"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 forward25 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.
This weekend is my 20th blogging anniversary, so I'm putting the tip jar right up-top should any of you feel inclined.
Burn The Lifeboats
Hurricane Katrina wasn’t enough.
Terri Schiavo wasn’t enough.
Torture revelations were definitely not enough. Hell, scum like
Hannity and Limbaugh celebrated it, and torture architect John Yoo is now
the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California,
Berkeley.
Even Iraq falling apart in a welter of lies, corruption and incompetence probably wasn’t enough.
It took all of that plus the collapse of the world economy
under MBA president George W. Bush to finally break the brains of the
Republican base. Because, finally there was no place left for them to hide.
Finally, there it was, right in front of them, every day: the irrefutable
proof that everything they believed was bullshit, and everyone they had
trusted had lied to them because they’re such gullible chumps.
And right then, in that awful revelation, they could have had a moment of
clarity.
They could have repented. They could have atoned. At the very
least they could have done the grown-up thing and apologized to those of us
who tried to warn them, and whom they had spat upon and called traitors.
They could have tried to figure out where they had been led
astray.
But they didn’t do any of that, because a Republican would rather die a
thousand painful deaths than ever admit they had been wrong, and that we America-hating, terrorist loving Libtards had been right.
Instead,
as I wrote 16 years ago, all the way back in 2009, like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin,
they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long
enough to burn their uniforms.
Instead of changing their ways and waking the fuck up, they got themselves
some stupid hats and little flags, stepped through the Fabulous, Tea-Baggulous Bush-Off Machine, and voila! Just like *that* they were no longer Republicans.
No siree! Now they were the Tea Party! Independents!
Independent Constitutional Conservative Originalists. Or
whatever. And instead of learning from the catastrophe they had
created, they threw themselves into the arms of any crackpot who would tell
them that none of this had been their fault. And that
everyone should just forget the entire Bush administration anyway, because
this new scary black guy named Obama was a million times worse than any
president ever.
So they embraced still-living sleazy con men like Glenn Beck:
And the very-dead sleazy con man Andrew Breitbart, speaking here at CPAC in 2012:
And, of course, they fell madly in love with the snarling, racist
King of the Birthers:
So deeply in love with him that they nominated him for president and put him on the debate
stage next to Hillary Clinton:
If you watched those debates you know that Hillary Clinton absolutely wiped the floor with him, but you also know that it absolutely didn’t
matter, because during the Clinton years and the Dubya years and the Obama years, the Republican base had learned the most important lesson of
all. They learned that if they all locked arms and screamed loud enough through
their Hate Radio and Fox News megaphones, they could make a craven legacy media drunk on Both Siderism go
along with them in pretending the Bush administration sorta kinda never
happened, and that Republican base voters weren’t really responsible for
anything they said and did, and that the Republican lies about Obama being
churned out a mile a minute by Fox News and Hate Radio were all legitimate news stories, and
that lockstep Republican congressional obstruction and sabotage were
actually Obama’s fault.
And that is the power of lying en masse.
And an ignorant, racist mob that demands to be lied draws con men, grifters and demagogues like shit draws flies.
And the King of Shit Mountain is now
the president of the United States.
Again.
So now we have a genuine scandal that ticks every box of every
issue Republicans were swearing five minutes ago that they cared about. National security.
Handling classified material. Transparency. Competence.
Freedom of speech. And the reaction from MAGA-land has been uniform and
entirely predictable.
From MAGA Twitter, this is a small representative sample from the literally
thousands of nearly identical reactions:
Karoline Leavitt, the actual White House Press Secretary: The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT “war plans.” This
entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for
his sensationalist spin.
This was followed by some mope named CECE who got hundreds of enthusiastic
responses: Why isn’t anyone calling out Jeffrey Goldberg
from The Atlantic for not announcing himself when he landed on a private
Signal call he wasn’t meant to join? Journalistic ethics demand transparency,
but he stayed quiet, copied the texts, and published them, to the world all to
make the Trump administration look bad. Where’s the outrage over a
reporter exploiting it for a hit piece? The focus stays on the mistake,
not his ethical lapse. Why?
Katagaruma: He should be hauled in for questioning and his
devices seized for analysis.
Gary D: Was it just a set up to create a MEDIA fire
storm? Asking for a friend.
SweetPeaBelle: He is unethical and out for the BIG story.
Janet1489534061: It was Planned
realredsd: He should be facing punishment.
EJGSH: They were counting on him being a piece of
garbage.
jnottah He's a Radical douchebag and The Atlantic is a
PROPAGANDA RAG .
HJ4719125173895: Maybe he is a spy guilty of treason !
SSgt Mark USMC: I really think he should be charged with
sedition or espionage. He knew he was going to be on that. He did unexpectedly
land on it. It was arranged. We need to find who arranged it. Charge them for
treason and charge him for sedition.
They're all speaking the same language. They're all goose-stepping in the
same direction. Deny. Deny. Deny. Except at this point
the base doesn’t know which lie to tell, and Conservative media hasn’t reached
a consensus on which lie to tell them to tell, so they're putting out a buffet
table of a dozen different, contradictory lies and letting the base play
Choose Your Own Lying Adventure until they figure out which one(s) works
best.
From Axios:
The MAGA media ecosystem "has splintered into a series of
competing theories to try to explain away the scandal."
But at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter which lie or lies they
settle on, as long as it accomplishes two objectives: First, their
Dear Leader and his people must be blameless, and second, somehow, some Liberal
somewhere is pulling the strings.
However I can tell you this. I did not have “Quoting Friedrich
Hegel” on my bingo card as part of this mad scramble for the perfect lie, but
guess what? It has happened.
But for that story I have to back up just a bit and check in to see
how poor ‘ol Jeff Bezos is doing with that little newsletter of his. And right off the bat we find that three headlines at three different media
outlets are all telling the same story.
