Professional Left Podcast Episode 967: The Death of Nixon(‘s Maxim)

"It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom."  --  Jonathan Swift

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Lawrence O'Donnell Goes Full Driftglass -- UPDATE

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It was a sight to see. 

And thanks to embeddable video -- one of the myriad casual miracles of modern life -- you can see it too.

UPDATE:

Quite apart from the sheer exuberant pleasure that comes from watching an artfully executed demolition, Mr. O'Donnell has also explained fully and clearly and for the first time on teevee in living memory exactly why both Moderates/Centrists and Conservatives are terrified of the past.  Why they will not, under any circumstances, set one foot outside of the unholy fortresses of their own frauds and fabulisms and debate the true nature and history of American Conservatism in any arena that is not rigged in their favor.

I admit, I am tickled by the thought that what we dirty fucking hippies have been saying for years to a few hundred readers -- 

...

From Sarah Palin to Andrew Sullivan, it is the lamentation of every Conservative with a megaphone and financial stake in the Right: that all those other clowns out there who keep pretending to be Conservatives are all wrong. 

For example, Dubya was a Conservative, re-elected and celebrated ...right up until the consequences of his stupid, criminal, treasonous policies started cutting into the profits of the carnival barkers of the Right.  Then, almost overnight, all mention of George W. Bush -- the Greatest Fucking Hero in History -- ceased and Dubya became just another UnConservative to be denounced by Republican Party base voters from behind illiterate signs and beneath sassy, tri-corner hats. 

It was mass political self-lobotomy on a scale that was genuinely shocking to find anywhere outside of "1984", and would have failed instantly and been laughed into the ash heap of marketing history had it not been abetted every step of the way by the greatest act of mass-journalistic malpractice since the Iraq war. 

This is, at its core, the most damning critique of the Reasonable Conservative or the Centrist Neoconservative or Gay Tory Catholic Conservative or whatever other group has recently been perp-walked to the door of American Conservatism: that despite the overwhelming evidence that they have been wrong for most of their adult lives, they continue to maintain that this is all just a merry mix-up, and once the real Conservatives take over and start running the show, everything will sort itself out.

But the Real American Conservatives are already here, Mr. Sullivan, and always have been.  They were here long before you were born -- before your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were born.  They were here before you chose to make a living by lending your time and talent to their depraved cause.  They were here before it began to dimly dawn on you that American Right is run by scumbags and monsters (a fact that Liberals have been trying to get through your thick head for 30 years.) They were here when their madness finally bucked you off their gravy train and onto the next gravy train.  They were here when you took up your new career -- whining that they had gotten Conservatism all wrong.

And they will be here long after you and I shuffle off our respective mortal coils. 

So since it is painfully obvious that Mr. Sullivan does not understand American Conservatism at all, I will explain his movement to him slowly and clearly -- as one would do with a small child -- by momentarily setting aside transient, "shiny object" issues and distractors (like contraception or Barack Obama's birth certificate) and instead simply focusing on the basic definition of what the word "conservatism" actually means.

From Wikipedia:

Conservatism (Latin: conservare, "to preserve")[1] is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports at the most, minimal and gradual change in society.

So any discussion about "Whither Conservatism?" or debate about real Conservatives vs. fake Conservatives is meaningless without first addressing this question:  What exactly are the "traditional institutions" and ways of life its adherents trying to maintain and defend?

Again, the answer for American Conservatives is both incredibly obvious and well-documented, and so painfully embarrassing to its elite defenders that they lie constantly to avoid accidentally mentioning it:

• American Conservatism is dedicated to the preservation of the absolute hegemony of straight, white fundamentalist Christian men within a social hierarchy based on the supremacy of the white race.
• This social hierarchy is ordained by Almighty God and therefor beyond debate.
• Every problem American society faces is caused by some deviation from this divine social hierarchy and can only be corrected by the restoration of this divine social hierarchy.

To preserve these "traditional institutions" and ways of life, American Conservatism's adherents have waged one hot war against the government of the United States and several cold ones.  They have attempted to seceded from the country.  They have closed down school systems.  They have fled cities.  They have embraced domestic terrorism.  They have murdered and legislated and prayed with equal fervor and righteousness.  They have formed new political parties and taken over old ones. They have spent centuries -- centuries! -- doing the the most basic work of Conservatism:  fighting the encroachment of change with every ounce of their strength.

...

-- Mr. O'Donnell is now saying to a few hundred thousand viewers.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

Lawrence O'Donnell's Dr. Jekyll-personae showed up to the Dancin' Dave party, knives out, and immediately and promiscuously violated The Gingrich Rule against bringing up the ugly, mendacious, hypocritical professional histories of any of the parade of wretched wingnut propagandists who -- for reasons that no one will ever explain in public -- keep getting handed unobstructed national platforms on programs like "Meet the Press":

.  

