Out Here in the Real World There Are Hundreds of Savvy, Sharp, Eloquent Liberal Voices Who Have Been Right All Along

But instead of any of them, ever, (because they might track in big, muddy, inconvenient footprints from the Before Time) the flagship Bulwark podcast has decided to continue the Chuck Todd Reputation Rehabilitation Project.  

Because some things never change.

Because the arc of the media Universe always bends towards the Chuck Todds of the world.

Because there continues to be a Club.

And we continue to not be in it.

I Am The Liberal Media

Accountability

 

"I want to live in a world where there is deep shame by all the people who worked in the Trump administration. Like, I want to live in a world where, 25 years from now, when people, uh, they've got a gap in their resume because they don't want to put they were part of the Trump administration on their resume." -- Sarah Longwell, The Bulwark.

What a noble sentiment!  Would that we lived in a world where people who uncritically served and cheered on a corrupt and criminally incompetent administration that left disaster after disaster in its wake would end up feeling really, really bad about it.  So deeply ashamed that it would affect their employability.  

Sigh.

Hey, how about, just for goofs, instead of looking forward 25 years to a utopian future where feeling shame about serving and cheering on a corrupt and criminally incompetent administration had, y'know, consequences -- 

-- let's look back 25 years and see how this noble sentiment played out in the real world during what our Never Trumper friends would have you believe were the good old days of rectitude and personal responsibility. 

So, the year 2025 - 25 gives us...hey!  2000!

You might remember that was the year a Republican mob disrupted vote counting in Florida.  The year that five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices anointed George W. Bush president of the United States.

After that came Bush's catastrophic failure on 9/11.  Then lying us into the wrong war.  Then fucking that war up -- the worst foreign policy debacle in modern history, but enriched the vice president's cronies and former business partners.  Pissing away the Clinton surplus and saddling us with even bigger deficits than Reagan and Bush I combined.  Then came Hurricane Katrina.  Teri Schiavo.  The failed attempt to privative Social Security.  The attorney general scandal.  Then the collapse of the world economy.  And so many more!

So, if we rejigger Ms. Longwell's words just a little bit...

"I want to live in a world where there is deep shame by all the people who worked in the George W. Bush administration. Like, I want to live in a world where, 25 years later, when people, uh, they've got a gap in their resume because they don't want to put they were part of the Dubya administration on their resume." -- driftglass.

But that didn't happen, did it?   

You will remember that, having been in office barely a minute and in response to a reporter's question about the arrest of his friend, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., in 2009 for disorderly conduct outside of his own home, Barack Obama made this offhand but truthful remark:

"I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it's fair to say... that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home." 

You’d have thought that he had publicly wiped his ass with the Bill of Rights.  A president of the United States had the temerity to say, out loud, that some cops acted stupidly!  Massive blowback.  Massive outcry.  

Fun historical fact: eight years later,  the same people who pretended to faint in outraged droves over this would go on to elect elect a racist internet troll and adjudicated rapist who calls anyone who disagrees with him even slightly "stupid" and "terrible" and "weak" and "the enemy of the people" and "terrorists" and worse, on and on and on and on and on, every fucking day.

Anyway, hence, the so-called beer summit.

But when it came the actual war crimes committed by the Bush administration, the legacy media and Conservative media and Republican politicians all locked arms and decided on a strategy of purposeful ignorance.

From Eric Alterman in The Nation, May 6, 2009:

Even after the disgraceful performance of so many armchair warriors during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, who would have dared predict the willingness, nay, eagerness, of respected journalists and pundits to argue in favor of purposeful ignorance? Sadly, many of them have shown less interest in potential war crimes committed by the Bush administration than little Misha Lerner, the Jewish Primary Day School fourth grader who quizzed Condoleezza Rice about her inability to explain the legality of these policies to a group of Stanford students.

While many have made the case to varying degrees, Peggy Noonan made it most explicitly: “Some things in life need to be mysterious,” she said of America’s role in torturing terrorist suspects. “Sometimes you need to just keep walking.” 

This is the full Noonan quote:

 "Some things in life need to be mysterious.  Sometimes you need to just keep walking. ... It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that." 

Go down the list of every war criminal in the Bush administration and you will find none – zero – who ever paid any price for any of the atrocities they committed.

In fact, this was the mastermind of the Iraq debacle back in 2014 at a Politico event.

Go down the list of the most prominent Bush administration cheerleaders and torture enthusiasts and what do you find?

You find that none of them ever apologized.  None were ever chastised.  None were shamed out of their media gigs.  None of them ever missed a meal.

Instead, you find some of them, like Nicolle Wallace and Joe Scarborough, hosting shows on MSNBC, Wallace glossing over the entire Bush Administration with the phrase, “My former boss whatever you think of him”.  You find them with op-ed columns in The New York Times, the Washington Post and The Atlantic.

You find the scumbag who cooked up the absurd legal predicate for the Bush administration's torture regime, John Yoo, is now the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. 

You find Spit-Comb Paul Wolfowitz being appointed the president of the World Bank, a job he had to quit two years later only because of an unrelated sex scandal.

All the Fox News degenerates who led the scorched earth slander campaign against the anti-war movement all still have jobs, and before he died and went to hell, Donald Trump awarded Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  

So, Sarah Longwell, this is exactly how we got to where we are.  Rules and consequences.  Your party’s rules and your party's consequences, going back decades.

Republicans spent an enormous amount of time and effort teaching generations of Republican voters one, basic rule:  that, no matter how ignorant and bigoted and wrong they acted, it was their God-given right to never be held responsible for anything.  To never feel shame for being dead-rat stupid.  To revel in being vicious and cruel.   

And the consequences?  You can see those all around you every day.

You taught Conservative media and Republican politicians that the key to success was flattering and appeasing the mob.  

You taught them, the louder the demagogue and the bloodier the lie, the more the morons would cheer.

I Am The Liberal Media

Morning Whiplash

Bartlett West GIFfrom Bartlett GIFs

"So much of what we do nowadays in communications is just online and bomb throwing....when you do actually talk to the person...it radically changes your perceptions of them." "Bill's kind of more than human though, he's kind of superhuman." Sam and Tim talk Bill Kristol:

[image or embed]

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) July 3, 2025 at 4:45 PM

Hearing Sam Stein -- who used to write about Bill Kristol as Satan incarnate -- sing the praises of Bloody Bill Kristol was...fascinating.  

And, sure, he acknowledges that this might piss off some of those crusty, old Liberals who are, y'know, still hanging on to old grudges about the Iraq war from the Before Time, but whatever, bitches! 

Tempus fugit!  Bill Kristol is a great guy.  The best.   Possibly superhuman.  To know him is to love him. 

