Heck of a Week

First, Sam the Sham Alito leads his ragtag band of Federalist Society myrmidons up to the ippy-tippy top of the jurisprudential mountain to announce to the world that, yes! yes! the United States Supreme Court really is the black-robed Conservative abattoir of democracy that those America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-killing Liberals have been warning us about for decades.

Then Nepo-great-great-grandbaby A.G. Sulzberger rode his high horse all the way to the uppermost  balcony of his New York Times to announce to the world that, yes! yes! America's Newspaper of Record really is the bastion of  petty, vindictive, cosseted monarchists that those dirty hippie ingate Liberals have been warning us about for decades.

Been a heck of a week, vindication-wise.  I'm exhausted.  Think I'll just kick back, open a cold one and wait for the very sincere apologies to come rolling it from all those Very Serious Persons who have been so very righteously wrong all along.  

I Am The Liberal Media

You Have The Right To Remain Silent

If you give up your right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be dismissed, warped, twisted and used against you by everyone on the Right from Wayne LaPierre (from today)--

In the midst of genuine grief, in an understandable passion, as millions of Americans searched for meaningful solutions, what do we find? Chris Murphy, Nancy Pelosi and more, cheered on by the national media, eager to blame the NRA and call for even more government control. They hate the NRA, they hate the Second Amendment, they have individual freedom. 

-- to the NRA's enablers at The New York Times -- 

David Brooks wrote something terrible this week. This is not a surprise. The Times pays him handsomely to write snotty, unedited editions of David Brooks Understands The Little People on a regular basis. They will not fire him, not even for takes as dopey and casually nauseating as this one:

So if you want to stop school shootings it’s not enough just to vent and march. It’s necessary to let people from Red America lead the way, and to show respect to gun owners at all points. There has to be trust and respect first. Then we can strike a compromise on guns as guns, and not some sacred cross in the culture war.

I think we’ve all seen what bending over backwards to accommodate Red America looks like. It looks a lot like the bullet-ridden liescape we all now currently occupy. Does the Times care that they’re printing this dreck? Of course not. Quite the contrary, the Times seems very happy these days to secure the endorsements of pretentious (and spineless) conservative publications and high-end white nationalist pamphleteers alike, and they have adopted a siege mentality when it comes to any profane opposition...

-- to a random Republican Congresswoman from New York --

Rep. Claudia Tenney, a Republican from New York, claimed in a radio interview Wednesday that “so many” people who commit mass murders “end up being Democrats.”

...

“I am fed up with the media and liberals attempting to politicize tragedies and demonize law-abiding gun owners and conservative Americans every time there is a horrible tragedy,” Tenney said in email statement to The Washington Post.

-- which precisely echoes the casual, reflexive, unhinged slander of Democrats that has become the every-day, all-occasion Mother Tongue of Republicans since at least the rise of Limbaugh and Gingrich a quarter of a century ago:

Mr. Gingrich's remarks were reminiscent of an interview he gave to The Associated Press just before the 1994 election in which he spoke of the widely publicized case in which two children had been drowned by their mother, Susan Smith.

"I think the mother killing her two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick society is getting and how much we have to have change," he said at the time. "I think people want to change, and the only way you can get change is to vote Republican."

I gave up my right to remain silent right around the time GOP turned their party over to scum like Gingrich, Limbaugh, Rove and Atwater.

And I've never missed it.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Yet Another Crackpot American Billionaire Does Not Understand How America Works

(h/t Alert Reader LS)

For a long time now, The Tribe That Rubs Shit In Their Hair ™ hasn't just a place for your drunk, Bircher uncle and his gun-humping pals to let their freak flags fly.  Oh my no.  In fact as recently as three years ago, The Tribe included many of America's richest and most well-respected lunatics as charter members.  For example, who can forget back in 2012 when billionaire crank Jack Welch and a whole phalanx of his fellow Conservative donor basket-cases all fell out with near-fatal cases of the flaming fantods because real world arithmetic math was in irreconcilable conflict with the voices in their heads? 

Conspiracy World

...

To live and seethe in that world of conspiracy theories means rejecting any form of objective reality. When unemployment numbers make the administration look good, they are obviously “cooked.” When poll numbers put Mr. Obama ahead, they are skewed. Birth certificates are forgeries. Safety-net programs are giveaways to supporters. Health insurance reform is socialism. And campaign donation disclosure is antibusiness.

...

