Reason #1,744 Why I Will Never Have a Column in The Atlantic

I Am The Liberal Media

Ghosts Of The Before Time: June 2015 and the Art of Seeing Clearly What Is Right in Front of You

If you have eyes to see with and ears to hear, you have no doubt noticed the media making a big deal of the 10 year anniversary of Donald Trump's June 16, 2015 journey down an escalator and into the hearts of the Republican base.   

The Atlantic:

A Decade of Golden-Escalator Politics

It was here that Donald Trump descended into American politics.

The New York Times

‘The Age of Trump’ Enters Its Second Decade

The Washington Post:

10 Years After the Escalator.

The Daily Beast:

Trump Has Us On His Golden Escalator to Hell—But There is a Way Off

Fox News:

Flashback: 10 years since Trump's golden escalator ride

‘The Five’ co-hosts recount President Donald Trump’s first election, his game-changing rise in politics and already ‘fascinating’ second term.

The Washington Examiner:

A decade of MAGA: How Trump’s golden escalator ride changed America

At the time, right down the line, all the Very Serious People and every Republican who would go on to be a Never Trumpers regarded the whole idea of Trump running for president as a goof.  A joke.  A jape.  A stunt.  Burlesque.  The notion of this jumped-up real estate buffoon and reality teevee guy running for, well, anything was seen as a clown on his way to the inevitable banana peel.  

But there was a tiny contingent of us dirty hippies (who had long since been dispatched to media Coventry for the unforgivable sin of being right about the Right when everyone else had been wrong) who looked at Trump and saw the genuine threat he represented. 

It's not that I had any special, inside dope about the way Trump had operated in the New York real estate market, or in the New York media market, or on reality teevee.  I didn't.  What I did have was a lifetime of up-close-and-personal exposure the Republican base, and could see with my own two eyes the terrible trajectory they had already been on for decades: a trajectory which both the legacy media and elite Conservative media categorically refused to believe existed at all.  

And so, on June 18, 2015 -- two days after Trump announced -- I wrote this, which you are encouraged to send along to your favorite Never Trumper who still insists that no one could possibly have seen Trump coming, or what geniuses they are because they and only they caught wind of what a colossal ass-ache Trump might develop into.  You are especially encouraged to send this along to your favorite Never Trump who is constantly moaning that we Liberals are potty-mouthed idiots who have no inkling what's really going on, or what is at stake.

From me, June 18, 2015:

The Premium Leads

In case you missed it, Squint and the Meat Puppet handed the MSNBC camera over to Donald Trump this morning for a relaxing, 30-minute handjob. While Trump rambled lazily from one pinnacle of bullshit and narcissism to the next, Morning Joe crack house regulars Mark Halperin (Glenn Beck's favorite mainstream media enabler) and the pickled remains of Mike Barnacle looked on, smirking and giggling. All that it lacked to complete the creepy, peep-show effect were trench-coats and bad lighting.

But of course, the story of the Trump candidacy has very little to do with Donald Trump. 

As I wrote a few years ago, the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.  

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

They are the GOP's premium leads, but however abundant and renewable a resource the Conservative meatheads may be, come Presidential election time, there is never enough room at the trough for every rapacious Republican hog.  This is why every few years we have these Little Red State Fundy moments; that delicate time when the knives come out and the various species of Conservative con men start cutting each other's balls over who gets to pluck the wingnut pigeons...

...while trying desperately not to call attention to the fact that their entire political system depends on pandering to the army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps which the GOP has worked so long and hard to cultivate.

Fortunately for the Right, now that the "respectable" media has as much to lose by cracking out of turn as Hate Radio and Fox News, we can all look forward to another campaign season of the American mainstream media looking stoically the other way.

End of sobering sojourn into the twilight of the Before Time.

Thank you for your attention on this matter :-)

I Am The Liberal Media.

About That Scary Deficit

If you're old enough to remember Count Floyd and SCTV Monster Chiller Horror Theatre, you may also remember this 1985 commercial.  It was commissioned by an international chemical company called W.R. Grace.

Jesus, Mary and Arthur Laffer, 2017 sure looks scary, which should come as no surprise since this bit of 60 second cinema was directed by Ridley Scott and cost about $300,000 in 1987 dollars to produce.

Fun Fact: It was initially rejected for broadcasting by all three networks back when such a thing was possible.  The networks rejected it on the basis of being too controversial and too one-sided, so W.R. Grace turned around and bought time on 150 independent stations.  

Then-NBC Vice President Rick Gitter was quoted as rejecting the commercial because "It's so well done. It expresses a view that budget cuts are a moral imperative" and didn’t even entertain the notion that, just maybe, raising taxes is also a valid option to pay down the deficits.  The only viable option that is ever on the table with Republicans are massive budget cuts.

Keep that top-of-mind: The only thing Conservative elites care about is cutting taxes for the rich. At all times and under all circumstances, there is no problem so great that they claim can’t be solved with a big enough tax cut.  Wars may come and go.  And as for the traditional battle cry of “Guns, God, Gays” those were all merely means to the end of getting enough Republicans elected so they could have more tax cuts.  

Even during times of budget deficits, you gotta cut taxes to stimulate the yadda yadda and you know the drill.  Utter bullshit.  That’s it.  Class dismissed.   

However, under Bill Clinton, Republicans had the opposite problem.  One they’d never anticipated.  What to do when, under a Democratic president,  the United States starts running budget surpluses and now has enough money on-hand to fund those social programs that Democrats had always wanted to improve, and Republicans were always demanding to be slashed because, hey, there’s a budget deficit!

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  Let us go back to one of the primary reasons George H.W. Bush lost in 1988.

If Bush the Elder is known for one phrase above all others, it's either his stand on “prudence” -- 

- or  "No.  New.  Taxes."  

That was his keynote address at the Republican National Convention in 1988 where he accepted his party’s nomination.  And in November of that year, he won the election.  

But he and his boss Ronald Reagan had spent the last eight years giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy, lowering the top marginal tax rate from 73% to 28%, which was the lowest the rate had been since 1925.  They also massively increased military spending.  And by Bush’s second year in office people were starting to freak out about the size of the federal deficit.  And so, in 1990, Bush the Elder broke his promise, and the opposition that fired up inside the Republican party plus an insurgent 3rd party run by H. Ross Perot pretty much doomed his presidency.

From NPR, December 14, 2018:

6 Little Words Helped Make George H.W. Bush (A 1-Term) President 

…less than two years after making the no-tax pledge, Bush found himself in circumstances in which he no longer felt he could keep it. Locked in budget negotiations with the majority Democrats in the House and Senate, Bush felt he had to allow higher rates on some existing taxes or the Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction bill would shut down important services of the government.

