By now you've all probably read about, or at least heard about, NPR's Steve
Inskeep's epic sanewashing of Tucker "Mothertucker" Carlson's deservedly
monstrous reputation.
NPR faces wave of pushback for helping MAGA star 'rebrand': 'Stop
sane-washing fascists'
NPR's Steve Inskeep faced thunderous criticism for interviewing a
seemingly contrite Tucker Carlson, who's been trying to distance himself
from President Donald Trump.
However, critics were not interested in hearing Carlson attempt to
rehabilitate his image.
"Apology not accepted," declared attorney Bradley P. Moss...
"Earlier this year, Tucker Carlson said that 'the defining fact of our
lives is that whites around the world are being eliminated,'" reminded
Media Matters' Matthew Gertz. "Journos who don’t watch his show are
helping his effort to rebrand so he isn’t a liability for his protege JD
Vance’s 2028 run."...
"The long awaited antiwar left-right coalition is gonna happen this time
I can feel it," groaned author Eoin Higgins, posting a photo of Charlie
Brown charging toward a football...
"NPR is the latest to rush in & give white supremacist Tucker Carlson
a mainstream media boost, helping to normalize him as he floats creating a
third party and running for president," observed podcaster Brittany Page.
"I listened to the whole thing. Not one single question about his constant
promotion of racist conspiracy theories."...
And the most striking thing about the tone of the critics is what it
wasn't. It wasn't shock. It wasn't confusion or bafflement.
It was a kind of battle-weary "Here we fucking go again" cynicism
inflected disgust that of course the legacy media is going to jump on
any opportunity to rehabilitate the reputation of any conservative blackguard
who dangles a faintly contrition-scented scrap of sucker-bait in the water.
For the sake of fairness, don'tcha know. And balance. And feeding
the tote-bag Centrist the narcotic they crave.
And the reason for the collective eye-roll from us independent outsiders is
that we've seen this kabuki before. Over and over and over again.
One of the earliest Trump-era examples was the media's determination to mistake Glenn Beck's tactical disagreement with Donald Trump for a moral awakening. They rushed to embrace the
then-newly "repentant" Glenn Beck during that brief interlude when he was
cosplaying as a Never Trumper -- a blindingly obvious con about which I a
wrote a great deal back in the day.
For example, in this here post -- Glenn Beck: Canary in the Never Trump Mineshaft
-- which you are free to read or not as you please. The gist is that in 2016 he
got the full treatment -- the door jamb wiping, triple foam wax
and the aromatherapy air fresheners -- from everyone from
The New York Times to NPR because he and Trump, swear to God, were never ever getting back together.
Glenn Beck dons MAGA hat: I will 'gladly' vote for Trump in 2020
Conservative firebrand Glenn Beck appeared to have a change of heart
about President Trump on Friday, vowing to vote for him in the 2020
presidential election. “I will vote for him in 2020! Gladly!” Beck said on his radio show. The
longtime NeverTrump pundit donned Trump’s signature red “Make America
Great Again” hat. Beck pointed to the media's negative coverage of Trump
for spurring his decision. Beck directed a message to the president: “I will tell you — the things
that you have done as the president are remarkable! Remarkable!”..
Glenn Beck: Here’s the real reason the left is coming unhinged, ‘You are
winning’
The same thing happened with Bill Barr. The minute Barr decided to cash in by pretending that his objections to Trump's January 6th conduct somehow erased four years of service as Trump's chief legal enabler, the prestige press was there with a warm towel and a mint on the pillow.
And the
same Steve Inskeep jumped right on the Bill Barr Reputation Rehab bandwagon back in 2022
when Barr was making the rounds, pimping his shitty book,
"Fuck You All, I Got Away With It" "One Damn Thing After
Another."
Most of you are no doubt familiar with Tom Friedman's infamous "Suck on this"
moment on the now-defunct Charlie Rose Show in May of 2003.
But but don't sleep on Rose leading Friedman off by
confidently asserting, "Now that the war is over...":
At the time, this was the received wisdom of the Beltway Sages. For
example, here is David Brooks writing for Bill Kristol's
Weekly Standard in 2003, practically endzone dancing with delight
because now that Bush had been proven unequivocally right about everything,
boy howdy were those dirty hippies gonna finally get what's coming to them.
The Collapse of the Dream Palaces
Mass destruction of mistaken ideas.
APR 28, 2003
... Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people
around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of
recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream
palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of
reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate
and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little
regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the
past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are...
Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this
dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over
for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush
and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do
about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a
hypocrite.
In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs
stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its
oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream
palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around
dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace,
the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue
to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties,
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long
for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican
villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.
My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as
their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their
anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his
corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this
hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their
rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics.
They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party,
perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will
seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally
Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant
public emotion.
In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the
dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of
mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a
winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies
of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right."
They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future.
Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will
lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will
claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they
rejected only months ago.
The magic of this piece of persiflage -- and all such super-patriot Salacious
B. Crumb caterwauling...
...by all your favorite Neocon pundits back in the day -- is not merely that
it got everything wrong, but that it got everything perfectly
backwards.
It's the GOP base/Tea Party/MAGA meatheads that grew more vociferous.