Last week, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.8 percent, depriving Mitt Romney of his standard talking point that the rate had never been below 8 percent during Mr. Obama’s term. No one expected Republicans to celebrate a positive trend for the country, but almost immediately the anchors on Fox News and the editors of right-wing Web sites saw something more sinister: a conspiracy, led by the Obama campaign, to manipulate the numbers to make the president look good a month before the election.

The charge was absurd. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which along with the Census Bureau conducts the underlying household survey, is run by career civil servants and is impervious to political pressure and manipulation, as all but the hypnotized in Washington understand. But, this time, the conspiracy theorists went beyond the usual suspects. Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, said Mr. Obama’s Chicago staff obviously changed the numbers, though he had no evidence of chicanery beyond the outrageous charge that the numbers came from an “ideologue division of the federal government.”

To Mr. Welch and his fellow cynics, the facts were inconvenient, so they had to be wrong. And not just wrong, but deliberately so. That’s the same mentality that led ideologues last month to accuse independent pollsters of deliberately skewing polls to show Mr. Obama ahead, though no such charges are emerging now that Mr. Romney is improving in the polls. And this trend is reinforced when people who know better, like Newt Gingrich and Senator John McCain, trash the civil servants at the State Department and the Congressional Budget Office. (Mr. Romney, to his credit, did not question the latest jobless figures.)

Democrats aren’t happy about the latest polls, but they aren’t suggesting Mr. Romney is manipulating them, just as they didn’t undermine the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the jobless numbers were high. Many are far more worried about a conspiracy that is verifiable and serious: the concerted effort by Republicans over the last four years to deprive minorities, poor people and other likely Democratic supporters of their voting rights.

That, of course, doesn’t seem to bother those who see “Chicago’s” evil hand everywhere. When there is real-world evidence of political collusion, the conspiracy theorists are nowhere to be found.

...

Good times!

But now things have changed, and the "drunk, Bircher uncle and his gun-humping pals" members of The Tribe have decided they're done with arranged marriages to Wall Street Conservative cyborgs. Instead, they've starting slutting around with a fast-talking, Big City real estate mogul of who Daddy Donor definitely does not approve,  but who knows how to make their batshit ganglia twitch. Which is why billionaire-American and life-long underwriter of crackpot wingnut schemes, T. Boone Pickens, feels that Daddy Donor needs to step in to put a stop to all of this wild, shameless, footloosery and instead install some kinda "bipartisan panel" which would screen out the unmanageable, large-bore loons so that the best possible smaller-bore, Pickens-acceptable loons end up running for president:

T. Boone Pickens calls for bipartisan panel to screen candidates for president

BP Capital founder T. Boone Pickens, a billionaire Republican donor, is calling for a bipartisan panel to determine who can run for president.

According to the Library of Congress, the only stipulations for running for president include being a natural born citizen, a resident of 14 years and at least 35 years old. Such limited standards allow political outsiders like Republican front-runner Donald Trump to run for president — and Pickens thinks they're not stringent enough.

“My big idea for 2016 is to put together a bipartisan screening committee that vets presidential candidates like we do anyone else applying for a job and recommends the best candidates possible,” Pickens wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. “We have people running for president now who don’t even have experience running a lemonade stand.”

Pickens, who donated to Jeb Bush early on before flirting with Ben Carson, said the committee should factor in leadership experience, team-building skills and plans for prospective candidates’ administration.

“Right now we have a process that emphasizes accusation and innuendo,” Pickens said, alluding to the incessant brawls among Republican primary contenders. “Fact-checking is done … after the fact. And just like reality TV, there is too much of an emphasis on the inconsequential and the irrelevant. Such a vetting process could alleviate much of that.”...

The fact that I have no doubt that ol' T. Boone sincerely believes this and that no one around him had the huevos to tell him that he sounds like a dribbling halfwit is what makes it awesome.

A Very Silly Article in The Atlantic

See if you can spot the moment this story becomes unreadable (hint: it's right where I leave off):

What Does It Mean for Obama to Love or Hate America?

Rudy Giuliani is only the latest conservative to claim that the president isn't fond of his country, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Rudy Giuliani is developing a productive sideline in rage-baiting. Fresh off a largely incoherent comment about black-on-black crime following the Michael Brown case, America's Mayor said Wednesday night that President Obama doesn't love America. Here's what Giuliani said, according to Politico, during a "private dinner" for Scott Walker "at the 21 Club, a former Prohibition-era speakeasy in midtown Manhattan":

I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.

