Lifelong Conservative Sarah Longwell Going on Morning Joe...

 

...to flog her new book and tell newly minted "independent" Joe Scarborough how Democrats should be running things may well be peak I fucking told you this is where we'd end up if liberals handed over our hard-won moral authority to a bunch of Republicans who had to flee their own party because they fucked it up so badly.

Fun Fact: For months now, The Bulwark has basically morphed into Sarah Longwell's personal AbeBooks page, reminding everyone every few minutes to Buy! Her! Book! Not a single conversation passes without her eventually beginning a sentence with, "As I say in my book..."

Now indulge yourself for a moment and imagine what the world would look like if the liberals who had been right about the Right all along had been given even a fraction of the tens of millions of dollars' worth of free, glowing, round-the-clock promotion these ex-Republicans have received from the legacy media since Day One.

Second Fun Fact: I have been asked by readers several times over the past 21 years why I don't write a book of my own. After all, I've got around 12,000 posts to draw from, some of them the length of novellas, so why not?

The answer is simple. It would be a Love's Labour's Lost kind of thing. A tremendous amount of work to do it right. Weeding out the typos alone might take as long as Penelope weaving and unweaving Laertes' burial shroud.

Then I'd be on my own to hire professionals to vet it and edit it. Then it'd have to be self-published and self-promoted, with me bearing all the costs. And in the end, while I'm sure a number of you lovely people would buy the thing, I would have spent far more time, energy, and money on such a project than I could ever hope to recoup.  

And frankly, there are a lot more enjoyable ways to lose money than writing a book that will change nothing and that almost no one will ever read.  

Burn The Lifeboats

"Inadvertently"? You Keep Using That Word.

I do not think it means what you think it means.

This is so fucking adorable I could plotz.

We had the makings of just such an "independent media" decades ago.  

It was the Liberal blogosphere.

We saw through the legacy media's toxic addiction to the "Both Sides" lie.  We warned -- very clearly, every day -- exactly where the poisonous combination of escalating conservative-media lies and racism, coupled with obstinate legacy-media Both Siderist denialism, was going to lead.

And all of those warnings were routinely slandered and dismissed by the likes of Longwell, Kristol and all the rest of them until it was far, far too late.  After all, we were just Dirty Fucking Hippies.

Funny thing about the term Dirty Fucking Hippies, which was coined, I believe by Atrios/Duncan Black sometime during the early aughts.  This would have been during roughly the same period that Sarah Longwell was working for the Conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and Bloody Bill Kristol was pimping the shit out of Bush's Iraq Debacle, promising it would all be over in a matter of weeks, and calling anyone who opposed it a clueless libtard traitor. 

Y'know, the Good Old Days.

The point of “Dirty Fucking Hippies” wasn't the profanity: it was the sarcasm. It was how Beltway pundits and journalists portrayed the online left precisely because bloggers could say things establishment media figures refused to say.

In fact, it could get you fired.  From Sarah Boxer, in The New York Review, February 2008:

Bloggers give new, Web-inflected meanings to old words. A “troll” on the Web is someone who posts provocative things just to cause an outcry. “Astroturfing” is creating a fake grassroots movement. Bloggers also sprinkle their blogs with expressions like WTF (translation: “What the fuck?”), lol (laugh out loud), and meh (a verbal shrug). They willfully misspell—like “teh” for “the.” They call the Internet “the internets,” cutely following George W. Bush’s slip. If people wrote like this for publication, they’d be fired. 

And, indeed, there is a term for getting canned because of your blog: “dooced,” named for the blogger Dooce, now a stay-at-home-mother (SAHM) or, as she puts it, a “Shit Ass Ho Motherfucker,” who got fired for blogging about her employer.

Bloggers challenged mainstream-media gatekeeping and the way the media had become an insulated, self-satisfied cult of performative "objectivity".  It's Jay Rosen's "view from nowhere".  And starting during the Bush years, Liberal bloggers treated profanity as evidence that they were not performing objectivity for elite approval.

Which sure sounds a fuck of a lot like the makings of an "independent media" to me.  

And of course, during all that time, Longwell, Kristol and all the rest of them never objected to the corrosive Both Siderism of the legacy media, because that corrosive Both Siderism always tilted the playing field heavily in favor of the Right.  It still does. And so only now, when the same Both Siderism is no longer reliably serving their side, do Longwell, Kristol and all the rest of them seem to have discovered that there's something wrong.  

But it's the word "inadvertently" that makes it art.  

As you might know, The Bulwark runs live-read ads for The New York Times, and were running live-read ads for The Washington Post right up until pundits like Jennifer Rubin began fleeing the place.  Their rapid growth has depended almost entirely on MSNBC (now MS NOW) promoting their business and their employees practically every single day since it was founded in 2019, plus regular appearances on NPR and that bastion of Both Siderism, the  Sunday Shows.  And, of course, by maintaining at least a cordial relationship with the legacy media.  A small sample:

 The Washington Post (May 2024):  

"The Bulwark finds a sweet spot in the center-right"

Vanity Fair (2025)

"How The Bulwark Is Thriving in a New Trump Era"

Semafor (2025)

"Washington Post economics columnist moves to The Bulwark"

Which is no surprise given that the Trump origin myth that Never Trumpers have been peddling since day one:  that Trump came outta nowhere and somehow hypnotized 77 million voters and virtually every elected Republican into becoming fascists.  Isn't that weird?

