Showing posts with label krugman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label krugman. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 08, 2019

Krugman Goes Full Driftglass. Almost.


From K-Thug today:
The Education of Fanatical Centrists
Will they finally admit what the G.O.P. has become?

By Paul Krugman
Short answer?

No.

But I do like where you're going, Doctor. 

Or course we all understand that the quaint, antebellum customs of the The New York Times prohibit you from saying that you're actually talking about your colleague, David Brooks.  So strictly for my own amusement, as we go along I'll just be mentally plugging in his name where it belongs (with emphasis added.)

Please continue.
And the whole tenor of our national conversation has changed. It looks to me as if we’re witnessing the rapid collapse of a powerful faction in U.S. public life, one whose refusal to accept facts at odds with its prejudices has long been a major source of political dysfunction.

But I’m not talking about the right-wing extremists who dominate the Republican Party. Sorry, but they’re not going anywhere. Most of Trump’s base is sticking with him, while the list of prominent Republican politicians willing to call out Trump’s malfeasance in clear language consists so far of Mitt Romney and, well, Mitt Romney.

No, I’m talking about cloistered hacks like David Fucking Brooks fanatical centrists, who aren’t a large slice of the electorate, but have played an outsize role in elite opinion and media coverage. David Fucking Brooks, These are people who may have been willing to concede that Trump was a bad guy, but otherwise maintained, in the teeth of the evidence, that our two major parties were basically equivalent: Each party had its extremists, but each also had its moderates, and everything would be fine if these moderates could work together.
Please continue.
Some of us have been pushing back against that worldview for many years, arguing that today’s Republican Party is a radical force increasingly opposed to democracy...
Some of have indeed, Doctor.
For a long time, however, making that case — pointing out that Republicans were sounding ever more authoritarian and violating more and more democratic norms — got you dismissed by David Fucking Brooks as shrill if not deranged...
With a very few exceptions, like Paul Krugman and Charlie Pierce, it also made you a social pariah and pretty much unemployable; dependent on little more than persistence, a tip jar and the good will of a small group of readers.
So it’s now crystal clear that the G.O.P. is not a normal political party; it is an American equivalent of Hungary’s Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice, an authoritarian regime in waiting.

And I think — I hope — that those who have spent years denying this reality are finally coming around.
Sadly, this is where the good doctor and I part company.
It’s important to understand that the G.O.P. hasn’t suddenly changed, that Trump hasn’t somehow managed to corrupt a party that was basically O.K. until he came along...

No, Trump isn’t an aberration. He’s unusually blatant and gaudily corrupt, but at a basic level he’s the culmination of where his party has been going for decades. And U.S. political life won’t begin to recover until malignant Both Sidersist goofs like David Fucking Brooks centrists face up to that uncomfortable reality.
Because short of an open revolution that brings this fight directly to the doorstep of, say, The New York Times, this will never happen.

Never.

Because it would extinguish the careers of every single one of those fanatical centrists who now enjoy a virtual stranglehold over elite media-driven political opinion.  Because in one, fell swoop they would be forced to admit that they have been wrong all along.  That the Left has been right about the Right all along.  And it's not like they have a backup career to fall back on: spouting Both Siderist bullshit is literally all cloistered hacks like David Fucking Brooks have been doing for the past couple of decades.

Worse still, it would completely upend the extremely profitable Never Trump scam by which many highly-paid Republican henchmen were magically transformed overnight into highly-paid Respected Columnists, Trusted Cable News Contributors and Best-Selling Authors.  But that transformation would never have been possible if newspapers and cable news outlets and book publishers (and way too many Liberals in the media who should have damn well known better) hadn't more-or-less collectively agreed to let them get away with pretending they they only discovered five minutes that their Republican Party was... OMFG !!! ...

...full of Republicans!!!



The media corporations which control 90% of our public discourse simply have too much invested in the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It and the hundreds of paid, professional liars who promulgate that lie to let it all go and start turning the microphones over to those of us who haven't been wrong about the Right all along.

And I for one will bet on media corporations putting the interests of their bottom line above the interests of the country every time.



Behold, a Tip Jar!

Friday, November 04, 2016

Whither National Greatness?



It Was (Nearly) 20 Years Ago Today...

David Brooks, March 1997:
A RETURN TO NATIONAL GREATNESS
A Manifesto for a Lost Creed
MAR 03, 1997 | By DAVID BROOK

...
Worse, under the influence of the New Left, the personal became political. Private concerns came to eclipse the larger public realm. At a time when a teenager's haircut was a political statement to be adjudicated by the Supreme Court, all the issues of the private realm -- smoking, methods of raising children, sexual preferences -- began to overshadow the traditional subjects of the public realm: subjects like order, justice, and the distribution of wealth. Americans have almost forgotten what the public realm is and how it differs from the sum of private concerns...
And after 20 years of highly-focused, lavishly-funded, unrelenting Conservatism pounding the shit out of the American dream?
The Banality of Change
David Brooks NOV. 4, 2016

A few weeks ago I met a guy in Idaho who was absolutely certain that Donald Trump would win this election. He was wearing tattered, soiled overalls, missing a bunch of teeth and was unnaturally skinny. He was probably about 50, but his haggard face looked 70. He was getting by aimlessly as a handyman.

I pointed to the polls and tried to persuade him that Hillary Clinton might win, but it was like telling him a sea gull could play billiards. Everybody he knows is voting Trump so his entire lived experience points to a Trump landslide...
20 years ago, in a nation at relative peace, enjoying relative prosperity and accruing a healthy national budget surplus after digging out from under crippling Republican deficits, Mr. Brooks could not find a single complementary thing to say about Bill Clinton:
Consider Bill Clinton. He longs to be a great leader, but cultural liberalism has robbed him of any way to realize his dream. The national- greatness ideal of the 19th century was based first on the vigorous virtues, but cultural liberalism mistakes virility for sexism and the oppression of women.
...

