If the historical record runs counter to what powerful interests want you to believe, well, history will just have to be rewritten. And constant repetition, especially in captive media, keeps this imaginary history in circulation no matter how often it is shown to be false.
This is the Conservative way. After every Conservative debacle -- foreign or domestic, military or economic -- there is an brief period during which the story of that debacle is still molten and malleable. Without an agreed-upon fairy tale and a Liberal villain to blame, for a moment both the Beltway media and the Wingnut Hive Mind are in chaos. This is when the cogs and gears of the Mighty Wurlitzer are most in evidence: the interregnum during which you can actually watch the Right invent, test and discard various bullshit cover stories before settling on one that the Pig People will swallow:
The Clinton's assassinated Vince Foster.
Trayvon was a thug who had it coming.
The ACA Website was Obama's Katrina.
etc x 1 million
Of cource, since it cost trillions of dollars and got thousands of Americans killed, George W. Bush's Iraqi Debacle required a series of series of fire-and-forget alibis --
Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are in league together and just weeks away from leveling New York City with an A-bomb
-- each of which was utterly false --
The war will pay for itself, we will be greeted as liberators and we'll be home before Christmas.
-- each of which was embraced enthusiastically --
Dubya is the greatest Murrican preznit in history and Liberal Iraq war opponents are terrorist-loving surrender monkeys who hate Murrica. Also Murrica!
-- and then discarded unceremoniously once it was used up --
The Surge worked!
-- until, inevitably, the most transparently ridiculous placeholder of all was put in play --
-- long enough for a proper Liberal Villain could be framed for their disaster --
We won in Iraq until Obama stabbed us in the back and invented ISIS.
so that it can pass into the wingnut pantheon of perfidy where it will be remembered forever more as the Undisputed Truth...
...enabled every step along the way by our compliant Beltway media who are more than willing to hold out chair for the liars and lend their tattered credibility to the lies they tell.
National Review's Lowry: Obama "Abandoned The War In Iraq." On the August 10 edition of NBC's Meet The Press, National Review editor Rich Lowry blamed President Obama for ISIS' uprising in Iraq and not leaving residual troops after the U.S. ended military action in the country. Lowry clamed "Obama never ended the war in Iraq as he said, he abandoned the war in Iraq." [NBC, Meet The Press, 8/10/14]
Weekly Standard's McCormack: Obama "Didn't Want To Leave Troops In Iraq." In an August 9 blog for the Weekly Standard, John McCormack argued that Obama wasn't successful at attaining a SOFA because he "wasn't seriously pushing for one":
National Review's Goldberg: "Obama Chose To Pull Troops Out Of Iraq As Quickly As Possible." National Review editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg accused Obama of presiding over the chaos in Iraq because of his decisions "directly or indirectly," which have negatively impacted the region...
...the Right continues to be willing to spend whatever it takes to build the infrastructure and hire the armies necessary to buy, build, infiltrate or corrupt every major microphone in America in order to pound their square pegs into round holes on every issue that matters to them all day long, every day. for however long it takes to finally kill this country and build the unfettered capitalist theocracy of their dreams on its grave.
Very Serious Conservative Junior League Person of the Year (1998), Ross "Chunky Bobo" Douthat longs for the good old days before the Republican Party went mad.
If fact, he has such a chubby or the Great Conservative Past that never was, he has dropped one of the most hilarious Freudian typos I have seen in print in a long time:
A long time ago, in the era we now know as B.T. (Before Trump), it was possible to envision a Republican primary campaign that would be a real contest of ideas, a clash of genuine policy visions — and therefore different from the empty I’m-not-Obama, no I’m-not-Obama contest of 2012. My favored scenario would have pitted Marco Rubio against Rand Paul: The former representing a reform-minded conservatism in domestic policy and a hawkish internationalism abroad; the latter representing a more libertarian domestic agenda and a noninterventionist posture overseas...
I realize that no one at the New York Times actually cares enough about what their wingnut welfare affirmative action hire writes to bother with fact-checking it, but I'm pretty sure that we're in the thick of the 2016 Republican primary campaign, not the 2012 Republican primary campaign.
However, Mr. Douthat's adorable fuck up right at the beginning of his latest exercise in dutiful Republican turd-polishing:
...