From Fox News :
Trump claims Bezos fretted to him about 'out of
control' people at Washington Post
President Donald Trump said in a new interview he was optimistic about his
working relationship with Jeff Bezos as well as the future of the Washington
Post, claiming Bezos had even disparaged the newspaper's staffers to him.
"They actually did a couple of bad articles on him (Bezos)," Trump said in an
interview with OutKick's Clay Travis. "He said, 'This is crazy, I lose my
fortune running this thing and they (Post newsroom employees), you know,
they're out of control.' These people are crazy. They're crazy people. They're
out of control."
From The Hill :
Trump: Bezos a ‘good guy,’ trying to be
‘more fair’ with Washington Post coverage.
“I think it’s great,” Trump told conservative commentator Clay Travis of
Outkick during an interview aboard Air Force One over the weekend. “At length,
I talked to him about it. He’s a good guy. I didn’t really know him in the
first term. I mean, it’s such a difference between now and the first time.”
And from the New York Post :
Trump claims Jeff Bezos complained
to him about ‘out of control’ Washington Post staffers: ‘They’re crazy people’
“They actually did a couple of bad articles on him (Bezos),” Trump said in an
interview with OutKick’s Clay Travis.
All three headline stories, but none of those media outlets did the original
reporting. They’re all citing the same source: Trump talking to
Clay Travis of Outkick during an interview aboard Air Force One
So let’s go there.
This is the OutKick blurb at OutKick:
Clay Travis is the founder of the fastest growing national multimedia
platform, OutKick, that produces and distributes engaging content across
sports and pop culture to millions of fans across the country. OutKick was
created by Travis in 2011 and sold to the Fox Corporation in 2021. One of the
most electrifying and outspoken personalities in the industry, Travis hosts
OutKick The Show where he provides his unfiltered opinion on the most
compelling headlines throughout sports, culture, and politics. He also makes
regular appearances on FOX News Media as a contributor providing analysis on a
variety of subjects ranging from sports news to the cultural landscape.
And here’s more about them.
He and Buck Sexton host The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, a
three-hour weekday conservative talk show which debuted on June 21, 2021 as
the replacement of The Rush Limbaugh Show on many radio stations.
Ah! Ideological continuity! So important in keeping the reprogrammable meatbags from getting all confused and cranky.
And sure enough, for decades, from 11AM - 2 PM every day, you could find Rush
Limbaugh or one of his lackeys on local radio station WMAY right here in
Springfield, Illinois. But Limbaugh is dead now. Dead and buried
in what I believe may have become the largest impromptu public urinal in St.
Louis, Missouri.
So now, where once you would find Limbaugh, you can listen to the Clay Travis
and Buck Sexton Show right here in Springfield, Illinois on WMAY. And on
any of hundreds of other radio stations across the country, because the Clay
Travis and Buck Sexton Show is part of a national syndication package, so that
hundreds of thousands of Republican base voters are all hearing the same
message at the same time.
As part of that syndication package, Before them on WMAY, from 9 AM
to 11 AM, you’ll find Fox News' very own Brian Kilmeade.
After them, from 2 - 4 PM, comes The Dana Show. That's Dana
Loesch. And after her, for three more hours, The Erick Erickson Show.
But wait! There's more!
Within the OutKick platform you'll find the OutKick Show with Clay
Travis. No surprise. But you'll also find 13 other shows.
There are gambling tips. Sports news. Politics and culture with
Tomi Lahren!
Dan Dakich has a show called "Don't @ Me" and he is billed as "an
American basketball sportscaster. He is a former player, assistant coach,
interim head coach for the Indiana University Hoosiers
American basketball player". But here he was on Twitter yesterday.
"NPR's Katherine Maher admits outlet failed to cover Hunter Biden laptop"
Then there's the Ricky Cobb show. Here's that blurb:
"Ricky Cobb show will offer fans that magical blend of insight and humor into
current sports topics along with his deep passion for sports, culture and
humor from the 70’s and 80’s." Recent topics were, let's see, "Tesla
terrorists attempt to go mainstream,” and "Tim Walz Fans The Tesla and Elon
Hate", "DEI officially done at Disney, are there any masculine
Democrats?"
There's Gaines for Girls With Riley Gaines. From the
blurb: "Riley Gaines has emerged as one of the most powerful voices in
the fight to save women's sports and spaces, but the fight is far from over!"
Three episodes from last year: "She Was FAILED For Using 'Biological
Woman", "Protecting the integrity of women's sports with Tommy Tuberville" and
"Josh Hawley Confronts NCAA About Trans Athletes In Women's Sports"
FOX59 Sports anchor/reporter Charly Arnolt now has her own
show. Recent episodes include "DOGE Superstar", "Have Any Woke Companies
Actually Bounced Back?". "The Woke Push To Keep Men In Women’s Sports".
"Canadian Sports Fans Continue To Boo The US National Anthem!", "Can Men In
Women's Sports Have Enough Impact To Flip Democrats"
The latest episode of Hot Mic w/ Hutton & Withrow is "No Woke
Basketball"
Fox News' Tyrus has his own place there. Recent episode asks "Can
Wrestling SAVE America From DIVISIVE Politics?!"
Then there is the Will Cain Show. That's Fox News' Will Cain.
Are you noticing the pattern here yet?
The lead sentence coming out of Will Cain's mouth on his show yesterday was literally, "Why
are women so woke?"
After that it was on to the "so called" war plans with
lots of scowling and air quotes around everything. Then he brought on
some obscure visiting professor named Gad Saad from Northwood University who
blathered on about two French philosophers who wrote books about how human
reasoning didn't evolve to find the truth, but just to win arguments.
