Watch closely as Ross Cardinal Douthat recycles the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz
"Team B" ruse as a meaty thumb on the scale justify his Both Sides Do It drivel
:
Progressivism in the last 10 years has pursued increasingly radical
measures through complex, indirect and bureaucratic means, using state
power subtly to reshape private institutions and creating systems that
feel repressive without necessarily having an identifiable repressor in
chief — McCarthyisms without McCarthy, you might say.
Over the same period, populism has consistently rallied around
charismatic outsider politicians who attack the existing political class
as hopelessly compromised and claim to have a mandate to sweep away any
rule or norm that impedes their agenda...
Those devilishly sinister Liberals strike again!
Somehow managing to be radical...yet indirect.
Repressive...yet subtle to the point of invisibility.
Steering movement of sweeping power and cruel intentions...with no leaders
or chains of command or any other form or visible
coordination.
Which, if you are unfamiliar, are some of the hallmarks of
every other imaginary bogeyman that clowns like Douthat have
conjured out of thin air to justify their despicable opinions.
In the 1980's it was the decrepit and dying Soviet Union that the neocons
fitted out with brand new seven league boots, invisible super-weapons and
inhumanly implacable purpose in order to rise to power. This is from
Thom Hartmann’s piece
“Hyping Terror for Fun, Profit — And Power” (Global Policy Forum /
Common Dreams), published
December 7, 2004.
Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of powerful new Soviet
WMDs were unproven - they said the lack of proof proved that
undetectable weapons existed - they nonetheless used their charges to
push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense
contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan
administration.
But, trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they
had been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld,
Cheney, and Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet
WMDs.
Not only do we now know that the Soviets didn't have any new and
impressive WMDs, but we also now know that they were, in fact,
decaying from within, ripe for collapse any time, regardless of what
the US did - just as the CIA (and anybody who visited Soviet states -
as I had - during that time could easily predict). The Soviet economic
and political system wasn't working, and their military was
disintegrating.
With the fall of the USSR, the Neocons of the 1990s were stuck trying to
make Bill Clinton into the
Greatest Threat The Republic Has Ever Faced. If you remember
those days, you remember that lord knows they tried their best and spent a
fortune on it, but in retrospect pretty much everyone who went big on the
Impeachment of Bill Clinton ended up looking like a raving
idiot.
And having spent so much time and money on something so petty and trivial,
as the Bush Administration took power, the neoconservatives found
themselves with a seemingly insoluble political problem. As I wrote back in 2009:
...
After conspiring to bring about two of the most destructive events in
modern American history -- the impeachment of a US President over
trivia, and the probable theft of the subsequent Presidential election
-- to what God could Republicans possibly pray that their eight years
of insanity, venom and violence "might be wholly blotted out?”
On 09/11/01, their dark miracle came winging its way out of a clear,
blue sky...
In the 2000's, Saddam Hussein provided these same Merchants of Fear with
the all-purpose bogeyman against whom all real Murricans
were required to stand united. Because, and I quote:
“The area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces
control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of
mass destruction were dispersed.
We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad
and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
That was Donald Rumsfeld on ABC News' "This Week" on March 30,
2003.
And when it all blew up in his face, Rumsfeld did what all Conservatives
do when their lies collapse. He just fucking lied about it.
And so, once again, as the Right found itself without an imaginary external
threat sufficient to bind the MAGA morons to their Dear Leader, they
invented all those terrifying immigrant caravans which always seemed to
appear right around election time, and disappear after the election was
over.
Mexico. Wall. Rapists. Taking your jobs. Stealing your heath care. It was in all the
papers.
But once the engines of Republican fascism start to gear up for another
round of outrageous lies, censorship and brute repression, more lies are
needed. Gotta keep the squishes and wobblers on side, using the same,
reliable Big Lie that Conservatives always retreat to once things start to
get insane and bloody.
The Both Sides Do It lie.
And that's where mopes like Douthat come in handy. Because Douthat
doesn't need to pretend that the repressive fascism that his party is
rolling out doesn't exist. He just has to pretend that the Left is
just as bad. And to do it, all he has to do is as a few bricks to the mighty ziggurat of lies, slander and poisonous conspiracy-mongering about the Left which the Right has spent the last 50 years building, and which is now in full bloom all around us every day.
And Douthat does this by using his New York Times real estate just like Rummy
used his appearance on ABC News' "This Week" 22 years ago.
By declaring that knows where the invisible Liberal Repression WMD's are.
They're in the area around Harvard and MSNBC and east, west, south and north
somewhat.
Since all of us here are snobby Liberal elites, I assume you're all familiar
with the parable of The Elephant and the Blind Men.
If you're not, here
it is, minus the happy ending where a Wise Man happens past and says, "Hey,
you're all partially right!" and then they're all filled with joy and
go off together and get drunk. and they all get jobs writing opinion pieces for The New York Times.
Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the
villagers told them, “Hey, there is an elephant in the village today.”
They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, “Even though we
would not be able to see it, let us go and feel it anyway.” All of them
went where the elephant was. Everyone of them touched the elephant.
“Hey,
the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.
“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.
“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who
touched the trunk of the elephant.
“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the
elephant.
“It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly of the
elephant.
“It is like a solid pipe,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the
elephant.
They began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that
he was right....
Well this is not that story.
