I had to interrupt listening to Tim Miller scolding Liberals, again, that our
litmus tests are too stringent. Going on and on about how, if he just put
on a swastika red hat he would instantly be accepted back into
the brownshirts Republican zombie brigade. But us snooty Liberals have"standards" that
are just too damned high.
Which made me laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh given that, whoever those
slightly-higher-than-no-standards-whatsoever-havin' Liberals may be (it's me),
somehow I never actually see any them on my Liberal teevee. Instead,
MSNBC has been virtually colonized by Never Trumpers like Tim Miller, thus
giving them an even wider platform from which to lecture Liberals about how we
never cut recently-former Republicans and now-current MSNBC contributors like
Tim Miller and Nicole Wallace and Risk Wilson and Charlie Sykes and Matthew
Dowd and Tara Setmayer and Sara Longwell and Tom Nichols and Mona Charen and
Michael Steele and Joe Scarborough and on and on and on any slack.
Anyhoo, I had to interrupt my regular scolding about my unfairly high
standards...
...because of the breaking news that MSNBC's Resistance Heroes #1 and #2 --
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski -- had stabbed us in the back.
"What we did agree on was to restart communications" -- Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski announced this morning that they traveled to Mar-a-Lago over the weekend to meet with Trump
This will have come as no surprise to anyone who noted (as we did) "Morning Joe"'s lightening-fast pivot from praising Kamala Harris for running a nearly-perfect campaign (pre-election), to dumping on her for blowing it (pre-election).
Never Trumpers like Squint Scarborough and his Meat Puppet Mika are the walking, talking embodiment of Groucho Marx's famous, "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."
1. Until very recently they were frequent and welcome guests on Morning Joe.
2. They all have remarkably punchable smarmy faces.
3. They eventually seek refuge in the Both Sides Do It lie, which is
always the last resort of the worst people.
4. They will never miss a meal or go a day without a someone providing
them a paycheck and health insurance. And...
5. Sooner than you will believe possible their reputations will be
laundered by their friends in the legacy media, and then it will be as if none of
this ever happened.
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war
with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” ― George Orwell, 1984
"Eating granola bars at the base of a windmill." -- Joe
Scarborough describing the alternative energy component of President Obama’s
“all of the above” strategy to Fracking King Ed Rendell.
You will remember that, about a year and a half ago, the Professional Left did a whole
No Fair Remembering Stuff episode on Joe Scarborough. If you're interested, here are few of the sources we cited on that
show detailing the what a reactionary, Liberal-bashing asshole Scarborough has
always been, his deep complicity in the rise of Trump and, generally, what a
cheap, malignant blight he has been during all the decades MSNBC has employed
him.
Slagging Liberal bloggers as Cheeto-smeared kooks, 2008.
Slagging Liberal bloggers as mommy's basement dwelling, Cheeto-smeared
kooks, 2012.
Slagging Liberal bloggers as mommy's basement dwelling, Cheeto-smeared
kooks, 2012: Part 2.
But above all else, Scarborough is a living, smirking example of the power ot
teevee. Specifically how, if you control the cameras, and who gets to
sit in front of them, and what they are allowed to say -- you can obliterate
and rewrite the past as many times as you wish and you'll keep getting away
with it as long as you employers permit it.
Of course, Fox News has been doing exactly this every day for decades, which
is one of the principle reasons why the Republican base are now a mob of
reprogrammable meatbags. But this happens all the time on "liberal"
cable teevee too.
The MSNBC Republican Reputation Laundromat (as one
disreputable wag refers to it) runs all day long, every day and has
whitewashed the disgraceful histories (with varying degrees of success) of
such odious creatures as Michael Steele, Matthew Dowd and Steve Schmidt, and
reintroduced these creatures to their audiences as Heroes of the
Resistance. They've also begun to slide shit-for-brains Chris Cillizza back into the rotation, and they're still trying to sneak skeezy sex pet Mark
Halperin back on the air.
You also might also remember that both Greta Van Susteren and Hugh Hewitt were
given new paint jobs and marketed heavily to the MSNBC audiences, but those
were two bridges too far.
And now Scarborough is exploring the limits of his power the Etch-a-Sketch the
past away and redraw it to his new specifications. You see, Morning Joe
has just now discovered a disturbing thing going on in the corporate
media. It seems that some in the corporate media are trying to create
some sort of "false equivalence" between the two candidates for
president.
Some sort of Both Sides Do It thingy.
And by God and Saint George, Joe Scar will not let this stand!
This was followed on social media by a veritable avalanche of "Thank GOD, FINALLY someone has said it!!!!" comments with lots of All-Caps and
exclamation marks.
And for which I can find only one adequate response:
Alert listener G. brought this to my attention this morning.
Ever since Mark Halperin was cast into media perdition for being a creepy sex
past, it's been painfully clear that the very ippy tippy top of Joe
Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski's to-do list is has been "Get Mark Halperin
back on network teevee".
Whether this is because Halperin keeps showing up on the ScarBinski's
doorstep, curled into the fetal position and wailing like a banshee with
kidney stones...or whether making sure that no Media Insider Club member is
ever left bereft of a place at the table is a duty that must be undertaken, no matter how distasteful it may be, for
the good order of the Club, is an open question.
What we can know is that on too many occasions to be a coincidence, ScarBinski
has gone out of their way to wedge Halperin onto MSNBC air,
either in person, by proxy or -- as happened today -- by repeating his name over and over
again, as if summoning Beetlejuice.
Today, no less than four times. "Halperin writes", "Halperin's
newsletter", etc.
Nothing to report, really, except members of the mainstream media remain
immune from consequences. Everyone knows it. That's how the Club
operates, which is why no one with knowledge of how exactly the Club works has
ever spilled the beans about how Club works.
Which may be why it is clearly very important to A.M. cable news' cringiest
power couple that no effort should be spared in helping Halperin tunnel out of purgatory.
...after I wrote about his attempted rehabilitation in 2017 ...
... I see no reason to once again waste perfectly good adjectives re-re-rewriting it now.