And that's when Sam unveiled his Policy For Judging Human Beings.  That while some people may seem terribly wicked from a distance or across the interwebs, once you get to know them, "when you do actually talk to the person...it radically changes your perceptions of them" (and, in this case, once they're signing your paycheck) they're pretty OK.

Basically, people are people, so even when people seem to be malignant, lying monsters, your go-to move should be to forgive and forget.  Absolve and move on.

Cool, cool.

So, given his radically revised Policy For Judging Human Beings, where does the newly enlightened Sam Stein stand on the question of those Republican people who lined up to vote for Trump's bill?

Oh, those people?  Those people all spineless, unprincipled, lying, performative scum who should rot in Hell.

Here endeth the lesson. 

Burn The Lifeboats

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cancel Culture

There is no concatenation of caveats, provisos, conditions, stipulations, reservations, qualifications, and conditional phrases you can deploy to, ahem, bulwark your editorial decision to give Butcher Bill Kristol a platform from which to mouth off about war in the middle east.  On that subject, his mouth should have long ago been (metaphorically) filled with salt and sewn shut forever.

And it all began back in 2014 when the then-barely-post-pubescent executive producer of "This Week" , Jonathan Greenberger, took it upon himself to pluck Kristol from the rubble of his many, many catastrophically bad public opinions and rehabilitate his professional reputation.  

[Fun fact:  In 2024, Greenberger left ABC News to become... wait for it... 

Jonathan Greenberger To Depart As ABC News D.C. Bureau Chief For Role At Politico

Jonathan Greenberger is departing ABC News, where he has been Washington, D.C. bureau chief, for a new job as executive vice president of Politico. Greenberger will start in his new position on April 22 [2024]

...because of course.]

Join me now in this brief jog down memory lane.

Given Kristol's very long and very public record of being pretty much wrong about everything (from the WaPo) --

Bill Kristol knows his predictions have been bad but he’s going to keep making them

...
“With Kristol what I love are not so much the big, grand predictions that are always wrong, but the smaller ones that really demonstrate how poor his actual grasp of politics is,” says Alex Pareene, the editor of Gawker, one of Kristol’s regular tormentors. “He is sort of ideologically motivated to make certain ridiculous claims — Iraq will be a huge success, Romney will win — and even his ‘peak Trump’ predictions are based on the fact that he can’t abide the ongoing rejection of his entire ethos by Republican voters. But it’s when he makes claims that are just wrong but not motivated by the advancement of his worldview . . . that we see just how bad he is at his ostensible job.”

-- at no point in the past 20 years have any of the many corporate media drones who have chosen to hire him (and his idiot son-in-law, Matthew Continetti) ever been vindicated in that decision (from Politico in 2014)

Bill Kristol joins ABC News

Bill Kristol, the editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard, has joined ABC News as a contributor, "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos announced on Sunday.
...

The agreement, one source said, includes regular appearances on the Sunday show, as well as special events and other political-relaed events. But there's also a window that allows him to do other shows on cable television.
...
Jonathan Greenberger, executive producer of "This Week," said in a statement Kristol is "an original thinker" that will make their team stronger:

“Bill makes our outstanding team of contributors and analysts even stronger. He’s an original thinker with a unique perspective on the political and cultural landscape, and we look forward to hearing his voice on the 'This Week' roundtable on a regular basis."

Furthermore, at no point in the last two decades has Kristol been exonerated of the years he spent strutting across the American media stage, blood-drunk and smirking, confidently insisting that not only could unleashing hell on Earth in Iraq “have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East” and that it would be a “two-month war, not an eight-year war” but that inflicting Kristol-brand democracy on Middle Eastern countries at the point of an American sword was something we should be doing a lot more.

So how, you may fairly ask, is Butcher's Bill Kristol still abroad in the land?...

What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who were this very loudly dead fucking wrong about everything got to keep their place in elite media circles and get to go right on being courted for their opinions on subjects about which they should shut their holes forever? 

What the hell kinda cancel culture are we running here where the people who were actually right about everything continue to be treated as pariahs, and told to sit down and shut up because it's rude and unproductive to, y'know, remember stuff?

Funny old world.

I Am The Liberal Media.

The Pundit Brain That Wouldn't Die

Listening to professional pundits on various Big Giant Podcasts can be quite entertaining if you look at it from a properly jaundiced perspective.  For example, this is not an actual transcript, but it is a fairly accurate distillation of the all-over-the-place criticism that proprietors of various Big Giant Podcasts are tossing around these days.

Pundits:  You have to understand, people are stupid.  Voters are stupid.  They don't understand anything political and don't know how anything works and you can't expect them to.  Trump tells them crazy bullshit and they believe it.  So, what are we to do?

Well, then how about starting by kicking the crap out of Trump on stuff like the price of eggs.  These stupid voters said that's why they voted for him.  He said he'd lower prices.  He said he'd do it on Day One.  We're well past Day One.  Start with that.

Pundits:  Look, these people aren't stupid, OK?  Voters aren't stupid.  They know he's only been in...

And back and forth we go, on and on, whiplashing between "Voters are dum-dums who know nothing and believe nonsense" and "You can't treat voters like dum-dums who know nothing and believe nonsense.".

And by the way, there are at least +75 million voters who aren't stupid, who do understand the stakes and who did understand the assignment.  So in future bull sessions among your fellow pundits with Big Giant Podcasts, it would be an enormous boon to your credibility with folks like me who are one of that +75 million to refrain from bitching about "people" and "voters" and "Democrats" and instead get specific about which clusters of MAGA or uncommitted/"independent" voters you are planning on targeting for persuasion and what exactly your big plans are for accomplishing that goal.

I Am The Liberal Media

Ever Wonder Why Your Never Trump Allies Are So Friendly and Deferential...

...to the same legacy media institutions that have fucked us over so badly?

Well, perhaps it's because outfits like The Bulwark are sponsored by outfits like Jeff Bezos' Washington Post.

Yeah, that Washington Post.   From NPR:

Over 200,000 subscribers flee 'Washington Post' after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement

The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president...

From the transcript of live ad read in the middle of the above-referenced podcast.

Tim Miller:  Hey guys, if you listen to this podcast you care about what's going on in the world.  And you know we're doing our best here at the Bulwark as we grow, to expand out, reporting, reported commentary no bullshit insight.   But, like all of this stuff is based on people doing shoe leather reporting.  People going out there and gathering sources and going around the world an... and educating us about what's happening in the world.  And... and one of the places that's out there still doing that is the Washington Post.  Uh, and this podcast is sp... sponsored by The Washington Post.  When you go to Washington Post.com slash The Bulwark, our listeners can get an exclusive deal to subscribe for just 50 cents per week for your first year.  Uh...if you listen to us you know the great work the Washington Post does on a bunch of topics...