So he signed off on a compromise involving revenues as well as spending restraints. Democrats exulted at having forced him to renege. Conservatives seethed. A young Newt Gingrich, elevated to the No. 2 spot in the House Republican leadership the previous year, made no secret of his displeasure. He insisted any option was preferable to any new revenue.

That position helped inspire a major Republican challenger to Bush's renomination in 1992. He was Patrick Buchanan, a former communications director for Reagan and a familiar commentator on TV. He announced his campaign for president in December 1991, saying he was running "because, we Republicans, can no longer say it is all the liberals' fault. It was not some liberal Democrat who said, 'Read my lips: no new taxes,' then broke his word to cut a seedy backroom budget deal with the big spenders on Capitol Hill."[

This was one of Bill Clinton’s  1992 campaign ads.  Notice that the objection isn’t about taxes per se, but about Republican unfairness and hypocrisy.  What costs more?  Beer and gas.  Who gets tax cuts?  Millionaires.

So, for most of the Reagan/George H. W. Bush Era the attitude was who gives a shit about deficits? We won! Reaganomics rule! Tax cuts rool! It's morning in Murrica!  And if the deficit needs to be cut, just slash a bunch of programs for those mooching poor and everything will balance out.

Then Bill Clinton was elected, and overnight, the Republican talking points about the deficit changed entirely.   Holy Mother of God! In the middle of the night while no one was looking a horde of mooching welfare queens snuck in here and nearly destroyed Murrica with deficits! 

Everyone knows deficits are worse than Hitler! We need to cut everything -- welfare, Medicaid, Social Security, school lunches, everything! -- in the next 60 seconds or we're all dooooomed!

Alan Greenspan let Clinton know before his inauguration, that  the situation was even worse than anyone outside Republican inner circles had let on.

From Bob Woodward’s book "Behind the Boom":

... On the five-hour trip back to Washington, Greenspan tried to assess what he had observed. Clinton was what Greenspan termed an "intellectual pragmatist." The term also applied to Greenspan himself. Clinton's campaign promises included tax increases on the wealthy, a violation of Republican orthodoxy. But increasing taxes reduced the federal deficit -- and those deficits, Greenspan thought, were such a threat to the future of the economy that it might just be worth it to support Clinton's proposal.

One of the paradoxes, Greenspan realized, was that by running up the federal budget deficits, Reagan had effectively borrowed from the period that was now going to be the Clinton era. Clinton would have to pay it back by paying down the deficit in some way. The irony was that Clinton probably wouldn't have been elected if Reagan hadn't created the deficits. ...  

Clinton was told by men like Greenspan that the markets would collapse and the world would be plunged into a who-knows-what kind of economic apocalypse unless he immediately put all his Liberal promises and programs on hold and focused almost exclusively on cutting the deficit.  

Which he did.  

Plans for improvements to health care, Social Security, education, and poverty programs were either shelved or greatly reduced.  You will remember that the phrase “Pay-Go” entered the political lexicon:  every budget item had to be accounted for with a matching revenue source, and any new spending would have to be offset with matching cuts to other spending.

Clinton reluctantly went along with all of it, but he also insisted on some revenue increases as well.  After all, if massive reckless tax cuts got us into this mess, surely a few sensible tax increases could help get us out of it.

And true to form, Republicans categorically rejected all of it.   According to them, any tax increase would completely destroy the economy, and America would be reduced to nothing but a smoking hole in the ground. Why does Bill Clinton hate America? 

Clinton also proposed a modest increase in the minimum wage, which – surprise, surprise – Republicans also categorically rejected.   According to them, any increase to the minimum wage would completely destroy the economy, and America would be reduced to nothing but a smoking hole in the ground. Why does Bill Clinton hate America? 

The Tax Reform Act of 1993 aimed to cut the federal deficit by increasing taxes and reducing spending. It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Not a single Republican in the evenly divided Senate voted for it and it passed 51 to 50 with Vice President Al Gore casting the tie-breaking vote.  

The Act raised the top federal income tax rate to 39.6%, as well as many other taxes including corporate taxes, fuel taxes, and more. And by 1998, it allowed Clinton's administration to achieve – say it with me now – the first balanced budget in three decades.  And  by the time Clinton left office, the United States was running a steadily growing, multi-billion-dollar budget surplus for the first time in American history.  

From a Clinton White House Press Release, September 27, 2000:

Today, at the White House, President Clinton announced figures released by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), showing that this year's budget surplus will be at least $230 billion…

THE LARGEST UNIFIED SURPLUS EVER. 

The largest unified surplus as a share of the economy since 1948;

The 3rd consecutive year with a surplus for the first time in over 50 years;

The 8th consecutive year of fiscal improvement for the first time in American history; and

The first surplus excluding Social Security and Medicare, making it the only on-budget surplus since Medicare was established in 1965.

From the same press release  

THE LARGEST DEBT REDUCTION EVER. 

As a result of the budget surplus:

The President's plan to eliminate the debt by 2012 remains on track;

The 12 cents of every federal dollar we currently spend on interest payments would be eliminated;

The U.S. is on track to pay down more than $360 billion in debt over three years, the largest 3-year debt pay-down in our history. Under the 12 years of Presidents Reagan and Bush, the debt held by the public quadrupled. 

Great!  Now Ridley Scott can get on with making Black Rain and Thelma & Louise and Republicans can join hands with Democrats and celebrate the Clinton presidency as one of the most peaceful,  successful, fiscally responsible in living memory, and go on to elect Clinton's Vice President, Al Gore, to continue Clinton's amazing legacy.

Funny story.  True story.  The more Clinton succeeded delivering on the things Republicans had always said they cared about, the more they fucking hated him.  Called him everything but a Child of God.  Went after his wife.  Impeached him over some bullshit.  For much longer take on this, see my post "Like a Virgin" from 2009.

Meanwhile, from The Brookings Institute, December 1, 2000

A Surplus, If We Can Keep It: How the Federal Budget Surplus Happened

“It’s the economy, stupid.” The battle cry of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign has been recycled to explain how a $290 billion budget deficit has been transformed into a $100 billion surplus that is expected to quadruple in the decade ahead. 

Liquidating the deficit ranks as one of the supreme budgetary accomplishments in American history. 

If the 1989 tax structure were still in place, there would be no surplus to discuss. 