And so, at the end of liberalism, we find Bill Clinton. Longing to personify greatness but too easy on himself, trained to discard the qualities that comprise it, he is the opposite of vigorous, the opposite of reticent, the opposite of self-disciplined.
Now, after 20 years of Limbaugh/Gingrich/Atwater/FoxNews Conservatism being pumped into the groundwater of American politics, Mr. Brooks gets a chance to see what an actual vortex of rapacious egomania looks like:
Now, if you wanted to design a personality type perfectly ill suited to be a change agent in government, you would come up with Donald Trump: solipsistic, impatient, combative, unsubtle and ignorant.
20 years ago, Mr. Brooks didn't care what Gummint did, as long it was ginormous --
...
It almost doesn't matter what great task government sets for itself, as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness. The first task of government is to convey a spirit of confidence and vigor that can then spill across the life of the nation. Stagnant government drains national morale. A government that fails to offer any vision merely feeds public cynicism and disenchantment.

But energetic government is good for its own sake. It raises the sights of the individual. It strengthens common bonds. It boosts national pride. It continues the great national project.
-- and driven by powerful individuals, and not stinky Gummint "collectives":
The national mission can be carried out only by individuals and families -- not by collectives, as in socialism and communism. Instead, individual ambition and willpower are channeled into the cause of national greatness. And by making the nation great, individuals are able to join their narrow concerns to a larger national project.
20 years later, and David Brooks doesn't seem capable of facing the fact that his long-ago prayer to the gods of Conservative Greatness has actually come true.

With a vengeance.

Mr. Brooks' party is now led by a billionaire egomaniac who has indeed promised to do gargantuan things like building a giant wall and blowing up the United States government.  Who has indeed allowed the millions of individual bigots and imbeciles who make up the base of Mr. Brooks' Republican Party to "join their narrow concerns to a larger national project" of jailing his political opponents, bulldozing NATO, banning Muslims and on and on and on.

Hell, even Trump's stupid motto, plastered across every wannabe-klansman's ball-cap and double-wide in the land -- "Make American Great Again" -- is an almost word-for-word answer to Mr. Brooks prayer for a "Return To National Greatness".

Trump is exactly to sort of whirlwind of wild, world-stomping power and insatiable ambition for which Young David Brooks beseeched the heavens 20 years ago.

How hilarious, then, that 20 years later -- without ever once admitting that those dirty Liberals have been right all along -- Mr. Brooks now offers his readers a punch list for the effective administration of a complex advanced democracy that sure looks a helluva lot like the resume of every competent Liberal public official I have ever met:
...
Let’s start with what “change” actually means. In our system, change means legislation. It starts with the ability to gather a team of policy experts who can craft complex bills. These days, bills often run to thousands of pages, and every bad rookie decision can lead things astray.

Then it requires political deftness...

Craftsmanship in government is not like craftsmanship in business. You can’t win people with money and you can’t order people around. Governance requires enormous patience, a capacity to tolerate boredom and the skill of quiet herding...

Change in government is a team sport. Public opinion is mobilized through institutions — through interest groups, activist organizations, think tanks and political parties...

In the real world, the process of driving change is usually boring, remorseless and detail oriented...
You know, if Mr. Brooks had actually learned a single fucking thing from being horribly wrong about everything for the last two decades and had applied what he had learned in the service of his readers, then I would happily put down my pen and never speak of him again.

But he hasn't.

He simply slithered from one, highly-profitable Beltway media scam -- Liberal Idiots Are Destroying Murrica! -- to another, even-more-highly-profitable Beltway media scam -- Why Oh Why Can't Both Sides Something Something! -- when he saw which way the wind was shifting.

And now, once again Mr. Brooks is doing his part to advance the Conservative cause by making sure he gets it on the record that, should she be elected, Hillary Clinton will be responsible for "gathering majorities" --
Passing legislation next year is going to be hard, but if Clinton can be dull and pragmatic, and operate at a level below the cable TV ideology wars, it’s possible to imagine her gathering majorities behind laws that would help people like that guy in Idaho: an infrastructure push, criminal justice reform, a college tuition program, an apprenticeship and skills program, an expanded earned-income tax credit and a bill to secure the border and shift from low-skill to high-skill immigration.
-- from a Republican Party (his Republican Party) that has already spent the last eight years ruthlessly and single-mindedly sabotaging Obama Administration at every turn, and have now begun openly laying plans to use whatever legislative power they can lay their filthy hands on to block Clinton Supreme Court nominations forever, witch-hunt her to extinction and begin impeachment proceedings almost before she has finished her inaugural address.

You know, it's almost like David Fucking Brooks doesn't even read Paul Krugman :-)
Who Broke Politics?

Paul Krugman NOV. 4, 2016

As far as anyone can tell, Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House — and the leader of what’s left of the Republican establishment — isn’t racist or authoritarian. He is, however, doing all he can to make a racist authoritarian the most powerful man in the world. Why? Because then he could privatize Medicare and slash taxes on the wealthy.

And that, in brief, tells you what has happened to the Republican Party, and to America...

So how did all our political norms get destroyed? Hint: It started long before Donald Trump.

On one side, Republicans decided long ago that anything went in the effort to delegitimize and destroy Democrats. Those of us old enough to remember the 1990s also remember the endless series of accusations hurled against the Clintons.

Nothing was too implausible to get on talk radio and get favorable mention in Congress and in conservative media: Hillary killed Vince Foster! Bill was a drug smuggler!

Nothing was too trivial to trigger congressional hearings: 140 hours of testimony on potential abuse of the White House Christmas card list. And, of course, seven years of investigations into a failed real estate deal. And, of course, seven years of investigations into a failed real estate deal.

When Mrs. Clinton famously spoke of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” out to undermine her husband’s presidency, she wasn’t being hyperbolic; she was simply describing the obvious reality...


Monday, March 14, 2016

Today In Both Sides Don't Do It: Paul Krugman



Things in the tenured faculty lounge at the New York Times are getting tense.

At one end of the lunchroom table sits David Brooks and his youthful ward Ross Douthat, still trying to conjure a Reasonable Conservative orthodoxy out of old packets of Splenda, some sweet and (very, very) sour sauce left over from one of Maureen Dowd's drunken wingdings, and the ritual incantation of "Both Sides. Both. Sides. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders..." which has been going on for months now.