This is the story of four elite Conservatives who spent their entire careers
willfully blinding themselves to the burgeoning rage, racism, paranoia,
arrogant ignorance and lust for a dictator that was motivating the base of
their party.
Instead, as they patted down the fascism at the heart of the Republican party, they reported back to the world that...
“Unlike those heathen, gay-loving Liberals, the Republican party is
deeply, sincerely and faithfully Christian,” said David French.
“Virtuous Republicans who care deeply about deficits and institutional
norms are all that keep us safe from those Liberal monsters,” said Bret
"Bug" Stephens.
So today The New York Times has presented its readerswith four extremely privileged, out-of-touch Conservative white
dudes on the payroll of Times, all of whom have spent
their entire professional lives being willfully blind to the monsters they
were helping to spawn, and being utterly wrong about the one thing they were hired
to have savvy opinions about based on their alleged expertise and insider
knowledge: the state of play inside the Republican party, and what the Right
was thinking and doing behind closed doors.
Let's see how that worked out!
David Brooks: I’d add another phrase: “brokenism.” This is the
belief system popularized by Alana Newhouse in Tablet magazine in 2022.
It’s the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all
down. Personally, I think some things are broken and some things are OK,
but most of my Trump-supporting friends are brokenists. They get this
from media consumption.
Translation: I personally have no idea what's going on but I gonna say that I still have Trump-supporting friends for some reason and they tell me...
David French: In addition to the brokenism that David talks
about, there’s a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics.
Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other...
Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...
Ross Douthat: I think there are all kinds of ways in which
Trump’s popularity is connected to distinctive shifts in the culture in
the last 15 years — the trends on both left and right that have boosted
populists all over the Western world. But it’s also important to stress
that part of what Republicans like about Donald Trump is just that
Donald Trump is a Republican.
Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides. Also I don't have that much of a problem with Trump because he's mostly doing Republican stuff that I like.
Brooks: I’d offer up one more word for consideration:
“exclusion.” Progressives really have spent the last few decades
excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of
institutions.
Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...
Brooks: A lot of elite conservatives continue to struggle with
what I call the near-abroad problem. They may dislike MAGA, but they
(we) are mostly around progressives or moderates on a day-to-day basis,
by virtue of being elite. These progressives sometimes make our teeth
hurt. We react more strongly to minor sins of the people across campus
than the major sins of the people far away. This is something I’m
working on.
Translation: We really don't know what we're talking
about.
Stephens: The other point that can’t be emphasized enough:
Trump wouldn’t be as popular as he is with his side of the country if
Democrats and progressives weren’t as unpopular with most sides of the
country. Just the fact that he drives the Rachel Maddows of the world
into fits of rage and despair and thoughts of European exile is reason
enough for many Americans to support him. Sometimes even including me.
Translation: My bone-deep loathing of Liberals remains undimmed and I will exploit any opportunity to drag them into any subject for a little hippie
punching.
French: Those of us who follow politics closely always seem to
forget that we’re the strange ones. I really question how much the
average rank-and-file Republican even knows about most of these early
controversies. If you’re watching Fox News or other right-wing outlets,
you’re hearing a lot of stories about strange, “woke” programs funded by
U.S.A.I.D. They don’t know about the lives that are saved or the lives
that are at risk.
That means they won’t know, much less care, about any given political
controversy until it affects them personally.
Translation: We really don't know what we're talking
about.
Douthat: Second, I would emphasize that many Americans
experienced the recent period of liberal power, especially under
Covidian conditions, as much more authoritarian and lawless-feeling in
its everyday impact ... than anything they experienced under Trump.
Translation: I'm with Stephens. Liberals are the worst.
Stephens: ...some of what Trump is doing is simply a turbocharged
version of what his liberal predecessors did while the mainstream press
remained mostly mum. Remember Barack Obama’s threats of unilateral
executive action through his phone and his pen? Or Joe Biden’s almost
open flouting of the Supreme Court with his student loan forgiveness
schemes? I also think millions of Americans are tuning out some of the
claims of Trump’s unconstitutional behavior as so much partisan noise.
That’s one of the downsides of some of the more doubtful efforts by
liberal prosecutors to put Trump in jail.
Translation: Have I mentioned that I still really, really fucking
hate Liberals and will use any opportunity to drag them into any subject
for a little hippie punching? Also Liberals are really to blame for
everything.
French: ... We’ve seen this pattern throughout the Trump years.
Trump will advance an illegal or unconstitutional policy, MAGA lawyers
will spring to MAGA media to rationalize and justify it, and then, when
even conservative judges or justices block Trump’s actions, they scream
that the courts are lawless, not Trump.
Translation: Fuck you, Stephens. I'm an actual lawyer not
some DEI hire from the Wall Street Journal brought on because
Cardinal Douthat here wasn't red meat wingnut enough for the five MAGA
rubes who Sulzberger believes still read his paper.
French: It’s so important to distinguish between the core of MAGA
— which dominates discourse online — from the bulk of voters who put
Trump back in the White House.
driftglass: No it's not. If they're not out-and-proud fascists, they
extremely cool with being out-and-proud fascist-adjacent. Fuck 'em
all: the three-strikes rule applies to everyone who voted for Trump
during his third run for the White House.
