Big Damn Heroes

The world if full of heroes.  Firemen.  Neonatal ICU nurses.  Teachers.  My Mom.  Lots of heroes.

But who are the biggest goddamn damn heroes of all?

Why the media of course!

Because after months and months and months of letting Donald J. Trump literally phone-it-in and say whatever and passively pointing their cameras at Donald J. Trump (or at an empty stage and Trump banner at which Donald J. Trump may appear in the near future) the media has begun to nip furiously at the ankles of the monster they helped unleash.  From The Daily Beast: 

Has the Media Worm Finally Turned on Donald Trump?

Donald Trump has had his roughest media week in the campaign, with journalists finally asking tough questions of the Republican candidate.

Is this the moment when the news media—at long last—has begun to hold Donald Trump to account?

And will the Republican frontrunner finally succumb to the accepted rules of politics he had previously flouted—an outcome the Washington establishment frequently predicts and desperately desires?

If so, the media will claim a fair share of the credit...

Big.

Damn.

Heroes.

And for the record, there actually is a group of people who really have been onto Trump from the beginning and, more importantly, have been raising the alarm for decades about the toxic confluence of ignorance, rage and racism within the Republican Party that makes it such easy picking for fascists like Trump and theocrats like Raphael "Ted" Cruz. 

This group is completely ignored by the Beltway Media, and known in the Conservative media as America-hating, God-trashing, terrorist-loving, cut-and-running, baby-killing, dirty Commie surrender-monkeys. 

But you can just call us "Liberals".

Biz

The business of blogging (from FDL) --

... 

The fashionable explanation is that “Twitter and Facebook have passed them by.”  Hogwash.  There has certainly been a consolidation of blogs for survival at places like Daily Kos and Firedoglake, but that means traffic has gone up, and not down.  If it was still possible to keep blogs afloat, news outlets (blogs and otherwise) wouldn’t be dropping like flies.

The reason increasing numbers of blogs can’t keep the lights on is simple –  Google.  As I wrote on Bytegeist recently, news advertising revenues (both online and off) have tanked since 2000, and that money is going straight to Google, who passes pennies on to news outlets for every dollar they receive.  Every news outlet from the New York Times on down is struggling in its wake.  Because Google has eliminated the competition by crushing it or swallowing it up with nary an antitrust peep from the FTC, news outlets (including blogs) are forced to take whatever they want to give. 

Premium advertising has historically gone for between $8 and $12 per CPM (thousand impressions) at online news sites, and Google charges similar rates.  But last month at the height of election advertising, when ad revenues used to be at their highest and provide the money that political news sites would live on for the rest of the year, Google passed on a mere .42 cents per CPM to FDL and many other outlets.

This part of Freedlander’s article gave me the biggest chuckle:

What’s left of the Netroots say they aren’t finished yet. They point to the handful of candidates for office this year that they got behind, like Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, as proof of their relevance—never mind that most of the Democratic establishment lined up behind them as well.

Freedlander doesn’t say who said that, but both Warren and Baldwin — candidates that the netroots certainly have stood by — have refused to even take the calls of advertising representatives of the blogs.  And you can add Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown to that list.  (And, as John Amato has noted, the unions too.)  If you’re giving money to these candidates, their ad dollars are going straight to Google in exclusive deals through their expensive DC consultants — many of whom mark the ad rates up 100% and skim the bulk of your donation rather than buy direct from publishers. 

...

-- has always been opaque to people like me.

As a free agent existing at the outer galactic rim of blogging, I am vaguely aware that these interaction go on, just as they go on behind the closed doors of Liberal radio and Liberal teevee.    But they come into my little hut through the internet's heating ducts and coconut wireless, like someone else's mommy and daddy arguing about divorce property settlements in the penthouse upstairs.

Since I started doing fundraisers, my business plan has been pretty simple: write and Photoshop like a fiend and then, along the way, periodically ask people to support what I do.  No ads.  No strategy where I kick you one day and ask you for cash the next.  No slides shows of nipple slips and celebrity diets designed for no purpose other than to drive up my hit-counts and increase my ad revenue.  No opaque financial dependencies that you don't know about but that constrain my ability to write what I please and whatever I please.

Me, from 2010:

I have watched the tides go in and out on blogging. Watched the organic material of the Great Primordial Blogging Sea organize itself into ever larger, more complex organisms, with ever more complex metabolisms and business plans, which -- when you pop the hood -- still depend heavily or entirely on "aggregating" something called "content". 

In much the same way a blue whale "aggregates" krill :-) 

Me? I'm still Tom Bombadil...

Since Day One I've been here on the edge of town, running my single-shingle, pie-and-coffee shop , serving my own hot, home-cooked essays with a scoop or two of hand-made graphics. 

One post a day, every day, more or less. 

Sometimes rock stars drop in, zipping between between here and there. I welcome their patronage, but they get what's on the menu like everybody else. 

Sometimes tiny mobs of angry people show up. 

Eventually they go away.

Then, after the transient ups and downs, life goes on.

One post a day.

Every day. 

More or less. 

And while the service is sometimes sloppy ("Waiter, there's an apostrophe in my s'oup!") like 'em or not, they're mine. 

What I do isn't "Candide", but it is an honest stick, and if I can sometimes hit the sweet spot between the sensibilities of Bradbury ("You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.") and Nin ("The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.") then I can step away from the keyboard feeling I've done my job.