It goes on.  And on. And on.  Bezos is definitely getting his money's worth.  

Because, as we have discussed on this blog several hundred times before...

There Is A Club

Siri, Give Me a Visual Representation of the Expression “What Fresh Hell Is This?”

Burn The Lifeboats

Never Trumpers Giving Shitty Advice: Sam Harris Edition

First, a little background.  This was Tim Miller, on his Bulwark podcast, November 21, 2024:  

Miller:   I've stayed on "X" part because of my addiction, that's not as bad as [Elon Musk's] but is... is real and something I'm reflecting on.  But I... I  refused to go into a liberal bubble social media. I was on Threads for one week it was unbearable. I, like, if this podcast conversation we just had... if any sentence of it was put onto Threads you would be overwhelmed with people, like, shaking their finger at you and telling you how wrong you are.

Also this:

PSA: Not going to Bluesky or squib or Meatspace. If you want to do that, cool, you can find my stuff at https://t.co/F6fA5UlPNV / Youtube.

I find Elon mostly terrible but I don't think siloing is healthy for our discourse or useful for my job/understanding of our politics. TL;DR pic.twitter.com/OH4gOH8Ifv

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) November 12, 2024

And here is Tim Miller four years earlier, in October of 2020, on Elon Musk's Nazi shithouse he will not leave because he values open and honest exchanges which -- boo hoo! -- he can't find on a "liberal bubble social media".  

At the time, he had been bitching that he was impatient with Republican fence-straddlers who kept hemming and hawing, pretending they weren't sure who Trump "really" was, because, he said, we know who Trump is. 

True enough.  However, I had the temerity to I point out to him on that it had been the Left which had actually been right about the Right all along. 

Here was his reaction to that open, honest exchange.

So why bring it up?

Because you may have noticed that the virtual MSNBC subdivision which The Bulwark has become really, really doesn't want to hear from Liberals.  At all.  They have one, tame, in-house lefty who can get as dark and depressing as anyone else, but there is a palpable aversion to putting anyone behind a microphone who might bring receipts from the Before Time to the party.

Might use the "T" word -- "trajectory" -- when talking about the Republican party.

Can't have that.  No, no no.  

Instead, Tim Miller brought on the insufferable Sam Harris, who came roaring in with one goal in mind: angrily deploy every straw man in the troop carrier to explain why Kamala Harris was unable to persuade a mob of unpersuadable lumpen MAGA goofs.  Because, I guess, insufferable slag-they-Left-without-ceasing assholes like Sam Harris are much closer to The Bulwark spirit than any liberal, anywhere.

I will translate what I heard into human language.

Kamala Harris lost the election because... of the completely insane Left's complete domination of "the culture"  [Translation:  Speech codes and other dumbfuckery on a handful of elite universities.]

Kamala Harris lost the election because... of all the trans stuff.  

Kamala Harris lost the election because... of  "Latinx".  

Kamala Harris lost the election because... of, OMG, the pronouns!

But she didn't run on any of those things.  Joe Biden didn't say or do any of those things, or govern in any way that reflected any of those things.

Sure, but Harris didn't disavow any of those things hard enough or loud enough!  Harris needed to "Sister Soulja" them tranny weirdos!

Also Kamala Harris lost the election because of the wokety, wokety woke woke!

So should Trump have disavowed any of the thousands of obvious, deranged, hateful lies he has spewed?    Should he have had to explain the many promises he broke, or policies he reversed?

Oh fuck no.  Voters just laugh that shit off.

Sam Harris flatly claimed there is an "epidemic of double mastectomies among 16-year-olds”, which is wildly untrue,. and that we are “watching biological men punch women in the face in MMA contests or anywhere" which is Trump-level lying.  

Honestly, I was waiting for Harris to angrily insist that part of the reason Kamala Harris lost was that she wouldn't sign Grover Norquist's No-Tax-Increase pledge, or her flag pin was crooked, or she refused to agree to put Ayn Rand's picture on the $20 bill.   

Actual Sam Harris quote: 

Harris: The Democratic party is a... is a this very rigged, uh, Rube Goldberg device of death.  Which is just, y'know, rigged to destroy, to... to cancel the reputation of anyone who touches the wrong gear or lever.  And, uh, we have to... we have to tear it down to the studs. I mean it's just like this... is there... Actually has to be a purge of the activist class in Democratic politics. Otherwise, y'know, this... no one we put forward will be electable.

Tim Miller's mighty pushback to this tantrum was:

Miller: Yeah, um, yeah I don't know... I mean.. I... some of that is maybe a little overstated for me.  Certainly having a candidate who could speak about it, uh, off the cuff and speak about it deftly and I...

Another Sam Harris quote: 

Harris: Black Lives Matter was clearly a a highly corrupt operation, uh, and a grift...

Harris came spring-loaded and ready to spend an hour raging that Kamala lost because of my pet issue, which makes me wonder about the rarified, well-appointed bubble these assholes live in.  Do they know any actual humans?  Except to stop for gas and take a piss and complain about the weak WiFi, have any of these people ever spent more than five minutes in places like where I live?  Around a lot of actual Trump voters?  

Because, take it from me, nothing is more futile than trying to persuade these reprogrammable meatbags of anything they don't wish to hear.   If you spent a week, slowly debunking the nonsense around trans issues, they'd just switch to some other rationalization for doing what they were going to do all along anyway. 

Finally, after the third troop transport full of straw men landed and Harris had gotten so high on his self-righteous dudgeon that he was in danger of being clouted on the head by orbiting space junk, even Tim Miller hadda say, now wait a minute.  

Miller brought up the Nancy Mace example, and suddenly master-debater Harris began equivocating and back-pedaling.  He hadn't heard all the details, y'know.  And he wasn't so sure Tim was explaining every nuance of the situation, y'know.  And he wasn't really up on the topic, y'know.  

Really?  Because based on his obsession with this one fucking subject, I'd have thought this was the only topic he was really up on.  They he began spinning out "answers" like solving this "problem" "architecturally".  Y'know, just build more bathrooms and make them gender-neutral.  Democrats could just go ahead and do that by themselves, right?

Tim pointed out that overarching all of this was the problem of the huge double standard here: Democrats are held to high standards, while Republicans are held to no standards at all.  

Harris responded by taking out his invisible meerschaum philosopher pipe, and mused that, yes, this was a problem  Puzzing.  Very puzzling indeed.  Then he walked himself backwards up the same twisted path he had just come down, negating pretty much everything he had just said and musing that this was indeed a vexing problem.  Perhaps one that could not be solved by politics at all because Republican voters, y'know, are blood oath members of a personality cult, and, as such, basically lost to reason.