So, pretty great right?  All those vital programs that Democrats were forced to postpone or put on starvation diets so they could pay down the Reagan/Bush deficits could now start to see some real money, right?

Well, that was one possible future for our country.

And then came the presidential campaign of 2000.  From The New York Times, June 13, 2000:

THE 2000 CAMPAIGN: THE BUDGET ISSUE; Bush and Gore Revise Plans To Match a Growing Surplus

By Richard W. Stevenson June 13, 2000

Projections of the federal budget surplus are likely to be revised upward by as much as $1 trillion in coming weeks, leading Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush to prepare differing claims to the windfall.

For Mr. Gore, more money means new initiatives to encourage savings and improve education, health care and environmental protection, as well as to speed his plan to reduce the national debt, his aides said.

For Mr. Bush, it is a chance to assert that his plans for a big tax cut, the creation of private investment accounts within Social Security and a national missile defense program are not only affordable but would also leave plenty of money for additional debt reduction, his aides said...

Yes indeedy,  Dubya did have very different ideas about what to do with that surplus.  Note the first 60 seconds of this local news clip:

– and on December 12, 2000, thanks to a 5-4 vote by the Supreme Court’s Conservative majority:

Just like that, the budget surplus that the Democrats  had worked so hard to create, would be handed over to a dry-drunk halfwit whose attitude was Holy Mother of God, where did all of these terrible budget surpluses come from?!? Jesus, we need to get rid of them immediately. Surpluses are worse than Hitler!  Can you believe those craxy Libtards are actually worried about deficits? Wheeee! Who gives a shit about deficits? We won!

And for the record, here are a few other gifts that landed in Bush’s lap thanks to eight years of hard work by the Clinton/Gore administration:  a 3.9% unemployment rate, a robust job-growth rate and the "problem" of wage inflation caused by too few workers available to fill all the available jobs.

And you know what comes next, right?  

Read. My. Lips.  Giant. Tax. Cuts.

Credible economists like Future Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman warned the Bush administration that their policies would plunge the country right back into deficit.  But did they listen?

No they did not.

The Shrill One in The New York Times, February 4, 2001:

Reckonings; Guns And Bitterness

…isn't the federal government awash in surpluses? Hasn't Alan Greenspan told us that our big economic problem is how to give the money away, lest politicians end up owning the stock market? If there's plenty of money for tax cuts, why won't the administration give the military at least some of what it wants and promise to keep its hand out of the Medicare cookie jar?

Because someone in the White House is aware of the truth, which is that there isn't plenty of money after all.

…Congress is about to go into a tax-cut feeding frenzy, adding huge tax breaks for corporations to Mr. Bush's proposal. The spectacle will be distressing, but it will be over quickly. Pretty soon, quite possibly as soon as this summer, we'll be worrying about deficits, not surpluses. 

That was on the one hand.

On the other hand, smug, delusional Conservative elites like those at the of The Weekly Standard had a lot of fun mocking Democrats as feeble-minded alarmists for worrying about Bush blowing the surplus.  

Because that would never happen.  Never, ever, ever.

In fact, hey look!  It's  David Brooks in The Weekly Standard in 2000, which is why we bloggers have archives.  Because The Weekly Standard doesn't exist anymore, but my archives do.  

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…

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...

Democrats were bedwetting fools, Brooks’ assured his readers, because even with "...the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge…the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006."

This is Brooks again, in the Weekly Standard, March 16, 2001 entitled  "Yes, There Is a New Economy – Thanks to once-in-a lifetime productivity gains, Bush's plans are easily affordable"

It ends with this paragraph:

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? 

Make a note of that  date.  March 16, 2001.  Because now were going to jump ahead a little over a year later, to a conversation between then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and Vice President Dick Cheney in November of 2002.  

This was reported in the Chicago Tribune, January 12, 2004 (emphasis added):

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill said he was told “deficits don’t matter” when he warned of a looming fiscal crisis.

In a new book chronicling his rocky two-year tenure and in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, O’Neill also said President Bush balked at his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime because of opposition from “the corporate crowd.”

O’Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits posed a threat to the economy.

Cheney cut him off, O’Neill said. “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: “We won the midterms. This is our due.”

A month later, in December 2002, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired. 

The vice president’s office had no immediate comment. John Snow, who replaced O’Neill, said Bush is committed to cutting the deficits in half over the next five years.

But… but… there weren’t supposed to be any deficits.  There was going to be plenty of money for everything and, according to Extremely Respected Conservative Frauds, there always would be.

So, lets us review

• Where the hell did these deficits suddenly come from? And,  
• If, according to Republicans five minutes ago during the Clinton administration, deficits were worse than five Hitlers, how is it that now they’re not only nothing to worry about, but they are the rightful spoils of Republicans winning the midterms? and ,
• “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter”?  Really?  Kinda gives the game away doesn’t it?

Well, not really, since the media immediately buried that little tidbit in the same Memory Hole where they buried the rest of the failed Bush Administration.  And for the rest of the Bush administration, the deficit grew faster than any point in American history:

From CBS News, July 15, 2003:

Deficit Projections Soar to $455B

The Bush administration dramatically raised its budget deficit projections on Tuesday to $455 billion for this year and $475 billion for next, record levels fed by the limp economy, tax cuts and the battle against terrorism.

"The deficit certainly remains a concern, but it's one that is manageable and it's one that we are addressing," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters. "Over the next few years, we will cut this deficit in half. It is a priority that we are addressing."

Damnit you, Ridley Scott! If only you'd have stopped Kingdom of Heaven and gotten your ass back into the Scary Commercial game, we wouldn't be in this mess.  

So having entered office with the Clinton/Gore budget surplus gift wrapped and waiting on his desk on the day they started office, what did the budget look like the day Bush and Cheney left office?

Well, combined with the Bush Administration's unpaid for Medicare prescription drug plan, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an economy deep in recession, and several massive tax cuts, by the end of the Bush Administration, the annual federal budget deficit had climbed to $1.4 trillion.  And instead of paying off the national debt held by the public – which was one of the things Al Gore had proposed we do – the total national debt ballooned from $5.7 trillion in 2001 to $10.7 trillion by the end of 2008.

Then Barack Obama was elected, and in the face of the worst economic calamity in 75 years, the Republican party instantly flipped once again from the party of “Deficits, who cares?” to the party of “OMG, deficits have mysteriously appeared out of nowhere and the Kenyan Usurper must cut every social program, forget about saving the auto industry, forget about this crazy American Recovery and Reinvestment  Act, and pay the deficit down now!now!now!”