In the end, this little blog of mine may be a poor thing.

But it is mine own.

Where Were You When I Laid

the foundations of the Earth?

Why is Newton Leroy winning the GOP battle of the bands?

Because he built the damn bandstand.

In the 1990s he framed out the terms under which the 2012 GOP nomination is being fought -- hatred, paranoia , megalomania, Jebus -- and furnished the "Traitor!Traitor!Traitor!" vocabulary that all the other freaks in the freak show are using.

Because after decades of careful conditioning, it is the only vocabulary which the homunculi Base is capable of hearing.

For future generations of little kids who will need to know what happened back when American went mad, I wrote this story -- "Little Red State Fundy" -- back in 2005.

For the Conservatives -- both Apostate and Brahman -- who are now wailing and gnashing their teeth over the possibility of Newt Fucking Gingrich being the standard bearer for the GOP next year, what is there left to say but...

....we told you so.

Holy Mother of God did we ever tell you so.

Over and over again. Begged you to listen. Begged you to stop and consider what long-term horrors you were visiting on this country in exchange having your bigot G-spot stroked.

And you told us to fuck off.

Told us to shut up.

Called us traitors and liars, cowards and crazy, Commies and Fifth Columnists. Many of you still call us these things, letting all those lovely, bile-soaked words that Newt Fucking Gingrich and his Pretty Hate Machine bequeathed to you roll eff-ort-less-ly off your tongue.

Because in the Beginning were the Words: the words that advanced your agendas, elected your candidates and built your careers. The words to which you owe everything.

And now that the Author of the script that permitted you to prosper has come for his due, I can think of no literary quotation more appropriate to the occasion that Yahweh's admonition to Job from my favorite book of the Bible:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said:

"Who is this that darkens my counsel
with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?

“Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?

“Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?
The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.
The wicked are denied their light,
and their upraised arm is broken.

“Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.

“What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!

“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
or seen the storehouses of the hail,
which I reserve for times of trouble,
for days of war and battle?
What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,
or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?
Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,
to water a land where no one lives,
an uninhabited desert,
to satisfy a desolate wasteland
and make it sprout with grass?
Does the rain have a father?
Who fathers the drops of dew?
From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
when the waters become hard as stone,
when the surface of the deep is frozen?

“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?
Can you loosen Orion’s belt?
Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons
or lead out the Bea with its cubs?
Do you know the laws of the heavens?
Can you set up God’s[e] dominion over the earth?

“Can you raise your voice to the clouds
and cover yourself with a flood of water?
Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
Who gives the ibis wisdom
or gives the rooster understanding?
Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?
Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens
when the dust becomes hard
and the clods of earth stick together?

“Do you hunt the prey for the lioness
and satisfy the hunger of the lions
when they crouch in their dens
or lie in wait in a thicket?
Who provides food for the raven
when its young cry out to God
and wander about for lack of food?

And for the less Old Testamently inclined, Charlie Pierce unloads his formidable boomstick in the same general direction here:

No, Andrew, you're wrong. The crisis in the Republican party is not that Newt Gingrich is leading the polls for the presidential nomination, while Willard Romney continues to be the flailing foof he's been since he entered public life. The crisis is not that David (Axis of Evil, Ask My Wife) Frum, or Charles (Friend of Death Squads) Krauthammer, or George Effing Will are clutching their pearls at the prospect of a national convention held entirely in the Newtiverse. The crisis is not that Gingrich is more than a contender. The crisis in the Republican party began when it made Newt Gingrich a national figure in the first place. The intellectual dry-rot set deep in the heartwood back then. In 1994, Newt Gingrich was no less a fraud, no less for sale, no less an intellectual snake-oil salesman, no less an adulterous hypocrite than he will be when he steps on the stage Saturday in Des Moines for the 6,795th of 8,761 scheduled GOP presidential debates. You may not have liked Gingrich's personal style back then — Mr. Will seems enormously displeased with the fact that Gingrich fails to recognize Will's own tinpot erudition as more authentic than his own — but you all loved the results he got...

Frum, Sullivan, Krauthammer, Will and all the rest of them had better pray for mercy.

Because justice would sting like a bitch.

While You Were Busy

busking for nickles and shaking out the sofa cushions one more time looking for a few pfennigs for good causes, here is what Team Evil was up to.

From Talking Points Memo:

Report: Millions Donated To Islamophobic Groups Since 2001

Ryan J. Reilly | August 26, 2011

Seven foundations and wealthy donors gave Islamophobic groups $42.6M from 2001 through 2009, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress.

"Sometimes the money flowing from these foundations and their donors is clearly designed to promote Islamophobia, but more often the support provided is for general purpose use, which the think tanks and grassroots organizations then put to use on their primary purpose -- spreading their messages of hate and fear as far and wide as they can," the report says.

On other words, the Usual Suspects:

• Donors Capital Fund
• Richard Mellon Scaife foundations
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
• Newton D. & Rochelle F. Becker foundations and charitable trust
• Russell Berrie Foundation
• Anchorage Charitable Fund and William Rosenwald Family Fund
• Fairbrook Foundation

Showering cash on the Usual Suspects:

And what does this money fund? Well, here’s one of many cases in point: Last July, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich warned a conservative audience at the American Enterprise Institute that the Islamic practice of Sharia was “a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it.” Gingrich went on to claim that “Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world.”

