Important But Lesser-Known American Anniversaries: Updated

I'll just bet you didn't know that this month of August marks the 30th anniversary of Rush Limbaugh being syndicated nationwide and beginning his ascent to the position of semi-official Spokesman and Kingmaker of the Republican Party.

That's right.  Three continuous decades of this carbuncle on the ass of American democracy --

-- sharting his racist drivel into the skulls of millions of Crazy Uncle Liberties one day, and hearing it pour out of their mouths as the gospel truth the next.

But take heart, fellow patriots, because 29 years later some of the Beltway's most elite observers are beginning to sit up and take notice!

More and more, "hate movement" seems like the proper term. Trump and some of his allies are promoting a "hate movement" against the American press. pic.twitter.com/s5C3eFZgJg

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 1, 2018

Next month will also mark the 28th anniversary of this unheeded and long-forgotten warning from The New York Times

The Politics of Slash and Burn

...

The group is Gopac, the G.O.P. Political Action Committee. Its general chairman is Representative Newt Gingrich. With the pamphlet, ''Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,'' comes a letter from Mr. Gingrich himself. Its message to candidates: Step up invective. Use words like these to describe opponents. These words work.

Mr. Gingrich's injunction represents the worst of American political discourse...

The Gopac glossary may herald a descent into even lower levels of discourse. It comes blessed by a politician of some influence - the Republican whip in the House - and it is intended for candidates on the state level, many of them presumably running for the first time. Even though Mr. Gingrich himself may not have seen the list before it was mailed, this is a disturbing document.

The nakedness of the Gopac offering also makes it useful. There must be limits to the negative politics that voters will bear...

We know this warning went unheeded because this November will mark the 24th anniversary of the Republican party officially crediting Rush Limbaugh with their 1994 takeover of the House.

Leaping ahead a couple of decades because it's my blog and I can do that, October 22nd will mark the 3rd anniversary of this 100th public demonstration of the inerrant political wisdom of Bill Kristol:

And for those of you keeping score at home, this May was the 2rd anniversary of all of those Republican thought leaders, columnists, elected officials and pundits who literally owe their careers to the poison crop Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich planted all those decades ago finally noticing that -- holy shit! -- their Republican party is full of Rush Limbaugh Republicans!

UPDATE:

30 years ago, the GOP finally decided to drop any pretense of still being the Party of Lincoln and instead focus on building an electoral battering ram out of Limbaugh-lobotomized racists and imbeciles.

And 30 years later, the Monster the GOP made called in to thank his Creator.

RUSH: So I have this note on the call screener computer: “On the hotline…” We don’t have a hotline. “On the hotline, you’re receiving a phone call in recognition of your anniversary broadcast. You’ll want to take this immediately.” Okay. So we’re going to the phones and we have a special guest. Who is it?

THE PRESIDENT: So, Rush, I just wanted to congratulate you on 30 years.

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: This is your favorite president, and I think you are fantastic.

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: I heard about it, and today’s the big day, 30 years. I wanted to call personally and congratulate you.

RUSH: I am floored. I… (laughing) I thought there was nothing anybody could do to surprise me today. I’ve been preparing for anything. Mr. President —

THE PRESIDENT: You’re a very special man, Rush, and you have people that love you. I’m one of them. But you’re a very, very special guy. What you do for this country, people have no idea how important your voice is. So I just wanted to personally make this one and I said, “I’ll even dial the number myself if I have to.”

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: But I just want to congratulate you. Thirty years in that tough business is incredible — and you’re stronger now than ever before.

RUSH: Well, I — I thank you so much. It’s such a thrill to hear from you.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it’s a thrill to be on...

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Today In Rampant Both Siderism

Spackled into every crack in the crumbling wall which protects our Elite Beltway Overlords from any form of accountability you will always find the vast and pervasive fraud of Both Sides.  The Big Lie of Centrism.