Even President Obama trying to clean up the ruin they left in their wake, and
asking nothing more than everyone help out and meet in the middle did not
dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of the Left (and
all the usual fascist scapegoats) is all that is left of Right.
And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their
MAGA rallies, their podcasts, their Hate Radio and their Fox News garbage.
They will still have a huge influence over the Republican party, perhaps even
determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly
unattractive to sane, normal humans who never really adopted outrage as their
dominant public emotion.
And there was never any magic "Aha!" moment that brought their Neocon
dream palaces down. None of them ever missed a meal. Most of the
got promotions and book deals. No matter how far Democrats extend themselves
and offer compromise after compromise to repair the damage the GOP has done to
this country, no day will come when Republican politicians, pundits and the
base of the party turn around and say, "We were wrong. The Left was right."
They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future.
Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The Right's lies and
conspiracy theories will get progressively stupider, as the ghouls and
grifters who spread them get progressively richer. And they will
backtrack, and reverse themselves again and again.
They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact...
...they rejected...
...only days before...
2011 video of Trump is going viral after Iran attack:
"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective."pic.twitter.com/QR9v3h0hdo
...what advice Team Legacy Media and Team Never Trump will always insist
Democrats must follow if they don't want to lose everything.
So, no surprise that, over at The Bulwark, Mark Leibovich's "advice" to
Democrats was centered entirely around picking fights with other Democrats.
From Leibovich's Atlantic article, which is why Tim Miller invited him
over for a bitch sesh:
The squabble underscored how the Democrats can’t help but keep playing to
a stubborn stereotype—a soft and pampered bunch, unwilling to make the
gritty sacrifices (such as getting dressed) necessary to prevail in their
“existential” campaign to save democracy.
“The Democrats treat their fucking people like kindergartners,” Sarah
Longwell, a former Republican consultant who quit the party over Donald
Trump, told me. Longwell can get exasperated by her new allies on the
left. When I mentioned the DNC’s in-person-work kerfuffle, it set her
off.
“Republicans are over here being straight-up mercenaries,” Longwell said.
“Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work-life balance.”
She apologized for yelling into the phone. Democrats “are not built for
when the fascists come,” she concluded...
Martin himself has a knack for reinforcing these caricatures. Just as I
was starting this project, he presided over the DNC’s summer meeting in
Minneapolis to begin the urgent work of rebuilding the Democratic
coalition and making the party palatable to American voters again. Soon
after calling the assembly of more than 400 party officials to order,
Martin relinquished his mic to a representative of the Saginaw Ojibwe
Nation for the DNC’s “land acknowledgment” ritual. Switching between
English and her tribal language, the Indigenous woman affirmed that
Minneapolis had been stolen from its native Dakota Oyate Tribe (“the
original stewards of the lands and waters”).
The interlude took only a minute or two but received outsize attention—and
ridicule—as an example of how Democrats remain overly concerned with
performative pandering to various small identity groups. “It is difficult
to imagine more than a handful of people looking out over the current
hellscape of U.S. policy and thinking to themselves: You know what we need
to be sure to address today? The Dakota War of 1862,” Andrew Egger wrote
in The Bulwark.
So let's take a look at how minor HR dispute and two minutes of harmless
comments at a summer DNC meeting in 2025 got turned into a five-alarm, OMG DEMOCRATS ARE THE WORST!
fire in 2026 at The Bulwark.
To start with, I found it interesting that Leibovich didn't feel the need to
include the next couple of sentences of Egger's Bulwark column which are as
follows (emphasis added):
Right-wing media gleefully ping-ponged the clip around social media:
Wake up, babe, they’re still doing land acknowledgments!
Democrats may believe, sincerely, that there is no harm (and, indeed,
some good) in these displays. But many more people instinctively recoil
against this sort of thing...
Two things. One for later and one for now. The later thing is,
who exactly are the "many more people" who "instinctively recoil against this sort of thing"
and how in the world do these "many more people" know the first god
damn thing about the 2025 DNC summer meeting?
Could these "many more people" tell me anything at all about the
other 99.9% of that meeting? Do they have strong opinions about the
Rules and Bylaws Committee evaluating the early voting state lineup for the
2028 presidential election?
Or the Resolutions Committee debate over proposals regarding the
Israel-Hamas war, including potential calls for a ceasefire and changes to
military aid?
How about the "Organizing Summer" Initiative to build volunteer networks,
register voters, and engage in non-political spaces to prepare for 2025/2026
elections? Any thoughts on those?
Let's put a pin in that for a minute, and get on to the second thing.
In the portion of the column that Leibovich left out, Egger explains how
this tiny moment became a "story" at all. The right-wing media was
doing what the right-wing media always does: latching on to
some incredibly trivial moment that would have otherwise passed unnoticed,..
or taking some remark wildly out of context ... or just making shit up and
using their gargantuan fascist echo chamber to hype the shit out of it.
Fox News headline, August 25, 2025:
DNC opens summer meeting with land acknowledgement ...
The second Fox News headline, August 25, 2025:
Lindy Sowmick, a Minnesota Democrat and self-described 'Indigenous
queer woman,' recited the acknowledgement Monday...