Sharia, or Muslim religious code, includes practices such as charitable giving, prayer, and honoring one’s parents—precepts virtually identical to those of Christianity and Judaism. But Gingrich and other conservatives promote alarmist notions about a nearly 1,500-year-old religion for a variety of sinister political, financial, and ideological motives. In his remarks that day, Gingrich mimicked the language of conservative analyst Andrew McCarthy, who co-wrote a report calling Sharia “the preeminent totalitarian threat of our time.” Such similarities in language are no accident. Look no further than the organization that released McCarthy’s anti-Sharia report: the aforementioned Center for Security Policy, which is a central hub of the anti-Muslim network and an active promoter of anti- Sharia messaging and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

In fact, CSP is a key source for right-wing politicians, pundits, and grassroots organizations, providing them with a steady stream of reports mischaracterizing Islam and warnings about the dangers of Islam and American Muslims. Operating under the leadership of Frank Gaffney, the organization is funded by a small number of foundations and donors with a deep understanding of how to influence U.S. politics by promoting highly alarming threats to our national security. CSP is joined by other anti-Muslim organizations in this lucrative business, such as Stop Islamization of America and the Society of Americans for National Existence. Many of the leaders of these organizations are well-schooled in the art of getting attention in the press, particularly Fox News, The Wall Street Journal editorial pages, The Washington Times, and a variety of right-wing websites and radio outlets.

Misinformation experts such as Gaffney consult and work with such right-wing grassroots organizations as ACT! for America and the Eagle Forum, as well as religious right groups such as the Faith and Freedom Coalition and American Family Association, to spread their message. Speaking at their conferences, writing on their websites, and appearing on their radio shows, these experts rail against Islam and cast suspicion on American Muslims. Much of their propaganda gets churned into fundraising appeals by grassroots and religious right groups. The money they raise then enters the political process and helps fund ads supporting politicians who echo alarmist warnings and sponsor anti-Muslim attacks.
...

In the interest of strict fairness, I'm sure not all of these deeply depraved assholes are in the Hate Business only for the money.

I'm sure that, if it came right down to it, many of them sincerely loathe this country enough that they would lie and slander tirelessly to subvert and destroy it for free.

Can't Someone Else Do It?

So what does the three-oranges-for-a-buck sale down at da Jewel have to do with the slow death of Wikipedia?

Funny you should ask.

From Gawker:

Wikipedia Is Slowly Dying

Jimmy Wales, the iconoclastic founder of Wikipedia, made a troubling announcement at the seventh annual Wikipedia conference: Nobody wants to edit Wikipedia anymore. Is Wikipedia going to shrivel up and fade away?

Wales told the AP that the number of Wikipedia editors is slowly dwindling. "We are not replenishing our ranks," he said, "it is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important." According to Wales a lot of the core Wikipedians have simply aged out, got married and found that they have better things to do with their time. Previous rumors of Wikipedias demise have focused on a lack of any new stuff to add; but this seems like a real existential threat.
...

And Twitter and Facebook have sucked up all the cognitive surplus younger internet users might have once devoted to building up Wikipedia and shattered it into a million fleeting hashtags.
...

We have a cherished saying in my family: "Let's you and him fight."

Which, translated, is our way of recognizing-with-an-Ozark-laugh that the world is full of people who have lots of good ideas about how other people should spend their abundant "spare time".

What's happening with Wikipedia is not a web phenomenon: it's just the latest manifestation of same something-for-nothing shell game played by every two-bit Alexander the Great I (and probably you) have ever worked for.

It is the fantasy on which turned just about every executive staff session I was ever dragooned into attending into a meeting of all-quarterbacks and no wide-receivers where every wild, dumb idea was flung blindly down-field to no one at all -- in the passive "someone really should move the building two feet to the left!" voice -- by organizational deadwood who later tell their loved ones what heroes they had been that day.

It is the fantasy that allows elected goofs get away with promising that if gummint were just "run like a business" everything would be fine. (Which is bullshit. Most gummint -- most lousy gummint -- is run exactly like a lousy business: idiots on top who got there because or their last names or their college roommates, making far too much money than they are worth by loading up the men and women who actually till the soil and tread the grain [so to speak] with more work than they can possible accomplish [the goof on top didn't get there by telling the public "No"]...and then bitching about their general laziness and clockwatchery, or outsourcing the whole deal to some third party for a quick buck.)

It is the fantasy that has turned unpaid interns into unwitting scabs, and WalMart into an American success story instead of something foul and feudal about which we should be heartily ashamed.

It is the ancient Faustian bargain of the slaveholder – an army of uncomplaining servants created by, oh, let’s say “Providence” to provide the privileged with an endless stream of luxuries at bargain basement prices, and around which mankind has historically erected all manner of depraved theologies explaining why those who do the work should not enjoy the fruits of their labor, but should content themselves sitting on the porch, singin' spirituals.

As I wrote back in 2006:

Live Free or Buy

[Tom Friedman] also treads as lightly as a chubby mouse in a catnip bomber-jacket navigating the main floor of the Lion House just around sup-sup-sup-suppertime, because far too much of his personal well-being is staked to his main gig -- delivering ten-year-old platitudes about globalization to twenty-years-out-of-date, Conservative CEOs. Rich, white men with Republican rock-ribs, who adore George Bush and have voted straight GOP-ticket since they were old enough to golf in ugly pants.