At the other end of the table, Dr. Krugman is having a merry old time making siege weapons out of sporks and lunch-lady hair nets, firing payloads of mashed potatoes and corn at his colleagues rickety bullshit --
I still sometimes see people suggesting an equivalence between Mr. Trump and Bernie Sanders. But while both men are challenging a party establishment, those establishments aren’t the same. The Democratic Party is, as some political scientists put it, a “coalition of social groups,” ranging from Planned Parenthood to teachers’ unions, rather than an ideological monolith; there’s nothing comparable to the array of institutions that enforces purity on the other side.
-- and generally making is really, really difficult for them to masturbate in peace:
But how does a party in thrall to a basically unpopular ideology — or at any rate an ideology voters would dislike if they knew more about it — win elections? Obfuscation helps. But demagogy and appeals to tribalism help more. Racial dog whistles and suggestions that Democrats are un-American if not active traitors aren’t things that happen now and then, they’re an integral part of Republican political strategy.

During the Obama years Republican leaders cranked the volume on that strategy up to 11 (although it was pretty bad during the Clinton years too.) Establishment Republicans generally avoided saying in so many words that the president was a Kenyan Islamic atheist socialist friend of terrorists — although as the quote from Mr. Rubio shows, they came pretty close — but they tacitly encouraged those who did, and accepted their endorsements. And now they’re paying the price.

For the underlying assumption behind the establishment strategy was that voters could be fooled again and again: persuaded to vote Republican out of rage against Those People, then ignored after the election while the party pursued its true, plutocrat-friendly priorities. Now comes Mr. Trump, turning the dog whistles into fully audible shouting, and telling the base that it can have the bait without the switch. And the establishment is being destroyed by the monster it created...
Very tense indeed.

Friday, December 18, 2015

Dr. Krugman Explains Strategic Forgettery In Two Sentences



From the New York Times:
If the historical record runs counter to what powerful interests want you to believe, well, history will just have to be rewritten. And constant repetition, especially in captive media, keeps this imaginary history in circulation no matter how often it is shown to be false.
This is the Conservative way.  After every Conservative debacle -- foreign or domestic, military or economic -- there is an brief period during which the story of that debacle is still molten and malleable.  Without an agreed-upon fairy tale and a Liberal villain to blame, for a moment both the Beltway media and the Wingnut Hive Mind are in chaos.  This is when the cogs and gears of the Mighty Wurlitzer are most in evidence:  the interregnum during which you can actually watch the Right invent, test and discard various bullshit cover stories before settling on one that the Pig People will swallow:

  • The Clinton's assassinated Vince Foster.
  • Trayvon was a thug who had it coming.
  • The ACA Website was Obama's Katrina.
  • etc x 1 million

Of cource, since it cost trillions of dollars and got thousands of Americans killed, George W. Bush's Iraqi Debacle required a series of series of fire-and-forget alibis --
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are in league together and just weeks away from leveling New York City with an A-bomb
-- each of which was utterly false --
The war will pay for itself, we will be greeted as liberators and we'll be home before Christmas.
-- each of which was embraced enthusiastically --
Dubya is the greatest Murrican preznit in history and Liberal Iraq war opponents are terrorist-loving surrender monkeys who hate Murrica.  Also Murrica!
-- and then discarded unceremoniously once it was used up --
The Surge worked!
-- until, inevitably, the most transparently ridiculous placeholder of all was put in play --
Who the fuck are you calling "Republican"?  I'm a Constitutional Independent Libertarian Conservative Teabagger who has never even heard of George Bush.
-- long enough for a proper Liberal Villain could be framed for their disaster --
We won in Iraq until Obama stabbed us in the back and invented ISIS.
so that it can pass  into the wingnut pantheon of perfidy where it will be remembered forever more as the Undisputed Truth...

...enabled every step along the way by our compliant Beltway media who are more than willing to hold out chair for the liars and lend their tattered credibility to the lies they tell.

National Review's Lowry: Obama "Abandoned The War In Iraq." On the August 10 edition of NBC's Meet The Press, National Review editor Rich Lowry blamed President Obama for ISIS' uprising in Iraq and not leaving residual troops after the U.S. ended military action in the country. Lowry clamed "Obama never ended the war in Iraq as he said, he abandoned the war in Iraq." [NBC, Meet The Press, 8/10/14]

Weekly Standard's McCormack: Obama "Didn't Want To Leave Troops In Iraq." In an August 9 blog for the Weekly Standard, John McCormack argued that Obama wasn't successful at attaining a SOFA because he "wasn't seriously pushing for one":

National Review's Goldberg: "Obama Chose To Pull Troops Out Of Iraq As Quickly As Possible." National Review editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg accused Obama of presiding over the chaos in Iraq because of his decisions "directly or indirectly," which have negatively impacted the region...
Repetition is the key.

While the Left throws nickles around like manhole covers and watches one of its few, clear, national platforms slowly being gutted right before its eyes...

...the Right continues to be willing to spend whatever it takes to build the infrastructure and hire the armies necessary to buy, build, infiltrate or corrupt every major microphone in America in order to pound their square pegs into round holes on every issue that matters to them all day long, every day. for however long it takes to finally kill this country and build the unfettered capitalist theocracy of their dreams on its grave.

Friday, October 16, 2015

Hit 'Em Agin Pa!



Dr. Krugman once again o'erleaps the New York Times' propriety privet fence to call his colleague an idiot:
On Thoughtful Conservatives

Corey Robin has an annotated response to David Brooks’s lament about how conservatives have lost their way. It is, after all, rather odd to talk about the virtues of conservatism-that-was without giving a single example of someone who embodied those supposed virtues. Who’s the poster child for the intellectually humble, incrementalist, humane creed that Brooks says we’ve lost?

