Rebel, Rebel, You've Torn Your Dress

Brother Charles Pierce points out a thing which is so  baseline, indisputably true that should it should long ago have become part of the pre-show checklist for every public interest teevee show in the land, along with "Your hair looks fine" and "We're live when the little red light goes on" and "Don't freak out when you see how empty and soulless David Gregory's eyes are up-close. Lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he opens his pie-hole and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch 'But Both Sides!' and spite of all your bloggin' and the hollerin' they all come in and rip you to pieces."

Where was I?

Oh yeah!  Mr. Pierce:

It seems almost pointless to mention this but there is simply no state Democratic party in any of the 50 states that is so clearly, obviously demented. This is the Republican Party. Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru are not. In fact, I think all those bold conservative thinkers of whom the New York Times thinks so much should bring their Big Ideas down to the next Texas state Republican convention and see how far they get. John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell, and especially obvious anagram Reince Priebus, who nominally presides over Bedlam, need to be asked every day which parts of the Texas Republican platform they support and which parts they don't. They don't get to use the crazies to get elected and then hide behind fake Washington politesse when the howls from the hinterlands get too loud. We allow ourselves only two major political parties. One of them is completely out of its fcking mind. This is a national problem.

Yes, that is one point of view.

Another point of view that has currency with some profound thinkers with large, international audiences is that Democratic voters should stand aside on purpose and let the crazies ride to power and pound the fuck out of the country from some undetermined period of time.  After which the Leprechauns of Liberty will ride the Unicorns of Freedom back from Big Rock Candy Mountain and restore America to greatness.  At the moment, two most famous proponents of this theory of social reform are Ra's Al Ghul:

And Glenn Greenwald:

Yet a third point of view is offered by America's Second Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual on his Pot-'n-Popes-'n-Stuff blog where he councils Liberals to quit kvetching and celebrate, because now that support for his two issues -- pot and same-sex marriage --  have turned a corner, it's game over for wingnuts and we Leftists should be more magnanimous in victory.

How delightful it would be if, in the grand American tradition, these three white men were to gather together in the spirit of Lincoln and Douglas and put their beliefs to the test in a big, public arena in the heart of the great state of Texas!

Or, at least at Netroots Nation next week.

Because that I would pay to see.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Punching out of your weight class" Edition.

If you were to watch Stephanie Miller level Carly Fiorina (Sunday on "State of the Union", from Raw Story) --

“A lot women including me are sick of the ‘war on women’, and we saw it in spades on Monday after the Hobby Lobby case,” Fiorina told a CNN panel. “Somehow this is the long arm of business and the Republican Party reaching into the body of women. It’s ridiculous.”

“The war on women is shameless, baseless propaganda, there’s no fact to it, and it’s worked because it’s scared women to death,” she insisted. “Enough. Enough.”

“I respect you very much as a woman for your accomplishments,” Miller snarked in response. “I even read that you studied medieval history, which I think will come in handy with trying to defend the Republican war on women.”

Miller noted that every woman she knew was “furious about he Hobby Lobby decision.”

“This is not just a war against women, this is a war against science, Carly,” the radio host explained.

“Oh, for heaven sakes,” Fiorina gasped.

“These religious people believe certain drugs cause abortions, doctors and scientists say they do not,” Miller continued. “They prevent abortion… I have friends who need it for endometriosis. How do you say you’re small government, and get the government involved in those personal decisions between a woman and her doctor?”

-- like Abraham Lincoln axing a vampire to dust --

-- your takeaway might reasonably be, "Fuck Yes!"

Which is a pretty reasonable reaction. After all, pit your average, bright Liberal against your average, dogmatic Conservative bullshit talking-point Pez dispenser, and what you get in a matter of minutes is a Conservative yak-bot running in circles and yawping incoherently.

Which is why you probably were delighted to see Steph take apart the Sunday Morning Mouse Circus' favorite Serial Political Failure and Destroyer of Companies, Carly Fiorina.

It is also why you're probably not an executive producer for the Sunday Morning Mouse Circus. Because if you were, you would know that the product American political teevee exists to sell is a puppet show in which comforting, establishmentarian Beltway truths are relentlessly reinforced.  And the centerpiece of the every show is supposed to be that, while Conservatism may sometimes sometimes be misguided, it's not really bad.  And that however seditious or insane or bigoted or bloodthirsty or fuck-stick-stupid overeager Conservatives may be, Liberals are undoubtedly worse, which is why the Wise Murrican should steer a nice, safe David Brooksian course straight down the middle.

