Elon Musk 2025 is...

...Andrew Yang 2020...

...No Labels 2010 ("Dead Center") ...

...Matthew Dowd 2016 ("So, Four Years Later, How's That Whole "Disrupt The K'rupt Duopoly!" Thing Working Out?") ...

...Ralph Nader 2000...

...George Wallace, 1968...

..Jill Stein, every fucking time:

All of these the spawn of the biggest lie in American politics.  The lie whose ubiquity has done more to warp American politics than any other.  The Big Lies that makes all the smaller lies possible.  And because I'm rather tired today, in lieu of brand new words the explain that Big Lie, I'm gonna drop in excerpt from eight years ago and take my wife out to lunch at a local diner.  

From "The Great White Party".

...

Because even as they they stood in the ruins of the Republican Bush Administration -- even as they watched the Republican Congress labor single-mindedly to lie, slander and sabotage the Obama Administration's Herculean efforts to clean up the ruins of the Republican Bush Administration and get us back on our feet -- nothing could override the frantic-junkie desperation of the Beltway brain caste to go right on pretending that Both Sides Do It.

And they're rich. 

And influential. 

And their bosses are rich and influential.  And the lobbyists with whom they crossbreed are rich and influential.  And the teevee networks that deliver their lies to millions and who depend on never offending anyone are crazy rich and influential.  And the Republican moles posing as "Independents" who knew god damn well that "Both Siderism" is the Big Lie that keeps the Right propped up are rich and influential.  

Which is why there has always been a shit-ton of money and job security available to any unprincipled hack willing to help the Beltway prop up it's foundational Big Lie of Both Sides Do It.

On the other hand, there is no profit or prestige to be found in telling the truth about the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It, for the same reason there is no profit or prestige in telling the Mayor of the "a coastal town in southern Norway" and Chairman of the Baths' Committee that the town's very lucrative spa is making people sick.

...

Peter Stockmann. —for his own family, as I was saying, as well as for the town he lives in.

Dr. Stockmann. It is I who have the real good of the town at heart! I want to lay bare the defects that sooner or later must come to the light of day. I will show whether I love my native town.

Peter Stockmann. You, who in your blind obstinacy want to cut off the most important source of the town's welfare?

Dr. Stockmann. The source is poisoned, man! Are you mad? We are making our living by retailing filth and corruption! The whole of our flourishing municipal life derives its sustenance from a lie!

Peter Stockmann. All imagination—or something even worse. The man who can throw out such offensive insinuations about his native town must be an enemy to our community.

... 

In Elon's case, he has hit Stage Five of the Seven Stages of Wingnut Grift.

Stage 1:  Completely clueless.

Stage 2: Buying into ludicrous MAGA/QAnon conspiracy theories about why things are fucked.

Stage 3:  Finding out the Right played you for a chump.

Stage 4:  Blame Both Sides.

Stage 5:  Third Party!!!

No Half Measures

Q: What Are Three Ways COBOL is Like White Supremacist Republicans?

1.  Both have been around for decades, running behind the scenes.

2.  Despite the addition of sleek, public-facing interfaces, behind the scenes both are still around and still going strong.

3.  Elon Musk arrogantly presumed he knew how both of them worked, but never actually had a clue, leading him to make big, stupid, public fuck ups.

No Half Measures

Elmo Just Broke the Most Sacred Rule of the Legacy Media AND Republican Politics AND Never Trumpers

🤨 https://t.co/DTdfJWydLS

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2025

Oh noes!  The richest asshole in the world has breached barrier that walls off the Before Time!

Who knows what inconvenient creepy crawlies might start slithering out?

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 906: That Escalated Quickly

"There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge." -- Hunter S. Thompson.

 

• 
  

The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary "sponsors" and real listeners like you!

The Real Guns of the South

Harry Turtledove's excellent, award-winning alternate history science fiction novel, "The Guns of the South", is set during the American Civil War. 

The story deals with a group of time traveling members of the Afrikaner AWB -- a South African nationalist, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi political party -- from 21st-century (Hey, that's us!)  In their timeline, the South African system of apartheid has been overthrown, but these fuckers have access to a time machine.  So, in the hopes of saving and spreading their depraved ideology, they travel back in time to the American Civil War and supply Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia with AK-47s and other advanced technology, medicine and intelligence. 

Their intervention results in a Confederate victory in the war.

33 years ago, in 1992 when the novel was published, who could have guessed that time travel shenanigans wouldn't be necessary for Afrikaner AWB scum to find safe harbor and political power in the United States?   All it took was 40 years of relentless propagandizing from Hate Radio and 30 years of relentless propagandizing from Fox News, and the relentless propagandizing from the rest of Conservative media to sculpt the Republican base into reprogrammable meatbags who adored the idea of a white Christian nationalist authoritarianism, and a few South African billionaires willing to put up millions of dollars to buy the White House for a corrupt degenerate felon who is 100% on-board with the white supremacist agenda.