Some liberals find it tempting to read this as nothing more than race-baiting. Isn't this just portraying Obama—who just happens to have a funny name and look different from Rudy—as the Other? (The White House simply replied, "It was a horrible thing to say.") But Giuliani isn't the only person to make this claim, and the others aren't just fringe figures. Erick Erickson, hailed by The Atlantic as America's most powerful conservative, says Obama "hates America." Former presidential candidate Steve Forbes doesn't think Obama loves America, nor does a prominent Tea Party organizer. Once-and-likely-future presidential candidate Rick Perry has doubts. The view is also importantly different from the idea that Obama is a threat to America, a critique that allows for the fact that the president may in fact be doing what he thinks is best for the nation and its citizens, but that is wrong. The Erickson-Giuliani consensus is important in that it requires a measure of malevolence on Obama's part. Therefore it makes sense to look at what evidence they marshal for the view to see what it can tell us about them and about Obama.

...

No.

No it definitely does not make  "...sense to look at what evidence they marshal for the view to see what it can tell us about them and about Obama."

Because this is not 1982.  Because we have all lived through decades of watching the Affable Reagan Mask rot off the Party of Lincoln to clearly reveal the paranoid ghouls and lobotomized bigots beneath.  Because we have watched the craven Beltway enablers of these monsters prop them up over and over again with heavy planks of Both Side Do It for long enough to know that it's a feature not a bug.

Because at long last is just a silly, masturbatory waste of time to continue to pretend that raking the coals of wingnut arson will yield any useful results.

So stop it, Liberal media.  Please just stop it.

Because for far too long to pretend otherwise, the Conservatives in this country have amounted to nothing but a mob of vicious, ignorant asshole holding a gun to the head of my country and baying the same angry, incoherent gibberish that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh has been shitting into their skulls for years.  And trying to address their movement as if it were anything other than a form of madness to be contained and exorcised from the body politic is as pointless as debating pod bay doors with HAL.

I am not remotely interested in their backstory and motives or carefully parsing "what evidence they marshal".  Instead, I am intensely and exclusively interested in getting the gun out of their hand, and care about the tenets and internal "logic" of their lunatic cult only to the extent that I might be able to ransack it for some useful means of putting their movement down like the dangerous, rabid beast it is.

To Repeat This For What Seems Like The Millionth Time...

...it is impossible to understand Conservatism in America AT ALL unless you understand that millions of Conservatives wear this special pair of glasses through which they filter everything they see.

If you continue to pretend these special glasses do not exist, or are politically trivial, you are lying.

If you continue to pretend that the GOP has not been deliberately manipulating and amplifying the warped, paranoid perceptions of these Conservatives for political gain for the last two generation perceptions, you are lying.

If you continue to pretend that there is anything remotely similar going on on the Left -- either in the breadth or degree or level of destructiveness -- you are lying.

Long ago American Conservatism was engineered by men with money and vision into an opportunistic disease designed to relentlessly attack democracy's immune system -- our courts, our schools, our free press, our electoral process, labor protections, etc. -- until the nation became weak enough to be knocked to its knees, chopped to bits and sold for parts.

And whether you like it or not, you are either a carrier of that disease or you are part of the cure.

And no, stepping aside and letting the Cliven Bundys win on the theory that, after unspeakably awful shit happens and everything falls apart and million die and Democrats have been sufficiently chastens, the Underpants Gnomes will arrive on their Libertarian unicorn cavalry to save the day is not a "viable strategy" -- 

-- so much as it is an "infantile tantrum" thrown by privileged children who have the money and connections to skip out on the horrorshow once their grand social experiment turns to shit and the Kochpocalypse reaches escape velocity.

First They Came For The McDonnells... UPDATE

Noted crazy person, disgraced college president, Newt Gingrich BFF --

The conservative flamethrower’s recent article in Forbes magazine served as the inspiration for Newt Gingrich’s notorious comment about President Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior” being the essence of his character.Gingrich thinks D’Souza’s piece to be a “stunning insight,” the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.

-- and auteur in the genre of wingnut paranoia hate-porn, Dinesh D'Souza, may still have a little further to fall before going splat back at the base of the Great Wingnut Welfare Food Pyramid.

 But if so, it is a distance that can now be measured in inches.

From Reuters:

Dinesh D'Souza indicted for violating U.S. election law

BY JONATHAN STEMPEL

NEW YORK Thu Jan 23, 2014 6:03pm EST

Jan 23 (Reuters) - Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative commentator and best-selling author, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for arranging excessive campaign contributions to a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

According to an indictment made public on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan, D'Souza around August 2012 reimbursed people who he had directed to contribute $20,000 to the candidate's campaign. The candidate was not named in the indictment.