Douthat: It’s not unique to MAGA, though — real partisans don’t
change their vote just because the economy goes bad, and especially not
under polarized conditions. It’s not like the inflation under Biden
suddenly made partisan Democrats...
Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...
Stephens: Well, Treasury Secretary Bessent is right. Market
corrections are healthy. Recessions should sometimes happen.
Translation: Let them eat cake.
Healy: Trump calling for the impeachment of that judge — and the
notion of impeaching or disregarding judges generally whom Trump
disagrees with.
Stephens: Terrible. I only stop to observe that all the liberals
who went berserk over John Roberts’s nomination to the court 20 years
ago owe the chief justice an apology...
Translation: I am so consumed by my hatred of Liberals that there is
nothing left inside of me, and it's really, really unfair that Trump's
awfulness makes it harder to devote every word in every column I write to
the subject of just how monstrous Liberals are.
Stephens: Musk is off to a bad start in his government career,
but I sincerely wish him success. The federal government isn’t just too
big, it’s obese. Elon may yet be its Ozempic.
Translation: Burn it all down -- I'll bring the marshmallows!
-- except for the parts I like.
Douthat: We are two months into the presidency, and we just lived
through four years of dramatic global and domestic upheaval under a
Democratic president whose manifest incapacity was deliberately
concealed from the country. I have a million concerns about where this
administration is going, but it’s a bit soon to attack the president’s
supporters for being irrationally loyal.
Translation: I'm with Stephens. Democrats are the worst.
In conclusion, while the four New York Times Conservatives columnists did
collectively manage to blame both sides, express their unalloyed contempt
for people like me, and confess that they have no idea what people outside
of their tiny cossetted bubble of privilege think about a damn thing, they
very definitely did not pinpoint why the reprogrammable
meatbag base of the Republicans party love Trump more than before.
For the answer to that question they would need to stop sniffing each others Buckley farts and ask any one of us who A) live well outside their tiny
cossetted bubble of privilege and, B) have been writing about the Republican
party for 20 years now.
Which they will never do because an honest
answer would, well...
It is one of the more amusing ironies of our age that while elite New York Times Conservatives (and The Atlantic Conservatives, and The Bulwark Conservatives, and so on) may be anathema to the Republican MAGA base, both groups detest Liberals for exactly the same reason: our existence and our decades of warnings make both groups look stupid.
...people and institutions are reacting according to their nature.
By hook or by crook, should Trump end up back in the White House in January,
we Liberals know exactly how screwed we are. Trump 2.0 will be the
Republican Hell Train we have been warning about for 40 years arriving, at
last, at its final destination.
To the place where it has been headed all along.
We Murrica-hatin', terrorist-lovin', baby-killin' Libtards knew we had targets on our backs once the blogosphere took off and we found we could tell
Bush/Cheney (and the Republican filth and legacy media stooges who gave us
Bush/Cheney) exactly what we thought of them in big, bold, public letters.
Along the way from there to here someofusdied, some of us
disappeared, and others
dropped the charade
and showed us that they had never been one of us at all. But for the
rest of us, we had a pretty good idea what we signed up for.
Under a Trump 2.0, the suffering of us small fry would be relatively small, but
we'd feel it. Little things like, say, the heart meds you need are
suddenly no longer covered by your insurance. So sorry! They
might be covered under TrumpCare, but you'll have to talk to your local
Loyalty Office about getting on that plan.
On the other hand, the fact that we small fry have been pariahs for so long
and so aggressively kept out of the national political conversation may work
to our advantage. After all, in the 20 years that we've been blogging we
have proven decisively that A) we have been right about the Right all
along and, B) no one pays us the slightest heed. And anyway, how far up
the Enemies List can we be when we've been cursed, dismissed as rude pests, and
blocked by Tim Miller
and Matthew Dowd and Tom Nichols and Charlie Sykes
and Glenn Greenwald.?
To be held in contempt by all of those and so many more? Who
knows? With those credentials, in a new regime I might be to wrangle an
ambassadorship!
On the other, other hand, this is a very big country, and with local media
being decimated and major media corporations knuckling under to a rising
fascist party --
-- in that possible future it will likely fall to the small fry to get the
word out about what's really happening to anyone who cares to listen. So
now might be a good time for all of you to archive your writing on a hard
drive. Y'know, just in case.
So much for the small fry like me.
The suffering of the larger fry will be appreciably worse.
You may see faces you know, voices you trusted, on teevee, now disheveled, gaunt
and hollow-eyed, recanting their previous criticism of Il Douche. Or
they may just be gone one day, leaving no forwarding address. Or perhaps
they'll find a new base of operations in some congenial foreign land, although
congenial foreign lands may quickly become less congenial when a nuclear-armed
fascist government declares that harboring an Enemy of the Patriotic American
People is something Il Douche does not look kindly on.
Obviously, I'm not saying any of this will happen. And I'm sure
every one of us is doing everything in our power to make sure this is not our
future. But we writers and we copious readers have the curse of clear
and vivid imagination, and this all really might happen. The numbers
are so close that the future has become truly unknowable.
And when the stakes are this high and the outcomes are this genuinely
unpredictable, the bet hedging begins in earnest
Right off the bat, everyone knows that, if Kamala Harris wins, she isn't going
to avenger herself on crap shacks like The Washington Post, or stage
live show trials featuring True Conservative (tm) pettifoggers like Bret
Stephens and Ross Douthat (despite my fervent wishes to the contrary,).