That story is ever so much more congenial to the Both Siderist bubble the lords and ladies of the legacy media live in than the actual history of the modern GOP that Liberals are always yapping about.  

So why go out of your way to piss off institutions who you wish to speak kindly of your business and your brand new book?

Hence the word "inadvertently".

But we Dirty Fucking Hippies know better.

Oh yes, we fucking well do.  

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

Looky Who's Getting A Glow Up From Our "Allies"

Once they were let into our Big Tent, unrepentant and ambitious to "reform" our party to their liking...

And once their friends in the media helped them colonize what little was left of the "Liberal" media and banish actual Liberals who had been right all along to the realm of the Neverborn...

...it was as inevitable as night following day that they would use their growing influence to reconstitute some version of the comfortingly familiar media ecosystem they once knew.  One that includes the likes of Chris Cillizza, but where you will find nary a one OG Liberal writer or podcaster.  

Burn The Lifeboats

A Unified Theory of Never Trumpism

As MSNOW, and the former staff of The Weekly Standard (The Bulwark) and Barack Obama's former joke writers (the Pod Save lads) continue to amalgamate into a single, Centrist/Center-Right media keiretsu, their third-rate/too-late epiphanies keep coming fast and furious.

This one in particular kept me chuckling all the way through the three-and-a-half hours Blue Gal and I spent at a local cinema watching half an hour of coming attractions (90% horror flicks) and three hours of Christopher Nolan's substantially revised version of The Odyssey.  I had no fear that my soft chuckles might disturb our fellow cinema patrons  because HOLY FUCK IT WAS LOUD.  And not ordinary, Nolan-loud.  I have no objection to ordinary, Nolan-loud.  This was loud -- like a jet engine and a fire alarm simultaneously going off six inches from your ear loud. "Trying to drive Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican Embassy in Panama City and force him to surrender." loud.  "My God, why didn't I bring a pot of wax to seal my ears?" loud.   

Repeatedly.  For minutes on end.

Anyhoo, I kept right on chortling because this time their third-rate/too-late epiphany came in the form of a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, the problem with the Republican Party stems from the fact that it's full of Republicans and a brief lament that no one else has thought to entertain this possibility.

Sad!

Jon Lovett (Pod Save lads): There's the quote going around uh it's something to the effect of more Americans are fascist than we realize.  And one day we're going to find out. And so I I want to I want to this is actually where I wanted to go next because um I think this is an old Hemingway.... But the gist of it I think does apply. A point you've made repeatedly which I think there's very little equity to in politics is... uh... you can blame Trump, you can blame misinformation, you can blame  Republicans, but and this is a a paraphrase of something you've written.  77 million Americans who voted for Trump are some combination of unserious, decadent, or weak. Now it it's a lot cheaper in politics to blame the powers that be. That's true on the left, that's true on the right. There's not a lot of discussion about the culpability of the actual voters and their agency in this. So, can you just as somebody that has been an observer uh of conservatism from the inside for a long time, uh what have you learned about um the voters themselves through this period?

Jonathan V. Last (Bulwark):  Well, so I mean I can tell you my impressions. I can't tell you that they are like facts that I've learned. Um, what I have seen suggests to me though that you to avoid ... to avoid...uh, coming to the conclusion that voters wanted what they chose, you got to start creating a whole bunch of  Rube Goldberg contraptions. And the minute you push on any of these constructs even a little bit, they start wobbling and so you have to build another one, right? 

And h/t to Alert Listener Walt for pointing this out.

My Unified Theory of Never Trumpism?  

That they will always be on the verge of catching up with where Liberals were 20 years ago.  

They always present their epiphanies as if they just discovered an elusive, and previously unknown element lurking between Fluorine and Nitrogen on the periodic table.

Their new element?

It's called 'oxygen' fellas." 

Congratulations.  You 'discovered' oxygen.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Today In Political Paleontology...

Nothing to see here.  Just a couple of Cold War relics scolding Democrats for trying to live up the legacy of FDR.

To lull themselves to sleep at night, they play this as soothing, white noise ASMR.

I Am The Liberal Media

"We"? Who The Fuck is "We"?

Once again, it is breathtaking but not at all surprising to see former Republicans, who were already deeply wired into the legacy media, building a massive media conglomerate by just copy/pasting what Liberal bloggers were writing about the Right more than 20 years ago.

Everyone out here in what's left of the Liberal blogosphere knew who they were, and not one of us were letting anyone off the hook.  If the Bulwark crew want's to get a good look at who was letting them off the hook back when they might have been stopped, I'd suggest at their next staff meeting they should take a good, hard look around the table because the culprits are in your house.  

All of this would sting a little less if it weren't for the fact that those Liberal voices who were, in fact, right all along, are the same Liberal voices they mocked and castigated as crackpot alarmists back when they worked for Team Evil.

And it would sting a lot less if they stopped using their new media conglomerate to continue pretending those Liberal voices never existed.

But of course, you know the rule...

No Fair Remembering Stuff

Things That Make You Doubt Whether You Exist At All

This exchange between former Trump spokesmodel turned Bulwark employee, Sarah Matthews, and Tim  Miller made me check my blogroll and archives to make sure the entire history of the Liberal blogosphere/ podcast universe really existed.  Or had I hit my head on a low-slung door casing in 1998 and just dreamed it all up.