This was when the Republican party base passed through the Magical Bush-Off Machine and emerged as Tea Partiers who had never supported Bush and his ruinous policies,  never been politically active, and personally hated  Barack Obama with the heat of 1000 suns and blamed him for all the nation’s problems.  

This was when the legacy media agreed to collectively forget that everything you have read to this point ever happened, and focus exclusively on, "Why won't Obama lead?!?"

On December 31, 2012, Mr. David  Brooks –  The Man Who Swore There Would Never Be Deficits Again – used his New York Times column to lecture All Sensible People about what everyone should agree on regarding deficits:

...except for a few rabid debt-deniers, almost everybody agrees we have to do something fundamental to preserve these programs (Medicare, Social Security, etc.) The problem is that politicians have never found a politically possible way to begin. Every time they tried to reduce debt, they ended up borrowing more and making everything worse

So the problem is…"politicians"?

Not the Republicans who sabotaged every offer the Obama administration made to team-up to fix our collective problems.  Just…politicians

And Bush?  Bush who?  Never heard of him?  

Another group who are to blame?  “Voters”

Brooks again from December 31, 2012:

Ultimately, we should blame the American voters.... Many voters have decided they like spending a lot on themselves and pushing costs onto their children and grandchildren.

Anyone else?   Of course!  Because it wouldn't be a true David Brooks column without the inevitable Both Siderist razor in the apple:

A large number of reactionary Democrats reject any measure...

...yadda yadda yadda

And:

A large number of impotent Republicans talk about reducing the debt, but are incapable of...

...yadda yadda yadda,

But The Obama/Biden administration kept after it, dragging the economy back from the brink of disaster, all while Republicans and the mainstream media screamed that they should drop everything else and focus on nothing but massive budget cuts.

And slowly, things got better.  Even the deficit went down.

From PolitiFact, September 5, 2014:

At a union rally on Labor Day, Obama declared "We cut our deficits by more than half."

The numbers back up Obama’s claim:  Thanks to income tax revenues rising and spending on emergency assistance dropping, America’s deficit has fallen by more than 50 percent, from its highest point since World War II to a level $733 billion lower.

We rate the claim True.

Then came Trump who, despite all the shouting and snarling and whining from the Never Trumpers,  actually passes the “Is he a True Conservative?  Is he a Real Republican?” test with flying colors.

And what is that test?

C’mon kids, we just talked about this.

The only thing True Conservatives care about is cutting taxes for the rich. At all times and under all circumstances, there is no problem so great that they claim can’t be solved with a big enough tax cut.  Wars may come and go.  And all that blather about Abortion, Guns, the Border and Trans Right are just a means to getting enough meathead Republican base voters furious enough to vote enough Republicans elected so they could have more tax cuts.  

And during his first four years in office, what was Donald Trump’s only major legislative achievement?

What was the reaction from the Republican rank and file (fink and bile?) Rapture!  The Second Coming!  USA!USA!USA!

What did this do to the deficit?

Trump flacks like Steve Mnuchin were all over Fox News promising that this massive tax cut would somehow decrease the deficit by One Trillion Dollars.  From Fox Business, September 28, 2017:

Tax cut plan will cut deficit by $1T: Treasury Secretary Mnuchin

“We think there will be $2 trillion of growth so we think this tax plan will cut down the deficit by a trillion dollars—that’s a large number. We’re focused on growth. We think the 3% GDP is a very moderate aspiration and we can do higher than that,” Mnuchin told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo on “Mornings with Maria.”

If all this sounds eerily familiar, it should.  Once again, Trump and his henchmen have been throwing around these same colossal lies around to, once again, defend the indefensible.

Donald Trump, social media post, June 5, 2025:

This is one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress. It’s a Record Cut in Expenses, $1.6 Trillion Dollars, and the Biggest Tax Cut ever given. If this Bill doesn’t pass, there will be a 68% Tax Increase, and things far worse than that. I didn’t create this mess, I’m just here to FIX IT.

Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, social media post, June 4, 2025:

OMB just reviewed the new CBO score of the One Big Beautiful Bill. It confirms what we knew about the bill at House passage. The bill REDUCES deficits by $1.4 trillion over ten years when you adjust for CBO’s one big gimmick — not using a realistic current policy baseline. It includes $1.7 trillion in mandatory savings, the most in history. If you care about deficits and debt, this bill dramatically improves the fiscal picture.

But back during Trump 1.0, what was the actual effect on the deficit of Trump's giant tax cuts for the wealthy?  

From The Washington Post, January 14, 2021:

One of President Donald Trump’s lesser-known but profoundly damaging legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on his watch. The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt. The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office.

And the Republican party – from its leadership to the base to the propagandists on Fox – didn’t care one little bit.

Ah, but once Joe Biden was in office?

From Bloomberg News, October 24, 2023:

Deficit Worries Making a Return as a 2024 Political Issue

After lying dormant as an issue for the past couple of elections, the soaring US budget deficit is starting to matter again in Washington.

From the National Review,  March 24, 2023:

Taxing the Rich Isn’t the Way to Reduce the Deficit

From  The Cato Institute, MAY 4, 2023:

Biden's Budget Is an Unserious Attempt at Reining in Runaway Deficits

From The Heritage Foundation, Sep 27, 2023:

How Washington’s $7.5 Trillion Deficit Spending Spree Is Bankrupting America 

From the National Review, October 24, 2023:

Markets Are Sounding the Alarm on Deficits

From The Heritage Foundation yet again, November 3, 2023

The Fuse on America’s Debt Bomb Just Got Shorter

So, the question before us during this post has been,  "Is Trump a True Conservative?  Is he a Real Republican?"  

And the answer, obviously, unanimously and resoundingly is,  fuck yes!  Of course he is.  

He checks the only important box Republicans / Conservatives have ever truly cared about.  

What's more, he checks it strongly, powerfully, hugely, and bigly. 

And the party and the media are only to happy to follow his lead.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, Monster Chiller Horror Theatre presents Tip O’Neill’s 3D House of Representatives!

 

I Am The Liberal Media

In or Out, There Is Never a Doubt...

Just who's pulling the strings.

Been quite a week for Little Marco, who has had his soul up for sale for decades ago, and which Trump has now picked up at remaindered prices from the bargain bin of failed Republican saviors.  

First, there's this goon named Pete Marocco who was (allegedly) one of the mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6th.  That guy was just appointed by Little Marco to run the U.S. Agency for International Development.

This thug's first act as "acting deputy administrator for management and resources" was to empty out the agency.

From Media-Ite.

