The Midterms...Now and 20 Years Ago

If you don't know what "Harold...call me" signified in 2006, ask your older sibling.

20 years ago, the Republican party was every bit as racist as they are today.  Leadership just hid it better and, with the assistance of the legacy media, managed to get away with it.  Along with all the other poisonous tools in the GOP toolbox -- Conservative fundamentalism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-choice, anti-civil rights and so on -- racism won elections for terrible people with terrible ideas.  Or, to put it more clearly, without all the hate and paranoia that Conservative media kept whipping up on the Right, not only could Republicans never win another election, there was a decent chance in some places they'd fall to third place behind a Green candidate, or a Libertarian candidate, or an out-and-proud racist.

See, the Republican party was and is every bit a coalition party -- a "Big Tent" party -- as the Democrats, but the Republican coalition is made up of the worst people in America, held together by a common, generalized hatred of the government (except when they run it), a whole assload of whiny grievances, and anything that smacks of "the Left".  And "the Left" is anyone Hate Radio and Fox News tells them is "the Left" on any given day.

That mob of bigots and imbeciles is what Republicans seeking higher office have to work with, which is why they spent huge amounts of cash hiring scumbags like Rick Wilson.  To do the filthy job of appealing to the mob by proxy so as not to get their hands dirty.  And the key to this shell game was to keep the bigots and imbeciles corralled within the Fox News/Hate Radio ecosystem (and never let them within a mile of the legacy media) while trotting the candidate out on safe spaces like Meet the Press or Face the Nation where they could mouth all the usual platitudes and never get any push-back.  

In 2006, the problems began when the streams got crossed, because back then it was still possible for Democrats to run on calling out Republican racism and corruption when it broke into the open --

-- and have that put the Republican candidate on the back foot for the rest of the campaign.

That, and this... (VoteVets ad):

Democrats could run on being unabashedly in favor of medical science:

And the premier Hate Radio scumbag (and de facto leader of the Republican Party) reacted exactly as you would expect:

In Purple-but-trending-Red-fast Montana, Democrat Jon Tester could squeak out a narrow victory over incumbent Republican Senator Conrad Burns by a margin of 0.87%, or 3,562 votes out of 406,505 cast.  Tester ran as "that neighbor you trust even if your politics are different" and was aided by the wider "Blue Wave" trend across the country.  

Then along came Barack Obama, and the bigots and imbeciles were no longer content to sit in the cheap seats, hoping that whatever mug the party bosses offered them would make good on all the promises that Hate Radio was making.  

They kicked down the doors and came storming out into the public square, and the reaction from the legacy media was to squeeze their eyes shut even harder and pretend that none of this was what it very much was.

First, they rolled out their oldest and most reliable deflection tactic: Both Sides Do It.  What follows are from the July 25, 2010 Meet the Press transcript, interspersed with some remarks of my own made at the time.

DAVID BROOKS: So we were trained in a certain way. A different sort of media, squabble culture, has come up on the left and the right, which, which decides their--they build audience by destroying other people. They don't know anything about policy, they don't care about government, they just want that squabble.

See! See! The Right AND the Left do it! 

The Right AND the Left “don't know anything about policy". The Right AND the Left 

“don't care about government”.

Not one statistic.

Not one correlation.

Not one fact.

Not one blurry security camera video of what might have been the shadow cast by a fact.

Not one artist's sketch of what some witnesses believe a fact might look like.

Not one of fact's neighbors telling the evening news that "Fact was kind of a loner who kept pretty much to himself."

Nothing.

To his credit, E.J. Dionne tried hard to push back:

DIONNE: Look, there is a concerted conservative campaign on part of the movement, a minority of the movement…to use race to split people. Glenn Beck says Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white people." J. Christian Adams, a Republican activist pushing this new Black Panthers story, says the Obama Justice Department is motivated by a "lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law." Now, there are people playing with this racial politics out there. I am not saying, the NAACP certainly isn't saying that this is the whole conservative movement…or most of the conservative movement or most of the tea party. But it's a part of this strategy, and people should condemn it.

Got that? Dionne shows up with actual, representative quotes from real Conservative leaders with real media and electoral power.

So how will that clear, well-documented and devastating argument be rebutted by America's Most Reasonable of Conservatives? He who took the trouble to enunciate “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check it Out” as his Golden Journalistic Rule just moments ago?

