Professional Left Podcast Episode 971: The Resistance Comes To Suburbia

"We can beat them, just for one day / 

We can be heroes just for one day." 

 -- David Bowie.

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UPDATED: Sunday Morning Comin' Down: How Long Has This Been Going On?

UPDATE:  Thank you all for the guesses.  No, I didn't write this in the 1980s or 1990s, because while I did think such things and say such things, blogging didn't exist then.  Nor did I write this in 2001 - 2003 because I didn't start blogging until early 2005, which is when I did blog this:  October 25, 2005.  

18 years ago.  

In lieu of an umpteenth vivisection of the Sunday Shows to reveal how godawful they are --

Biden hasn’t handled Hunter’s case at all. What is Chuck Todd even talking about? pic.twitter.com/xkeksW4so7

— John Aravosis 🇺🇸🇬🇷🏳️‍🌈 ex-verif’d (@aravosis) August 13, 2023

-- and how godawful they have always been, today -- if you're up for it -- a little one-question quiz the likes of which I guarantee you will never see in The New York Times.  

Ready?

Go.  

If I told you I had written the following...

This morning, rolling along... full of dying flu virus, I almost felt the meekest, most theoretical peek of pity for the poor Moderate Republican coming on.

Not, of course, the Fundy CHUDS who shame the good name of Christ with every breath they draw.

Not the three-toed, chittering Failed Men who make up the vast George Wallace wing of that Party...

But for the Mods...[because in  a few] short years, the Moderates have lived to become everything they detest. Every word of clucking reproach they yelped in snickering glee during the [previous Democratic administration] has gotten caught up in the [following Republican administration] Treason Cyclotron, sped up to light-speed, and is now coming screaming back at them like a sack of radioactive axe-heads.

Their worst nightmare is in the process of coming true, big as a mountain in stilettos, carrying a sledgehammer in one hand and a 40-foot-long straight razor in the other, and there is not shit all they can do about it. Because everything they believed or touted or crowed about or tried to rub in our faces is in the process of coming down around their ears.

Every. Single. Thing.

...and this...

The leaders who swore to them it was all holy and justified ... are outed as a Confederacy of traitors and liars and fools. 

Their pet media, nothing but perambulating pustules, refilled with hate and mendacity every night by White House messengers.

That they have never been anything to the GOP but chumps: little sacs of cash and votes and “mandate” to be squeezed dry with impunity, because Moderates are basically beat-down whores who will always go wriggling back to their abusers.

But now it’s not one thing that’s melting down; it’s everything. The serial cons that have kept the grubby Mods goggle-eyed and heroin-loyal are all falling apart simultaneously and there’s nothing but decibels left in the Shiny Object Bag to keep them from noticing the awful truth.

That their Leaders are traitors.

Their heroes are liars.

Their dogma is a joke.

Their President is a feeble-minded creep who has fucked up everything he has ever touched.

It’s as if their mothers suddenly ripped of rubber masks and have shown themselves to be the spree killers they’ve always been.

...and this...

How terrifying that must be. I mean, I’m wrong about a lot of stuff...but everything?

Every God Damned Thing?

And worse – so very much worse – not only were they utterly wrong about everyfuckingthing, but the Evil Liberals were right all along.

The big picture. The fussy details. The arithmetic. The real, racist heart of the GOP. The various myriad, casual betrayals by the ... White House.

All of it.

The Liberals were right, and the Moderates had been given no fewer than 30 years of warning that this is precisely where their idiocy would land us.

I can’t even imagine how it must feel to know at some level that your whole world is a farce, and your whole belief system is a Ponzi Scheme run on you by thugs who never gave a shit about you, or your family or your dearest peon dreams.

... after counting the tree rings,  and checking the carbon dating, when - within a year or two -- would you guess I had written it?