This is why we OG bloggers have archives. So I'm just going to link to all of that old stuff below and you can
visit it, or revisit it, or not as you see fit.
This week's inciting incident began with Halperin humping the leg of one of
the worst human beings to ever disgrace this Land of the Free.
In which Halperin launches his latest "Hey, remember me? I used to be bigtime!"
moneygrab:
He also discusses his new platform, 2WAY. 2WAY is a live video platform that
allows participants to take part in informative and civil conversations
online with people from across the political spectrum.
Which, based on his history as a creepy sexpest, he probably should have
called "Live from his NewsMax cubicle stabbin' cabin, it's 3WAY With Mark
Halperin". It is an invitation? A threat?
Then, having lubed up his pundit street cred by taking a roll in the podcast
hay with an even bigger degenerate than himself, Halperin was ready to slip
back into the periphery of the Bright Lights of the Big City with...Morning
Joe.
Squint Scarborough prepped his unsuspecting viewers by telling them that he
had personally
"looked at a Democratic focus group last night as it was going on" and
it was "so fascinating on so many fronts".
A focus group led by...Mark Halperin over at the very important-sounding "The
Wide World of News" but which, it turns out, is just Halperin's shitty little
blog on Substack.
Some mornings the internet can be an unbearable hellscape, but bless my soul
if the reaction to Joey Joe Joe Junior trying to Halperin-roofie his audience
wasn't swift and clear.
Dozens and dozens of Tweets like this.
WTF. Morning Joe sneaks disgraced Mark Halperin onto the show to pull an
Ezra Klein, talk with a screenload of white people about Biden stepping
down (it's pure fantasy) and attacking Kamala Harris.
— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis)
February 21, 2024
Halperin had been a loyal housepet of the Morning Joe freakshow for years, and
ever since he got sent to the media sexpest farm upstate, Squint and the Meat
Puppet have tried over and over again to find a way to slip him back on the
air. One can only imagine the calls the Scarborough household gets at
all hours from an increasingly desperate Halperin reminding them for the
umpteenth time of what Great Friends they are, and How Much Value his creepy,
robotic, always-tilting-Right presence brought to their show even though he
didn't have to do it since he was Mr. Big Time Regular on
Meet the Press.
Also that the Iron Rule of the Beltway Media is that There is a Club, and that
if all of us clowns and grifters don't stick together and cover for each
other, The Club starts to lose cohesion and then we all go
down.
So, of you'd like to read a lot more about this awful person and the Beltway
media crusade to rehabilitate him, here's the link.
And here's a link for those of you who may want to know why 75 powerful Democratic operatives were not interviewed for this post.
-- Joe Scarborough described the alternative energy component of President Obama’s “all of the above” strategy to Fracking King Ed Rendell.
Don't forget to visit our website -- http://www.proleftpod.com
-- for all those sweet bells and whistles: there are links to donate
to our podcast work at that site, as well as links to our
swingin' Zazzle merch store, our respective blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Kittehs! and much
more. Many thanks once again to
@theologop for her invaluable support!
No Fair Remembering Stuff is a Professional Left podcast production and is brought to you by our wholly imaginary
"sponsors" and real listeners like you!
"Every conceivable standard of conduct, propriety, ethics and governance was
shattered by the Lincoln Project board."
-- Steve Schmidt, Lincoln Project co-founder.
Part of me thinks that, like Michelangelo contemplating a fresh slab of
marble, I should just circle the following Tweets for a year or two, looking
at every angle, contemplating them in all their perfection, and letting the
underlying truths emerge before picking up my hammer and chisel..
8/ the
@ProjectLincoln. Before the organization started
@TheRickWilson
set up a GO Fund me to make a movie 🎥 about Trump. He raised tens of
thousands of dollars 💵 and never made the movie. I asked him about it 500
times. No movie. I was not comfortable with this. It is a big
The reason
@ProjectLincoln
was able to extract millions from gullible liberals -- to say nothing of
the petty fraud and theft of Rick Wilson for this film -- is
@GoFundMe,
@JoyAnnReid,
@JoeNBC kept
endorsing and glorifying them, so liberals assumed they should keep giving
cash.
But I don't have a mountain demesne to which I can retreat because I'm
not a grifting douchebag who suckers credulous dopes out of their
cash.
Nor do have I a year or two to fiddlefuck around while I live off the interest
of the large pile of cash which the aforementioned credulous dopes have handed
me. There is no endowment or dark money war chest or internet
zillionaire benefactor. There are no cable news corporations who
incorporated me into their business plan and now invest millions in free
publicity every month to promote this little blog of mine.
That tip jar you see at the bottom of these posts? That's it.
But with that tip jar (and the permanently low profile this blog is going to
have until the day they drag me outta here) comes a certain freedom.
Here, I am at liberty to say pretty much whatever I want to say (within the
editorial limits I set for myself) knowing that, from time to time, I am going
to piss off a nontrivial percentage of my readers and my political
"allies".
Which is a fair bargain. And why, when I saw that not only was
grifting sleazebag (and former Liberal media darling) Steve Schmidt using
all of this words to vivisect the grifting sleazebags (and
former and current Liberal media darlings) of the Lincoln Project including
grifting sleazebag (and Liberal media darling) Rick Wilson...
...but that grifting Bolshi Freedom Troll (and former Liberal media
darling) Glenn Greenwald was using grifting sleazebag Steve Schmidt's words to
bludgeon the Lincoln Lads and the MSNBC whelping box that spawned them...
...well let's just say that I smiled.
Bitterly, but I smiled.
A lot.
I had all the feels, as the kids say, because this was the crossover "Why Do
Otherwise Intelligent People Keep Falling For This Shit" episode I never
expected.
And the fact that I had to go to a bottom-of-the-wingnut-barrel schlock shop
like Twitchy to retrieve this stuff (no link because fuck 'em) --
‘WORST con artists’: Glenn Greenwald takes a cue from Steve Schmidt
OUTING The Lincoln Project and DECIMATES Rick Wilson
-- because everyone involved in the story blocked me years ago for the high
crime of remembering their inconvenient pasts?