From The New York Times:

The Road to Trump’s Embrace of White South Africans

The Trump administration’s hostile approach to South Africa was shaped by a convergence of factors.

It was May 2019 and national security officials were in the Situation Room discussing Iran when President Trump abruptly changed the subject. He wanted to talk about granting asylum and citizenship to white South African farmers.

Mr. Trump had floated the idea before, claiming that the farmers were a persecuted minority group being displaced from their land, according to John R. Bolton, his national security adviser at the time, who was at the meeting.

Mr. Bolton said he thought little of Mr. Trump’s wish. The president had embraced fringe ideas and false narratives pushed by white Afrikaner activists, Mr. Bolton said.

“It never amounted to anything, so I just put it as typical Trump,” Mr. Bolton recalled in a recent interview. “Some random person tells him something and he’s obsessed with it.”

Years later, Mr. Trump’s views on white farmers in South Africa are shaping U.S. foreign policy in his second term. On Monday, the first group of Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority that ruled during apartheid in South Africa, landed in Washington, as the Trump administration upended a refugee system that had provided sanctuary for those fleeing war, famine and natural disasters.

The administration is welcoming white South Africans after suspending the program for everyone else, including other Africans who have waited in refugee camps for years and were vetted and cleared, and Afghans who supported the U.S. war in their country...

From The Guardian:

‘Trump and Musk are gaslighting’: anti-apartheid artist on how US president and his billionaire ally are attacking South Africa

From MoneyWeb:

The deep South African ties in the Trump administration

Apart from Elon Musk it’s clear the US president has the ear of South Africans, or those who have lived here.

Everyone by now is aware that Elon Musk has the ear of US President Donald Trump, and is to a large extent shaping US attitudes to SA.

Apart from Musk, there are several others with strong South African ties in Trump’s inner circle, including David Sacks, the US’s new AI and crypto czar; billionaire investor Peter Thiel, a key backer of Trump for many years; and Joel Pollak, who has been tipped as the next US ambassador to SA...

I Am The Liberal Media

US FDA Suspends Food Safety Quality Checks, Brought to You by Carl’s Junior

From Reuters:

US FDA suspends food safety quality checks after staff cuts

WASHINGTON, April 17 (Reuters) - The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality control program for its food testing laboratories as a result of staff cuts at the Department of Health and Human Services, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.

The proficiency testing program of the FDA's Food Emergency Response Network is designed to ensure consistency and accuracy across the agency's network of about 170 labs that test food for pathogens and contaminants to prevent food-borne illness.

The firing and departure of as many as 20,000 HHS employees have upended public health research and disrupted the agency's work on areas like bird flu and drug reviews. President Donald Trump hopes to slash as much as $40 billion from HHS.

"Unfortunately, significant reductions in force, including a key quality assurance officer, an analytical chemist, and two microbiologists at FDA's Human Food Program Moffett Center have an immediate and significant impact on the Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) Proficiency Testing (PT) Program," says the email sent on Tuesday from FERN's National Program Office and seen by Reuters...

Sure, but on the other hand, these people use big, smarty-pants words like "analytical" and "microbiologist" and "proficiency" so they're probably snotty, college-educated elitists who you shouldn't trust anyway.

Brought to you by Carl's Junior.

Burn The Lifeboats

The Third Body Problem

If two's a disaster, three's a pan-dimensional clusterfuck.

From Politico: 

Musk said Wisconsin would decide the fate of Western civilization. 

Now he says he ‘expected to lose.’ The Musk-backed Brad Schimel got thumped Tuesday night.

No Half Measures

DOGE In Action

Except for the fig leaf of a warrant, it's all there.

The smarmy, arrogant ignorance.

The dismissal of all warnings that what this idiot is about to do will cause a disaster.  From Wired:

DOGE Plans to Rebuild SSA Codebase in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse

Social Security systems contain tens of millions of lines of code written in COBOL, an archaic programming language. Safely rewriting that code would take years—DOGE wants it done in months.

And, of course, after the disaster, this idiot blaming the people who tried to stop him from blowing everything up.

Also my 20th blogiversary tip jar remains open.  

And don't forget to...

Burn The Lifeboats

My Name is Ozymandias, King of Kings

 Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

No Half Measures

Apartheid Clyde's ACME Rocket Company Strikes Again

🚨 BREAKING: Another one of Elon Musk’s taxpayer-funded Starship rockets just exploded—AGAIN.

How many billions are we wasting on this failure factory?

Everything Musk touches blows up, catches fire, or crashes—including the Trump Administration. pic.twitter.com/40kXk8NpNy

— Chris D. Jackson (@ChrisDJackson) March 7, 2025

Burn The Lifeboats

We're Getting Very Close...