Answer in comments or on Twitter or wherever.    And then meditate on why our Never Trump allies really, really don't want to hear a mumbling word from us Dirty Disreputables of the Left.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Bubble, Bubble, Troll and Rubble

I recently had occasion to watch The Big Short again.   And get very angry all over again.  And once again get wistful over all that I and millions like me had lost because rich monsters and arrogant too-big-to-fail institutions and corrupt rating agencies and a complicit financial media conspired to use the United State housing market as a casino where they could make whatever crazy bet they wanted to, and use house money to do it.  

While Moral Hazard, the Irish setter owned for photo op purposes by New York Times columnist David Brooks, dozed soundly beneath the roulette table.  (h/t Brother Charlie Pierce.)

And I was struck by how many great, good and mediocre movies and teevee shows have been made about the Great Recession.  There is the aforementioned Big Short, Queen of Versailles, Too Big To Fail and The Last Days of Lehman Brothers. 

There are movies that were "inspired by" the collapse, or set inside the Great Recession Extended Universe like Margin Call, 99 Homes and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

There are also lots of documentaries like  Inside Job, Plunder, The Flaw, Inside Lehman Brothers, Money for Nothing and Capitalism: A Love Story.

There's even a very bad action/revenge flick called Assault on Wall Street

So if you were an average person who had been asleep since the 1990s and wanted to know what in the hell actually happened to the boring, predictable, rock-solid American housing market in 2000s that nearly caused a Second Dark Age, you've got your pick of source material, from the sublime Bird and Fortune --

-- to the excellent --

-- to the "meh" --

-- to this tasteless, paint-by-numbers hackery:

Point being, if it is knowledge you seek, it's readily available, in easy-to-digest form, right there at your fingertips.

Now let's consider the other malignant bubble that nearly destroyed -- and may yet destroy -- the country.  The Republican Party.  Which, if you ponder on it for a minute, has a lot in common with the housing crisis.  

Specifically, the GOP is to American politics what Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) were to the housing market before the housing market went tits up.  

First, there was a general, unspoken understanding among inside players that a certain percentage of the Republican Party base was, uh, problematic, to say the least. Bigots, imbeciles, lunatics, grifters, gun nuts, homophobes, etc.

Second, it turns out that the political equivalent of the ratings agencies -- the mainstream media -- who were supposed to be the system's impartial arbiters and referees had zero incentive to actually look under the GOP's hood and see what madness was boiling right below the surface.  Quite the contrary, the media had every financial and professional incentive to continue the mark the GOP as a rock-solid, AAA  political party decades after the underlying elements of the party -- the base and the Conservative media and key GOP leaders and all of the Very Serious People with important jobs at major newspapers and teevee networks -- had gone to shit.

Nobody in the media was was going to nuke their reputation or risk all that insider access by siding with those America-hating, terrorist-loving Libtards who were jumping up and down screaming that something had gone very, very wrong with the GOP. That it was getting exponentially worse because the underlying individual political currency on which the media should have been rating the Republican party -- Republican voters -- was completely toxic.

And once the GOP's internal rot became too putrid to hide, the political ratings agencies simply switched from pretending that the GOP was doing just fine to pretending that, no matter how fucked-in-the-head the GOP might be, there was no better place to invest your vote.  

After all, don't all the Very Serious People who manufacture the Wisdom of the Political Market agree that Democrats are somehow always just as bad.  Probably even worse!  So if you were freaked out by what's happening in the GOP, really the only sensible and serious alternative was for you to take your vote and invest in exotic Third Party vaporware.   Maybe Evan McMullin!  Or David French.  Or just write in "Ronald Reagan" which will not only give you a nice, warm, self-righteous glow but which, by some alchemy that the average human could not understand, will something something Disrupt the K'rupt Duopoly fer sure!

Then this happened.

And you know the rest.

But you know what?  It all ended kinda like the housing crisis ended too, didn't it?

The corrupt rating agencies -- the mainstream media -- are still pretty much intact, with all the same hacks and quislings still employed at all the same jobs.