The National Desk, August 26, 2025:
DNC faces ridicule over land acknowledgment
Ridicule? Really? From whom, I wonder? Is it from...the fascists?!
The Colorado Springs Gazette:
Byron York blasts DNC land acknowledgement...
Really? York at the Colorado Springs Gazette? Oh how the mighty
fops of yesteryear have fallen.
Megyn Kelly on Facebook:
The Democratic party learned NOTHING as they start summer meeting with
"land acknowledgement..."
Megyn Kelly on YouTube:
The Democratic party learned NOTHING as they start summer meeting with
"land acknowledgement...
Megyn Kelly on YouTube Shorts:
Megyn Kelly reacts to the ridiculously long "land acknowledgement" at
DNC summer meeting.
The Blaze:
The Democrats have gone insane
So at this point this is just another
"OMG! Obama wore a tan suit!"/ "OMG! Obama likes fancy
mustard!"/"OMG! That crazy communist Kenyan Obama thinks inflating
your tires correctly will solve all our energy problems!" bit of catnip for the bigots and imbeciles who think Fox News is "news" and
who jerk off to Megyn Kelly's hate-porn.
For the fascists to boost bullshit like this out of the Fox News terrarium and
into the wider world they're gonna need help.
They need their manufactured indignation at least appear to be
"bipartisan".
The need some cranky, octogenarian Democrat who is 20 years past his sell-by
date to pop off about how awful this insignificant little moment was.
They need...
Carville slams DNC over land acknowledgment.
There we go!
Yep. That was the Fox News headline, August 28, 2025.
And this was the Fox News headline, August 29, 2025:
Carville rebukes DNC over woke 'land acknowledgment' ...
And this was the headline in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post,
August 29, 2025:
Carville erupts over DNC's woke land acknowledgment ...
Yay! It's out there in the world now! People are talking!
People like Dan "Turncoat" Turrentine talking to [checks notes] Laura
Fucking Ingraham.
‘It’s Maddening’: Ex-Dem Strategist Slams Party After Day 1 Of DNC
Summer Meeting
Former Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine condemned his party on
Monday following the first day of the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) summer meeting.
One of the first items on the DNC meeting agenda was a “land
acknowledgement,” based on the premise that the Minnesota land they
were on was improperly taken from indigenous people. Turrentine said
on “The Ingraham Angle” that the Democratic Party was repeating its
past mistakes that led it to its current diminished state.
“Laura, you said it: it’s the definition of insanity: you just keep
doing the same thing over and over again. And as a Democrat, it’s
maddening that we’re still not serious,” Turrentine told host Laura
Ingraham.
And this is where Cokie's Law kicks in.
Are you familiar with Cokie's Law? If not, let the coiner of the term,
OG Liberal blogger and my Bradcast radio partner, Heather "Digby" Parton,
explain. From Salon,
August 24, 2015:
Many years ago when political blogging was in its infancy, I coined the
phrase “Cokie’s Law,” which referred to a specific comment by pundit
Cokie Roberts about the Lewinsky scandal that illustrated the precise
way the beltway media excused their propensity for cheap gossip and
scandalmongering. In discussing whether or not Hillary Clinton had
actually blamed her husband’s childhood for his philandering, Roberts
said:
“At this point it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not
because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor
yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.”
Cokie’s Law is the axiom that says the press can pass judgement
about anything once it’s “out there” regardless of whether or not
what’s “out there” is true. This allows them to skip doing boring
rebuttals of the facts at hand and instead hold forth at length about
how it bears on the subject’s “judgement” and the “appearance” of
wrongdoing without ever proving that what they did was wrong.
Once Carville had popped off, and Egger had written his bitchy paragraph and
worried about those "many more people" who "instinctively recoil against this sort of thing", the pervasive contempt for Democrats which is always roiling just
below the surface at The Bulwark was free to ricochet around like a
fistful of bottle rockets in a phonebooth.
They were obsessed with this story, not because of anything inherent about
the facts of the story, but because of what "people out there", "voters",
"normal people" would think. See! See! Democrats don't
care about normal people stuff. This is why Democrats lose!
No, this is why you can never trust a Never Trumper. Because they've
still got that Conservative media wiring in their heads. Because
whenever the Conservative media machine (which they loyally served for their
entire adult lives) does shit like this, it never occurs to them to attack
the machine itself for wildly exaggerating some bit of nothing into
Civilization On The Brink Of Collapse.
Instead they automatically
react by beating up on Democrats for...what? For letting someone talk
for 90 seconds at a two day conference?
This is why your humble scrivener warned y'all about the Never Trumpers
colonizing the Liberal media and elbowing actual Liberals out of the
way. Because believe it or not, there is another way -- a different
way -- to talk about these garbage stories which the right-wing media is
constantly trying (and, as they did here, frequently succeeding) to
stovepipe into the wider public conversation.
You hang a lantern on it. Contextualize it. Talk about how
the whole Fox News business model is based on taking trivial nonsense and
inflating into crises and expecting us to fall for it. To be
distracted from the Epstein Files by it. Good God how stupid do they think
we are?