Fortunately, unmoored drift-net Bob Woodward was on hand to... 

...very...

"...something.   something."

...veeery...

 re. lit. i.gate.

 ...sloooowly...

"the. 19. 90s."

prevent Lawrence O'Donnell from following his right cross with a fast, fatal left uppercut.

Like, say, a quick history lesson about a certain grifting adulterous bigot who cannonballed about as deep into the moral sewer as humanly possible to exploit grotesque tragedy for partisan electoral advantage:

Gingrich & The Susan Smith Case 

Even after a South Carolina jury declared Susan Smith guilty of murdering her two sons, reporters are not pressing Gingrich about the Smith case. Many seem to have forgotten that nine months ago, he loudly proclaimed the infanticide to be a campaign issue. 

April 25, 2000

Newt Gingrich has gotten away with it. Again. Even after a South Carolina jury declared Susan Smith guilty of murdering her two sons, reporters are not pressing Gingrich about the Smith case. Many seem to have forgotten that nine months ago, he loudly proclaimed the infanticide to be a campaign issue. Back in early November, the motor-mouthed Gingrich had much to say about the case -- offering a treatise so wrong-headed that it's almost laughable.

Except there's nothing funny about the Susan Smith tragedy...or Gingrich's attempt to exploit it for election-eve advantage.

Here's what Gingrich said three days before last November's election -- in response to an Associated Press reporter who asked him how the campaign was going: "Slightly more moving our way. I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things." Gingrich concluded, "The only way you get change is to vote Republican. That's the message for the last three days." Two days later, less than 24 hours before the polls opened, Gingrich defended his comments on the Smith case as no different than what he'd been saying for years -- that violence and related ills arise from a Democratic-controlled political system: "We need very deep change if we're going to turn this country around."

Asked if the change he was offering the country would stop killings like those in South Carolina, he replied, "Yes. In my judgment, there's no question."

Today, reporters should ask Gingrich an obvious question: Does he still impute blame to the Democrats for Susan Smith's deed? Journalists might also ask Gingrich about Smith's stepfather, Beverly Russell. Prior to the kids' disappearance, Russell was busily campaigning not for the depraved Democrats, but for Newt Gingrich and his minions. Russell was a Republican leader in South Carolina and local organizer of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition.

During the nine days that Susan Smith had the country hunting for a nonexistent black carjacker, Russell urged nationwide prayer for the two missing kids: "All we can do is pray. This is a nightmare." A prominent businessman and stockbroker, Russell married Smith's mom after she divorced Smith's dad (who later committed suicide). From the age of six, Russell raised Susan Smith in an upper-middle-class, church-going home. Gingrich's campaign comments notwithstanding, the home was free of counterculture and welfare-state influences. But Susan Smith attempted suicide at age 13, and at age 15 told authorities that her stepdad had been sexually molesting her for at least a year. Her mother helped talk her out of pursuing charges against Russell. (At age 18, she attempted suicide again.) 

The child-abuse case against the well-connected businessman smells of a cover-up. It's not known exactly how long the molestation went on, because the case file mysteriously vanished. And Susan Smith was not even represented in court by a lawyer or guardian, as required for minors. The social-service worker who investigated the molestation testified at the murder trial that although Russell admitted the abuse and agreed to seek counseling, she was "concerned" that law enforcement closed the case so quickly. Whatever counseling Russell underwent had little impact. The murder trial revealed that he was still having sex with his stepdaughter as recently as two months before she killed her kids. 
...

Anyone with a functional memory who actually gives a shit about the deplorable shape of our politics knows perfectly well that Newton Leroy Gingrich is the gleeful, sociopathic Patient Zero of the disease that rots our country's civil society.  For his entire public career he has been the busy, busy plague rat of bomb-throwing, no-limits, slaughterhouse politics, and yet there he is, on teevee week after week after fucking week, invited again and again into America's living rooms by the very same pundits who spend much of the rest of thier tim whiiiiiiiiining about how shrill and mean and unserious our civic discourse has become.

Small wonder industrial wind machines like Woodward don't want to litigate, re-litigate or otherwise bring up the past: if we did, most of their pals and colleagues would be in prison or terminally unemployed.

Which is why it is a new and notable thing when someone who has both the method and the opportunity also summons the huevos to shank Newt on live teevee.

So good on you, Mr. O'Donnell.

Down the dial, Dr. Krugman played unfairly with the other children by smuggling "facts" into a bullshit frolic, cracked wise (putting Jim DeMint at the head of the Heritage Foundation "takes the 'Think' out of 'Think Tank'"),and appeared generally perplexed by the fact that ABC keeps reanimating the corpse of George Will 

and rudely flinging it at people.

