The Fascists and the Blind Men

Since all of us here are snobby Liberal elites, I assume you're all familiar with the parable of The Elephant and the Blind Men.  

If you're not, here it is, minus the happy ending where a Wise Man happens past and says, "Hey, you're all partially right!" and then they're all filled with joy and go off together and get drunk. and they all get jobs writing opinion pieces for The New York Times.

Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers told them, “Hey, there is an elephant in the village today.”

They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, “Even though we would not be able to see it, let us go and feel it anyway.” All of them went where the elephant was. Everyone of them touched the elephant.

“Hey, the elephant is a pillar,” said the first man who touched his leg.

“Oh, no! it is like a rope,” said the second man who touched the tail.

“Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree,” said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant.

“It is like a big hand fan” said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.

“It is like a huge wall,” said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.

“It is like a solid pipe,” Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.

They began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that he was right....

Well this is not that story.

This is the story of four elite Conservatives who spent their entire careers willfully blinding themselves to the burgeoning rage, racism, paranoia, arrogant ignorance and lust for a dictator that was motivating the base of their party.

Instead, as they patted down the fascism at the heart of the Republican party,  they reported back to the world that...

“Unlike those heathen, gay-loving Liberals, the Republican party is deeply, sincerely and faithfully Christian,” said David French.

“Virtuous Republicans who care deeply about deficits and institutional norms are all that keep us safe from those Liberal monsters,” said Bret "Bug" Stephens.

"There will be no Trump coup,"  said His Eminence Ross Cardinal Douthat, primate of the Archdiocese of Dorkylvania.

“It's gonna be Rubio!” said David Brooks.

So today The New York Times has presented its readers with four extremely privileged, out-of-touch Conservative white dudes on the payroll of Times, all of whom have spent their entire professional lives being willfully blind to the monsters they were helping to spawn, and being utterly wrong about the one thing they were hired to have savvy opinions about based on their alleged expertise and insider knowledge: the state of play inside the Republican party, and what the Right was thinking and doing behind closed doors.    

Let's see how that worked out!

David Brooks: I’d add another phrase: “brokenism.” This is the belief system popularized by Alana Newhouse in Tablet magazine in 2022. It’s the idea that everything is broken and we just need to burn it all down. Personally, I think some things are broken and some things are OK, but most of my Trump-supporting friends are brokenists. They get this from media consumption.

Translation: I personally have no idea what's going on but I gonna say that I still have Trump-supporting friends for some reason and they tell me...

David French: In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there’s a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other...

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Ross Douthat: I think there are all kinds of ways in which Trump’s popularity is connected to distinctive shifts in the culture in the last 15 years — the trends on both left and right that have boosted populists all over the Western world. But it’s also important to stress that part of what Republicans like about Donald Trump is just that Donald Trump is a Republican.

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides.  Also I don't have that much of a problem with Trump because he's mostly doing Republican stuff that I like.

Brooks: I’d offer up one more word for consideration: “exclusion.” Progressives really have spent the last few decades excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of institutions.

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Brooks: A lot of elite conservatives continue to struggle with what I call the near-abroad problem. They may dislike MAGA, but they (we) are mostly around progressives or moderates on a day-to-day basis, by virtue of being elite. These progressives sometimes make our teeth hurt. We react more strongly to minor sins of the people across campus than the major sins of the people far away. This is something I’m working on.

Translation:  We really don't know what we're talking about.  

Stephens:  The other point that can’t be emphasized enough: Trump wouldn’t be as popular as he is with his side of the country if Democrats and progressives weren’t as unpopular with most sides of the country. Just the fact that he drives the Rachel Maddows of the world into fits of rage and despair and thoughts of European exile is reason enough for many Americans to support him. Sometimes even including me.

Translation:  My bone-deep loathing of Liberals remains undimmed and I will exploit any opportunity to drag them into any subject for a little hippie punching.  

French: Those of us who follow politics closely always seem to forget that we’re the strange ones. I really question how much the average rank-and-file Republican even knows about most of these early controversies. If you’re watching Fox News or other right-wing outlets, you’re hearing a lot of stories about strange, “woke” programs funded by U.S.A.I.D. They don’t know about the lives that are saved or the lives that are at risk.

That means they won’t know, much less care, about any given political controversy until it affects them personally.

Translation:  We really don't know what we're talking about.  

Douthat: Second, I would emphasize that many Americans experienced the recent period of liberal power, especially under Covidian conditions, as much more authoritarian and lawless-feeling in its everyday impact ... than anything they experienced under Trump.

 Translation:  I'm with Stephens.  Liberals are the worst.

Stephens: ...some of what Trump is doing is simply a turbocharged version of what his liberal predecessors did while the mainstream press remained mostly mum. Remember Barack Obama’s threats of unilateral executive action through his phone and his pen? Or Joe Biden’s almost open flouting of the Supreme Court with his student loan forgiveness schemes? I also think millions of Americans are tuning out some of the claims of Trump’s unconstitutional behavior as so much partisan noise. That’s one of the downsides of some of the more doubtful efforts by liberal prosecutors to put Trump in jail.