Also, I for one would like someone to explain to me how it came to be the
received wisdom of the Legacy Media that low-information or disengaged or
undecided voters can be people who have no idea what's happening in the
country and couldn't tell you who their senators are or their representative
is if you held a bazooka to their heads..
...while at the same time these same low-information or disengaged or
undecided voters are apparently so deeply enmeshed in the
right-of-the-decimal-point organizational details of the Democratic party that
they're going to give up on the Democrats and vote straight fascist party
ticket because of 90 seconds at the 2025 DNC party meeting or some HR dispute that
some anonymous, disgruntled staffer leaked to
The New York Times (which is always only too happy to "report" on
bitchy office gossip.)
And our "allies" will never just use a Fox News talking point to bludgeon
Democrats just once. They recycle them, stacking one high dudgeon atop
another until they have the highest dudgeon of all.
Because it wasn't enough for our "ally" to wildly overreact in the pages of
The Atlantic to what amounted to an HR dispute:
“The Democrats treat their fucking people like kindergartners,” Sarah
Longwell, a former Republican consultant who quit the party over
Donald Trump, told me. Longwell can get exasperated by her new allies
on the left. When I mentioned the DNC’s in-person-work kerfuffle, it
set her off.
“Republicans are over here being straight-up mercenaries,” Longwell
said. “Democrats give everybody Fridays off and talk about work-life
balance.” She apologized for yelling into the phone. Democrats “are
not built for when the fascists come,” she concluded...
Goodness no. Leibovich just had to recycle the bullshit
Fox News talking point from last year to make sure the knife went
in all the way.
You can watch this shit move through the system like a contrasting agent
moving through a human body during a C/T scan. From the Fox
News Bombast Machine to Megyn Kelly's histrionics to a useful chump like
James Carville shitting pine cones over it, then on to The Bulwark and
cable news...
...then recycled and amplified in The Atlantic, then back to
The Bulwark where any $10 Cassandra knows what comes next.
A stern warning that if Democrats want to win, they need to start picking
fights with other Democrats.
And picking fights with former Democratic presidents.
Oh, and don't forget picking fights with "various groups that make up the
party’s broad coalition".
So yay! More hippie punching. All of which is supposed to make
Democrats more popular with "regular people."
And yet somehow going after Republicans -- y'know, the actual fascists who
actually have a knife to the throat of American democracy -- isn't really
on the menu.
So, should Democrats follow this advice and start a circle of infighting,
what exactly is it that "regular people" are supposed to suddenly
notice? That no Democrat likes the Democrats? That every
Democrat is running against their own party?
In which case this $10 Cassandra predicts that, should any of that happen,
we can all look forward to a chorus of Team Legacy Media and Team Never
Trump voices decrying "Democrats in disarray."
One final note, by way of demonstrating that anyone can have all kinds of
fun with Cokie's Law. Can you believe Sarah Longwell losing her shit and
yelling into the phone while she was on the record?
But, well, what'dya expect? Chicks, amirite! Way too emotional
to be trusted with really important jobs.
And, being a sane and decent person, you would probably bark at me. How
dare I! And rightly demand that I take that misogynist shit
back.
But, see, under the shield of Cokie's Law I am protected.
Because under the shield of Cokie's Law it doesn't matter if it's true.
All that matters is my assertion that some non-specific group of "people" are
talking about it.
Definition:
Enjoying a hearty laugh at someone else's adversity or tribulation even as
you stand up there on the windy gibbet.
I was moved to coin this term when I heard -- and not for the first time --
the recently-former Republicans and MSNOW employees at The Bulwark shaking
their fist at the heavens and insisting that "billionaires who care about
America" need to step the
fuck up and fund a new media that can push back against Conservative media and the
Republican-controlled legacy media.
Oh how carefully they avoiding saying that Liberal billionaires need to step up and fund a genuinely Liberal media.
From a December 31, 2025 Bulwark podcast:
Sarah Longwell: What do we do about an entirely consolidated
media system that has been built around Trump's allies?
Jonathan Last (with a smirk): Why Sarah, what do we do?
Longwell: We have to build new things.
We have to be the ones, like, where are the patriotic
billionaires? Like, Bezos acted like a patriotic billionaire and then
sold out to Trump and gave him the [Washington] Post. The [Washington] Post
is a shell of itself. We're going to have to build entirely new media
ecosystems and billionaires who care about America are going to have to step
up and start helping to both build and and bring back these media.
Tim Miller: We probably need to regulate them too.
As most of you know, Liberals have been writing about the awfulness of the legacy media
forever -- shouting it from our little blogs for more than 20 years, and
talking about it for decades before that. So imagine my
gallows schadenfreude when I heard these former Republicans --
who popped into existence five minutes ago and were immediately lavished with
the kind of daily, unalloyed support of the "liberal" media that is beyond the
wildest dreams of OG Liberal bloggers and podcasters -- suddenly noticing that
the legacy media sucks, then breathlessly announcing it to the world as if
they think they've just discovered radium, and then insisting that patriotic
billionaire damn well need to step up and take action.
Except based on their performance to date, if they did ever find a djinn
bottle on the beach and wish for the independent media of their dreams to be
conjured into existence, it's pretty clear what kind of "independent" media
they would ask for.
