legacy media and a fleet of Zeitgeist Media Action Vans will be dispatched from the East coast to interview a whole passel of Cletuses in a bunch of local diners.  From there, Cletus' down-to-earth, recited-by-rote wisdom will make its way into the comments of quotable, high-profile people who won't scold Cletus for being a dumbass who listens to liars, but will instead blame Democrats and liberals for being pompous and highfalutin.   

And the circle of life will once again be complete.

If you would like a blueprint of how this process works, including a complete list of materials and tools, just send $64 to the...  

Burn The Lifeboats Fund

Or you could just go here ("Joe Walsh and The Triumphant Return of Joey Tabula Rasa") to a post in which I wrote about a specific, traceable example of this phenomenon.  A fragment of a speech by Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm was taken wildly out of context by one conservative asshole.  It was passed upward through the Conservative media digestive system until it was allegedly overheard by one of Joe Walsh's many, nameless, imaginary just-plain-workin'-folk friends who, like Tom Friedman's many imaginary cab drivers, always just so happens to say exactly what Walsh wants to yell at Democrats about on any given day.

And on this particular day, Walsh transmogrified that entire daisy-chair of fiction, fake outrage and nonsense into yet another tirade about how out-of-touch Democrats are with the just plain regular American proletariats.  

In that post I break down that whole process, and you can go read it for yourself for free.  However, if you are inclined to send along $64 or more, I wouldn't think less of you.   

UPDATE:  Jim from the comments makes an important point.  When you consider the vast, empty expanse of all the things about which Cletus is dead-rat ignorant -- "Cletus doesn't know Trump is a convicted rapist. Cletus doesn't know Trump spent $160 million on NFL TV ads bashing TWO (that's right 2) trans prisoners who continued their transition treatments in prison following the TRUMP Administration's guidelines. Cletus also doesn't know Trump is convicted on 34 felony counts." and so forth -- how is it that Cletus doesn't know fuck all about anything, but is 100% for damn sure that some college professor out there at Hah-vahd spends all his days and nights cackling about Cletus not using the right pronouns.    

We Know Where the Republican/Harris Voters Are

They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and the Pittsburgh suburbs, east, west, south and north somewhat.*

Can we, at long last and for the sake of  Mighty Koalemos, the Greek god of stupidity, finally be done with this ridiculous, billion-dollar snipe hunt for "decent" Republicans who, if we ask them real purdy and promise them a cookie and a parade, will maybe-maybe-maybe hold their nose and lower themselves to voting for a commie, baby-killing Democrat?

As it minimum, it would be a great kindness and a service to American democracy for all of those Never Trumpers who never understood the doomsday machine fascist party they spent their professional lives creating, and still don't fucking get it (such as) --

A Good Country’s Bad Choice

And what I got wrong about the 2024 election, By David Frum

-- to finally stand down, vacate their positions in the elite media and turn them over to those Liberals who never had any illusions about who Republican voters were and what their real agenda was.

This, of course, will never happened because it is impossible for any Never Trumper to take a long, hard look in the mirror and conclude, "I actually suck at the one thing I get paid to do."  And it is equally impossible for media executives to contemplate the idea of hiring people who would show up for work on day one loaded for bear with embarrassing receipts dating back to the Before Time.  

*In case you are unfamiliar with the quote. 

No Half Measures

Two Minutes Before the End of the World

I Am The Liberal Media