And Crown Thy Good With Brotherhood

From sea to shining sea.

I Am The Liberal Media!

They Knew.

They knew, or they were completely delusional.  

And in just this past week, we find four prime examples from prominent recently-former Republicans looking back past the "Danger!  Do Not Enter!" Forbidden Zone barrier of 2016 and noting just how long ago it should have been clear to anyone that they were building a Doomsday machine with no off switch.

Tim Miller knew.  And, looking back, it's clear now that Scarborough either knew it and won't admit it, or didn't know it because he's a fucking lump.  

And credit to Miller for cutting Squint off at the "McCain wuz a maverick" pass.  Yeah, sure, but he tapped Sarah Palin as his VP, because Palin was the one that got the base to stand up and salute.  

From NJ.com, October 4, 2008:

Palin: The Lowest Common Denominator

... Here's what Rich Lowry had to say: "Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, 'Hey, I think she just winked at me.' And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it." 

Post-debate, Hannity gushed about how attractive Palin was. At Palin rallies, you can buy buttons about how "hot" their VP is, etc. And yet they called Biden sexist for saying Palin was more attractive than he was? They called Campbell Brown sexist for wanting an example of Sarah Palin's foreign policy experience. 

Palin employed sex appeal in the debate in a display unbecoming of a 44-year-old mother of 5 and a candidate for one of the highest offices in the land. As a woman, I was embarrassed and sickened. And that is why republicans think she "won" the debate--because she employed cutesiness, recited all her rehearsed lines, and didn't answer any questions she did not want to ask. Often, she just out-and-out lied... 

And let's be clear: McCain knew exactly what he was doing when he took on Palin.  It was political Viagra for a limp campaign, and came from the same, clear-eyed, ruthless understanding of exactly who the GOP base really was, that his visit to Liberty University to kiss Jerry Falwell's poxy ass came from.   The same Jerry Falwell that McCain had publicly slammed as an "agent of intolerance" who represented the "outer reaches of American politics" just eight years earlier.  

You will also remember that reliable Conservative stalactite Kathleen Parker, had her bump-it blown back by the response from her loyal readers to her column suggest that Palin wasn't up to snuff.  From the long-gone Firedoglake:

Kathleen Parker Shocked To Find Her Party’s Full Of “Vicious”, “Threatening”, Delusional Wingnuts

By: Blue Texan Wednesday October 1, 2008

Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.
...
"After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

And she knows vicious. Here's Parker in 2003, on the Democratic presidential candidates:

Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot."

Suck it up, Kathleen. You've been tossing red meat to a caged rabid animal for two decades. No sympathy when it finally bites you.
Now, she whines:

...when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.

I'm truly speechless.

You will also remember The Most Ubiquitous Conservative Writer in the Solar System, wiping his brow in relief, because now that Palin was fading like a bad dream, everything was looking great for the future of David Brooks' Republican party.  This was mere months before Donald Trump oozed down the escalator.  And you all know what happened next.  

Next up we have Stuart Steven saying straight out that he was wrong, wrong, wrong about the Republican party.  That all the terrible things that "people" [he means "Liberals" but still can't say it] said about the GOP turned out to be true.  

Then we have Stevens' fellow Lincoln Square colleague, Rick Wilson, (get better colleagues, Stuart) who was flown to England and feted by the UK's Quiet Riot podcast so that he could drink their mead, eat their bully beef and lie about his origin story.  From the podcast:

I've done this longer than any other Republican leader.  I did this starting in 2015. I was the founder of the never Trump movement. Yeah. I've run the Lincoln Project now. Over 10 years now. 

Like hell  he was.  The "Never Trump" name and concept were just a hashtag on Twitter in early 2016 that cropped up during the Republican presidential primaries.  Then, thanks to glowing, round-the-clock coverage by MSNBC, goofs like Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol became the public face of a tiny number of Republicans who were freaked out that Wingnut Judgement Day might finally be just around the corner.

And what Wilson is trying to pass off as founding "Never Trump" in 2015 was just him doing normal, well-paid, campaign dirty work for a candidate.  He worked for the Rubio campaign until Rubio flamed out, then hired himself out to the Cruz campaign.  Which is no more the "founding" of anything than working for Santorum in 2012 was founding a "Never Romney" movement.  

Also, fun fact, the Lincoln Project was actually founded in December of 2019 when Conservative grifters figured out that credulous Liberals would throw huge bags of money at any former Republican who would produce slick "Trump is an asshole" ads that never budged a single vote but was political PornHub to those credulous Liberals.  Founded by George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, Rick Wilson, Jennifer Horn, Ron Steslow, Reed Galen, and Mike Madrid, and two years later had all but collapsed due to sexual and financial scandal.  

Inside the Lincoln Project’s ‘toxic’ workplace

Interviews with nearly two dozen people with knowledge of the group’s workings reveal a culture of infighting, sexist language and disparate treatment.

But inside Wilson's shameful flim-flamming of our British friends, we find a grain of truth.  