Matthews:  Don't get me wrong like of course there's a little part of me that thinks internally of course it feels good to be right but like I didn't want to be right about all of this. 

Tim Miller: I did and that's one way that we're different. And I don't want to be immodest or anything, but it does feel like as I survey the news that we're going to go to this morning, like that the most extreme cringe version of Never Trumpism uh seems like it was it was correct. Like, whatever person you have in your mind, you're like, "This person like hates Trump so much that some of their takes are even a little bit like, you know, make you wince a little bit because they've gone so far around the bend." Like that person, whoever that person is in your mind, was like way more right than any anybody who tried to say like,  "Let's call it balls and strikes." Like, let's see, you know, he's he had some good points on this or that. 

Matthews:  And now obviously like you know five years of being the on the anti-Trump side and yeah feels feels good to know that we were right.

Sure she did all the things and enjoyed all the perks and told all the lies and backed all the madness, but she reassures Tim, in her hip-hop heart (tm New York Times Pitchbot) she was never really down to clown.  She was never really bought in to all the MAGA stuff.  Deep down she knew things weren't right.

(So lemme understand.  Back then, when she worked for Donald Trump, on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis she was just lying about what she truly believed.  And doing it so expertly that no one could tell that she never believed the things that were coming out of her mouth.  

But now she's telling the unvarnished truth?  And you can trust that because...?  C'mon people.  It's like no one has ever seen Double Indemnity. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. The File on Thelma Jordon. Or  No Man of Her Own, )

Well none of those questions were on the table.  Instead Tim did the podcast equivalent of chucking her under the chin and telling her, it's OK kiddo.  As the official brand-ambassador for the "pro-democracy coalition", I can assure you, all is forgiven. You're on The Bulwark payroll now, and we absolve everybody.   

Everybody?

Well --- not everybody.  There are two groups whose transgressions are so grievous that they can never be excused.

The first group is one guy.  Tucker Carlson.  Who has always been lying, skeevy con man who'll say anything to advance his personal and political fortunes.  All his "apology" amounts to is another MAGA rat scurrying down the-rat line of a sinking ship.  Never trust this guy.  

The second group are... Liberals.  Especially Liberal bloggers and podcasters who had the poor taste to have been. inconveniently, 100% right about the Right since long before there was ever such a thing as  The Bulwark or a Never Trumper.  Since long before Trump was even a thing.  

If the Bulwark crew had it within their power to wish all of us with long memories and detailed files ... 

... all into the cornfield, they'd do it before close of business.

But since that is beyond their abilities, they settle for pretending we never existed, except as straw men whose imaginary follies prompt endless eye-rolling from the savvy set.

I Am The Liberal Media

Goin’ to a Party Where No One’s Still Alive

As longtime readers of this blog know, my opinion of former RNC chair Michael Steele is that he's rather a grifting hustlebuck who will take pretty much any side of any issue depending on which way the wind is blowing and who is covering his tab.  

Let's face it, no one would know who Michael Steele is if Barack Obama hadn't been elected president in 2008.  He'd have gone down in the history books as another minor politician who's political career stalled out on the middle rungs   of state government, and who went on to do occasional Fox News hits, sit on corporate boards and maybe teach poly sci at a state university.  

Not a bad life.   

But instead, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in November of 2008, and was inaugurated on January 20, 2009.  Ten days later, on January 30, 2009, the manifestly racist Republic National Committee elected Steele as its party chairman because they desperately needed to pretend that they weren't a manifestly racist organization.  

To be blunt, GOP bigots needed a black face fronting for their party, and Steele was only too happy to take the job.  

If you follow Illinois politics you may have noticed the striking similarities between the national GOP's panicked election of Steele just days after Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the Illinois GOP's  panicked nomination of an out-of-state lunatic named Alan Keyes to run against Obama the Illinois 2004 Senate election.  

In March 2004, Illinois Republican primary voters nominated Jack Ryan (not that one) as their choice to run against Obama in the Fall, but a late-breaking sex scandal caused him to step down.

Illinois election law allows party leaders (not voters) to fill the vacancy, and as Obama was already building momentum, several prominent GOP leaders declined the party's invitation to get their asses kicked in November.  So they imported Keyes from Maryland, who proceeded to lose in an absolute blowout, pulling just 27% of the vote compared to to Obama's 70%.  

And the rest, as they say, is history.

So when the national GOP also brought in a black bit player from Maryland to be the face of the party...well, let's just say no one here was terribly surprised.  

Now, as a time-saver and to spare my sore arm, I'm going to grab this short explainer from my blog from a few years ago.  2021 to be exact:

But above all, Michael Steele is a black man who has spent his entire adult life flacking for an explicitly racist American Fascist Party.  And in the long shadow of Donald John Trump, this is what him especially interesting to me.  Because his flailing, back-peddling, excuse-making mush-mouth double-talk about why he remained loyal to the GOP -- how he could be the chair of the party, and why he still retains his party membership as it was turning itself into a racist monster machine capable of producing a Trump -- is a distilled version of all the excuse-laden "We never knew!" gibberish that is now the mother tongue of the Never Trumpers.  

It was not so very long ago that Steele, while acknowledging that the GOP may have had a long and problematic history on the subject of race, still insisted that, as party chairman, he drove the bigots out of the GOP like St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.  And it was only after he was cruelly betrayed and deposed that all of them in their millions came running back to the Party of Limbaugh.