In fact, once you start to look for it you'll begin to notice that the wall which protects our Elite Beltway Overlords wall is now mostly Centrist spackle: that our system of political reporting is now so entirely on autopilot that whenever there is the slightest threat that Republican perfidy or bigotry or sabotage might be reported as explicitly Republican perfidy or bigotry or sabotage, one of the system's extremely well-paid maintenance drones will immediately appear to squirt a gob of Both Siderist goo into the fissure.

This Friday's featured Loyal Beltway Maintenance Drone is Mr. David Brooks, who proved himself reliably incapable of merely reporting the fact that Republican government shutdown was an obvious disaster --

DAVID BROOKS: The government shutdown was one.

-- without balancing that catastrophe out with something he asserts is an equally catastrophic Democratic action (modest filibuster reform), as well as a third disaster that is apparently the fault of "Congress" generically:

DAVID BROOKS: The government shutdown was one. I would say the change in the filibuster rules was a disaster, and then the failure to pass immigration reform, which really has majority support. So I think that is three pretty big strikes. I think they have earned whatever their approval rating is, 1.2 or whatever it is at this point.

Two seconds later, we find Mr. Brooks perfectly capable of noting that Congress is in terrible shape:

DAVID BROOKS: I think it's been a pretty lamentable, lamentable Congress...

But being a Loyal Beltway Maintenance Drone, Mr. Brooks is financially hardwired to reflexively lie about why the Congress is in such lamentable condition, and so we find the blame for the Republican Party breaking the Congress scattered all over God's little acre with nary a mention of the word "Republican" anywhere to be found:

DAVID BROOKS: I think it's been a pretty lamentable, lamentable Congress. And that is partly because of Congress, partly because of the country, frankly, and partly because the president has not gathered a governing majority at any point in his presidency, some 60-vote majority that he can count on time and time again.

Mr. Brooks went on to say more silly, ignorant things (many of which he will probably reprise on Meet the Gregory this Sunday) but the Centrist scriptural lesson was clear:

For where two or three are gathered to try to name names, a Both Siderist watchdog will be there with them.

In Defiance of the Predictions

Of our Elite Media's most powerful psychics

and prophets

turns out I passed the three million page-hit mark sometime in the last week or so.


So I've got that going for me.

Strategic Forgettery Defined

For some reason, Mr. Sullivan has obligingly stuck a pin in the map to indicate the exact spot where his wants his readers to believe his Glorious Imaginary Conservative Movement went off the rails: the moment when his own, relentless, doublethinkful Strategic Forgettery begins.

"At what point do we decide that a political system has become decadent?"

EJ Dionne takes the Weiner "scandal" as the moment he realized we were late imperial Rome. PM Carpenter takes the Bush vs Gore Supreme Court ruling. Personally, I think it was some moment between the Congress's assent to torture in 2006 and when Sarah Palin was selected as a serious vice-presidential nominee in 2008.

Any thoughts?

Sure.

Lots of thoughts.

Which I have often shared with Mr. Sullivan open-letter-style.

For years.

And all but one he has never replied to, so rather than further spending down my reserve stock Majyk Conjure Adjectives to recapitulate the my central thesis, allow me to swipe a chunk of my own work from days gone be to explain to Mr. Sullivan (who, I have it on good authority, does sneak a peak at what I am doing over here from time to time) exactly what my "thoughts" are on the subject,

And why?

Because as long as people like Mr. Sullivan continue to occupy strategic positions in our media ecosystem and as long as they continue to use that position to sell lies and snake oil for fun, status and profit every bit as energetically as Sarah Palin does, I will continue to stand on my tiny soapbox and yell about it from the rural exurbs of Bloggylvania.

Here then, a sliver of one such exercise from 2009:

"Here is a Revised List..."

"This is your captain speaking.
There is no need for panic...do not rush for the lifeboats ...
Women, children, Red Indians, spacemen
and a sort of idealized version of a gay Republican
expatriate Libertarianish papist Renaissance Man
(but definitely NOT a Liberal) first!"