After a lengthy disquisition in which Wilson shows that he knew perfectly well that going into the 2016 election, a huge percentage of the Republican base was motivated by an unhinged, racist hatred of Barack Obama, one of the Brits say, well yeah, but hadn't this sort of thing been going on for decades?

What about Nixon's Southern Strategy?  And that 30% who hate Obama isn't enough, is it? They have to be amped up.  That hatred has to be used by someone.  

Great point.   Wilson replies...

Wilson: Listen, the old theory of the Republican party was we knew that 25% of the base, if I may put it as bluntly as it used to be said in the room, were cousin fucking weirdos.  

Big laugh

Wilson: And you brought them out of the closet every four years. You hosed them off and you sent them off to vote.

We did not want to talk about those people. We did not particularly like those people. I come from... you can call it the RINOS or the country club Republicans or whatever you want to call it, but we were the guys who could win races and the weirdos could not win races, but that coalition, they were a part of it. Now they're in the government. 

You may have noticed two different flavors of lies here.

First, it was never 25%.  As Stuart Stevens now effectively admits, it was much higher than that.  Probably closer to 70% or 80%.

Second, "everyone in the room" means that everyone in Republican leadership knew damn well what kind of dangerous nutcases these people were.

And third, as to this "we were the guys who could win races" claptrap?  A lie by omission. The only way your country club Republicans clients could win anything was by flattering and pandering to "cousin fuckers".  By ratcheting up their hatred every election cycle, and using Fox News and Hate Radio to keep them at a full boil in between.  Without the "cousin fuckers" you'd never have won fucking thing and eventually they figured it out.

And do you know who was jumping up and down, shouting warnings about Frankenstein, and the Golem and the Sorcerer's apprentice while Rick Wilson was getting rich whipping the cousin fuckers into a frenzy?  From me in 2005 in a "Both Sides Do It" column by (who else?) David Brooks -- 

 ...I’ll name 15 leaders of your party who are intolerant, hate-mongering theocrats. Superstition-touting extremists. Your opinion leaders. The ones who get out the vote for your candidates and without which you cocksucking Cocktail Party Republicans would never win anything.

-- which is a sentiment I've repeated in dozens-- probably hundreds -- of posts ever since.

And just for sport, there is also this from me in 2011:

The sad truth is that Hate is the Right's Ring of Power. They're never going to give it up, because they know the minute they do -- the minute they're no longer allowed to pretend that Liberals are evil, freedom-hating fifth-columnist monsters who are dragging America into a Marxist abyss on the secret orders of our Kenyan Usurper Overlord -- their whole ideology would implode...

...they would never win another election...

...and tens of thousands of powerful, well-remunerated insiders from Rush Limbaugh to David Gregory who depend on that hate for their daily bread would suddenly have to go out and find honest work.

To be clear, it wasn't just me.  I was one voice in a great chorus of Liberal writers and bloggers who were all sounding the alarm.  That to stay in power, the leaders of the GOP were now explicitly bending the knee to Hate Radio and Fox News because their dependence on Conservative media to get out the vote and drum up contributions was now complete.  

To anyone paying attention with honest eyes, this was all clear as day when, in 2009, the head of the RNC had to go groveling to Rush Limbaugh to beg forgiveness for saying [checks notes] true things about that despicable scumbag.

Steele to Rush: I'm sorry

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

But the louder we Liberals sounded the alarm, the louder we were denounced as alarmist crackpots.  And this went on and on right up until Trump showed up and it had become all far too late to stop what was about to happen.   

What happened next? 

First, media corporations -- which were overstuffed with savvy pundits who had assured the public that the GOP was fine and healthy and this sort of thing could never happen -- began scrambling for talking heads who could explain the inexplicable.  

And, second, they wanted nothing to do with all those Liberal alarmist crackpots who, as it turned out, had been right all along.  Because those Liberal alarmist crackpots tended to arrive with receipts.  And those receipts made their vastly overpaid savvy pundits look like idiots.  Because we can't have that.

The much better alternative was to platform the shit out of a handful of now-unemployed Republican comms people who you all already knew, and who were only too happy to spin the story of the Rise of Trump in a much more savvy pundit-friendly way.  That this was some kinda Black Swan event.  A fever that was sure to break sooner or later.  A glitch in the Matrix that no one could have seen coming and for which certainly none of them were responsible.

But you know, come to think of it, you know who might be kinda responsible for a big chunk of the horrors that were now raining down on their heads?   Those damn Liberals.  Because, just maybe, it was them saying the Republican party was a racist party... made so many Republican voters mad that, well, they went ahead and started doing racism just to say "Fuck you!" to the Liberals.

Which was a theory floated by Charlie Sykes and a number of his guests when he was the public voice of The Bulwark... as the Bulwark was being relentlessly promoted by CNN and MSNBC the New York Times and the Washington Post.  Because for hardwired right-wing goons like Sykes, regardless of the circumstances, somehow, some way, the Left will always turn out to have been the villains.  

They either knew they were playing with something dangerous and radioactive, or they were willfully blind to it.  And as the toxicity of the GOP base spiked higher and higher year after year, the more they were either willing to go along with it for the money and the influence, or the tighter they had to squeeze their eyes shut to what was happening all around them.  