Corey Robin says that there never was such a person — and buttresses his case with many quotations from conservative icons across the past couple of generations.
...
It is a delight this to see all kindsa people suddenly moving into this shuttered and nearly-abandoned precinct of punditry which I have been walking pretty much alone for the last +10 years/+1000 posts.

From me in April, 2005:
BoBo pleads for “compromise”. Again.

Just hold still and we’ll skin you with a better knife.

Short Brooks is Same-As-It-Ever-Was Brooks: Let’s cooperate. You bend over a trifle further and we’ll screw you a bit less brutally.

This from today’s NYT where, owing to forces that I find incomprehensible, David Brooks still draws a paycheck for tasks completely unrelated to filling the vending machines up with fresh cookies and HoHo’s at night. And, yes, I add in a word or two...
It is discouraging that after over a decade of writing well ahead of the curve, apparently not one of them can be troubled to notice that I exist at all.

Oh well, back to the want ads.  I hear long-haul truck-drivers are in demand...

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

David Brooks in Krugman-Land



This is Mr. David Brooks on subject of Dr. Paul Krugman in 2002.  At that time, Dubya was in high cotton and nobody was a more loyal Bush Administration codpiece than Mr. David Brooks, managing editor of Bill Kristol's neocon rag, The Weekly Standard. 
The Pelosi Democrats

Are they going to become the stupid party?

ARE THE DEMOCRATS about to go insane? Are they about to decide that the reason they lost the 2002 election is that they didn't say what they really believe? Are they about to go into Paul Krugman-land, lambasting tax cuts, savaging Bush as a tool of the corporate bosses? Are they about to go off on a jag that will ensure them permanent minority status in every state from North Carolina to Arizona?
...
It is helpful to remember that at the time Mr. Brooks wrote this, the Republican Party was already 10-15 years into its long, ruinous collapse into a hellscape of raging idiots, bigots and politically incompetent demagogues.  At least according to Mr. David Brooks.  Writing in the New York Times.  Yesterday.

And this is Dr. Paul Krugman on subject of Mr. David Brooks in 2015:
Everett Dirksen Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

I see that David Brooks is lamenting the decline of conservatism as he defines it:
By traditional definitions, conservatism stands for intellectual humility, a belief in steady, incremental change, a preference for reform rather than revolution, a respect for hierarchy, precedence, balance and order, and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured and responsible. Conservatives of this disposition can be dull, but they know how to nurture and run institutions.
...that kind of conservatism left the Republican Party a very long time ago. Remember, Ronald Reagan embraced supply-side economics, which was not only a radical doctrine but one rejected by virtually the entire economics profession; was that “intellectual humility”? And remember that Newt Gingrich tried to undermine the constitutional separation of powers with a government shutdown more than 20 years ago.

And on the other hand, by David’s definition Barack Obama is pretty conservative: the Affordable Care Act is a classic example of incremental change, building on the existing system rather than trying a complete overhaul.

My point is that if what you want is traditional conservatism, the only people with real influence with anything like that mindset are Democrats. Actually existing conservatism is a radical doctrine.
Mr. Brooks has raised the avoidance of venues where anyone will ask him any substantive questions about anything to an art form.  And you can understand why.

At the same time, his Beltway colleagues have made groveling deference to Mr. Brooks banal maunderings their Gold Standard of Journalistic Seriousness.

So now that the Both Siderism' very own Master Chief has gone momentarily off-mission --



-- it will be mighty entertaining to see just how the Beltway Both Siderist threat neutralization team handles their old commander.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Krugman Keeps Swinging That Big Driftglass Hammer


I wonder if it's doing any good?

From the NYT:
The Crazies and the Con Man
OCT. 12, 2015

How will the chaos that the crazies, I mean the Freedom Caucus, have wrought in the House get resolved? I have no idea. But as this column went to press, practically the whole Republican establishment was pleading with Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, to become speaker. He is, everyone says, the only man who can save the day.

What makes Mr. Ryan so special? The answer, basically, is that he’s the best con man they’ve got. His success in hoodwinking the news media and self-proclaimed centrists in general is the basis of his stature within his party. Unfortunately, at least from his point of view, it would be hard to sustain the con game from the speaker’s chair.

To understand Mr. Ryan’s role in our political-media ecosystem, you need to know two things. First, the modern Republican Party is a post-policy enterprise, which doesn’t do real solutions to real problems. Second, pundits and the news media really, really don’t want to face up to that awkward reality.
...

Predictions aside, however, the Ryan phenomenon tells us a lot about what’s really happening in American politics. In brief, crazies have taken over the Republican Party, but the media don’t want to recognize this reality. The combination of these two facts has created an opportunity, indeed a need, for political con men. And Mr. Ryan has risen to the challenge.
This is a conversation Liberals have been having for decades.  It has rung off the walls of our empty churches.  We have spray-painted it up and down the length of walls of the media ghetto where the mainstream press keeps us safely locked far away from the nation's microphones and cameras.


Now the flames are bright enough to be seen from space and hot enough to make the Beltway press sweat inside their realty-denying panic room.

Now Krugman is tagging the other side of our ghetto walls.

I wonder if it's doing any good?

Monday, September 28, 2015

Paul Krugman Is Now Full Driftglass 24/7: Cont'd.



From today's New York Times:
The Blackmail Caucus, a.k.a. the Republican Party
SEPT. 28, 2015

John Boehner was a terrible, very bad, no good speaker of the House. Under his leadership, Republicans pursued an unprecedented strategy of scorched-earth obstructionism, which did immense damage to the economy and undermined America’s credibility around the world.

Still, things could have been worse. And under his successor they almost surely will be worse. Bad as Mr. Boehner was, he was just a symptom of the underlying malady, the madness that has consumed his party.
...

All in all, Republicans during the Boehner era fully justified the characterization offered by the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, in their book “It’s Even Worse Than You Think.” Yes, the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier” that is “ideologically extreme” and “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science.” And Mr. Boehner did nothing to fight these tendencies. On the contrary, he catered to and fed the extremism.

So why is he out? Basically because the obstructionism failed.
...