My smile just kept getting bigger.
You longtime readers can probably fill in the rest of the story, but for the
newer arrivals, our tale begins way back during the Obama administration, when
Bolshi Freedom Troll Glenn Greenwald was beloved by many on the Left and in the media because
Snowden and documents and Russia and "Obama is worse than Bush!" and it was in
all the papers, so you can read all about it somewhere else.
Or just rent the shitty movie.
Anyway, almost immediately after Greenwald became the World's Greatest
Journalist and before his internet sugar daddy cut him a check for a quarter
of a billion dollars, something about the many, bilious diatribes Greenwald
was cranking out on a daily basis began to stink.
Greenwald had a whole shelf
of ideological axes to grind and petty vengeances to enact, and now he had the
clout to do it. And he did. Insufferably. Incessantly.
He bent the truth with abandon and then broke it. Went to the Dudgeon Outlet Mall and bought the highest dudgeon he could find and used it at an indignation
decibel level that could knock satellites from their orbits to rail against
anyone who did not meet his standards of ideological and journalistic purity
-- standards which he himself freely and frequent broke.
And woe betide the poor fool who noticed and wrote about Spleenwald's lies and
hypocrisy.
Well dear readers, I was one of those benighted, woe betided fools, who saw
what was going on in plain sight, wrote about it, and got absolutely slagged
for it by my "allies".
Overnight I was no longer a Liberal in good
standing. I was a drooling, jackbooted fascist. A corporatist
shill. An "Obot". The blowback was swift, severe and
material...but I kept writing while a whole lot of much more connected Liberal
writers with steady gigs in the legacy media kept their heads down and said
little or nothing because it wasn't worth getting the Greenwald horde on their
asses.
Such are the perils and privileges of being an indy writer, beholden to
no one.
Then Glenn started heading off the deep, deep end in exactly the ways I
had predicted, and in a manner that his fan boys could no longer ignore.
Showing up on Fox News. Whoring for Tucker Carlson's White Power
Hour. Yucking it up with Laura Ingraham. And so forth. And
gradually his mob of avenging Purity Angels stopped showing up at my place and
calling me a Nazi.
Search the blog for "Greenwald" and you'll find all of it.
Not terribly much later, Donald Trump began his steady rise to power in the
Republican Party. And while
drooling, jackbooted, fascist "Obot"s crackpot Liberal
alarmists like me were warning that Trump was grotesque end product of decades
of Republican Southern Strategy politics come to claim his throne -- that he
was the GOP base made manifest -- all the savvy Conservative political
havers-of-opinions like David "It's Gonna Be Rubio!" Brooks and streetwise GOP
political arsonists-for-hire like Rick Wilson reassured the public that the
nomination and election of Donald Trump was utterly impossible.
Greetings, Donald Trump super fans. I am a member of the GOP
establishment. I’m writing to tell you that, no matter how much you wish
it otherwise, the Donald Trump candidacy is almost over.
Don’t be fooled by Trump’s double-digit lead in a new poll: He is not
going to win. He’s not going to win the primary. He’s not going to win the
general. He’s not going to win a third-party bid. Sure, he can damage the
GOP ticket badly enough to guarantee Hillary’s election, but he can’t win.
He’s too flawed, too liberal, too undisciplined and too afflicted with
verbal dysentery when even slightly provoked. He lacks the fundamental
presence and gravitas of a commander-in-chief.
Donald Trump is not running a real campaign. He is working the phones,
stirring the pot and using the media ecosystem to its fullest. Soon, the
bolder members of the field will follow Rick Perry, Marco Rubio and Jeb
Bush in making harder and more decisive strokes against him. Unlike Trump,
they’ll use real oppo, tested and targeted messages—ads built not just to
cut, but to kill. They’ll break his operational tempo, get inside his OODA
loop and turn his circus into a crispy ruin. It’s what real campaigns
do....
Even if it means (and it well may) that Hillary Clinton sits in the White
House, names 3 or 4 Supreme Court justices and lets Bill run around the
East Wing molesting the help, you’re going to teach the hated
Establishment a lesson by becoming Trump Super Fans, even if he runs as a
third party candidate and guarantees Her victory...
And just as they had been for decades about every other Republican atrocity,
all the Very Serious Conservative havers-of-opinions and all
the GOP political arsonists-turned-Never-Trumper and all the savvy
mainstream media political pundits were wrong, wrong, fuckity wrong about
Trump. They watched -- stunned and unbelieving -- as the racist base of
the Republican party that GOP leadership and media had so carefully cultivated
did exactly what we crackpot alarmist Liberals had been warning
for decades that they would eventually do: hoist a monster of their own making
up on their shoulders and carry him to the White House.
At this point in our story it is terribly important to step back and
contemplate how thoroughgoing the failure of institutional media and
Conservatives leadership had been up to the day Trump was elected. How
gleefully they had all jumped on the "But Her Emails" bash Hillary bandwagon
because they believed it was impossible for her to lose.
The point being that this was not the first catastrophic institutional failure
of the national media and Conservative elites. Far from it. In
fact, the savvy havers-of-opinions who were caught flat-footed by the rise of
Trump were pretty much the same savvy havers-of-opinions who were caught
flat-footed by the collapse of the Bush administration, and flat-footed by the
Fake Tea Party once they dropped their masks. Over and over again they
showed themselves to be so pot-committed to their reassuring fairy tales of
who they wished Republicans to be that they actively refused to see who
Republicans actually were until something big and scary kicked in their doors
and grabbed them by the throat.
And even then, it was unimaginable that they would turn for advice and council
to the one group of people who have actually been right about the Right all
along. The dirty hippies. Once again, the savvy havers-of-opinions
were so pot-committed to their campfire tall tales of Liberals as feckless
dopes and crackpot alarmists that it was institutionally inconceivable to them
that we dirty hippies might be able to explain how Trump came to
be.
It would also be institutionally dangerous to give the dirty hippies a
national platform because of our terrible habit of Remembering Inconvenient
Stuff.