Men who live in First Class – sometimes, to be clear and fair, through dint of long hours and hard work, which are traits to be admired – and have deluded themselves into believing that they can outsource the rivets and steel that hold the plane together, the engines that make it go and the flight crew that navigates it safely though the storm…and yet somehow they will be able to fly on in comfort forever, fueled by consultants and canny financial valuation trickery.

Friedman catches such men as the last of their employees plummet wholesale Earthward, as they sit in the skeletal airframe of their once-proud ships and the deathly cold wind of 30,000 feet is whistling though their ass-cracks and he advises that, perhaps, Steps Of Some Kind Should Be Taken.
...

We may or may not be able to educate our way out of the corner we’re in, but to even attempt to do so, we first have to come squarely to terms with who we are, what we are, and how we really got here.

To do that, consider this, which is one of my favorite quotes from Charlie Chaplin.
“The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.”

That is the dirty truth and true root of our problem; We have become the saddest thing Charlie Chaplin could imagine.

“We have become used to luxury.”

Those $.99 chicken fingers? The $12 bumper-to-bumper, inside-and-out car-wash? The three-oranges-for-a-buck sale down at the Jewel?

These are, all of them, luxury items, created not by a band of rugged Libertarians hewing agricultural and technological miracles out of the living rock, but made possible by an ocean of cheap labor, federal subsidies and a continent rich beyond the dreams of Avarice in natural resources.

What we’re all about (and always have been) is manufacturing what, for most of human history, has been luxury goods, selling them cheap and living fat off the margins. There is nothing at all wrong with making a living doing this, except that in the long run, every race will go to the cleverest, and right now our problem is that we don’t believe that.

We are drowning in our own mythos of Sunshine, Freedom and Manifest Destiny.

We have take a fatal dose of our own Exceptionalism propaganda and have internalized down to our tubby little toesies the belief that God Almighty wants us to live in opulence.

That God wants gas prices to be low.
...

In 1861 the South was prosperous specifically because of the forced labor of four million brown people who were reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

In 2006, America is prosperous specifically because of the peonage-cheap, illegal labor of twelve million brown people who are reviled, exploited, abused and utterly necessary.

We tolerate with a wink-and-a-nudge a system that simultataneously criminalizes a labor force of twelve million to keep them underground and terrified, and then carefully extracts their labor for pennies.

Any social policy which doesn’t confront immigration on those terms will fail and fail badly because, in the end, we really only have two choices: Either a renegotiation of the social contract to pay working people a living wage, or an open recognition that we will forever rely more and more on cheaper and cheaper labor to remain spoiled and Holy.

So far we have chosen neither. We have chosen to burn through our collective inheritance of wealth and prestige to make foolish choices, set foolish policies, wage foolish wars, without having to feel any pain. Like crack-heads, we have stolen from our parents and mooched from our children enough fast, high-interest cash to allow us to trundle along in a state of oblivious Eloi-ness where we don’t have to make any hard decisions and our God-Given Right to Comfort and Ease keeps us from asking too many tough questions about where all this Free Lunch is actually coming from.

But Physics and Economics are brutal loan-sharks and we can’t all live forever on borrowed money, no matter how successful certain individuals like Dubya have been at doing just that.
...

I use Wikipedia for the occasional fast quote or summary here and there. I appreciate its convenience, just as I appreciate the convenience of free-of-charge services like YouTube and Blogger and gmail.

But I do not own them, and if they went away tomorrow I would find other tools with which to do my thing.

"Crowdsourcing", "cognitive surplus" and suchlike have never been anything but webslang for Homer J. Simpson's famous campaign slogan: "Can't someone else do it?"

And if you build your business, your ideology or your nation like "a foolish man who built his house on the sand" don't come crying to me when the rain comes and washes it all away.

Disgraced Republican Pervert Urges

"GOP Courage on Debt Issue"

And no, I am not kidding.

From Forbes:

Gingrich urges GOP courage on debt issue
By SHANNON McCAFFREY , 07.06.11

ATLANTA -- Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich on Tuesday urged fellow Republicans to stand firm in their battle with President Barack Obama over raising the federal government's debt ceiling.

In a policy paper provided to The Associated Press, Gingrich invoked the twin government shutdowns during the 1990s when he was House speaker. Republicans, he said, were unfairly denounced by liberals and the news media at the time.

"Ultimately, standing firm led to the first four balanced budgets in our lifetime," Gingrich said. "Proving we were serious changed the attitude of the Clinton White House toward working with us. Being firm led to both a policy and political success," he said.

Gingrich says the choice today doesn't have to be between tax increases and draconian spending cuts. He says reining in waste and abuse in government programs like food stamps coupled with streamlining government management could help save money.
...

Of course, Newt is only a Disgraced Republican Pervert this week.

Next week, or the week after, or whenever his campaign finally shudders to a stop and dies unnoticed, broke and unmourned under America's political porch, Newt will undoubtedly be welcomed back by David Gregory into the loving embrace of "Meet the Villagers", after which the Disgraced Republican Pervert will fundamentally/basically/radically be restored to his former title of "Lying Racist Gasbag Who Beltway Ball Washers Continue to Defiantly Insist is the Smartest Human Being on Earth."