And once it all fell apart, then came the mad scramble for...believe it or not...credit.   Listen to any Never Trump podcast and within minutes you'll hear them boasting about how they were warning Republicans about Trump in 2016 or 2017 or 2018 and woe betide the fools who did not listen.  You will hear them rolling their eyes at how all those morons called them [checks notes] alarmist crackpots back in 2018 or 2019 or 2020.  And now look at 'em!  

Their whole marketing campaign is based on the single premise that they saw this coming when no one else did, which is why you should send them money and heed their warning that the Democratic party needs to become more Centrist.  And buy their book!

Now that they have successfully colonized what little was left of the "Liberal media" it's safe for them to mention, often in passing, that, sure, they knew the base was nuts.  That when your job is to get Republican elected, and bigots, imbeciles and Fundies are all what you have to work with, then that's what you work with.   

Too bad.  So sad.  Also buy my book. 

No wonder they hate Liberal bloggers and podcasters.  No wonder they continue to pretend we never existed.  We fuck up their entire business model.  

So, while we know we'll never be invited to cross the pond and feted by the Brits, as we eat their prime joints of venison and partridge and drink their Taylor Fladgate port and tell the true tale of what really happened, today I felt compelled to set the "Who, What, When" record straight once again.

Burn The Lifeboats

Dear Mr. President, HELP!

Mr. President Trump, sir, I swear, the Illinois Republican party has lost its damn mind.  Pardon the swear but I'm just SO MAD at them.  Their about to go into battle with the forces of EVIL and COMMUNISM right here in the Lard of Lincoln and I just heard there going to do it without there  GREATEST GENERAL.

At a time when the Dumocraps have sew much MONEY, they told the papers they're going to do it without you.  This is insane!!!  There going into the lions den without the LORD on there side!!!

Instead we here this sort of thing in the papers.  "Bailey and his Republican colleagues mostly steered clear of mentioning the president" and "The president of the United States has nothing to do with the problems that Illinois is having right now."

Sir, they wont even say your name!

I dont even no what to say.  These are people I sent money to, and voted for, LOYALLY, and there going into the elections turning there backs on the GREATEST LEADER in American HISTORY.  The man I voted for SIX TIMES.  The man who is saving this country form the plots and schemes of the RADICAL LEFT COMMUNISTS.  

I swear, the only LOYAL one of them is the amazing Mary Miller who PROUDLY shows a picture of you and her on the front page of her web site.

HELP!!!

These fools need you HEAR as soon as possible to get them back in line. They need to see that BIG BEAUTIFUL plane landing hear, and you coming down the steps, like the KING that you are, and reminding these clowns that there about to get BALLROOM AND The OVAL OFFICE back in better shape than ever.  And dont forget the ARCH!!  

You need to remind them that we have already won the war against the muslem villains of IRAN and the STRAITS are ours now!!!  That no one is better at ECONOMY than you -- just look at the 3.2 billion dollars you made in just the last 2 years!!!  If ANYONE knows more about making money, I've never met them.

 

Mr. President Trump, sir, PLEASE come as quick as you can and save us from these stupids before ITS TOO LATE!!!

Yours in Christ,

A LOYAL Springfield MAGA

 

The "Bring Trump To Illinois" MAGA Victory Fund!!

Can't Stop Won't Stop

This was a lead story in The New York Times today.

The short answer, which is actually rather long, is "No".

This is roughly the 12,258th "think piece" on progressive outsiders winning a few Democratic primaries.  It's nearing the "But Her Emails" saturation point. And these articles tend to come either in one of two flavors.  

First, Dire!Warnings! cursing Democrats for risking dooming us all by not becoming GOP Lite in order to chase the votes of disaffected Republicans.  These articles tend to come from (small wonder) recently-former Republicans whose "advice" to Democrats has always been -- rain or shine -- to keep moving rightward, ever-rightward -- in pursuit of an imaginary Center which is always, somehow, slipping over the horizon.  

Second, there are the breathless articles touting how a few members of the Democratic majority (do the math) are fighting back hard against a small number of progressives with whom they have no intention of sharing even a small corner of the Democrat's Big Tent.  Mind you, they had no fucking problem when it came to sharing our Big Tent with ghouls like Liz Cheney who spent their entire career slandering Democrats in the most monstrous language imaginable...but us New Deal Democrats get nothing but the stink-eye and a boot in the ass from the gatekeepers who own the velvet ropes. 

From The New York  Times, August 6, 2026:

Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left

One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.

The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful defeat of the year.

Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism. 

It will not shock you to learn that Third Way gets its money from Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech as well as outfits such as ExxonMobil and various health insurance companies.  All the usual suspects who would rather see a MAGA flag flying over this country forever than share the Democratic Party with actual progressives.

Now, it is rumored that this “Better Dead than Al-Sayed” gang of Regressives is led by a shadowy figure known only as “David Fucking Brooks”.  And two Fridays ago Mr. Brooks left his Bethesda Maryland compound just long enough to appear on the PBS News Hour where, practically in tears, he said this.

Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.

That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which the party is moving further and further away from the center, and therefore…

At which point, Brooks co-panelist, Jonathan Capehart, reached his limit of politely tolerating this old fraud's endless bullshit and interrupted him with:

I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket argument that the Democratic Party is running far left. 

That was the signal for the host – Amna Nawaz – to do the PBS thing of quickly moving on to the next topic at the slightest sign of conflict.

However, since I do not abide by PBS rules, I will just add that it is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at this moment".  

It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.

And of course Third Way is not a solo act. They have plenty of fellow travelers who are horrified that a few Democratic candidates have won their primaries in ways that Third Way, LLC does not approve of.  

From The Washington Post, June 3rd, 2026:

Centrist Democrats launch new pledge: ‘We are capitalist, not socialist’

Two Democrats in Congress who flipped Republican-held seats in 2024 are launching a pledge for their party’s candidates they hope will act as a rallying cry for centrists, calling for a “politics of persuasion over purity” and declaring that “we are capitalist, not socialist.”

The pledge is a direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt as democratic socialists such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) capture the party’s energy and activism.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Adam Gray (D-California) said they will unveil the pledge Wednesday afternoon at the center-left conference WelcomeFest, and hope to get candidates up and down the ballot to join them in signing it. 

From Common Dreams, February 9th, 2026:

‘One More Billionaire Front Group’: Centrist Dems Mocked Over New Initiative Led by Corporate Lobbyist

In fact, establishment panic over even mildly social-democratic ideas predates the current cycle by years.

From In These Times, seven years ago,  February 7, 2019:

Why Is the Political Establishment So Afraid of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal?

So, the short answer is "No".

The longer answer -- the reason why the answer is "No" -- is uglier and deeply embarrassing to the legacy media, which is why you will never hear them speak of it.  Because it has to do with what the "Tea Party" actually was.

For several years I bored you all silly with post after post after post about how the Tea Party was not some new, insurgent outsider group who were storming the barricades of the moribund Republican party.  That they were the Republican party: the same ignorant, racist, shoutycrackers Republican base they'd always been, but now that the Bush administration had shit the bed hard enough to crack the Earth's mantle, they needed their own, incredibly inconvenient past to go away so they could get on with the important work of having a full-on, eight-year-long, screaming mental breakdown over the election of a Black man as president.

And they accomplished this by A) Putting on stupid hats, waving Gadsden flags, and swearing that they'd never even heard of George W. Bush and, B) Getting the legacy media to go along with this massive fraud, which the legacy media was only too eager to do, given their own despicable complicity with the various crimes and treasons of the Bush administration.

And it worked.  And, as is our eternal fate, the only people willing to straight-up call bullshit on the whole scam were us dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically not a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam.  Ed Kilgore wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and E.J. Dionne. There was also this July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:

The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

No, no, no!  Definitely could not say that because that would violate the post-Dubya Generally Accepted Beltway Narrative that all problem are caused by "the extremes on Both Sides" and in the middle there is a "vital Center" full of millions of political virgins who had been moved by the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.

And to this very day, that lie continues to be one of those "Zombie lies", which everyone sorta knows is nonsense -- like Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves -- but has so completely passed into the realm of myth that the legacy media keeps right on pretending that it was actually true.  

In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth was so secure that by 2016 Joe Scarborough could finally come right out and say of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all knew it  and know with perfect certainty that there would be consequences (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

And that's the longer answer.  The Democrats are not facing their own "Tea Party" moment because There. Was. No. Tea. Party.  There was just the Bush-Off Machine goin' like 60 to rebrand the Republican base.  

What corporate Democrats are facing are ... New Deal Democrats.  People who revere FDR as the man who crushed fascism, and whose programs built the Middle Class, strengthened the union movement and helped insure that old age and poverty weren't a death sentence.   

People who remember that FDR was called a commie by the Republican party and the Republican media every inch of the way.

People who look at the mess the establishment has made of this country and think the Middle Class could used some help, the aged, infirm and poor could use some help, that good health care should be affordable, that unions are a good thing, that robber barons and Republican looters are bleeding us dry and, most importantly, for any of that to happen, fascism in America must be discredited and destroyed, root and branch.  

I Am The Liberal Media!

The Lincoln Curse?

As you probably already know, Donald Trump has turned the USS Abraham Lincoln into a floating gulag for any sailor unlucky enough to be stationed there:

Trump says record USS Lincoln deployment 'not nearly long enough'

President Donald Trump reacted to reports of poor conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln on Friday, claiming that families of service members are "not" concerned and saying that the vessel hasn't been deployed for "nearly long enough."

The president also confirmed that a new aircraft carrier is headed to the Middle East to replace it during a very brief gaggle with reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews Friday afternoon. 

The aircraft carrier's movements come amid reports of mental health and supply issues aboard the USS Lincoln, whose long deployment to the Middle East in support of the Iran war includes a record-setting time at sea of more than 200 days. Navy leaders, including the Navy's acting Secretary Hung Cao, last week held a heated town hall for families of the USS Lincoln who had raised concerns about the conditions on the ship.