So a vote for Rubio is a vote for adaptation and ambition — for a conservatism that seeks to reassure the anxious middle on domestic policy and shore up the Pax Americana overseas. A vote for Cruz is a vote for rigor and retrenchment — for a more intensely ideological conservatism at home and a narrower definition of the national interest abroad. A vote for Trump is a vote for rupture — for a conservatism defined more by identity politics than ideology, more by nationalism than libertarianism, more by caudillism than the Constitution.
I have sympathy for all three of these tendencies — if not necessarily the men who currently embody them — and I think the ideal nominee would find a way to synthesize them, to sift the best and the worst of each.
But that nominee may not exist. So it’s up to the voters to choose which Republican future they prefer, from a lineup that offers not just echoes of the same old conservatism, but a real and pressing choice.
-- does open the door on what is fundamentally and irreparably broken on the Right: the fact that (as I have written about on this blog to the point of tedium) they only continue to survive by continuously lying about their own recent past. A past which is fresh and clear in the minds of the rest of us and which has been documented more thoroughly than any other period in human history.
At the low end of the spectrum, the lies come in the form of that endless, ever-replenishing ocean of ALLCAPS batshit "President Obama orders U.S. service members not to say 'Christmas'"-type conspiracies upon which much of the Right's beliefs float like tectonic plates. These lies that are passed around at the speed of light from one cluster of wingnut shut-ins to the next. These are the lies which sites like Snopes ("Bankrolled by foreign socialists, I hear!") spend 80% of their time debunking and which the Pig People go right on taking as gospel because, let's face it, without the Kenyan Usurper to blame for their every itch and hangnail, they risk having to face the fact that the Liberals have been right all along, that they really just bigoted, halfwit dupes and they really have spent most of their adult lives being played for chumps by a political movement which done nothing but fuck them coming and going.
And that is a reality which Conservatives are frankly too weak to face, which is why the ratings for Fox News and Hate Radio and Donald Trump will go right on being yoooge.
At the high end, the lies and the liars have to be more genteel. They have to align themselves with the sensibilities of the donor classes and the owners of media companies. To pass as Serious, they have to make at least a passing nod to the horrors of the immediate present, but preferably by allocate blame equally to Both Sides and definitely without implying that the events happening now are in any way related to the toxic shit the Right has been pumping into America's political groundwater for 40 years,
History for the Elite Conservative liars must be presented as a series of discrete and non-contiguous moments in which even the briefest critique of the events of today may only be made in transit between Conservatism's Bright Fake Past and it's Glorious Fake Future.
Yes, Ross Douthat, is does suck that the 2016 primary campaign of your Republican party is nothing but a childish, playground game of "I’m-not-Obama, no I’m-not-Obama".
But so was your party's 2012 primary campaign, which was definitely "Before Trump".
Or don't you remember?
2008 was the year a desperate GOP turned Sarah "Obama pallin' around with terrorist" Palin loose on America to the delight of the Pig People who prop up your party. (No coincidence that 2009 was the year the Koch Brothers rolled out the Bush Off Machine so that the Pig People could burn their Bush/Cheney lawn signs, put on tri-corner hats, without missing a beat, begin pretending they had never even heard of George W. Bush.)
Or don't you remember?
In 2004, your party ran and won on a platform of hating gays, trashing Liberals as pro-terrorist, slandering John Kerry's honorable military record, and warning Murrica that Osama bin Laden would probably murder their children of they voted for the Dixie Chick party.
Or don't you remember?
Of course, misremembering the past is something we all do. For example, just today I found out that I had mistakenly grafted the ending of one Arthur C. Clarke novel onto the body of another. Or as Proust said, “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
But publicly and calculatedly lying about major events of the recent past? In defiance of overwhelming evidence? That is another matter entirely. It is despicable. It is dangerous. It is cowardly. And apparently it also guarantees at least a few lucky Americans a wingnut welfare affirmative action job-for-life at America's newspaper of record.
Putin Endorses Donald Trump For President
The Russian for “tremendous!” is замечательно!
posted on Dec. 17, 2015, at 6:47 a.m.
Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a qualified endorsement of Donald Trump’s candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday, saying he hoped Trump’s election could improve Moscow’s relations with the United States.
“He’s a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt. It’s not our job to judge his qualities, that’s a job for American voters, but he’s the absolute leader in the presidential race,” Putin said after his annual press conference in Moscow, according to the Interfax news wire.
“He says he wants to move on to a new, more substantial relationship, a deeper relationship with Russia, how can we not welcome that? Of course we welcome that,” Putin added.