Which, of course, isn't really the middle at all; just a slightly less flamboyantly downsloping path to the same corporate/theocratic feudalism where Conservatism has been taking us all along.

But none of the smoke-foofers or mirror-spindles that make the Beltway Magic Machine run will operate correctly without the liquid fear of the Nefarious Schemes of Fake Liberals to lubricate the works.  Which is why, none of the professionals who turn the cranks on the Beltway Magic Machine saw what you saw on Sunday.

For them, the takeaway will be a cautionary tale about how you should never, ever let real Liberals inside the happy, clappy perimeter of the Beltway Magic Machine.

For examples of how the Beltway Magic Machine is supposed to work, just flip the remote over to CBS where this happened, or to the absolute freak show which was once, long ago, a marginally-reputable program called "This Week..." and behold :

...air time being happily handed over to discredited felon and slavery's last defender, Dinesh D'Souza, so that he can report on what the voices in his head are telling him about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's Sekrit Compact with Saul Alinsky.

...Newt Gingrich, who is still permitted to exist on the Earth and be treated like something other that one of the worse cases of ambulatory moral syphilis in modern American political history for reasons no one can explain.

...And lookie here!  It's Rick Perry sayin' something stoopid!  

During a Sunday interview on ABC News, host Martha Raddatz gave the Republican governor a chance to back away from his conspiracy theory.

"Governor, do you really believe there’s some sort of conspiracy to get people into the United States by the federal government, by the Obama administration?" Raddatz asked.

"When I have written a letter that is dated May of 2012, and I have yet to have a response from this administration, I will tell you they either are inept or don’t care, and that is my position," Perry said, doubling down on the theory. "We have been bringing to the attention of President Obama and his administration since 2010, he received a letter from me on the tarmac... I have to believe that when you do not respond in any way, that you are either inept, or you have some ulterior motive of which you are functioning from."

The former Republican presidential candidate added that his theory was proved by the fact that the president had not responded to his letter, and had not deployed drones to the border.

Poor Governor Goodhair.  No one on his staff had the guts to tell him that smartifying glasses don't really have the power to unstupid him.

I don't really have a neat, button-hook ending here.
I'm just really, really tired.

The Horror. The Horror. -- UPDATED

Two hacks, no waiting.

To watch these two soft, wealthy, privileged cranks cheerfully sniffing each other's farts you would never guess that the United State has just limped away from the worst foreign policy debacle in American history, and that these men were two of that disaster's most enthusiastic cheerleaders.

UPDATED

The first, inevitable, David Brooks "Both Sides" razor in the apple is at around the 27:30 (emphasis added):

As we think about foreign affairs and maybe domestic policy too, we're trying to gauge how utopian, how aggressive, how assertive we could be.  And I say we've screwed it up in two directions.  George W. Bush was way too utopian aggresive.  I think Barack Obama is way too minimalistic. 

And striking that balance -- I don't know if you'd agree -- is still hanging out there.

"We" screwed up?

Really?

But of course it has to be "we" doesn't it.  Barack Obama somehow has to be just as wrong as George W. Bush, or else someone might someday start asking how it is that Bush War cheerleadering cowards like David Brooks -- who have been so uniquely and horribly wrong about everything for so damn long -- have never been held to account for the uniquely horrible shit they have said and done.

And then, less than two minutes later, David Brooks shared his advice for non-David Brooks life forms on how to live virtuously:

If you're working on your resume, you want to invest in your strengths.  If you're really good at math, work hard in math.

If you're looking at your own internal life it seem to me the strategy is entirely opposite. You want to tackle your weaknesses.  And you want to focus...what are the sins I commit?  What are my characteristic sins?

Am I a pleaser?  Am I a shallow.  Am I a coward?

Oh! Oh!  Call on me!  Puhleeeeeeeeze call on me!

But they never did.

And they never will.

Because the illusion of Authority of Very Serious People is only maintained by making very, very sure that no one who would dare ask these discredited Neocon idiots a single, substantive question would be allowed anywhere near their mutual masturbation society.

Professional Left Podcast #239

"Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible. Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.”