In other words, despite all Mr. Boehner’s efforts to bring him down, Mr. Obama is looking more and more like a highly successful president. For the base, which has never considered Mr. Obama legitimate — polling suggests that many Republicans believe that he wasn’t even born here — this is a nightmare. And all too many ambitious Republican politicians are willing to tell the base that it’s Mr. Boehner’s fault, that he just didn’t try blackmail hard enough.
...
There is no doubt that Dr. Krugman is 100% correct.

There is also no doubt that you will be able to count on the fingers of one hand the number of non-Dirty Hippie news sources who will repeat any of this in anything other than a conspiratorial whisper shared off-camera when no one is looking.  

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Why?



In which Good Dr. Krugman re-plows the most well-tilled soil in America:
Slavery’s Long Shadow
JUNE 22, 2015

America is a much less racist nation than it used to be, and I’m not just talking about the still remarkable fact that an African-American occupies the White House. The raw institutional racism that prevailed before the civil rights movement ended Jim Crow is gone, although subtler discrimination persists. Individual attitudes have changed, too, dramatically in some cases. For example, as recently as the 1980s half of Americans opposed interracial marriage, a position now held by only a tiny minority.

Yet racial hatred is still a potent force in our society, as we’ve just been reminded to our horror. And I’m sorry to say this, but the racial divide is still a defining feature of our political economy, the reason America is unique among advanced nations in its harsh treatment of the less fortunate and its willingness to tolerate unnecessary suffering among its citizens.

Of course, saying this brings angry denials from many conservatives, so let me try to be cool and careful here, and cite some of the overwhelming evidence for the continuing centrality of race in our national politics.
...
So...why, Paul?

Why be "cool and careful here"?

Why be anything in particular at all?

You are reciting for the umpteenth time the bare facts of one of the most well-documented and easily checked strata of American history.

It is the Year of Our Lord 2015*, and and for most of the adult lives of anyone who might read your column, Conservatism has been an unbroken series of lies, bloody catastrophes, more lies and casual sedition while a scorching magma of rage, racist and paranoia roils just below a thin crust of mainstream media respectability.

Anyone still hanging onto their Conservatism at this late date is either a making a buck as a willing co-conspirator, or is a willing dupe irretrievably beyond the event horizon of wingnut denialism.

Either way, they are lost past redemption, and no magical string of words -- no matter how cool and careful or astringent or logical or kind -- will save them.

*typo corrected.  thanks!

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

The New Party Line: UPDATE


"If we can't make memories, we can't heal."

-- Leonard Shelby, Memento



As has been exhaustively documented on this blog (and almost nowhere else) for the last decade, Mr. David Brooks has devoted himself relentlessly to lying about our nation's recent past.  Lying about Liberals.  Lying about the economy.  Lying about the basic nature of the American Conservatism he helped to create, and lying about depraved nature of the Republican Party he helped to shape.

On the rare occasions Mr. Brooks does not write some iteration of his basic "Both Sides" claptrap, or name-check all the powerful and famous people he has on speed-dial, or regurgitate some version of history in which the actual Republican as we know it does not exist, Mr. Brooks writes long, gassy meditations on importance of reticence, humility, self-reflection and modesty in developing good character.

I have long since given up trying to decide whether to laugh or at this majestic, public hoax, but what is perfectly clear is that Mr. Brooks has helped engineer an entirely fraudulent and enormously profitable cartoon version of our nation's recent past.

It is, of course, an insult to the thousands of American and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died for Bill Kristol's blood-drunk fantasies to continue this farce, but soft and cowardly men like Mr. Brooks never really gave a shit about them anyway.  Nor did they care about the trillions of dollars flushed down the Iraqi rathole to fund their vision of global conquest.  Like the nation's fear and rage after 9/11, our nation's blood and treasure were never more than the means for these men to achieve their ideological ends.  They deliberately warped the war they got into the war they wanted and slandered the hell out of anyone who stood in their way.

And as I have documented on this blog almost every day for the last 10 years, when it all went tits up and it turned out that, yes, the dirty hippies were right all along -- yes, the Bush Administration really did piss away the Clinton Surplus and plunge us right back into deficits as far as the eye can see and, yes, the Bush Administration really did lie us into the wrong war and botch that war and, yes, they  really did set up torture camps around the world which were directed from inside the White House and, yes ... and yes ... and yes ... --- for a moment the whole country was suspended in midair.

As the Bush Administration's Jenga tower of lies collapsed and the Very Serious People who had grown rich penning fawning reviews of that tower began running in terrified circles at the thought of being held accountable for all the Very Public treachery and calumny and spite they had so recently been slinging...for a moment there was a vacuum.  A moment of genuine crisis when it looked as though the dirty hippies might actually crash the gates and begin insisting that the people who conspired to create the worst economic and foreign policy disasters in modern history start answering some blunt questions about the smoking ruins all around them.

And then, in the pit of their despair, America's Wingnuts and Beltway Elite both heard the clarion call of a New Party Line.  A new Big Lie which would save them all from the brutal judgement of history and let them get back the  business of running the world.

And the New Party Line was...Deny.  Deny.  Deny and anyway, Both Sides Do It.

The past never happened.  And on those embarrassing occasions when it proves to be impossible to get away with simple denial, just remember that everyone is equally to blame for their honest mistakes and partisans on Both Sides are Equally Bad, so why single out any one person or party for special spanking?

Oh if only there were some kinda Third Way!  One with No Labels!  One which the Very Reasonable People on Both Sides could get behind!

...
There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.

All were on display Tuesday night.

The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind.

The Republican Party was represented by its collapsing old guard — scandal-tainted Tom DeLay trying to get his name removed from the November ballot. And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.

The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.

The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.

But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.

The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country comes before party, that in politics a little passion energizes but unmarshaled passion corrupts, and that more people want to vote for civility than for venom.
...
And here is where the Very Serious People found their salvation, their battle cry and their new High Priest:  Mr. David Brooks -- once Bill Kristol's loyal creature at the Weekly Standard, now a columnist-for-life at the New York Times and the CEO of Humility Incorporated -- pounding away, week after week, column after column for year after year, in a relentless artillery barrage of raw denialism and silky Both Siderism, all sheathed in the language of faith and piety of Mr. Brooks' Church of Lyin'tology.