All of that is, of course, bullshit and everyone knows it, which is why things get especially surreal when Steele shows up in a different venue, such as a Lincoln Project podcast with Stuart Stevens entitled "The Republican Party's Original Sin".  After a long and accurate disquisition from Stevens about race being the GOP's original sin...Steele not only agrees, but goes into greater historical detail.

Suddenly, instead of the hero who drove the bigots out of the GOP and swept the party back to power in 2010, Steele reimagines himself as a noble, doomed Cassandra who warned party leaders that putting a black guy at the head of the party "wouldn't do jack".  That without fundamental reform at the precinct level the party would never change, but the party has refused the advice and recommendations of noble, doomed Cassandras like Steele who have tried to point this out the them.

Then he launches into a long recitation of the history of the GOP which is just surreal.

We hear about "Barry Goldwater and his embrace of segregation".

And Richard Nixon and "his embrace of a Southern Strategy."

And "My political hero, even, Ronald Reagan, starting his presidential campaign in the worst, god-forsaken, racist hole in Mississippi."  Did the GOP think that "black folks were gonna sit there and not pay any attention to that?"

I dunno, Mr. Steele.  You sure as shit didn't pay any attention to it.  In fact, you made such a successful cottage industry out of not paying attention to it that eventually that racist dung-heap of a party hired you to front for them.  

Steele is a hall-of-famer for filling up the space between commercials with circular, card-palming  gibberish, but having said all of that (and so much more over the years) I do appreciate that, during his latest guest appearance on The Bulwark, Steele took pains to specify that it wasn't just "the voters" who are to blame for Trump, but explicitly the 78 million who voted for him for the third time in 2024:

There was this:

Steele: At the end of the day, I put it on us because they are reflection of who we are, the American people. 70... at least 78 million of us decided let's do this shit again.  After everything we knew, after everything we saw, they got hung up on the cost of, you know, a piece of bread, or tank of gas or whatever ... whatever they wanted to make up about Joe Biden that they didn't like. 

And this:

Steele: It's sad but it's still bad, because remember 78 million people put him back in power.

That being said, when he and Tim Miller meandered over to the subject of Byron Donalds, I about fell out of my chair.

Steele:  [Trump] doesn't want to be reminded of his failures of leadership and his capacity to be anything other than a racist. He doesn't want to be reminded of that. And he likes the coloring that guys like Hegseth give him to sort of put a veneer on it to whitewash it. That's why they're taking, you know, black history and stripping it down. We don't want to talk about slavery. 

So, let me find a negro that's going to go out and... and parrot that.  Byron Donalds, right? And... and... and make and make me feel good about my racism.  He makes a whole lot of white folks feel good about themselves. As I just said,

he does not hold the mirror up. He does not reflect back to them the the culture from which he comes uh to say, "This is part of your his history as much as anything else. Why are you trying to wipe it out?

Honestly, as many times as I've seen it, when I run across this species of Republican switcheroo in the wild, it still leaves me a little dizzy.  Seeing sorta-former Republicans who used to make a living doing something despicable (and which they refuse to acknowledged ever happened)... now making a living trying to shame a current Republican for making a living doing exactly the same fucking thing.  

Like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, you can almost hear the muffled screams of whatever little self-awareness Steele keeps locked up in some underground vault as it slowly suffocates in the cold, dark ground.  

Oh, and one thing more.

A regular feature on Never Trump podcasts is the Victory Lap Segment.  A few self-congratulatory minutes devoted to reminding everyone who is listening that they and only they were right all along.  That they and only they warned about Trump early on, but did anyone listen?  Nooooo.  And look what happened.  

Miller:  So, I just I just want to start with like you and me have to kind of reflect this morning, right? I mean, you know, we're out. Okay. We were never Trump from the jump, you know.  And we were... we... we warned people. We said that we don't think this is going to go well. You can't trust this guy...

Steele:  Yeah, you know, I... I thought about that too, Tim, and I thought about it a lot and I came to the uh conclusion that I'm the only one who's got his shit tight  right.  The rest of these motherfuckers they don't know. I have no idea what the fucker they think they doing, but they have ruined a once great party. They have they are in the throes of taking down um uh a great nation. 

Then, later...

Steele: And yet now folks are sitting around going, "Well, I just didn't know. I I didn't... I didn't realize."  Bitch, please!  We told your ass back in 2013, 14, and 15. 

Miller: We told you. Yeah.   

Steele:  We watched Marco Rubio get his ass handed to him on a stage uh in 2016 by a guy who was at 2% in the polls at the time.

Miller:  Yeah.

Steele:  So, yeah, Tim, here we are. Um I'm still in it. You... you got out. I'm still in it.  That's because I'm high on something. I... I should sell whatever it is because..

Miller:  Yeah, that's cathartic to review. I guess I would just say we warned them all, but I don't know about you. Um I... I... I want to come on and just kind of do a victory lamp and be like, "Hell yeah, I was really right." And I was right. We can just we just kind of say that I was right. And I do like to text my MAGA friends sometimes and remind them that I'm right when I wake up in the morning and I'm feeling a little feisty. But, um, it is it's kind of even worse than I thought...

And it occurs to me that this sure is an awful lot of big talk from people who despise and actively hide from Lefties who actually were right about the Right all along.   