And then it was over.

And you know what?

I'm beginning to suspect The Bulwark only values certain kinds of open and honest exchanges.

I Am The Liberal Media

Happy Belated “Bellyaching Because Democrats Aren’t Doing It Right” Day to All Who Celebrate

As you know, the Friday before election day is the time when fair weather friends, sunshine patriots and, as of late, many of our Never Trump "allies", gather together to bitch and moan that Democrats have not adequately stepped up to the job of reversing the fortunes of the American fascist party  -- a fascist party which those same fair weather friends, sunshine patriots and,Never Trump "allies" all had a hand in creating.

But that last little fact is somehow never mentioned in their solemn, sour conclaves.  Instead we are treated to yet another airing of their grievances against the Democrats because we failed to do whatever the whatsit these "Centrist", "Center/Right" dispossessed recently-former Republic aristocrats feel should have been our Job #1.

The proper attitude of these fuckers should, of course, be apologizing without ceasing and begging Democrats for forgiveness for the decades they spent helping to build the doomsday machine that is bearing down on us all, then turning their unearned positions in the media over to people who weren't wrong about the Right all along, then asking what more they can do to help us win.

Instead we get the Bulwark's Beg to Differ podcast, this week featuring Reagan era fossil and Disparaging Aunt Who Thinks You Would Have Been Better Off Marrying That Rich Accountant, Linda Chavez saying shit like this:

Chavez: I... I just wanted to say something that, um, hasn't been, uh, and that is, uh, Kamala Harris and the transsexual issue. 

Here we go.  Also "Kamala Harris and the Transsexual Issue" is definitely the name of my garage band if I ever get around to forming a garage band.  . 

Chavez: And I think that the fact that those commercials -- those, uh, Trump commercials --run every time there's a sporting event... I mean they're clearly aimed at male voters, um, who I think are probably more uncomfortable on that issue and she needed a...

Wait for it...

Wait for it...

Chavez: Sister Soulja moment.

And there it is.

Chavez:And she she hasn't given herself that. She might have been able... I don't think she could do it at this point on that issue, uh , y'know she's basically... the campaign... not... she has has more or less tried to diminish this issue and clearly it it's not a huge issue in terms of the number of people it affected, uh, but, y'know, some of us have been warning that this was an issue culturally that doesn't sit well with the American people.

So, find a trans person.  Punch them in the face on camera.   And bingo bongo, you've won over drooling incels!  Yay!  Except drooling incels also hate women generally, and black people, so there's that.

Remember, kids, to please Conservative pundits, Dems must always hunt up some symbolic hippie to punch to prove to Conservative pundits that they love Murrica or whatever.  

I can easily image this same group of Senior Center cafeteria opinion havers having exactly this same gripe session in 2004, after Dubya won re-election of the strength of Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd putting gay-bashing referenda on the ballot in swing states to make sure the Conservative Evangelicals came out on force, advising Democrats that if they wanted to get right with "the American people", they would have to have a Sister Soulja moment with Teh Gays.

BTW, the momentary silence you hear at the end of Ms. Chavez' remarks is Tim Miller not saying a damn thing.

Instead, Bill Galston, another relic from the Land That Time Forgot,  piped in with this:

Galston:  First of all I agree with what Linda just said emphatically...

What these goofs actually know about "the American people" could fit in a gnat's fanny pack, 

So, once again, happy belated “Bellyaching Because Democrats Aren’t Doing It Right” Day to all who celebrate

Burn The Lifeboats

"You"? "Our"? Who The Fuck Are You Talking About?

 

Because "we" never had any illusions about the bigots and imbeciles who comprise the base of the Republican party.

Or the trajectory of the Republican party.

Or the doomed final destination at which the Republican party would eventually arrive if things did not change immediately and drastically. 

Those massive psychological defects belongs to your professional opinion-having Never Trump buddies, not "us".

I Am The Liberal Media

Old King Coal Strikes Again

You will remember not so very long ago one of the most common sermons that our Never Trump "allies" would shout at us us dirty, disreputable hippies was how we must move towards the "center".   

The "center", of course, being defined as corrupt trolls like Joe Lieberman and Joe Manchin.

For God's sake, didn't we realize that the fate of the republic hung in the balance!

One example:

An Ode to Saint Joe Manchin

Democrats are mad at Joe Manchin. They ought to be grateful for him.

-- by Tim Miller

And Manchin didn't just deserve our quiet deference or even our respect: he was the noumenal ideal of "Democrat" to which we should all aspire.  And shame! shame! on us dirty, disreputable hippies for not gratefully accepting this profound wisdom from our Never Trump betters.

And then...some time later...

Joe Manchin Proves Again That He’s an Idiot With Endorsement Decision

Joe Manchin seems to think Kamala Harris is just as much a threat as Donald Trump.

Senator Joe Manchin is retiring at the end of his term, but that won’t stop him from being a Democratic Party pooper all the way through the November election.

On Tuesday, following Vice President Kamala Harris’s announcement that she would do away with the filibuster in order to pass federal abortion protections, Manchin said this move was a step too far and that he’d rescind his endorsement of Harris for president...

So where's your messiah now?

I know it's the sheerest abyss-shouting to write these things, but how many times do our Never Trump "allies" have to prove they have no fucking idea what they are talking about and that their political advice is 100% stupid juice before they shut up and sit down.  Remember, these are the same people who were so impotent and so arrogantly clueless that they couldn't even save their own goddamn party from Donald Trump...who easily took over the Republican party using the very same doomsday machine that these smug fuckers spent their adult lives building.   

Well, at least they can still count on Mitt Romney, right?

Right?

When asked if he might endorse Harris in September, [Romney] told a reporter that he's "got nothing more on that front," adding "we'll see" if he writes in Ann Romney again.

I Am The Liberal Media

Congratulations to MSNBC on Becoming BulwarkTV

It took awhile to get there --

-- but you finally arrived.

I Am The Liberal Media

Breaking Protocol

Since the short, turbulent Biden to Harris candidacy transition episode, I've taken a bit of a break from my job as the unofficial Never Trump podcast listening post warden.   You will remember that, during that brief window of confusion, when everyone needed to calm the fuck down and let Joe Biden consult with his trusted inner circle and decide on a way forward, instead virtually every Never Trumper decided that this was the perfect moment for an en masse freakout.  That all of us feckless, soft-headed Democrats needed to immediately shut the fuck up, step aside and let them run things.

Frankly, I got fed up with bottomless sanctimony of this small clutch of media creatures who, in their former exalted positions within the Republican establishment, were so myopic and so pathetically impotent they couldn't even protect their party from an obviously grifting, racist scumbag like Donald Trump.  