Tapper: What is your husband saying about conditions on the ship? Wife of Service Member Aboard USS Lincoln: My husband is appalled at the conditions on this ship. This is not his first deployment. And he is saying that it is the worst deployment that he's ever been on. His shipmates say the same.

[image or embed]

— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.com) August 14, 2026 at 8:31 PM

This should come as no surprise, as Donald Trump has never given a shit about the United States military except as a toy for him to play with.  Trump also thinks anyone willing to risk their life for their country is a "sucker" and a "loser". 

John Kelly confirms Trump privately disparaged U.S. service members and veterans

Trump called fallen soldiers "suckers” and "losers" during his presidency, according to a 2020 report in The Atlantic.

But do you remember the fate of the USS Abraham Lincoln during the last Republican administration that lied us into a disastrous war in the Middle East and then catastrophically botched it?  

It was in all the papers.

That would be Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech, delivered on May 1, 2003.

And that, just two days before that speech, the cover story of the now-defunct Weekly Standard featured David Brooks declaring that The War Was Over! 

Yay!  

The Good Guys had triumphed! Neoconservatism had been vindicated.  And it was time for the resistance to crawl under a nearby porch and quietly die, or dry up and blow away or dissolve into laughably delusional absurdism.  

Pieces of Mr. Brooks' radioactively reckless and vindictive claptrap can be found here.

As you literati know, maritime myth and literature are full of stories about ships "sailing under a doom." The story of Jonah from the Bible.  The tale of the Mary Celeste.  The legend of the Flying Dutchman.  Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Poe's MS. Found in a Bottle.  Melville's Moby Dick.  And so on.

Now I'm not saying that the USS Abraham Lincoln is cursed.  I am saying that, if it is cursed, we definitely know why.  And that, out of an abundance of caution, it wouldn't hurt to burn some sage, flick a little holy water around, ring some church bells, and never, ever put another Republican in the White House.   

I Am The Liberal Media

The Republican Party's Two Sets of Books

As most of you know, on this blog, on our podcast, and on stage and screen, I have long maintained a particular theory about how the Republican Party got itself into this mess. 

They kept two sets of books. 

The first set of books was for the rubes, the bigots and the chucklefucks, who make up the Republican base. And those books were full of absolute nonsense.

Liberals are baby killing, gun-grabbing Commie demons. Trans people are coming for your children. Immigrants are rapists. Tax cuts pay for themselves. The government is always the problem. Whatever scary story or conspiracy theory would keep people angry, frightened, and voting Republican -- that was what went into the first set of books.

And there is no bottom to it. No limit. The Republican base will believe whatever they were told, because the Republican Party spent decades training them to believe it.  But the point of those lies was never really governing. The point was power.

The racism, the conspiracy theories, the fear, the culture-war panic -- those were the keys that unlocked the public treasury. The Republican Party could use Fox News, talk radio, and an entire conservative media ecosystem to push those buttons whenever they needed votes. Then, once they were in power, they could do what they actually wanted to do: deregulate everything, cut taxes for wealthy people, and serve their donors.

That was the first set of books.

Ah, but to keep the country from complete collapse, Republican leadership had to keep a second set of books.  This one contained reality.

That was the book with the spreadsheets and the data and the boring stuff: how economies work, how wars work, how logistics work, how science works, how diseases work. It was the book you actually need if you are trying to run a country.

And for decades, the Republican Party had a strange arrangement. They would loudly scream about all the imaginary horrors from the first set of books to get the base furious enough to elect them, then quietly operate from the second set of books once they were in office.

They would tell their voters that they were going to deport everyone they hated, crush their enemies, restore some imaginary golden age, and punish all the people they had been taught to fear.

Then they would get into office and discover that reality existed. They never delivered the fantasy. They never actually purged the country of all the people they demonized. They never delivered the revenge fantasy they sold their voters.  OMG, they even -- gasp! -- cut deals with those baby killing, gun-grabbing Commie demon Dems!   

And as long as the Republican elites and donors controlled the party, the arrangement sorta worked.

Then along came Trump, and the important thing Trump changed was not the Republican Party's nature. It was that he simply burned the second set of books. Trump decided he didn't need the reality-based ledger anymore. He operated entirely from the first set of books.

He told the base: Yes. I really am going to give you everything you dreamed of. I will punish the people you hate. I will hurt the people you fear. I will break the rules for you. And in exchange, you will let me loot the place.

That was the deal.  And it still is.

The Republican Party had always used fantasy as a political weapon. Trump simply stopped pretending that reality existed at all.  He looked at the spreadsheets, the facts, the experts, the institutions, and basically said: screw it. We don't need any of that.

It was the same kind of thinking that led people throughout history into disasters: don't worry about the details, don't worry about logistics, don't worry about reality.  We can definitely invade the Soviet Union and conquer it in two, three months tops because we're awesome!  We always win because we are awesome!

A triumph of the will, if you will.  And when the Dear Leader lives in that mindspace, facts are no longer an issue.