Translation:  Have I mentioned that I still really, really fucking hate Liberals and will use any opportunity to drag them into any subject for a little hippie punching? Also Liberals are really to blame for everything.

French: ... We’ve seen this pattern throughout the Trump years. Trump will advance an illegal or unconstitutional policy, MAGA lawyers will spring to MAGA media to rationalize and justify it, and then, when even conservative judges or justices block Trump’s actions, they scream that the courts are lawless, not Trump.

Translation:  Fuck you, Stephens.  I'm an actual lawyer not some DEI hire from the Wall Street Journal brought on because Cardinal Douthat here wasn't red meat wingnut enough for the five MAGA rubes who Sulzberger believes still read his paper.  

French: It’s so important to distinguish between the core of MAGA — which dominates discourse online — from the bulk of voters who put Trump back in the White House.

driftglass: No it's not.  If they're not out-and-proud fascists, they extremely cool with being out-and-proud fascist-adjacent.  Fuck 'em all:  the three-strikes rule applies to everyone who voted for Trump during his third run for the White House.

Douthat: It’s not unique to MAGA, though — real partisans don’t change their vote just because the economy goes bad, and especially not under polarized conditions. It’s not like the inflation under Biden suddenly made partisan Democrats...

Translation: Both Sides... Both Sides... Both Sides...

Stephens: Well, Treasury Secretary Bessent is right. Market corrections are healthy. Recessions should sometimes happen.

Translation:  Let them eat cake.

Healy: Trump calling for the impeachment of that judge — and the notion of impeaching or disregarding judges generally whom Trump disagrees with.

Stephens: Terrible. I only stop to observe that all the liberals who went berserk over John Roberts’s nomination to the court 20 years ago owe the chief justice an apology...

Translation:  I am so consumed by my hatred of Liberals that there is nothing left inside of me, and it's really, really unfair that Trump's awfulness makes it harder to devote every word in every column I write to the subject of just how monstrous Liberals are.  

Stephens: Musk is off to a bad start in his government career, but I sincerely wish him success. The federal government isn’t just too big, it’s obese. Elon may yet be its Ozempic.

Translation:  Burn it all down -- I'll bring the marshmallows!  -- except for the parts I like.  

Douthat: We are two months into the presidency, and we just lived through four years of dramatic global and domestic upheaval under a Democratic president whose manifest incapacity was deliberately concealed from the country. I have a million concerns about where this administration is going, but it’s a bit soon to attack the president’s supporters for being irrationally loyal.

Translation:  I'm with Stephens.  Democrats are the worst.

In conclusion, while the four New York Times Conservatives columnists did collectively manage to blame both sides, express their unalloyed contempt for people like me, and confess that they have no idea what people outside of their tiny cossetted bubble of privilege think about a damn thing, they very definitely did not pinpoint why the reprogrammable meatbag base of the Republicans party love Trump more than before.

For the answer to that question they would need to stop sniffing each others Buckley farts and ask any one of us who A) live well outside their tiny cossetted bubble of privilege and, B) have been writing about the Republican party for 20 years now.  

Which they will never do because an honest answer would, well...

It is one of the more amusing ironies of our age that while elite New York Times Conservatives (and The Atlantic Conservatives, and The Bulwark Conservatives, and so on) may be anathema to the Republican MAGA base, both groups detest Liberals for exactly the same reason:  our existence and our decades of warnings make both groups look stupid.

I Am The Liberal Media

As Always, Bret "Bug" Stephens....

...is cordially invited to take a flying fuck at the moooon.  

This invitation is also extended to the entire House of Sulzberger for giving poisonous little trolls like Stephens a national platform at a once-respectable newspaper.

I Am The Liberal Media

As We Dance on the Razor’s Edge of This Fateful Election...

...people and institutions are reacting according to their nature.  

By hook or by crook, should Trump end up back in the White House in January, we Liberals know exactly how screwed we are.  Trump 2.0 will be the Republican Hell Train we have been warning about for 40 years arriving, at last, at its final destination.  

To the place where it has been headed all along.

We Murrica-hatin', terrorist-lovin', baby-killin' Libtards knew we had targets on our backs once the blogosphere took off and we found we could tell Bush/Cheney (and the Republican filth and legacy media stooges who gave us Bush/Cheney) exactly what we thought of them in big, bold, public letters.

Along the way from there to here some of us died, some of us disappeared, and others dropped the charade and showed us that they had never been one of us at all.  But for the rest of us, we had a pretty good idea what we signed up for.  

Under a Trump 2.0, the suffering of us small fry would be relatively small, but we'd feel it.  Little things like, say, the heart meds you need are suddenly no longer covered by your insurance.  So sorry!   They might be covered under TrumpCare, but you'll have to talk to your local Loyalty Office about getting on that plan.