And yet, there the were, imperiously presuming to tell us how to run our party.

All of their worst, hardwired Conservative habits-of-mind came right back out into the open.  Fer chrissake, they've been singing paeans to Dick Fucking Cheney and openly dreaming of the Great Restoration, when the GOP shall be returned to the ante-Trumpian state good old days of [checks notes] George W. Bush.

This is who they are, and who they probably always will be.  

However, for purely schadenfreude-related reasons I might listen to this particular Never Trump podcast from 12 days ago:

From the Hindustan Times, because this is now an international story:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. allegedly bragged about intimate photos of journalist Olivia Nuzzi, leading to her suspension after she admitted to sending them.

Of all the bad old Conservative traits these recently-former Republicans have retained, one of the worst is their absolutely terrible taste in what "friends" they choose to saddle up with.   

I Am The Liberal Media

If You're Just Dying To Hear Recently-Former Republicans Bitching About The Walz VP Pick...

 ...and whining that Democrats don't know anything about middle Murrica, boy do I have a Bulwark  podcast for you.

Oh the things I do for the England.

At this point you might be asking yourself (for the hundredth time), "WTF is wrong with these people?

Well gather 'round, kids, and old Unca Driftglass will tell you WTF is wrong with these people.

The begin with, the one thing elite political professional Never Trumpers now swear they never understood was [dramatic pause] their own fucking party. I know this because they have said as much, over and over again, for the last nine years.   Complete surprise.  Utter shock.  Who could have predicted!  Because it's either that, or they would have to cop to fucking well knowing better -- that they understood that their party was built on a foundation of racism, paranoia and rage -- but they never believed that the Vesuvius of bigots and imbeciles they had built would blow its top in their lifetime, or damage them personally.  

Oops.

So having presided over the destruction of their own party, they rowed their lifeboats across the bay to a realm they understood even less:  the Democratic party.

Never Trumpers don't know shit about Democrats.  And they don't really care to know shit about Democrats. I've done my best to explain to them who we are and why we are the way we are, but they're, shall we say, aggressively disinterested in any of that.  All they know or care about are the caricatures of Democrats they themselves helped manufacture in order to rile up their own base of bigots and imbeciles enough to get them to the polls and voting against their own interests.  

And since they were run out of their own party, none of that has really changed.  In computer terms, they've installed a few, shitty translation apps that helps them communicate basic concepts -- air, water, food, MSNBC -- but their basic hardware and operating systems remain virtually unchanged.  And based on that, they are seized with the conviction that, in order to save!democracy! the entire Democratic party is obliged to tilt on its axis and change its orbit to accommodate them.

From Matthew Sheffield's essay on the subject over at Flux.  

...Ever since Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016, we have heard constantly from self-described “centrists” that Democrats are painfully out of touch with White rural America, and that they need to do more to reach citizens who have been left behind by economic globalization and changing demographics and opinions, but if that really were the objective, why then has there been so much Never Trump resistance to Tim Walz, a jovial man from rural Minnesota who has a teacher’s talent for explaining himself? If you want agrarian outreach, Tim Walz is almost the perfect candidate to do it for Democrats, especially since he practices a full-inclusion model of politics that includes people of all races, sexes, beliefs, and orientations.

Tim Walz is everything these pundits pretended to want. What he isn’t is what they actually want, a conservative Democrat.

It’s more than a little ironic for me to complain about this as a former Republican, but the inconvenient truth is that there are way too many conservatives who gave up on their own party and are trying to turn Democrats into the party they once controlled before Trump took it over.

...Nine years after Trump first announced his candidacy, the Republican party as currently constituted is no place for conservatives. It is a reactionary authoritarian party. But instead of fighting the radical right within their own party, conservatives have been trying to move Democrats to the right, while also calling themselves “centrists.”

They cannot help themselves.

They hate the party they left behind, and they deeply resent the party that has generously given them refuge.  All they have left are nostalgic memories of the Imaginary Republican Party of their youth, which is why, no matter what moves Democrats make or what Democrats believe or propose or accomplish, they will never stop insisting/demanding/cajoling the Democratic party to become Republican-lite.  

They pine for the Imaginary Reagan Party of their childhood, and really believe that we'd all be better off if Democrats would just hand the keys over to them and let them save us from ourselves by dragging the party to the right far enough that Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney would find themselves at home there.  

And the more the Democratic party doesn't budge, the crankier they get.  And because the media invited them to colonize cable news and America's op-ed pages, their little tantrums now cast wildly outsized shadows.

I Am The Liberal Media!

Both Siderists Racing Endlessly Through The MAGA Rat Maze

There's a part of the brain of those afflicted with Compulsive Centrist Disorder that Trump and the Republican Party have broken forever.     Broken like Kirk and crew broke Norman's brain in I, Mudd. 

The existence of Trump and the Republican party presented them with an unresolvable paradox, and many of them have gone mad trying in vain to square that unsquarable circle.  

Take, for example, Mr. William Galston, who "holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a senior fellow. Prior to January 2006 he was the Saul Stern Professor and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland..." an several other academic and political resume items.  He is also a contributor at the vile Federalist Society, and a columnist at Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal.

He is also a hardcore, life-long slightly-left-leaning centrist, and honestly, among all of our "allies", these sorts are just the fucking worst.  Because they do the work of the radical Right while wearing the jersey of the Sensible Left-Leaning Centrist.  

Specifically, as the Right kept rocketing further and further down the political color spectrum into Infrared Crazytown, to maintain their Sensible Left-Leaning Centrist credentials this species of cage-fed academic pundit was always too happy to pull up stakes and relocate the "center" further and further to the right.  In Galston's case, after Democrats elected Barack Obama (who might as well have been built in a Sensible Centrist lab) and, in response, Republicans began an eight year, racist primal scream and embarked on a plot to destroy Obama by any means necessary...

...from high atop his academic ivory tower, Galston surveyed the scene and concluded that, damnit!, what Murrica needed right now was Moar Centrism!  Moar Both Siderism!  And so he and a number of other useful idiots grifters founded No Labels, about which I wrote a long thing two days after they launched, and which as proven to be an extremely accurate and prescient bit of blogging.  

If you want to read it, it's here, "Dead Center".  

That was in 2010.

In 2014 -- fully six years into the relentless Republican campaign of slander and sabotage -- Galston once again cast his gaze across the political landscape and, as a Sensible Left-Leaning Centrist, concluded that the country's best way forward was to get behind a group of clean-cut, well-meaning rising rising Republican stars who called themselves the "Young Guns".  From the Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2014:

A Cautious Step Toward Republican Reform

Challenging conservative orthodoxies on tax policy and education, but not going far enough.