An awesome Sensible, Center-Right new/old media -- a retro-media, if you will -- where no one talks about the state of the GOP before Trump. Where it would perpetually be 2013: a spiritual recreation of Sally Quinn's tight circle of parlor austerity trolls of days gone by, but this time with emojis. Where George Will would once again be the fount of all wisdom, and David Brooks would once again be free to roam the
land, concocting imaginary bright futures for an imaginary Republican party.
(From
Brooks in 2013)
A Second G.O.P.
...It’s probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It’s
smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete
in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along
the West Coast. It’s smarter to build a new division that is different the
way the Westin is different than the Sheraton...
The second G.O.P. wouldn’t be based on the Encroachment Story. It would
be based on the idea that America is being hit simultaneously by two
crises, which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles
Murray crisis.
A media where, for the greater good --
-- Liberals who insist on writing about the Before Time or the idiocy of the new/old Brahmans of this
brave, new retro-media would be kept safely away from the microphones, just as
they were in days of old (both are deadlinks, so don't bother.)
David Brooks: Stupid as a Boiled Ham by BooMan Tue Jan 29th, 2013 at 09:42:45 AM EST You knew that at one point David Brooks would suffer enough cognitive
dissonance to lead him to make a permanent break with the Republican
Party. That day has not yet come. Instead, because his paycheck depends on
his willingness to ignore all cognitive dissonance, Brooks has today
decided to advocate the creation of a second Republican Party. This party
won't be based in the South or the Mormon Mountain West. It won't be
completely paranoid about the ever-growing encroachment of the Nanny
State. Possibly, it won't be bug-eyed nuts about Sharia Law and Latinos
who behead white people in the Arizona desert...
The GOP isn't even honest about who they are when they're navel-gazing.
Americans expect politicians to lie to us, but we expect them at least not
to lie to themselves.
Andrew Sullivan is currently skulking around behind a Substack paywall
griping about all the usual, fearmongering about trans people. Half his
blog is now apparently spent posting pictures of the views from the windows of
various people.
Matthew Dowd is making the rounds complaining how unfair it was that
he was fired. A) Yep, and B)
Welcome to the American workforce!
MSNBC pundit ousted over Kirk talk says network agreed comments were
misconstrued
Matthew Dowd tells Katie Couric ex-employer concurred but ‘it didn’t
matter’ and they dismissed him anyway.
The political analyst fired by MSNBC over his Charlie Kirk commentary
says his former employer agreed with him that his remarks were being
misconstrued as “insensitive” – but said “it didn’t matter” to the
network, and they dismissed him anyway.
“I said: ‘I think you guys are making a huge mistake,’” Matthew Dowd said
on Katie Couric’s podcast. “I said: ‘You know and I know that’s not
anything what I meant. You know it’s been misconstrued’ – and they agreed
with that.
“They agreed it had been misconstrued. But they said it didn’t matter.
The decision’s been made.”
Political pundit and consultant Matthew Dowd said the media’s “herd
mentality” is promoting the feeling that President Donald Trump’s tactics of
distraction and disruption are working to fool the public into putting Trump
in a better light than he deserves.
Despite Steve Schmidt's repeated, heroic efforts to burn his career to
the ground, the grifter in him just keeps trying to resurrect himself from the
ashes. This week he scored that coveted 32nd paragraph mention in
a New York Times column of which no one made it past the 3rd
paragraph.
Would it surprise you to learn that Schmidt is lashing out at [checks
notes] Both Sides?
"The ad comes from a new group, the Save America Movement, whose leaders
say they want to fight Trump with what they call “counter-propaganda.” Two
of its leaders — Mary Corcoran, a former public relations executive and
Steve Schmidt, a former top aide to John McCain who co-founded (and later
left) the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project — are not currently
impressed with either party.
They view Trump’s Republican Party with utter contempt, and fault
Democrats for failing to push back effectively..."
So far, the group has raised $4 million for their venture, though they hope
to use location-targeting technology to spend efficiently...
By now the Alert Reader has noticed that every two bit grifter and refugee
from their sinful Republican past has pitched up their own individual revival
tents hung with their own, individual "movements" and "causes" banners, each
one promising to save Murrican Democracy for the low-low introductory
membership price of just $9.95 per month.
But wait! There's more!
If you choose to upgrade to our Platinum Membership level ($250/month or a
one-time "Hero of Democracy" donation of $10,000) you will receive early
access to their podcasts, access to their Discord and an
"I Paid A Shit Ton Of Money To Save Democracy And All I Got Was This Lousy
Tee Shirt" tee-shirt.
If I told you that Mark "Helicopter Boy" Halperin had shaved his head,
gotten some Iron Cross and Skull tats and had gone undercover with the Proud
Boys, for a second would you wonder if maybe it was true? Because
the oleaginous Halperin, who was once a ubiquitous presence on the Sunday
shows and cable news, has vanished from sight. Where is he now?
Lemme throw a couple of headlines at you, then you can guess.
First:
Mark Halperin Tells Megyn Kelly How Charlie Kirk’s Assassination...