Exactly how you'd think:

BROOKS: There are liberals who call conservatives racist as a matter of tactics, too.

Really? Who? Name some. Quote some.

Nothing.  Just...both sides.

Then comes deflector tactic number two:  the anecdotal and highly-suspect "eyewitness account".

BROOKS: Listen, I was out jogging. You wouldn't know it to look at me. I was out jogging in the mall. I was at a tea party rally, tea party rally. Also there was a group called the back--Black Family Reunion, celebration of African-American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle, sitting at the same table, eating, watching concerts together. Among most of those people there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on a, on a warm Sunday afternoon.

Got that? David Fucking Brooks -- easily the most ubiquitous "Reasonable" Conservative spokesman in America -- absolutely will not touch that question [of racism in Republican politics] with a 10-foot Gallup Poll. Instead, he airily asserts that, somehow, Glenn Beck and J. Christian Adams don’t methodically play on the fear, racism and paranoia of millions of Pig People for personal and partisan gain...because he saw some people getting along on the Mall in D.C. once.

Thus ends our brief excursion to 2010 and the wild lengths the legacy media was willing to go to to pretend the GOP was something which it very much was not.

So what changed? Meet the Press is still garbage. Brooks and his dozens of imitators are still overpaid hacks peddling Both Sides claptrap.  Hate Radio and Fox News are still what they always were.  So what changed?

What changed was the Republican party's approach to the concept of "shame".  

Conservatism was built on an ethos of never, ever apologizing for anything.   As I've mentioned many times on this blog, on the Right, the only acceptable way to admit you were wrong is to cop to not being conservative enough.  Republican policies that go horrendously awry are never the problem -- the  problem is always that they weren't implemented aggressively enough.  Remember, Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.  

And inevitably, this Conservative culture of ignorant, belligerent certitude ran smack into Republican policies and rhetoric for which any decent human being should feel ashamed.  So, faced with a choice between chucking the policies and the hateful, racist rhetoric, or cauterizing their conscience and killing any sense of shame...the base, in their millions, chose the latter.

They had already been thoroughly humiliated when their fanatical allegiance to George W. Bush very publicly blew up in their faces.  Pile on top of that the intolerable existence of a Black Democrat in the White House and they were ready to follow any demagogue, no matter how shitty and corrupt he may be, to the ends of the Earth as long as he promised them they would not only never again have to be ashamed of the cowardly racist morons that they were, but under his regime, their bigotry and stupidity would be celebrated so hard that the Liberal tears would never end.  

And that is how +70 million Americans came to finally, happily divest themselves of the virtues that make for a decent human being.

And since that was their choice -- and we believe in personal choice -- in doing so they have relieved us of any obligation to treat them as decent human beings.  

They have worked hard over the course of many decades to make themselves contemptible.  

The least we can do is honor their decision by treating them with contempt.  

Burn The Lifeboats

Can't Stop Won't Stop

This was a lead story in The New York Times today.

The short answer, which is actually rather long, is "No".

This is roughly the 12,258th "think piece" on progressive outsiders winning a few Democratic primaries.  It's nearing the "But Her Emails" saturation point. And these articles tend to come either in one of two flavors.  

First, Dire!Warnings! cursing Democrats for risking dooming us all by not becoming GOP Lite in order to chase the votes of disaffected Republicans.  These articles tend to come from (small wonder) recently-former Republicans whose "advice" to Democrats has always been -- rain or shine -- to keep moving rightward, ever-rightward -- in pursuit of an imaginary Center which is always, somehow, slipping over the horizon.  

Second, there are the breathless articles touting how a few members of the Democratic majority (do the math) are fighting back hard against a small number of progressives with whom they have no intention of sharing even a small corner of the Democrat's Big Tent.  Mind you, they had no fucking problem when it came to sharing our Big Tent with ghouls like Liz Cheney who spent their entire career slandering Democrats in the most monstrous language imaginable...but us New Deal Democrats get nothing but the stink-eye and a boot in the ass from the gatekeepers who own the velvet ropes. 

From The New York  Times, August 6, 2026:

Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left

One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.

The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful defeat of the year.

Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism. 

It will not shock you to learn that Third Way gets its money from Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech as well as outfits such as ExxonMobil and various health insurance companies.  All the usual suspects who would rather see a MAGA flag flying over this country forever than share the Democratic Party with actual progressives.