(h/t Monty Python for the lingo, and Internet Weekly for the a time-saving graphic.)

...it turns out that virtually all of Mr. Sullivan's hard-won epiphanies amount to little more than the well-thumbed history and plainsong lore of our Fucked Up Modern Age as it has been long understood and passed down among those awful Liberals. And so when I see statements like this -- "Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not." -- what I see is a man who might want to distance himself from the appalling actions and despicable outcomes of his former allies, but still wants to continue honoring their idiotic parameters and debased vocabulary.

Yes, Mr. Sullivan, your objections emphatically do make you a "radical leftist", because in the hands of the shitkicker demagogues of the Right like Malkin, phrases like "radical leftist" have long since lost any meaning. They are just the pejorative-du-jour, pulled from a random grab-bag of Limbaugh-words -- socialist, elitist, feminist, Marxist, anti-American, compassionate, cut-and-run, surrender, Liberal, extremist, collectivist, queer, Communist, fascist, atheist, humanist, "New York", "San Francisco", “Chicago”, French, European -- that each used to have discrete and very different meanings, but are now bleated interchangeably by the Pig People and their overlords at anyone with a softer heart than Curtis LeMay and less imperial ambitions than Genghis Khan.

But then again, if Mr. Sullivan simply outed himself as a Liberal, he would instantly lose his place in the food-chain, wouldn’t he? Because like that microscopic number of self-loathing black Conservatives who make their daily bread by serving the interests of the Southern Bigot Party, more than any other single factor, it was always the sheer gawking, oddballness of the brazen self-delusion inherent in being the gay champion of the Christopath Homophobe Party that put Mr. Sullivan in the spotlight.

That was what gave him his unique and lucrative cache.

After all, Liberal gay political writers are a dime a dozen, and so in a strange way we find Andrew Sullivan locked in the same kind of mortal combat over labels -- and for exactly the same reasons -- as Roy Cohn's character in "Angels In America" as he adamantly insisted -- even as he was dying of AIDS -- that he was not a "ho-mo-sex-shall".


(Not Safe For Work)

Because, Cohn reasoned, homosexuals were nobodies; losers who had zero clout and “in 15 years cannot pass a pissant anti-discrimination bill from City Council.” And since Roy Cohn could get the President of the United States (or his wife) on the phone -- could take the man he was fucking to the White House and make Ronald Reagan smile at him and shakes his hand -- it therefore followed that Roy Cohn could not possibly be a homosexual.

That unlike every other person in his position on Earth, Roy Cohn was a heterosexual man, who fucked around with guys.

Likewise, even though Mr. Sullivan now, belatedly comes to believe much of what Liberals believe and finally deigns to notice a horde of grotesque truths about his Conservative Movement about which Liberals have been sounding the alarm for 30 years, Andrew Sullivan nonetheless looks us all straight in that eye and argues that he could not possibly be some mere Liberal.

Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.

Mr. Sullivan regularly receives such largess, therefore he must not be a Liberal.

He instead must be the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur.

Because if he is not something spontaneously-generated and utterly sui generis, then he is just another Lefty-Come-Very-Lately, showing up at our door at 3:00 A.M., 20 years late and trailing toxic baggage behind him like Halley's Comet.

And who in the world would pay him to do his little dance then?

Professional Left Podcast #71

"One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives."

-- Arthur Miller

Links for this episode:

1. Blue Gal puts the boot in on David Effing Brooks.
2. Lawrence O'Donnell throws Orly Taitz off his show (h/t Heather).

Outside of a dog, a Professional Left button is man's best friend.


Inside of a dog it's too dark to read (sorry, Groucho .)

You know you want it, so why not toddle on down to Blue Gal's Cafepress Store (and keep listening later in the year for an opportunity to win one). Also too, the Podcast Donate Button Button below allows listeners to throw a contribution specifically towards the podcast. Thanks for your listenership and support!

Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic at the ProLeft website and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget, our archives are available for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

Aggressive Rhetoric

Can upset some; motivate others.