Trump has long sought to play up his affinity with Putin, whose strongman character, appeal to disenfranchised sectors of the population, and affinity for colorful statements often match his own...
"A drug person can learn to cope with things like seeing their dead grandmother crawling up their leg with a knife in her teeth, but nobody should be asked to handle this trip."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, writer
Your Players on the Main Stage:
Donald "Victor Von Doom" Trump
Ben "Past Sell-By Date" Carson
Ted "Failgunner" Cruz
Marco "The Perky One" Rubio
Jeb(!) Bush
Carly "Babies-N-Gravy Saleslady of the Month" Fiorina
Chris "Bridge Troll" Christie
John "3/4 Scale Scott Walker-Shaped Man Pillow" Kasich (h/t Athenae)
Rand "Running Man" Paul
Your Players back in the Crazy Uncle ALL CAPS Karaoke Lounge:
Mike "God and Man at IHOP" Huckabee,
Rick "Don't Google It" Santorum,
Lindsey "Play Misty For Me" Graham
George "Don't Let 'Em Get Me Like They Got Jindal!" Pataki
Your Interlocutors:
Wolf Blitzer (CNN)
Dana Bash (CNN)
Hugh Hewitt (Hate Radio)
A few random remarks from the loser's table before I make dinner for the family:
Graham: I'm tired of beating up on Bush, I miss that incompetent, lying, dry-drunk halfwit. If he were running things, the Mideast would be a fucking paradise by now. I wish he was behind me right now. Surging. Surging hard. Yeah! Yeah! Who's your daddy, Goober! Who's your daddy!
(Other panelists look away in embarrassment)
Graham: Obama and Saul Alinsky invented ISIL in the basement of the White House.
Graham: President "Buttercup" is a sneering jackbooted tyrant who also and inexplicably lets everyone walk all over him.
Pataki: I will arm the Ukranians with terrible weapons and set them against the Great Bear. I will blow Russian planes out of the sky if they cross me in Syria. Don't worry; they'll back down.
Graham: America was awesome until Obama came along.
Graham: The American military was awesome until Obama came along and wrecked it.
Pataki: Chicks in combat. Sure. I'm cool with that.
Santorum: Chicks in combat are icky.
Pataki: Gitmo! I call "Gitmo"!
Huckabee: The government should pay your ransom is someone kidnaps your kid, but they don't. You have to pay your own ransom because Obama.
I am reminder of this quote from "Dune":
"[A] drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable– except when you see it happen in the drawing room.” -- Paul Muad'Dib
Or in a debate.
Big Table Round I:
CNN goes straight-up pro-wrestling Fear!Fear!Fear! with a full, Michael Bey soundtrack in their introduction.
In a world full of killer Muslim robots from space who want to make your kids gay.
Now, please rise for our National Anthem...
Must. Ration. The. Whiskey.
Paul: Stop being afraid. Don't censor the internet or topple dictators or arm bad people. Quit acting like fraidy-cats.
Well put, Rand.
Kasich: Turn the damn music down. Politics is too loud. We need to unify Murrica!
Well put, next-guy-to-drop-out
Christie: Obama and Clinton have betrayed Murrica because some asshole who didn't want to take their English exam called in a bomb threat in Los Angeles.
Well, there goes the Great Unification
Fiorina: Take our country back from bombastards and insulters. I've had breast cancer. I have ruined whole companies. Media. Ooga Booga. Librul Elite. Ooga Booga.
Bush: Hey look! I rehearsed four sentences that all start with the word "under". Will you love me now, Daddy?
Rubio: I used to sit a few miles from here with my grandfather who taught me to smoke, count cards and lie like a motherfucker. Also Obama hates Murrica.
Cruz: We are at war and Obama won't say the Majyk Conjure Words which will win that war. Keep Murrica safe. Kill. Destroy. Stomp. Political correctness.
Carson: A moment of silence. We are always at war. I used to have to diagnose things. Now Murrica is dying of Political Correctness.
Trump: Hey Jeb, watch me start three sentences with "building". Bite my ass, loser. People love and respect me.
Blitzer: Fear, Fear, Fear. This will be the focus of tonight's debate. Trump, don't you want to wall off America?
Trump: Our country are out of control. People have ISIS phone plans. No more.
Blitzer: Why is Donald Trump unhinged?