Now, it is rumored that this “Better Dead than Al-Sayed” gang of Regressives is led by a shadowy figure known only as “David Fucking Brooks”.  And two Fridays ago Mr. Brooks left his Bethesda Maryland compound just long enough to appear on the PBS News Hour where, practically in tears, he said this.

Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.

That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which the party is moving further and further away from the center, and therefore…

At which point, Brooks co-panelist, Jonathan Capehart, reached his limit of politely tolerating this old fraud's endless bullshit and interrupted him with:

I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket argument that the Democratic Party is running far left. 

That was the signal for the host – Amna Nawaz – to do the PBS thing of quickly moving on to the next topic at the slightest sign of conflict.

However, since I do not abide by PBS rules, I will just add that it is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at this moment".  

It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.

And of course Third Way is not a solo act. They have plenty of fellow travelers who are horrified that a few Democratic candidates have won their primaries in ways that Third Way, LLC does not approve of.  

From The Washington Post, June 3rd, 2026:

Centrist Democrats launch new pledge: ‘We are capitalist, not socialist’

Two Democrats in Congress who flipped Republican-held seats in 2024 are launching a pledge for their party’s candidates they hope will act as a rallying cry for centrists, calling for a “politics of persuasion over purity” and declaring that “we are capitalist, not socialist.”

The pledge is a direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt as democratic socialists such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) capture the party’s energy and activism.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Adam Gray (D-California) said they will unveil the pledge Wednesday afternoon at the center-left conference WelcomeFest, and hope to get candidates up and down the ballot to join them in signing it. 

From Common Dreams, February 9th, 2026:

‘One More Billionaire Front Group’: Centrist Dems Mocked Over New Initiative Led by Corporate Lobbyist

In fact, establishment panic over even mildly social-democratic ideas predates the current cycle by years.

From In These Times, seven years ago,  February 7, 2019:

Why Is the Political Establishment So Afraid of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal?

So, the short answer is "No".

The longer answer -- the reason why the answer is "No" -- is uglier and deeply embarrassing to the legacy media, which is why you will never hear them speak of it.  Because it has to do with what the "Tea Party" actually was.

For several years I bored you all silly with post after post after post about how the Tea Party was not some new, insurgent outsider group who were storming the barricades of the moribund Republican party.  That they were the Republican party: the same ignorant, racist, shoutycrackers Republican base they'd always been, but now that the Bush administration had shit the bed hard enough to crack the Earth's mantle, they needed their own, incredibly inconvenient past to go away so they could get on with the important work of having a full-on, eight-year-long, screaming mental breakdown over the election of a Black man as president.

And they accomplished this by A) Putting on stupid hats, waving Gadsden flags, and swearing that they'd never even heard of George W. Bush and, B) Getting the legacy media to go along with this massive fraud, which the legacy media was only too eager to do, given their own despicable complicity with the various crimes and treasons of the Bush administration.

And it worked.  And, as is our eternal fate, the only people willing to straight-up call bullshit on the whole scam were us dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically not a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam.  Ed Kilgore wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and E.J. Dionne. There was also this July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:

The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

No, no, no!  Definitely could not say that because that would violate the post-Dubya Generally Accepted Beltway Narrative that all problem are caused by "the extremes on Both Sides" and in the middle there is a "vital Center" full of millions of political virgins who had been moved by the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.

And to this very day, that lie continues to be one of those "Zombie lies", which everyone sorta knows is nonsense -- like Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves -- but has so completely passed into the realm of myth that the legacy media keeps right on pretending that it was actually true.  

In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth was so secure that by 2016 Joe Scarborough could finally come right out and say of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all knew it  and know with perfect certainty that there would be consequences (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

And that's the longer answer.  The Democrats are not facing their own "Tea Party" moment because There. Was. No. Tea. Party.  There was just the Bush-Off Machine goin' like 60 to rebrand the Republican base.  

What corporate Democrats are facing are ... New Deal Democrats.  People who revere FDR as the man who crushed fascism, and whose programs built the Middle Class, strengthened the union movement and helped insure that old age and poverty weren't a death sentence.   

People who remember that FDR was called a commie by the Republican party and the Republican media every inch of the way.

People who look at the mess the establishment has made of this country and think the Middle Class could used some help, the aged, infirm and poor could use some help, that good health care should be affordable, that unions are a good thing, that robber barons and Republican looters are bleeding us dry and, most importantly, for any of that to happen, fascism in America must be discredited and destroyed, root and branch.  

