Can't Stop Won't Stop

This was a lead story in The New York Times today.

The short answer, which is actually rather long, is "No".

This is roughly the 12,258th "think piece" on progressive outsiders winning a few Democratic primaries.  It's nearing the "But Her Emails" saturation point. And these articles tend to come either in one of two flavors.  

First, Dire!Warnings! cursing Democrats for risking dooming us all by not becoming GOP Lite in order to chase the votes of disaffected Republicans.  These articles tend to come from (small wonder) recently-former Republicans whose "advice" to Democrats has always been -- rain or shine -- to keep moving rightward, ever-rightward -- in pursuit of an imaginary Center which is always, somehow, slipping over the horizon.  

Second, there are the breathless articles touting how a few members of the Democratic majority (do the math) are fighting back hard against a small number of progressives with whom they have no intention of sharing even a small corner of the Democrat's Big Tent.  Mind you, they had no fucking problem when it came to sharing our Big Tent with ghouls like Liz Cheney who spent their entire career slandering Democrats in the most monstrous language imaginable...but us New Deal Democrats get nothing but the stink-eye and a boot in the ass from the gatekeepers who own the velvet ropes. 

From The New York  Times, August 6, 2026:

Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left

One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.

The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful defeat of the year.

Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism. 

It will not shock you to learn that Third Way gets its money from Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech as well as outfits such as ExxonMobil and various health insurance companies.  All the usual suspects who would rather see a MAGA flag flying over this country forever than share the Democratic Party with actual progressives.

Now, it is rumored that this “Better Dead than Al-Sayed” gang of Regressives is led by a shadowy figure known only as “David Fucking Brooks”.  And two Fridays ago Mr. Brooks left his Bethesda Maryland compound just long enough to appear on the PBS News Hour where, practically in tears, he said this.

Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.

That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which the party is moving further and further away from the center, and therefore…

At which point, Brooks co-panelist, Jonathan Capehart, reached his limit of politely tolerating this old fraud's endless bullshit and interrupted him with:

I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket argument that the Democratic Party is running far left. 

That was the signal for the host – Amna Nawaz – to do the PBS thing of quickly moving on to the next topic at the slightest sign of conflict.

However, since I do not abide by PBS rules, I will just add that it is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at this moment".  

It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.

And of course Third Way is not a solo act. They have plenty of fellow travelers who are horrified that a few Democratic candidates have won their primaries in ways that Third Way, LLC does not approve of.  

From The Washington Post, June 3rd, 2026:

Centrist Democrats launch new pledge: ‘We are capitalist, not socialist’

Two Democrats in Congress who flipped Republican-held seats in 2024 are launching a pledge for their party’s candidates they hope will act as a rallying cry for centrists, calling for a “politics of persuasion over purity” and declaring that “we are capitalist, not socialist.”

The pledge is a direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt as democratic socialists such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) capture the party’s energy and activism.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Adam Gray (D-California) said they will unveil the pledge Wednesday afternoon at the center-left conference WelcomeFest, and hope to get candidates up and down the ballot to join them in signing it. 

From Common Dreams, February 9th, 2026:

‘One More Billionaire Front Group’: Centrist Dems Mocked Over New Initiative Led by Corporate Lobbyist

In fact, establishment panic over even mildly social-democratic ideas predates the current cycle by years.

From In These Times, seven years ago,  February 7, 2019:

Why Is the Political Establishment So Afraid of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal?

So, the short answer is "No".

The longer answer -- the reason why the answer is "No" -- is uglier and deeply embarrassing to the legacy media, which is why you will never hear them speak of it.  Because it has to do with what the "Tea Party" actually was.

For several years I bored you all silly with post after post after post about how the Tea Party was not some new, insurgent outsider group who were storming the barricades of the moribund Republican party.  That they were the Republican party: the same ignorant, racist, shoutycrackers Republican base they'd always been, but now that the Bush administration had shit the bed hard enough to crack the Earth's mantle, they needed their own, incredibly inconvenient past to go away so they could get on with the important work of having a full-on, eight-year-long, screaming mental breakdown over the election of a Black man as president.

And they accomplished this by A) Putting on stupid hats, waving Gadsden flags, and swearing that they'd never even heard of George W. Bush and, B) Getting the legacy media to go along with this massive fraud, which the legacy media was only too eager to do, given their own despicable complicity with the various crimes and treasons of the Bush administration.

And it worked.  And, as is our eternal fate, the only people willing to straight-up call bullshit on the whole scam were us dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically not a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam.  Ed Kilgore wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and E.J. Dionne. There was also this July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:

The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

No, no, no!  Definitely could not say that because that would violate the post-Dubya Generally Accepted Beltway Narrative that all problem are caused by "the extremes on Both Sides" and in the middle there is a "vital Center" full of millions of political virgins who had been moved by the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.

And to this very day, that lie continues to be one of those "Zombie lies", which everyone sorta knows is nonsense -- like Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves -- but has so completely passed into the realm of myth that the legacy media keeps right on pretending that it was actually true.  

In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth was so secure that by 2016 Joe Scarborough could finally come right out and say of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all knew it  and know with perfect certainty that there would be consequences (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

And that's the longer answer.  The Democrats are not facing their own "Tea Party" moment because There. Was. No. Tea. Party.  There was just the Bush-Off Machine goin' like 60 to rebrand the Republican base.  

What corporate Democrats are facing are ... New Deal Democrats.  People who revere FDR as the man who crushed fascism, and whose programs built the Middle Class, strengthened the union movement and helped insure that old age and poverty weren't a death sentence.   

People who remember that FDR was called a commie by the Republican party and the Republican media every inch of the way.

People who look at the mess the establishment has made of this country and think the Middle Class could used some help, the aged, infirm and poor could use some help, that good health care should be affordable, that unions are a good thing, that robber barons and Republican looters are bleeding us dry and, most importantly, for any of that to happen, fascism in America must be discredited and destroyed, root and branch.  