And crap shacks like the Post and elite slugs like Stephens and Douthat know
it: under a Harris administration, those awful people and institutions will be
free to go right on being as awful as they are now.
Probably worse!
But under a Trump 2.0 administration?
Oh my friends, that is a very different animal indeed, which is
why the cowardly, the careerist and the feckless are hedging the hell out of
their bets now.
The L.A. Times --
The Wrap is reporting the LATimes had also planned a "Case Against Trump"
series to run alongside its Kamala Harris endorsement before the owner
quashed it: https://t.co/sk6A6RTpjG
Today would be a good day to cancel your Washington Post subscription.
@wapo will not
make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election: Democracy versus
Fascism & they don't want to weigh in after 36 yrs despite their
Democracy Dies in Darkness sloganhttps://t.co/cokGFw81nypic.twitter.com/M1hzGHSsLB
-- both want to make it abundantly clear to any future Ministry of
Truth officers that they never officially took sides against the
fascists.
As if that will save them.
If you were wondering about the endorsement policy of our local Republican
rag, they
abandoned their tradition of endorsing candidates four years ago, because of, y'know, "polarization" and such. Back when they went
from being our local Republican rag to a Gatehouse Media gutted corpse of a
Republican rag:
There are few community recognition programs with the esteem of the
First Citizen. We are proud to continue the tradition.
And as we celebrate the kick-off of one tradition, we are ending
another — the SJ-R will not endorse candidates for office.
That decision was not made lightly.
Political endorsements have been a tradition for many news
organizations. However, they are a holdover of days past, and I am not
convinced that any endorsement we made would influence you to vote for
a particular candidate. In 2008, when the country was not nearly as
polarized as it is today...
The SJ-R is not alone in its decision to move away from endorsements.
News organizations across the country have made similar choices. The
Dallas Morning News announced earlier this year that they would not
endorse a candidate for president. The Peoria Journal Star and The
Indy Star are among those who also will not make endorsements this
election....
While our approach is changing, it fits today's political climate.
As always, thank you for reading the SJ-R.
Leisa Richardson is executive editor of The State Journal-Register
and Lincoln Courier.
This week,
as we have have already discussed, The New York Times' Bret Stephens went to truly ridiculous lengths
to hide his terse, grudging endorsement of Kamala Harris under an avalanche
of tarted up MAGA talking points about how incompetent and featherweight she
is, how she's probably a Sekrit Commie Sleeper Cell and how, if Trump wins,
it certainly won't be because the Republican base are a mob of bigots and
imbeciles. Heavens no! They're all awesome! The salt of
the Earth!
The fault would lie with all of us god damned Liberals calling them
bigots and imbeciles.
And when the mob comes for him, he can calm them and turn them away by
waving all of that in their faces.
As if that will save him.
And finally there is the case of Ross Douthat: Stephens' fellow True
Conservative (tm) at The New York Times'.
You remember Ross Douthat, right?
Douthat goes even further down Vichy Highway than Stephens by declaring
that Harris is so terribly unfit for the presidency that he cannot bestow
upon her his meaningless endorsement. And for reasons I will leave
it to you all to chew over out for yourselves, our Never Trump "allies"
felt that two weeks out from this fateful election was the optimal time to
elevate the petty, whiny opinions of their very good friend Ross.
Douthat argues that since Liberals have gone insane in the past five years, he cannot in good conscience support Kamala Harris. In support of his thesis, Douthat cites wildly goofy nonsense like crazy Liberals are responsible for things like [no kidding] increased traffic deaths during COVID so, y'know, he just can't get onboard. This is someone who has left the bottom of the barrel far behind that he is now scraping at the Earth's asthenosphere for excuses to keep his True Conservative (tm) skirts clean and hold himself aloof from making the only and obvious choice.
So when a phalanx of enforcers from Stephen Miller's Ministry for the
Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice show up at
The Bulwark's door, they can wave this interview in their faces as
proof that they were committed to making sure Both Sides were fairly
represented.
And when they come around to Douthat's house to "interview" him, he can
wave the very same interview in their faces as proof that he he was an
obedient and loyal citizen who never took the side of the
dirty Commie Marxist Left!
At the House of Sulzberger, Ross Douthat understands the assignment. President
Joe Biden committed the unpardonable sin of not acceding to A.G. Sulzberger's
demands, therefore the war which nepo baby Sulzberger manufactured will
go on until such time --
-- as Sulzberger decides otherwise.
For now, drones like Douthat have been given the go-ahead to recklessly
speculate, impute and lie to their heart's content about what goes on in
places and between people into they have absolutely no insight.
Douthat has been freed to slander whomever he wishes:
Certainly, it’s better for Kamala Harris not to be asked questions
(assuming that she ever deigns to be interviewed) about whether she
participated in that cover-up or was taken in by it. Indeed, it’s better
for Harris not to have her boss in the political conversation at all, the
better to separate her own identity from his presidency’s unpopularity.
Minimize Biden's accomplishments to the point where they can fit in the tiny
coffin Douthat made for them:
But also we don’t know if it will be possible to keep Biden’s struggles
safely in the background, if all the events that require him to play a
presidential part will be small successes like the recent hostage swap,
where his aides can just swear to his intense behind-the-scenes
involvement,
And generally hint and harumph that where there is media manufactured smoke,
surely there must be some fire somewhere.