-- Bertrand Russell

Links:

• Origins of the Serling quote

Da' money goes here:

Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

Now that his two, pet issues -- sane pot policies and same-sex marriage -- are ascendant, Mr. Andrew Sullivan would like America women to stop getting their vaginae in a twist just because the Theocrat Right (also known as "The Right") is winning their battle to turn the large swaths of America under their control into a Margaret Atwood novel.

Of course, he doesn't say "women" or "war" or "theocrat" because that would give the game away. Instead, Mr. Sullivan once again decides "Liberals" need a firm, condescending lecture, this time on how we need to be gracious in "victory" now that the Iraq War is over Liberalism is swelling to a mighty and unstoppable force which is in the process of sweeping aside all opposition.  And to make your reading experience extra special sweet, Mr. Sullivan taps no less an authority on Liberals Knowing Their Damn Place than Ross Cardinal Douthat to back him up! (emphasis has been added):

...A few organizations and closely-held companies want to be exempted from that coverage for religious reasons. They just got it. The administration can still respond by crafting a compromise along the lines of that given to purely religious groups, or by other methods. Yes, there’s a precedent here that could be expanded. But, as Ross notes today, Kennedy’s concurrence suggests not by much. And overall, this battle has been decisively won by secular liberals and their allies (who include many religious people as well). What’s really being done here is negotiating the terms of surrender. And in general, I think victories are more durable if they are allied with a certain degree of magnanimity.

You can read countless screeds against this decision, for example, that nowhere even mention that for some devout people, the mandate might actually be a genuine problem of conscience. Is liberalism indifferent to the conscientious dissent of minorities? The truth is: I don’t think so. But many cannot yet see that the religious right is no longer a majority, fast becoming a small minority, unable to win at the ballot box, and needing some accommodation with respect to majoritarian rule.

That used to be a liberal value. And I hope, before too long, it will again.

...

I guess Mr. Sullivan is unfamiliar with the first time these people "surrendered".

Or the second.

Or the third.

Or the fourth.



Or the fifth.

I guess Mr. Sullivan is unaware that these are the same breed of Conservative who coped with the Clinton Administration's constant attempts to appease them (while cleaning up the toxic mess they left behind) and passing a whole passel of Conservative laws by spending eight years on witch-hunts, unhinged conspiracy and impeachment. 

I guess Mr. Sullivan is unaware of this...even though these people were his boon chums and Conservative fellow-travelers for years and years and years.

I guess Mr. Sullivan is unaware that these are also the same people who have coped with the Obama Administration's constant attempts to appease them (while cleaning up the toxic mess they left behind) by conspiring to shut the federal government down, deliberately default on our debt, grind the normal process of running the country to a dead stop, arming themselves to the teeth at their own unhinged conspiracies and openly talking of sedition and impeachment because they consider every moment that Barack Obama refuses to resign the office of President and hand the keys over to Ted Cruz to be an act of unalloyed treason.

I guess Mr. Sullivan is unaware that these people never "surrender" (from The Atlantic) --

That decision is beginning to reverberate: A group of faith leaders is urging the Obama administration to include a religious exemption in a forthcoming LGBT anti-discrimination action. Their call, in a letter sent to the White House Tuesday, attempts to capitalize on the Supreme Court case by arguing that it shows the administration must show more deference to the prerogatives of religion. "We are asking that an extension of protection for one group not come at the expense of faith communities whose religious identity and beliefs motivate them to serve those in need," the letter states.

-- (and from Mother Jones) --

Supreme Court Broadens Hobby Lobby Ruling to All Forms of Birth Control

...
Less than a day after the United States Supreme Court issued its divisive ruling on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, it has already begun to toss aside the supposedly narrow interpretation of the decision. On Tuesday, the Supremes ordered lower courts to rehear any cases where companies had sought to deny coverage for any type of contraception, not just the specific types Hobby Lobby was opposed to.

The Affordable Care Act had listed 20 forms of contraception that had to be covered as preventive services. But Hobby Lobby, a craft supply chain, claimed that Plan B, Ella, and two types of IUD were abortifacients that violated the owners' religious principles. The science was against Hobby Lobby—these contraceptives do not prevent implantation of a fertilized egg and are not considered abortifacients in the medical world—but the conservative majority bought Hobby Lobby's argument that it should be exempted from the law.