And that somehow proves that Jeffrey Goldberg clearly wrote his Atlantic
article just to hurt Republicans.
Gad Saad:
"He's not a true journalist.
He's not pursuing objective truth. He simply wants his team to win an
argument by making the other team look bad.”
For the record, Northwood University is "a private university focused on
business education". Its most popular undergraduate majors according to
2021 records were things like Business Administration and Management,
Marketing/Marketing Management, Vehicle & Vehicle Parts & Accessories
Marketing Operations and Sport & Fitness Administration/Management, so I
have no idea what a visiting philosophy professor has to do there, except that
whatever he does leaves him with enough spare time show up on The Will Cain
Show when summoned.
Late breaking news from Gad Saad on Twitter -- 11:40 AM · Mar 27, 2025 "My appearance tonight on Jesse Watters is going to be rescheduled to another
date."
Oh. He's that guy!
And then we're off to, as promised and no kidding, Hegelianism. You
know, sweeping, big-word musings on what even is knowledge? How can
anyone really know anything? All of which amounted to nothing but a
job-lot of big smarty pants words from a Real Philosopher to reassure the MAGA
meatheads that they’re really the smart ones and the Signal scandal is really
some kinda Liberal plot against the Dear Leader.
For the record, today’s top essays at OutKick are
Some Environmentalists Could Give A Rip About The Environment by Tomi Lahren
Trump Pokes Fun At Reporter For Still Wearing A Mask by Ian Miller
Yes, Red State Voters Helped Tank 'Snow White' Box Office by Ian Miller
And do you know who advertises on OutKick? Everybody. In fact, I might have missed the crucial 99th Lifetime teevee
episode, about Gypsy Rose, Life After Lockup if I hadn't been tooling around
over there. And this was Season 2, Episode 99: The Unseen
Footage!!!
This is the universe in which MAGA Republicans live all day, every
day now. It’s safe there. Reassuring. And the bargain
they’ve made with their media is their eternal financial and electoral loyalty
in exchange for protecting them from ever feeling stupid or wrong. And for that reason, those people are now permanently lost to reason and unreachable, and it is a waste of time and energy to continue to try.
From Greg Sargent at The New Republic:
In Signalgate, Trumpworld
is demonstrating exactly what's wrong with authoritarian populism: Refusal to
admit error, walling out of constructive criticism and the cult-like defense
of the leader at all costs.
And it is a very profitable business. Which is why, just down
the street, yet another for-profit MAGA propaganda shop is opening for
business, with some depressingly familiar faces.
From The Hollywood Reporter:
Former Fox News primetime star Megyn Kelly says that she is launching
MK Media, a video and audio podcast network that will work with creators and
journalists in the news and entertainment space. The first three shows will be
hosted by journalist and 2Way founder Mark Halperin, Daily Mail culture
columnist Maureen Callahan, and influencer and political commentator Link
Lauren, and others will follow.
Media Matters has the larger picture:
The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports,
comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces
A new Media Matters analysis found 9 out of the 10 top online shows assessed
are right-leaning,
...This analysis was based on 320 online shows with a right-leaning or
left-leaning ideological bent. We found that right-leaning online shows
dominate the ecosystem, with substantially larger audiences on both
politics/news shows and supposedly nonpolitical shows that we determined often
platformed ideological content or guests.
The biggest scandal of Trump 2.0 is no scandal at all on MAGA media
So, as legacy media is slowly dying, and the Conservative media
ecosystem continues to expand exponentially, the Liberal media, such as it is,
is stuck where blogging was in 2007.
Back then, blogging was exciting
and vital; some of us are still at it. In fact, this Monday will be my 20th
anniversary of blogging, which is part of the reason I have the tip jar out at the top this time. But back in 2007, just as we seemed to be
coming together, a number of A-List bloggers decided that the internet was
full. That there wasn’t room for all of us noobs, and if you hadn’t
started blogging in 2003 and weren’t part of their crew, you should just give
up and do something else.
And since blog traffic was the lifeblood of blogging (and later revenue), this
was also right around the time of the infamous Blogroll Amnesty Day!
That day when, a handful of A-List Liberal bloggers finally got tired of us
smelly little lesser blogging monkeys amongst whom they had been
trapped. So they purged their blogrolls of anyone who wasn’t them, and
made sure that they only linked to each other and drove traffic among
themselves.
And now, as we look at the podcast world that we’ve been a part of for more
than 15 years, it sure looks like that’s what’s happening with what’s left of
Liberal media. Increasingly the Centrist/Center-Right Bulwark that has
grown thanks to MSNBC relentless sponsorship, and the Centrist/Center-Left Pod
Save crew who made it big on the strength of their inside contacts with Barack
Obama and Democratic leadership, are only talking to themselves and each
other.
The Signal Scandal (or Whiskey-Leaks as some wags have called it) may be so bad
and have such sprawling implications that the one-third of the country that is
completely oblivious to politics might actually hear about it as it is spread
by word-of-mouth.
Of course, no one is going to go to jail for this, and given the wall-to-wall
corruption and incompetence of the Republican-controlled government, it's
likely there will be no serious investigations, which is a tragedy.
But just imagine if we had a
Liberal media anywhere near the size, scope and level of message discipline as
the Right has.
Imagine if we had the depth and reach to compel the legacy media to make this the story for months on-end. To compel them to go after this actual scandal like a dog worrying a bone, just like the Right intimidated the legacy media into pounding non-scandals like "Her emails..." and Benghazi and Whitewater and on and on and on into the ground
Twitter isn't real life, but it can give one a strong whiff of the putrescence
of today's Republican party. The "Fuck Liz Cheney She's a Commie!"
replies go on and on and on like all over social media, which is
unsurprising. Any Republican capable of growing opposable thumbs and
climbing down out of the Treasonous Idiot Tree did so political eons
ago.