On the other hand, the fact that we small fry have been pariahs for so long and so aggressively kept out of the national political conversation may work to our advantage.  After all, in the 20 years that we've been blogging we have proven decisively that  A) we have been right about the Right all along and, B) no one pays us the slightest heed.  And anyway, how far up the Enemies List can we be when we've been cursed, dismissed as rude pests, and blocked by Tim Miller and Matthew Dowd and Tom Nichols and Charlie Sykes and Glenn Greenwald.?

To be held in contempt by all of those and so many more?  Who knows?  With those credentials, in a new regime I might be to wrangle an ambassadorship!   

On the other, other hand, this is a very big country, and with local media being decimated and major media corporations knuckling under to a rising fascist party --

-- in that possible future it will likely fall to the small fry to get the word out about what's really happening to anyone who cares to listen.  So now might be a good time for all of you to archive your writing on a hard drive.  Y'know, just in case.

So much for the small fry like me.  

The suffering of the larger fry will be appreciably worse.  

You may see faces you know, voices you trusted, on teevee, now disheveled, gaunt and hollow-eyed, recanting their previous criticism of Il Douche.  Or they may just be gone one day, leaving no forwarding address.  Or perhaps they'll find a new base of operations in some congenial foreign land, although congenial foreign lands may quickly become less congenial when a nuclear-armed fascist government declares that harboring an Enemy of the Patriotic American People is something Il Douche does not look kindly on.   

Obviously, I'm not saying any of this will happen.  And I'm sure every one of us is doing everything in our power to make sure this is not our future.  But we writers and we copious readers have the curse of clear and vivid imagination, and this all really might happen. The numbers are so close that the future has become truly unknowable.  

And when the stakes are this high and the outcomes are this genuinely unpredictable, the bet hedging begins in earnest

Right off the bat, everyone knows that, if Kamala Harris wins, she isn't going to avenger herself on crap shacks like The Washington Post, or stage live show trials featuring True Conservative (tm) pettifoggers like Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat (despite my fervent wishes to the contrary,).  And crap shacks like the Post and elite slugs like Stephens and Douthat know it: under a Harris administration, those awful people and institutions will be free to go right on being as awful as they are now. 

Probably worse!

But under a Trump 2.0 administration?

Oh my friends, that is a very different animal indeed, which is why the cowardly, the careerist and the feckless are hedging the hell out of their bets now.

The L.A. Times -- 

The Wrap is reporting the LATimes had also planned a "Case Against Trump" series to run alongside its Kamala Harris endorsement before the owner quashed it: https://t.co/sk6A6RTpjG

— Eric Deggans at NPR (@Deggans) October 25, 2024

-- and the Washington Post --

Today would be a good day to cancel your Washington Post subscription. @wapo will not make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election: Democracy versus Fascism & they don't want to weigh in after 36 yrs despite their Democracy Dies in Darkness sloganhttps://t.co/cokGFw81ny pic.twitter.com/M1hzGHSsLB

— Fly Sistah 🪷 (@Fly_Sistah) October 25, 2024

-- both want to make it abundantly clear to any future Ministry of Truth officers that they never officially took sides against the fascists.  

As if that will save them.

 

If you were wondering about the endorsement policy of our local Republican rag, they abandoned their tradition of endorsing candidates four years ago, because of, y'know, "polarization" and such.  Back when they went from being our local Republican rag to a Gatehouse Media gutted corpse of a Republican rag:

There are few community recognition programs with the esteem of the First Citizen. We are proud to continue the tradition.

And as we celebrate the kick-off of one tradition, we are ending another — the SJ-R will not endorse candidates for office.

That decision was not made lightly.

Political endorsements have been a tradition for many news organizations. However, they are a holdover of days past, and I am not convinced that any endorsement we made would influence you to vote for a particular candidate. In 2008, when the country was not nearly as polarized as it is today...

The SJ-R is not alone in its decision to move away from endorsements. News organizations across the country have made similar choices. The Dallas Morning News announced earlier this year that they would not endorse a candidate for president. The Peoria Journal Star and The Indy Star are among those who also will not make endorsements this election....

While our approach is changing, it fits today's political climate.

As always, thank you for reading the SJ-R.

Leisa Richardson is executive editor of The State Journal-Register and Lincoln Courier.

 

This week, as we have have already discussed, The New York Times' Bret Stephens went to truly ridiculous lengths to hide his terse, grudging endorsement of Kamala Harris under an avalanche of tarted up MAGA talking points about how incompetent and featherweight she is, how she's probably a Sekrit Commie Sleeper Cell and how, if Trump wins, it certainly won't be because the Republican base are a mob of bigots and imbeciles.  Heavens no!  They're all awesome!  The salt of the Earth!

The fault would lie with all of us god damned Liberals calling them bigots and imbeciles.  

And when the mob comes for him, he can calm them and turn them away by waving all of that in their faces.

As if that will save him.
 

And finally there is the case of Ross Douthat: Stephens' fellow True Conservative (tm) at The New York Times'. 

You remember Ross Douthat, right?