... to the sort of "Whose orders do I obey?" showdown that can break a country.

No Half Measures

To Serve MAGA: Part 2

There are many Denizens of the MAGA cesspit who do not like what I write.  Didn't like it back when they were Fake Tea Partiers.  Didn't like it before that when they were Bush's loyal cheerleaders.  

Yeah.  Been at this awhile.  

And since Musk's Incel Clown Posse can't cut off my nonexistent Soros/USAID/ACORN (Remember ACORN?) funding and no one in Trump's cabinet can sack me, instead I get shit like this.  

To which I say, thanks for the content The Blogger Team!

Burn The Lifeboats

To Serve MAGA

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Perfect Coda to The Career of One of Musk’s Incel Clown Posse

...and they're racist.

This from MSNBC.

Musk’s 25-year-old DOGE staffer resigns after racist posts emerge: report

Marko Elez is the 25-year-old DOGE staffer who reportedly had access to the U.S. Treasury’s most sensitive payment systems. But a Wall Street Journal reporter linked Elez to a now-deleted social media account full of racist and hateful statements, including, "I was racist before it was cool."

And:

New: A 2nd DOGE staffer has amplified extremists online, including Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate

www.reuters.com/world/us/sta...

[image or embed]

— Raphael Satter (@raphae.li) February 7, 2025 at 1:16 PM

You already know the punchline, right? 

The horrified agent asks what the act is called.

The proud answer, delivered with a flourish: "The Aristocrats!"

Burn The Lifeboats

What Is Dead May Never Die: Grace Hoppers (Ongoing) Revenge

"One day, my pretties, we will destroy them all!"*

Some of you may remember waaaay back during the Before Time when a secret ally of democracy suddenly revealed itself to put a hurt on a Republican trying to do mischief.  

The year was 2010.

The Republican was Ahnuld Schwarzenegger, who, believe it or not kids, for a minute was actually governor of Galivornia (official pronunciation during his tenure in that oviz.)

And the secret ally of democracy was...COBOL!  Yay! My very own programming mother tongue!

Like the the Dead Men of Dunharrow, summoned by the last King of Gondor to turn the Battle of the Corsairs in The Return of the King, COBOL emerged from its hiding place to frustrate Ahnuld's plan to screw over government employees.

Twice!

I wrote about the Guvinator barking out his empty orders "zee bayroll zizdem being vixed now! Now! Now! And zo fort" here and we did a podcast about it here.

And now from the rotting carcass of the Party of Lincoln, a new and vastly more destructive villain has emerged.  One who is attempting to bypass laws and courts by dispatching his Aqua Teen Incel Fascist Force to seize direct control of the government payroll system and cut off funding to whoever offends him.

And once again, Grace Hopper's Ghost Army of ten million lines of ancient B-XOR, END-INVOKE and 88-level number code -- some of which was probably last updated and compiled during the Carter administration -- have emerged from the shadows to kick Musk's Shitler Youth in their hairless yam sacks like an angry Mayan Codex with a black belt in taekwondo. 

H/T to alert listener Ravi for passing this along.  From Paul Krugman:

The 20-somethings Musk is deploying to take over, locking out those old hands and pushing aside the people who know how the system works, almost surely don’t understand enough to politicize payments right away.

As Nathan Tankus, the go-to expert on these matters, says,

I 100% believe that the primary barrier to Elon Musk gaining control of the Treasury payments system is COBOL.

For readers mystified by the reference, COBOL is a very old programming language that was once pervasive in the business world but in which hardly anyone under 60 knows how to program — yet is still widely used in government. (During Covid, the state of New Jersey put out a frantic call for people who knew COBOL to implement expanded unemployment benefits.)

So raise a glass to the inventor of COBOL -- navy Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper [December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992] -- was, by all accounts, a perfectly nice, brilliant nerd*, the likes of whom we could sure use more of these days, and exactly the sort of hero Tosspot Pete Hegseth would have run out of the Navy.

Burn The Lifeboats

Elmo Calls for the Dissolution of the Republican Party

This quote is from me in 2005, just a nobody Liberal blogger out here in the middle of Middle America speaking the plain truth about what was obviously going on inside the GOP:

Run the racists off the ranch, and who would stuff all the envelopes and staff the phone banks? Write all those lovely checks and boom down from the pulpit at the chittering inbreeders, that if they vote for a Democrat, they’ll burn in Hell with the Fags and the Feminazis?

Face it, without the Segregationists, the Dominionists, the Neocon Imperialists and the rest of nutjobs that pack the extreme Right Wing of Bedlam, the GOP could no more win an election than Michael Jackson could lose a celebrity trial.

For all of their posturing, every day they become more and more nothing but the Party Of Jefferson Davis…in bad drag.