The reprogammable zombies who remain have been too well trained over too many
decades by Republicans like [checks notes] -- hey whaddya know! -- trained by
Republicans like Liz Cheney to automatically relegate to the
status of dirty, commie Trump-hating, baby-murderers --
-- anyone who tries to tell them anything they don't want to hear.
Which is why, regardless of her flawless record of despicable Conservative
vileness, the meatheads immediately ran her out of the Republican party
the minute she told them something they didn't want to year.
You've got to admit, Liz & Company did a really bang-up job of turning the
Republican base into a mindless doomsday machine with no "Off"
switch.
And now she's been brought in as something akin to a trick shot artist in
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. A sideshow act hired on to entertain the
faithful, and maybe audition for a bit part in a possible Harris
administration.
The rubes will ooh and they will ahh and it'll get her booked on every Sunday
show, and in the end, it won't mean a thing, because go ahead and paint me a picture of the Republican voter who, after a decade of Trump lies, corruption, racism and madness, is still all-in on him. Nothing has budged them. Not Trump's sexual predation. Not the felonies. Not his COVID debacle. Not J6. Not defiling Arlington. Nothing.
What's more, following their decades of now-hardwired Conservative media conditioning, they will reflexively reject anyone who even tries to tell them anything they don't want to hear. However ultra-uber-super Conservative that person might have been up until they said a Bad Thing about Trump, the moment they break bad on the Il Douche is the moment they get automatically sorted into the Dirty Commie Deep State Liberal Media Conspiracy pile.
So paint me a picture of that person suddenly saying to themselves, "Y'know I was gonna vote for Trump a third time, but that Cheney endorsement turned me right around! Now I'm voting for the Communist!"
However, like the Lincoln Project scam in 2020, should the Harris/Walz ticket
win in November, you can damn betcha that ol' Liz will use her juice with the
legacy media and her juice with the Never Trump media to lay claim to as large
and undeserved a slice of cake as she can grab.
Because, at the end of the day --
Kamala Harris is a radical liberal who would raise taxes, take away guns & health insurance, and explode the size and power of the federal gov’t. She wants to recreate America in the image of what’s happening on the streets of Portland & Seattle. We won’t give her the chance.
This is an excerpt from my late friend Harlan Ellison's introduction to
his book Strange Wine:
Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don't Look so
Terrific Yourself.
I used to know Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on Bonanza. He was a
wise and a kind man, and there are tens of dozens of people I would much
rather see dead than Dan. One time, around lunch-break at Paramount, when I
was goofing off on writing a treatment for a Joe Levine film that never got
made, and Dan was resting his ass from some dumb horsey number he'd been
reshooting all morning, we sat on the steps of the weathered saloon that
probably in no way resembled any saloon that had ever existed in Virginia
City, Nevada, and we talked about reality versus fantasy. The reality of
getting up at five in the morning to get to the studio in time for makeup
call and the reality of how bloody much FICA tax they took out of our
paychecks and the reality of one of his kids being down with something or
other . . . and the fantasy of not being Dan Blocker, but of being Hoss
Cartwright.
And he told me a scary story. He laughed about it, but it was the laugh of
butchers in a slaughterhouse who have to swing the mauls that brain the
beeves; who then go home to wash the stink out of their hair from the
spattering.
He told me–and he said this happened all the time, not just in isolated
cases–that he had been approached by a little old woman during one of his
personal appearances at a rodeo, and the woman had said to him, dead
seriously, "Now listen to me, Hoss: when you go home tonight, I want you to
tell your daddy, Ben, to get rid of that Chinee fella who cooks for you all.
What you need is to get yourself a good woman in there can cook up some
decent food for you and your family."
So Dan said to her, very politely (because he was one of the most courteous
people I've ever met), "Excuse me, ma'am, but my name is Dan Blocker. Hoss
is just the character I play. When I go home I'll be going to my house in
Los Angeles and my wife and children will be waiting."
And she went right on, just a bit affronted because she knew all that, what
was the matter with him, did he think she was simple or something, "Yes, I
know . . . but when you go back to the Ponderosa, you just tell your daddy
Ben that I said . . . "
For her, fantasy and reality were one and the same...
Bonanza ran from September 12, 1959, to January 16, 1973. That's
14 seasons and 431 episodes; the second longest running Western television
series in U.S. network history. It was also the first Western series
televised in living color. So, this conversation probably happened
sometime in the mid- or late-1960s. Back when teevee was still a
magic box that brought you Three!Count!'Em!Three! networks to choose
from. When color teevee was still a rarity. When Blocker would
come into your home as Hoss Cartwright every week, year after year.
You would have known who Hoss was and what he was about.
Another part of your brain would have also known who Walter Cronkite was and
what he was about. He was serious. The news mattered. And however addled you
might get, you'd never have mixed up the news of the day with life on the
Ponderosa. But somehow, through the magic of teevee, sometimes some
element of that fictional drama on teevee would get to feeling familiar and real.
Especially if it was part of an ongoing drama that you spent time with over and
over again for years.
Even though a part of that teevee brain knew it wasn't, it seemed like it was
This was a principle theme of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
Mildred kicked at a book. “Books aren’t people. You read and I look around, but there isn’t anybody! . . . Now. . . my “family” is people. They tell me things; I laugh, they laugh! And the colours!”
The "family" she's referring to is the television program that's playing all day, every day on the walls of her "parlor".
Back to Ellison:
There was a woman who had the part of a home-wrecker on a daytime soap
opera. One day as she was coming out of Lord & Taylor in New York, a
viewer began bashing her with an umbrella, calling her filthy names and
insisting she should leave that nice man and his wife alone!