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the the 5-4 opinion, used numerous qualifiers in an attempt to limit its scope, but a series of orders released by the court Tuesday contradict any narrow interpretation of the ruling.
...

-- they regroup and rearm and come roaring back because they are nuts and because their particular brand of insanity is useful to their billionaire backers who are willing to cultivate, underwrite and amplify their madness forever.

And thus Andrew Sullivan's long and truly spectacular record of knowing fuck-all about American Conservatism and even less about Liberals remain unbroken.

David Brooks: Sekrit Liberal

Because No True Conservative...

Even though I'm one of the Liberal blogosphere's informal "David Brooks guys", I had no intention of weighing in on Mr. Brooks' awful, sweeping, unsupported, revisionist codswallop of a column from last Friday.

It wasn't just that I was very, very busy and juggling a hundred other things.  And it wasn't the labor involved: seeing as how it consisted of almost nothing but a retread of his and Bill Kristol's Neocon "National Greatness Conservatism" claptrap from the 90s (tarted up in Whig attire and dumbed down for convenient consumption by modern, memory-impaired and Iraqtose-intolerant Conservatives by simply omitting the actual, inconvenient history of the last 20 years) everything I would have needed to properly carve it up and bury it at the crossroads with a stake through its heart were already at my fingertips.

It was that I have already penned over a thousand Brooksian vivisections in the last ten years and seeing as how exactly none of them -- no matter how thorough or well-written or clever or upscaled with cool graphics -- have ever achieved escape velocity and broken out of the Liberal blogosphere, and it has gotten a little hard a on my somewhat-dinged-up soul to keep futilely banging my head on that particular mile-high iron wall.

So I really had not planned to Sysiphus that particular stone up that hill again...

...until I read this by Mr. Andrew Sullivan.

Which is why, when push comes to shove, David Brooks is a liberal.

That is, no kidding, the actual diagnosis made by America's Second-Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual -- Andrew Sullivan -- of the secret political proclivities and deviated preversions of America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual, David Brooks.

And completely unbidden, this guy showed up in my head...

...and I once more made that long walk back to the keyboard.

"So what exactly makes David Brooks a Liberal," you ask?   "His unswerving passion for sending other people's children off to conquer and subdue other countries in the name what he used to call National Greatness Conservatism," Mr. Sullivan replies:

If we don’t have that faith, we are somehow reduced. I guess I’m just being an atomized individual, but my own “counter-weight to rampant materialism”, for example, is Christianity. But this faith is, for David, insufficient. It doesn’t strengthen the nation! I must join some collective, secular spiritual mission to complete my life and one, moreover, that goes out into the wider world to find monsters to destroy or countries to civilize. The fact that this ideological mission is deeply out of step with this moment in world history and has just been discredited on a massive, comprehensive scale sails past the need for it to exist in Brooks’ mind. Which is my best read on the cognitive dissonance in the column.

And what is the only thing that can save us from the mad, global hegemonic schemes of Liberals like David Brooks?

Well...conservatism.  Duh!

What Mark is saying, it seems to me, is that only conservatism, properly understood, can rise to the challenge of governance in this post-ideological age.

But, of course, only brand-name True Conservatism will do so ask for it by name.

Sadly, not a single, solitary one of us po', dumbfuck colonists actually understands True Conservatism, which is why we need  Andrew Sullivan to explain it to us.  Veeeery slowly:

And conservatism in America is, alas, as widely misunderstood as it is routinely ignored.

Well, post-Bush-glory-days Andrew Sullivan, anyway.  Because, as you all no doubt recall, at the very apex of Bush's days of blood and thunder and shock and awe, that Andrew Sullivan was busy-busy-busy enthusiastically ratifying the global hegemonic schemes of David Brooks and George Bush as the ne plus ultra of True Conservatism, going so far as to deploy no less than his hero -- Michael Oakeshott -- as the source of his True Conservative moral authority.

Those were the days when Liberals were cheerfully bashed around the clock as the dupes of foreign powers and enemies of freedom. 

As contemptible terrorist-lovers.  

As scheming fifth-columnists.

Liberals bore all of this from every fucking quarter for doing exactly what Andrew Sullivan -- the self-appointed Chairman of the Department of True Conservatism Weights and Measures -- now insists is the true measure of the True Conservative: standing athwart the global hegemonic schemes of David Brooks and George Bush and Andrew Sullivan and shouting "Stop!"