Me in 2006:

So as the Party of Lincoln has morphed into the Party of Jefferson Davis, the Battle of Selma is now being stage-managed by the fusspot ghost of George Brinton McClellan.

Me again in 2006:

No, BoBo [David Brooks]. It is YOU who don’t have the numbers to govern. You are riding shotgun in Jerry Falwell’s Clown Car, not the other way around. You are the one who has made a career of telling people not to mind the madmen in the basement of the GOP, as they ripped the walls out, burned the deeds and carefully mutated the Party of Lincoln into the party of Jefferson Davis.

Right before your very eyes, and you did...nothing. Worse than nothing; you told people to ignore the lump in the flesh of their Party. That it was harmless.

Just a cyst. Just the fringe.

While the carcinoma spread, people like you didn’t sound the alarm; instead you smashed the alarm to flinders and then hid the evidence in your pillowcase.

You-know-who, again, in 2006:

The Klan was and is a domestic terrorist organization run by murderous cowards and sociopaths, a bulwark of Dixie Conservativism and the indispensable lynchpin of the Republican's despicable Southern Strategy.

The Klan is, in a very real sense, the main reason why there even is a Republican Party that looks and acts and governs the way it does today.

Why it has mutated and degenerated from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Jefferson Davis.

That same guy in 2008:

In the end, the Dixiecrats became Republicans, and, in the process, destroyed the Party of Lincoln, hollowed out its corpse, and turned it into the Party of Jefferson Davis.

So, what's the point in playing the oldies?

Well, this week Elmo -- possibly tweaked to the gills and knowing fuck-all about American politics other than how much it costs to buy a presidency --   decided to have Big Opinions about the issue of bigots in the GOP.  

After agreeing with a post calling the American right “retarded,” Elon says there are “contemptible fools” who are “hateful, unrepentant racists” within the Republican Party - and they have to be removed or they’ll be the downfall of the party.

Full-blown MAGA Civil War folks. pic.twitter.com/99KW3KZidI

— Ahmed Baba (@AhmedBaba_) December 28, 2024

Racists will be downfall of the party?  Really?

Flush out your headgear, new guy.  They are the fucking Republican party

And now the MAGA chumps who Musk saddled up and used to ride Trump back to the White House are sloooowly learning what it must be like to be one of Elmo's human brood mares:  once you've given him what he wants, he has little use for you.   

You're furniture.  

And if you raise your voice to him, out you must go.  

Burn The Lifeboats

And He'll Huff And He'll Puff...

 

...and the whole rest of that story.

Except, in the real world, Republican weaklings and cowards keep scampering to weaker and weaker shelters.

From The Washington Post:

Republicans reject spending bill, under pressure from Trump and Musk

Unless Congress acts, a government shutdown deadline looms just past midnight Saturday.

Republicans rejected House Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan plan to avert a government shutdown, as President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk joined a broad swath of the House GOP on Wednesday to condemn a compromise bill full of Democratic policy priorities.

The rebuke, which built steadily through the day and culminated with a long written statement from Trump in the late afternoon, has forced Johnson back to the drawing board on a plan to prevent a Christmastime shutdown — and maintain the support of his chaotic conference to be reelected as speaker early next year.

“Your elected representatives have heard you and now the terrible bill is dead,” Musk boasted on X, the social media site he owns, after he spent the day blasting the legislation. “The voice of the people has triumphed!”

Johnson has not outlined a backup plan, and multiple people familiar with the real-time conversations said the next step remains unclear, as leaders would need significant support from both parties — and Trump — to pass a funding extension. If Congress doesn’t extend the deadline, most federal operations would shut down at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, though the effects of a shutdown wouldn’t fully kick in until Monday...

Wow, so there really is a War on Christmas.  And its the Republicans who are trying to blow old St. Nick out of the sky.

Well Feliz Navidad, kids, and a Happy FAFO New Year to all the meatbags who voted for this clusterfuck.  

Burn The Lifeboats

D.O.U.C.H.E.

I AM The Liberal Media

Ever Wonder What Would Happen if You Binged 4CHAN and Watched Dr. Strangelove at the Ass-End of a 3-Week Ketamine Bender?

How it started:

How it's going.  From The Independent:

Elon Musk suggests support for replacing democracy with government of ‘high-status males’ 

 

Elon Musk has used his large platform on X to promote a theory that a free-thinking “Republic” could only exist under the decision-making of “high status males” – and women or “low T men” would not be welcome in it. 

 

On Sunday, Musk re-posted a screenshot of the theory – which appears to have been conceived on 4chan in 2021– on the social media site...

Have You Ever Seen a Commie Drink a Glass of Water?

Whatsamatta Kid?

You afraid of a little "free speech"?

I Am The Liberal Media