I Am The Liberal Media!

They're The Same Picture

Burn The Lifeboats

Garbage In...

...Garbage Out.

It's not that hard to figure out.  

However, what remains a taboo subject everywhere except out here in disreputable wilds of whatever is left of the Liberal blogosphere is how exactly the Republican base came to be such a aggregation of unsalvageable garbage people that they would nominate this degenerate monster for president three times and elect him twice.  

How is it that no one but us dirty hippies noticed or cared about the monstrous cancer that was growing in plain sight at the heart of the GOP until it was far too late to stop it?

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 892: She Told Us So

"History is a vast early warning system."  -- Norman Cousins

Links:  

• 
  

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

The Tea Party at 12: No Bands Playing, No Flags Flying

You probably didn't notice, but last week was the 12th anniversary of the creation of the Fake Tea Party. And the reason you may not have noticed is because almost no one did. There was no wall-to-wall coverage on Fox like that which attended its birth. No news reports. No breathless retrospectives. No "Where are they now?" docudramas. Beyond Bill Scher doing yeoman's work to warn that the forces that powered the Fake Tea Party were are still very much with us --

The Tea Party Began 12 Years Ago. What’s Changed—and What Hasn’t.

CNBC’s Rick Santelli started it all by attacking Obama and a rescue plan that he called a subsidy for “losers.” Biden should be ready for the next Santelli.

-- the Fake Tea Party is just another weed-choked political grave in the Potter's Field of forgotten Republican scams.

Well, mostly.

Over at the Never Trump Revisionism Factory we find Matt Lewis using the corpse of the Fake Tea Party to retcon himself into the now-lucrative pantheon of Republicans who "have long argued" yadda yadda and something something warned years ago...

It’s the Tea Party Anniversary. Here’s Why I’m Not Celebrating.

The famous “Santelli rant” happened 12 years ago last week. I mark it out of sadness. It led us straight to MAGA-land.

...

While many of my Never Trump conservative brethren still see this movement as a largely positive phenomenon, I have long argued that there was a straight line from the Tea Party to MAGA. For sane conservatives, this was the beginning of the end...

Which may have been the impetus for Charlie Sykes to inviting him onto The Bulwark podcast where they could commiserate over various things.  

Like how there was a time, as recently as 2016, when CPAC might have been a little goofy, but was still a place where decent, God-fearin' folk could walk unmolested in the streets.  

And how there was a time when Matt Schlapp was a mensch.  

And how there was a time when Rush Limbaugh was fun and irreverent and a Man of Ideas.

And how they were both got hip to the fact that something hinky was going on with the Fake Tea Party before it was cool.

Charlie Sykes:  The other thing that happened was the way the grifters settled in.  And this is something else on the Right, uh, because...

Because you and every other Conservative Hate Radio goober spent decades corralling and hand-feeding claptrap to millions of Republican bigots and imbeciles?  Building an army of chumps who would be easy pickings for every thimble-rigger, flim-flammer and Trump on the Right?

Nope.

Sykes:  ...because I remember very early on um, when, y'know, pre-Trump I kept asking the question, "Who exactly is the Tea Party? Who's speaking for the Tea Party?"  Because I have all these groups popping up the claim that "We are the Tea Party" or "We are the Tea Party" and, um, y'know who... who basically gave you the the franchise and many of them were extremely strange.  And then of course you just had the people who were just raising money off of it -- using the outrage machine to raise as much money as possible.  So there's, y'know part of the story of... of the Right has just been the way that so much of these things have been taken over by... by the grifters and the people who are looking for the clicks and the contributions.

It either never dawns on Charlie or he is sunk too deeply in denial to admit that the reason the Right is riddled with "grifters and the people who are looking for the clicks and the contributions" is because manufacturing malleable chumps is what the entire Conservative enterprise has been all about all along -- one very long, very well-funded project aimed at dumbing down and angrying up the Republican base enough so that they would consistently vote against their own interests and instead make common cause with the plutocrats who bankrolled the whole thing and the carnival barkers they hire to lure the rubes into the tent.  

And once men like Charlie had labored long and hard to build a machine designed to crank out credulous idiots, as sure flies find shit and rotten meat, grifters followed their nose straight to it.