I Am The Liberal Media!

Blood Money

Under Republican misrule, you may soon have to sell your blood to pay for your blood pressure meds.

From The New York Times:

Trump Will End Subsidies for Medicare Drug Premiums

Millions of older Americans could pay more for their prescription drug coverage next year.

The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it intended to end a Biden-era program that for the past two years has helped tamp down the cost of monthly premiums for drug coverage for people on Medicare.

The decision means that millions of Americans 65 and older could face higher Medicare drug premiums next year, when the cost of living is already a major concern. That could be politically damaging for Republicans in the midterm elections. In the weeks leading up to November, Medicare beneficiaries could experience sticker shock while shopping for next year’s drug plan.

For 2025 and 2026, the federal government gave health insurers billions of dollars in subsidies to help them keep down drug premiums for people on Medicare. Without the subsidies, millions of people could have had to pay hundreds of dollars more a year for their drug plans.

 

I Am The Liberal Media

Old School/New School

Today we're making a quick stop at the Before Time to visit the early days of the Liberal blogosphere.

 In and out, nobody gets hurt, OK? 

To begin, it's critical to understand that, as cutting and as harsh as our prose might have been, all in all, the Liberal blogosphere was and is a fundamentally optimistic enterprise.  A belief that we were not doomed.  That the future could be better, and that it was worth fighting for.

First and foremost, it was about creating community with a "You're not crazy, I see it too" ethos.  Back in the depths of the Bush regime, it felt as if a political apocalypse had happened right in our back yard:  something so bad and so surreal that words frequently failed.  And we were the ones slowly scanning the short wave radio bands in search of other survivors.  At the time this was only possible through the blogs because, then as now, the Beltway media was dedicated to the proposition that we were crazy, that there was nothing to see here, so let's move along shall we.   

But the hoped-for secondary effect of the blogs was a stubborn, Quixotic faith in something fundamental about the American people.  

Or at least most of the American people.  

Or at least a bare  majority of the American people.  Something that would be enough to beat the howling, brain-rotted Fox News zombie horde, if...

If people were presented with the facts of the case.  If they could be shown, unequivocally, that  Republican policies had fucked them over but good.  That whatever opinion they had of the Democrats, Dems were, by every metric, vastly better for the public than the GOP.  

It was towards those complacent, habitually fence-straddling Mopes in the Middle that much of our energies were directed.  And there was a moment as the Bush regime was collapsing when we had the momentum of events and history at our backs.  The Liberal blogosphere of the Before Time felt a little like the energy Hunter Thompson describe in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. 

This, but angrier.  

The feeling that, just maybe, together, we could outshout the narcotizing effect of the "Both Sides Do It" Beltway press and Sunday Shows had on the Mopes in the Middle.   If we could pry their eyes open for just a moment -- force them to see what was really happening to their country in their name...

But it was a vain hope.  

Perhaps, with 1000 times the media reach and firepower that the Liberal blogosphere had at its peak, we might have been able to pull it off.  But by then the Republican base was hopelessly addicted to its own rage and racism and the lies Fox News and Hate Radio fed them every day.

And the Mopes in the Middle vastly preferred lolling in a tepid pool of Both Sides Do It goo to a cold shower of facts.  Then as now, they don't know.  They don't wanna know.  And they get very angry if you try to make them know.    

All available evidence shows that the only force that can pry them out of their False Equivalence Goo Spa and spur them in the general direction of productive (if fleeting) civic engagement is having the metaphorical red-hot poker of Republican corruption and catastrophe shoved straight up their metaphorical collective asses.  

Or, to put it a little less graphically,  the only time they can be moved to action is when economic and social pain affects them personally and profoundly.  Then and only then can they be moved to lumber out of their comforting goo bath to go stumbling into the world looking for scapegoats.  

Which, in itself, can be either good news for democracy, or bad news.  Because once they are roused to action, the Mopes in the Middle are none too picky about who they blame for what has happened to them: they're as likely to hold trans people, Mexicans and Democrats responsible for their reduced circumstances as they are fascists, Republican looters and degenerates, and evil billionaires.    

And any grifter running against "the system" or "the duopoly" or "politicians in Washington" will always have the inside track with these idiots.

We of what is left of the Liberal blogosphere will go right on writing.  Some of us also podcast now or are frequent podcast/radio guests, so we'll go on with that as well because trying to make sense of the world and sharing it with others is why we do what we do.  And there is intrinsic value in that.  Every "I never thought of it from that perspective" or "Once you put it that way it started to make sense" or "I thought I was the only one" we get from readers or listeners is worth its weight in gold.  

Of course, we'll gratefully take the gold too, but you get what I'm saying.  

However, for the time being, I think many of us have lost much of our faith in both the utility of persuasion and in most of the American people.  It is a loss that many of us are grieving.  

From the Stay Human - Shape Tomorrow Substack

There’s a grief I don’t see named anywhere. It belongs specifically to people who are older, who have fought long and hard, who still care deeply — and who are now watching the possibility of a better future slip away at the exact moment their own capacity is slowing down. And not just a better future for themselves, but for the younger generations they love so dearly. Mad and sad at the same time. Carrying decades of investment in institutions and movements and people, and watching all of it under threat and being torn down.

No Half Measures

32.2 Feet Per Second Squared

Although it ticks down a tiny amount at, say, the peak of Everest, 32.2 ft/s² is the average acceleration due to gravity here on planet Earth.  All the time, everywhere.

But how do I know this is true right now?  How can I be sure?  Did I personally test it today?  

No.

Did I test it yesterday? 

No.  

Will I test it tomorrow?  

No.  Don't be a pedant.  There is no need to measure it because gravity is a function of how mass warps spacetime, and so far as we are concerned, it is effectively constant.

Which is why the acceleration due to gravity on Earth is the same today as it was yesterday, and as it was in 1881 and in 1510 and 10 million years and a billion years ago.  