Meanwhile, on the other side of Crazytown...

...fresh from having Bravely Diagnosed our current problem with his Republican Party (threatening to blow up the world) as the fault of Barack Obama (still not kidding) for not preventing the Giant Pig Party Implosion at the end of the Empire by (I'm only guessing here) going back in time and killing Richard Nixon before he could codify the Southern Strategy (or something)...

...David Frum them goes on Bravely Propose the following solution (wait for it.........): Moar Tax Cuts!

And no, I am still not kidding:

Democrats Should Offer to Extend the Bush Tax Cuts

Here’s one Democratic compromise that could move the debt ceiling talks further along: Extend the Bush tax cuts for four more years.

Arguably, the Bush tax rates may be the single most important deal-maker on the table.

But however deep and tragic his desperate-flight-from-personal-responsibility intellectual coma may appear to be to the untrained layperson, please do not worry about Mr. Frum's future. Like Gingrich, and so many of their fellow travelers in the In-The-Club Wingnut set, there is literally no amount of steaming, demented self-negating intellectual offal that this former Bush speechwriter can poop into the public record that will stop him from getting invited back in front of the teevee cameras and onto the pages of the Journals of Serious People.

Over

And over.

And over again.

No kidding.

I Was A Teenage Libertarian II:*

The Incredible Shrinking Memory


Apparently, Mr. Sullivan's very lucrative political amnesia shall be permitted to sail on and on, unimpeded, until the End of Days.

Okay then, that being the case, in this unusually long post, see if you can spot exactly where his brain turns to poo (and, no, while funny, "1977" will not be accepted as a valid answer):

The Party Of Fiscal Responsibility

Ezra Klein claimed last week that it's the Democrats. Douthat isn't convinced:

To the extent that there are serious liberal plans for bringing the budget toward balance — whether they involve centralized rationing, middle class tax increases or huge tax hikes on the rich — neither the White House nor the Democratic Party as a whole seems to feel a sense of urgency in rallying behind them. In part, no doubt, that’s because much of the left doesn’t think of the deficit as a particularly urgent issue. They have every right to take that view. But it explains why the case that the Democrats are the real party of fiscal seriousness looks thin indeed.

But the GOP after the past ten years? It has a very long way to go before it retains any credibility.

Skipping lightly over whether Mr. Sullivan meant "regains" [very likely given the context] or "retains" [unlikely] let us focus instead on what I'm sure we all remember as that positively motherfucking Camelot of Conservatism prior to 2001...

{Insert cheesy flashback special effects here}

Back when the United States could coast breezily along on those record-breaking Reagan/Bush Surpluses (bolstered by the confidence America then had in the robust good health of its economic institutions such as the Savings and Loan industry and the staunch moral rectitude of its high-flying Captains of Capitalism) with enough scratch set aside in the boodle bag to carry us comfortably through the Dark Days of The Clinton Profligacy. In fact, the good times might have gone on forever had it not been for a silly man in a flight suit (which no Conservative ever voted for...or voted for again...or in any way ever supported) who -- with naught but the able assistance of his trusty, gun-totin' sidekick -- single-handedly drove Adam and Eve Smith out of Conservative Paradise forever and ever.

Very sad.

Also thank God the emergency auxiliary backup Conservative at the Little Paper That Could is finally getting some linky love from the Daily Beast. Because, dammit, the off-brand generic diet Conservative cola product that Mr. Douthat brews up out of adjectives left over from David Brooks' bi-weekly Beltway Common Wisdom bromides truly represents an edgy, rebel perspective to which our consarn Lamestream Media simply will not devote anywhere near enough attention.

* (In response to a question from Tild, I'm pretty sure the tee-shirt font I used started out life as Ariel Black, with which I added some fading, mid-tone burning, perspective distortion, liquifying and pasting-into.)

Eventually They Will Peel Our Flesh

to use as pool-liners.

Of course, if pressed at, perhaps, a Davos media mogul bukkake roundtable on, oh, let's say, the Future of Post-industrial Media Ecosystems and Integrated Wisdom Vector Visioneering they'll make a little moue and explain how they rilly, rilly regret it, but times are tough and sacrifices have to be made and it's whole new world now and where the fuck is that intern with my latte and a big sack of free content I can used to pad out my cash cow bold, new direction in journalism?

From Media Bistro:

WaPo Staffers Pissed at Publisher’s Paycheck
By Alec Jacobs on March 25, 2011 4:54 PM

WaPo‘s 2010 SEC filings were released this week. In a year when the newspaper saw tough cuts in staff, publisher Katharine Weymouth (granddaughter of famed Post publisher Katharine Graham) earned $537,000 and a bonus of $483,750, plus an additional $1,053,441 based on a pre-established long-term pay plan. She’s also getting a 16.5% raise in her 2011 salary. Not too shabby. Except that now, staffers at WaPo are…displeased.
...

And from "Broadcast News"...24 long years ago.


Because everything old and filthy is new and even filthier again.

The Blood Libel and The Party of God

When your political Glass House is built almost entirely out of whopping great lies and eliminationist rhetoric that you just keep escalating with no end in sight, maybe you don't want to be tossing around the term "blood libel".