It just wouldn't do to have some dirty hippie on a Sunday morning
Power Panel explaining that Trump was not a black swan event, but the
end-product of 50 years of cynical Republican political and media strategies
and a willingness on the part of a complicit national media --
including every sniveling fucker on this Power Panel -- to look
the other way or "Both Sides" every Republican act of depravity.
Nope, that wouldn't do. Wouldn't do at all. And since they control
the cameras, media corporations just cooked up a narrative that suited their
corporate interests. They bankrolled Trump voter whisperers like Salina
Zito to speak to them of "economic anxiety". They invented the entirely
new genre of journalistic fiction that one wag refers to as Magic Ruralism and dispatched their Zeitgeist
Action News vans to the interior of the American continent to interview Real
Murricans in diner after diner after diner after diner.
They also repurposed their existing assets.
Almost overnight Joe Scarborough went from being Trump Fluffer #1 to Mr. Trump
Truth Teller Guy #1 Who Had Never, Ever Been a Trump Supporter. We dirty
hippies bellowed our outrage as loudly as our tiny platforms would allow, but
when you're a celebrity (and you control the cameras) they let you do stuff
like that.
Almost overnight Bill Kristol went from being a smirking Conservative
ghoul and unreconstructed Iraq War pimp famous for being catastrophically
wrong about everything (Maddow on MSNBC in 2014), to rambling Uncle Billy, a valued MSNBC contributor who said mean
things about Trump, oh and by the way we're starting a new media company called
The Bulwark you should check it out!
Almost overnight Charlie Sykes went from being Wisconsin's Rush Limbaugh
to trusted MSNBC contributor and Man Who Is Perpetually Shocked At How The GOP
Completely Lost Its Mind Overnight, oh and by the way I'm part of a new media
company called The Bulwark you should check it out!
Almost overnight MSNBC became the preeminent Reputation Laundromat for outcast
Republicans and unemployed Conservative pundits, as long as they stuck
more-or-less to the same script. That the GOP had suddenly and
spontaneously lost its mind in 2016. That no one could have seen it
coming. And that none of the Conservatives who were now employees of
MSNBC were in any meaningful way responsible for what their party had
become.
If you were a Bush regime dead ender like Nicolle Wallace or Steve Schmidt, or
a friend of theirs like Matthew Dowd, or a fellow traveler like Michael
Steele, a place would be found for you in the budget and at the table.
And in this new order it wouldn't do to have some mouthy dirty hippie
confusing things by showing up with receipts.
Wouldn't do at all.
And once the dramatis personae had been cast and seats at the table
filled, the ritual among these very recently-former Republicans became a
contest to see who could outdo whom in calling Trump a shithead and calling
his "followers" racist morons without letting on that these were
the same racist morons that these recently-former Republicans had spent
their careers cultivating and exploiting.
A couple of people who excelled at calling Trump a shithead and calling his
"followers" racist morons were Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, who were
packaged and sold to cable news audiences as canny, street fighting campaign
veterans who knew how to win!win!win! despite the fact that their candidates
kept losing. Their candidates for president lost in 2008 and 2012, and
in the 2016 GOP primaries all of their show ponies got wiped out and glue
factoried.
But none of that mattered. Because despite the fact that Democrats
came roaring back in 2018, taking the House and the Senate thanks almost
entirely to Democratic women and minorities working their asses off and
organizing, the new mainstream media political fairy tale was that since
Democrats are irredeemably and
holistically bad at politics, and since Trump must be defeated, the republic was
dooooomed unless Democrats wisely stepped aside and let all of
these newly ascendant recently-former Republicans tell them how to run things.
These are the same recently-former Republicans who had by now -- surprise! --
colonized cable news and national newspapers, and built their own media
corporations like The Bulwark thanks to large infusions of cash from
wealthy benefactors and glowing saturation coverage by MSNBC. All of
which served only to amplify the message of
"Democrats have a sacred responsibility to the future of the nation to
immediately stop being Democrats and start aggressively courting
phantom independents and reasonable Republicans" until it just about drowned everything else out.
And so, having carefully prepared a rich, fertile loam of peril and the incessant negging of Democrats as
hapless fiddlefucks who don't know anything about the Real Murrica beyond Berkley
and Swope Park, a for-profit advertising agency
consisting of recently unemployed Republican shit-slingers, con men and
perverts was seeded, watered and fertilized by a cable teevee network which
was now dominated by the voices of recently-former Republicans.
And thus The Lincoln Project was born.
The Lincoln Lads specialized in shunting the vast sums of money they were raking in to
marketing and production companies owned by Lincoln Lad board members.
Out the other end of that pipeline came slick 30- and 60-second commercials
which called Donald Trump a lying scumbag and the "credulous boomer rubes" who
supported him stupid.
At this point I am obliged by Clio, the Muse of History to mention that at no point in
the entire lifespan of the Lincoln Project have any one any of the Lincoln Lads generated a original single idea or observation that Liberals hadn't already had and made over and
over and over again for decades. However, what we Liberal never had
during all of that time (and never will have) were cable news outlets and
major American newspapers willing to carry our often salty critiques of
the Republican party, every day, for years, for free.
We thundered and sermonized and parodied and discoursed as loudly as out tiny
platforms permitted. We said "fuck" a lot and spilled billions of pixels
over the course of decades but to no avail. We were (and are)
pariahs. Nobody wanted to hear it. Everyone wanted us alarmist
crackpots to STFU and go away.
Back-to-back, the Lincoln Project scores a glowing front-page article in
The New Yorker AND a their own segment on 60 minutes.
Just for
fun, let's take a look back at how Liberal bloggers were treated in 2006
for doing saying/exactly the same things.https://t.co/6VIdjny6d2
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico)
October 12, 2020
Then came Trump, and almost overnight MSNBC became the Recently Unemployed Bush
Regime Dead-Ender/Hate Radio talker/Weekly Standard Editor Full
Employment Project, which, in turn, gave birth to the Lincoln Project, which
MSNBC sold the shit out of as if they were dick pills or reverse mortgages.
There were endless glowing
interviews. Book promotions. Practically handing the mic over to
them week after week. Running their ads over and over again as "news".