One time during a college lecture, I idly mentioned that I had actually
thought up all the words Leonard Nimoy had spoken as Mr. Spock on the
sole Star Trek segment I had written; and a young man leaped up in the
audience, in tears, and began screaming that I was a liar. He actually
thought the actors were living those roles as they came across the tube.
The teevee brain is still with us, but in some incredibly toxic ways it has
changed. It has evolved to deal with 300 channels instead of three, and in the process, the teevee brain has, in a way, reversed the flow of credulity.
Today, teevee viewers are used to seeing the same actor play many different
parts in many different places. No one is trying to arrest Bryan
Cranston for cooking meth or Idris Elba for running a Baltimore drug empire,
because [spoiler] A) both of the characters they played died in-series, and
B) both actors (especially Elba) are well known for a variety of other
standout roles.
Similarly there is no confusion over who Julia Louis-Dreyfus is.
Or Edie Falco. Or Danny DeVito. They are talented
professionals, who can put on a costume and inhabit a role that makes us laugh
or cry or both. What we feel while we are being entertained is real,
but by now the teevee brain knows that the actors are not the characters.
They're playing a part, and then they'll move on to the next part.
Different costume, different character, different feelings. Then
they'll move on once again. Maybe a movie this time. Maybe the
stage.
What the teevee brain now processes coming through the magic box is an
overwhelming, kaleidoscopic tsunami of comedies, dramas, biopics, animation,
docudramas, reality teevee, politics, westerns, news, science fiction,
reruns, ancient aliens, cooking shows, bitchy housewives, wealth porn, porn
porn, all stitched together with a million ads for better sex, sad dogs,
happy dogs, eczema cures, floppy penis cures, baldness cures and Little Pills
with Big Stories to Tell.
It's all just teevee.
And the teevee brain has learned to expect
performers to go from one role to the next, just as the sports brain has
learned to expect that today's heel who pitches or QBs for our rival, might
be tomorrow's hero when he's traded to our team and performs his miracles
for us. We'll cheer them when they play the hero, and boo them when
they play the villain, but there are no world-ending stakes because it's all
a game. All just teevee. And when they come through the magic
box, the teevee brain accepts them for who they are now, not for who they were in their last series or when they wore a different
number on their jersey.
As I said, the teevee brain has reversed the flow of credulity: it now
values how the performance makes it feel over whether or not
the performance is strictly "real".
And the teevee brain doesn't care whether the person on the screen
right now has ever been in anything else. It is impossible to imagine watching, say, this season of Fargo with someone who
rolls their eyes at Juno Temple's amazing performance because, "Who's she
trying to fool? Everybody knows that's Keely Whatshername from
Ted Lasso. I mean, she's not even American?!? And OMG, that guy's not a sheriff.
That's Don Draper!"
Now hold that thought in your mind while considering this story, which, if
you're of a certain age, you might remember as making national news 26
years ago:
This is during the same period when when television networks began demanding that news
division start showing a profit.
How Profitability Has Moved Networks Out of Hard News
Twenty years ago, there was no network news “business.” The Big Three
broadcast television networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—all covered news, but
none generally made money doing so. Nor did they expect to turn a profit
from news programming. They presented news programming for the prestige
it would bring to their network, to satisfy the public-service
requirements of Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, and
more broadly so that they would be seen as good corporate citizens.
Back then, the networks earned enough money from entertainment
programming that they could afford to run their news operations at a
loss. And so they did. Former CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb recalls
Owner and Chairman William Paley instructing news reporters at a meeting
in the early 1960’s that they shouldn’t be concerned about costs. “I
have Jack Benny to make money,” he told them.
It is no exaggeration to say that just about everything has changed
since then. Today, ABC, CBS and NBC operate in a competitive environment
in which most viewers have dozens of channels from which to choose. That
has transformed not just TV news but the entire television industry.
Those most severely threatened by the way the broadcast business
operates are the Big Three. The ABC and CBS networks (now subsumed into
larger corporate structures) are losing money, according to Wall Street
analysts. NBC’s network profits are also falling sharply. Those who own
these networks—Disney (ABC), CBS Inc. with its major stockholder, Mel
Karmazin, and General Electric (NBC)—all demand that their news
operations make money...
So that's what was happening to the news. And it's no secret when the line separating "actor/entertainer" and
"politician" began to collapse:
Conservative media figured this out the minute Reagan and his henchmen
killed the Fairness Doctrine. Radio and teevee were powerful tools for
making listeners and viewers feel something, and that's exactly what Rush Limbaugh and all his
imitators, and Fox News and all their imitators sold their customers. Feelings.
While Democrats were out there trying to sell policy solutions to actual
problems, Fox News was selling its customers rage and thinly-veiled
racism. Paranoia. Patriotism. Moral superiority.
Sexual arousal. The vindictive joy of making Liberals cry. And
because the consumers of Conserative media were also the base of the Republican party, the
language of Republican politics quickly became indistinguishable from the
language of Fox News and Hate Radio.
...The freshman class, which included not a single "femi-Nazi," one of
Mr. Limbaugh's favorite epithets for supporters of women's rights,
whooped and applauded, proving itself one big fan club of the man it
believes was primarily responsible for the Republican avalanche in
November.
Mr. Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the class as its members
tonight finished a three-day orientation here sponsored by the Heritage
Foundation and Empower America, two conservative Washington research
organizations.
Barbara Cubin, an incoming freshman from Wyoming, told Mr. Limbaugh
that because 74 percent of the nation's newspapers had endorsed
Democrats, "talk radio, with you in the lead, is what turned the tide."
On behalf of the women in the class, she gave him a plaque that said,
"Rush Was Right." He also received a pin like the ones the freshmen
wore, saying, "Majority Maker."
"Rush is as responsible for what happened here as much as anyone," said
Vin Weber, a former Representative from Minnesota, now of Empower
America. Citing a poll taken after the election by Frank Luntz, a
Republican pollster, Mr. Weber said that people who listened to 10 hours
or more a week of talk radio voted Republican by a 3-to-1 margin. "Those
are the people who elected the new Congress," he said...