Douthat goes even further down Vichy Highway than Stephens by declaring that Harris is so terribly unfit for the presidency that he cannot bestow upon her his meaningless endorsement.  And for reasons I will leave it to you all to chew over out for yourselves, our Never Trump "allies" felt that two weeks out from this fateful election was the optimal time to elevate the petty, whiny opinions of their very good friend Ross.

Douthat argues that since Liberals have gone insane in the past five years, he cannot in good conscience support Kamala Harris.  In support of his thesis, Douthat cites wildly goofy nonsense like crazy Liberals are responsible for things like [no kidding] increased traffic deaths during COVID so, y'know, he just can't get onboard.  This is someone who has left the bottom of the barrel far behind that he is now scraping at the Earth's asthenosphere for excuses to keep his True Conservative (tm) skirts clean and hold himself aloof from making the only and obvious choice.

So when a phalanx of enforcers from Stephen Miller's Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice show up at The Bulwark's door, they can wave this interview in their faces as proof that they were committed to making sure Both Sides were fairly represented.  

And when they come around to Douthat's house to "interview" him, he can wave the very same interview in their faces as proof that he he was an obedient and loyal citizen who never took the side of the dirty Commie Marxist Left!

As if that will save them.

Burn The Lifeboats

Liberals Are Always To Blame for Everything: Part 1,000,000

From the Department of Straining at Gnats and Swallowing Camels, this just in:  Just in case the entire body of work of this bitter, venomous hack hadn't already made this clear, Bret "Bug" Stephens really, really, really hates Democrats.

And yet this week Bretbug felt himself back into a corner from whence he felt there was no escape but to very reluctantly endorse Kamala Harris long after any sentient creature had stopped caring about anything Stephens had to say about anything.

However, since this clown runs his mouth under the banner of The New York Times, people noticed, and there was a tiny round of golf claps from a number of people who clearly lead very sheltered lives.  There was also  a larger round of baying at the moon from MAGA zombies about how what'dya expect from sum New York Time Librul!  If he wanna keep his job, he hadda do it.  

For goodness sake people, Stephens even lost the respect of Dennis Prager!  Which apparently matters to some number of moral invertebrates skulking around somewhere out there in the dark.

Dennis Prager Uses Bret Stephens To Explain TDS – and more | Religio-Political Talk (RPT) - https://t.co/O2aHSMgG0E Prager’s Description: Dennis defines “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and explains why “Never Trumpers” have a narcissistic attitude that could ruin our country.

— Blood Bathed Pony Soldier (@papagiorgio200) October 23, 2024

 But that's not the story.  

The story is the ramshackle psychological scaffolding Stephens had to hurriedly erect around his bitter, grudging endorsement in order to 1) absolve himself of the words coming out of his mouth, and 2) make it clear that everything bad that was happening and that might happen in the future is entirely the fault of us malevolent Liberals.  

Like Ron Swanson trying to take a bite of banana for the sake of his family --

-- the only way Stephens was able to choke down a mealy-mouthed endorsement of Harris, was to mash into the middle of a huge, greasy sandwich of contempt, loathing, lies and barely concealed racism.  

It's barely been a month since  this smarmy, preening asshole was stamping his feet and demanding that Dems damn well better impress him. 

Spin 'round.  

Do a lil' dance.

 An' it'd bedder be good, goddamnit.   Bedder be great! 

Cause I got lotsa choices. Lotsa lotsa choices!

This was New York Times employee Bret Stephens less that two months ago in that stiflingly mildewed drawing room puppet show called "The Conversation" in which the 817-year-old Gail Collins attempts to yuck it up with whichever junior-most Conservative on the payroll drew the short straw:

Harris is an even weaker candidate than Biden. Not that I’ll vote for Trump, but I don’t think I can vote for her.

Poor ol' Bret really thinks he's Ellen Foley from Paradise By The Dashboard Light.

But he's not.  

He's just another bitter, jumped-up Conservative loser who's been wrong about everything since forever, but is protected from the harsh marketplace consequences of his incompetence by the largess of the House of Sulzberger...

And of course, what would a Stephens shitpost be without a steaming side dish of Both Siderism?

Trump may be much the worse sinner, but Democrats aren’t blameless when it comes to weaponizing the instruments of state power to interfere with the will of the voters.

So at last, thanks to the miraculous intervention of Arnold Palmer's penis or whatever it was that finally dragged him one micron over the 50 yards line, Stephens spat out a sullen, bitchy, last minute endorsement of Harris which, he wanted to make very, very clear, was:

...a 99.999 percent vote against Trump and a 0.001 percent vote for Harris. 

He was so desperate to make sure that no one thought he got any of that icky Libtard stank on him, he followed his "endorsement" with a long paragraph describing Harris as “vacuous”...“stumbling”... “capitulating” to the “party’s left flank”.  There was the usual yadda yadda about ”identity politics” and "mindlessly expanding the role of government".   Stephens screeched about her “mediocre advisers, like her embarrassingly bad veep pick” and that her  “failed … presidency will do more to turbocharge the far right in this country than to diminish it.”

Y'know, because the base of Stephen's party are racists. 

He used all his words except “uppity”, which you know was dancing on the tip of his tongue. 