For decades, the mainstream media Tone Police stomped the hell out of any
Liberal who tried to play hardball. Now, as we all watched in real time,
that same mainstream media fell all over itself giving the Lincoln Lads
tens of millions of dollars worth of free, flattering promotion.
Now put on your Imagination Hats and try to imagine a universe in which
actual Liberals
who had been right about the Right all along -- right about
the Right during all the years when the Lincoln Lads were being paid
princely sums to angry up the crazies in order to get Republican monsters
elected -- got that kind of sweetheart coverage from cable news and American
newspapers.
Imagine if...
...there were bidding wars over who would get to publish Digby's book, and endless
coverage of it in the media.
...instead of dying poor and in obscurity, the late Steve
Gilliard, who had Michael Steele's number from jump, had been given
the teevee pundit seat reserved for odious Mr. Steele.
...it was Eric Boehlert who had been chosen to host Meet the Press and it was Chuck Todd
who was hit by a train.
...it had been the Sexy Liberal crew
interviewed by 60 Minutes about their strategy for taking down Trump.
But none of that happened, and nothing like that will ever happen.
By contrast, the launch of the Lincoln Project was treated by the media as a cause for rejoicing on the scale somewhere between the development of the polio vaccine and the arrival
of the Mercury astronauts in New York City:
Finally, there is light at the end of this tunnel! Finally the
heroes we prayed for have come!
And the money poured into the Lincoln Lads' coffers. And out
came more ads calling Trump an asshole. And calling Susan Collins a
ditzy fuckface. And calling Lindsay Graham a gimp.
And in poured even more money.
And a few of us in what remains of the Liberal blogosphere digital world -- a very few of us -- started
looking around and asking, "What the actual fuck is going on?" Do you people know
who these goof are? What dregs of the racist Right they were palling
around in just five minutes ago? These guys built entire careers
calling you commie scum and electing ghouls to destroy everything you hold
dear. And these ads? They're not going to budge any Republican
votes. They're not going to "mess with Trump's head". All
they're doing is repeating back to you your own fantasies of rage and
revenge and getting right up in some fascist's grill and shouting "Fuck You!".
Jesus, Seka and Johnny "Wad" Holmes people, these ads are just political PornHub clips for Liberals. How
can you not see that?
But the people liked their political porn. They thirsted for it.
And so the cycle of porn, followed by free publicity for that porn on cable
news, followed by money continued. I wrote about it, over and over
again, in great detail, and the general reaction from my allies (such as it was) was that I
needed to shaddap and get with the program.
Being a good soldier I reassured my scolders and upbraiders that they had
nothing to worry about. That I had written on a wide variety of
subjects over the past 17 years, and however right I turned out to be in the
end, none of if had ever made the slightest difference and none of it had ever earned me one iota of credibility for the next time I started making
unpopular predictions. So they needn't be concerned that some nobody
blogger out here in the middle of Middle America pointing out that, say, the
Lincoln Project has a Rick Wilson problem will ruin everything and get Trump re-elected
Don't worry Susie, I have a long history of nobody listening to me, not
even my "allies" :-)
Until 4-5 years later.
And
then it's all "Holy shit, why didn't anyone warn us!"
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico)
June 18, 2020
But the doomsayers kept at it, warning me that jostling the Lincoln Lads'
elbows even slightly could mean the ruin of us all, and whether or not I was
actually right about the sleazoid character and histories of the Lincoln
Lads was beside the fucking point
because didn't I realize that American democracy was on the line! So if I wanted to remain a Liberal in good standing I had damn well
shut up and start clapping or Tinkerbell would be dead, dead, dead and it
would all be my fault!
Well, (he said, rounding the clubhouse turn) since I had already been
through this sort of thing with the Cult of Greenwald, this time around this "friendly fire" didn't really bug me. I kept right on writing and watched as all my initial predictions
about how these recently former Republican would leverage the existence of
Trump and the legitimate threat he posed into lucrative new media perches
for themselves --
Trump was sent by Satan to normalize Bill Kristol
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico)
August 16, 2017
-- from which they could virtually embargo any discussion of their own complicity
in building the GOP monster machine that made Trump possible in the first
place.
The Lincoln Lads moved fast, grabbing book deals extolling their electoral
genius (and calling Trump a shit head), setting themselves up as the sole arbiters of Who Shall Be Forgiven of Their Political Sins and Who Shall Be
Damned Forever ("Boom Times Are Coming to the Indulgence Factory") and
going international:
The Trump-taunting Lincoln Project Is Coming to Israel. But Not as
Liberal Saviors
Fresh from what fans consider their Never Trump triumph, the Lincoln
Project founders have a new mission: To help ditch Netanyahu. But you
might not like what happens next.
The media did its part as well. Before the smoke had cleared from the
2020 election, Brian Williams (Brian who?) was on the air throwing "Michael
Steele and the Lincoln Project" a victory parade.
Brian Williams is now telling America that Michael Steele and the
Lincoln Project should take a "well-deserved victory lap" for this
election.
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico)
November 5, 2020
Except, no.
Because for all their faunching and preening and all the unlimited and glowing free
media they were handed by virtually every media outlet, the Lincoln Project
amounted to nothing. Sure, they had built a
very profitable Liberal political porn site, but by
every electoral metric it was a failure. Trump's 2020 vote total was +10M higher than 2016, not
lower. Their main senatorial targets like Graham and Collins --
who the Lincoln Lads promised they would knock off without breaking a sweat -- both won handily and by much bigger margins than they had had in their
last elections.
If you needed a byline to tell you bitter truths, you could turn to the wise words of
Brother Charlie Pierce:
The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election
Never Trump conservatives are about as relevant to the actual election
results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party.
But credulous Liberals continued to defend these goofs because they had gotten in
too deep, which is what every con man bets on. Because they gave their
hearts and dollars away to grifters that their trusted Liberal teevee
network re-branded into heroes by putting them on the air practically every
day while banning any discussion of their sleazy pasts.