Happily, no actual Liberals were harmed in the making of Mr. Sullivan's farce -- Mr. Sullivan wouldn't recognize an actual American Liberal if one of us took his slap-dash Tinker Toy ideology apart, right in front of him, live at the Madison Square Garden.

Also no ideological stars have started from their celestial spheres.  

In his cited column, David Brooks was doing nothing more than continuing to do what David Brooks has been doing all along: plodding doggedly towards his mirage of Whig Valhalla while instantly unremembering all the wreckage his terrible ideas  leave in their wake.

And for his part, Andrew Sullivan was was doing nothing more than continuing to do what Andrew Sullivan has been doing all along: interminably recalibrating his definition of True Conservative to suit whatever his passions and fancies happen to be this month and (even more importantly) to keep himself well outside of what one disreputable wag once referred to as that "impoverishing political ghetto" know as Liberalism "that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee."

Unless, of course, you're one 'a them Sekrit Liberals.

Like David Brooks.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Voting

Brother Charles Pierce has one opinion about the sacred act of voting:

YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE FOR NOT VOTING. NOT ANYMORE.

We get the government we deserve, and we are on track for one that is heedless of concern for women's health, and poised to eliminate unions.

By Charles P. Pierce on July 1, 2014

...

Quite simply, if the Republican party gains control of the United States Senate, and if it maintains that majority in 2016, neither Barack Obama, nor Hillary Clinton, if she were to succeed him in office, will be allowed to appoint a Supreme Court justice. It will not happen. There will be nobody whose views and judicial philosophy will be satisfactory to the majority Republicans unless whoever the president is happens to nominate Antonin (Short Time) Scalia's left nut. Yesterday, the bare 5-4 majority of Federalist Society Papists demonstrated that it is heedless of concern for women's health, and poised to eliminate the ability of public employees -- and, later, any employees -- from organizing themselves.

(For an interesting historical view, I can highly recommend the redoubtable Thers at Whiskey Fire, who draws on his academic experience to explain how, in regard to human sexuality, the United States Of America is turning into the Irish Free State, circa 1935.)

So there really isn't any excuse any more.

...

It's a good story, above the digital fold at Esquire Magazine.  Well worth your time.

Glenn Greenwald -- the world's most famous journalist and hero to thousands -- has another, dramatically different opinion:

Perhaps one day these men will start asking each other why they believe what they do.

Meanwhile, if the past is any guide, draw up a chair for a fireworks show "where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues" of denial, evasion, deflection and subject-changing.

Profoundly Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

I hope liberals grasp that being required to fund something you believe is murder is form of conscientious objection: http://t.co/lGvsGksIGy
— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 1, 2014

You mean like all that tax money the Cheney Administration took from me and gave to Halliburton so we could slaughter brown people in Iraq?

And do I get all that money back now?

Because back then I had a really good, full-time job, but since then, let me tell you, things have been tough! I lost all of that and so much more in the Bush Recession, and I'll never see a fraction of that kind of income ever again, so all that extra "Iraq War Refund" dough would sure come in handy!

You know every now and then it becomes hilariously clear that, just like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and David Brooks and all the rest of Conservatism's very special people, Andrew Sullivan has never actually met a real, honest-to-goodness American Liberal in his entire fucking life. That, just like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan's entire schtick would vaporize and blow away like SnoCone in a blast furnace if it were not propped up by an endless supply of Imaginary Dirty Hippies.

Which, in the abstract, is really quite funny, but in practical, dollars and cents terms it means that punching the fuck out of Liberals like you and me is what pays Andrew Sullivan's mortgage, what made David Brooks' mansion possible, what put $30 million dollars into Sean Hannity's pocket and what permits Rush Limbaugh to own a private jet.

So the irony is that while I may be broke and barely hanging onto the bottom rung of the economic ladder down which I have fallen so very far, slandering Liberals like me has grown into a huge and very lucrative industry.

Fiunally, I can also guarantee that no court will ever order this mob of con men and fascists and lunatics who reap such gargantuan dividends from lying about us to stop doing so based on our conscientious objection to being publicly slandered by them day after day after day.

PS.  Proper "Thank Yous" to everyone who hit my tip jar will really, truly be forthcoming once things get a little more settled down on my end.