Bush: We need to go after the caliphate. Donald is a Chaos Candidate. And he'd be a Chaos Candidate.
Trump: All I want to do is Make America Great Again. Jeb is a loser. He doesn't really think I'm unhinged. He's just desperate and sad.
Bush: No I'm not no I'm not no I'm not!
Rubio: Obama betrayed Murrica, of course. ISIS is the most sophisticated terror group in the history of everything, including SMERSH and KAOS.
Hewitt: Why is Donald Trump nuts?
Cruz: Donald said what he did because Obama is in league with terrorists to kill your kids and/or make them gay.
Hewitt: Is this the country Reagan wanted?
Fiorina: I nuked an entire company and got paid millions to do it. I'm Reagan's wet dream. I can do anything. I promise to bring all my SnapChat experience to the NSA.
Blitzer: People are terrified because some douchebag called in a bomb threat. Can you see my raging ratings-boner from here?
Christie: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have betrayed Murrica. You're all gonna diiiiiieeeee unless we stop Hillary Clinton from working with Saul Alinsky to hand the country over to terrorists.
Kasich: We need people on the ground. We should watch stuff. Also climate change is gay, amirite!
(applause)
Bash: Don't you think it should be easier to spy on Americans?
Cruz: Sure. Also the Obama loves punishing law-abiding citizens when terrorists kill Murricans.
Rubio: Hey Jeb, watch me start three sentences with "With the ability...".
Cruz: I call "Alinsky" on you!
Rubio: Maybe you don't wanna show your ass on national teevee, punk.
Paul: Marco gets it completely wrong. Also he wants to let terror babies overrun our country. And I'll see Cruz's "Alinsky" and raise you a "Schumer"! And not that funny, potty-mouthed lady Schumer either.
Paul: Marco is not very bright. He doesn't understand complicated stuff so let me explain it v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
Christie: People "debating" stuff is fucking insane! The American people don't care about thinking about stuff.
Carson: I'm still here. And we need to watch everyone doing anything that makes me feel icky. Muslim brotherhood said that "We will use Political Correctness to kill them all!"
Bush: If we try to do this on our own we will fail.
True.
Bush: I haz a plan.
Fiorina: Wolf, I will now ignore your question and talk a little technobabble to bamboozle the rubes. Parents check their kid's SnapChats all the time but suddenly we're queasy about the gummint reading people's email? Please. Also the gummint always sucks and the Obamacare Website was a disaster.
Yay!
Trump: I will shut down the bad parts of the internet. But we will keep the hot, lesbian sexy parts.
Kasich: Encryption is a bitch, Wolf. A big, gnarly bitch.
Wolf: How would you fight this war? Would you wipe out Raqqa, a specific city.
Cruz: I'd bomb the shit outta stuff. Bombs work. Barack Obama and political correctness are killing us. Obama is ISIS's big, gay cheerleader. He doesn't give a shit about this country.
Rubio: Bombs are great, but we need vast armies of Sunni's. And our air force is now basically Sopwith Camels being flown by drunk janitors. Thanks Obama! And thanks Ted Cruz for helping to destroy America's military.
Cruz: Marco is a lying son-of-a-whore who loves Hillary Clinton more than God himself.
driftglass: Why won't the Liberal media report on Cuban-on-Cuban crime?
Trump: I will be firm with the families of terrorists. Firmly kill them.
Bush: I will now use the word "serious" six times. Have I won yet, Mommy?
Trump: I will now use the word "toughness" and "strength" a hundred times and bury your weak ass.
Bush: You will not be able to insult your way to the White House (cue the establishment seat-fillers Jeb(!)'s million have hired to cheer for him.)
Hewitt: Why are you, Ben Carson, objectively in favor of killing innocent children?
Wow. Crowd boos. Doesn't matter. Hewitt lives on a diet of hate.
Bash: Do you, Senator Paul, think members of your own party have fucked up the region?
Paul: Basically, yes.
Good answer.
Blitzer: Arab nations want nothing to do with your nutty neocon claptrap.
Rubio: Because of...Obama!
Fiorina: We need a commander-in-chief who has the executive ability to wreck companies and get rich thereby. Also, Margaret Thatcher was a woman.
Christie: Folks on this stage have participated in the fuckups they're now bitching about. Also...Obama has ruined everything! Have any of these people ever ruined an entire state? No! Shut down a major bridge out of political pique? No!