Of course, some of us on the Left would have been only too happy to explain to Mr. Sykes that the Tea Party was a fraud -- a rebranding scam to get Republicans off the hook for all the heinous shit they said and did during the Bush administration.  Some of us we're, in fact, using our tiny blogs and podasts to get the word out about the Fake Tea Party since the earliest days when Republicans began disappearing into the weeds and then and popped back onto the mainstream media's radar as "Independents"  From me in 2009:

The "Independent" Granfalloon 

...

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their lives and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

But men like Charlie Sykes were much too busy tone policing Liberal Hate Talker to notice our warnings.  

And well before Matt Lewis found himself basking in the glowing blurbs from the likes of Rick Perry, Ken Blackwell, S.E. Cupp, Andrew Breitbart, Erick Erickson and Tucker Carlson -- 

If you learned everything you knew about American politics from Matt Lewis, you'd be in pretty good shape. I should know, since I practically do. -- Tucker Carlson

for his paean to Sarah Palin and all that she stood for, "The Quotable Rogue: The Ideals of Sarah Palin in Her Own Words",  we Liberal Hate Talkers busied ourselves writing post after post after post about the Fake Tea Party which were dutifully ignored by everyone.  

For example, here is one of my own hundreds of contributions to the genre from 2010 with which some of you may already be familiar :-)

Now, The Bush-Belly Sneetches

But two years later, Conservatives with huge media platforms were still swearing that the Fake Tea Party was the salvation of the GOP

"The tea party helped save the Republican Party..." - @JoeNBC on MoJoe

— Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) October 22, 2012

And Charlie Sykes? Well, for Charlie the trials and tribulations of the Fake Tea Party were just one more excuse to bitch about the Left:

Happy 5th Birthday, Tea Party! The epic rant that began it all. http://t.co/5LmF1H8BlY

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) February 28, 2014

Left to Portray Tea Party as Bloodthirsty Zombies - Literally - Right Wisconsin http://t.co/WODyX6fO0I

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) March 27, 2014

Obama praises abortion advocate who called tea party ‘racist,’ suggested Romney wants to heave rape victims into water http://t.co/dB4RIbPH

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) February 7, 2013

@Murphyms73 Nio. the Tea party and NOT crackpots. Read what I wrote. People who support secession... are.

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) April 15, 2014

And this last grievance, the abuse of the noble Teabaggers at the hands of Barack Obama's IRS goons --

10 crazy things the IRS asked Tea Party groups « Hot Air http://t.co/D64zDUy9mo via @hotairblog

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) May 11, 2013

-- was something that Sykes went on and on and on about.

Who knows, Charlie?  Maybe one big reason the IRS took an interest in the Fake Tea Party was because, as one high-profile MSNBC contributor put it, it was fraught with "grifters and the people who are looking for the clicks and the contributions."

Everywhere they turn these days, Dry Drunk Republicans like Lewis and Sykes find the same, terrible fact staring back at them.  That the Left has been right about the Right all along.

Which is why Dry Drunk Republicans work so hard at erasing us from history and rewriting the past to valorize themselves.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

There. Is. No. Tea. Party: The Epilogue Continues

Funny story.  True story.

Once upon a time, about a fucking decade ago...

...millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done for the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat of 1,000 suns.  In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.

But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.

But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.

No the real story is how massively well-funded and coordinated this lie was by Fox News and all the usual loathsome creatures of the Right (Media Matters has a sampling of Fox News' wall-to-wall barrage of "These are just plain folks rising spontaneously up again the Evil Gummit!" propaganda here.) The real story was how quickly and cravenly the "respectable" media went along with this transparent hoax.  In Washington D.C., David Brooks turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that they were the salt of the Earth,  In Chicago, the local PBS affiliate went all-in with the "We've never even paid attention to politics before" teabagger line of bullshit, failing to do even the most minimal research to find out who they were actually interviewing and what their actual political affiliations really were.  Even the "liberal" New York Times could only manage a tepid, he said/she said, Both Siderist take on this "tea party" thing in which some people say it's a real movement full of awesome, while others say it's just ten square acres of Koch-funded AstroTurf, so who really knows?

And the only people straight up calling bullshit on the whole scam?

Surprise!  Those dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically NOT a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam... 

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

So here we are, a decade later.

And now that everything we dirty, disreputable Liberals had long since warned about has long since come to pass,  what story do I find running away with social media morning?  (From the WaPo)

“It turns out a lot of them were not in favor of limiting the size of government, they were just opposed to the president at the time,” said [Justin] Amash, who helped found the tea party-aligned House Freedom Caucus. “The tea party is largely gone. It was replaced with nationalism and protectionism and the general philosophy of the party now under Trump.”