So, was that enough decontaminating his general area with ISwearToRepublicanJesusI'mNotLiberal disinfectant to give Bretbug a good night's sleep.

Not by a damn sight.  Because remember, this is a ISwearToRepublicanJesusI'mNotLiberal sandwich, and all that has gone before was just half of that big, greasy lard-bomb.  

The other half came the very next day.  A long screed making sure everyone knows who will be to blame if Trump wins.  

There’s One Main Culprit if Donald Trump Wins

Can you guess who it is?

That's right kids!  It's you and me!  Because isn't it always:

There’s truth in all of it. But it lets off the hook the main culprit: the way in which leading liberal voices in government, academia and media practice politics today. 

Stephens blats on for another few hundred words like these:

The politics of condescension, typified by Barack Obama’s suggestion this month that Black men might be reluctant to vote for Harris because they “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”

Again, he means "uppity".  Y'know, I can never get enough of extremely privileged, extremely caucasian narcissists like Stephens whitesplaining to the first Black president how he should talk to Black men.  It's like 2011 all over again!

And words like these:

The politics of name-calling, which happens every time Trump’s voters are told they are racists, misogynists, weird, phobic, low-information or, most recently, supporters of a fascist...

Yes, those dirty, rotten Liberals scoundrels who call Trump a fascist like [checks notes]  Donald Trump's White House chief of staff:

John Kelly, the retired Marine general who was Donald Trump's White House chief of staff, entered the 2024 fray in stunning fashion, saying the former president fits "into the general definition of fascist" and wanted the "kind of generals Hitler had" in a series of interviews published Tuesday.

And [checks notes again] the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump:

“We have got to stop him!” Milley said. “You have got to stop him!” By “you” he meant the press broadly. “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” His eyes darted around the room filled with 200 guests of the Cohen Group, a global business consulting firm headed by former defense secretary William Cohen. Cohen and former defense secretary James Mattis spoke at the reception.

“A fascist to the core!” Milley repeated to me.

I will never forget the intensity of his worry.

The rest of his blather as as bad or worse.  Applying a New York Times high gloss to every insipid MAGA talking point, and personally vouching for the rectitude and honesty of GOP bigot and imbecile base, because, I guess, these MAGA zombies are so far gone that they sincerely believe that...

You see, by Bretbug's reckoning, democracy is not on the brink of destruction because the base of his party are reprogrammable meatbags or that willing stooges like him played an integral part in shaping them into a mob of reprogrammable meatbag.  Heck no!  According to Bret Stephens of The New York Times. democracy is on the brink of destruction because we mean ol' Liberals keep pointing out that the base of his party are reprogrammable meatbags

Over he course of his career, Stephens has shown himself to be a comprehensive failure as a writer, as an analyst, as a citizen and as a human being.  

How fortunate for him that he works for the House of Sulzberger where all of those failures are considered valuable assets.  

 

Burn The Lifeboats

Bret Stephens Believes It’s 1:55 AM, the Electoral Bar Is Closing at 2:00...

..and, sure, he's a smarmy, preening asshole but, hey, Hobson's Choice amirite! So, Dems, what're you gonna do to 'mpress me huh?  

Spin 'round.  

Do a lil' dance.

 An' it'd bedder be good, goddamnit.   Bedder be great! 

Cause I got lotsa choices. Lotsa lotsa choices!

This was New York Times employee Bret Stephens less that two months ago in that stiflingly mildewed drawing room puppet show called "The Conversation" in which the 817-year-old Gail Collins attempts to yuck it up with whichever junior-most Conservative on the payroll drew the short straw:

Harris is an even weaker candidate than Biden. Not that I’ll vote for Trump, but I don’t think I can vote for her.

And this is Bret Bug today:

Poor ol' Bret really thinks he's Ellen Foley from Paradise By The Dashboard Light.

But he's not.  

He's just another bitter, jumped-up Conservative loser who's been wrong about everything since forever, but is protected from the harsh marketplace consequences of his incompetence by the largess of the House of Sulzberger.  

And so today we get this drivel:

But: Trump.

That’s the all-purpose response for many voters to any doubts about Harris’s qualifications. It makes November’s choice easy for anyone sincerely convinced that the former president poses an existential threat to the perpetuation of our political institutions. It also makes it easy for Never-Trumpers who hope that a decisive electoral rebuke of the former president might return the G.O.P. to its pre-MAGA incarnation as the party of John McCain or Mitt Romney.

And this, which has a light gloss of verisimilitude (the GOP isn't going back to it's "its former ideological leanings" because they were all a lie), on top of the ludicrous dismissal of Trump as a genuine threat):

Yet Trump victory or no, the Republican Party isn’t likely to revert to its former ideological leanings. And the argument that Trump is our Mussolini, scheming with ever-greater malevolence and cunning to end the Republic, is getting a little long in the tooth.

And of course, what would a Stephens shitpost be without a steaming side dish of Both Siderism?

Trump may be much the worse sinner, but Democrats aren’t blameless when it comes to weaponizing the instruments of state power to interfere with the will of the voters.