The last few weeks have been incredibly frustrating for Conservatives at the
"But Her Emails" paper of record. After all, the enthusiasm, joy and
unity of the Harris/Walz ticket is disaster the Times' most popular products:
Both Siderism, arrogant cynicism, contempt for middle America and Dems in
Disarray! So any fleck of meat from any shard of bone that can be conjured out of journalism's vast stock of weasel words shall be dressed up to look like a feast for those jonesing for a hit of "Bad News for Biden".
FKA Twitter exploded on Friday after another of those inexplicable New York Times headlines for which the paper has become known of late. The digital din was such that editors have since altered it.
In a war -- which this very definitely is -- it's important to understand who
is on your side, who isn't, and who is working for the enemy under the flag of
neutrality.
The Times clearly falls into the third category and should be treated as such
in public as loudly as possible.
Having covered a lot of stomach-churning nonsense sharted out by cosseted
Conservatives on the op-ed pages of The New York Times, at last I have
found the place I dare not look --
-- and found Ross "Chunky Reese Witherspoon” staring back at me.
So nope, nope, nope.
Non.
Nein.
Nee.
아니요.
いいえ.
Hindi.
Não.
I'll Need Another Jug Of Brain Bleach To Get Past This
Mr. David Brooks may have taken a paid "book leave" from The New York Times for a quarter of the year off to pick up an extra paycheck on side, tooling around the country lecturing Americans on humility and Both Siderism --
New York Times columnist, author and public broadcasting commentator David Brooks is in Missoula to kick off the University of Montana's President's Lecture series. The conservative pundit spoke about Donald Trump and humility with Sally Mauk before the lecture. "To me, humility is not thinking lowly of yourself," Brooks says. "My favorite definition is, 'it's radical self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness."
-- but he still cares deeply about the care and feeding of his elite Beltway audience. Specifically, he cafes very much that they no be left going cold turkey for lack of regular doses of his brand of "gliding above it all, casting blame equally in all directions except, of course, at his elite Beltway audience" journalism.
And so he left the keys to his Shitty Shitty Bang Bang vehicle with Bret Stephens --
This Revolution, Too, Will Eat Its ChildrenWhat this frenzied national inquest means for our civic culture.
-- on the horrors of living in the post-Kavanaugh world --
In the post-Kavanaugh world, however, we have new editorial standards. The Gawker standards.
-- without once mentioning that, long before Republicans decided to ram the Kavanaugh nomination through come hell or high dudgeon, they had already turned up the music, clapped their hands over our mouths and dragged the county against its will into the post-Merrick Garland world.
I refer to the decision of Senate Democrats to wage a tooth-and-nail battle to oppose Kavanaugh, an effort that is likely doomed to fail and equally likely to hurt Democratic chances in the fall. Who knew Chuck Schumer was so content with his job as as Senate minority leader?
Let’s count the ways in which the Democrats aren’t helping themselves...
For now, however, the first question Democrats ought to ask themselves is whether they really have political capital to waste on a losing battle...
Fierce opposition to Kavanaugh hurts Democrats...
Liberals always cry wolf...
But we haven't forgotten, Mr. Stephens. We will never forget.
And then, before we can catch our breath, here comes this week's homily from Mr. Stephens' fellow New York Times employee -- Ross Cardinal Douthat -- who hilariously leads off with what may be the --
-- Worst. Deuce. Fan. Fiction. Ever.
An Age Divided by Sex
The Kavanaugh nightmare shows how the competing moralisms of conservatism and feminism are tearing us apart.
The Year of Our Lord 1982... The ’70s were officially over, but their spirit still lived on... The shadow of AIDS hadn’t yet fallen on the sexual revolution, the era’s teen movies offered unapologetic raunch... Most contemporary discourse about the social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s imagines a consistent “left” that created those revolutions and a consistent “right” that opposed them. it was a world where a social revolution had ripped through American culture and radically de-moralized society, tearing down the old structures of suburban bourgeois Christian morality, replacing them with libertinism. With "if it feels good, do it" and the Playboy philosophy. With “Fear of Flying” for women and “Risky Business” and “Porky’s” for the boys...
Then comes the obligatory Bill Clinton name-check as required by the NYT Conservative Style Book
..in the age of Bill Clinton...
Then, because he is the product of a privileged suburban life of Hamden Hall Country Day School and Harvard University (after which he was decanted directly into an editorship at The Atlantic and a column at The New York Times) and does not have the slightest fucking idea what the 70s or the 80s or urban life in American were actually like, Mr. Douthat shifts from the stilted language of the Wikipedia book-report (The Sexual Revolution: A Land of Contrasts) to a vocabulary with which he is much more comfortable:
To put this disagreement in terms familiar from 1980s movies...
yeah. That happened.
And then, as you must have guessed by now, Mr. Douthat ties the whole, pompous, banjaxed mess up with a big Both Siderist bow --
Thus the puritanism of conservatism would be more admirable... The puritanism of feminism, meanwhile, would be more realistic... Instead of such a tempering of both worldviews, though, we seem to be headed in the opposite direction — toward a world where the parties are polarized by gender and the two moralistic programs, feminist and conservative...