Round Two:
Cruz: Obama, Hillary and "some Republicans" have screwed everything up.
Cruz: Obama, Hillary and "Washington Republicans" ruined everything and Bebe Netenyahu agrees with me.
Kasich: Assad has got to go and somewhere there are some moderates I'm pretty sure, who will help us.
Trump: We pissed away $4 - $5 trillion in stupid wars that we could have spent on roads and bridges.
Fiorina: That's just what Obama said.
Fiorina: Who got everything wrong? Hillary Clinton...
Trump: Ben Carson is a great guy who agrees with me about gettin' the oil.
Bush: Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a great idea. Barack Obama ruined everything. He destabilized the whole region.
Cruz won't shut his pie hole. And not in a good way.
Trump: We can't fight everyone at the same time.
Christie: Obama is a sock-puppet of Iran. They're gonna kill us all Hugh!
Paul: I know this sounds nuts coming from a fan of Ayn Rand, but we need a realistic foreign policy and not a policy run by neocon nuts.
Blitzer: Would you still tell Vlad the Putin to shaddap?
Fiorina: I never said I wouldn't communicate with Putin (yes you did). Also Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama invented ISIS by stabbing us all in the back (applause).
Christie: I'm from New Jersey so I'm going to start blowing Russian planes outta the sky on Day One if Putin looks at me cross-eyed.
Paul: If you want WWIII, Chris Christie is your guy. A guy who'd shut down a bridge because of a tantrum.
Bush: I know what I don't know. I'll get a strategy. I'll rebuild our military which Barack Obama has ruined. The Armed Forces Radio is using tin cans and string.
Trump: Jeb is a weakling and CNN are punks for using me to build their ratings.
Bush: You're being insulting.
Trump: And you're at 3%.
Kasich: Stop it!Stop it!Stop it! This fighting is tearing us apart.
Carson: The less qualified a person is, the better they'd probably be as president. I build things. Lotsa things.
And now, Immigration...
Cruz: Reagan. Mmmm. Flavor country. Just say the word. "Reagan". Some people choose to stand with Chuck Schumer. And Hitler. The Rubio/Schumer/Hitler strategy is flawed and evil,
Rubio: I'm puzzled as to why Ted "Amnesty" Cruz keeps pretending that he never did what he obviously has done.
Fiorina: Stop it!Stop it!Stop it! This is why no one trusts professional politicians and Cubans.
Trump: Walls work. Also bwahahahahah! I live in these people's heads.
Bush: Heroin is too easy to get. Also all of our good American heroin distribution jobs are being taken by immigrants. And cops need to be trained to do...law enforcement? And if we get stuff right we can get stuff right. And, of course, the real problem is... Barack Obama.
Carson: We need to decide better decisions.
Rubio: If we can't guarantee that not even one bad person will ever get in then we need to shut the whole thing down.
Round Three:
Fiorina: I have bought many dresses in China, so I know I can force them to contain North Korea.
Carson: North Korea owes me $5. If we can use our oil correctly, we can use North Korea to tricksie-trick Putin. Also our submarines are very old.
Christie: Cyber-warfare? I would totally fuck up China on Fallout Four if they screwed with me. Also, let me repeat, Obama and Clinton have betrayed Murrica.
Bush: Emails! What about those Hillary emails! Yeah, that'll do the trick.
Hewitt: Which of the legs of our nuclear triad is more fucked up than the others?
Trump: Global warming is bullshit.
Rubio: Our planes are old.
Bash: You said Ted Cruz is nuts. What about it?
Trump: Senator Cruz is awesome.
Bash: Senator Cruz, you bashed Donald Trump as a looney tune in private. What about now, in public?
Cruz: Reagan beat the commies! Also ISIS and Iran.
Bash: But...but...
Hewitt: Will you, Donald Trump, run as a Republican?
Trump: Sure. I'm awesome. And I'll beat Hillary Clinton.
Carson: Reince Pubis [yes, that's how he pronounced it] tells me that no one is going to screw with me, so I'll party with you all for awhile longer.
Final Round:
Paul: Republicans spend money on war. Dems spend it on the Poors. Fuck 'em both! John Galt roolz!
Christie: I would like to remind you for the 177th time that I was a federal prosecutor.
Fiorina: I too remember 9/11. I ordered my staff to back up their hard drives. It's called "leadership" people. We need to unify our party behind the goal of putting my failed ass in the White House.