I Am The Liberal Media

These Days, Any $10 Cassandra Can Predict With Astonishing Accuracy...

...what advice Team Legacy Media and Team Never Trump will always insist Democrats must follow if they don't want to lose everything.

So, no surprise that, over at The Bulwark, Mark Leibovich's "advice" to Democrats was centered entirely around picking fights with other Democrats.

From Leibovich's Atlantic article, which is why Tim Miller invited him over for a bitch sesh:

The squabble underscored how the Democrats can’t help but keep playing to a stubborn stereotype—a soft and pampered bunch, unwilling to make the gritty sacrifices (such as getting dressed) necessary to prevail in their “existential” campaign to save democracy.

“The Democrats treat their fucking people like kindergartners,” Sarah Longwell, a former Republican consultant who quit the party over Donald Trump, told me. Longwell can get exasperated by her new allies on the left. When I mentioned the DNC’s in-person-work kerfuffle, it set her off.

“Republicans are over here being straight-up mercenaries,” Longwell said. “Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work-life balance.” She apologized for yelling into the phone. Democrats “are not built for when the fascists come,” she concluded... 

Martin himself has a knack for reinforcing these caricatures. Just as I was starting this project, he presided over the DNC’s summer meeting in Minneapolis to begin the urgent work of rebuilding the Democratic coalition and making the party palatable to American voters again. Soon after calling the assembly of more than 400 party officials to order, Martin relinquished his mic to a representative of the Saginaw Ojibwe Nation for the DNC’s “land acknowledgment” ritual. Switching between English and her tribal language, the Indigenous woman affirmed that Minneapolis had been stolen from its native Dakota Oyate Tribe (“the original stewards of the lands and waters”). 

The interlude took only a minute or two but received outsize attention—and ridicule—as an example of how Democrats remain overly concerned with performative pandering to various small identity groups. “It is difficult to imagine more than a handful of people looking out over the current hellscape of U.S. policy and thinking to themselves: You know what we need to be sure to address today? The Dakota War of 1862,” Andrew Egger wrote in The Bulwark.

So let's take a look at how minor HR dispute and two minutes of harmless comments at a summer DNC meeting in 2025 got turned into a five-alarm, OMG DEMOCRATS ARE THE WORST! fire in 2026 at The Bulwark.

To start with, I found it interesting that Leibovich didn't feel the need to include the next couple of sentences of Egger's Bulwark column which are as follows (emphasis added):

Right-wing media gleefully ping-ponged the clip around social media: Wake up, babe, they’re still doing land acknowledgments!

Democrats may believe, sincerely, that there is no harm (and, indeed, some good) in these displays. But many more people instinctively recoil against this sort of thing...

Two things.  One for later and one for now.  The later thing is, who exactly are the "many more people" who "instinctively recoil against this sort of thing" and how in the world do these "many more people" know the first god damn thing about the 2025 DNC summer meeting?

Could these "many more people" tell me anything at all about the other 99.9% of that meeting?  Do they have strong opinions about the Rules and Bylaws Committee evaluating the early voting state lineup for the 2028 presidential election?  

Or the Resolutions Committee debate over proposals regarding the Israel-Hamas war, including potential calls for a ceasefire and changes to military aid?  

How about the "Organizing Summer" Initiative to build volunteer networks, register voters, and engage in non-political spaces to prepare for 2025/2026 elections?  Any thoughts on those?

Let's put a pin in that for a minute, and get on to the second thing.  In the portion of the column that Leibovich left out, Egger explains how this tiny moment became a "story" at all.  The right-wing media was doing what the right-wing media always does: latching on to some incredibly trivial moment that would have otherwise passed unnoticed,.. or taking some remark wildly out of context ... or just making shit up and using their gargantuan fascist echo chamber to hype the shit out of it.

Fox News headline, August 25, 2025:

DNC opens summer meeting with land acknowledgement ...

The second Fox News headline, August 25, 2025:

Lindy Sowmick, a Minnesota Democrat and self-described 'Indigenous queer woman,' recited the acknowledgement Monday...

The National Desk, August 26, 2025:

DNC faces ridicule over land acknowledgment

Ridicule?  Really?  From whom, I wonder?  Is it from...the fascists?!

The Colorado Springs Gazette:

Byron York blasts DNC land acknowledgement...

Really?  York at the Colorado Springs Gazette?  Oh how the mighty fops of yesteryear have fallen.

Megyn Kelly on Facebook:  

The Democratic party learned NOTHING as they start summer meeting with "land acknowledgement..."

Megyn Kelly on YouTube:  

The Democratic party learned NOTHING as they start summer meeting with "land acknowledgement...

Megyn Kelly on YouTube Shorts:  

Megyn Kelly reacts to the ridiculously long "land acknowledgement" at DNC summer meeting.

The Blaze:  

The Democrats have gone insane

So at this point this is just another "OMG!  Obama wore a tan suit!"/ "OMG!  Obama likes fancy mustard!"/"OMG!  That crazy communist Kenyan Obama thinks inflating your tires correctly will solve all our energy problems!" bit of catnip for the bigots and imbeciles who think Fox News is "news" and who jerk off to Megyn Kelly's hate-porn.

For the fascists to boost bullshit like this out of the Fox News terrarium and into the wider world they're gonna need help.   