And,as a metaphor, this is why I personally do not react with shock every time Trump and his minions wipe their asses with the Constitution.  Or when Republicans in Congress abase themselves at his every whim.  Or when Republican voters, knowing who and what he was, nominated him three times and elected him twice and cheered on his every depraved excess.  Or that the legacy media rolled over for all of it.  Or that "respectable" institutions" sold us out and bent the knee.  Or that a substantial percentage of those minions and voters have begun looking for a lifeboat  because "[Fill in the whatever] isn't what I voted for" and "He fooled me!"

Because it all begins with the voters.

And because rage...

MAGA Gets New ‘Tears of the Left’ Whiskey

...racism...

The Republican Party Is Racist and Soulless. Just Ask This Veteran GOP Strategist.

...violence...

Megyn Kelly: I'm supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pretti - but I don't

...corruption...

Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion

...stupidity...

What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to Ignorance?

...paranoia...

20 Conspiracy Theories Trump Has Pushed Before and During His Presidency

...white nationalism...

How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics

...a contempt for facts and reason...

When a cult goes mainstream: Inside the toxic psychological engine of Trump’s MAGA movement

...a bone-deep horror at the thought of ever being held responsible for any of the evil that they do...

‘Disappointed,’ ‘Surprised,’ ‘Betrayed’: 12 Trump Voters on What Has Gone Wrong

...and a double scoop of authoritarianism...

Trump fits the bill of an authoritarian. But so do many Americans

...are the components that Republican leaders and Conservative media have been breeding into the party base for decades.  

I know this because, like you, for my entire adult life I have watched with growing alarm (and written about it on this blog for 21 years) as Republican leadership, Conservative media and the legacy media all pitched in to assemble this doomsday machine.

Their depravity is not a fluke or a fever.  It has become a political constant. And their trajectory is ever-downward.  Something we now have to factor in to every strategy and decision.  It is impossible to imagine Republicans ever again acting in good faith about anything.   Ever rising above their barbarity.  Ever giving a good goddamn about this country or its future, or ever backing even slightly off of the raving language of bile, resentment and leering sadism that has become their Mother Tongue.   

And so all our plans devolve into disaster mitigation.  Trying to predict what grievous wounds they will inevitably inflict on civilization next and how we can best prepare ourselves for their acts of grunting, bitching, Bible-wrapped savagery.

Both Sides Don't 

The Triumphant Return of Magic Ruralism ™

There's only one thing wrong with the title of this post.  It's the word "return", because Magic Ruralism never left.

In case you are unfamiliar with the term:

Magic Ruralism:  Noun: a literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of political fantasy.

As I have mentioned once or twice before, after Trump slithered down the escalator and into the hearts of Americas bigots and imbeciles, Magic Ruralism became the Beltway media's favorite new genre of fiction:

...just as Thrilling Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly were in the business of cranking out hard-boiled crime genre fiction for the titillation of their readers, so have The New York Times and the Washington Post gone into the business of cranking out True Tales Of Rust-Belt Trump Murricans! for the titillation of their readers.

And at this point, we as a country have already run enough versions of the "Just reach out humbly and respectfully to Republican base voters with policies that will materially benefit them and they'll see reason and stop voting for lunatics, grifters and fascists" experiment to understand that it never fucking works and never will.   

This strategy was the sum and substance of the entire Obama administration, which had to immediately set to work cleaning up after the various catastrophes Bush and the Republicans had left behind.  The Right reacted with an eight-year-long racist primal scream followed by the nomination and election of the King of the Birthers.  

The coastal media remained positively obsessed with that goddamn Ohio diner, because rich city folks live a million social and economic miles from the actual Middle America and their lives were substantially untouched in any material way by the Republican madness abroad in the land, they were free to savor hair-raising tales (from The Washington Post July 30, 2018) --

White, and in the minority

She speaks English. Her co-workers don’t. Inside a rural chicken plant, whites struggle to fit in.

-- of rural Murrican pity and terror (the New York Times also from July 30, 2018)  --

How to Talk to a Racist

White liberals, you’re doing it all wrong.

-- from a safe distance.

After the disaster of Trump 1.0, the Biden administration's policy of reaching out to people whose lives have gotten worse under Republican administrations and yet still fucking hate Democrats and always vote for the party that screws them was directionally the same as the Obama administration: focus on manufacturing in red states, infrastructure, raising the standard of living for the working class, and lifting poor children out of poverty.  

Once again the Right reacted by ignoring reality, obsessing over the lies and slanders being cranked out all day, every day by Conservative media, nominating the King of the Birthers for the third time, and electing him again.  

 As has been proven time and time again, the whole notion that ignorant ofay "Ohio diner" voters are driven by "economic anxiety" is bullshit.  They are driven by fear, paranoia, rage and racism and no matter how genteel your language or calm you approach, it doesn't work and it's never gonna work. 

 And so, of course, from the Department of Infinite Credulous Mulligans...

The author's case for wasting time and energy pursuing the same outreach to the unreachable strategy that has already failed more often than Trump Mortgage, Trump University, Trump Steaks, and Trump Vodka combined is based entirely on her conversation with one woman and her brother-in-law, six years ago.

Roxanne lived in a double-wide trailer with her husband, plus her parents-in-law and brother-in-law. It was during the Covid-19 pandemic, so we sat distanced on her porch to talk.

Because of the garbage she'd read online, Roxanne was very confused about Joe Biden.

Some of them said Biden was the worst thing that could happen to America, while others said they were relieved at the outcome of the election because Trump was evil and had to go. She was open to talking with me because she was trying to sort through all of it for herself, to figure out what she believed. “Regardless, I don’t plan on voting in the runoff election,” she told me. “I don’t think it makes much of a difference.”

At least one of the presumably many reasons Roxanne was worried about Joe Biden was based on some absolute bullshit which she had picked up from somewhere and had apparently never bothered to find out the truth of it. 

Roxanne had voted for Trump in the general because she had been told Biden would take away their disability. Now that Biden had won, fear of losing their benefits kept her up at night. “I don’t know how we’d live without it,” she said.