From it's humble origins in the fiery wreckage of the Bush Administration,  Mr. Brooks' Church of Lyin'tology has grown into a vast and profitable enterprise.  Its hymns are sung on every Sunday by every member of the Gasbag Cavalcade, and its dogma is scrupulously copied out in the editorial pages of virtually every major American newspaper.  It's why Bill O'Reilly will never be fired no matter what he says or does, and why Joe Scarborough can lie with impunity for three hours a day, every day, on your Liberal teevee.  Because every member of the conspiracy knows that once any of them starts pointing fingers, naming names and demanding accountability -- once demanding truth and consequences is permitted -- their whole, multi-billion dollar sham starts to unravel.

But no matter how huge and powerful their confederacy of denial may be, the Big Iraq Lie is still the pillar of their temple.  Defend that ground, and every other lie on which the Right and the Fake Center depends is strengthened possible.  Crack that foundation, and the magnificent machinery which has made wealthy and powerful men out of traitors, liars and lunatics starts to tear itself apart.

Errors and Lies
MAY 18, 2015
...
Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago.

But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on.

Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who was involved in the debate over the war knows that it’s false. The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. We were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war.

The fraudulence of the case for war was actually obvious even at the time: the ever-shifting arguments for an unchanging goal were a dead giveaway. So were the word games — the talk about W.M.D that conflated chemical weapons (which many people did think Saddam had) with nukes, the constant insinuations that Iraq was somehow behind 9/11.

And at this point we have plenty of evidence to confirm everything the war’s opponents were saying. We now know, for example, that on 9/11 itself — literally before the dust had settled — Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, was already plotting war against a regime that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack. “Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] ...sweep it all up things related and not”; so read notes taken by Mr. Rumsfeld’s aide.

This was, in short, a war the White House wanted...

-- Mr. David Brooks was called upon to take a break from his "Lecturing America About Morality" book tour in order to aggressively defend the foundation lie of his cult from the Ope Ed page of the New York Times with all the bullshit at his command:
Learning From Mistakes
MAY 19, 2015

...
History is an infinitely complex web of causations. To erase mistakes from the past is to obliterate your world now. You can’t go back and know then what you know now. You can’t step in the same river twice.

So it’s really hard to give simple sound-bite answers about past mistakes. The question, would you go back and undo your errors is unanswerable. It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?

Which brings us to Iraq. From the current vantage point, the decision to go to war was a clear misjudgment, made by President George W. Bush and supported by 72 percent of the American public who were polled at the time. I supported it, too.

What can be learned?

The first obvious lesson is that we should look at intelligence products with a more skeptical eye. There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war.

That doesn’t gibe with the facts.
... 
The Iraq war error reminds us of the need for epistemological modesty.
...
And were I a betting man, based on all the reading and writing I have done on this subject over the last 10 years, I would bet every cent of the $1.97 I have in my checking account that Mr. Brooks and his co-conspirators will hunker down, close ranks and continue to get rich lying about the Iraq war and every other damned thing.

Because when have they not?


UPDATE:

On the plus side, Brother Charles Pierce was moved to take out his silver hammer:
It seems that Brooks has noticed that people are talking again about the war for which he so enthusiastically shook his moneymaker back during the Avignon Presidency. So, naturally, it's time for a Professor of Humbleology to cover his own sad-sack ass. (Especially since Paul Krugman kicked said ass pre-emptively yesterday.) Mistakes, it seems, were made. The spectacle is ungainly and obscene.
On the minus side, even the finest life-forms inside the Corporate Media Terrarium continue to look sickly.  For example, my favorite teevee Liberal -- the kindly Dr. Maddow -- cannot well-and-truly unload on the ghouls who shame this country every day by continue their Iraq charade.  In an otherwise admirable beat-down describing the contemptible media circle jerk that props up these obscene lies, the Good Doctor showed that she cannot spit the $7M bit out of her mouth long enough to form the words necessary to name them and shame them.

Words like "Chuck Todd" and "David Gregory" and "Meet the Press".

Instead all she can manage is a bank-shot off of Jon Stewart's vivisection of Judith Miller and oblique references to the "commentariat", the "Beltway Media", the "Beltway Press" and what happens on American teevee "every Sunday".

As I have said many times before, to provoke the honest and vigorous public discussion of Iraq they believe we desperately need, literally all Dr, Maddow or Chris Hayes would need to do is the one thing which none of the rest of us can do: trot the few hundres feet between their offices and Chuck Todd's, plant a camera on his desk and start asking questions.

But that will never happen, will it?

And the vast distance between these two realities -- the obvious, physical simplicity of a Journalism 101 "show up and ask questions" approach to getting answers to their question, and the equally obvious, Business 101 "Career Killers to Avoid" impossibility that Dr. Maddow or Mr. Hayes will ever actually drop by Chuck Todd's office to ask him why he lets Iraq War mongers off the hook -- is the measure of how thoroughly corporate culture has enslaved political journalism in this county and the festering national wound which will never heal as long as frauds David Brooks are permitted to act as our attending physicians:  




Mr. Brooks is suddenly the object of much interest:
Think Progress:  The Casual Dishonesty of David Brooks

Salon: David Brooks’ sickening Iraq apologia: How the New York Times hack just rewrote history  (Spoiler:  As readers of this blog know, Mr. Brooks has actually been continually rewriting history every day for the last 10 years, but welcome to the party!)

New York Magazine: Was the Iraq War a Crime or a Mistake? Yes.

The Rectification of Names: What have I learned from my mistakes? Denial skills that will last a lifetime!

Friday, May 15, 2015

What, Why and How


Dr. Krugman ably explains the "what":
...
What’s going on here? My best explanation is that we’re witnessing the effects of extreme tribalism. On the modern right, everything is a political litmus test. Anyone who tried to think through the pros and cons of the Iraq war was, by definition, an enemy of President George W. Bush and probably hated America; anyone who questioned whether the Federal Reserve was really debasing the currency was surely an enemy of capitalism and freedom.