And then:
Journalist calls it ‘incredible’ that ABC pulled Kimmel after years of
anti-Trump programming
Panelists Mark Halperin (editor and chief of Two Way?) and Byron York (Fox
News contributor) join ‘The Ingraham Angle’ to discuss fallout from Charlie
Kirk’s assassination and ABC’s decision to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air.
Hilarious that Halps is still demanding to be called a "journalist". And
wuzzit Two Way? A YouTube thingie which he co-hosts with Sean
"Puffy" Spicer and someone from the Shadow Realm called Daniel Calhoon
Turrentine -- a name obviously stolen from the unpublished works of Mark
Twain.
The blurb for morning edition of this drivel... well ... the word "grandiose"
hardly covers it (for the full effect, this should be read in your head in the
voice of the late Ted Knight doing his Super Friends voiceover.)
Every weekday morning, the executives who run America’s television news
networks chair a key gathering of their anchors, correspondents and
producers to look ahead at the day’s forthcoming events. The meeting
offers – for those lucky enough to attend – a fascinating, forward-looking
snapshot of the news cycle ahead.
Each weekday morning on 2WAY, the home of conversations like no other,
“The Morning Meeting” offers the chance to attend – and participate in –
one such meeting...
And since I am a merciful blog host, I shall reprint only the first little bit
of the blurb for the evening edition of this drivel:
Join Mark Halperin and some of the leading minds in politics...
But the best headline of all? From an outfit called "ABD Post":
MARK HALPERIN brilliantly breaks down why Disney canceled Jimmy
Kimmel...
The "ABD Post" is a pro-Erdoğan Turkish-American website about which you have
never heard, and from which you will never hear again.
And finally, a two-fer. In case you were worried that you might have to
hold a bake-sale to support Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, you
can stop worrying. They are both are residing comfortably in the reactionary libertarian free-speech terrariums their tech oligarch sugar daddies built for
them and their ilk.
Tech billionaires and iconoclast journalists suddenly see eye to eye.
...
"Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the
Left", a new book by the journalist Eoin Higgins, is an attempt to understand
how a collection of unimaginably wealthy, increasingly angry titans of
technology and finance were able to acquire loud allies among journalists
who had, until relatively recently, been largely associated with the
political left. Higgins previously covered this beat in his work for
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and for his own newsletter, The
Flashpoint. Some of that work is repurposed here, but the book expands on
it, taking a broader look at the sociocultural and political currents that
have brought new alignments of writers, audiences, and funders.
His two main subjects are the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi,
although a number of other new-media all-stars and hangers-on make
appearances...
A number of employees in a range of industries, as well as in academia,
are finding themselves in hot water over remarks they made about Kirk's
death or his political beliefs.
PHNX Sports, an online sports news site focused on Arizona, announced the
firing of reporter Gerald Bourguet after he said on social media on
Wednesday, in a since-deleted post, that "Refusing to mourn a life devoted
to that cause is not the same thing as celebrating gun violence."
"Truly don't care if you think it's insensitive or poor timing to decline
to respect an evil man who died," he added.
Bourguet declined to comment when reached by CBS News.
MSNBC said it cut ties with analyst Matthew Dowd after he said in an
on-air conversation that Kirk had pushed incendiary speech and that
"hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful
actions." In a public statement, Comcast accused Dowd of making "an
unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event."
"That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being
willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing
opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but,
ultimately, with respect. We need to do better," Comcast executives
said.
Dowd, the former chief strategist for Republican President George W.
Bush, apologized in a Substack post on Friday, saying he hadn't meant to
imply Kirk was to blame for the violence that killed him, the AP reported.
But Dowd, a long-time political analyst at ABC News before joining MSNBC
in 2022, also accused the network of caving to pressure to fire
him.
"The right wing media mob ginned up, went after me on a plethora of
platforms, and MSNBC reacted to that mob," he wrote on Substack. "Even
though most at MSNBC knew my words were being misconstrued, the timing of
my words forgotten ... and that I apologized for any miscommunication on
my part, I was terminated by the end of the day."
Also in the media industry, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said
in a Substack post Monday that the company dismissed her last week after
she spoke out "against political violence, racial double standards, and
America's apathy toward guns," noting that she only referred to Kirk once
in a separate social media post.
A spokesperson for the Washington Post declined to comment to CBS News on
personnel matters...
Reminds me of nothing so much as the CEO United Way hard-sell that I used to
run across back in my days working in the private sector. The question
was never "if", but always "How much?". Sometimes it was strongly
implied, sometimes it was more explicit, but always it was clear
what was expected of you if you wanted to keep your job.
Probably time to remind the what it means to work in an "at will" state.
Scientists have long pondered the question:
"Is Chuck Todd as big a 'Both Sides Do It' hack as he appeared to be when he
had the big chair on Meet the Press, or was he performing the part of a Both
Sides Do It hack on Meet the Press because that's what NBC executives
require of anyone who sits in that chair?"
Sadly this question seemed doomed to remain a topic of mere idle armchair
speculation, with scientists spending their lunch breaks arguing one side of
the question and then swapping around and arguing the other (you know how
scientists are) because there was insufficient funding available to build the
extremely sensitive equipment that would be required to settle the matter.
And then, one day last week, on local radio, right here in Springfield,
Illinois, the matter was settled when Chuck Todd dropped by the Patrick
Pfingsten show on WMAY to remove all doubt.