This was from me in September of 2016 -- years before anything called "Never Trump", and decades before Never Trumpers sloooooly and grudgingly began to accept that the real problem with the Republican party is that it's full of Republicans. 

Once you start to notice that a depressingly large number of our fellow citizens have become reprogrammable Orwellian meat-puppets, the rise of Trump is not hard to understand at all.

And this was the citation from Orwell I was using:

"Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those 19th century ideas about the laws of Nature.  We make the laws of Nature."  -- O'Brien, 1984 

And this is how Republicans operate all the time now.  Everywhere.  Except there are still places where reality has a way of forcing itself back into the room.

The courtroom is one of those places.

Outside the courtroom, operating from the first set of books, Republicans can and do say anything. They can invent stories about reflecting pools, election fraud, conspiracies, whatever. They can feed the base whatever toxic slop they want because nobody is forcing them to prove it.

But eventually somebody crosses the border between fantasy and reality.

That's what happened to Jeanine Pirro.

When she is on television, playing to the audience, she can live in the first set of books. She can repeat whatever bullshit the audience wants to hear.

But when she walks into a courtroom, she has crossed into domain of the second set of books.

Here, there are rules. Here, tangible evidence matters.  In fact, it's pretty much all that matters.   In here there are questions that can't be dodged, wriggled out of, or dismissed with a demeaning insult.  And most importantly, in here there are now consequences for lying.

And once you've crossed the membrane between the domain where Boxwine Pirro spends most of her time, where Doug Burgam and Donald Trump can lie all they want to because, as long as they keep feeding the bigots and imbeciles the lies they want to hear, they are rewarded for lying...

...and the domain of the courtroom, suddenly all the things that worked outside the courtroom don't work anymore.

In here lawyers and judges get to demand that you show actual evidence.   Where are the photographs? Where are the witnesses? Where is the chain of proof ?  In here, Trump regime's lies and bluster  evaporate like fairy gold once the enchantment has been broken.

This stupid Reflecting Pool fuck-up is the Decline and Fall of the Republican Party in microcosm, because reality is the wall Republicans keep slamming into. They have spent decades building a political machine fueled entirely by bullshit from a fantasy universe where nothing has to be proven.  Because the base doesn't want facts.  They hate facts.  They demand the story they were promised -- the toxic slop they now crave like crack, which is why the people who feed them that slop keep getting elected.

But science doesn't work that way.  The law doesn't work that way. Reality doesn't work that way.

We saw it with COVID. The refusal to respect facts and science had real consequences. People died because this administration and its allies chose political fantasy over reality.  And now we see the same pattern in something as small and ridiculous as the reflecting pool fiasco.

Trump made a bet that he could hire one of his mobbed up stooges to slap some paint, declare victory, and everyone would accept the story.  Which is pretty much his same "strategy" in Iran.  When reality pushed back, the response was exactly what it has always been.  Find a scapegoat. Find a boogeyman. Blame somebody else.

For example, from MSNOW:

On questions about depleted munitions, Team Trump struggles to keep its story straight

To recap, the depleted stockpiles aren’t depleted, though they could be better, and everyone should blame Joe Biden.

But eventually you run into the problem that every authoritarian movement runs into.  There are still places where facts matter.  There are still institutions where you cannot simply scream louder than everyone else and reality goes away.

Which is why they keep losing.  The more you force them into arenas where they have to answer questions, produce evidence, and defend their claims, the more exposed they become.

Because their alternative to reality is always the same thing: Scream louder. Blame immigrants. Blame Muslims. Blame liberals. Blame trans kids.  Blame anyone except themselves and their catastrophic decisions and failure.  And the louder they scream, the clearer it becomes that they have nothing else.

Look at the Republican campaign ads flooding the country right now. They have money. They have the machinery. But what do they have to run on?  Trump has wrecked the economy. He has driven up prices. His tariffs have hurt consumers. His foreign policy disasters are piling up.

So what is left?

The first set of books.  Fear. Rage. Racism. Resentment.

Because that is all they have.

It cracks me up with I see headlines from anonymous sources about Republicans getting nervous about Trump hurting their chances in the midterms.  Hey dum-dums, what it is about ""Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" that you do not understand?  Because that, sure as shit, is what you signed up for.  

Trump is the Republican Party.  Trump is the movement.  You no longer have an independent identity separate from him. You are not partners, or pals, or peers.  You are a tool he can use and discard. You are mere cells in the body of Trumpism.

This is the bargain you accepted when you handed your party over to someone who never cared about the second set of books.  Someone who never cared about reality.  Someone who only cared about the first set of books — the one where every lie is true as long as enough people want to believe it.

 But eventually, reality always comes looking for payback.

And payback is a bitch.  

Temu Reagan

Some days it's hard to understand what put the "Never" in "Never Trump".  Or, rather, why their slogan was not, is not, and never will be "Never Republican".  

Because Temu Reagan actually delivered on their dearest wishes.  And he did so by diligently pursuing the path to political success laid down by St. Ronald Reagan.

First, political strategy.

Pandering to bigots to win elections?  Check.  