Between bong hits in the Andrew Sullivan Memorial True Conservative Dorm Room and Fanciful Speculatarium, the very-nearly always wrong Ross Douthat reposed on medium-sized pile of money, peered into the cracked and wine-dappled crystal ball he borrowed from Peggy Noonan and speculated about History and The Future.
But with that proviso, here are a few guesses as to how [President Obama's] legacy will ultimately be judged...
What followed was mostly-harmless flapdoodle. Another lazy, cosseted Conservative columnist padding out another column with sawdust and moonbeams and navel-gazing until it's nothing but sawdust and moonbeams and navel-gazing.
And then, suddenly, the bong breaks and the crystal ball falls, and down comes Ross Douthat, navel and all.
Because for all the sawdust and moonbeams and navel-gazing, at this moment in history the single most important task for trifling Conservative hacks with outsized megaphones like Mr. Douthat is to hang the blame for the Rise of The Bastard President somewhere far, far away from themselves. Somewhere far, far away from the sprawling, multi-media Conservative lie factory in which Mr. Douthat serves as a medium-sized cog. The sprawling, multi-media Conservative lie factory which created a political breeding ground for The Bastard President by building a Republican base that was malignantly ignorant enough --
-- to fling themselves into the arms of a gibbering beast who sold them a supersized version of the same grotesque fairy tale that the sprawling, multi-media Conservative lie factory has been telling them for years -- that their paranoia is actually patriotism and their ignorance and bigotry is a mark of special grace.
And thus Mr. Douthat rolls out of his New York Times hammock and straight into the important business of blaming President Obama and his liberals cult (hey, I finally made it into the NYT!) for the Rise of the Bastard President
Not that this will prevent him from being a liberal icon, years or generations hence. If John F. Kennedy’s blundering imperilment of world peace was buried under hagiography, there will be a similar forgetting spread over Obama’s foreign policy setbacks. As the first black president, the politician who passed health care reform and the man who personally embodied upper-class liberalism’s cosmopolitan self-image, he will almost certainly regain, in what is sure to be an active post-presidency, some of the cult that surrounded him during his ascent.
...
But it is precisely this once-and-future cult that’s crucial to understanding Obama’s greatest failure, and the part he played in delivering us to Trumpism...
And now, boys and girls, we are well and truly off to the races. Because it wasn't the sprawling, multi-media Conservative lie factory which Mr. Douthat serves so obediently that dumbed-down and angered up the wingnuts to the point of voting the country off a cliff. No, it was President "transformational-bordering-on-messianic" style and embrace of "the imperial presidency" which created the "perfervid fears" within the widdle hearts of Real Murricans.
The fears helped give us both the zeal of the Tea Party and the alienation of the Trumpistas.
There was only ever a rebranding scam for gutless Republicans base voters who were desperate to get on with the important business of hating the first black president because deficits! and czars! and tyranny! and stuff! before he had even unpacked...
... without having to answer any tricky questions about why they had spent the previous eight years cheering on President Dumbass as he did exactly those things that they had suddenly decided were insuperably evil.
So much easier to put on a stupid hat, wave a little Koch Brothers funded flag, step into the Bush-Off Machine and pop out the other side pretending that you'd never even heard of George W. Bush...especially since America's major media outlets were so damned eager to aid and abet that Big Lie.
But the ruse is long dead. Zombie-dead to be sure since every dime-store wingnut poo-flinger resurrects it whenever they need a weasel-worded synonym for "the same old, dumbfuck Republican base", but higher up the food chain Douthat's fellow useless New York Times Conservative tool, David Fucking Brooks, finally admitted that there is no Tea Party. Hell, even Joe Fucking Scarborough finally admitted that there is no Tea Party.
I guess the older kids are not sharing their communiques from True Conservative Central Command with support staff like Mr. Douthat. Sad!
Of course being a loyal pray-pay-and-obey member of the Beltway's High and Holy Cult of Both Siderism, Mr. Douthat is contractually obligated to briefly double-back and try to soften his vile "blame Obama" claptrap with a dose of equally idiotic "blame everybody"claptrap:
I would blame a lot of people — Republican leaders and conservative media personalities and the liberal cultural establishment and Hillary Clinton’s campaign team and Angela Merkel and more — for Trump’s rise more than I would blame Obama.
And yet...
But I still suspect that the Trumpening might have been prevented had Obama promised less grandly, eschewed imperial temptations when stymied in his ambitions, and dressed his technocratic liberalism in less arc-of-history nonsense.
See, if only President Obama had been more flexible, probably none of this woulda happened!
If only President Obama woulda been more like, say, Bill Clinton --
"...a man of more modest promises and somewhat more Bill Clintonian flexibility..."
-- probably everyone woulda gotten along fine!
Surely under that scenario, Mr. Douthat's Republican Party would never have devolved into a horde of hateful, deluded scumbags addicted to political demagogues and Conservative media liars (from the NYT in December of 1994):
Republicans Get a Pep Talk From Rush Limbaugh
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE,
Published: December 12, 1994
BALTIMORE, Dec. 10— To all the advice for the new Republicans coming to Congress, add this from Rush Limbaugh: A hostile press corps lurks inside the Beltway.