Attempts to reach D'Souza and a lawyer representing him were unsuccessful.

D'Souza was charged in the indictment with one count of making illegal contributions in the names of others, and one count of causing false statements to be made.

...

Obviously Mr. D'Souza made the classic mistake of not being partisan enough. Which, we all know, is the only reason the Liberal jackals of the American judicial system ever go after Conservative heroes like Mr. D'Souza.

Because Freedom!

Also I'm sure his future contribution to America letters --"Notes from the Liberal Gulag: My Life as a Conservative Prisoner of Conscience" -- recounting his harrowing four months trying to survive low sheet thread-counts and a very limited wine list at the Taft minimum-security Correctional Institution will go on to be Regnery Press' biggest seller of 2017.

UPDATE:  And just like fucking clockwork...

From Fox News:

...

D’Souza’s co-producer in “2016” Gerald Molen told FoxNews.com he believes the charges are politically motivated and D’Souza is being singled out by federal authorities for a “selective prosecution.”

The 2012 film examined President Obama’s past and early influences that may have shaped his political ideology and was a surprise hit, making over $33 million at the box office.

The duo is teaming up again for a new film “America,” which Molen said will be released on schedule in July 2014 regardless of what happens in the case.

“Neither the filmmakers nor the American public can allow this prosecution to deter us from the film's release, and I am calling upon the American people to show their elected officials that this kind of selective prosecution will not stand, by joining us at the box office,” Molen said. “I look forward to my good friend Dinesh being vindicated for what appears to be nothing more than a misunderstanding."

Kook, I Am Your Father

Now tell them that there are, oh, let's say, exactly one trillion Sith Lords in the "Democrat" Party.

What's a "Sith Lord"?

It doesn't matter.

Sigh

I'm sure almost everyone who reads this blog has some understanding of who "Tailgunner" Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn were, but it is possible that not everyone remembers this exchange between Angela Landsbury (in the greatest role of her career) and James Gregory from the original, 1962 version of "The Manchurian Candidate":

(Over dinner)   

Mrs. Iselin: I'm sorry, hon'. Would it really make it easier for you if we settled on just one number?    

Senator John Yerkes Iselin: Yeah. Just one, real, simple number that'd be easy for me to remember.  

(Later, addressing the Senate)

Senator Iselin: There are exactly 57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the Department of Defense at this time! 

The point is that even by 1962 enough people knew filthy, McCarthy-style demagoguery for what it was well enough for it to show up, virtually unedited, in a major motion picture.

Everybody got the point, which is why it took the GOP so many years and so many billions of dollars to rebury the crazy, paranoid core of their party deep enough so that they could pretend it did not exist.

But now...well, pick your metaphor; the containment unit around their radioactively crazy base has failed; the monster they built to win their elections has kicked the lab door off its hinges and is now running amok; even the legend of the Golem fits the facts entirely too well:

...
These are solemn rites performed for the Party Golem -- the Men of Mud with no thoughts but the thoughts they are told to think by the Dear Leader, hard-wired with the Prime Directive that Liberals are Always Wrong, Liberals are to Blame for Everything, and that the Dear Leader is a Plainspoken Man and a Per’fessed Christian and therefore is simply incapable of telling anything other than the Unvarnished Truth.

They are brought to a semblance of life by the stamp of hate and fear and greed that the Roves and Dobsons affix to their steeply-sloped foreheads. They are animated by Majyk Conjure Bile words by the likes of Coulter and Limbaugh; the demigods who casually burn yesterday's Scripted Verities, carefully inscribe on Hate Radio Parchment what their thralls are supposed to think today, and slip the new talking points into their mouths.

Their eyes flutter – the Party Golem – and they roar out into the streets to obediently scream today’s lies, which may or may not completely contradict what they were screaming the day before.

These people are not recruited for their critical thinking skills; they are useful only for their stupidity and meek submission to Conservative Authority. For the manipulable hellfest of bad religion and ugly ideology that packs their Creationist Bell Jar skulls. For the leering, jeering delight at that particular bloodthrill pleasure knucklewalkers get when they can pound the shit out of people who are better, smarter and more honorable than they will ever be.

But here's the catch: The rites must be observed. 