By William A. Galston

As a member of the gang of insurgents who prepared the way for Bill Clinton's presidency, I know something about reforming a political party on a losing streak. The conservative manifesto "Room to Grow," released May 22 by the advocacy group YG Network—the YG stands for Young Guns—offers a glimpse of a similar effort among today's Republicans...

The document's scope is limited—deliberately, I assume. It has nothing to say about foreign policy or hot-button social issues such as same-sex marriage. The focus is on economic opportunity and mobility for people striving to enter the middle class or struggling to remain there. The frame is narrowed even further. "Room to Grow" is all but silent on the budget, trade and immigration. It touches on tax reform and Social Security only tangentially, and on Medicare only in the context of the Affordable Care Act...

The document's emphasis on the middle class is a thinly veiled repudiation of the Romney campaign, whose emphasis on "job creators" reduced the 2012 Republican convention to a gathering of the National Federation of Independent Businesses. As Sen. Mitch McConnell noted at a "Room to Grow" public event last week...

By acknowledging and cataloging the challenges facing the middle class, policy analyst Peter Wehner takes a large step toward reality in the "Room to Grow" introductory chapter...

And then comes the yummy-yummy Both Siderist gravy that Sensible Left-Leaning Centrists slather on everything they write

It isn't just the fault of one administration or party, and the American people know it. "When it comes to Republicans and Democrats," Mr. Wehner writes, "the public's attitude is: A pox on both your parties." Conservatives, he says, need to "set aside their habit of speaking as if the very same solutions we offered a generation ago would work equally well today."...

Sure, it doesn't go far enough.   And sure, there are critical issues that are, as yet, too hot to touch.  But just maybe, with sober-minded elders like Mitch McConnell to guide them,  those crazy kids will turn this whole cockeyed caravan around!

Throughout the remainder of the Obama administration, the entirety of the Trump administration and the first two years of the Biden administration, No Labels (and it's legislative arm, the so-called Problem Solvers Caucus which, fun fact, never actually solved any problems) remained dogmatically committed to the proposition that everything was always the fault of Both Sides, and that only Sensible Centrist movement of some kind could save the nation from the Extremes on Both Sides.

When, in fact, No Labels has only ever truly served one purpose.  From The Intercept, December 4, 2018:

Here’s a Better Name for No Labels: Republicans

Far from remaining aloof from politics, No Labels has been swooping down into the fray in recent years on behalf of Republicans and conservative Democrats.

As we all know by now, journalists, academics and think tanks acting as stalking horses for terrible Republican ideas while masquerading as Sensible Centrists are the lollipops in the mouths and butter in the asses of the Beltway media.   

They absolutely cannot get enough of it, which is why No Labels never lacked for glowing publicity and a steady flow of dark money.  And you can see how useful such creatures are to schemes of some recently-former Republican Never Trumpers who dream of returning to their Bush/Cheney glory days.  Which is why Mr. Galston and his dreary "But the Democrats..." mantra is a cast regular on Mona Charen's weekly Bulwark podcast.   

But then, about five minutes ago a whole lotta people started to catching up in big a hurry with where your 'ol Unca Driftglass had been all along.  That was when No Labels began its most ambitious fifth column project on behalf of the Republican party; when, in a move guaranteed to drain votes from Joe Biden and accomplish nothing else, they announcing they were launching a foredoomed third-party run for president.

There sometimes comes a moment in the lives of at least some of these broke-brained, Sensible Centrist goofs when the terrors real world intrude deeply enough into their cosseted, Centrist comas that they suddenly realize just how close to the snapping jaws tyranny their little pink toes actually are.  

Then, in a fleeting moment of clarity, they actually do something.

From USA Today, May 13, 2023:

A Trump-Biden rematch? Pass, says this group searching for a third-party option in 2024
...
Whatever its rationale, No Labels’ pursuit of a third-party option has caused strife even within the organization. William Galston, another of the group’s founders, resigned in April after questioning the wisdom of its launching third-party campaign.

“My judgment is that an independent third-party candidacy would make Donald Trump’s return to the White House more likely, not less likely,” Galston said. “I decided I had to act on that belief.”

So good on him for that.  

However, that junkie itch of the hardcore Both Siderist is well nigh impossible to resist for long.  

And so, last week on the aforementioned Bulwark podcast, during a long and tedious discussion of the various shades and styles of partisanship (oh, the things I listen to for you people! :-), when Mr. Galston's turn came around, this is, in part, what he had to add to the conversation:

Will Saletan:  ...a recent survey in which 62% of Republicans said they were prepared to vote for a candidate who faced allegations of sexual harassment more than 40% would vote for a convicted felon more than 40% said they would vote for a candidate who compromised National Security and [professor of political science Shanto Iyengar] said that there was quote a huge partisan divide with more...with Republicans much more likely to ignore these things.  So to what extent do you think the partisan hostility accounts for this loss of self- policing within the Republican party or to what extent do you think other factors are more salient.

Galston, [after explaining that it would be way too much work to go through all the relevant studies and statistics] :...I'd really have to put in a lot of work to be able to answer your question at a social science level of rigor so let me just revert to informal punditry and say that it seems to me obvious that the worse you think would be the consequences for the country of the other side taking control the more likely you are to make excuses for the misdeeds of your own side.  The stakes are too high to allow those misdeeds to get in the way of the overall objectives which is to save the country from those evil people on the other side.  Uh... and I think from that standpoint... uh... y'know... uh... I think there's a certain symmetry between the two political parties at this point.  Namely each party, for different reasons, believes that a takeover by the other party would entail catastrophe for the country, uh, and that's so that's half of the answer...

Some of you may remember the final episode of the outstanding Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which the new WJM station management announced that it was going to keep idiot Ted Baxter on the payroll and fire everyone else.  All the talented, hardworking news professionals who actually made the show work.

In a moment of bravado, Ted threatened to resign if management fired the rest of the staff. However, when pushed, he immediately caved. This prompted, Murray Slaughter, the writer, to remark, "When a donkey flies, you don't blame him for not staying up that long." 

Same deal here.

There is no exit from the MAGA Rat Maze which does not involve conceding that both sides are emphatically not the same.  At all.  Period.  Which is why Compulsive Centrism Disorder/Both Siderism is not only every bit as much of a cult as MAGA Republicanism, these two cults exist in symbiotic relationship to each other.  

The further into Crazytown the Republican party goes, the further to the Right the Both Siderist cult must haul the fulcrum of Centrism in order to keep up the pretense of fairness and neutrality (and continue marketing themselves as the safe harbor from The Extremes on Both Sides.)   And, seeing that Both Siderists will reflexive respond to growing fanaticism on the Right by dragging the "center" rightward, the Republican party is encouraged to continue driving ever further in the direction of outright fascism.   