A thing to know about Mr. Pfingsten is that he is, in his own words,
"a conservative who's a former Republican" who, like so many other Never Trumpers who got run out of their own party but
cannot abide admitting that, far from being the dirty, commie, America-hating,
terrorist-loving, baby-killing caricatures his party made us out to be,
we on the Left are, in fact, the only group who have been right about the
Right all along.
And so Mr. Pfingsten has taken up residence in the mighty fortress of "Both
Sides Do It" about which we had a long chat one post ago. You should
also know that the station where Mr. Pfingsten works also syndicates Brian
Kilmeade and Clay Travis, so put a pin in that because it'll come up later.
Anyway, out of the clear blue comes now Chuck Todd to share his cultural and
political wisdom two days after Charlie Kirk was killed. And I, your
humble scrivener, listened to the whole fucking thing, grinding a quarter in
of enamel off my back molars in the process. So here are selected
portions of that conversation. It does not start well.
TODD: Well, here's the thing. We we all kind of know what we
should be doing, but in in some ways, you know, our ... we're going
to have to give up hoping our political leaders are going to do the right
things.
Right off the bat, fuck you and your "our political leaders" claptrap, Chuck
Todd. It's Republican political leaders, starting with
President Shits-His-Pants von Cheats-At-Golf, who throw gas on these fires,
and Democratic political leaders who try to tamp it down, which
he fucking well knows.
TODD: Sometimes you need incentives to do the right thing.
You need reward structures to do the right thing. And right now all of our
incentives are aligned against us ... uh... to, to bring us together. All
of the incentives are aligned against us to sort of figure out how to act
bipartisan.
And right there, in three short sentences, Chuck Todd memory holes the legacy
of the last three Democratic administrations, and the increasingly berserk Republican reactions to each of them.
And, again, Todd fucking well knows better.
Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem
by Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein
...We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than
40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past
writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was
warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the
core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is
ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional
understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the
legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly
impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the
country’s challenges.
Chuck Todd continues, remembering 9/11 as a great, uniting
experience.
TODD: 9/11 is the last time we ... we ... we really got ... we
brought ... got brought together as a country and it lasted a good year or
so. But even when we stopped being united, y'know, the
wars. The... the wars divided us, it was respectful right?
It was sort of conventional political debate.
No surprise that a creature of a Beltway media that rolled over for Bush and
Cheney remembers those times very differently than those of us who live in the
real world. There are literally tens of thousands of Liberal blog posts
by those of us who were writing about what was really going on in real time,
but this should give you a taste of what those "respectful", "conventional"
debates were actually like:
The host then chimes in that, yes, it was all great until those god damn
Liberals...
PFINGSTEN: I don't know. There was a lot of calling George Bush
a war criminal...
For the record George Bush and Dick Cheney were and are war criminals.
And the rest is just more cask-strength, Chuck Todd Both Sides Do It drivel
TODD: I mean, this is where I don't, you know, if you
go online, most conservatives think most liberals are communists and most
liberals think most conservatives are fascists... The online world has us
at each other's throats.
For the record, conservatives were making a living slagging us liberals as
dirty, commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-killing monsters long
before "the online world" was as omnipresent as it is now. And, for
the record, conservatives nominated a degenerate, corrupt, lying, rapist,
racist, fascist for president three times in a row and elected him twice, so
yeah, the case for thinking most conservatives are fascists is fucking well
open and shut.
TODD: It is instead like you could build an audience much
faster if you go hard right or hard left, right?
Who is there "hard left" of which Todd speaks? Where are they?
And what the hell does Todd think "hard left" even means?
TODD: The left doesn't police the left and the right doesn't
police the right.
For the record, everybody polices the left. The legacy media Tone
Police stomp all over any Liberal who raises their voice using unapproved
vocabulary. Meanwhile, nobody polices the Right, which is how hate-vampires like Charlie Kirk came to be.
Never has a man’s own words so adeptly justified contempt for him
People are having a grand time digging through Charlie Kirk’s own
words to show that he deserved being dragged.
It’s tempting to sit down and just compile a list of all the hateful
things the man said — I could spend the next few weeks documenting
what a horrible little man he was. But that’s something that should
have been done before he was killed, because what should have been
assassinated was his reputation while he was cuddling up to racists
and anti-semites and anti-gay and trans people, all that stuff
journalists shied away from while he was living and building a
movement. All we can do now is condemn him when it is too late...
TODD: 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if there was a bad
actor on one side or the other, this, you know, there would be
people that would speak out about it so that the totality would
look bipartisan.
Barack Obama was president from January, 2009* until January, 2017. In
what fucking universe did the Republican Party's unified, racist, obstruction
of every single thing Obama tried to do "look bipartisan" in its
totality? In what fucking universe does Donald Trump oozing down the
escalator and into the hearts of the GOP base qualify as heroically standing
up to a "bad actor".
Once again, in one sentence, Todd simply erases the inconvenience part.
TODD: And and this is where ... I don't know if this is a
leadership problem. It's, y'know, I am ... I am exhausted from pointing
fingers somewhere. Oh, it's here, it's here, it's here. When really,
it's all of us, right?