"If you don't like their ideas, you're free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible."
--Sarah Palin

Because maybe someone will actually take the time to dig below the yawning, yapping emptiness of another wingnut talking point and point out that there are actually deeply disturbing parallels between the poisonous, paranoid, rage-drunk, Big Lie bullshit on which the GOP now completely depends for its hold over its illiterate masses...

...and the poisonous, paranoid, rage-drunk, Big Lie bullshit on which the medieval Catholic Church that invented the "blood libel" depended for its hold over its illiterate masses.

Like, for instance, Part I of an essay by yours truly, from four years ago entitled "My Name is Legion".

Here's a snip:

...
Civilization has shown us this ugly countenance before.

Many times.

It is our dark side, and like an opportunistic virus it swims in the shit inside our reptile brains and waits for us to be weak or afraid or greedy. Then it comes roaring out of the shadows yet again, offering us scapegoats to blame and fury to tuckpoint up the hollow places in our souls.

It offers us the warmth of a sick fever, the comfort of the grave. It offers us the chance to play god in the only way it understands a god to be: not loving or merciful or wise, but brutal and exterminating.

It offers us a giddy, teevee-friendly Armageddon, where the Bad People all perish in awesome explosions far away leaving behind only the good, the pure, the righteous.

And really reasonable gas prices.

And all it asks in return is your soul.

A long time ago I believed in that quaint method of dealing with lunatics best summed up by Rameses II in “The Ten Commandments”. The “Let him rave on, that men will know him mad.” school of thought, (which always seemed very reasonable if you assume the person involved isn’t Moses.)

I no longer believe this kind of benign neglect works, but many nice people still do. They wonder “Why waste precious adjectives on the likes of Coulter and Hannity? Limbaugh and Falwell?”

Why bother zeroing in on these obviously unhinged, obviously evil bottom-dwellers and the moral plague rats who blindly and orgiastically follow them down and down and down forever?

They and the homunculi who shower them with cash and cachet and oinky, monosyllabic praise are unreachable. As lost to the discourse of civilized society as the dead. As unmoved by reason, compassion or simple truth as an asteroid, their orbits are affected only by the gravity of hate and fear, lies and power.

So why speak of them at all?

And I think the best place to begin to answer that question is with the story of little Billy Norwich, in the Year of Our Lord 1144.

This site sums up the narrative in brief, chilling detail:

In 1144 CE, an unfounded rumor began in eastern England, that Jews had kidnapped a Christian child, tied him to a cross, stabbed his head to simulate Jesus' crown of thorns, killed him, drained his body completely of blood, and mixed the blood into matzos (unleavened bread) at time of Passover. The rumor arose from a former Jew, Theobald, who had become a Christian monk. He said that Jewish representatives gathered each year in Narbonne, France. They decided in which city a Christian child would be sacrificed.
…

This site provide illuminating examples of how the Fox News of the 12th Century fairly and balancedly reported on these lies…

…
At the dawn of day, on the Monday [March 20, 1144] after Palm Sunday, that detestable messenger of the Jews set out to execute the business that was committed to him, and at last the boy William, after being searched for with very great care, was found. When he was found, he got round him with cunning wordy tricks, and so deceived him with his lying promises....

HOW ON HIS GOING TO THE JEWS HE WAS TAKEN, MOCKED, AND SLAIN....

Then the boy, like an innocent lamb, was led to the slaughter. He was treated kindly by the Jews at first, and, ignorant of what was being prepared for him, he was kept till the morrow. But on the next day [Tuesday, March 21], which in that year was the Passover for them, after the singing of the hymns appointed for the day in the synagogue, the chiefs of the Jews.... suddenly seized hold of the boy William as he was having his dinner and in no fear of any treachery, and ill-treated him in various horrible ways.
…

And so began the despicable tradition of the Blood Libel.
...

Or perhaps some people might find Part II of that same post to be a little less history-lesson and a little more on-contemporary-point:

My Name is Legion -- Part 2 of 2

...
A second fraud that accompanied the Blood Libel was the lie of the Desecration of the Host, described here:

...According to the Christian doctrine of Transubstantiation, the wafer consecrated in the ceremony of Eucharist becomes thereby the actual body of Jesus...

A third lie was the Poisoning of the Wells, also described here:

The third myth was referred to at the end of our last class, namely the Black Death. In this case the relation between the myth and its consequential massacres was direct and obvious. Between 1348 and 1350, one hundred million people, a third of Europe’s population, died of an epidemic caused by the bacillus “pasteurella pestis.” In centers with denser populations, such as monasteries, the proportion of dead people was higher.
...

Substitute terrorism for plague and this last detail -- that at least initially, the Pope tried to defend the Jews even as the mobs murdered them -- strikes the most frightening parallel to modern Conservativism.

That, as in the examples of both John of Capistrano and Rush of Limbaugh, the most virulent and murderous rhetoric starts out on the fringes, and begins with the most wildly provocative bullshit the local priest/Hate Radio jocks can dream up.

But it always gains traction because it is anchored in a basic article of faith that the Leaders cannot denounce without negating the very foundation of their own authority. And so John of Capistrano who, among other things, was instigator of the mobs who burned 41 Jews in the city of Breslau, 36 Jews in the Berlin marketplace, and the annihilated of the entire Jewish community of Liegnitz, ends up as with the nickname "Scourge of the Jews" and becomes a saint of the Catholic Church.