One cult is full of shrieking bigots, demagogues, grifters, perverts, imbeciles and heavily armed gun-nuts waiting for the signal to grab their muskets and take the fight to the streets, while the other cult is stocked with pundits, op-ed writers, academics and other mild-mannered users-of-correct-grammar-and-cutlery, but make no mistake, they're in this together.

Or, in the wise words of Omar Little...

"I got the shotgun.  You got the briefcase. But it's all in the game, though, right?"

I Am The Liberal Media

Wait? You Mean I Coulda Been Getting *Paid* For This?!?

 

The time: Peak George W. Bush administration.

The place: The American media landscape.

And the challenge:  If you are moved by cataclysmic circumstances to write about politics and the media, what is the shortest and surest route to becoming a complete media pariah? Giving slight offense will not get it done.  Treading, once and lightly, on the corns of a specific editor will not do.  You need get your picture  laminated next to every door into the mainstream media so that whichever bouncer is on duty today at whichever point on ingress knows not to let you pass.  You're shooting for the total persona non grata package, so what can you do that is so transgressive that you can never, ever be forgiven?   

The answer: Write about how fucked in the head the Republican party had become and write about how fatally compromised the mainstream media is for aggressively refusing to report on how fucked in the head the Republican party had become. 

I'm going to repost excerpts from two things I wrote in April of 2005.   The reason I'm reposting them is because they're from my very first month as a blogger, and because nearly 20 years later, rather than being kicked out of the media for ever whispering such things, an entire cottage industry of recently-former Republicans who are being offered top dollar for proffering exactly the same analysis.

If this stuff bores you, skip over it.  The moral of the story is way down at the bottom.  You will find it under the heading, The Moral of the Story.

First example, is from April 5, 2005.  That's +19 years ago.  It covers the rise of the crazies in the GOP.  How they're taking over the party.  And how the money guys and the "moderates" whistling past Lincoln's tomb thought thing weren't going to get so much worse.  Here you go:

The Fundies vs. The Funders.

The money guys are getting nervous. This whole patched-together GOP Dark Tower arrangement is visibly shuddering, and those up in the penthouse on the tippy-tippy-top can feel the swaying of the edifice more pronouncedly than anyone.

Something is coming.

Might not get here for awhile, but the coming Schism is already shaking the ground. The GOP’s own internal Cuban Missile Crisis. Their own third reel of “Reservoir Dogs.” Everybody pointing guns at everyone else and nobody willing to back off. Question is, who’s gonna shoot Nice Guy Eddie?
Very dangerous game -- chicken -- and we liberals should know; we’ve been playing it every election cycle for decades, but now we seem to be slowly learning how to stand together. The Republicans, OTOH, seem to be learning how to tear themselves apart in public like a German kinetic sculpture. Maybe there’s some kind of Cosmological Political Self-Immolation Constant in the Universe that always finds a way to balance itself out. Who knows?

What we can say is the Republican party is sick, and has been for a very long time. And the Moderates and Money guys are getting really, really scared of the increasingly deranged Fundy hired help, while the Fundies are getting louder and louder about their “Apocalypse Now!” agenda.

I have friends who used to describe themselves as Moderate Republicans. With these people, I could have gotten along. Found common ground. You know: “governed.”

9/11 made a lot of them lose their right minds in a lot of ways, but most acutely, it gave them a kind of Hysterical Political Blindness. Through sheer willpower (and cranking up the Limbaugh until their ears bleed) they try to drown out the clamor of the race back to the Dark Ages that their frenzied fellow-travelers are pursuing so feverishly.

Some virulent form of Spinal Dennis Milleritis, but now the Tower rumbles, and chunks of concrete are hitting the pavement, and a few of these moral sleepers are rubbing their eyes and wondering who the hell is making all the damned racket.

It’s the Fundies, pal. And the Funders are getting freaked.

The dirty Republican Secret that they hide right out in the open is sooo simple: Without their cross-burners, their Fundies, their militia groupies and their assorted other Hate-based Civic Organizations, they can't win anything. Without them, the Original GOP Gangsters would poll no higher than 30-40% from now until the end of time...and they know it.

So the whole of the GOP Noise Machine is (and must be) devoted to pandering to the Ultras, appeasing them. Fox News and Scream Radio are the damned cheering section for these Special Wingnut Olympics: devoted exclusively to telling stupid. hateful slugdumbs that they are not stupid and hateful. That their asinine, Jack Chick cartoon “religion” is somehow not ludicrous.

It is Hungry Tiger on whose back the whole Republican Party rides. Bush 41 made the mistake of not knobbing their rotting peckers hard enough and it cost him the election: since then who’s the Boss and who’s the Bitch has been crystal clear, and the split is starting to gape wide and ugly. The Ultras aren’t backing off this time: they smell arterial blood and they're hungry.

The Moderate and Money Republicans thought they were safe. Thought they could dispatch their Fundy thugs to beat-down and demonize Democrats whenever we got too close to victory. Thought their Imperial litters would be borne into Neocon Heaven on the broad backs and pin-heads of the Red State Shining Path Evangelicals.

Unfortunately, the trouble with having a Magic, 500,000 watt Demonizing Cannon in the hands of crazy people is that they have no compunction about turning it on anyone. Anyone at all.

Shit baby, they turned their shit-hoses on to genuine War Heroes -- in your own Party -- and didn’t bat a fucking eye. So what makes you think for a minute that they’re not going to swing those big guns around and fire them right into your wheelhouse if they believe you aren’t 100% down with their whole American Fascist Theocracy program? Because they’re realists? Because they believe in compromise? Haven’t you been paying attention!

There’s an old saying from World War II that “A Jew is anyone that Hitler says is a Jew.”
And a Commie is anyone that Joe McCarthy says is a Commie.
And a terrorist is anyone that George Bush says is a terrorist.
And an America Hating Enemy of Christ is anyone that Tom DeLay says is an America Hating Enemy of Christ.

Jesus, these fucks just never, ever learn do they? Always think you can get away with being a little bit pregnant and a little bit fascist, and skip out before the check comes.

Moderate Republicans (and non-voters) is where we win. We need to talk to them. Arrange pen-pal correspondence with them. Whatever.

Have one or two fresh Fundy outrages ready to slip into the conversation. Be firm but sympathetic: Every time you pulled the lever for the GOP, you handed over power to your worst nightmare...

The second core sample from the Age of Bush is from just four days later.  April 9, 2005.  It is a vivisection of a column by Mr, David Brooks of The New York Times, who was already fully committed to the Both Sides Do It lie.  He was busy cautioning this Republican party that, well-intentioned though they may be, Mr. and Mrs. Average Murrican were getting a wee bit nervous about a few of the GOP's more ambitious proposals -- like gutting Social Security -- and a few of its more enthusiastic supporters.