The Alert Reader will notice how closely Stephens' POV tracks with so many other recently-former Republicans.   The entire Republican party is written off as a toxic disaster.  Never Trumpers who think otherwise are Pollyannaish dopes.  And, of course, the Democrats -- who Stephens has spent his adult life career slagging for a living -- can be dismissed as not "blameless" for how utterly fucked the Republican party has become.  Because his head would explode in a cloud of smarm if he were ever forced to admit that the Left had been right about the Right all along.  

And completely absent from this bill of particulars?  Bret Bug himself.  Like other members of his sneering, little tribe of recently-former Republicans, Stephens holds himself above it all, accepting no responsibility for any of it.  His job is to just cruise along in high Earth orbit, and muse about how terribly disappointed he is in everyone else.

Then, after all the negging [Negging ("to neg", meaning "negative feedback") is an act of emotional manipulation whereby a person makes a deliberate backhanded compliment or otherwise flirtatious remark to another person to undermine their confidence and attempt to engender in them a need for the manipulator's approval.]  comes the 2:00 AM electoral Lothario's Big Pitch

For what my vote is worth — very little, considering I live in New York — I’d much rather cast a ballot for Harris than stay home. But votes need to be earned.

So sorry Bret.  The clock has already struck 2:00, the bar has emptied out and no one is interested in your pathetic offer.  

Time for you to toddle on home and jerk off to Reagan's 1961 Medicare is the slippery slop to Communism speech (of which we're 98% certain you own in original vinyl in near-mint condition) until you pass out.  

 

Burn The Lifeboats

Because Bret Bug Only Has Democrats' Best Interests at Heart

Burn The Lifeboats

Brain Bug is Afraid

As an unreconstructed neocon, Bret "Bug" Stephens remains extraordinary extravagant about who he thinks Joe Biden should be bombing and how hard.  Listening to him whine about how cautious Biden is being about not lobbing lit road flares around in a region that is already saturated with gasoline and oily rags, one cannot help but conclude that the idea of "From the River to the Sea" is an eastward-pointing slogan for Bret Bug.  That he'd be more than happy to restart the Bush-era delusion of region-wide regime decapitation, starting with Biden glassing everything from the Jordan River east to the Caspian Sea, then sending in the Marines to something something Jeffersonian democracy and a flat tax.  

Only by embracing this Cheneyesque vision of American hard military power, violently projected everywhere from Day One, could Biden have won the favor of Bret Bug.  Which, you would think, after the historic, humiliating debacle that became of the Great Iraqi Liberation Thing Bug and his fellow neocons were so enthusiastic about, clowns like Bug would have second thoughts about.  

But you would be wrong. 

Clowns like Bug never learn. That's part of their Conservatives ethos: never, ever admit you're wrong about anything.  Just keep doubling down on your disastrous ideas until a coven of Underwear Gnomes pass a miracle and everything turns around and you can tell history to fuck off because, secretly, you've were right all along!

The trick to understanding goofs like Bug is that they do not live in the here-and-now.  Instead, thanks to the princely salary that the House of Sulzberger provides him, Bug can afford to live far over the ever -receding horizon of the future, in an imaginary happy tomorrow place where he has already been proven right and he can tell all us smarty-pants Liberals to suck it.

But until then, according to Bug, the very least Biden can do to make it up to Bug for failing him so badly is to immediately announce he is stepping aside, thus throwing the Democratic party into chaos six months before the election and virtually guaranteeing a Trump win in November.

His op-ed is entitled "The Most Courageous Thing That Joe Biden Can Do", and by now I think we can all agree where anatomically Mr. Bret 'Bug' Stephens of The New York Times can stick his advice and opinions with a ramrod.

The first sentence is the usual Obligatory Conserative Reagan Knob-Slobbering -- 

In 1977, Ronald Reagan shared his thoughts on the Cold War with his aide Richard Allen...

-- about which even the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab electron microscope could not detect how little of a damn I give.

And then, right at the end, comes this bag of burning shit dropped on the White House lawn.  The doorbell is rung, and Bug scampers away into the night.  

It all leaves the president with one option that can be a win for America and, ultimately, his place in history. He can still choose not to run, to cede the field to a Democrat who can win — paging Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer — and do the hard and brave things it will take to secure security and peace for the free world.

 So what motivates a mook like Bug to not just write such patently ludicrous trash, but to publish it in The New York Times?

I would speculate that it's fear.

Fear of what, you may ask?

Fear that a Biden victory in November would mean that Bug's dream of an America that bombs the hell out of anyone who even looks at us cross-eyed would have to be shelved for another four years.  Because, I would speculate, Bug would rather live under a lawless madman who will garrotte our democracy to death on live television but will also blow a lot of shit up that Bug wants to seen blown up...

...than under a judicious Democrat who is trying very hard not to start WWIII and who has also undoubtedly driven Bug mad by managing to pass more landmark progressive legislation, and against greater odds, than any Democrat since LBJ.  