Yet another Republican being elevated to the rank of Patriot Hero First Class by bravely noticing that his Republican party was full of Republicans all along.

So my question is, how the hell can I get myself graded on that curve?

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Tea Party II: Dyspeptic Boogaloo

DICK ARMEY (V.O.)

Bartonville.  Shit.  I'm still only in Bartonville.
Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back at FreedomWorks.
I'm here four years now... waiting for a mission... getting softer...

And all the Children

Are insane...

Having learned from the Great Tea Party Hoax of 2009 that the Beltway media will let Conservatives get away with literally anything as long as they get to go along for the ride and take a cut of the spoils, what you are witnessing right now is a vast and poorly orchestrated effort at splunging the hell out of Don the Con by the blame-the-man-not-the-movement and the support-but-not-endorse-through-clenched-teeth-and-clucking-tongues coalitions.

And because we have all been to this shitty movie more than once, I can confidently predict the following.

That right around the time Sidney Blumenthal, Jeremiah Wright and the ghost of Saul Ailinky are gathered around the Yule log this winter helping Hillary Clinton put the finishing touches on Barack Obama's Third Inaugural Address...

...Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan and Frank Luntz and whatever beast-that-walks-like-a-man Rupert Murdoch gets to run his American media properties will be reconvening the Caucus Room Conspiracy to game out how best to sabotage the incoming Clinton Administration, disavow Trump as a Fake Conservative and re-re-re-re-brand their same old wretched hive of Republican scum and villainy as something fresh and grass-roots-y.

Try our New and Improved Conservatism: It's Toasted!

Before then, the best hope for the republic is for every one of these people (and media parasites who enable them) to be metaphorically stripped bare and driven into the sea while their grip on power is still weak and uncertain.

So get on that.

And before you rebuke me for violating the First Jinxing Rule of Electoral Politics, rest assured that just after I wrote "the incoming Clinton Administration" I went outside, turned around three times and spit and cursed.

Because at this stage only a great fool would risk tempting the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing.

There. Is. No. Tea. Party: Epilogue

"Conservatism repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce."

-- K. Marx (slightly abused)

For this, I have to take you on a trip through time. Just a little jaunt, back almost exactly seven years to April of 2009.  Barack Obama had been sworn in just a few weeks earlier and the Right -- which had cheered on every Bush Administration debacle and laughed off every Bush Administration crime -- suddenly and completely lost their shit and declared the end of civilization as we know it.

It apparently all began with something called, "Potato Day"...

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... but that's not the story.

The story is about those first, early days of the massive Republican Base re-branding scam called the "Tea Party".

You see,  back in 2009, millions of our fellow citizens who had cheered on the Bush Administration (and screamed "Traitor!" and anyone who dared question the infinite wisdom of George W. Bush) had a sudden and urgent need to completely disavow everything they had said and done for the previous eight years (without, of course, taking any responsibility for saying and doing it) so they could get on with the important business of hating America's first African American president with the heat of 1,000 suns.  In a normal, health democracy, the idea that millions of wingnuts could build a mile-high bonfire out of their Bush/Cheney lawn signs and then dance around it pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush would be a problem for the nation's top mental health professionals.

But we do not live in a normal, health democracy, and millions of wingnuts really did leap almost overnight from relentlessly praising George W. Bush to deny!deny!denying! him harder and faster and more desperately than Peter denied Christ.

But that's not the story either, because really, Republicans lying en masse and in lockstep isn't even a story anymore: it's just another day in America.

No the real story is how massively well-funded and coordinated this lie was by Fox News and all the usual loathsome creatures of the Right (Media Matters has a sampling of Fox News' wall-to-wall barrage of "These are just plain folks rising spontaneously up again the Evil Gummit!" propaganda here.) The real story was how quickly and cravenly the "respectable" media went along with this transparent hoax.  In Washington D.C., David Brooks turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that they were the salt of the Earth,  In Chicago, the local PBS affiliate went all-in with the "We've never even paid attention to politics before" teabagger line of bullshit, failing to do even the most minimal research to find out who they were actually interviewing and what their actual political affiliations really were.  Even the "liberal" New York Times could only manage a tepid, he said/she said, Both Siderist take on this "tea party" thing in which some people say it's a real movement full of awesome, while others say it's just ten square acres of Koch-funded AstroTurf, so who really knows?