It doesn’t matter that the skeptics have been proved right. Simply raising questions about the orthodoxies of the moment leads to excommunication, from which there is no coming back. So the only “experts” left standing are those who made all the approved mistakes. It’s kind of a fraternity of failure: men and women united by a shared history of getting everything wrong, and refusing to admit it. Will they get the chance to add more chapters to their reign of error?
...
Recently, Salon saw the onetime aide to GOP Rep. Jack Kemp (the party’s 1996 vice presidential nominee) criticizing a piece about a campaign finance reform-oriented GOP presidential candidate from Harvard Law’s Lawrence Lessig. We decided to reach out, and ended up speaking with Bartlett over the phone for about 30 minutes. Our conversation touched on Lessig’s piece, Bartlett’s contrarian view of campaign finance, and why he thinks lobbying is one of the most insidious threats to American government. A condensed and edited transcript of our conversation can be found below.

What element of Professor Lawrence Lessig’s Daily Beast piece on a reform Republican challenging Clinton — which, I should just note, he admitted was fanciful — did you find most unrealistic?

Well, the impression I had [was] that he, like many other people, such as David Brooks, seems to be longing for a moderate Republican savior who they believe is out there somewhere and [will] rescue the Republicans from utter insanity and stupidity. Lessig has this belief … that the only reason this white knight savior hasn’t emerged is because of problems in campaign finance. So he has this scheme for mobilizing the millions of small donors that he, for some reason, believes are out there longing for this White Knight moderate, who can channel an adequate amount of funding to this White Knight. I think that’s just ludicrous; it’s just nonsense.

The reason there isn’t a moderate Republican is because there’s absolutely no demand for such a person in the Republican Party. There is no such person. Even if I were Sheldon Adelson and was willing to throw a billion dollars at such a person, who the heck would it be? The [GOP] bench has no such person on it that you could make into a contender simply by throwing money at them. And one [reason why] is that Lessig, among others, grossly overestimates or misunderstands the problem of money and politics. I don’t believe, personally, that it’s about campaign spending. My much greater concern about money and politics has to do with lobbying, which I think is a much more insidious problem that nobody is focusing on at all.
...
But thus far, almost no one outside of the walled Coventry of the Liberal blogosphere has taken a real extended swing at explaining the "how".

Because the only reason this obviously deranged zombie waltz does not collapse from its own absurdity -- the only reason Crazy Uncle Liberty is not laughed off the street every time he opens his tea-hole -- is that our elite media is engaged in a vast and public conspiracy to never, ever permit this matter tp be discussed openly and at the "adult table".

The self-deception machinery that keeps Conservatism running is internally self-sustaining, so there really is no point in engaging them: functionally, they are citizens of another country which has sworn eternal hostility to our own.

No, the only way to alter the tragic trajectory of the status quo is to take down the mainstream media. To make it too personally and professionally painful for them to continue to enable the Conservative hate machine. 

Do that and you change the game.

Fail at that and the game is lost.

Saturday, May 02, 2015

Paul Krugman and Strategic Forgettery



Longtime readers of this blog know that one of the themes I have returned to year after year is that a conspiracy of ongoing and radical denial of the recent past has become the central pillar of Conservatism in America.  And that Conservatism's program of mass "Strategic Forgettery" continues to succeed because it is actively aided and abetted by the mainstream media.

So imagine my delight when I found the awesome Paul Krugman taking that theme and running with it in the New York Times, reaching more readers in an afternoon that I could reach in a year of  daily blogging and weekly podcasting combined.  
Ideology and Integrity

...
Times like these call for a combination of open-mindedness — willingness to entertain different ideas — and determination to do the best you can. As Franklin Roosevelt put it in a celebrated speech, “The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

What we see instead in many public figures is, however, the behavior George Orwell described in one of his essays: “Believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.” Did I predict runaway inflation that never arrived? Well, the government is cooking the books, and besides, I never said what I said.

Just to be clear, I’m not calling for an end to ideology in politics, because that’s impossible. Everyone has an ideology, a view about how the world does and should work. Indeed, the most reckless and dangerous ideologues are often those who imagine themselves ideology-free — for example, self-proclaimed centrists — and are, therefore, unaware of their own biases. What you should seek, in yourself and others, is not an absence of ideology but an open mind, willing to consider the possibility that parts of the ideology may be wrong.
...

...as far as I can tell no important Republican figure has admitted that none of the terrible consequences that were supposed to follow health reform — mass cancellation of existing policies, soaring premiums, job destruction — has actually happened.

The point is that we’re not just talking about being wrong on specific policy questions. We’re talking about never admitting error, and never revising one’s views. Never being able to say that you were wrong is a serious character flaw even if the consequences of that refusal to admit error fall only on a few people. But moral cowardice should be outright disqualifying in anyone seeking high office.
...

I still think this election should turn almost entirely on the issues. But if we must talk about character, let’s talk about what matters, namely intellectual integrity.

It is heartening to see public thinkers and writers I admire eventually arriving at the same place and describing the topography of the most important ideological battlefield of our times in the same terms we on the Left have been using for decades.

We on the Left remain a ragged and mostly ignored or despised few.  We are perpetually outspent and outnumbered by the Crazy Right and the Enabling Center by many, many orders of magnitude, and we're also kinda tired of punching away at the same fucking brick wall with our bare fists year after year and having little more than chipped paint and sore hands to show for it.

But...

But at least we know we are punching away at the right wall.

And, more importantly, we know exactly why the wall is there in the first place and why it is so heavily defended.

Friday, March 20, 2015

Paul Krugman Is Now Full Driftglass 24/7



From the New York Times:
Trillion Dollar Fraudsters
MARCH 20, 2015

...
The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum.