Looks to me that, not-so-secretly, Bug is afraid that Biden might win.  

And I, for one. take comfort in that.

I Am The Liberal Media

Bret Stephens Is Now a One Issue Op-Ed Guy

Since October, New York Times Conservative affirmative action hire Bret "Bug" Stephens has written fifteen op-ed columns for his employer, all on the same subject.

In fact, this is the title of his latest column.

Why I Can’t Stop Writing About Oct. 7.

Other than his icky, stilted "Conversation" thing with Gail Collins once a week or so, this is now all Stephens writes about, and during those icky, stilted "Conversations" with Ms. Collins, it is almost all he talks about.  When she tries to steer him into talking about, say, climate change, he shrugs  and quotes some poem he claims his father made him memorize, then they're done.  When Collins brings up domestic politics, he automatically dismisses Liberals as idiots.  When the subject of the elections of 2024 is raised, here's Stephens' opinion.:

How about putting in a good word for Dean Phillips, the Minnesota representative challenging Biden? Or at least urging the Biden team to lose Kamala Harris in favor of a veep pick more Americans would feel confident about as a potential president, like Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary?

Then, back to Israel.  

Or, to change things up just a little, Israel with a lot of Liberal Colleges Are All Neo-Fascist Cesspools top-spin:

Colleges have discovered the virtues of free speech only now, when the speech in question hurts Jews.

If Archie Bunker and Benjamin Netanyahu had a baby, and then sent that baby to the University of Chicago so it could learn to express the crabbed thoughts of its small mind using Big Words, that baby would be Bret Stephens.  And against that kind of sneering contempt for anyone who does not share his opinions, Gail Collins is a poor match.  Should  Stephens opine that, say, it was Liberal swine that ruined Murrica and drove Real Murrica into the arms of Donald Trump, Collins would likely riposte with something like, "Ha ha ha! Agree to disagree, Bret!  Let's move on to...what do you think of the lovely fall foliage!"

This whole "Conversation" conceit is useless, pundit padding in a paper already overstuffed with stupid, bad opinions.  It should have been retired decades ago, back when it was David Brooks blaming the Left for whatever wild hair he had up his ass that week, and Collins coming back with ,"Ha ha ha! Agree to disagree, David!  Let's move on to...what do you think of the Cubs chances this year!"

But...

But...since goofs like Stephens never risk putting themselves in any venue where anyone will ask them any questions on any topic that he had not already agreed to, I sometimes allow myself to dream that, just for one day, a little journalism might slip into this puppet show.  

That Gail Collins might dare to Remember Stuff Bret Stephens Actually Wrote.  

And. y'know, ask him about it. 

Like, say, three years ago when (from "Today In "Liberals Are The Real Hitlers":  Bret Bug Stephens")...

...Bret Stephens quickly and airily dismisses Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party as an irritating but transient inconvenience -- much like, say, an infestation of bedbugs --

Reading Orwell for the Fourth of July
As we celebrate freedom, speaking freely is in danger.

...
We also have our own problems with freedom.

For once, the main problem isn’t Donald Trump. The president may be an instinctual fascist, a wannabe autocrat. But, after nearly four years in power, he’s been unmasked as an incompetent one.

Trump may have privately praised Xi Jinping for building concentration camps for Uighurs. Congress still passed legislation to impose sanctions on China for them. He may want to bring Russia back to the G7. The other six won’t let him. He may have sought to abolish DACA for the Dreamers. John Roberts decided otherwise. He may call the press an “enemy of the American people.” That enemy still operates without restraint when it comes to slamming him.

To adapt the Lloyd Bentsen line, Donald John Trump, you’re no Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

-- before taking on the real fascists who are, even as we speak, sneaking sneaking up on Murrica through the tall grass of the Oberlin college quad:

The more serious problem today comes from the left: from liberal elites who, when tested, lack the courage of their liberal convictions; from so-called progressives whose core convictions were never liberal to begin with; from administrative types at nonprofits and corporations who, with only vague convictions of their own, don’t want to be on the wrong side of a P.R. headache...

Press him.   

Ask him if he still thinks Trump isn't the main problem?  

Ask him whether "the more serious problem today comes from the left"?  

And keep asking until, "Ha ha ha! Agree to disagree, Gail!  Let's move on to...what do you think of the chocolate chip ice cream!"

No Half Measures

Bret Stephens on Memory and Forgetting

Shout out to Alert Reader Katherine for catching this line from from Bret Stephens at the very end of this week's New York Times' "Conversation" feature. 

Actual Bret Stephens:  And before we go, I hope our readers didn’t miss Ian Johnson’s extraordinary essay about the Chinese journalists and historians fighting to preserve the knowledge of China’s tragedies and atrocities in the face of the regime’s attempts to suppress it. It made me think of how badly our own sense of history, including events like Jan. 6, has eroded, and reminded me of my favorite Milan Kundera lines: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

driftglass:  Cool!  Hey Bret, what about remembering the deeply ugly, racist history of your Republican party and your Conservative movement prior to 2016/2017? 