They need their manufactured indignation at least appear to be "bipartisan".  

The need some cranky, octogenarian Democrat who is 20 years past his sell-by date to pop off about how awful this insignificant little moment was.

They need...

Carville slams DNC over land acknowledgment.

There we go!

Yep.  That was the Fox News headline, August 28, 2025.

And this was the Fox News headline, August 29, 2025:

Carville rebukes DNC over woke 'land acknowledgment' ...

And this was the headline in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post,  August 29, 2025:

Carville erupts over DNC's woke land acknowledgment ...

Yay!  It's out there in the world now!  People are talking!  People like Dan "Turncoat" Turrentine talking to [checks notes] Laura Fucking Ingraham.  

So helpful!

From The Daily Caller, August 26, 2025:

‘It’s Maddening’: Ex-Dem Strategist Slams Party After Day 1 Of DNC Summer Meeting

Former Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine condemned his party on Monday following the first day of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) summer meeting.

One of the first items on the DNC meeting agenda was a “land acknowledgement,” based on the premise that the Minnesota land they were on was improperly taken from indigenous people. Turrentine said on “The Ingraham Angle” that the Democratic Party was repeating its past mistakes that led it to its current diminished state. 

“Laura, you said it: it’s the definition of insanity: you just keep doing the same thing over and over again. And as a Democrat, it’s maddening that we’re still not serious,” Turrentine told host Laura Ingraham.

And this is where Cokie's Law kicks in.

Are you familiar with Cokie's Law?  If not, let the coiner of the term, OG Liberal blogger and my Bradcast radio partner, Heather "Digby" Parton, explain.  From Salon, August 24, 2015:

Many years ago when political blogging was in its infancy, I coined the phrase “Cokie’s Law,” which referred to a specific comment by pundit Cokie Roberts about the Lewinsky scandal that illustrated the precise way the beltway media excused their propensity for cheap gossip and scandalmongering. In discussing whether or not Hillary Clinton had actually blamed her husband’s childhood for his philandering, Roberts said:

“At this point it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”

Cokie’s Law is the axiom that says the press can  pass judgement about anything once it’s “out there” regardless of whether or not what’s “out there” is true. This allows them to skip doing boring rebuttals of the facts at hand and instead hold forth at length about how it bears on the subject’s “judgement” and the “appearance” of wrongdoing without ever proving that what they did was wrong.

Once Carville had popped off, and Egger had written his bitchy paragraph and worried about those  "many more people" who "instinctively recoil against this sort of thing",  the pervasive contempt for Democrats which is always roiling just below the surface at The Bulwark was free to ricochet around like a fistful of bottle rockets in a phonebooth.  

They were obsessed with this story, not because of anything inherent about the facts of the story, but because of what "people out there", "voters", "normal people" would think.  See!  See!  Democrats don't care about normal people stuff.  This is why Democrats lose!

No, this is why you can never trust a Never Trumper.  Because they've still got that Conservative media wiring in their heads.  Because whenever the Conservative media machine (which they loyally served for their entire adult lives) does shit like this, it never occurs to them to attack the machine itself for wildly exaggerating some bit of nothing into Civilization On The Brink Of Collapse.  

Instead they automatically react by beating up on Democrats for...what?  For letting someone talk for 90 seconds at a two day conference?  

This is why your humble scrivener warned y'all about the Never Trumpers colonizing the Liberal media and elbowing actual Liberals out of the way.  Because believe it or not, there is another way -- a different way -- to talk about these garbage stories which the right-wing media is constantly trying (and, as they did here, frequently succeeding) to stovepipe into the wider public conversation.

You hang a lantern on it.  Contextualize it.  Talk about how the whole Fox News business model is based on taking trivial nonsense and inflating into crises and expecting us to fall for it.  To be distracted from the Epstein Files by it. Good God how stupid do they think we are?

Also, I for one would like someone to explain to me how it came to be the received wisdom of the Legacy Media that low-information or disengaged or undecided voters can be people who have no idea what's happening in the country and couldn't tell you who their senators are or their representative is if you held a bazooka to their heads.. 

...while at the same time these same low-information or disengaged or undecided voters are apparently so deeply enmeshed in the right-of-the-decimal-point organizational details of the Democratic party that they're going to give up on the Democrats and vote straight fascist party ticket because of 90 seconds at the 2025 DNC party meeting or some HR dispute that some anonymous, disgruntled staffer leaked to The New York Times (which is always only too happy to "report" on bitchy office gossip.)  

And our "allies" will never just use a Fox News talking point to bludgeon Democrats just once.  They recycle them, stacking one high dudgeon atop another until they have the highest dudgeon of all.  

Because it wasn't enough for our "ally" to wildly overreact in the pages of The Atlantic to what amounted to an HR dispute:

“The Democrats treat their fucking people like kindergartners,” Sarah Longwell, a former Republican consultant who quit the party over Donald Trump, told me. Longwell can get exasperated by her new allies on the left. When I mentioned the DNC’s in-person-work kerfuffle, it set her off.

“Republicans are over here being straight-up mercenaries,” Longwell said. “Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work-life balance.” She apologized for yelling into the phone. Democrats “are not built for when the fascists come,” she concluded...

Goodness no.  Leibovich just had to recycle the bullshit Fox News talking point from last year to make sure the knife went in all the way.  