"You will never ever be their friends," the talk-show host warned most of the 73 Republican freshmen at a dinner here tonight. "They don't want to be your friends. Some female reporter will come up to one of you and start batting her eyes and ask you to go to lunch. And you'll think, 'Wow! I'm only a freshman. Cokie Roberts wants to take me to lunch. I've really made it!' " The audience laughed.
"Seriously," he added. "Don't fall for this. This is not the time to get moderate. This is not the time to start trying to be liked."
The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights, whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in November...
Surely under that scenario, Mr. Douthat's Republican Party would never have turned into a mob of seditious goons who would shut the entire government down in a fit of pique:
Surely under that scenario, Mr. Douthat's Republican Party would never have morphed into gang of rage-drunk thugs who would use any means at their disposal to cripple the Democratic president's ability to simply govern as he was elected to do:
Yes, of only President Obama had been more like Bill Clinton, then surely his successor would not have been a wildly unqualified dolt who lost the popular vote but "won" anyway thanks to our electoral process being tampered with by people I would not trust to cat-sit for five minutes (from New York Magazine, in June of 2012):
Yes, Bush v. Gore Did Steal the Election
By Jonathan Chait
The general topic of wildly partisan Supreme Court rulings is on everybody’s mind right now for some reason. The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney wants everybody to know that the Supreme Court really, truly did not hand the presidential election to George W. Bush. “You can disagree with the ruling in Bush v. Gore,” writes Carney, “but you can’t honestly argue that it decided the election.”
Well, yes, you can. In fact we know nearly for certain that the recount stopped by the Supreme Court would have given Gore the lead. (Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Republican-controlled Florida legislature would have simply overridden the results of the count and handed the state to Bush, as it threatened to do.) But Carney is repeating a common misconception.
...
Now, the actual effect of the recount is obviously something of a side issue when assessing the actions of the Court. Nobody knew the outcome of the recount, only that it threatened to make Al Gore president, and stopping it would guarantee Bush’s victory. That is the environment in which five Republican-appointed justices essentially invented a one-time-only ruling to stop the recount...
And obviously under that scenario, Mr. Douthat's Republican Party would never have gotten the stone cold Orwellian nerve to launch a massive, multi-media Memory Hole campaign to pretend that none of this ever happened.
Confesses he really doesn't know anything about public intellectuallizin'.
Today was the day it began to dawn on H. Pecksniff Rosencrantz "Ross" Douthat III that he and every other card-carrying member of the professional Conservative Brain Caste really really suck at their job:
The first failure was a failure of governance and wisdom, under George W. Bush and in the years that followed. Had there been weapons of mass destruction under Iraqi soil and a successful occupation, or had Bush and his advisers chosen a more prudent post-Sept. 11 course, the trust that right-wing populists placed in their elites might not have frayed so quickly...
What Mr. Douthat is trying gently suggest is that if Dubya hadn't lied American into the wrong war and hadn't fucked that war up something something New American Century!
What Mr. Douthat is desperately trying not to say is "Holy shit, the Left really was right about us smug little assholes all along!"
Mr. Douthat continues:
...
The second failure was a failure of recognition and self-critique, in which the right’s best minds deceived themselves about (or made excuses for) the toxic tendencies of populism, which were manifest in various hysterias long before Sean Hannity swooned for Donald Trump. What the intellectuals did not see clearly enough was that Fox News and talk radio and the internet had made right-wing populism...
Some conservatives told themselves that Fox and Drudge and Breitbart were just the evolving right-of-center alternative to the liberal mainstream media, when in reality they were more fact-averse and irresponsible. Others (myself included) told ourselves that this irresponsibility could be mitigated by effective statesmanship, when in reality political conservatism’s leaders — including high-minded figures like Paul Ryan — turned out to have no strategy save self-preservation.
...
For the record, it has taken less than the gestation period of the average porcupine for Donald J. Trump (and that vengeful bitch Karma) to force both of the New York Times' highly-paid professional Conservative Public Intellectuals into clenched-teeth admissions that they never had the slightest fucking clue as to what was really going on inside the Conservative movement, the Republican party or America in general (David Brooks, March 2016)
Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.
The only thing that could make this ideological walk-of-shame more tawdry would be for Mr, Douthat to seek solace by throwing himself into the ideological arms of Bill Kristol's idiot son-in-law.
But what are the odds of...
Wait! I spoke too soon!
“This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual,” writes Matthew Continetti, the editor of The Washington Free Beacon, in a long essay tracing how the highbrow conservatism of Burnham and William F. Buckley sought to work with and through the anti-establishment impulses of the Middle American right. “After years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that populism has exiled him from his political home.”
And, Continetti adds, “what makes this crisis acute is the knowledge that he and his predecessors may have helped to bring it on themselves.”
The only word amiss in this analysis is “may.” The crisis described in Continetti’s essay was not created by the conservative intelligentsia alone. But three signal failures of that intelligentsia clearly contributed to the right’s disastrous rendezvous with Trumpism.
Less than a week ago we found David Brooks using his priceless New York Times' real-estate to mainstream disgraced ratfucker James O'Keefe.
As in a dream, I don't remember how I got there exactly, but there I was, in the middle of the night, staggering I down an infinitely long corridor, bottle of Lagavulin in one hand and the foot-thick World Science Fiction Convention Program Guide in the other, looking in vain for either the "Blue Drazi/Green Drazi: Can Mixed Marriages Ever Work?" panel or the one listed as "From Pufnstuf to Hufflepuff: One Woman's Journey Through Fantasy Fandom".