And here comes her brother-in-law Jeremy who is also full of stupid opinions.

While we were talking, her brother-in-law, Jeremy, came outside. He had splurged and gotten his nails done, and they looked fantastic, which I was sure to compliment him on. They were long purple stiletto-shaped acrylic nails. Roxanne told him I was there to talk about the runoff elections, and he quickly told me of his distrust of the Democratic candidates, especially Jon Ossoff. “For someone that young to be that successful, they had to do something crooked.”

Then Astral Projection David Brooks entered the chat...

“Hold on now,” Roxanne told him. “She’s here to talk about voting for them. Let’s be polite.”

“Well, I don’t hate them,” he said, “but I don’t like any of them — neither side. I won’t vote for any of them anyway.” 

Because Both Sides...  Both Sides...  Both Sides...  

You can practically hear a generation of legacy media Both Siderism and Republican excuse-making pinging around Jeremy's head like a BB in a rain barrel.  

As they talked, I listened for what was underneath their distrust of the political process. They were afraid of losing their health care, their disability benefits and their home. They were worried about losing their family members who were sick. Roxanne grieved the loss of her health. They worried about their neighbors who didn’t have heat in the winter. These problems had only gotten worse over the years, never better, no matter who was in office. “It hasn’t mattered if there was an R or a D after their name,” Roxanne said.

Both Sides...  Both Sides...  Both Sides...  

And rather than perhaps, y'know, gently pointing out the many Democratic policies that already have materially improved Roxanne's life and would have improved it even more had it not been for Republican obstruction, sabotage, slander, and gutting, the author opts instead to... 

I affirmed their experiences, validated their feelings and pointed out the very real injustices in their lives, the very real failure of either political party to help...

Again, Both Sides...  Both Sides...  Both Sides...  

In the words of BlueSky user Always Jae...

Ohhh...that's what kept them voting for all this?  They weren't "welcomed" enough?  Seriously?  The interference that the media continuously runs for white people in the sticks is almost pathological at this point.

To which I would only add that, when it comes to the way legacy media runs cover for these people, we no longer need to modify the word "pathological" with the word "almost".  

Which is why we need to...

Burn The Lifeboats

And on His Headstone Shall Read These, His Final Words: “...But the Democrats”

Whenever you hear Never Trumpers musing about the good old days of the Before Time, it sounds like something between Greek myth and a road company production of Camelot.   Heroes and giants walking the Earth.  Mighty deeds being done by mighty men.  The snow never slushed upon the hillside, and by 9 p.m. the moonlight was required to appear.

And so forth.

And I'm sure that many of them do remember it that way, seeing as they weren't the ones being slandered and demonized every day by the Conservative Media Hate Machine.   They were, in fact, the ones who were profiting handsomely from the Hate Machine.  But as I warned 20 fucking years ago... 

And yet to build this electoral dynamo the Republican Party has had to completely sell out any vestige of principles or soul it once had for dominion over the divided and bitter land it has created. And because of that, there is no “Plan B” if you are a GOP candidate for national office.

Your Party Masters have burned your bridges and salted the Earth behind you, and now there is nothing left for you to do but desperately tunnel deeper into the Hell you have built for yourself.

Which is why John McCain now publicly grovels and kisses the poxy asses of the men who service and steer the Pretty Hate Machine indifferently past the bodies of the dead and dying of NOLA, and gleefully down the blood-tarred, bone-macadamed streets of Iraq. Men who went right after his family -- his wife and children -- and his honorable national service without a second thought when it suited their despicable purposes.

Because the Pretty Hate Machine does not come with a conscience, and it now casts its depraved shadow over their entire Party.

And over the entire nation that Party has seized.

And over the entire world that Party has polluted.

It has become all Means and no Ends but More Power, and as with all power, it comes with a steep price...

Well, the GOP's 2008 candidate for president, John McCain, is gone now.  His daughter married one of the Hate Machine's operating engineers and has disappeared down the MAGA rat hole.  And his 2008 running mate -- Sarah Palin, the Scintilla from Wasilla, MAGA 1.0 -- had her bullshit libel suit thrown out and was a big, big Trump supporter until he went all AI Jebus and now appears to have joined the crowded field of third tier wingnut influencers slow-fast walking to the pier to look for a lifeboat.  

Safe to say, John McCain's political legacy in is ashes.  

But what of the next sterling man of character that was offered up to the general public as a candidate for president?  Their 2012 candidate, Willard "Mittens" Romney?  

You remember him, right?   

He's the guy who was gonna herd the MAGA mob safely back into the corporate/neocon pen.  I wrote a whole thing about it back when it was a thing ("Hokum's Heroes") whence I salvaged these rare curios from that now nearly-forgotten past.

For now at least Mitt Romney has become the leader of the Republican Resistance to Trump.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) January 2, 2019

Watching David Frum explain how Mitt “is setting up rendezvous with destiny” by being the poltroon he’s always been is peak punditry.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) January 3, 2019

"What Mitt Romney said" was "so profoundly important"

It created "a breaking point from this mind-trap that a lot of Republicans" are in - fmr. RNC Chair @MichaelSteele pic.twitter.com/HM4CmIRFUo

— TheBeat w/Ari Melber (@TheBeatWithAri) January 2, 2019

Yeah, it turned out they were just as wrong about Mittens as they were about everything else, which is why after that last, humiliating display of hilarious political naivete, no one ever heard from David Frum, or Bill Kristol, or Michael Steele ever again :-)

"So why bring him up now?" you ask.

Fair question. 

It's because, speaking of things said and done 20 years ago, this week is the 20th anniversary of then-governor Mitt Romney signing Romneycare into law in Massachusetts, and The Bulwark sent Jonathan Cohn to, well, not "interview" him really.  To just nod and transcribe whatever the Great Man said.