The dogshit GOP -- who are still packed to the rafters with the same bigots and imbeciles and lunatics that have always been there -- is still intact, still being treated as a serious political party by the corrupt rating agencies.

The cynical rage and hate brokers -- the men who fucking well knew the base was insane and continued to work to bundle them up in order to get GOP scum elected -- have, by and large, done pretty well too.  Some of them are still with the old firm and still getting paid.  Others -- like the Never Trumpers who got run out of the party -- just set up shop across the street, selling "OMG Can You Believe How Fucking Crazy The Post-Trump GOP Has Become!!!" stock to eager buyers in the mainstream media.

And nowhere except in what little remains of the Liberal blogosphere, or on a few Liberal podcasts here and there, will you hear anyone breaking down the long-term, underlying causes of the implosion of the GOP the way all those movies explained the implosion of the housing market.  

No Academy Award nominated films.

No films "inspired" by the actual history of the modern Republican party.  

No documentaries.

Not even any shitty action/revenge flicks.  

Because the Very Serious People who manufacture the Wisdom of the Political Market still still believe the Republican Party must be propped up by wishful thinking and fairy tales at any cost.  

Because the Very Serious People who manufacture the Wisdom of the Political Market still regard that monstrous, corrupt, deranged institution that is still quite capable of taking down the entire country as Too Big to Fail. 

No Fair Remembering Stuff

David Brooks Says Trump's "Sabotage and Fuck You" EO Might Turn Out Great For Everybody

Every now and then a nondescript little man from Wingnut Central Command shows up at Mr. David Brooks' door to remind him that it is time once again to renew his Conservative credentials.  It is a brief but critical ritual upon which Mr. Brooks' entire professional life literally depends.  After all,  it isn't the word "American" or "author" or "political and cultural commentator" in his CV that The New York Times shells out crazy money to slap on it's op-ed page every week:

David Brooks is a conservative American author as well as political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times.

It's the word "conservative" they're renting.  It is the word "conservative" which has given Mr. Brooks entree to the  corridors of power, gigs on NPR, PBS and NBC, book contracts and a job-for-life at the NYT which pays for Mr. Brooks' various hearths and homes and travels and book tours.

So every now and then he needs to get his "conservative" card punched again.  And of course, given the nature of Conservatism, this means he needs to say something horrible and blatantly untrue in some public forum somewhere.  This time around, the forum was The News Hour, and the horrible and blatantly untrue thing was this:

...

On health care, they are dismantling it. There will be a period of disruption. But what was interesting to me about the CBO analysis of what they’re doing, after this period of disruption, there will be more people insured, not less. So it won’t look like Obamacare, but as the markets respond, there is a possibility that more people will be insured.

And so it’s not a simple, oh, we’re just tearing everything apart

Mr. Brooks lives on another planet and no one on his world wants for necessities of life.  No one in his social circle will ever be affected personally by anything Donald Trump does (except for those yummy yummy tax cuts for the wealthy) and so there is no need for Mr. Brooks to trouble himself by learn anything about how, say, insurance works.  For those of you with longer memories, you might recall how remarkably similar this sounds to Mr. Brooks' equally blase approach to the policies of the last Ambulatory  Fuckup Generator that his party installed in the White House.

Behold the inerrant economic wisdom of Mr. David Fucking Brooks!

David Brooks from March 2001

Yes, There Is a New Economy

...

In other words, if you wade through the economic literature, it's hard not to agree with the Cleveland Fed's Jerry Jordan: We are living at a once-in-a-generation moment of economic opportunity. As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?

David Brooks, September 2001

The New Stupid Party

LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of excellence that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime.

Last week the Congressional Budget Office came out with a budget forecast. The report immediately got submerged in a chatterstorm about whether Congress or the White House would dip into something called the Social Security trust fund, but the essential facts are these: The CBO economists estimated that the federal government will run a surplus of about $150 billion in 2001. That’s a lower surplus than the CBO estimated a few months ago, before the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge. But even in these adverse circumstances, the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006.