 

Imaginary Bret Stephens:  Shaddap!  Shut your lousy, stinking, disrespectful Liberal pie hole! 

driftglass:  I see.  Touchy subject.  OK then, how about since you brought up the subject of "lice", maybe you could use your memory thingy to remind us why you are known throughout Christendom as "Bret Bug"?

Imaginary Bret Stephens stares icily at your 'umble scrivener.

driftglass:  Wow.  Another touchy subject?  OK then, lets let The Guardian have the last word:

NYT columnist quits Twitter after daring critic to 'call me a bedbug to my face'

Free speech advocate Bret Stephens emailed David Karpf’s boss to complain about ‘bedbug’ joke – and then quit Twitter after being widely mocked

    

Burn The Lifeboats

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

Now Watch This Drive: At The Very Serious Conservative Flea Market of Very Bad Ideas

Armed with the hammer of the boundless certainty of their dogma, and the anvil of their sneering contempt for the Left, Republicans like Bret Stephens and Tom Nichols continue their life's work from their respective sinecures -- 

20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq War

By Bret Stephens [New York Times]

-- at their respective, respectable publications.

Just War.  

by Tom Nichols  [The Atlantic]

I supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I have changed my mind about some things but not everything...

Now I'm going to do something unfair.  I'm going to interleave selected quotes from both articles by both men among my comments and not tell you which is which.  

But since both men are highly paid writers-of-opinions for national publications, you surely shouldn't have any trouble distinguishing one from the other by their mighty words alone, right?

Right?

Anyway, here they both are -- 

The record provides ample evidence of the justice of a war against Saddam Hussein’s regime. Iraq has shown itself to be a serial aggressor led by a dictator willing to run imprudent risks, including an attack on the civilians of a noncombatant nation during the Persian Gulf War; a supreme enemy of human rights that has already used weapons of mass destruction against civilians; a consistent violator of both UN resolutions and the terms of the 1991 cease-fire treaty, to say nothing of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions before and since the Persian Gulf War; a terrorist entity that has attempted to reach beyond its own borders to support and engage in illegal activities that have included the attempted assassination of a former U.S. president; and most important, a state that has relentlessly sought nuclear arms against all international demands that it cease such efforts...

Any one of these would be sufficient cause to remove Saddam and his regime(and wars have started over less), but taken together...

-- doggedly pound away at history -- 

The question now was whether even Saddam Hussein was worth the cost. Twenty years ago, I would have said yes. Today, I would say no—but I must add the caveat that no one knew then, nor can anyone know now, how much more dangerous a world we might have faced with Saddam and his psychopathic sons still in power...

But if there was one indisputably real W.M.D. in Iraq, it was Hussein himself. Until his downfall, he put everyone and everything he encountered at risk...

Ultimately, the choice for the United States and our allies in early 2003 wasn’t invasion or containment. It was invasion or, over time, the quasi-rehabilitation of Hussein’s Iraq...

-- excising inconvenient impurities -- 

And yet, for a few years more, I stayed the course. I believed that Iraqis, like anyone else, wanted to be free. They might not be Jeffersonian democrats, but they hated Saddam, and now they had a chance at something better...

Still, there’s too much revisionist history about the Iraq War... 

Critics of the war now make the point that the intelligence fiasco wrecked America’s credibility. It’s true. But no less damaging was the never-ending “Bush lied” charge that, 10 years later, morphed into the “Obama lied” charge when it came to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria or the suggestion that President Biden is lying about last year’s sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline. One conspiracy theory tends to beget another, in ways that are destructive to all sides... 

-- and adding in retroactive justifications --

In 2003, I was far too confident in the ability of my own government to run a war of regime change, which managed to turn a quick operational victory into one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in American history...

The problem in Iraq wasn’t simply a matter of faulty decisions, of which — as in every war — there were many. It was of faulty systems. Around the 10th anniversary of the invasion, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction painted a devastating picture of our efforts. Billions of dollars were wasted on projects that were rarely, if ever, completed. Uncle Sam, whose cruise missiles could destroy Iraqi targets with astounding precision, couldn’t keep the lights on in Baghdad...

-- until they have reforged the past into a shiny story of the nobility of their idols, the folly of their enemies and in which they, somehow, have been right all along.

Today, there is not a word of this I would take back as an indictment of Saddam Hussein or as justification for the use of force. But although I believed that the war could be justified on these multiple grounds, the George W. Bush administration chose a morally far weaker argument for a preventive war...

Readers will want to know whether, knowing what I know now, I would still have supported the decision to invade. Not for the reasons given at the time. Not in the way we did it. But on the baseline question of whether Iraq, the Middle East and the world are better off for having gotten rid of a dangerous tyrant, my answer remains yes...

And having hammered an irredeemably vile past into a gleaming mathom (look it up) that no Very Serious Conservative need be ashamed to display on their mantle, both men rush off to sell their trinkets at their respective booths, side-by-side, at the never-ending Very Serious Conservative Flea Market of Very Bad Ideas.  

Behold, a Tip Jar!