And if the proper Kabuki is not performed with all deliberate speed, the rank-and-file will start rubbing their little, dry hind legs together and making little frightened chirping noises. Not out of any concern for the “truth” -- they don't "do" truth -- but out of a growing fear of being stranded out in the big, scary Liberal World with no one to tell them what slogans they’re supposed to shout. 
...

Now the Party of God breeds demagogues like a McDonald's dumpster breed maggots on a hot summer day, all sounding like seventh generation replicants of the same, depraved original.

From the L.A. Times:

The voice of today's GOP: Allen West says Democrats are commies

By David Horsey

April 12, 2012, 5:00 a.m.

Rep. Allen West, one of the loosest cannons in the Republican arsenal, believes there are about 80 members of the Communist Partyin the United States Congress.

Tuesday night at a town hall meeting in Jensen Beach, Fla., one of West’s constituents asked him how many “card-carrying Marxists or international socialists” there were in Congress. Without hesitation, Allen responded, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party.”

He went on to identify them as the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a group within the Democratic caucus that wants to end corporate welfare for oil, gas and coal companies, rebuild the country’s infrastructure, expedite an end to the war in Afghanistan and eliminate tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans while extending tax relief for the middle class. Now, that may not sound like communism to you, but to West, such scary ideas apparently reek of Bolshevism. (Note to Rep. West: solid majorities of voters tell pollsters they support every one of those proposals -- the commies have already won!)

Democrats are a wee bit offended. They say West’s remarks are reminiscent of Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist witch-hunt in the 1950s. Well, yeah. But I think we are a long way from another Red Scare. Compared with the powerful McCarthy, the first-term congressman from Florida’s balmy beaches is a pipsqueak.

What makes West’s comment notable is how it is only a tiny stretch beyond the rhetoric being employed by many more prominent Republicans.
...

Of course, what is truly frightening is not that the Right listens to certifiable nut-cases or even that they elect certifiable nut-cases to office.

No what is truly dangerous and deeply depressing is the predictability of their reactions every single fucking time they get caught out once again defending the indefensible; how automatic and off-the-shelf their thinking has become:

1. Somewhere in a moral universe far, far away a horde of Teabaggers read Mr. Horsey's article and begin jumping up and down in unison screaming "But Saul Aliiiiiiiiiinsky!" at their computers. 


2. Then they call Rush. Busy! Damn it! 


3. Then they dashes off a million missives to their email list (including me) "proving" that Barack O'Bummer is opening secret, luxury prisons in Peoria to house his terrorist friends before he turns them loose to kill us all (When you can't win...Pound The Table!) 


4. Then I take 38 seconds to completely debunk everything they just wrote. 


5. Then I get another email rampant with eagles and flags "proving" that sites like Snopes and the Encylopedia Britanica are run by Commie co-conspirators who are funded by "George Sorooooooos!" 


6.  And somewhere in a moral universe far, far away, Karl Rove and Roger Ailes smile.

By the way, if you missed my recent fundraiser, don't worry:  I am more than happy to take your dough anytime!

Here is the PayPal button should you wish to make a contribution.

 

Or, if you prefer using the U.S mail, you can send a check made payable to and care of

The Professional Left Podcast 

P.O. Box 9133

Springfield, IL 62704

Professional Left Podcast #115

“Now, I know all you folks are the right kinda parents.
I'm gonna be perfectly frank.
Would ya like to know what kinda conversation goes
On while they're loafin' around that Hall?
They're tryin' out Bevo, tryin' out cubebs,
Tryin' out Tailor Mades like Cigarette Feends!
And braggin' all about
How they're gonna cover up a tell-tale breath with Sen-Sen.
One fine night, they leave the pool hall,
Headin' for the dance at the Arm'ry!
Libertine men and Scarlet women!
And Rag-time, shameless music
That'll grab your son and your daughter
With the arms of a jungle animal instinct!
Mass-staria!
Friends, the idle brain is the devil's playground!"

-- Excerpt from President Santorum's Inaugural Address

Links:

• Lawrence O'Donnell on Santorum and the debate with conservatism


• Coming soon: Blog again theocracy -- Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Da' money goes here:

Voice of Empire, Ctd

Special "...it's too late to lose the weight you used to need

to throw around" Edition.

Rather than one more straight vivisection of the chin-deep hot-tub-full-of-offal that is The Mouse Circus, instead let us consider a case that is currently whipping around the internet: the case of Mike Lofgren -- a lifelong Republican button-man -- who has acknowledged in print ("Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult") everything you have ever suspected about the Party of God. (h/t Edward for the head's up.)