You can watch this shit move through the system like a contrasting agent moving through a human body during a C/T scan.   From the Fox News Bombast Machine to Megyn Kelly's histrionics to a useful chump like James Carville shitting pine cones over it, then on to The Bulwark and cable news...

...then recycled and amplified in The Atlantic, then back to The Bulwark where any $10 Cassandra knows what comes next.  

A stern warning that if Democrats want to win, they need to start picking fights with other Democrats.

And picking fights with former Democratic presidents.  

Oh, and don't forget picking fights with "various groups that make up the party’s broad coalition".  

So yay!  More hippie punching. All of which is supposed to make Democrats more popular with "regular people."

And yet somehow going after Republicans -- y'know, the actual fascists who actually have a knife to the throat of American democracy -- isn't really on the menu.  

So, should Democrats follow this advice and start a circle of infighting, what exactly is it that "regular people" are supposed to suddenly notice?  That no Democrat likes the Democrats?  That every Democrat is running against their own party?  

In which case this $10 Cassandra predicts that, should any of that happen, we can all look forward to a chorus of Team Legacy Media and Team Never Trump voices decrying "Democrats in disarray."

One final note, by way of demonstrating that anyone can have all kinds of fun with Cokie's Law.  Can you believe Sarah Longwell losing her shit and yelling into the phone while she was on the record?

But, well, what'dya expect?  Chicks, amirite!  Way too emotional to be trusted with really important jobs.  

And, being a sane and decent person, you would probably bark at me.  How dare I!  And rightly demand that I take that misogynist shit back.  

But, see, under the shield of Cokie's Law I am protected.

Because under the shield of Cokie's Law it doesn't matter if it's true. 

All that matters is my assertion that some non-specific group of "people" are talking about it.

That it's "out there"  

That it's "in the air".

That it's what I'm hearing.

I Am The Liberal Media

The Long, Slow Road Halfway to Damascus

Because I listen to various major Never Trump podcasts so you don't have to, I can reliably report back to you that almost all of them -- free or paywalled -- feature in each episode what I would call the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin.

After spending a fair chunk of time being outraged by the fascist who runs their former party, then switching back and forth at whiplashing speed yelling at Democrats for not shouting enough or shouting too much... or shutting the government down or not shutting the government down ... or too much baking soda, then not enough baking soda (I swear, it's like having picture hanging instructions barked at you by a metamorphopsia sufferer who's also drunk) then comes the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin.

In case you are unfamiliar, the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin always centers around one of the tiny number of Republican elected official out at the perimeter of the GOP who Never Trumpers thought, when nut-cuttin' time finally came, would take at least a tiny step forward and show a little of those steely Conservative principles which Never Trumpers always thought were there.

When, after yet another "Surely this time..." moment has passed and Republicans have behaved like, y'know, Republicans, and you hear Never Trumper's saying things like...

What the hell is wrong with Susan Collins?  Or

Lisa Murkowski has betrayed...  Or

I had such hopes for Bill Cassidy...  

...congratulations!  You've arrived just in time for the Quarter-Hour of Chagrin!  

And the chagrin is palpable, and yet it's repeated over and over again, every day and always with the same tone of "You mean there's no Santa Claus?!?" disbelief.   Because deep down they simply refuse to believe that they could have been this spectacularly wrong about the cause to which the devoted most of their adults lives.  

And these last 10 years (although some of us would peg it at the last +30 years)?  If they have proven anything far beyond the need to pile up even one more piece evidence, it's this.  This is not and never has been some passing fever that will break if we all keep calm and go right on treating these fuckers with civility.  There is no national epiphany at hand. No sudden burst of collective conscience where we all agree that this was evil and we should stop pretending otherwise.

Yes, the MAGA mob may disperse once they're out of power, but not to go on some contemplative nature hike where they learn important lessons about life and compassion.  Instead they'll do what they did after the Bush regime collapsed: scatter like roaches, rebrand, then rely on a complicit legacy media to tell everyone that the danger has passed and we can get back to "politics as usual" while the MAGA scum regroup.   

Because by now their rage and racism and paranoia are not affects: these are the traits that define them.  These are the building blocks of their spiritual DNA and at this late date we can no more expect them (or the puppeteers/influencers who spin them up and given them scapegoats) to change than we could expect a wood tick to become a golden retriever.  There will be no Damascene moments down the dark road they are traveling.

On the other hand, very slowly and through layers of habit and denial, Old Man Epiphany appears to be chipping and chiseling his way into the Never Trumper bubble with the bad news that, yep, it's the whole fucking party, from top to bottom.  

You still hear loose talk about how Trump, "hostile takeover" of the party, or how he  "hijacked" the party, which is nonsense.  Yes, I'm sure the handful of party elites for whom the Never Trumpers worked felt like it was a hostile takeover when the party base chucked them out in favor of the guy who talked like they talked and hated who they hated, but all Trump ever did was speak to the base in the Limbaugh language they understood, instead of disdainfully holding that Hate Radio hate speech at arm's length and act like they were better than all that.

And as for "hijacking ", as I've written on this blog many times, it's not a hijacking when they hand you the keys and beg you to drive.  Three times.

However, the Never Trumpers seem to have given up their ridiculous, Trump 1.0 fantasy of returning to a shattered Republican party as the "We told you so" caucus after Trump crashed and burned.  That somehow, the staff of the defunct Weekly Standard and a few of their fellow travelers would show up like Charles II to restore the Neocon monarchy and lead the grateful, shamefaced mob back into peonage under the same people that gave them Bush and Cheney twice, and tried to force-feed them Romney and Jeb.