From The Washington Post, June 19, 2020:

Ronald Reagan in Philadelphia, Miss., to Donald Trump in Tulsa, a pattern of racially divisive politics.

Welcome the Evangelical Right to the inner circle of Republican power brokers?  Check.

Also from The Washington Post, March 22, 2021:

Reagan tied Republicans to White Christians and now the party is trapped

Republicans have a passionate base that is out of touch with the rest of America.

...Reagan’s first-term record was a mixed bag, as far as cultural conservatives were concerned. Even so, four years into his presidency, Reagan saw an opportunity to use religion to forge a political realignment in the South. Addressing a crowd of 10,000 religious leaders at an “Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast” during the 1984 Republican Convention, the president delivered a rousing speech. Reagan willfully blurred the line between church and state. “Religion needs defenders against those who care only for the interests of the state. The truth is, politics and morality are inseparable — and as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related.” He concluded: “If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”

Not surprisingly, the Republican platform that year reflected the agenda of White evangelicals. It called for a constitutional ban on abortion with no exceptions and the appointment of federal judges who opposed abortion. It supported voluntary school prayer, ignored the Equal Rights Amendment (which Republicans had supported in every platform from 1940 to 1976 with only two exceptions: 1964 and 1968) and rejected equal pay for women. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, closed the 1984 Republican convention by triumphantly calling the incumbent ticket “God’s instruments in rebuilding America.”

 

Second, tangible deliverables.

Gargantuan increase in military spending?  Check.

From AFSCME Defense Spending Resolution #1, June 18-22, 1984:

The Reagan Administration is seeking an unprecedented peacetime military buildup. The Reagan Administration’s Fiscal Year 1985 budget request for national defense spending is greater, even when adjusted for inflation, than defense spending in any other year since World War II, including the years of the Korean and Vietnam wars. If the Reagan Administration has its way, defense spending would climb an additional 25 percent, in inflation adjusted dollars, between 1985 and 1989. By 1989, Department of Defense spending would be 29% higher (after adjustment for inflation) than during the peak of Vietnam when 50,000 American troops were engaged in combat overseas...

From House.gov, June 24, 2026

Republicans Advance Largest Pentagon Budget in History while Cutting Billions from Domestic Investments

The $1,072,210,299,000 military budget is the most expensive ever, while the Trump administration requests even more funding

Massive tax cuts?  Check.

WTTW, February 25, 2020:

‘Arguing with Zombies’: Paul Krugman on Economic Ideas That Won’t Die

In his new book “Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future,” Krugman calls a number of economic policies “zombie theories” because they have been proved false, refuse to die and keep coming back. 

Another example he cites is that “tax cuts pay for themselves.”

“We both tried tax cuts and tax increases and it’s never happened. The Reagan tax cut led to big deficits. George W. Bush’s tax cut led to big deficits. Trump’s tax cut led to big deficits,” Krugman said. “Bill Clinton raised taxes and, you know, Republicans predicted disaster. It goes on and on.” 

“This is a theory that has – nothing has been tested as often as this one. And yet, when the Trump tax that was passed just about every Republican in Congress said, ‘Oh, I’m sure this will pay for itself,’” he said.

So why does that theory persist? And did Republicans really believe it would pay for itself? 

Krugman has a blunt answer.

“With politicians, do they actually believe in anything?” he quipped. ”The answer is, look at the people whose taxes are cut. A lot of zombie ideas, not all of them, but a lot of zombie ideas are basically kept shambling along eating people’s brains by billionaires.”

Center for American Progress, November 20, 2025:

7 Ways the Big Beautiful Bill Cuts Taxes for the Rich

Overall, the Big Beautiful Bill will harm poor Americans and raise the incomes of rich Americans—driving gains for the rich through cuts to marginal tax rates and the estate tax, along with tax breaks for businesses, business owners, and investors

Over the next decade, the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) will cut taxes for the richest 10 percent of Americans by more than $14,700 per year per household and cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans by more than $50,000 per year, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). Despite this, there has been comparatively little coverage of the specific mechanisms by which the BBB funnels money to the ultrarich. Meanwhile, tiny tax cuts for the working class have received disproportionate media attention, even as the BBB will reduce the incomes of the poorest Americans.

Overall, the BBB cuts taxes by $4.5 trillion over the next decade, primarily with $2.3 trillion of provisions that deliver most of their benefits to the richest 10 percent of Americans by income, according to new analysis of JCT data by the Center for American Progress. Within that, the BBB delivers $1 trillion in tax cuts to the top 1 percent while cutting more than $1.1 trillion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and other health programs used by the poorest Americans. 

Slashing the social safety net?  Check.

From The Washington Post, August 20, 1981:

Reagan Budget Means Drastic Cuts In Medicare and Medicaid Programs

Fifth of Nation Is Affected Reagan Budget Means Drastic Surgery for Medicare, Medicaid

The budget bill just signed by President Reagan will, as finally drawn, cut federal medical aid to more than a fifth of the American population.