And what would it say about them -- about their faith in their own their
judgement -- if they were now forced to admit they were
not only wrong, but that they had been so easily scammed into carrying water
for and lining the pockets of a bunch of Republicans?
What would it say about them that the mouthy grouches who warned them
not to do it were right all along?
And yet, because reality doesn't care about our feelings, and because
beneath its glowing mainstream media façade, the Lincoln Project has
always been a rat's nest of cynical, profit-driven and just plain skeevy
Republican operatives, it came as no surprise to this tired, old blogger
that when it fell apart, it fell apart really fast.
First came the revelations of scandal. Then the attempts to cover up
the scandals and smear anyone who spoke out of school. Then the mass
resignations. And, of course, there was all of that grifting.
All of which
I documented here as it was happening.
And now, as foretold by your host (albeit through a glass and darkly) two
years ago --
I look forward to Matt Damon playing Rick Wilson and Ben Affleck
playing Steve Schmidt in an 8-part, Lincoln Project funded Showtime
series called "Saviors of the Republic".
— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico)
October 27, 2020
-- ShowTime has indeed completed and is releasing a five-part documentary
about the collapse of the Lincoln Project.
Which, in turn, has
prompted Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt to leap into his own hīnayāna
and (as I said miles and miles ago at the beginning of this very long
post) use all of this words to paddle the hell away from the Lincoln Lads as fast as he
can.
Which, along with the documentary itself, is now getting all kinds of play
in all kinds of places:
Lincoln Project's Steve Schmidt blasts co-founders as unethical,
suggests disgraced group should disband
Schmidt says Showtime documentary on Lincoln Project shows 'some of
the most despicable and unethical behavior'
So how in the world did this dirty commie nobody Liberal blogger from the
middle of nowhere with no friends inside the media draw such an accurate
bead on the true nature of the Lincoln Lads from the start...
...while every voice in the mainstream media was singing paeans to them
and virtually all of my "allies" were telling me to shut up and sit down?
Well, let's answer that question by rephrasing it like this: How in the world could I have predicted that building a Super PAC out of
the timbers of old GOP pirate ships, selling it to a credulous public with tens of millions of
dollars worth of free publicity and enlisting "liberal" MSNBC to endorse
it, and then crewing it with Republican brigands, mercenaries.
marauders and cut-throats would lead to conflict, scheming, plunder and
betrayal?
Golly, I dunno. I guess I'm just a fooking genius. Fooking
psychic!
Either that, or maybe I just understood what was likely to happen when a
bunch of Republican mercenaries and con men were handed the keys to the
media, while at the same time credulous Liberal were told over and over
again by that same media that unless these grifters were given their
unswerving support democracy was doomed.
Understood it in the same way one can understand a simple, well-known chemical reaction. The
same way any high school chemistry teacher can tell you what will happen
if you drop metallic sodium into water.
*Note: I left this in "draft" a couple of years ago and found it while I was looking for something else. Seems like as good a time as any to publish it.
Five years ago, Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough was absolutely, God damn sure of one thing.
"Radicalism" was gonna ruin the two-party duopoly!
Why radicalism will ruin parties’ duopoly
And what was the specific "radicalism" that was going to sink the two-party duopoly?
If you need any more evidence that Washington is radicalized and disconnected from Americans, look no further than the debate over how to limit gun murders.
... But since the radical wing of an interest group opposes what almost every American supports, this small group of extremists could rule the day.
And what in the wide world of sport fishing does the fact that the NRA has GOP's yam sacks in a vise have to do with the K'rupt Duopoly?
Well kids, that is one of those question which, in Mr. Scarborough's social circle, polite people never raise. Instead, over and over again, year after year from every corner of the mainstream media, this was the boilerplate answer we got in response to every single Republican atrocity.
It is pathetic and one more reason why I believe Americans will soon begin rising up in protest against the major political parties and the extremism and partisanship they now promote.
Five years ago, while every sane Liberal in America was sounding the alarm that the greatest threat to American democracy was the fact that Joe Scarborough's Republican party was a raving shitpile of bigots and imbeciles, Mr. Scarborough would hear none of it. According to him, clearly the US debt was the biggest single problem in the known Universe.
Voters in gerrymandered districts love hearing their member of Congress ranting on about global warming, gay rights or Benghazi. And while these issues are all worthy of Washington's attention, they do not carry with them the same urgency as the coming crisis that will ruin the economic lives of Americans whether they are rich or poor, black or white, straight or gay.
Mr. Scarborough chose this battlefield because, by simply ignoring the inconvenient fact George W. Bush inherited a large and growing budget surplus from Bill Clinton, Mr. Scarborough could once again boldly laid the blame for US debt on his new favorite boogieman
Both Sides!
U.S. debt exploded $6 trillion under President Barack Obama in his first term. America's debt went up that same amount over George W. Bush's two terms. Because of Bush and Obama's $12 trillion bill to younger Americans, basic budget math tells us that the time for action has long passed. Consider these sobering facts...
The whole debt debate is bullshit for a number of reasons which are a different subject for a different day, but what is hilarious here is how flagrantly Mr. Scarborough omits any mention of the diametrically contrasting reasons why debt went up under Dubya (wildly irresponsible tax cuts for people like Joe Scarborough, an unpaid-for Medicare benefits and two treasury-plundering wars fought on credit) and Obama (saving the global economy from complete collapse thanks the Dubya's Great Recession.). As if going into debt to send your kid to college was exactly the same thing as going into debt to buy a big pile of cocaine because math!
These were glaring contradictions that a fraud like Mr. Scarborough can never explain so, over and over again, he simply pretended they did not exist.
Trickle-down liberalism and a decade of debt
By JOE SCARBOROUGH 01/27/2013 08:16 PM EST
Big Government Republicanism sunk America $11 trillion in debt. Big Government Liberalism took that bad situation and made it worse...
So five years ago we had an openly-racist, deeply unhinged Republican Party which had long since purged itself of any interest in factual reality and was holding auditions for the role of strutting demagogue who would give voice to their openly-racist, deeply unhinged values...
