Thousands and Thousands and Thousands

Here's a exciting gladiatorial contest that the whole family would enjoy, except that it'll never happen.

The graphic above represents the spectrum of Republican party/Conservative movement as it existed around 2016.

On the left is Joe "Joey Muskets" Walsh.  Failed, one-term congressman from Illinois and blustering, shoutycracker MAGA Trump guy until late 2017/early 2018 who we call "Joey Muskets" because he was forever grabbin' his musket and rushing off to fight on the barricades of whatever wingnut idiocy was hot shit that week. 

Grab your musket.
Sign the pledge.
Join the revolution.href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/MAGA?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#MAGAhttps://t.co/cYLt7Vn0Ah

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) December 6, 2017

On the right is Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times about whom I have written on this blog once or twice :-)

If there exists a noumenal ideal of the smug, clueless, Beltway fraud, it's Mr. David Brooks. who despite being profoundly wrong about everything all the time has nonetheless built himself a very lucrative and influential cottage industry feeding Both Siderist bullshit to wealthy, cosseted ideological shut-ins.

For his entire career, David Brooks has maintained that bellicose goofs like Joey Muskets either did not exist at all, or were nothing but an admittedly loud but teeny tiny irrelevant fringe of his Republican party.

For Joey Muskets, Brooks was just the sort of RINO squish Beltway quisling who was always collaborating with the Libtards to deny real Murrican patriots their FREEDUMB!!

Both are men.  Both are white.  Both are on their second marriages.  Both are 62 years old as of this writing.  Both claim to be "Conservative" whatever the hell that means anymore.  Both make some or all of their living as professional opinion-havers on various media platforms.  And, of interest to us today, both of them base their claim to a place in the media spotlight on their own, special signature insight into the hearts and minds and souls of "the people".  

Especially "voter" people.  

Very especially Republican voter people.   Thousand and thousands of Republican voter people.  

Here's just a couple of such claims made by Joey Muskets:

I hear from thousands of GOP base voters every day. Here’s the thing:

Tucker Carlson spent this past week making the case for autocracy over democracy. And while you & I are rightly disgusted by this, the GOP base isn’t. Because Tucker Carlson speaks for the GOP base.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) August 7, 2021

Unlike most of you on this website, I engage with thousands of GOP base voters every day. So maybe my vantage point is really skewed. But I’m telling you, these voters live in a COMPLETELY different reality. I don’t think most CNN/MSNBC types sufficiently get this. It’s real bad. https://t.co/iP9YT4DMBP

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) July 29, 2021

And, in diametric opposition, here is David Brooks last night on the PBS News Hour responding to Jack Posobiec at CPAC saying "We're here to overthrow [democracy] completely. We didn't get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here." then holding up a cross and saying "Replace it with this."

Brooks:  Yes, it's meant to be — I mean, there's a game right-wing commentators of that sort play.  They get — they say something that offends the left, and then they could say, oh, the left hates me. And then they get popular in their own crowd, and so it's a form of performance art to shock the bourgeoisie.

And I take it with utmost cynicism, that they are just trying to get attention, and this kind of humor is, shock the left. And then I have owned the libs. So I think it's like, crass, stupid. 

Do I think it represents the thousands of Trump voters I have interviewed? 

No, none of them would talk like that.  They're all serious people who have serious views that I happen to disagree with, but they're not like that kind of guy at CPAC.

With Brooks, it's the Tea Party all over again.  Brooks' career is defined by a truly superhuman refusal to see his Republican party and his Conservative movement as they truly are.  Which is why, back in 2010, he turned the act of jogging past one group of protesters into a deep, sociological proof that the Tea Baggers were all the salt of the Earth and not even a little bit racist.  

Even when the turn of events became so tectonic that they brought all of his bullshit crashing down,  briefly prying his eyes open and moving him to swear to his employers that he would do better and get out of his bubble and touch indians and see the mountains and the valleys and the whole rest of that song -- 

-- at his earliest opportunity he snapped right back to being "Both Sides Do It" David because he is psychologically and professionally incapable of being anything else.

So, I propose that PBS or NPR or the WWE bring these two mopes together in a televised, sanctioned Thunderdome of disputation to determine which of them has actually talked to thousands and thousands of Trump supporters, on what day and at which Ohio diner. 

The winner will be awarded the "True Conservative" belt, even though I have a very strong feeling the answers to those three questions are going to be "neither", "never" and "none".  

And you know what?  I won't even insist that, because it's my idea, I get to officiate.

Instead I will content myself with sitting up in the cheap seats.

Eating popcorn.

And rooting for injuries.  

I Am The Liberal Media

The Disordered Thinking of Fascism's Deadbeat Dads

In my capacity of "He Who Listens To Cable Teevee Never Trumpers When They Talk Among Themselves" I hear things.  Like the unnamed narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart", above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. 

How, then, am I mad? 

Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you about Michael Steele's visit to Joe Walsh's podcast.  

It breaks down as follows.

First, the top line of Steele's resume remains his button-busting pride at the "winning coalition" he says he put together in 2010 which stopped Obama in his tracks.  Which is typical, Republican revisionist bullshit.  What actually happened was Steele's political fortunes were raised because Steele -- the Party of Old White Men's buffoonish "See? We're not bigots!" former codpiece -- was willing shut his mouth and ride the rising tide of overt, berserk Tea Bagger racism in the Republican Party.  

These days he and Joe Walsh can be heard on Walsh's podcast braiding each other's hair while Walsh fawns over Steele political savvy in welcoming lunatics like him into the mighty Republican coalition that put an end to the Kenyan Usurper's sinister plans to turn Murrica into a socialist hellhole.

Actually, neither man mentions Obama at all.  Obama's existence and the eight year racist Republican primal scream that followed his election have simply vanished from the tale.  Instead, they both sigh and remember that period as the Good Old Days.

But of course those of us who (ahem) have archives and  memories remember those days a little differently.

From me back in 2010:

Hoping the rest of the world wouldn't notice, today RNC Chair Mikey Steele hooked up with Rightwad Crazies in the political Men’s Room for a brief, degrading “Tory Hole” assignation.

Oops.

Tea partiers get audience with RNC chairman but not a shared public stage

By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele treated tea party leaders like an ugly date Tuesday afternoon: They were good enough to take upstairs, but not good enough to be seen with in public.

Steele invited leaders of the conservative movement over to the GOP's Capitol Hill headquarters (to the adjacent National Republican Club, technically) for a private meeting on the third floor. But Republican leaders, probably wary of TV footage showing a tea party takeover of RNC headquarters, denied the activists' request to use the facility for the news conference they had planned for afterward.
…

The Money Quote:

The moment encapsulated well the Republican Party's dilemma as it tries to harness the considerable energy of the tea party movement. Steele's task is essentially to co-opt its leaders, keeping them from electoral challenges that could hurt the GOP's chances. Yet at the same time, he can't appear to the rest of the country to be embracing a movement known for extremist words and deeds.…

Even as he roasts in the depths of Hell, at this moment Lee Atwater is laughing hard enough to lactate bile.

This was also the period during which Rush Limbaugh responded to Steele making some mildly critical remarks about Limbaugh by dropping a house on his head to remind him who, in this relationship, wears the boots and who shines the boots.  

Steele reacted by crawling back to Limbaugh and begging forgiveness:

Steele to Rush: I’m sorry

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele says he has reached out to Rush Limbaugh to tell him he meant no offense when he referred to the popular conservative radio host as an “entertainer” whose show can be “incendiary.”

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.”

So that's the first segment.  

The second segment featured Steele and Walsh being sad and bumfuzzled over what the heck happened to their party?  How could it have come to this?  

I dunno, Mike.  Maybe that winning coalition of the you're so proud of -- that indestructible doomsday machine of bigots and imbeciles --  had something to do with it.  Maybe groveling before Limbaugh's throne instead of working to drive him and the rest of this filth out of the party had something to do with it.  But in Steele's hands, the past is always malleable, like clay, ready to be shaped and reshaped into whatever form he needs at the moment to sell himself to whoever will hire him today.  

If you're interested, I wrote a longer thing about it back in 2016 when Ana Marie Cox wanted me to believe she had not "let him off the hook" when he was on her podcast as part of his perpetual Reputation Rehab tour.  Spoiler:  She let him off the hook.

Here's a little taste from that 2016 podcast:

Steele:  You say voter suppression on the Republican side.  I say voter control on the Democratic side.  It works on Both Sides. I'm beyond excuse-making.  I want to get to why things don't work the way we want it to work.

And, just for fun, here's another little taste:

Steele: The president [Trump] is much more of a Democrat than he is a Republican

For his sins, these days Steele can be found in constant rotation on MSNBC, either guesting or substitute hosting -- his hugely problematic past now as dead disco, and as safely entombed as Chernobyl by his friends in the media.

The third segment was about why Steele could never register as a Democrat, because there's no room for a "pro-life" person like him in the party.  Maybe, someday, if the Democrats every really became a "big tent party" he would consider it, but he shall remain a member of the white supremacism, Hang Mike Pence, lying, treasonous insurrection party for the foreseeable future because he is [checks notes] a Man of Principle.

The fourth segment was about how Democrats should count their blessings that the GOP is as crazy as it is, because if not the Republican party would be running everything, because Democrats suck and are terrible at "messaging" and are elitist snobs who are out of touch with Real Murrica and how Dems are just a few years away from being just as batshit as Republicans because something something AOC.  

And OMG, why aren't Democrats talking about infrastructure more!?

This public act of shouting into the abyss has been brought to today you by me, because...

I Am The Liberal Media