Trump Official Who Allegedly Stormed Capitol Places Aid Workers on Leave: ‘You Are Not to Enter USAID Premises’

Remaining staffers at the U.S. Agency for International Development were placed on administrative leave, Tuesday by a Trump administration official accused of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In a memo titled, “PLACED ON ADMINISTRATIVE LEAVE,” acting deputy administrator for management and resources Pete Marocco advised USAID employees they were “being placed on excused absence (also known as administrative leave) with pay effective immediately.” 

Next up, Little Marco puts an out-and-proud wannabe Klansman in charge of [checks notes] "public diplomacy."

From MSNBC:

Senior State Department official haunted by his scandalous record

"Haunted"?   

Nah.

"Proud of".

Yep.

But please continue. 

In theory, revelations about Darren Beattie's recent past should end his State Department tenure. In practice, it might not be that simple.

In 2018, officials in the Trump White House started receiving media calls about a speechwriter and policy aide named Darren Beattie. Journalists wanted to know whether Beattie’s colleagues were aware of his role at a conference regularly attended by well-known white nationalists, and soon after, he was fired.

Eight years later, Beattie is back, serving under Rubio as an acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. NBC News reported:

Beattie has a history of making inflammatory remarks, including a post on X in October that said: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” Beattie’s site promoted a baseless theory that the attack on the Capitol was the handiwork of the FBI, or has he put it, a “Fedsurrection.”

On a related note, Beattie also spent part of Jan. 6, 2021, telling various Black people — including Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina — to “learn their place” and “take a knee to MAGA” 

The agencies and functions Little Marco is gutting at the behest of Il Douche are the faces we show to the rest of the world.  Providing food and medical care to the sick and starving.  Promoting democracy in oppressed corners.  A beacon to others in dark places.  

And now Little Marco is putting a Klansman's hood on the Statue of Liberty --

-- and making absolutely sure the rest of the world knows that the bare plurality of bigots and imbeciles who now govern this country never gave a fuck about any of that.

Burn The Lifeboats

George Will Would Like To Sing "Daisy" For You

You may not know it, but two famous fictional villains sprang into existence in what urban planners refer to as the Champaign-Urbana Metropolitan Statistical Area, but what we Illinoisans know as Chambana.

There was, of course, the HAL 9000 computer, which became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois on January 12, 1992. Later, HAL would become dangerously insane and have to have his higher brain functions shut off.

The region's other famous fictional villain is Mr. George Fredrick Poppin' Fresh Will, who became operational somewhere in Champaign, Illinois sometime during the 17th century. He, too, would eventually become dangerously insane and have to have his higher brain functions shut off, at which point the Washington Post gave him a permanent position on the op-ed page, He can also occasionally be seen sharing his stories of the siege of Constantinople between stories about missing persons and stories about UFO on a thing called NewsNation, which is [checks note] station 13,432 on your cable teevee dial.

Because his higher brain functions are kaput, Mr. Will is only capable of repeating various climate denial mendacities, and the simple song he was taught back when he was but a barefoot boy, with cheek of tan.

 

And that song is called, Both Sides.

Both   Sides

Both   Sides

No other frame will do

I'm half crazy

From huffing Conservative glue...

Today's Both Siderist regurgitation takes this form:

Abracadabra! It’s the dueling Harris and Trump economic magic acts.

Between Harris’s price controls and Trump’s tariffs, this campaign is a travesty of economic policy.

Adding a dash of substance to her one-word political program (“Joy”), Kamala Harris says that as president she would tell the Federal Trade Commission to first define “excessive” price increases, then prosecute the living daylights out of the miscreants responsible for cornflakes costing (by some undisclosed metric) too much...

And this:

Harris, to whom the private sector is as foreign as Mongolia...

Then, at roughly one third of the way through the wordcount comes this:

Donald “Tariff Man” Trump’s Harris-esque contribution to this year’s magical beliefs expands upon his 2016 promise that Mexico would pay for his “beautiful” border wall. Now he says China, like all nations that export goods to the United States, will somehow pay the additional tariffs...

And this:

He also promises to cut energy costs in half — in 100 days or less. And the six-times-bankrupted financial wizard says he will lower auto insurance costs — details pending...

Then Will takes a moment to piss on anyone with a byline who has not immediately lined up to crucify he Harris/Walz campaign on a cross of hot-takes, anonymous slander and neg-vibes -- 

Today’s sophisticated journalists are unlike those hard-bitten, fedora-wearing journalistic skeptics in the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play “The Front Page.” Their successors in today’s newsrooms have tumbled base-over-apex for Harris, she of hitherto hidden — very hidden — depths, and for the grandpa coach, paragon of “Midwestern values” that have suddenly smitten the press corps.

-- then wanders off, wondering aloud who is to blame for the fact that everything these days seems to smell of urine.  

I Am The Liberal Media

More Thrilling Tales of True Conservatism! Vol 27: Bret Stephens Once Again Really, Really Wishes Imaginary Conservatism Was Real

From Bret Bug Stephens yesterday:

The Tragedy of Fox News

April 24, 2023

By Bret Stephens

In the summer of 2011, Rupert Murdoch stopped by my small office at The Wall Street Journal, where I was a columnist and editor...

Stephens proceeds to tell the story of Murdoch making sure his employee, Bret Stephens, fully understood that the new policy was not to put anything in email:

...but I do remember the gist of what he said about the fiasco: Never put anything in an email. His private takeaway, it seemed, wasn’t to require his companies to adhere to high ethical standards. It was to leave no trace that investigators might use for evidence against him, his family or his favorite lieutenants.

And then, realizing he was part of a vast, wingnut propaganda operation so dirty that The Boss wanted to make sure that nobody wrote nuttin' down, Stephens' sense of moral rectitude kicked in and he immediately resigned from Murdoch's WSJ to go and do good work elsewhere, right?

Nah.

Bret Bug stuck around Murdoch's WSJ for another six years and only quit once the Sulzberger family offered him the opportunity to spout his claptrap on the even bigger and more influential platform at The New York Times.  

And now?  Now, Stephens takes out the by-now-familiar can of True Conservative whitewash to reshape the history if the modern GOP as a Reaganesque utopia that fell from grace into the pit of "the angry populism of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay":

But there’s also the sense of what Fox might have become. Murdoch had an opportunity to build something the country genuinely needed in the mid-1990s, when the G.O.P. was moving away from the optimistic and responsible party of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush toward the angry populism of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay: an effective center-right counterbalance to the overwhelmingly liberal tilt (as conservatives usually see it) of most major news media.