...band of vituperative, foul -mouthed bloggers screaming into an uncaring mainstream abyss that this was, in fact, the most serious existential threat facing our country...
...and mainstream media goofs like Mr. Scarborough who used their vast and influential corporate media platforms to relentlessly preach that the openly-racist, deeply unhinged base of the GOP was just an irrelevant fringe group. A round error. White noise. And that the real problem was the Debt and the Terrible K'Rupt Duopoly! In this cause, Mr. Scarborough enlisted no less that the Most Ubiquitous and Respected Conservative Public Intellectual in the solar system:
For GOP, 2 is better than 1
By JOE SCARBOROUGH 01/29/2013 06:55 PM EST
David Brooks makes a modest proposal in today's New York Times. The moderate Republican columnist calls for a split in the Republican Party. As Brooks explains it, "The second GOP would tackle both problems at once. It would be filled with people who recoiled at President Obama’s second Inaugural Address because of its excessive faith in centralized power, but who don’t share the absolute antigovernment story of the current GOP."...
And as to that the openly-racist, deeply unhinged base of the GOP?
Any Republican in Washington, D.C. that questions the wisdom of Brooks' proposal should look directly south to Virginia to see just how hopelessly divided the GOP has become. The party's potential nominee for governor is an unyielding hardliner who complained over the weekend that conservative legal legend Antonin Scalia is too liberal for his tastes. Previously, Ken Cuccinelli had been caught on tape telling voters that he was considering not getting his youngest child a Social Security number because "that's how the government tracks you." Maybe this nonsense works in Virginia primaries in off years, but this kind of stridency has twice cost the Republican Party a state that it cannot afford to lose in presidential contests if it ever wants to return to the White House.
And just two years later, what became of this brilliant mainstream media plan of simultaneously denying the existence of an openly-racist, deeply unhinged base of the GOP which was demanding their own, private Godzilla to lay waste to the entire government...
...while telling that non-existent, openly-racist, deeply unhinged GOP base over and over again that, yes, the entire government is uniformly rotten, that the whole K'rupt Duopoly needed to be torn down, and that Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio were just the men for the job?
Turned out pretty much exactly like those degenerate Libtards had been predicted.
And what lessons has Mr. Scarborough learned from this?
Because like every other Republican he lies about the past.
Constantly.
Because he is always the hero of the story and the story is always if only everyone had listened to me... (from yesterday)
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I warned Republicans for five years that this guy was not conservative. I said it repeatedly. I said that he hated Republicans, he hated conservatives, he wasn't conservative, that he was going to spend this country into debt. We have had the biggest deficits ever under Donald Trump and this Republican Party. We have had the biggest national debt ever under Donald Trump and this Republican party. We have had the biggest pork-barrel spending budgets every single year under Donald Trump and this Republican Party. We have had a president who has tried to undermine all the good things that Republicans and Democrats alike have done as it pertains to NATO, as it pertains to spreading democracy across Europe, protecting democratic countries. And here we have a president that's radical. He spins radically. He has radical foreign policy designs. He has a radical foreign policy that embraces dictators and tyrants, and now you look at what he is doing here in the United States constitutionally...
He goes on and on like that, because why stop monologuing about your awesome and prophetic heroism when you have your own teevee show?
And that's the key.
Generally, I would never want to deny every mother's son and daughter the right to make up whatever fanciful origin stories about their own awesomeness that pleases them. After all, if the foma of life-- the harmless untruths "that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy" -- can make our short time on this Earth a little easier to bear, who am I to take away the harmless myth-making about being born a lion that many a mouse may need to make it through the day?
But the lies men like Scarborough tell every day are a different matter entirely, because the lies they tell are not harmless. They are huge and toxic and because men like Scarborough are given enormous media platforms by powerful corporations, those huge, toxic lies are pounded into our national vocabulary day after day after day until they become part of the accepted history of the United States.
And what of those who say otherwise? Those who remember it otherwise? Those who don't remember Joe Scarborough bravely racing through every Middlesex village and farm five years ago warning that Trump was a monster, but instead remember four years ago when Scarborough gathered his rogues gallery of goobers and sycophants including and Michael Steele and Mark Halperin and (by proxy) Bill Kristol to fawn over Trump's awesomeness?
Well it sure seems to these tired eyes that no matter how loudly those contrarians shout or how many receipts they bring to the party, they will always be drowned out by the sound of corporate media chainsaws being taken to the green lumber of recent history as yet another cohort of Republican scoundrels builds themselves yet another armada of lifeboats on which they can safely sail away from yet another catastrophe of their own making.
Yes, kiddies, I haz seen The Future of cable teevee news! And it looks a lot like four life-long, highly-paid Republican goons and a couple of neutered Liberals, sitting in a drum circle promoting Rick Wilson's latest book and lamenting that, somehow, while no one was looking, their Republican Party filled up with...Republicans!
Oh Lordy! Why didn't someone warn them!
From Morning Joe this AM:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Since we have four former Republicans here, you will hear from our good friend Charlie Pierce that the party was always corrupt, it was always rotten, it was always racist. You are now reaping what you sow. There are times when I have been going, wait a second, were the liberals right? Were the liberals that said GOP was racist and -- all the things that I have been my entire life, Evangelical, Southern Baptist, a proud Southerner, you just go down the list, right now you look at it and, 95% of the people who voted for me when I was running a very different platform, they are all Trump supporters now.
RICK WILSON: I think that Trump catalyzed things that --
SCARBOROUGH: I used to mock the press for always going for the whacko early in the process. You do that because this reinforces what you believe about Republicans. They will never make it. I wrote a column called "Crazy Never Wins" in 2012. We usually got the Mitt Romney, Bob Dole.
WILSON: And George HW Bush. The moderating forces inside the party, the old three-legged stool of foreign policy conservatives, social conservatives, and fiscal conservatives, that's gone now. The entire party is dedicated to being...
SCARBOROUGH: When did it happen?
WILSON: I think we went off the rails in 2010. The 'owning the libs' portion of the Republican Party and 'let's be transgressive' -- Ted Cruz said I would rather have 35 real conservatives than the majority.