NBC News, April 2, 2026:

Trump says it's 'not possible' for the U.S. to pay for Medicaid, Medicare and day care: 'We’re fighting wars'

Trump urged states to fund benefits programs instead because "we have to take care of one thing: military protection."

He went on to say that he told Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought: “Don’t send any money for day care, because the United States can’t take care of day care. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. You got to let a state take care of day care, and they should pay for it too.”

Then add to the mix all the culture war bullshit -- the "Guns, God and Gays" bullshit -- that holds the coalition of Republican bigots and imbeciles together so the donor class can get what they're paying for.

Ronald Reagan was the first sitting U.S. president to actively champion overturning Roe v. Wade and making opposing the 1973 Supreme Court decision a core platform of the national Republican Party.

Ronald Reagan also accelerated the decades-long political and legal push to reshape the federal judiciary with conservative judges who opposed Roe v. Wade, helping create the conditions under which organizations like The Federalist Society would become enormously influential and raise up crop after crop of lawyers and judges who were Right Wing True Believers.

And Reagan -- along with two Conservative federal judges named Bork and Scalia -- gutted the Fairness Doctrine and unleashed a tidal wave of Conservative propaganda outlets that no longer had to worry about facts or fairness.

What Reagan delivered with a smile and hair dyed unnaturally brown, Trump delivers with a scowl and  hair dyed an the color of a Dreamsicle.   How can any fair-minded human look at the last 50 years of Republican politics and not see that Reagan was the overture and Trump is the finale of one, long, catastrophic Conservative revolution?

Or, to borrow a lightly edit quote from Holy Writ of the Oligarch Class.

You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins; it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection.

You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and Donald Trump is the man who has granted you your wish.

Update:  For more on these exciting developments we join Charlie Pierce already in progress...

Wait, Did the Republican Party Only Just Realize That It Hired a Bunch of Yahoos and Morons, and That’s Why It’s Falling Apart?

I’ve seen this coming ever since Reagan opened the Gates of Mordor back in 1980.

I Am The Liberal Media

Blood Money

Under Republican misrule, you may soon have to sell your blood to pay for your blood pressure meds.

From The New York Times:

Trump Will End Subsidies for Medicare Drug Premiums

Millions of older Americans could pay more for their prescription drug coverage next year.

The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it intended to end a Biden-era program that for the past two years has helped tamp down the cost of monthly premiums for drug coverage for people on Medicare.

The decision means that millions of Americans 65 and older could face higher Medicare drug premiums next year, when the cost of living is already a major concern. That could be politically damaging for Republicans in the midterm elections. In the weeks leading up to November, Medicare beneficiaries could experience sticker shock while shopping for next year’s drug plan.

For 2025 and 2026, the federal government gave health insurers billions of dollars in subsidies to help them keep down drug premiums for people on Medicare. Without the subsidies, millions of people could have had to pay hundreds of dollars more a year for their drug plans.

 

I Am The Liberal Media

The Despairing Posture of Their Fall: WHCD Edition

The Plague swept the kingdom and the prince's subject were dying like flies.

Blood was its Avator and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood.

In response, prince lavishly provisioned his castle, then gathered all the fancy people behind the safety of its thick walls.

When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. 

 Finally, they welded the doors shut so no one could enter or leave.

This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair from without or of frenzy from within.

Then they partied!

The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballêt-dancers, there were musicians, there were cards, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

But uh-oh!  Spoiler!  The Plague got in!

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night.

And that was that. 

And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death MAGA Republican Party held illimitable dominion over all.

I Am The Liberal Media

Sneak Preview of Trump's 07/16/2026 Address

 

President Stupid + Star Trek TOS = ...

TRUMP:  Chavez stole the 2020 election.  My good friend Nickolas "Mad Dog" Maduro -- I call him Mad Dog...I invented that -- he confessed after some light persuasion by Stephen Miller's boys.  I am appointing My Pillow Guy as National Election Czar.

KIRK: Watch his mouth.

TRUMP: Also I won the popular vote in 2016 by 35 million votes.  We have it on tape.  We have the files.  Just before he exploded, my friend Lindsay Graham told me.  60 million illegals voted for Demon Rats in 2016.  These scum will be prosecuted and execute for treason.  

SPOCK: Captain, the speech follows no logical pattern.

KIRK: Random sentences strung together.

TRUMP:  Reflecting Pool was sabotaged by Antifa terrorists.  Their headquarters are Barack Hussein Obummer's big, ugly, low-IQ so-called library where there are no books, just Muslim terrorist things.  We have the details.  Chavez has confessed.  Arrests are coming.

MCCOY: He looks drugged, Jim. Almost at a cataleptic state.

TRUMP: Iran is over.  We won.  The Strait is open.  Unlike Barack Hussein Obummer who gave the Strait away to his Muslim terrorist friends.  We're going to make billions.

MCCOY: I have to have a close look at him.

TRUMP: Many people say I am the best president ever.  I am the biggest winner.  No one could have done what I did.  Ballroom.  Reflecting Pool.  Epstein files are a hoax. Stopping 125 wars.... zzzzzz.

Never Forgive.  Never Forget.