But the shambling, rambling, embarrassing remains of George Will seems positively sizzling with vitality and brio compared to Zombie Mary Matalin.  I tell you, it is downright creepy to watch the woman who James Carville hired to breed him a passel of snake-headed swamp babies continue to work her waxy face hole and snap and snarl and bite long after her soul and ideas have died and purified and drooled out her eyes.

A season of "The Living Dead" had girded me for such an experience, but I wanted to Tweet Dr. Krugman that all chunks he was carving out of her would do no good:  to turn a Walker like Matalin into a harmless pile of chip-chop, nothing short of a snow shovel to the brain stem will do.

And speaking of Twitter, further on down the dial, Pappy O'Daniel's one-time senior press flak, Bob Schieffer, 




carefully explained to all of his Del Webb closed circuit day room viewers that "this generation of politicians" has been rendered incapable of good, old timey compromise due to all this new media and the internet and Twitter and the rock and the roll and suchlike.

I give three points for having Joe Klein explain to the same audience that it hasn't been "this generation of politicians" who have fucked everything up so much as it been the Republican Party.  That in 2009, President Obama heaped the altar high with all kinds of  offerings that he offered to give away to the Right for the sake of "compromise" and the GOP told him to go pound sand.  That having gone all-in on the compromise thing once and pulled back a bloody stump and having just decisively won an election, President Obama does not have much incentive to give the GOP a fan dance to provide cover for their terrible ideas this time around.

Then I take those three points away for putting former Dubya speechwriter and boot-scrapper, Michael Gerson, on the same teevee machine to explain what Barack Obama  must do to be a "historic" President.  Which is not exactly the same as having the Hindenburg's purser on to explain how to make a spectacular entrance, but it's in the same area code.

As it does every Sunday Fake Centrism again stalked the Sunday Mouse Circus, with inexpiable creatures like Matthew Dowd skittering around the corral insisting that, in the name of sacred compromise, "both sides" need to hold hands and take the hit for the GOP's profoundly awful proposals.

Lastly, it is worth nothing that you could not find anyone on any Mouse Circus political panel who thinks that hitching one's political star to a campaign of hating gays and denying them basic civil rights is a good idea.  Mind you, more than half of these same assholes were pro-Bush at 150 decibels back in 2004 when Dubya slithered back into office running a campaign that promised 1) a brutal death for your loved ones at the hand's of terrorists if you voted Democratic and, 2) Teh Queer would destroy what was left of America after the terrorists and Liberals were done if activist judges and the ACLU ever allowed them to be treated as first-class citizens.

Which was immediately followed by Team Dubya's attempt to privatize Social Security by  inventing a fake crisis and bulldozing organizations like AARP out of the way with rancid shit like this:

Or don't you remember?

After This "McLaughlin Group" Outburst

Lawrence O'Donnell became hard to find on the teevee machine for awhile.

Then time passed and seasons changed and MSNBC hired him and eventually gave him his own shot.  Which was a very fine thing.

However while he can still bring the heat, as I pointed out in this post from April of this year, Mr. O'Donnell has also shown that he has learned the art of rolling over and playing snuggle puppy when members of the Beltway's Elite Media Club -- people who could actually reach out and smack him back into relative obscurity -- cross his path:

...

Back when the Big Iraqi War Lie was the hot, new fraud on the block, those who  went along with the program reaped all the worldly rewards the Beltway Whorehouse had to offer.

Those who didn't go along, got marginalized or pulverized.

Sure, the droolbuckets who fell into lockstep behind President Cheney were, in the end, shown to be completely and criminally wrong, and the dirty fucking hippies were completely vindicated:  this is an unreservedly good thing and hopefully the reputations of America's warpimps will one day dangle from the righteous gibbet of history. But it is also true that here-and-now there is no court of appeal or office of professional rectification to whom the perverse judgement of our Beltway Overlords can be appealed; that, for the most part, the scum kept their spoils and even traded up and, for the most part,  those who were driven out of the public arena out have been kept out.

And this has been a powerful lesson.

Here is MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell vivisecting lying Teabagger goof Joe Walsh

Here is MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell taking on lying Birther goof Orly Taitz 

Here is MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell pulling apart Ron Paul's happy Libertarian horseshit and showing us the ooey-gooey racist center:

So it's not Mr. O'Donnell doesn't know how to construct an argument against a purveyor of bullshit or how to mount that argument with mucho gusto.

And yet, when the High Priest of the Church of Axiomatic Centrism sits down across from him to pimp his latest book, on go the kid gloves and out comes the cocoa butter... 