Yes, they really are just a bunch of treacherous, lying nihilists:

...
The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care.
...

Yes, it is orchestrated from on-high:

...
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
...

Yes, it is on-purpose:

...
Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic.
...

Yes, it is dependent on the abysmal stupidity of the average American voter:

...
This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News.
...

Yes, our hugely overpaid Villager Media Overlords ignore it.
Malignantly and on-purpose.

...
The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse.
...

Yes, the Right really is using every means at hand to suppress the votes of those who do pay attention:

Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote...

Yes, they are composed of the bigoted, xenophobic dregs of American culture:

...
As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.
...

In other words, "Yes! Yes! Yes!", to everything Liberals have been shunned and slandered for saying for the last 30 years.

I do not see this as vindication or validation anything at all...any more than I see dropping the one millionth egg on the sidewalk and watching it break "validates" the theory of gravity. I don't need some fucking GOP henchman on a pension to ratify the evidence of my own sense for me because as Senator Sam Ervin famously told John Ehrlichmann's lawyer during the Watergate Hearings: "...I can understand the English language. It's my mother's tongue."

Of course we have been right all along.

Of course they have been wrong and lying about it all along.

And of course none of this really matters because there is no one left on the sidelines to convince: the Right has devolved to the point of being the bastard children of George Orwell

(doublethink is) the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

and a Far Side cartoon:

• What Liberals say: "The 100,000th column restating the same, obvious, terrifying realities."
• What Conservatives hear: "Blah, blah,blah, Socialism!"

the Center are the same will-o-the-wisp cowards and grifters they have always been, and the Left has grown hoarse shouting truth into a vacuum

decade after decade.


No, for me the most salient sections of this piece are as follows (emphasis added by me):

..the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis.

...
I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too.
...

So to sum up, the author was the willing stooge of evil men.

He spent 30 years helping filth to slander people like me and destroy my country.

And he did it for money.

And now that the traitors and thugs who hired him are threatening to come after his 30 pieces of silver, he has decided to speak out.

Also, long after it is all far too late, he wants his victims to know he's sorry.

To which what can one say (with a much Christian charity as one can muster) except:

Fuck.

You.

Mr. Lofgren has committed the worst crimes against honor imaginable: he has shamed his ancestors and knowingly betrayed his country into the hands of its destroyers for money. In a culture that actually valued integrity, Mr. Lofgren would find only one path open to him

if he truly wanted to make amends and begin to remove the giant, bloody stain his actions have left on his family name.

Instead, as things stand now, I fully expect him to be taken to the bosom of the Conservative Expatriate Corps, where a lucrative book deal will be put together for him, after which some sinecure will be found for him at "The Daily Beast", "FrumForum", The New York Times, or on "Morning Joe", putting a high gloss on Harold Ford, Junior's shoes.

All of which leads us to Sunday's Mouse Circus.

Project against the scrim of Mr. Lofgren's confession of his complicity in arguably the longest and most destructive campaign of lies, slander and sabotage in American history -- a confession that underscores

A) Anyone making false-equivalency claims about the Right and Left are flat-out lying and,

B) They fucking well know they are lying

-- note how extra-extra-hollow the usual, flaccid gasbag lies ring now.

How absurd Republican Paul Gigot sounds when he suggests that the best way to blow the Republican's collective minds is to "confound" them by basically giving them everything they want.

How nakedly ridiculous Republican Mark McKinnon sounds when he flogs his idiotic "No Lables" scam,

founded on the very "Both sides do it" premise that Republican Mark McKinnon full well knows is a complete lie.

How fatuous and grotesque Tom Friedman sounds

pimping one more of his godawful books and blatting on about salvation at the hands of a Centrist third party.

How either sneeringly cynical or criminally insane Douglas Holtz-Eakin (the former economic adviser to Sen. John McCain) sounds when he insists that the only way out of our current disastrous political cul-de-sac is for President Obama to "show some more ideological flexibility".

Christiane Amanpour: WTF are you even talking about? Hasn't he already given the Right virtually everything they wanted.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin: Fuck you, I'm reading my American Enterprise Institute talking points.

On second thought, it's pretty clear that Douglas Holtz-Eakin is just a straight-up liar.

And how miserably crooked the King of the Mouse Circus Fucknozzles -- David Gregory -- sounds...every time he opens his bibble spigot:

Gregory: People were not opposed to the Iraq War: they were opposed to incompetence.