And oh my goodness, does Mittens show himself to be every bit the clueless, obsolete, Republican cipher we lefties knew him to be back when all your favorite Never Trumpers were, well, trumpeting his praises and hailing him as the savior of the Republican party.  

A "savior" who has been assembled out of spare parts salvaged from all their previous failures.  Because in the interview, Romney happily parrots just about every MAGA culture war lie on the checklist --

Romney:  I think today it's the culture stupid. I think, my own view is Democrats have staked out some positions -- or a number of Democrats have -- that don't make a lot of sense to everyday Americans. Defund the police.  It's like are you kidding? You think that's going to sell in cities? Defund the police. Uh biological males competing in girl sports. Like that doesn't make any sense at all. uh open borders, people flooding into the country, people saying, "What in the world are you doing?" Democrats were doing some absolutely, in my opinion, just crazy stuff, right?  And that caused a lot of everyday Americans to say, you know, I used to be a Democrat, but I can't put up with that stuff. And they became they became Republicans. And uh and I mean, I think the Democratic Party is in a world of hurt uh in part because of their posture on so many of these social issues.

-- slathered with a big ol' helping "Both Sides Do It".

Romney:  I think both parties have uh have sown the seeds of defeat uh in part by taking some positions which I think are out of the mainstream.

And: 

Romney:  I think at politics maybe more today even than them which is if it's an idea raised by a Republican Republicans like it. If it's idea raised by a Democrat um Republicans hate it and vice you know vice versa. 

And:

Cohn:  And what about the Republican party? Do you feel like that where they are?

Romney:  I mean do you feel like on immigration on there's a lot of policies where people would say, you know, they are extreme in their own way and does that well we're both parties are creating their own problems. 

Romney:  I think what the president did to secure our border is wisely uh done and very popular. I think some of the ICE uh actions throughout Minnesota and other places is seen by people as being unnecessarily brutal um and is and has hurt the president's popularity. Um, so some things I think the president has done that make a lot of sense that are politically attractive. Other things I think are more harmful. I look, I have a list of things where I agree with President Trump and it's a good long list. Then I have a list of things where I disagree with him, but I understand his logic and  say, you know, he may be right, I may be wrong. I'm not right on everything. 

Scary trans males in women's sports?  Check!  "Open borders"?  Check!  "Defund the police"?  Check.

If you want virtually any shitty MAGA talking point repeated by a bland technocrat loser, Romney's your man.  

Because Romney was never the cure for what ails the Trump Republican Party.  

Instead, Romney was just another respectable, Beltway-approved carrier of the disease that made the rise of Trump possible.   

And he still is. 

I Am The Liberal Media

Observing MLK, Jr. Day By Judging Republicans by the Content of Their Character.

No Half Measures

Remember When This Used to Be a Federal Crime Instead of Federal Policy?

From Fox News 59, Indianapolis, Indiana, April 2, 2013.

Teen says masked men forced him into van, drove him around until he escaped

Indianapolis Metropolitan police are investigating a teenager’s report that masked suspects forced him into a van and drove him around before he escaped.

According to an IMPD report, the eighth-grade student was walking to the Immaculate Heart of Mary School around 7:25 a.m. when the van approached him near 57th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. According to the teen, two people got out of the front, grabbed him and “tossed him inside” the van, where a third suspect awaited.

The third suspect hit him “several times using his left and only and held him” while the van continued on. The teen described the vehicle as a white, full-size maintenance vehicle without any rear windows, according to the report. The teen also said a partition with a small sliding door separated the front passenger area of the van from the back...

Administrators put the school on lockdown after the encounter. The case remains under investigation.

Now masked thugs routinely snatching innocent people off the street, or just murdering them in front of a dozen witnesses, is the official policy of the Trump regime.  

Step out of line or just get in the way and they'll not only blow your head off, they'll slander you from the highest offices in the land before your body grows cold.

 But Kamala has a weird laugh.

And Biden is old.

 

No Half Measures

MAGA is a Genre

You want to know why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are?

Well, because I like you, I'll tell you.  And I do this in the full knowledge that none of this secret intel will leak to the savvy people because the savvy people do not read Liberal blogs.

Ready?

Ok...but first we have do a thing.  What the kids call a side-quest.  

You love Westerns, right?  Anyway, I do, so there we are. 

So, Westerns.  What defines a Western?  Well, even if you're not a professional deconstructor of films, if you watch enough Westerns from every era, you can see clear themes and commonalities, some of which remain fairly constant across time, and others which change and morph into something else entirely.  

For example, in early Westerns, the heroes and villains were mostly two-dimensional.  Often literally White Hats versus Black Hats.  Or White Hats versus The Savages.  But over time this changes.  For example, John Ford's landmark 1939 Western Stagecoach (The Canterbury Tales with Stetsons) is all about inverting social hierarchies, with John Wayne's Ringo Kid and Claire Trevor's Dallas characters -- the Outlaw and the Prostitute -- emerging as the heroes of the tale.

30 years later, in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, the recognizable tropes of the Western were mostly still there -- heroes, villains, hats, horses, guns, saloons, etc. -- but their meanings had all been scrambled.    The villain was no longer the Savages or the Black Hats, it was the crippled railroad baron.  The Black Hat gunslinger was now reduced to the status of a hireling: the henchman of capitalism.  

To make the point absolutely clear -- that this was about the closing of the frontier and the end of the traditional Western -- Leone hired iconic American good guy actor Henry Fonda to play Frank, the murderous, amoral tool of capitalism.   

And sticking with Once Upon a Time in the West for just one more minute, the opening scene does what all great opening scenes do: it sets the tone for the rest of the tale.   In Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, the entire story is about a train that's due to arrive at...when?  When?  Don't go simple on me now, it's the title of the movie.  Four bad men -- Frank Miller and his backup singers -- are due to arrive in town at noon and they are out for revenge.  Everyone in town knows it,  and as the fateful hour approaches (the director keeps the audience apprised of the time by placing clocks in nearly every scene) the townspeople slowly desert their sheriff, leaving him to face the four bad men all alone.