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Which is not to pick on Mr. O'Donnell, who usually does a fine job, but rather to point out that a lot of people on teevee lie about a lot of things.

When the lies are about birth certificates, or civil rights or the budget or about ACORN, there is a phalanx of people with microphones and cameras on hand who take on the liars and push back hard.

But when it comes to the Big Lie of Centrism, everyone except the rag-taggiest of dirty fucking hippies -- even people who are normally on the side of the angels -- fall ominously silent in the face of a powerful, invisible force-field of professional deference leaving liars like Tom Friedman  to spout their destructive idiocy unmolested.

So my question is, which Lawrence O'Donnell will show up when he sits across the table from bomb-throwing grifter, serial liar and fellow NBC employee Newt Gingrich tomorrow on "Meet the Press"?

Dr. Jekyll or Uncle Fluffy?

To Be Clear

I would never suggest that Lawrence O'Donnell might have been influenced in any way to take the unprecedented step of banning Congressman Joe Walsh from his teevee show for being a massive liar...


...by this post earlier in the week

suggesting we as consumers demand that broadcasters begin to take the unprecedented step of banning massive liars from their teevee shows, and in which I used as an example Lawrence O'Donnell (whose show I like very much) putting massive liar Congressman Joe Walsh on the air:

Only Nixon can go to Nixonland

"As much as I like Lawrence O'Donnell, a couple of nights ago when he trundled Marcia Blackburn and Joe Walsh and David Frum out in front of the cameras, I turned his program off. I did it because I am not interested in what liars have to say.

I am not interested in watching a "debate" that isn't a debate at all.

Because, as everyone on the Left learned long, long ago, there are no depths to which the Right will not sink in order to hold power and enrich their paymasters. Treason, economic sabotage, scapegoating, direct appeals to racism, stealing elections, voter suppression, you name it.

But most of all, just plain lying. All the time. About everything."

Because to suggest that would obviously be silly and perverse.

Instead, I would merely salute Mr. O'Donnell's valiant decision to use his public platform to make liars begin to pay for their lies.

Breaking: Nothing New Under The Sun

Film at 11.

From Joe Klein, Time Magazine, 10/14/2010:

But Christine O'Donnell is not like that. She is attractive, to some, because she doesn't know anything. She couldn't name a Supreme Court decision she disagreed with, not even Roe v. Wade. There is no way she could ever be confused with a member of the elites; there is no way she could be confused with an above average high school student. Her ignorance, therefore, makes her authentic--the holy grail of latter-day American politics: she's a real person, not like those phony politicians. In that sense, she--and the lifeboat filled with other Tea Party know-nothings--follow in the wake of our leading exemplar of ignorant authenticity, Sarah Palin (who seems every bit as unaware of public policy--she certainly never talks about it--as she was when a desperate and petulant John McCain chose her to be his running mate).

There is something profoundly diseased about a society that idolizes its ignoramuses and disdains its experts. It is a society that no longer takes itself seriously.
...

From "Jubal Harshaw" in "Stranger in a Strange Land", 1961:

Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit. The Bible Belt faith in which I was brought up encouraged me to think that I was better than the rest of the world; I was 'saved' and they were 'damned' — we were in a state of grace and the rest of the world were 'heathens' and by 'heathen' they meant such people as our brother Mahmoud.

It meant that an ignorant, stupid lout who seldom bathed and planted his corn by the phase of the Moon could claim to know the final answers of the Universe. That entitled him to look down his nose at everybody else. Our hymn book was loaded with such arrogance — mindless, conceited, self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us and us alone, and what hell everybody else was going to catch come Judgment Day

From Samuel Johnson, "The Patriot", 1774:

A man sometimes starts up a patriot, only by disseminating discontent, and propagating reports of secret influence, of dangerous counsels, of violated rights, and encroaching usurpation.

This practice is no certain note of patriotism. To instigate the populace with rage beyond the provocation, is to suspend publick happiness, if not to destroy it. He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace. Few errours and few faults of government, can justify an appeal to the rabble; who ought not to judge of what they cannot understand, and whose opinions are not propagated by reason, but caught by contagion.

More on this fast-breaking story as it develops...

And, for no extra charge, a little extra "Stranger in a Strange Land" goodness...

Jubal: "You're bitching about friendly fornication — do you know what I'm worried about?"

Ben Caxton: "What?"

Jubal: "Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. Sweat over that, instead!"

When Scary met Calley

And then one day the anti-wanking O'Donnellite teabaggers and pro-armed-insurrection Angloid teabaggers joined forces...

G. Gordon Pretty

"What monstrosities would walk the streets
were some people's faces as unfinished as their minds."

-- Eric Hoffer