And Rush of Limbaugh, ranting wingnut fringe imbecile, ends up being feted by the 1994 Republican Congress as the “Majority Maker”.
...

I'm sure something clever about "those who forget history being condemned to vote Republican" would be appropriate here, but watching the proudly hateful and defiantly ignorant legions that now gather under the banner of Palinism devolving into orcs in almost-real-time has left my reserves of humor a little short this month.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, as long as Howie Kurtz can keep milking her fan club for ratings he will continue to find ways to dutifully sniff Sarah Palin's panties and call it news.

The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the Congress with His Head Up His Ass While Sucking His Own Balls

Based on his latest 800-word New York Times Centrist embarrassment,

...
This ethos has dissolved, on left and right. The new mentality sees the country not as an equilibrium, but as a battlefield in which the people, who are pure and virtuous, do battle against the interests or the elites, who stand in the way of the people’s happiness.

The ideal leader in this mental system is free from moral anxiety but full of passionate intensity. This leader pushes his troops in lock step before the voracious foe. Each party has its own version of whom the evil elites are, but both feel they’ve more to fear from their enemies than from their own sinfulness.

Compromise is thus impossible. Money matters should be negotiable, but how can one compromise with opponents who are the source of all corruption?

(and yes, every fucking bit of the rest of it is like that) I would hate to have to read a David Brooks police report.

Officer: So you say you saw who mugged you, sir?

Brooks: Yes. It was a big guy. With a bat. Also liberals were involved.

Officer: Leaving aside the liberals for a moment, what did this "big guy" look like?

Brooks: About six foot. Maybe 200 pounds. White. But the Democrats unreasonable position on Medicare contributed...

Officer: Like I said, sir; we'll get back to the Democrats and liberals later. Now about the man who mugged you. Could you describe what kind of clothes he had on?

Brooks: Yes. He was wearing a "Bush/Cheney '04" t-shirt, a tri-corner hat and was carrying one of those "Don't Tread On Me" flags. (pauses) Officer, you seem to be deliberately ignoring the liberal involvement here.

Officer: No sir -- I'm writing all of it down. It's just important that we start with the facts.

Brooks: Well the fact is, officer, that Democrats are clearly implicated here as well as a fringe nutcase who in no way represents the main body of Conservative thinking.

Officer: Alrighty then, Mr. Brooks, you seem to be going into shock or maybe you have a slight concussion, so lets try coming at this another way. You say you were mugged, right?

Brooks: I was definitely mugged. Assaulted and mugged.

Officer: OK, then. How many people were physically holding the baseball bat? How many different people had their hands on it?

Brooks (pauses): Uh...just the one guy.

Officer: The man with the "Bush/Cheney '04" t-shirt?

Brooks (pauses): Yes.

Officer: And how many people actually said to you -- and I quote -- "Gimme your fucking wallet or I'll fucking kill you you fucking Commie"?
Said that out loud.
In your presence.
During the mugging.

Brooks: Well, technically it was that one guy, but...

Officer: And how many separate and distinct people actually hit you in the face with the bat?

Brooks: The one guy.

Officer: The one man with the "Bush/Cheney '04" t-shirt?

Brooks: Yes.

Officer: And how many people -- physical, real people -- were within, say, 30 feet of that one guy? At any time during the incident?

Brooks: Well that is very hard to say. I mean, there was a lot going on, what with the one guy screaming at me and hitting me in the face with the bat, and the Democrats causing an equal amount of...

Officer: Oh, I'm sure it was frighting, sir. Very frightening. But it would make my job a lot easier if right now you could just tell me how many other, physical, real people were within 30 feet of that one guy.

Brooks: Well, if I had to guess.

Officer: Yes.

Brooks: -- and this is just an approximation, you understand?

Officer: Of course.

Brooks: I'd have to say...around...

Officer: Yes.

Brooks: Generally...

Officer: Yes.

Brooks: Roughly...

Officer: Yes.

Brooks: In the vicinity of...

Officer: Yes.

Brooks: Bordering on...

Officer: Yes.

Brooks: Verging between...

Officer: Yes.

Brooks: Ballpark...

Officer: I've got all day sir.

Brooks: Más o menos...

Officer: Yes.

Brooks: Somewhere between, maybe, five...

Officer: Yes.

Brooks: And...none.

Officer: And closer to which of those two numbers -- five and none -- would you say would be more accurate?

Brooks: (long whistle) Well the range is potentially unlimited, isn't it? I mean, what with geometric regression and Nancy Pelosi and rounding errors and Harry Reid and fractals...

Officer: Would it help your memory if I told you we have the whole thing on tape?

Brooks: Oh.

Officer: (pointing) See those two cameras? The one on that bank over there and a traffic camera across the street?

Brooks: Uh.

Officer: Between them, they'll give us a very accurate count of how many physical, real people were involved.

Brooks: Oh.

Officer: So you were estimating something about it being between five and none?

Brooks: Uh, let's just go with "none" then. To keep it simple.

Officer: Of course sir. So there were no people other than you and the assailant within 30 feet of the incident. How about 50 feet?

Brooks: None.

Officer: 100 feet?

Brooks: None.

Officer: So it would be fair to say, then, that the entire street was deserted except for you and the big man in the Republican t-shirt, and Tea Party flag and hat who called you -- and, again, I'm quoting -- a "fucking Commie"...