Then, at last, the clocks strike twelve.

Once Upon a Time in the West completely inverts this.  Instead of an arrival by train being the event towards which all plot lines are moving, Once Upon a Time in the West starts with an arrival by train.

Instead of four bad men getting off the train and marching into town to hunt down the hero, three bad men are waiting at the train for the hero to arrive.  

To drive home the point that this movie was to be the end of the Western, Leone originally wanted the stars of his Dollars Trilogy --  Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach -- to play the three gunmen.  But they declined, so Leone cast Woody Strode, Jack Elam, and Al Mulock instead.

At this point I was going to go on a long thing about how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, but this isn't a movie review post, and if you didn't already know how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, well, I just feel sorry for you is all.

Obviously Once Upon a Time in the West wasn't the end of the Western genre, because the archetypes the genre developed are too sturdy and too firmly rooted in human nature to disappear.  And so, every year or two, someone comes along to mix and match the same elements in different way.  In Silverado you find a classic Western done very well, even ending in a gunfight in the street with the church behind our hero.  In Lonesome Dove, a sweeping epic.   In Quigley Down Under you get the Western in Australia.  In No Country For Old Men, you get the Western in the West Texas of 1980 because the Coen brothers love Westerns.

Is Unforgiven a Western?  Obviously.  But is Firefly a Western?  You bet.  It's whatchacall a "neo-Western", but c'mon.  

Is Justified?  Damn right it is.  

So what is all of this to do with Republicans and their MAGA headgear?

Well, since you asked, getting back to explaining why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are... don't go simple on me now, because it's the title of this post.   

MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a genre.  MAGA is a vibe.  

Which is why, when the savvy crowd sees Republican voters appear to casually and completely reverse what they swore were their bedrock beliefs (and then do it again... and again) the savvy crowd are flummoxed.   They have no theory to fit the facts, because they had always taken as gospel that what Republican mopes say they believe on any given day was something akin the hammer throw at a track and field event: momentum is built up, then released, and the hammer follows a straight tangent line from the point of that release.

But Republican voters do not behave that way.  At all.  Because the policies they'll swear by on a Monday because Sean Hannity said so... and then drop like first period French on Wednesday because Sean Hannity said so...are just props.   Just plot devices.  

This is why MAGA mopes not only don't give a shit that Trump lies constantly, they're thrilled by it.  Since, in the MAGA genre, everything is treated as a plot device that either advances the MAGA narrative, or threatens it, who cares whether an individual story element is true or not?

Now for a quick bit of genre hopping.  

You love Film Noir, right?  Well anyway, I do, so here we are again. When Howard Hawks was filming The Big Sleep, his writing team couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor.  So Hawks fired off a telegram to the author of the original novel, Raymond Chandler, asking him to clarify.  Here was their exchange.

Hawks:  "Who killed the chauffeur?" 

Chandler: "Dammit, I don't know either."

Even though the murder of Owen Taylor is central to the plot, Chandler didn't know or care who killed him because that wasn't the point of the novel. The Big Sleep is about atmosphere and characterization, not nailing down every detail, and since it didn't really matter who offed the chauffeur, Chandler didn't bother with it.  

From the MAGA perspective, asking whether or not this is true...

... or this is true ...

Trump repeats false claims that children are undergoing transgender surgery during the school day

Trump’s remarks escalated conservatives’ claims that educators are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender.

...or this is true ...

Trump:  “It’s a tremendous difference... We’re going to get the drug prices down… Not 30 or 40 percent… No, we’re going to get them down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent — numbers that are not even thought to be achievable… and it will be, you know, serious. It will be numbers that nobody can even imagine.”

... or the 10,000 other lies Trump has spewed are true is irrelevant.

As irrelevant as who killed Owen Taylor.   

Because all those lies are just plot devices designed to advance the MAGA narrative.  

Ergo understanding which way the MAGA mob will jump next is not (and never had been) a matter of sifting through the mountain of self-contradicting bullshit that constitutes MAGA dogma.   This is what the savvy crowd always gets wrong.  

Understanding the wild oscillations of MAGA dogma only makes sense when you understand the Republicans mythos being served by those lies: a mythos that long pre-dates the rise of Trump. 

And it's really pretty simple.  As simple as the earliest Westerns.  Their world is a world of Black Hats and White Hats.  They -- white Conservative Christian nationalists and their fellow travelers-- are the White Hats and pretty much everyone else are the Black Hats.  

They're the real Americas.  They are "righteous" in the original meaning of that word: just, upright, and in accord with divine law.  And since, to MAGA, this is all self-evident -- that they and only they are properly aligned with God's moral order -- then it follows that whatever they feel to be true and good must be true and good.

Instead of "Cogito ergo sum" -- "I think therefore I am" -- the MAGA way is (pardon the rough Latin translation) "Sentio ergo est" -- "I feel therefore it is".  

It's a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking, where faith doesn't merely beat facts all day long, but facts that conflict with the One True Faith are the darkest heresy.  Something to be rooted out and destroyed. 

For decades Conservative media and Republican politicians have been making fortunes and winning elections reinforcing this mythos by feeding the base an endless supply of Black Hats to hate and vote against.  Liberals.  Mouthy women.  Brown people who don't know their place.  Urbanites.  The gays.  Immigrants.  Unions.  Trans people.  Pointy-headed intellectuals.  Government employees.  Hollywood.  "Rootless cosmopolitans".  Socialists.  You know the drill.  

And once the base came to accept as axiomatic that is was perpetually under siege by the Black Hats, everything became existential crisis.  Deficits were an existential crisis...then they weren't...then they were again...then they weren't again.  Every Democratic president was somehow illegitimate and also  simultaneously a feckless weakling, a jackbooted tyrant and the Worst President in History.  