It was late, OK? The pickings were slim. The place was desolate and the rooms poorly marked and, to be 100% honest, I owed a lot of money to various unsavory types up in the Con Suite. A lot of money. Which is why, when I stumbled through the first open door I found into a dimly lit room with a pasty, paunchy guy on stage fiddling with his noted and a few sleepers and coughers sitting around in folding chairs, I figured I could at least take a load off, dodge the various Fetts on my trail, and resume my hunt for the panel of my dreams in a while.
Then the panel began.
I could not find it listed anywhere in the program, but it appeared to be entitled "What If, Maybe, Someday in The Future, The Democratic Party Becomes as Shitty as The Republican Party???!! I'm Not Saying It Will Definitely Happen. Or Even That It Will Probably Happen. Because Who Knows, If a Bunch of Stuff Changes it Could Happen, People! It Could Happen!!!"
And it was so mesmerizingly bad -- so "The first time you saw Plan Nine From Outer Space and realized, holy shit, they weren't exaggerating!" bad -- that I sat though the whole thing:
A Trumpism of the Left
Ross Douthat OCT. 5, 2016
...In a world where a figure like Donald Trump is a major party’s nominee for the presidency, why shouldn’t a character like Alicia Machado aspire to high office as well? I’m joking (and anyway Machado is constitutionally ineligible for the presidency), but there is an interesting underlying question here. Trumpism represents the conquest of the still relatively staid world of politics by tabloid seaminess and the reality-television carnival. But that seaminess, that carnival, is hardly limited by ideology or partisan affiliation. Democratic voters swim in the same cultural sea as the “Apprentice”-watching Republicans who helped make Trump the G.O.P. nominee... Given all this, could a Trump-style celebrity takeover someday befall the Democrats as well, without the white identity politics but with all the raging telenovela drama that’s trailed in Trump’s wake...
Right now it couldn’t, because the Democratic Party...
I raised my hand because I knew the answer and because the poor, rambling doofus seemed so fucking lost at this point I kinda felt sorry for him.
Oh! Oh! I know! Because the Democratic Party isn't a madhouse of bigots and imbeciles? Because the Democratic Party is noticeably lacking in overwhelming numbers of bigots and imbeciles because they're all in the Republican Party? Because the modern Republican Party was built on a strategy of flattering and pandering to bigots and imbeciles?
But Mr. Douthat was not taking questions at this time.
Instead he lumbered on --
-- heedless of his own absurdity:
But what’s true today might not be true forever. The differences between the Democratic Party’s younger, poorer, browner base and its older, whiter, richer and more moderate leadership are a potentially unstable equilibrium.
The anger coursing through left-wing protest politics could find a cruder, more nakedly demagogic avatar than Bernie Sanders...
A Hillary Clinton administration could supply various betrayals and compromises or foul up in some disastrous way...
...a Trumpism of the left would imitate the left-wing populists of Latin America and Asia — the Chavismo of Alicia Machado’s native Venezuela, or the Trumpian socialism presently being served up by the ranting, trigger-happy president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte...
This may sound implausible, indeed frankly un-American — but so did the ascent of Trump’s National Front-ish politics, and yet here we are...
Yes, here we are. Here we are indeed. An while we are here, I just can't help noticing that while Mr. Douthat has so very many words to spend pondering the Possible Democratic Hellscape of Tomorrow, he spends so few asking just exactly why we are where we are today.
Nary a word to be spared to condemn the Republican Party's disastrous decision to bet its future on recruiting militia nuts, racists, xenophobes, homophobes, anti-science dominionists and various other species of human flotsam from the shallow end of the American gene pool. Nary a word to be spared mentioning that the arrival of someone like Il Douche was hardly implausible to those dirty American "Chavismo" Liberals who have been warning about the madness, bigotry and open-mouth-with-tongue flirtations with fascism which have been running wild through the GOP for decades -- warnings which gutless Conservative brain wizards like Mr. Douthat have chosen to ignore.
Nary a word to be spared for any of that.
Instead...
Cultural and demographic change can ripple into politics slowly, and then all at once. The elite checks on a gonzo left-wing populism are real and powerful, but so are the cultural forces roiling underneath...
And the same demographic changes that have made the right more nativist and populist, more European and reactionary, could expose the left to a Latin American temptation if liberal governance ever really hits the rocks.
If and when it does, the Hillary Clinton campaign’s skillful deployment of Alicia Machado may be cast in a somewhat different light. It’s Clinton’s Democratic Party today — managerial, technocratic, polished, a little smug. But Machado’s wilder, messier, “I’m not a saint girl” style might have its own claim on the American left’s future...
Then it was over. His New York Times bearers whisked him away, leaving the rest of us stunned and silent. As we began to shuffle out. I noticed Maureen Dowd mating grimly with some nameless, ancient horror in the dark corner behind the door.
Her panel was next.
I killed what was left of my Lagavulin and lurched into back into the hall, this time with renewed purpose and resolve.
It was time to face whatever was waiting for me up the Con Suite.
Because honestly, nothing they could dish out could possibly compare to the existential pain I had just experienced being punched in the brain by so much stupid in such a short period of time.