At this point the trajectory was clear. As traditional news networks
became more and more focused on entertaining and soothing their viewers rather than
alienating them with information that made them uncomfortable, the
Republican party devolved further and further into a for-profit division of
Conservative Media, Inc. incorporated.
Tony Snow could go from having his own show on Fox News and being the
primary guest host of Rush Limbaugh's radio program, to being George W.
Bush's press secretary and no one said "boo".
Karl Rove could go from being "Bush's Brain" in the White House ... to
Wall Street Journal contributor and Fox News political analyst ... to
advisor to Donald Trump's 2020 presidential campaign, without breaking
stride.
And as the language that brought the Republican customers into the tent and kept them there -- the
language of rage, racism and paranoia -- was amped up and up and up,
the mainstream media kept increasing the dosage of the anesthetizing language it uses to hang
onto its customers. Over and over again, mainstream news customers are
told that there is nothing to be alarmed about. That whatever noise
you might be hearing on the Right, it's just a kooky fringe, which is loud but mostly harmless, and just as
loud and just as mostly harmless as the kooky fringe on the
Left. And you all are safe from all that mishegoss here beneath the sheltering bower of the Sensible Center.
And anyway, it's all just teevee. There's nothing dangerous going on here. No need to raise an alarm. It's just actors
changing costumes. Everyone knows the four walls of our
democracy are solid and eternal. Everyone know the inerrant, Capraesque wisdom of the
American people will always kick in during the third act and save the day,
so nothing really really bad can happen here. Things might get
weird every now and then, but the stakes aren't really real life or death, so remain calm and keep shopping.
And this dynamic goes on and on until we arrive at a place where the entire Republican party can go very
publicly insane and plunge right off the cliff into out-and-out fascism...while the Great Middle of America still can't decide whether to go
with Biden or Trump, because aren't both parties pretty much the same?
Never doubt that the people at the helms of the media corporations and the
political party that brought us to this precipice began this project decades
ago with very definite agendas in mind. Eliminating taxes on the
wealthy. Deregulating everything. Gutting social programs.
And for the leaders of Conservative Media Inc., turning the Republican
base into a zombie army of reprogrammable meatbags who would believe any
nonsense that was shit into their skulls as long as it made them
feel righteous or furious or giddy began as nothing more as a means to
those ends.
But now -- as we on the Left warned them over and over again would happen --
the leaders of Conservative Media Inc. have lost control of the
monster they made. Now, feeding the insatiable, junkie-hunger of that
rage-drunk mob has become an end in itself. It's either feed the
monster, or lose your seat in congress.
Feed the monster, or watch your audience share drop as the mob finds someone
else to tell them what they want to hear.
The role of violent threats in Trump’s GOP reign, according to
Republicans
Tim Alberta is out with his latest must-read this week — a profile of
freshman Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.). Meijer joined Congress just days
before the Capitol insurrection and almost immediately jeopardized his
political career by supporting Donald Trump’s impeachment
It’s a must-read, but a tough read. That’s because it describes an
exceedingly ugly situation: one in which lawmakers are disregarding
private principle in their votes and often doing so out of literal fear.
Not only does Meijer describe members who advocated for invoking the
25th Amendment to remove Trump from office later voting against
impeachment, but he cites fears of physical violence directly impacting
such votes...
This is the late stage teevee brain of the MAGA mob. Completely immune
to facts. Lost to reason. Unmoored from their own past.
Moved to action entirely by the ganglia-twitching trigger-words they get from
the magic box.
Meanwhile, bathed in the soothing, narcotic hum of Both Siderism, the late
stage teevee brain of the mainstream media customer is barely aware
that any of this is happening. And if it is, well it can't possibly be
as bad as all that...because...uh...Both Sides Both Sides Both Sides.
And finally, let's not forget that late stage teevee brain is what makes it
possible for "liberal" MSNBC to run a full-time reputation laundromat for a
whole menagerie of current and recently-former Republican scumbags. For
example, does anyone doubt that, sooner or later, Steve Schmidt's old
friend Nicole Wallace will find a way to get his mendacious, grifting ass
readmitted yet again into the circle of the Heroes of the Resistance? Just
like she has already done? Twice?
Remember, Schmidt was the GOP mercenary that put Sarah Palin into our lives.
Boo!
But then he Came to Jebus and started calling Trump a poopy head on MSNBC, and almost
as one, Liberals on social media threw themselves at him like a drunk prom
date.
Yay!
He loves us! He says all these beautiful things that no one else
says! OMG, let me get my checkbook and how much should I make it out
for?
And my oh my didn't these same credulous dopes loudly and angrily scold
those few of us that could not fucking believe they were falling for this
guy.
Then he threw all those pretty words out the window for a Howard Schultz
payday.
Boo!
He said he loved us? How could he have betrayed us like that?
But Howard Schultz show eventually closed down and once again Steve Schmidt found himself "at liberty" as the vaudevillians used to say.
And so, once more through the MSNBC Reputation Rehab Laundry and...he's back
baby!
Yay!
Spinning all those beautiful words. Saying things that no one else has the guts to say! OMG, do you prefer Venmo or PayPal!!
And once again, I'm over here in my little corner of the internet wondering how the hell are these otherwise intelligent mopes falling for this con man
again?
Then Schmidt threw all those pretty words out the window for a Dean
Philips payday.
Boo!
He said he loved us? How could he have betrayed us like this?
Schmidt could do this, because Shmidt understands late stage teevee brain. He was a performer, playing the role of Hero of the Resistance. The pay was good. The hours were good. The reviews were good. Then he got offered a better part as Howard Schultz's political consultant. Six weeks. No heavy lifting. And when that show closed, Schmidt changed back into his Hero of the Resistance costume at MSNBC.