This was how Mr. Brooks described the situation:

The Republican Party is running into a problem: the conservatism of the American people. Over the past decade, the Republicans have set themselves up as the transformational party... [But the American people] have a taste for order and a distrust of those who want too much change on too many fronts too quickly...

 

And here was my helpful translation:

Translation: They are scared shitless that the Crazier’n a Shithouse Rat Theocrats that the Evil Liberals have always warned them about might actually exist and have the keys to the car. Oh and all the Mapquest Route Planners they left behind as clues have a place called “Armageddonville” circled in big, red Crayon.

 

Hey, remember Mapquest?!  What a time it was!

Brooks went on at some length trying to gently remind his Republican party that their most effective strategy had always been was keeping their racism and crazytalk hidden behind a genial, smiling Reagan mask, so put the fucking mask back on already!   

Then there was the problem of the Dear Leader of the Republican party being, y'know, a terrifying lunatic.  

Sound familiar?

In 2024 that Dear Leader is Donald Trump.  In 2005 that Dear Leader was Tom DeLay.  

Here's Brooks:

House Republicans like what DeLay has done, and few have any personal animus toward him, but his aggressiveness makes them - and his own constituents - nervous. Only 39 percent of DeLay's Texas constituents said they would stick with him if he were up for re-election today, a Houston Chronicle survey found.

Here's my translation:

DeLay has their nuts in his medicine bag and they don’t fucking dare say a word against him. DeLay makes a viper like Gingrich look like a charming Southern Gentleman, that’s how de-ranged he is. Don’t fuck with The Hammer, dude. My cousin said she had a friend who saw him beat a homeless guy to death with a congressional staffer. Then he ate him, whole, like an Anaconda eating a rabbit. He’s Kaiser Fucking Sose, man. Prince of Darkness. On the plus side, two-out-of-every-five ambulatory humans in Sugarland, TX would still support him even now that he has been outed as the Satan’s Wingman. Gotta love Texas: It’s like a whole other Special Olympics Purgatory.

However, Mr. Brooks also warned, that Democrats should take no comfort in any of this because Mr. and Mrs. Average Murrica found both sides equally yadda yadda yadda:

Brooks:

This does not mean good news for Democrats. That party is at risk of going into a death spiral. The Democrats lost white working-class voters by 23 percentage points in the last election, and now the party is being led by people who are guaranteed to alienate those voters even more: the highly educated and secular university-town elites who follow Howard Dean and believe Bush hatred and stridency are the outward signs of righteousness.

My translation:

America has had a chance to test drive Irresponsible Cowardly Stupid for a few years now and they luvs it! Even though they will climb over corpses to send their kids to college, Americans hate “elites.” Jeez, just saying that word creeps me out. ElitesElitesElites!    Stop it dude: you’re scaring the Fundies. Nothing more frightening than a citizen with a book. And positively terror-ific if they went to college...except Bob Jones...who Rock! Go Fighting Antimiscegenists!

And for +19 years and +11,000 posts (and 811 podcast episodes), to this very day, though I've veered here and there and around the block again from time to time, I've been on this beat.  Which has been rewarding in more ways than I can count, but it also provides a thoroughly Mapquested route to media ostracism. 

Go after the monstrousness of the Republican party without surcease?  Check.

Go after the Both Sides Do It lie without letup?  Check.

Go after the Very Serious Persons of the mainstream media -- especially The New York Times -- for using the Both Sides Do It lie to deflect, diffuse and otherwise run cover for the monstrousness of the Republican party?  Check.

And now, The Moral of the Story.

I read this Bulwark article yesterday evening, and after laughing all night, and right through breakfast, I thought maybe I'd write about it.

And then I got this wave of what I can only describe as precognitive deja vu.  The uncanny sense that, whatever I write today as a disreputable pariah Liberal blogger, 20 years from now I shall read the exact words I type today staring back at me from the pages of an elite media publication, under the byline of someone who built their career stomping the shit out of everything we Liberals cherish.

Anyway, here's the first few paragraphs from that Bulwark headline story:

1.  Both Sides

At this point, I think the New York Times has moved past trolling and on to attempted homicide. Here’s a paragraph in a story about Eric Adams:

Mayor Adams is far from the only notable elected official who has been criticized for making comments that seem inappropriate. President Biden has made remarks about people’s physical appearance. Former President Donald J. Trump often mocks people’s physical appearance and was found liable in a civil trial for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll.

Both sides.

BOTH SIDES.

BotH SiDeS!

It goes on like that for another 12 paragraphs.  

And then I read a thing that kicked my laugher up from rueful guffaws to something else:

Here's the thing I read:

At this point it’s clear that if we want better media, we have to build it ourselves. Which is what we’re trying to do, right here.

Yes, with the aid of wealthy benefactors, a quarter of a million subscribers, and, most importantly, in-kind promotional contributions from MSNBC worth tens of millions of dollars every year that got them a quarter of a million subscribers, The Bulwark is building its "better media".  And they are building it out of [checks notes] former Republican comms people, former Republican office holders, and former employees of Bill Kristol's now-defunct Weekly Standard.

From a long profile in The Washington Post, May 28, 2024:

The Bulwark: How could it be wrong when it feels so center-right?

...The Bulwark, a franchise of 11 podcasts and six Substack newsletters, has become an outlet for a lot of people. Not nearly as much so as Trumpism, but, well — that’s kind of the whole idea. It has picked up those that MAGA, and polarization in general, left behind...

And it’s been growing. This spring, the Bulwark added a podcast on Trump’s trials hosted by conservative lawyer George Conway; Adam Kinzinger, the former Illinois Republican congressman who voted in favor of Trump’s second impeachment, will become a regular contributor and podcast guest. It also hired political scribe Marc Caputo to send dispatches from Florida in a newsletter vertical titled “MAGAville.”

Meanwhile, the anti-Trumpers of the center-left are, as always, looking for conservatives who agree with them. Together with the refugees from the right, it amounts to a market. With 267,000 subscribers — 37,000 of whom pay for a fire hose of additional content and live chats — the Bulwark ranks third among Substack’s political sites. The company counts Kathryn Murdoch, Rupert’s daughter-in-law, among its early investors, and brings in about $5 million a year in gross revenue. Longwell says the venture is close to breaking even.

The Bulwark’s live shows are another way for all those people to know that they’re not alone in their starry-eyed desire to Make Centrism Great Again. 

Ah, yes.

Make.

Centrism.

Great.

Again.

I Am The Liberal Media