Which, even if it were true, begs an ominously larger question: how did Stephens manage to not just sleep through all those decades between Gingrich and DeLay and the rise of hellbeasts like Limbaugh...and the arrival of Donald Trump, but remain a loyal and aggressive stooge for that party until Trump ran him out?

But let's gat back to Stephen's fairy tale of a Conservative media that never was:

In other words, instead of trying to surf a killer wave, Murdoch could have purchased a ship and steered it. It might not have had the ratings that Fox would get — though Fox was always about influence, as much as money, for Murdoch. But, executed well, it could have elevated conservatism in the direction of Burke, Hamilton and Lincoln, rather than debase it in the direction of Andrew Jackson, Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan.

But of course that is exactly what Murdoch did, but in a way that was ultimately much broader and more toxic than a "Coffee Talk with Edmund Burke" cable station, or whatever Stephens has in mind. 

You might not remember it now, but those sorts of programs already existed on PBS and elsewhere.  Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, Ethics in America, Credibility in the Newsroom, Race to Execution, That Delicate Balance II: Our Bill of Rights, The McLaughlin Group, Firing Line and on and on like that.  I enjoyed them at the time, but they weren't exactly setting the political world on fire, and they weren't dragging the Overton Windom to the Right as fast as Conservatives wanted.

So, in 1995, Murdoch showed up with a big bag of money and hired Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes to create a high-end Conservative media platform that would have the clout to shift the elite media landscape in the direction Murdoch wanted.  And what came of that project wasn't  a "Shootin' the Shit with Alex Hamilton" cable station, but as a high-end Conservative journal of influence called The Weekly Standard. Which ran at a loss of a million dollars a year and never had much more than 55,000 subscribers, but its existence makes perfect sense when you understand that Conservatism has always been about the hierarchical relationship between the rulers and the ruled. 

Those at the top -- the ruling class, the Brain Caste of the Right -- existed to cook up and disseminate up Big Terrible Ideas.  Those at the bottom -- the base of the Republican party -- existed to provide the Brain Caste with a political mandate to enact those Big Terrible Ideas by winning elections.  

Outfits like The Federalist Society, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, The American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, The Hoover Institution, The Manhattan Institute and so forth?  Those were the Brain Caste part of the hierarchy, and the whole point of Murdoch's creation of the Standard was to become the bible of the apex of that Conservative hierarchy.

From Wikipedia:

Many of [The Weekly Standard'] articles were written by members of conservative think tanks located in Washington, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Hudson Institute, and the Foreign Policy Initiative. Individuals who wrote for the magazine included Elliott Abrams, Peter Berkowitz, John Bolton, Tucker Carlson, Ellen Bork, David Brooks, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Christopher Hitchens, Harvey Mansfield, Cynthia Ozick, Joe Queenan, and John Yoo. The magazine's website also produced regular online-only commentaries and news articles. 

 

The Standard was viewed as heavily influential during the administration of president George W. Bush (2001-2009), being called the in-flight magazine of Air Force One.[14] In 2003, although the magazine's circulation was only 55,000, Kristol said that "We have a funny relationship with the top tier of the administration. They very much keep us at arm's length, but [Vice President] Dick Cheney does send over someone to pick up 30 copies of the magazine every Monday."[15]

Collectively, these organizations were much more successful than Stephen's dream of a "Thinkin' with Lincoln" cable station ever could have been, because, first, they gave the Right enough money and clout to be taken seriously and, second, they used their money and their clout to colonize the mainstream media.  They made sure that every op-ed column in every venerable newspaper felt obligated to overstuff their pages with the likes of David Brooks and George Wills and Jennifer Rubin and Michael Gerson and so on.  They made sure that every Sunday show was also overstocked with Brookses and Hewitts and Gingriches, and that actual Liberal voices were, at last, completely shut out of the "Center/Left, Center/Right" panels that were never any such thing,

This was what Murdoch and his fellow travelers were getting for their money at the top of the pyramid.  But none of it would amount to anything -- none of the Brain Caste's Big Terrible Ideas would ever become the law of the land -- if the angry, racist, dumbass base of the GOP didn't turn out to vote, which is what Conserative Hate Radio was all about, and what Murdoch's investment in Fox was all about:  to control the whole supply chain of Big Terrible Conservative Ideas, from inception to enactment. 

From his bowdlerize version of  the "optimistic and responsible party of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush" Stephens conspicuously omits the fact that Ronald Reagan didn't begin his 1980 campaign by reading aloud to the people of Philadelphia, Mississippi from the Collected Works of Edmund Burke.  Instead he went to the site of three of the most infamous murders of the civil rights movement and spoke to his very white, very bigoted audience about "states rights" because Reagan damn well knew what it was going to take to get elected in the Southern Strategy Republican Party that Nixon had left behind.

And when G.H.W. Bush was floundering when he ran to warm Reagan's chair in 1988, he didn't turn to a Lincoln scholar to turn things around.  He put his fate in the filthy, racist hands of Lee Atwater, because Atwater knew how to get the bigots fired up and voting.  

But the actual history and trajectory of the modern Republican Party is a subject that scares the hell out of Never Trumper's like Stephens because of how deeply it either implicates them as complicit, or indicts them as incompetent.  So instead, from the safety of their sinecures at the apex of elite American media,  they comfort themselves with mournful musings about a Conservatism that never was -- 

Such a channel would still have been plenty conservative, in a way that most liberals would find infuriating. But it would also have defended the classically liberal core of intelligent conservatism...

 --  and never could have been.

Burn The Lifeboats

More Thrilling Tales of True Conservatism! Vol 26: It Rubs the Trumpism on Its Skin or Else It Gets the Hose Again.

It was long past time for another edition.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Today In Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, Bret Stephens Asks...

Today's question comes to us from New York Times Conservative Opinion Haver, Bret "Bug" Stephens who asks:

How to Destroy (What’s Left of) the Mainstream Media’s Credibility

By Bret Stephens

The question-mark is implied.

The answer, of course, is that if you want "Destroy (What’s Left of) the Mainstream Media’s Credibility", by all means continue to employ tedious frauds like Bret Stephens as Conservative Opinion Havers at newspapers like The New York Times.  

I'll spare you a long, dull slog through Stephens' on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-handing and take you right to the dessert buffet where we find yet another ultra-privileged, straight, white, male Conservative coastal elitist pouting for the millionth time about how cruelly the Liberal media (for which he works) mocks and short-sheets the MAGA humps out here where I live in the middle of Middle America.