Everything was a battle in a forever war for the survival of real America where the salvation of the nation was always hanging by a thread.   And gradually, the fascist "blood and soil" language that has been thrown around on Hate Radio since the 1980s -- constantly framing the press as the "enemy of the people", slandering any opposition as deranged parasites, speaking of the nation as something that needed cleansing and purification -- filtered up from the base, where it was the common tongue, and into Conservative teevee, Republican political ads, Conservative think tanks and publications and Republican politicians.  

And in that environment, what does it matter if what the Dear Leader says is true or not?  What does it matter if what fascist state media says is true or not?  Who cares if slander about eating the pets is racist bullshit?  Who cares if trans people are no threat to anyone?  The only thing that matters is the utility of the words coming out of the Dear Leader's mouth. And since us Black Hats are so dangerous -- "the face of pure evil" (Liz Cheney, 2019) -- any and all weapons and tactics are permitted.  

Which is why we can carefully pack up all our facts -- our mountains of irrefutable facts stretching back decades --  and lay them aside for another day, or for when we talk among ourselves.  Conservative media and Republican politicians worked very hard for many decades engineering a voting base for whom facts are irrelevant and anyone who tells them anything they don't want to hear is dismissed as treason and Fake News.  This how Conservative media and Republican politicians paved a road for Donald Trump to win the White House.

Did lies about Obama's birth certificate feel true to the racist Republican base?  Did lies about Somalis eating people's pets feel true to those same bigots 15 years later?  Did lies about cafeteria castrations feed the MAGA moron's hysteria about trans people?  Does the torrent of lies that Trump vomits out on a daily basis tickle MAGA's ganglia and reinforce their myths about apocalyptic struggle, heroism and destiny?  

Yes.  And in the end, to them, that's all that matters.  

Because MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a vibe.  MAGA is a genre in which it's just Black Hats versus White Hats, all day long.

And all those lies are the necessary story elements that move the plot along.  

I Am The Liberal Media

The Ghost of ACA Sabotage Plots Past*

Since the latest battle in the Republican Party's 15 year long campaign to gut the ACA will reach its catastrophic conclusion in just a few days...and since we may well be going from one government shutdown to the next over that issue... and since a leitmotif of this little blog of mine has been the absolutely lethal effect which the Both Sides Do It lie has had on our media and our politics... in the spirit of the season, let's tie that all together in a big, Christmas bow and take a No Fair Remembering Stuff (™) journey back to the Before Time about which most dare not speak.

The date: September 25, 2013.  

The location: The United States Senate.

The issue: Passing the damn budget.

Tea Party crank, first-term Texas senator and possible Zodiac-killer, Ted Cruz, decided that heaving a boulder onto the budget-approval tracks by staging a filibuster to kill the Affordable Care Act by stopping the vote to pass the budget would conjure him some political capital.  So he began running his mouth on September 25th and didn't stop until the next day.  His all-night stunt included him quoting the Founding Fathers and the Bible and reading “Green Eggs and Ham.”  

There are videos of this on YouTube which I will spare you because I'm a nice guy.

Cruz's irritating stunt didn't delay the Senate vote on the ACA.  It didn't change any votes in the Senate, but it did manage to piss off a number of Senate Republicans.  However it also inspired Republican Tea Party lunatics in the House to just up and shut the whole government down to try to kill the Affordable Care Act.  

The Republican House kept the government shut down for 16 long days and then gave up.  

In the end the shutdown accomplished nothing but the temporary furlough of 800,000 federal workers, punching the economy in the gut and infuriating the general public.  This doomed idiocy was led by Heritage Action and the Fake Tea Party.  Republicans lost, Democrats won, and the government reopened with an agreement to vote on a clean funding bill that didn't screw with the ACA, on October 25 

Here is a portion of a speech that then-president Barack Obama gave during the shutdown, included here because it'll come up later.

Given all of this high drama, it should come as no surprise that on Sunday, October 20, 2013, the Sunday Shows were full of Gummint Shutdown Talk.  And, since I have extensive Sunday Morning Comin' Down archives --

-- I rooted around in there for a bit and my oh my, is this all going to sound familiar.  

This is me, from The Before Time of 2013.

This week, another drunk dial from the Valley of the Dead as the Both Sides Caucus fired up their fighters and screamed into the sky to strafe any attempt at truth and reconciliation to bits.

First, on "This Week...with The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea" we begin with a panel of delusional teabaggers perfectly ordinary, indignant white Americans who express their love for Murrica and their completely rational concerns about how the Kenyan Usurper has personally stomped everything they ever loved to death by dutifully regurgitating every brain-dead, wingnut bumper-sticker you have ever heard of.

What was missing?

How about...an identical panel of non-crazy Liberals?

Anywhere?

Ever?

Patiently and lovingly deconstructing paranoid Conservative piffle?

For the one millionth time?

That you will never see on network teevee.

Instead, we pivot straight to Matthew Dowd (paid Conservative Shill who still has a job in front of a teevee camera for reasons that continue to defy understanding) and Adam Kinzinger (R, IL Whitelandia) tag-teaming the Kenyan Usurper for committing the single most horrific transgression against the serenity of the life forms who exist floating from party to party within the Washington D.C. terrarium: actually naming and blaming the people who were actually to blame for the most recent Republican clusterfuck:

DOWD I think that Martha, part of the real problem in this is until this part changes I think that we're going to be in this situation. We need to redefine winning differently. We define winning today as us versus them.

I'm going to score points and if I don't score points I'm going to decide who the winner and the loser is. We define everything as a battle, everything as a civil war. The president, I think, has tried to balance this tension, but I think he constantly falls into; I think he would like to bring the country together and be accommodating and do all that. He ran on that just like Bush ran on that.

The end result of Bush's didn't turn out well. The end results of President Obama's didn't turn out well. But I think President Obama lapses back into this sort of dualistic thing that, OK I wasn't able to do it, I'm going to point fingers and I'm going to, and you watched his speech last week. And his speech last week was a perfect microcosm--

Martha Raddatz, (warming the seat for The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea): Let's change the tone, but maybe not. 