Brooks: Yes.

Officer: ...clubbed you on the head...

Brooks: Yes.

Officer: ...and stole your wallet.

Brooks: Yes, yes, yes. If you want to be a pedant about it, technically that is a description with which I cannot disagree.

Officer: "Pedant" is a big part of my job description, sir.

Brooks: I see. So are we through?

Officer: Not quite sir. A few minutes ago you were quite worked up over some people you seemed to imply were in some way conspiring with big man in the Republican t-shirt, and Tea Party flag and hat.

Flips through his notebook.

Officer: You identified a "Nancy Pelosi" and a "Harry Reid" by name, and implicated two groups called "liberals" and "Democrats".

Brooks: Finally! Yes! The Liberals!

Officer: Now if you would be good enough to point to exactly where these persons and groups were located relative to the crime scene.

Brooks: I don't understand.

Officer: I mean, did you see Nancy Pelosi in one of those windows up there? Perhaps talking to your assailant on a cell phone?

Brooks: Of course not.

Officer: Did you hear a group of these "Liberals" hiding around the corner shouting instructions? Or maybe this "Harry Reid" person drove past you in a car in a threatening manner?

Brooks: No. It doesn't work like that.

Officer: What "doesn't work like that"?

Brooks: (mutters inaudibly)

Officer: I'm sorry sir, could you speak up please? I couldn't hear you.

Brooks: "Centrism", alright? I said "Centrism"?

Officer: Meaning...what?

Brooks: Meaning that Liberals don't actually have to be present or in any way involved to be blameworthy.

Officer: So they're...invisible Liberals?

Brooks: No, no! You don't understand. They're not "invisible"; they're...uh...implicit. See, implicit in everything that guy with the bat did, there is a liberal counter-move or opposite-thingie which makes the Left equally to blame.

Officer stares silently.

Brooks: And that is where the real detective work begins.

Officer: The "real" detective work?

Brooks: Of course! Any idiot can look at mere evidence and blame the crazy Republican with the bat, but a real detective knows he has to keep looking and looking and looking and looking until he figures out the secret Liberal-counter-recto-converse thingie which makes the crazy Republican with a bat and Nancy Pelosi equally to blame.

Officer: Fascinating. Then what happens?

Brooks: Then you write it up in 800-words for the New York Times, go home to your suburban mansion and wait for huge bags of money to arrive.

Officer: Is that all?

Brooks: Basically. You also get invited onto national teevee and radio talk shows where your repeat your column word-for-word, but that's just beer money.

Officer: And that's what you think "real detective work" is?

Brooks: Sure. What else would you call it?

Officer: I'm sure I don't know, sir. I'm a trained police detective and all I see here is one Republican who has been beaten and mugged by another Republican.

Brooks: Ah, but to the truly trained eye, Officer, the implicit Liberalness here is evident.

Officer: (sighs) Mr. Brooks , "implicit" is from a Latin word. "Implicitus". It means "interwoven".

Brooks: You know Latin?

Officer: Yes sir.

Brooks: (mutters) Fuck me.

Officer: So explain to my untrained eye exactly in what way are Liberals "interwoven" with a crime committed against you on an empty street by a crazed Republican with a baseball bat?

Brooks: (petulant) Look, that's just the way it works.

Officer: The way what works?

Brooks: "Centrism".

Officer: So according to this "Centrism", every time a Republican assaults someone, somewhere out there is a Liberal who is at least equally to blame for it?

Brooks: Correct.

Officer: And every time a Liberal does something wrong, a Republican is also at fault?

Brooks: No, every time a Liberal does something wrong Conservatism is vindicated and Ronald Reagan smiles down on us from Heaven.

Officer: I see. (closes his notebook) I think I have all I need here.

Brooks: So what happens now?

Officer: Now we pick this guy up. Based on the description you gave us -- Republican in a funny hat who screams "Commie" at random strangers before smacking them with a baseball bat -- it shouldn't be that hard.

Brooks: And Nancy Pelosi too?

Officer: No, not Nancy Pelosi too; we pedants in the police department are limited to acting only on actual evidence.

Brooks: Then what?

Officer: Then we book him, you ID him, it goes to court and he goes to prison.

Brooks: Oh no, no, no. We can't do that.

Officer: Excuse me?

Brooks: We can't do that.

Officer: Is there a problem?

Brooks: (drops his voice) Honestly, if there is any way for you to just discreetly get my wallet back and let the rest of it drop... (trails off)

Officer: Mr. Brooks, some very serious crimes have been committed here, and but for a little bit of luck you could be lying dead in the street. And given what you've told me, if we act quickly there is a very good chance we can catch the person who did it, put him behind bars and keep him from hurting anyone else.

Brooks: And I appreciate that, but you must understand, there are wider implications.

Officer: What are you taking about? This guy's a violent lunatic -- with club -- who is walking around ripping people off and then smashing them in the head? Why in the world would you not want to press charges against him?

Brooks: (Looks around nervously and whispers) Because he's my boss.

That Friday Podcast all the Kids are Talking About!

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

-- Aldous Huxley

Our media juggernaut keeps its whole catalog and (for those included to drop a little dough into chapeau) the PayPal thingie here.

Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help.

Some Resourceful Citizens

will always find ways to prosper in difficult times.