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund...

I could go on at much greater length,  but since I already have, I see no reason to repeat the exercise.  It is sufficient to say that even the most cursory glance at Mr. Brooks actual record as a Conservative Public Intellectual shows three things.

First,  judging by any objective standard, Mr. Brooks is a colossal failure at Having Opinions about Things.

Second, given his long record of failure at Having Opinions about Things, by any objective standards, it is insane that he continues to reap lavish financial rewards and peer-group respect that are clearly unrelated in any way to his actual job performance.

Third, no one talks about it. Seriously.  Other than a few asshole Libtard bloggers in flyover country, no one talks about this.  And the conspicuous uniformity with which no one talks about this is what makes it so damn eerie [See "The Adventure of Silver Blaze"

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."]

And the reason for this is, I think, really very simple.

The corporations who run our media don't give a shit about any of this stuff.  Truth?  Falsity? Depravity?  The casual, sadistic infliction of harm on millions of Americans?  It does not affect them at all.  Just grist for the media mill.  What they do care about, deeply, is controlling the narrative.  Specifically, the narrative that Both Sides are to blame for every problem.  And so, to keep selling that corrosive and patently ridiculous narrative, they need Reasonable Conservatives they can plug into any medium.  They need reliable deacons of the  High and Holy Church of Both Siderism who can hit their marks and deliver the doxology of their toxic faith on any platform.

In other words, the need people exactly like Mr. David Brooks.

And to be of value to them, they need for him to keep that magical, golden word in his CV -- "conservative" -- active and up-to-date. 

And to do that, every now and then Mr. Brooks has to sally forth into the world and assert something that blatantly awful and wrong and astonishingly ignorant. 

And this he has now done.

Mission Accomplished, Mr. Brooks.

Mission Accomplished.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

I Remain Manfully Committed to Decreasing My Insufferability Quotient

by temporarily suspending the conceit that I am right about some things and other people are wrong or are so late to the party that they should at least wipe their feet before heading for the keg.

I therefore leave it to other, meaner people to calculated exactly what level of irony-density we must have reached now that we have a Republican Senator crying his anonymous eyes out to the author of "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life" 

about how awful it is that his Party of Personal Responsibility has lost its fucking mind:

A Republican Senator Doubts His Party Can Govern
By Ramesh Ponnuru Oct 21, 2013 4:28 PM CT

It’s the day after Congress voted to fully reopen the federal government and raise the debt ceiling. The senator I’m meeting, who would fall roughly in the middle of the Senate’s Republicans if they were lined up by ideology, voted with the majority. “I’m being shredded by the Tea Party radio people today,” he says, although he doesn’t seem concerned about it. “That is what it is.”

His bigger concern: He doesn’t think that his party is ready to govern the country.

The Republicans who were in the public eye during the shutdown have generally been either the party’s top congressional leaders or its most vocal hard-liners. Most Republicans in Congress don’t fall into either category. This senator -- who requested anonymity so he could describe the party’s problems candidly -- is part of that less-high-profile contingent. My impression is that his views are widely shared within it.
...

The questions that his colleagues need to ask themselves, the senator says, are “What have we learned?” and “How do we not repeat this?” Most Republican senators, it seems to me, emerged from the shutdown fight with the same views they had going in. Those who thought it was a mistake found confirmation of their views in the party’s sagging poll numbers and lack of accomplishments; those who favored it thought it could have worked if the skeptics hadn’t sabotaged it.
...

It was very naughty for our political thought-leaders not to have warned untutored, dewy-eyed idealists like Senator Anonymous and Ramesh Ponnuru long ago that this sad pass was coming.

Breaking: Candidate for Public Office

May have misrepresented opponents activities.

Noted web log takes exception.