Gregory: Congresswoman Maxine Waters, you said mean things about those nice Tea Party people. Doesn't that make you a monster, unfit for human society?

Gregory: There's populism in the Left and populism on the Right. But what about the fucking Middle! Huh? Huh?

The most honest man on teevee was, once again, Paul Krugman, who opined that no substantive action on jobs whatsoever would pass Congress (actual quote):

"If Obama called for endorsing motherhood, Republicans in the House would oppose it.”

Once again, Krugman must carry the whole weight of speaking the ugly tired truth about the Destroyer Right on teevee; a Destroyer Right that Liberals have been warning about for decades; a Destroyer Right meticulously bred, cultivated and harvested by thousands of professional cultural Quislings like Mike Lofgren.

A Destroyer Right that is only going to get exponentially worse until the gated Centrist stronghold where our Villager Media Overlords ply their trade

is rendered professionally uninhabitable.

Paris Peace Talks Break Down

Apparently Democrats wanted the negotiating table to be round, but were willing to hold their collective noses and settle for square...or semi-circular...or oval...or rectangular...or a parallelogram...and were also cool with scattered seating, or beanbag chairs, or cafeteria-style, or simply sitting around a campfire, or even just letting Republicans dial in on Skype from their homes, nude, during the few moments they can spare in between their marathon group "Atlas Shrugged" jerk-off sessions.

Republicans, on the other hand, insisted on burning the negotiating table to the floor, nuking everything in a 100-mile radius, and then being served the remains of any widows and orphans that weren't seared to ash in the initial blast as Safety Net Tartar on toast points.

I look forward to watching David Gregory unhinge his jaw so that he can manage to swallow what just happened in its entirety and still poop out little trademark "Both Sides Do It" pellets on Sunday.

Crazy is for Closers

Far be it from me to be damnfool enough to attempt to copy-edit James Wolcott's prose, but I believe when describing David Mamet's new book and the author's sad descent into Right-wing conspiracy mongering:

...
Mamet has a book out called The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, which sounds like a tired rewrite of Allan Bloom twenty years late with some Norman Podhoretz Hamburger Helper, and lazy as hell.

what Mr. Wolcott meant to say was:

,,,
Mamet has a book out called The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, which sounds like a tired rewrite of Allan Bloom twenty years late with some Norman Podhoretz Hamburger Helper, and ass-banjo me with a fucksaw if it isn't as fuck-all lazy as fucking hell.

Other than that, no modifications.

Now, Mr, Mamet, will you go to lunch? Go to lunch. WILL you GO to LUNCH?

Bobo Loves The Smell of Napalm

in the morning

It smells like...Medicare. (I have temporarily run out of adjectives to describe for the 1,000th time what a truly pernicious cultural phenomenon David Brooks has become, but thanks to blogenfreude we learn that the NYT had to cut comments on Bobo's odious column off after 25 when it became clear that the general reading public had an ample surplus of harsh language for Our Mr. Brooks and was not afraid to use it.)


It has almost ceased to matter what the perceived problem-of-the-day actually is, what really caused it and what all the options really are, because in the Bizarro World where we now live 24/7, we all know the rules:

1. Behind the tiny, transparent figleaf of fixing the problem, he Right breaks out its All-Occasion, Randite Playbook and begins radically tampering with something really, really important. While screaming "FREEDOM!". At 120 decibels.

2. Liberals warn them -- repeatedly and loudly -- that they are about to badly clusterfuck one of our body politics' vital organs, possibly irreparably.

3. Liberals are told to shut the fuck up. Liberals say a naughty word. Liberals are never seen on teevee again because, y'know, how rude! Liberal warnings go unheard and unheeded because, yee-HAW, we're gonna put a boot in someone's ass!

4. Time passes.

5. The terrible clusterfucking the Liberals warned would happen comes to pass. The Right is found at the crime scene, squatting over the corpse, murder weapon in hand, while wearing a tee-shirt that says "I Killed Dis Here Guy and all I Got Was Dis Lousy Tee Shirt" which is covered in fresh blood.

6. Our elite media carefully scrutinizes the evidence and determines that both the Right and Left are obviously equally to blame.

7. While Liberals are rendered temporarily, Billy-Budd stunned into a b--b--but stammer over this latest travesty, the Right slips out the back way, showers off, picks up pair of clean jackboots, a tri-corner hat and a "Don't Tread on Me" flag from their friends at Koch Industries, and returns the same way they came in swearing they had nothing to to with the corpse that is now starting to reek on the floor.