Finally, the purpose of journalism in a democracy is not just about reporting. It’s also about listening. “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” Arthur Miller once remarked. Downie and Heyward are right that more diverse newsrooms can help readers gain the perspectives of people from marginalized communities, which don’t always have large megaphones of their own. But that listening must also extend to the sorts of Americans much of the mainstream media now sees, at best, as a foreign tribe, and at worst, grave threats to democracy itself: people like religious conservatives, home-schoolers, gun owners and Trump supporters.

Right now, much of mainstream journalism is failing at that task by treating this part of America with tut-tutting condescension and name-calling (“racist,” “misinformer,” “-phobic” and so on). One purpose of objectivity in reporting is that it can push the news media to listen to all kinds of people without casting moral aspersions — while allowing those people to see and hear themselves represented in the media in a way that isn’t belittling or disparaging.

Those poor, poor MAGA humps with nary a single voice in the media that speaks their thoughts and shares their values

Well, nary a single voice except Fox News.  And Fox Business.  And Fox & Friends.  And Fox Nation.

And The Wall Street Journal. 

And Newsmax. 

And OANN. 

And the Salem Media Group. 

And the Sinclair Broadcast Group‎. 

And The First. 

And The Babylon Bee. 

And Blaze Media. 

And Breitbart News‎. 

And The Daily Caller. 

And The Daily Signal. 

And The Daily Wire. 

And The Blaze. 

And The Federalist. 

And Parler. 

And Hot Air. 

And Joe Rogan. 

And of course a hundred streaming shows like Steve Bannon's War Room

And also of course all the Conservative talk radio programs that are on all day, every day, from coast to coast with hosts like Glenn Beck, Monica Crowley, Larry Elder, Hugh Hewitt, Mark Levin, Dave Ramsey, Dana Loesch and Mike Huckabee. 

And also, also of course the Conservative voices that have long since colonized half-or-more of the op-ed pages in major newspapers. 

And then there's 4Chan.

And 8Chan. 

And is there a 16Chan yet? 

And Truth Social. 

And Regnery Publishing‎. 

And Prager U. 

And Gays Against Groomers. 

And The Washington Examiner. 

And The Washington Free Beacon. 

And The Western Journal. 

And, increasingly, CNN.

And, increasingly, MSNBC.

And WorldNetDaily. 

And Real America's Voice. 

And Real News Update. 

And Rumble.  

And, of course,  most of these same people and organization have massive followings on FaceBook, Instagram and Twitter.

And do you know what all of them have in common?  They're all telling the MAGA humps where I live, 24/7,  how awfully they've been treated at the hand of Liberal tyrants like me, and how ruthlessly silenced and mocked and canceled they've been by those Big City Liberal newspapers that none of them fucking read or care about.  

But if Bret Bug is really that concerned about the plight of the MAGA humps out there in unexplored wilds beyond the Hudson River -- MAGA humps who have been cruelly deprived of proper media representation -- I have a solution.

He and David Brooks and David French and Ross Douthat and, ugh, Pamela Paul can cast lots to see which of them will give up their premium seat at the Gray Lady so that The Times can add Christopher Rufo or Charlie Kirk or Candace Owens to their Conservative op-ed roll of honor.   

I Am The Liberal Media

Addlepated Conservative Pundit Keeps Throwing Around the Term “Thoughtful Conservative” as if It Means Something

A thousand pardons for using a back issue of the award-adjacent "True Conservative" magazine to illustrate this post, but there was no!time!no!time to rush another one into print before I wrote about Mr. David French and the Exciting!Tale! of True Conservatism that The Atlantic magazine just paid him to write.    

You may know Mr. French as either as the saccharine-pious stiff that Bill Kristol once conjured out of the anonymous depths of the pre-Trump Conserative punditocracy and offered up as an alternative to voting for Trump since voting for the Democrat was to horrifying for him to contemplate...

...or as one of the many Never Trump conservatives who write for The Bulwark, are frequently on The Bulwark podcast, and who's advice to Democrats never changes: that we need to stop being Democrats and remake our party into one that lets Never Trumpers -- who fucked up their own party so badly that they got run out by the racist mob they created -- call the shots.

Yeah, that goof also has a regular column in The Atlantic because of course he does.  And today, his dire warning to Democrats is...

 Herschel Walker and the Plight of the True Conservative Voter  

 

There's no good option for conservative voters in Georgia this election.

Yeah, it is definitely time to get another issue of the award-ready True Conserative magazine into print as soon as possible.

Mr. French begins his, "But the Democrats..." apologia for Republican fascism as all of his species do.  By acknowledging that Republicans may -- if you look at it in a certain light -- have a problem with, y'know, violent, brain-dead lunatics running for office.

If ever there were a time and place for a thoughtful, patriotic conservative to vote third party or perhaps even vote for a reasonable Democrat, it’s the 2022 election in Georgia. Herschel Walker’s past is, if possible, even more checkered than Donald Trump’s. After all, no one ever claimed that Trump threatened one of his ex-wives with a gun.

Recent evidence that Walker paid for an abortion is just one more...

Yet personal scandal is hardly the only problem with Walker...

Then comes the turn...

Moreover, Walker’s personal failings aside, there is an overwhelming case that these are not ordinary times, and that the 2022 election is not an ordinary election. So thoughtful, patriotic conservatives should swallow hard, forsake the policy victories they hope for with a Republican Congress, and either stay home or vote Democratic, right?

Then comes the predictable "Democrats are to blame for Republicans being monsters"

If that’s the argument, someone needs to tell the Democratic Party what’s at stake. Because right now, it’s making an unsustainable demand of Republican voters: You sacrifice the policies that you believe are best for our nation and its people; we sacrifice nothing...

French goes on the define "thoughtful Conservatives" as hard-line, right wing Christians for whom abortion is the only issue.

Right now the message to conservative anti-abortion voters is that they should risk a potential policy loss on what is for many of them their single most important issue, because the republic could be at risk. Yet, key Democrats—sensing opportunity in the weakness of Walker, or of Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania—are refusing to compromise on that same issue.

Hey asshole.  Roe was the fucking compromise.  And your "thoughtful Conserative" Christopath fanatics mounted a 40 years campaign to seize the courts and turn them into a tool for establishing your dream of Republican Gilead.  And the first trophy on their wall was stripping women of their basic rights, so how's about you just fuck right off, n'kay?

They’re even using the moment to push an unpopular position on the most contentious issue in the culture wars. They see the Republican crisis as more of an opportunity than a risk to our national union.