And the late stage teevee brain was willing to go along with it because, really, it's just teevee. So whatever parts he had played before in any other teevee drama, what did that matter? At that moment Steve Schmidt was giving the audience the feels it craved, and that's all that mattered.
You can go right down the line at CNN and at MSNBC and watch this happening. Joe Scarborough. Bill Kristol. Matthew Dowd. Michael Steele, who will now be given his own weekend show. Liz Cheney was a performer who worked for the political division of Conservative Media, Inc. and when she played that part she repeated the horrifying, unforgivable lies about Democrats.
Now Cheney is this month's hot property on the not-Fox News cable news and book circuit, and she's playing that part by spilling the beans about what went on behind closed door while she was the third most powerful person in the GOP.
This is why it doesn't really surprised me when I see someone like Chris Cuomo saying trash like this:
Chris Cuomo: “I don’t think there’s any greater risk to America with
[Trump] than with Biden."
I didn't realize Chris Cuomo is such
a moron. A second Trump term would be 1000 times worse than the first.
pic.twitter.com/uVL7pzGO3Y
Cuomo is a media creature and he understands the various species of late stage teevee brain. He knows that, in the long run, whatever outrageous garbage he spews today to hang into the spotlight a minute longer, it won't be a barrier to being welcomed back into the media insider club tomorrow. A change of costume and a new script and he'll be right back in the good graces of enough credulous chumps to make it worth his while.
...is the title of a podcast I will be reviewing today.
It's from those kooky kidz over at The Bulwark, and I patiently skimmed
the "All Hail Liz Cheney" podcast (with MSNBC regular Tim Miller, and MSNBC
regular Sarah Longwell, and Jonathan Last) waiting for what I knew would
inevitably be there.
Twas as if I were at a familiar fishing hole at dawn. It's cool. There's a
little rain. You know they'll practically jump into your net. All you
have to do is put a line in the water and wait a few minutes..
First came the lavish praising of Liz Cheney. She wrote a book!
Which is apparently a great thing because it "exposes" stuff. Just like Mitt
Romney's book. And Adam Kinzinger's book. And the other +2000
books about Trump.
But of course they're not really "exposing" anything, are they?
ex·pose
/ikˈspōz/
verb
1. make (something) visible by uncovering it.
"at low tide the sands are exposed"
2.
reveal the true, objectionable nature of (someone or something). "he has
been exposed as a liar and a traitor"
(Kind of a cheat to use the word "reveal" to define the word "expose" since
they mean virtually the same thing --
re·veal
/rəˈvēl/
verb
make (previously unknown or secret information) known to others. "Brenda
was forced to reveal Robbie's whereabouts"
-- but whatever.)
Anyway, nothing mind-changing or soul-shifting is being revealed or expose in
these books because, after all this time, who is there left to persuade one
way or another?
Nobody. It's all trench warfare now. A "game of inches" as the
sports people say.
If you want to add one more books to the mile-hile pile of Trump books that
have already been published because you have some fantasy that someday, some
historian is going to paw through the billions of words written about Trump
and the Republican party, find your particular book, crack it, read it,
and say "Aha! Now I get it!"...well, OK. Great.
And of your pals at the Recently Former Republicans media corporation want to
pimp your book, well that's fine too.
But just between you and me and George Soros, everyone knows that there's
nothing anyone can write -- no series of words, no matter how cunningly
constructed -- that is gonna make anyone who is still a Republican jump the
fence. Or any committed Both Siderist climb down off that fence. Or open
the eyes of any Liberal any wider about all the shit we already knew about the
Republican party decades ago.
So all of that just breezed past me. Don't care. Don't care. Don't care. Well, 90% "don't care" and the other 10% is a kind of pity I guess. After all, these people have had their noses rubbed
in the reality that virtually every Conservative they have ever trusted,
virtually every Republican political client they have ever worked for and pretty much
all of their professional colleagues and friends...are scum.
Unprincipled cowards and grifters at best. At worst, outright
fascists. And the base of the Party of Reagan? A shitpile of bigots and
imbeciles.
In other words, pretty much everything we Progressives had been warning them about all along.
And they're all trying to find a way to square that with their own self-images as savvy, smart, insightful political professionals. They want to mount a
righteous high horse and scowl down at the ruins of their recently former
party and shout "We told you so! We warned you!" while at the
same time retaining their contempt for us Progressives who have been shouting
"We warned you! We told you so!" at them for
decades.
So if you do nothing more than wait at that fishing hole for not-very-long,
eventually they'll get around to shitting on Progressives.
And thus it was that after all the lavish talk that medals be struck and paeans
be penned and statues be raised to Liz Cheney in every Middlesex village and
farm, Sarah Longwell took time to gripe about "Progressives" in the most Never
Trump imaginable: by calling out a specific Progressive by name and then
very carefully skipping right over the actual issue that person raises.
Sara Longwell: The question is, what does Liz Cheney do next?
What... how does she try and defeat Donald Trump? And I thing
I... One of the things that's really complicated aout this moment is... Tim
was talking about the Progressives who still kind of hold it against
her. Like Don Winslow or somebody, who just, like,
re--lent--lessly pumping out stuff like, here's what she said about abortion and
here's what she said about this. And what's disappointing or, uh, um,
I don't kinda know what to do with is what...what is the role of Liz Cheney
next.
This right here is absolutely Bulwark in-house policy. I've heard many
of them do it. Hand-wave away what Liz Cheney said about Democrats and
abortion without ever actually addressing what Cheney actually said. Instead, it's airily dismissed as a mere difference of opinion,
and then on to the ritual Slagging of the Liberals for not getting with the
program and joining the Liz Cheney for Sainthood parade.