SCARBOROUGH: They're not real conservatives.
Of course, once Reality finally got her hands fully around the throats of the Never Trumpers (who were swearing by Reagan and Jesus Christ just a few years ago that there was nothing was wrong with their party) and throttled them out to the point where they would grudgingly admit that their party is rotten to the core, the Most Important Thing became controlling any discussion of the exact moment when their party lost its mind. Picking a date on the calendar that would both acknowledge the self-evident truth that the GOP is a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles...while more or less exonerating them personally of any responsibility for the problem.
All while pimping Rick Wilson's book.
So this morning, after gassing on and ruminating and drying each others tears, a panel of four Republicans eagerly allowed Rick Wilson to lie about the history of their Republican Party.
WILSON: I think we went off the rails in 2010. The 'owning the libs' portion of the Republican Party and 'let's be transgressive' -- ted Cruz said I would rather have 35 real conservatives than the majority.
That Gingrich never happened.
And Limbaugh/Hate Radio never happened.
And Fox News never happened.
And Tom Delay never happened.
And the entire Dubya administration never happened.
And Rick Wilson's own despicable contributions to the debasement of his party never happened:
Wilson has plenty of experience. In 2002, he made a commercial that criticized Democratic Senator Max Cleland, who had lost three limbs in Vietnam, while showing images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. In 2008, Wilson made ads attacking Barack Obama by showing the incendiary statements of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. “I wanted to scare the living shit out of white people in Pennsylvania and Ohio,” Wilson said. “Today, they would all be Trump voters, I’m sure.”
In fact, the entire history of the modern Republican Party never happened. Instead, someone threw a magic, invisible switch in 2010 that spontaneously converted Rick Wilson's party from a team of sober, Constitution-loving, Burke-quoting fiscal conservative normals into a raving shitpile of bigots and imbeciles.
Which is what makes this quote from Rick Wilson (extracted from one of his Tweets, which the Huffington Post bundled together and padded out into an entire article) so utterly perfect:
It is always the Year Zero; memory and consistency is the enemy of loyalty in the Trump world.
It also must amuse the hell out of Stuart Stevens -- the "most successful Republican political operative of his generation" -- who says quite bluntly in his upcoming book that the GOP has, in fact, been rotten to the core for decades.
And from the opposite end of the spectrum, I'd like to think this thoroughly bumfuzzles Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual David Brooks who famously swore in 2014 that his Republican Party was completely over it's scary "Sarah Palin" phase and was back to being 1000% awesome!
All of which is to say these fuckers can't even get their lies straight among themselves.
But even if what Rick Wilson said were true, that means he went right on happily collecting blood money from a party he knew was a raving shitpile of racism and madness for six more years -- right up until Rubio and Cruz were crushed by Trump in the Republican primaries in 2016.
And now Rick Wilson making the rounds insisting that stoopid Liberals like us -- who have been right about the Right all along -- need to shut up, step aside let him tell us how to win presidential elections.
Well, when it comes to presidential elections, let's remember that Rick lost in 2008.
Lost bigly.
And lost again in 2012.
And lost again in 2016. I mean, if even half of Rick Wilson's claims of nearly omnipotent electoral wizardry are true, wouldn't President Rubio or President Cruz be sailing to a slam-dunk re-election with a comfortable 60% approval rating right about now?
More to the point, if even one-quarter of their claims of nearly omnipotent electoral wizardry are true, why the hell haven't Rick Wilson, Tom Nichols and the rest of the Twelve Angry Kibitzers decamped themselves to Massachusetts to pour all their energies into Bill Weld's campaign?
After all, Bill Weld doesn't need reverse-engineering. He already checks pretty much every one of the Never Trumper's ideological boxes. And he's a decent man. And he's running an actual campaign that could use all the help in can get. So if the Never Trumpers are really capable of divining the deepest desires of some vast-but-invisible-but-apparently-decisive army of "Real" Republicans, Sensible Centrists and Noble Independents, why aren't they putting their towering electoral genius to work drawing them into the Party of Lincoln and destroying Donald Trump before the GOP hands him the nomination again?
Jesus, just imagine the rewards and accolades that would shower down upon them for bringing down the Trump administration and sweeping Bill Weld to power! Just imagine how many helpings of steaming, hot crow Libtards like me would have to eat while we watch Bill Weld take the oath of office in January of 2021?
But of course, we all know the real reason: because the GOP that Rick Wilson and Tom Nichols and Elise Jordan and Joe Scarborough created really is nothing more than a raving shitpile of bigots and imbeciles. Because in Donald Trump, that raving shitpile of bigots and imbeciles found the perfect embodiment of the lies and bigotry and paranoia that a generation of relentless conditioning by Fox New and Hate Radio and paid goons like Rick Wilson have trained them to accept as gospel.
Which is also why advice from goons like Wilson is worse than useless. Because Wilson's magic tricks -- his style of politics -- only worked with the Republican Party because decades Gingrich/Limbaugh/Fox News lobotomizing had created a racist meathead voting base so ignorant, racist and drunk with rage that they were easy for someone like Wilson to exploit.
So then what is Rick Wilson's game?
Simple.
If Democrats take back the White House in 2020, Rick Wilson will make the rounds of cable teevee claiming that he nearly single-handedly dragged the feckless Democrats over the finish line.
If Democrats lose in 2020, Rick Wilson will make the rounds of cable teevee claiming that the feckless Democrats lost because they refused to take his advice.
It'll be win-win for Rick, while real Liberals who have actually been right about the Right all along will be nowhere to be found.
And for the record, this --
SCARBOROUGH: They're not real conservatives.
-- is what makes it art.
UPDATE: Without changing suit or tie, Rick Wilson skittered across town so that CNN could give him a nice, soothing, hot oil massage and help him sell his book. Because this is the future of media:
GOP strategist @TheRickWilson believes if Trump wins the election in 2020, there will be a political family dynasty to follow because "The Republican party as we knew it is dead. It's not about lower taxes or individual liberty... it's now about worshipping Donald Trump." pic.twitter.com/RhjIVlqVIb