8. Having been spared by the righteous judgment they so richly deserve, the Right begins to scream that Big Gummint Liberal Socialists are somehow the real culprit here, and anyway somebody really ought to get rid of that reeking corpse.

9. On the pretext of getting rid of yon reeking corpse, the Right breaks out its All-Occasion Randite Playbook and begins radically tampering with something really, really important.

While screaming "FREEDOM!"

At 120 decibels.

How does this keep happening?

It keep happening because the Reasonable Center keeps being frog-marched ever further into the depths of Crazy Town as demonstrated by the following from awful, awful "Weekly Standard":

Rush Limbaugh on Ryan's Budget: 'It is Substantively Superb and Politically Brilliant'
11:46 AM, Apr 5, 2011 • By MARK HEMINGWAY

It seems to me that when Paul Ryan can get both David Brooks and Rush Limbaugh enthused, he's really on to something...

Of course, this latest upgraded iteration of Basic Wingnut Truth is currently contained in the "Weekly Standard" Bad Idea Contagion testing facility, but it won't stay there for long.

Because it never does.

And unless the Left fights back -- as one and hard -- sooner that you'd believe, these will become the parameters of acceptable public debate, set in unalterable Elite Media cement: Limbaugh defining the Right, Bobo defining the Left, leaving Paul Ryan's "Logan's Run" budget

as the Middle, and leaving the public to choose between being hit on the head with a hammer...or being hit on the head with an anvil.

Because no matter what the problem is, for the Right it is always one more opportunity to invade the wrong country, or slather the wealthy with more tax cuts, or spank the living shit out of poor, the weak and the dispossessed with an axe.

Which their enablers in the Mainstream Media will then obligingly gift-wrap in economic, cultural or religious scripture and call it Sober and Serious.


Pull Newt's finger and help Fight the Crazy...

Art For Art's Sake

Republican House Candidate Art Robinson goes all-in with the new GOP "Embracing Your Inner Maniac" strategy.

So who is Art Robinson?

You know your crazy uncle? Not the amusingly eccentric one, but the magnetism-is-a-Commie-lie, I-can-smell-the-moon-people-with-my-mind, full-throttle-with-afterburner-crazy one who is perpetually boiling-piss infuriated about something?

Well apparently that uncle has joined something called the "Tea Party" and, in their wisdom, the good Republicans citizens of Oregon's 4th congressional district have chosen him to fight for their values and beliefs against Democrat Peter DeFazio in the upcoming national election.

The good Republicans citizens of Oregon's 4th congressional district did this in very much the same way -- and obviously using very much the same carefully calibrated set of competence-calipers -- that various other groups of Republican citizens (who these days [for very complicated reasons having to do with assuming that everyone else is as stupid and gullible as they are] often like to play dress-up in pantaloons and funny hats while pretending not to be Republicans) have used to select people like Sharron "Both Right and Obtuse" Angle, Christine "Meatballs But No Happy Ending" O'Donnell, Rand "We The Lying" Paul, Jan "Been Through The Desert With a Corpse With No Name" Brewer, Joe "A Noun, A Verb, and 'Unconstitutional'" Miller and Carl "Paulie Walnuts" Paladino to run for very powerful elected offices in their names.

Which is why, when Crazy Uncle Art went on the teevee last night and spent the better part of 18 minutes alternately yelling at Rachel Maddow, smirking at Rachel Maddow, interrupting Rachel Maddow, insulting Rachel Maddow, patronizing Rachel Maddow and calling Rachel Maddow a liar...as she patiently tried to read Mr. Robinson's own crazy words from his own crazy newsletter back to him and get him to explain his very bizarre ideas and/or confirm or deny that he continued to believe them...I literally could not look away.

It was a singular event, and seen from a safe distance, strangely beautiful, in the same way I would imagine the 1908 Tunguska event might have seemed beautiful if one had seen it from orbit.

As our democracy continues its long, painful, nervous breakdown and slide into McFeudalism, it is, I suppose, sometimes a blessing to have someone as purely rage-blown berserk as Art Robinson pop briefly out of the maelstrom, if only to remind us just how hilariously grotesque the Conservative Soul really looks without its makeup and pearls.

The Democratic Underground has your Art Robinson starter-kit here.

As I have said before , and will no doubt be moved to say again: Modern Conservatism is a disease. If you don't understand that, you're already infected.


Update: Blue Gal kills it here.