And the only people straight up calling bullshit on the whole scam?

Surprise!  Those dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically NOT a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam.  Ed Kilgore wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and E.J. Dionne. There was also this July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:

The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

No, no, no!  Definitely cannot say that because that would violate the new, post-Dubya Generally Accepted Beltway Narrative that all problem are caused by "the extremes on Both Sides" and in the middle there is a"vital Center" full of millions of political virgins who have been moved by the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.

Which brings us right up to the present time, where this continues to be the only story the Village is interested in hearing and telling.  Those who obediently sing from the approved hymnal are rewarded, those to stray from the Party line are punished, and once again the possibility of finally bringing the Right to book for its open, suppurating lunacy is buried unto another mountain of Beltway fraud and fairy tales.

In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth is now so secure that, just yesterday, Joe Scarborough could come right out and say of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all knew it  and know with perfect certainty that MSNBC management will not dock his pay one dollar or his camera time one minute and that none of his "Liberal" colleagues will so much as breathe a word of it on the air (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

Because there is a Club.
And you will never be in it.

The Last Defender of Whinealot

Sure Chris McDaniel lost.

Lost over and over again.

But he's not giving up,

Because Hitler, dammit!

Hitler!

From The Clarion-Ledger:

McDaniel lawyer confident with appeal

As his lawyers appealed dismissal of his election lawsuit to the state Supreme Court on Friday, Chris McDaniel referenced Nazism on his Facebook page.

"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil," McDaniel, who was reportedly out of state, posted Friday, quoting Deitrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran reverend and anti-Nazi dissident in World War II Germany. "God will not hold us guiltless … Not to act is to act."

Specially appointed Judge Hollis McGehee last week dismissed McDaniel's challenge of his June 24 primary runoff loss to incumbent GOP Sen. Thad Cochran, saying McDaniel waited too late to file his lawsuit.

An appeal of the lower court ruling in an election challenge by law goes to the state Supreme Court.

McGehee agreed with Cochran attorneys that a 1959 state Supreme Court decision is "still good law," and imposes a deadline of 20 days after the election for filing a challenge, first with the state Republican Party. McDaniel filed his challenge with the state party 41 days after he lost the runoff to Cochran by 7,667 votes.

McDaniel attorneys argued that election laws had been changed since 1959, particularly with a 1986 overhaul, and the 1959 "Kellum" ruling was moot. The judge disagreed, saying the laws on challenging primary elections were substantially the same as at the time of the ruling.

McDaniel lead attorney Mitch Tyner on Friday said: "We continue to be confident that when Senator McDaniel's challenge is heard on the merits it will change the results of the Republican primary. Republicans should be allowed to choose their nominee without influence or raiding by Democrats."

...

There is something about a whiny Teabagger.

From Mississippi.

Bitching about the Nazis and the fairness of election laws.

That is so fucking delicious...

Fundraiser Day Two: Today In Ongoing "We Fucking Told You So" Team Coverage...

Longtime readers of know that while we here at the driftglass blog strive to maintain a levels of technical, graphic and authorial quality which meets or exceeds those of other sites with budgets 100,000 times larger than ours, sometimes we have to cut corners. For example, you might not know that in order to provide our readers with as close to cutting-edge Ramesh Ponnuru coverage as we can afford, we have had to outsource that beat to an itty-bitty, off-shore division staffed with drunks and layabouts so that we can bring you an irregular feature called "Ramesh Ponnuru's Wingnut Purity Creds to Expire".   Unfortunately, this has often amounted me having to yell at them to off their their lazy asses every now and then and check the meat thermometer on Mr. Ponnuru's stealthy, deliberate transition from "the smirky little weasel who wrote 'The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life'" to a Very Serious Conservative Thinker who Thinks Very Serious Conservative Thoughts.

For Money.

Of course carry out his bold plan to sidle on over to the David Brooks side of the S.S. Conservative Obtusitania, from time to time Young Ramesh has to...well..."steal" is a harsh word, so let's just say it has been rumored that from time to time he wire-drops into Liberal Central Command

in order to "liberate" some of our time-honored observations about Conservatism without leaving any finger-prints.

(Needless to say, Liberals realize when they have, once again, been jacked without so much as a 'Thank you' or by-your-leave, but who the fuck pays attention to those losers anyway? As one of their more disreputable members observed long ago,

...