So, about those budgets: both claim drastic reductions in federal spending. Some of those spending reductions are specified: There would be savage cuts in food stamps, similarly savage cuts in Medicaid over and above reversing the recent expansion, and an end to Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies. Rough estimates suggest that either plan would roughly double the number of Americans without health insurance. But both also claim more than a trillion dollars in further cuts to mandatory spending, which would almost surely have to come out of Medicare or Social Security. What form would these further cuts take? We get no hint.

Meanwhile, both budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1 trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts; somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.
...

So, no, outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why.

...I’m partial to a more cynical explanation. Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.
...

Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.

Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.

March comes in like a lion, and leaves like a lamb.

Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman came in like a mild-mannered economist, and is, well, not "leaving" but certainly lecturing like a Liberal blogger.

Because (he said, repeating himself on purpose) like that tiny band of despised Liberal outsiders at the edge of the wilderness have been reporting for years, the monsters aren't coming.

They're already here, tearing us to pieces every day.

And the entire apparatus of our incredibly powerful, unimaginably profitable, First Amendment protected political media is single-mindedly devoted to job of enabling the monsters by pretending there are no monsters

No wonder K-Thug is laying aside the currency conversion tables and picking up the whammy stick.

Because facts don't work any more.  

Monday, February 02, 2015

Other Voices In The Hurricane




As I have said on many occasions, the most truly Conservative thing about Andrew Sullivan is his willingness to carve whole slabs of the past out of existence and fill in the holes with Fizzy Burkean Lifting Drink in order retroactively load the dice to make them roll the way he wants them to:
Something Something Whig Something Something Burke, Ctd.

Mr. Sullivan continues his demented, long-running performance of "Something Something Whig Something Something Burke" at the Theater of Conservative Make-Believe, once again putting Mr. Potato-head eyes on the steaming turd that is Modern Conservatism and pretending it's really a misunderstood Colonel Steve Austin action figure just itching to bust out of its box and put its Bionic Burke Power Arm to work saving the world.
Which is where my libertarianism cedes to conservatism. At some point, freedom must be tempered if its impact undermines the very social contract that allows it to exist. The inequality we are experiencing as a function of globalization, technology, recession and a tax system so complex it beggars understanding is a real and direct threat to our social coherence and stability as a democratic society. It seems to me conservatives should be among the first to recognize this danger – as Bismarck and Disraeli once did – and forge a public policy to counter it.

This conservatism would embrace universal healthcare as a bulwark of democratic legitimacy in an age of such extremes; it should break up the banks and bring back Glass-Steagall; it should drastically simplify the tax code, ridding it of special interest deductions; it should construct an international agreement to prevent the egregious and disgusting tax avoidance of a company like Apple; and it should seek to invest and innovate in education and infrastructure. 

Some of this inequality cannot be stopped, the globalizing forces behind it are so strong. But mitigating its damage is a real challenge. And conservatives who believe that we are one nation should rise to it.
Busting up banks? Universal health care? Spending real money on infrastructure and education?  As pillars of Conservatism?

Somewhere in the wilds of Vermont, Bernie Sanders is laughing hard enough to shart maple syrup into orbit.

It is in the baroque grandiosity of the lies Mr. Sullivan tells himself about Conservatism that he is at his most Conservative.

Something Something Bismarck Something Something Disraeli.
It turns out, I'm not the only one who noticed.

From The Nation (h/t Tengrain):
Sullivan Versus Sullivan
Eric Alterman on February 2, 2015 - 2:16 PM ET
...
How was The New Republic so crucial a bastion of American liberalism if under Andrew, it published and promoted Charles Murray’s racist pseudoscience? (Andrew: “one of my proudest moments in journalism.”) And ditto Betsy McCaughey’s lying, dishonest takedown of Clinton’s health care reform? (Andrew: “I was aware of the piece’s flaws but nonetheless was comfortable running it as a provocation.”) And if it were so dedicated to serious, thoughtful journalism, what the hell was Andrew doing publishing Camille Paglia on “Hillary the man-woman and bitch goddess.” And do I even need to mention that he appointed Stephen Glass as the magazine’s first-ever head of fact-checking? 
But even funnier are the positions Andrew himself took. Back in the days when he was still part-Marty Peretz, Sullivan literally called me a traitor to my country, telling an outright lie about my allegedly stated views on Afghanistan. I repeatedly offered to give thousands of dollars to charity if Andrew could substantiate his lie but he never even tried. He also attacked me as a purveyor of hateful anti-Semitism owing to my analysis of the media coverage of Israel, comparing one of my columns to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Now, he has done a complete 180 and is far more critical of Israel than I ever was (or will be) and viciously attacks the people who used to be his comrades, thereby inspiring his one-time friends and colleagues to wonder why Andrew, himself, hates the Jews. So the old Andrew would have called the new Andrew a traitor and an anti-Semite. And the new Andrew apparently thinks the old Andrew is an idiot, who supported stupid imperialist wars and ran interference for evil countries. (Notice I did not even have to bring up the Trigg thing.) If this person is the most influential “intellectual” in America as I have seen two people claim in recent days, then that’s about the worst thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about my country. Andrew is to intellectuals what Sarah Palin is to politicians and Vanilla Ice was to hip-hop. Seriously, I do not begrudge Andrew his role as a pioneer blogger, nor his genius for self-promotion, but what I find most impressive about him is his ability to somehow convince people not to hold him responsible for the consequences of his atrocious judgment...
I see from Ezra Klein that Andrew Sullivan says that he’s stopping blogging; Klein and others are offering various encomiums. You’ll pardon me if I don’t join in. You see, I remember Sullivan declaring that the “decadent left” was poised to become a fifth column in the war on terror — and of course I remember the campaign of character assassination he waged against yours truly for daring to criticize his then-beloved George W. Bush and his wars. If he ever apologized for any of that, I never heard about it.
As a Liberal, you spend most of your time shouting into the abyss that you get used to perpetually being drowned out be the sheer decibel roar of Hate Radio and conspicuously ignored by the entire Beltway press corps.

So every now and then it's nice to know that you are not entirely alone.

As I recall, that was very the impetus for the First Golden Age of Blogging and I see no reason why it should not be the thing that spurs a Second.