They seem to have finally gotten it through their heads that things have changed.  Forever.

But however clearly they begin to see how wrong they were about their party and their movement and their former friends and colleagues, the distance between that and forcing their mouths to say the words "The Left was right about the Right all along" is incalculable.  Or at least something to be measured in light years.  Because continuing to roll their eyes at the excesses of the Left -- even when those excesses amount to nothing more than the usual media "nutpicking" -- remains the floatation device that keeps them viable.  

After all, within the legacy media, admitting out loud that, in effect, you never had any idea what was really going on inside the party you worked for your entire adult life is considered merely a venial sin.  Minor, but forgivable, since the overall media party line continues to be that nobody could have seen this coming.

But then to say out loud that the dirty hippies who they built their careers mocking and shitting on had it right all along? Are you insane? That, my friends, would be the most sure-fire way to A) make yourself as big a legacy media pariah as the dirty hippies are because the media does not want to hear that shit, and B) lose your profitable podcasting gigs, newspaper columns, book contracts and round-the-clock appearances on MSNOW as the media-anointed Leaders of the Resistance.

No, they've chosen the safest available path: indignant about the fascists who run their former party, then carping at Democrats for being too tall, but also not tall enough, and too vanilla, but also problematically not vanilla enough.

Selah.

I Am The Liberal Media

Gallows Schadenfreude (™)

Definition:  Enjoying a hearty laugh at someone else's adversity or tribulation even as you stand up there on the windy gibbet.

I was moved to coin this term when I heard -- and not for the first time -- the recently-former Republicans and MSNOW employees at The Bulwark shaking their fist at the heavens and insisting that "billionaires who care about America" need to step the fuck up and fund a new media that can push back against Conservative media and the Republican-controlled legacy media.  

Oh how carefully they avoiding saying that Liberal billionaires need to step up and fund a genuinely Liberal media.  

From a December 31, 2025 Bulwark podcast:  

Sarah Longwell:  What do we do about an entirely consolidated media system that has been built around Trump's allies? 

Jonathan Last (with a smirk):  Why Sarah, what do we do? 

Longwell:  We have to build new things. We have to be the ones, like, where are the patriotic billionaires?  Like, Bezos acted like a patriotic billionaire and then sold out to Trump and gave him the [Washington] Post. The [Washington] Post is a shell of itself. We're going to have to build entirely new media ecosystems and billionaires who care about America are going to have to step up and start helping to both build and and bring back these media. 

Tim Miller:  We probably need to regulate them too. 

As most of you know, Liberals have been writing about the awfulness of the legacy media forever -- shouting it from our little blogs for more than 20 years, and talking about it for decades before that.  So imagine my gallows schadenfreude when I heard these former Republicans -- who popped into existence five minutes ago and were immediately lavished with the kind of daily, unalloyed support of the "liberal" media that is beyond the wildest dreams of OG Liberal bloggers and podcasters -- suddenly noticing that the legacy media sucks, then breathlessly announcing it to the world as if they think they've just discovered radium, and then insisting that patriotic billionaire damn well need to step up and take action.  

Except based on their performance to date, if they did ever find a djinn bottle on the beach and wish for the independent media of their dreams to be conjured into existence, it's pretty clear what kind of "independent" media they would ask for.  

An awesome Sensible, Center-Right new/old media -- a retro-media, if you will -- where no one talks about the state of the GOP before Trump.  Where it would perpetually be 2013: a spiritual recreation of Sally Quinn's tight circle of parlor austerity trolls of days gone by, but this time with emojis.  Where George Will would once again be the fount of all wisdom, and David Brooks would once again be free to roam the land, concocting imaginary bright futures for an imaginary Republican party. (From Brooks in 2013)

A Second G.O.P. 

...It’s probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It’s smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast. It’s smarter to build a new division that is different the way the Westin is different than the Sheraton...

The second G.O.P. wouldn’t be based on the Encroachment Story. It would be based on the idea that America is being hit simultaneously by two crises, which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles Murray crisis. 

A media where, for the greater good -- 

-- Liberals who insist on writing about the Before Time or the idiocy of the new/old Brahmans of this brave, new retro-media would be kept safely away from the microphones, just as they were in days of old (both are deadlinks, so don't bother.)

BooMan weighs in:

David Brooks: Stupid as a Boiled Ham
by BooMan
Tue Jan 29th, 2013 at 09:42:45 AM EST

You knew that at one point David Brooks would suffer enough cognitive dissonance to lead him to make a permanent break with the Republican Party. That day has not yet come. Instead, because his paycheck depends on his willingness to ignore all cognitive dissonance, Brooks has today decided to advocate the creation of a second Republican Party. This party won't be based in the South or the Mormon Mountain West. It won't be completely paranoid about the ever-growing encroachment of the Nanny State. Possibly, it won't be bug-eyed nuts about Sharia Law and Latinos who behead white people in the Arizona desert...

Shakes sticks a fork in it:

The GOP isn't even honest about who they are when they're navel-gazing. Americans expect politicians to lie to us, but we expect them at least not to lie to themselves.

However, for the time being...

I Am The Liberal Media