There's that deep, well-reasoned, fact-based political analysis for which
NBC News shelled out big bucks.
TODD: And look, I... I accept the premise that there are
folks on the left who say, "Yeah, we have our extremists, but we think
those guys are worse." And I accept the premise that on the right they
say, "We may have our extremists, but those guys are worse."
This, right here -- the media' pathological obsession with providing "Both
Sides Do It" political cover for the worst people in America and an
all-purpose excuse for the laziest and most cowardly people in America -- is
the real reason American politics is fucked.
But at least those battling scientists can finally move on with their their lives
now that the question of which-came-first has been settled.
Chuck Todd continues:
TODD: Like take the Matthew Dowd comment. Okay. Terrible
thing that he said. What do we think? 125,000 people saw it in real time.
It gets amplified on social media, right?
First, as much as it pains me to admit, what Matthew Dowd said wasn't
terrible. At all. And second, it was
Fox News that amplified it... just as they have been
originating and amplifying the most grotesque slander during all those
halcyon decades of "bad actor" policing and "respectful", "conventional"
debate.
And now, let's remove the thing I asked you to pin 527 paragraphs ago and
get back to the issue Mr. Pfingsten's fellow WMAY talking heads, Brian
Kilmeade and Clay Travis.
'Just Kill 'Em': Fox Host Makes Shocking Comment On Homeless
People
“Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade suggested this week that
homeless people suffering from mental health issues who refuse help
should simply be killed...
“Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something,” he said. “Just
kill ’em.”
The other two hosts barely react to his remark before continuing
their discussion.
WMAY syndicated radio host and Fox News employee, Brian Kilmeade, got
to keep his Fox News gig and his WMAY gig after casually suggesting on live
television that the homeless should be mass murdered, while Matthew Dowd was
crucified by Fox News and fired from his MSNBC gig even after apologizing
profusely for what were a few anodyne comments about violent language.
Which brings it to that other WMAY syndicated radio host, Clay Travis and his
violent, unhinged rant about Liberals following the killing of Charlie
Kirk. From
Crooks & Liars:
Fox News Contributor Clay Travis Should Be Fired
The right can say and do anything and are not allowed to be criticized for
it.
Clay Travis, the host of Outkick, and a Fox News contributor went a
scorched earth to Sean Hannity on the left after the Charlie Kirk
shooting and received no push back from Fox News for his antics.
The incendiary rhetoric by most of the right-wing talk shows, media
outlets, and podcasters is a staple of the institutions, and they make
their living by vilifying the left with eliminationism.
They are quick to vilify anyone else who correctly describes the
actions some of them take, as well as their political leaders, and they
look for events to pile on.
Matthew Dowd was fired by MSNBC, where is Fox News' accountability?
Where's the accountability, WMAY?
Chuck Todd again:
TODD: You know, there was a time where we punished a
politician that didn't try to unify the country, right? It was just that's
bad politics.
By my calculations, Todd had now used up an entire Olympic swimming
pool's-worth of Kilz and White-Out to blot out the actual history of the
Actual Republican party. But he's not done yet, because
the stupidest, most craven and most sinister comment of all was buried inside
this slab of mildewed nonsense:
TODD: And that's what frankly both sides do
this. They grab the nubbest, nuttiest thing somebody says in one of these
somewhere online and says, grabs it, isolates it, right? Gets it to take
off and go viral and say that's all of them, right? This person, it was
representative of this entire community, right?
And you know, the right has been arguing that this has been happening
way too often in ... in mainstream media. And I know exactly. And my
answer is yes, you're correct.
But the answer isn't to do it that that there should be sort of mutual
assured destruction, right?
At a stroke, Todd has not only told the MAGA mob that, yes, one of their most cherished delusions is real -- that there is a Giant Liberal Media
Conspiracy plotting against them -- but that the mainstream media is in on
it! Also, hey asshole, you are the mainstream media.
What are the odds that the next time the Crooked Media lads --
-- or the Bulwark crew --
-- welcome Chuck Todd back onto their podcast like a long lost lodge brother,
his embarrassing WMAY wallow in the Both Siderist shitpile will be politely
forgotten or ignored by the hosts.
* Thanks to Alert Reader Bruce for catching my temporal error.
"Americans already understood Trump to be corrupt, and proved themselves
willing to tolerate that," Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr. argue.
"But now they are coming to believe that he is inept. In American politics,
that is an unforgivable sin".
The Atlantic headline:
Trump’s Unforgivable Sin
"Voters have proved willing to tolerate corruption, but there’s one thing
they won’t ignore." -- By Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr.
The Corrections:
"AmericansRepublicans already understood
Trump to be corrupt, and proved themselves willing to tolerate that they were cool with that because it made Libtards cry," Peter
Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr. argue. "But now they are coming to believe
that he is inept. In American Republican politics, that is an unforgivable sin".
...
Trump’s Unforgivable Sin
"VotersRepublicans have proved willing to
tolerate corruption, but there’s one thing they won’t ignore." -- By Peter
Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr.
Jesus, Mary and Marty Baron, are they so god damn skint at
The Atlantic that they can't afford to hire even one decent editor?