Finally, at no point during this latest reshuffling of America's Conservative media courtiers will anyone be gauche enough to mention that the Filthy Liberals were, once again, absolutely right all along.

Still, over here in the cultural ghetto of Liberal Central Command, we will all laugh and drink our chardonnay and laugh some more.)

And speaking of Young Ramesh and our media's gentlemen's agreement to never notice when Liberals are once again shown to have been absolutely right all along...here's a lovely little bit of awesome from a few weeks ago which my surly, drunken, good-for-nothing staff did not call to my attention until now:

The Tea Party Never Existed

MAY 21, 2014 4:34 PM EDT

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Much of journalism consists, G.K. Chesterton wrote, of "saying Lord Jones is dead to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive." Much of political journalism this week consists of people who have not understood the Tea Party since its birth saying that it's now dead.

The loosely organized movement arose as a reaction to the reigning liberalism of 2009 and 2010, just as previous liberal moments in the mid-1960s, late 1970s and early 1990s brought about conservative backlashes. It was also, in part, a retrospective reaction by conservatives to compromises they had made during George W. Bush's years in the White House. This, too, is a fairly normal feature of political life: Purification is always easier when your side is out of power.

And just as the intra-Democratic conflicts of the Bush years -- think of the 2006 Ned Lamont-Joe Lieberman Senate primary in Connecticut, for example, itself a retrospective reaction to the party's moderation during Bill Clinton's administration -- didn't lead to lasting schism, so the Republican factionalism of recent years seems to be fading away.

This was predictable and, for that matter, predicted. In early 2010, Kate O'Beirne and I looked at detailed polling of Tea Party attitudes for the National Review. We argued that unifying the Republican Party would be easier than it was when Christian conservatives or supporters of Ross Perot joined the coalition: Unlike those earlier groups, Tea Party advocates already believed the same things that regular Republicans did. They basically were regular Republicans, just, if you will, more so.

The differences between the Tea Party and "establishment Republicans" have largely concerned style and attitude rather than program and ideology, and these are easily finessed -- especially because moods change.

...

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader whom self-proclaimed spokesmen for the Tea Party have loudly denounced, almost certainly won most Kentucky Republicans who consider themselves Tea Partiers in his re-election primary this week. Some of the denouncers are warning that McConnell will lose in November unless he gets his challenger's Tea Party supporters to turn his way. Some of those supporters tell pollsters they're so disgusted with McConnell that they'll back his Democratic opponent. They won't.

That's not because the Tea Party movement is dead. It's because the movement the pundits imagined -- a bitter enemy of the existing, pretty conservative Republican Party -- was never truly alive.

If you are masochistic enough to take a trip down that most despised thoroughfare in American politics -- Memory Lane -- all the way to origins of the "Tea Party" myth, you will fine no one but Filthy Liberals, yelling impotently at the Mainstream Media Behemoth that this was obviously another Republican  lie:

...based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

Nothing but a cheap a gimmick by and for Republicans frantically trying to escape accountability for the catastrophe piled atop catastrophe that they had just spent eight unleashing on the country.

...

And then out of the West came their own gin-soaked Moses

Who swore all their shame could be turned into roses.

His name was Sylvester "Dick Armey" McBean

Inventor of the Fabulous, Tea-Baggulous Bush-Off Machine.

For the price of their souls and a couple of bucks

The Bush-Bellies could now buy some nips and some tucks...

A bald-faced fraud that the Mainstream Media was obviously in on:

...

The thing is, I don't especially begrudge these Four Heist Men of the Teapocalypse their ludicrous little charade; Hell, if I'd spent the last decade happily sucking the dicks of the people who destroyed my country, I'd guess I'd be dressing up in pantyhose and jaunty little hats and pretending I'd been asleep since the Ford Administration too.

Phil Ponce, on the other hand, is a different story. Letting these clowns use the the public airwaves to put across their underhanded, one-sided scam is unforgivable, and letting himself be used as their sweat rag in the process is beyond embarrassing.

If Royko were alive, he'd be dangling Ponce by his ankle from a fifth story window right about now, making him conjugate the verb "muckrake".

In Latin.

Backwards.

Else how's that boy ever gonna learn!

Sadly these observations from 2009 and 2010 were all written by a Liberal.

And who the fuck ever listens to those whiners?