By now we should all be familiar with the Never Trumper's sniveling whine that its somehow the Democrats who refuse to take the Republican threat to our democracy seriously.

Then, predictably, the Both Siderist dagger comes fully out of its sheath.

There is no moral standing to scorn Republicans for refusing to risk their preferred policies for the sake of democracy if prominent Democrats are doing the exact same thing. 

Opposition to Trump or concerns about election conspiracies don’t make them any less anti-abortion, and the unwillingness of Democrats to compromise tears conscientious conservatives in two...

Goofs like Mr. French -- carefully cultivated hothouse Conservative Big Thinkers who wouldn't last five minutes in a debate out in the real world with Liberal packing receipts -- will never stop being a permanent feature of the mainstream media.   

Never, ever.

I Am The Liberal Media!

More Thrilling Tales of True Conservatism! Vol 25: Ross Douthat Defends The Hive

Yeah, Douthat wrote that.

Got paid to write that.

Got paid by The New York Times to write that:

Why We Miss the WASPs 

Their more meritocratic, diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

And immediately the Internet Justice League dragged him across social media.  But honestly, I consider the best reaction to have been this:

Maybe a couple months ago I would have liked to join in on dunking on Ross Douthat but now I’m just dead to my core and mad that he gets paid for shitting out monarchist opinions every week while most of us have to scrape together to pay rent

— zooey béchamel (@floozyesq) December 5, 2018

Also fun fact:  Mr. Douthat's column is such a near-carbon copy of this David Brooks column from 2010 --

...
Sixty years ago, the upper echelons were dominated by what E. Digby Baltzell called The Protestant Establishment and C. Wright Mills called The Power Elite.
…
Since then, we have opened up opportunities for women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics and members of many other groups. Moreover, we’ve changed the criteria for success. It is less necessary to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working.

Yet here’s the funny thing. As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.

-- which I extensively vivisected back in 2010 here --

Monster

"What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds."

-- Eric Hoffer

As the Republic burns and the New Conservative Barbarians caper in the firelight screaming for blood and tax cuts, America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual sits in an empty lot at the edge of the conflagration, desperately sifting the Sands of Derelict Nostalgia, looking for something other than the complete failure of everything he has ever believed in to write about.

Which is a tough beat.

Because no matter where one pokes one’s pen these days, out oozes a radioactive stream of Conservative fraud and failure, and unluckily for him, for all of David Brooks’ stature and influence, in the end he really only knows three or four card tricks. There is the Barely Humorous Anecdote. The 800-word essay on The Last Book I Read. The “Ain’t Modern Life Kooky?” chestnut.

And, most often these days, there is the Ahistorically Nostalgic Melodrama starring nonspecific groups of People...

-- that if I were I still teaching writing, and Mr. Douthat was my student, I'd have a strongly-worded chat with him to make sure he understood that plagiarism has consequences.

Which is why no one should lose any sleep over the apparently imminent demise of The Weekly Standard.  Because, kids, there will always be huge piles of stupid money burning holes in the pockets of rich idiots who are ready and eager to underwrite the True Conservative fan fiction that flatters the rituals and dogmas of their caste.

And as long as there are fat stacks to be made selling toxic drivel to wealthy cretins, it doesn't matter if one distribution node for their narcotic of choice is shut down.  Another will rise up to try and meet the market demand.  From The Hill:

Michelle Malkin departs CRTV one day after Blaze merger announced
...

“I am so proud of the investigative journalism I did for CRTV,” Malkin said to her 2.14 million followers. “So many heroes, so many compelling stories. I will not be continuing with the company, but wish my colleagues all the best.”

Honestly, so far CRTV has been so effective at concealing their existence that I had almost forgotten Michelle Malkin exists at all.

The Hill continues:

The Blaze and CRTV announced on Monday that they were merging to create Blaze Media. Both say the move will allow the new conservative entity to reach 165 million people via television, online and on social media. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Blaze was founded by former Fox News host Glenn Beck in 2011, not long after he parted ways with the network, while CRTV was founded in 2014 by current Fox News host Mark Levin, who also hosts a nationally syndicated radio program.

In addition to Levin, hosts at CRTV include co-founder of Vice Media Gavin McInnes, Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty,” former Fox News host Eric Bolling and Deneen Borelli.

So, this new powerhouse is staffing up with..

Neo-nazi and Proud Goys founder, Gavin McInnes.

The Duck Dynasty goof that Andrew Sullivan used to find so adorably atavistic back when he believed such people weren't really a threat ( from me back in 2013):

...given that Mr. Sullivan spends most of his life firmly cocooned in the Washington D.C./NYC elite media bubble, I tend to believe that his venomous contempt for Alec Baldwin and his detached bemusement with Mr. Robertson --

... I’d much rather have dinner with Phil Robertson than Alec Baldwin. Engaging fundamentalists on this subject is one of my favorite activities. And I’d much sooner engage than condemn.

-- come less from the details and context of either incident, and much more from Mr. Sullivan's hardwired Tory elitism.  When he looks at Alec Baldwin, the Conservative Mr. Sullivan sees a successful member of the rival, Liberal upper class who must needs be brought to book in the harshest manner available.  When the Conservative Mr. Sullivan looks at Mr. Robertson, Mr. Sullivan does not -- dare not -- see a fellow, card-carrying member of his Conservatism: instead, Tory to the core, Mr. Sullivan merely sees a harmless aboriginal tribesman from the furthest reaches of Darkest Louisiana, brought before him to poop adorably in his teevee cage and say outré things for Mr. Sullivan's amusement.

Eric Bolling:  Another right-wing troll who got drummed out of Roger Ailes' Fox News sexual predator petting zoo once the employees started ratting each other out.

And some person named Deneen Borelli who has clearly decided that hitching a ride on the same wingnut welfare train that brought Dinesh D'Souza to national attention is easier than honest work.

And based on arc of True Conservatism over the last half century, I would not be terribly surprised to find that within two or three years, most of the The Weekly Standard's loyal readers crowd happily snorting Gavin McInnes' ass hair off Glenn Beck's dick using rolled up pages from Mein Kampf and calling it True Conservatism.

Because as William Burroughs once noted --

"The junk [heroin] merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."

-- and right now in American politics there are no more reckless, helpless, desperate junkies than the True Conservative and the Both Siderist, joined at the hip. shaking, down on their knees, both begging for a hit of anything that will let them pretend for just one more day that the Left hasn't been right about the Right all along.

And for the right price -- a terrible price -- eventually the free market will always provide.

Behold, a Tip Jar!