DOWD: Let's change the tone but they're at fault. Whenever you say they're at fault, you can't--

To her credit, Representative Donna Edwards, (D, MD) actually attempted to haul this umpteenth iteration of the same, sick, tired, trifling, poisonous, premeditated, highly profitable and genuinely evil Both Sider bullshit to the ground:

EDWARDS: Well Matt come on it is really important here. We don't want to do a rewrite of this. And in order not to do a rewrite, you actually have to understand who was, who was at fault. And there was real fault here. We had a majority of Republicans--

And for her trouble, she was promptly and frantically side-tackled (in a brutal, face-mask-grabbing, fact-snapping move called "Blitzering" in the lingua franca of Bullshit Mountain) by Ms. Raddatz:

RADDATZ: But that again is--

EDWARDS: And Democrats who wanted to keep the government opened.

RADDATZ: Peter let me switch a little bit here. I want you all to talk about Obamacare...

Translation: Please stop pointing out that more than half the guests on this show are paranoids, nihilists, rubes and liars!

Meanwhile, over at "Meet the Press" we find exactly the same song being sung in a different key.

First, to establish that one is not flat-out insane, one must make a token gesture in the direction of acknowledging that the Tea Party (for which you expressed such fondness back in 2010) might actually be a little tetched:

DAVID BROOKS:  I think the Republicans may decide to tire of doing face plants. And so I think the moderate Republicans, such as they exist, may have had a little manhood injection, willing to stand up to the Tea Party and actually be a much more bipartisan, or at least a more moderate, party, a more realistic party...

DAVID BROOKS: ...The question now is will the Republican Party have a civil war over the nature of the party? And I think we're beginning to see rumblings of that. The problem is, to have a civil war, you actually have to have two sides. The Tea Party has a side. They have a political movement. They have a think tank. They have a donor side. 

The other side, the Republicans who want to be able to compete in California, in New York, along the east coast and in Illinois, they don't have a side. They have American Crossroads, a PAC. They have a cocktail party. And so what they need to do is actually build some institutions, some think tanks, some fundraising efforts, some grassroots organizations, to match Tea Party, or else the Tea Party will take over.

driftglass aside/

Golly, I wonder whatever happened to those institutions and think tanks and passion and money?

Oh yeah!  I remember!   

In order to win elections, you handed all of that over to these people  

 

when you made Rush Limbaugh your "Majority Maker" 20 years ago.

/ end driftglass aside

Then, once they were done with all the icky work of grudgingly granting that Liberals have been right all along (without, of course, actually acknowledging the existence of Liberals or their rightness) 'bout a mile outta Both Sider Town...

...Andrea Mitchell says, "Pig Pen, this here's Rubber Duck...

...And I'm about to put the hammer down."

ANDREA MITCHELL:  Both sides are going to have to give.

'Cause we got a little ol' convoy

Rockin' through the night.

Yeah, we got a little ol' convoy,

Ain't she a beautiful sight?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. The question [President Barack Obama had] never answered in all these years is, "How do I build a governing majority in this circumstance?"

Come on and join our convoy

Ain't nothin' gonna get in our way.

DAVID GREGORY [rough translation]:  Fuck yeah!

We gonna roll this truckin' convoy

'Cross the U-S-A.

DAVID BROOKS:   He's got 40 House Republicans who are never going to be with him. How does he siphon them off and get the other Republicans on his side to get a majority coalition? You have to anger the left a little to build that bipartisan coalition. He's never figured out a way to do that.

Convoy!

E. J. Dionne was on-hand to provide some tired, token push-back -- 

--compared to the Democrats, oddly particularly in Tea Party. The president, a lot of times, though, when people say the president should lead, what they want him to do is adopt Republican positions and then push for those. That's not leadership, that's capitulation. I think we should stop talking about a grand bargain and try to have normal government in the next two months. Let's just get rid of some of this sequester, which is hurting the economy, and which a lot of Republicans don't like.

-- to which absolutely no one paid any heed.  Of course, if E.J. Dionne did want anyone to pay any attention to what he was saying, all he really needed to do was turn on Mr. Brooks fast-fast-fast, put a finger right in his face and precede his remarks with "Look fucko..."  But then he would be faced with the unhappy task of explaining to his wife and all the little Dionnes why daddy didn't have no job no more, so don't waste to much time waiting at that bus stop...

End of 2013 Sunday Show tour.  Before exiting the vehicle, please check around your seat for any personal effects (or affects, hahaha) you may have dropped during the journey.

And looking back at that 2013 shitshow, the thing is, Republicans were entirely to blame. 100%.  There was no dispute about that.  What these two men were bitching about was that Obama had violated the legacy media's Both Sides Do It commandment by saying what everyone knew out loud.  That Republicans were at fault.  Period.  

And remember, this was a year and a half after respected political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published their now-famous article in the Washington Post, "Let's just say it: The Republican Party is the problem".  And the two diametrically opposed reactions to the article tell the story of just how corrupt the legacy media had become.  Because while it got both Mann and Ornstein blackballed from the Sunday Shows, it also quickly became the most widely read, shared and forwarded opinion piece they had ever written, even briefly crashing the Post's comment section servers.

Also, remember that the Mann and Ornstein column came a full decade after the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere, which gave us the capacity to say -- in print and in public -- all the stuff we'd been saying among ourselves for decades, but the legacy media wouldn't touch with a barge pole.  Especially our assault on the Both Sides Do It Lie.

But in October of 2013 that patently ridiculous lie was still being staunchly defended across the board by America's media elite on the Sunday Shows.

And in December of 2025 it still is.

*Note:  We mentioned this incident briefly on our December 23rd episode of The Professional Left Podcast.  However, we got the timeline backwards: Cruz's filibuster preceded the shutdown, it didn't follow it.  Management regrets the error and, rest assured, although our entire research staff and all of our archivists have all fled into the hills in shame, those responsible will be hunted down and brutally reprimanded.  

Burn The Lifeboats