What the fuck is wrong with us that, for the greater good, we can't get past a
little disagreement over policy?
Sykes: Let's flip the card a little bit though. How do you explain the psychology of -- and you... you... you... alluded to this -- the psychology Progressives activists including people like Don Winslow, who's a filmmaker, y'know, and, like, anti-Trump Progressive novelist and everything. Y'know, big Twitter guy who is obsessively -- I mean obsessively -- attacking, right now, Liz Cheney. It's like this is the moment when Democrats are facing a wipeout in the midterms...
driftglass: What the hell does how the Dems may or may not do in the midterms have to do with Liz Cheney?
Sykes: ... when we are facing this existential challenge of the coup... at this moment they've decided...
driftglass: "they've" decided? Who is "they"? Because the only person Sykes has mentioned is Don Winslow?
Sykes continues: "No, we can't like Liz Cheney because, y'know, she's a Conservative Republican and pro-lifer and therefore we gotta make sure we tell all Progressives ...
driftglass: "we gotta make sure we tell all Progressives"? Who is "we"? Because, once again, the only person Sykes has mentioned is Don Winslow?
Sykes continues: ....don't give any credit to these folks who have thrown themselves on the grenade to protect democracy because X, Y, Z."
driftglass: "these folks"? Who are "these folks"? Because the only "folks" Sykes has mentioned is Liz Cheney? Also more about this "X,Y,Z" bullshit at the bottom of this post.
Miller continues: And... and... and the coalitions on the Left and on the Right. There are more antibodies on the Left to the crazy and the rage. That doesn't mean that there aren't also parallels...
driftglass: And then , after all the assurances that this is not an attempt to draw an equivalence, comes the equivalence.
Miller: And what I write about in the backwards section of the book -- where I write about my complicity is working with Conservative media types -- is [long pause] this addiction. To the rage juice. Right? This addiction to the daily outrage. Where you are made to feel like you are good and your other... your fellow Americans as made to be seen as evil.
driftglass: Let us pause to reflect on the fact that Tim Miller is whining about the insidious effects to the Outrage Media...on a media site that routinely carps about the Republican base being deranged, and 96% of Republican leadership as being either outright fascist or cowards or amoral opportunists willing to ally with fascist to advance their careers.
Miller: And people like Don...and other Resistance media types...
Sykes [barely audible]: This is so good.
driftglass: Here comes another shot at fence straddling
Miller: I do think there is a big difference between Left media and the Right media...
driftglass: Golly, thanks Tim.
Miller: ...and there are some Left media who are being good and, y'know, are praising Liz Cheney, so it's not uniform like it is on the Right media.
Translation: I hope you don't think I'm talking about you guys on MSNBC. You guys are the best! No, we're talking about all those other Progressive media outfits. The ones who are naughty bad and don't have half the staff we have here at The Bulwark on juicy contributor contracts. So don't give any of this a second thought.
driftglass: And here comes the pivot...
Miller: But there are people on the Left that use that same tactic on the Right.
driftglass: And here is where Tim Miller, confessional writer slips out the side door, and Tim Miller, veteran Republican hatchet, man slips in.
Miller: The...no, you need to be mad at Liz Cheney because she was pro-life and she said this mean thing about Ralph Northam four years ago. And, like, you need to be mad at Adam Kinzinger because he didn't vote for this bill. And you need to be made at even Democrats...you need to be mad at Joe Manchin, mad at Kyrsten Sinema, and mad at Nancy Pelosi and mad at Chuck Schumer and mad at anyone who's not, like, walking the right line.
driftglass: And in the blink of an eye, Tim Miller escalates all the way from scolding people for being "mad at Liz Cheney" to scolding anyone who gets mad at anyone for any reason for being an Outrage Juice addict. Which I'll remind him of in my calmest voice when the Supreme Cult comes for his gay marriage. "Hush now, Tim. That's just the Outrage Juice talking, and not your perfectly justified fury."...
Except this is not in any way just a spirited disagreement over Roe vs.Wade, or being mad at Liz Cheney for "being pro-life", and every one of these recently-former Republicans fucking well knows
it. They all know perfectly well exactly what Cheney said; they just
don't own a sledgehammer big enough to pound the square peg of Cheney's
utterly despicable comments into the round hole of their insistence on her
unalloyed heroism. So every time this comes up, they very deliberately
skip over what she actually said and hurry on to the Slagging of
the Liberals.
And when you hear what Cheney actually said, you'll understand why.
It's not from way back when Liz was selling out her own sister to clamber a little higher up the greasy pole of politics, or ruthlessly defending her daddy's slaughterfest in Iraq. This
clip is from the House Republican YouTube channel. It's from just four years ago, when Cheney was the third most powerful member of the Republican caucus and a staunch supporter of Donald Trump. It's entitled "Conference Chair Liz Cheney on Democrats’ Horrifying Pro-Abortion Stance".
This is not merely being pro-life, nor is it merely a "mean thing about Ralph Northam", nor is it whatever the fuck "X,Y,Z" means. It is a full-on, Blood Libel attack on the "Democrat" party as a cabal of "pure evil" who sanction the murder of children after they are born.
In tone and intention, there is not a dime's worth of difference between Liz Cheney claiming that it is the policy of the "Democrat" party to murder babies after they are born and that Democrats are "pure evil", and Trump's branding us as lying, cheating "vermin".
And Miller and Sykes and Longwell and all the rest of them fucking well know it.
"It is unknowable how long [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." -- Donald Rumsfeld
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Unreconstructed Iraq War pimp, torture advocate and Weekly Standard goon, Stephen Hayes, bringing the full weight of his moral heft to bear on this makes it awesome.
But Dick Cheney ... going on Hugh Hewitt... to call out Donald Trump for going too far is what makes it fucking art.