Bush: Ask yourself, do you trust Hillary and Obama? And now I will stutter my way through a half-assed closing statement that I spent a week memorizing.
Rubio: Once upon a time...there was a country...where new greatenesses were great and greatness was given greatly by greater greats than now.
Cruz: I have many nouns. Reagan! Obama wants to kill us all. Also Reagan!
Carson: My mom said I can be president. Don't make my mom a liar.
Trump: We don't win anymore. Nothing works. We will win again.
Conclusion:
Who won? Cruz and Rubio punched each other up pretty good. Paul locked down all 11 isolationists left in the Republicans, Carson was calmly ethereal and might tick up a few points and Bush may also pick up a pity point or two, but the non-Trumps are all picking each other's pockets and wiping their noses on each other's shirttails.
In my opinion Trump won using the most basic yardstick of political victory: setting the agenda and forcing everyone else to fight over the scraps from your table.
To quote the late Dr. Thompson, Trump is "one of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
Showtime Getting In On 2016 'Circus' With Weekly Documentary Series
The network will team up with Bloomberg on a series that will air as the campaign unfolds.
Michael Calderone, Senior Media Reporter, The Huffington Post
NEW YORK -- As the political world's attention turns to Iowa in early 2016, Showtime will launch a new weekly series that promises to take viewers behind the scenes of the presidential race in real-time.
Showtime announced Tuesday it's teaming up with Bloomberg Politics for "The Circus: Inside The Greatest Political Show On Earth," a half-hour, Sunday night program that will feature Bloomberg Politics managing editors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann and veteran political strategist and media adviser Mark McKinnon...
As your attorney, for your own mental health, I advise you gas up, point your land cruiser at the horizon and get as far away from this rat parade as possible.
"I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo! And somebody was giving booze to these god damn things! It wont be long now, before they tear us to shreds."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times continues to tinkle random fatuous remarks about the Nature of Man on the tiny, irrelevant human far, far below.
Childhood fears and adult traumas are stored differently in the brain than happy memories. They are buried like porous capsules deep in the primitive regions...
There is a vast psychological literature on the diverse ways people are held back by these hidden capsules...
Some people experience a longstanding but vague sense of unease about the crucial matters of life...
The symptoms differ according to the nature of the hidden memories.
Some people dissociate from their experiences...
Some feel compartmentalized, as though they are actors trapped in many roles at once...
Some fear making commitments...
Some suffer from nightmares...
And some suffer from all four. They try to work out their epic personal and ideological failures by dropping little passive-voice turds in the pages the the New York Times and they live in fear that someone someday will bring it all crashing down by asking some simple, pointed questions about their past.
But please go on!
“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events...
Like, say, building one's career on slandering Liberals -- who have been proven right over and over again -- and pimping Conservative wars, candidates and policies, which have all gone disastrously wrong?
But please go on!
...and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
Amen!
In fact for most people in Mr. Brooks' profession the conflict between seeing the horrors on the Right which they helped to enable finally battering down their own door, and the desire to keep pretending it's not happening so they can continue to get paid can be so stressful that it induces a profitable but near-catatonic state of perpetual Both Siderism.
But there is hope, because pathological Both Siderism can eventually be cured by large doses of Both Siderism!
But people with patience and resolve can look forward to a life in the sunshine. They face their fears, integrate the good and bad memories — recognizing that many different truths lie side by side.
No hold on tight, because here comes the inevitable awkward transition from the bourgeois professional and marital woes of highly-paid fraud and wide-respected Very Serious Person, Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock...
The parallel is inexact, but peoples and cultures also have to deal with the power of hard memories.
...and the Problems of The World:
Many of the issues we have been dealing with in 2015 revolve around unhealed cultural memories...
The most obvious case involves American race relations...
Unhealed cultural memories have shaped other policy areas. In the Middle East, Sunnis and Shiites are battling bloodily over competing pasts...
Thus, we find ourselves involved at all levels in the therapy of memory. I’d only mention three concepts that might be useful going forward. The first is Miroslav Volf’s notion of soft difference...
The second is the distinction between blame and responsibility.
The third is the danger of asymmetric rhetoric.
You know, not very long ago, Mr. Brook used to mock people who wanted to:
...experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments.
Now. he is the High Priest of the Beltway Church of Never Talking About The Awful Shit We Said And Did Yesterday and has made a fortune working both sides of that scam.
