d r i f t g l a s s

I Assume Tina Brown Was Compelled

2012-02-12T19:03:00.000-06:00

To turn over the job of explicating the many cultural and religious ley-lines that intersect at the reproductive rights of American women to her favorite Gay Catholic Tory blogger because neither Cardinal Richelieu nor Jessica Rabbit were available.

Somewhere, the ghost of Mike Royko

just threw up a little ectoplasm up in his mouth.

Henry Fonda, Bill Cosby and Elsa Lanchester Walk Into a Bar

2012-02-12T15:13:00.002-06:00

Well, OK, they walk into an elevator.
Pedants.

Making Shapeless Prose

2012-02-11T00:44:00.003-06:00

Once again giving writing by rote a bad name, Our Mr. Brooks pens a quick primer on one method of making a living by writing badly:

1. Settle on a meaningless word or phrase on which you will hang your entire thesis.

I’m borrowing the phrase “other-directed” from David Riesman’s 1950 classic, “The Lonely Crowd.”

2. Mention in passing that you really have no idea what you are talking about.

"I don’t actually know what sort of person Romney is. He’s a reticent man. He’s unwilling to talk about his roots, home and family history, so it is hard to understand what’s really going on in his head."

3. Unspool a list of declaratives detailing how he-who-you-really-have-no-idea-about can become he-who-you-wish-he-would-be if only he would quickly undergo a series of massive personality inversions and reversals:

If Romney is to thrive, he really needs to go on an integrity tour.

He needs to show...

He needs to trust...

He needs to tell his own...

He needs to tell us...

He needs to stop...

He needs to show that he is willing...

He needs to step outside...

He needs to find a policy...

And if invisible unicorns would just stop being so other-directed and learn to poop solid gold then they would be completely awesome.

Actually Williard Romney would be the perfect candidate for the GOP to select from a "creative destruction" point of view.

The GOP is an old company with a ruined brand run by lunatics, bigots, idiot nephews and a handful of oligarchs who are only interested in squeezing the last. few pfennigs out of the carcass of the Land of the Free before they fire-sale the whole thing and locust-swarm on to the next mega-grift. And Romney has the skill set that every successful "loot and scoot" artist possesses: the ability to suppress his gag reflex so profoundly that he can wade through a chin-deep lake of flaming poo wearing a titanium smile while telling the gibbering, bug-eyed offal dwellers w-h-a-t-e-v-e-r they want to hear.

Whatever it takes to close the deal.

Because, in the end, the leaders of the GOP -- just like the delusional leaders of so many other ruined companies -- have no use for people who tell them the truth. In fact, they actively shun and hate people who tell them the truth.

Like any other bunch of 3rd generation inbred senior executives, they want someone who will flatter them; who will tell them great, big, heroic lies about their genius and bravery and patriotism and the more gigantic you make your whoppers the better. They don't want some dick lecturing them about the horrid decisions they have made -- horrid decisions that landed the in this spot in the first place. No, they want Pecos Bill-sized tall tales about what studs they are: how powerful and canny they are and how everyone on Earth secretly envies them.

The Right has shown that people with little or no talent beyond being pathological liars can accumulated enormous wealth and influence peddling transparently ludicrousness fair tales to imbeciles.

In that environment, there is no reason why an accomplished vulture capitalist like Romney should not, in the end, be wildly successful.

An O-Bot

2012-02-10T21:26:00.003-06:00

Since before O-Botting was cool.

Or nefarious.

Or whatever term the Supreme Bloviet is hanging around our necks this week.

Yes, this is a for-real "Thank You" note sent to me by then-State Senator Barack Obama me for my support in his ultimately-failed Democratic primary challenge for Illinois' 1st Congressional district. I'm pretty sure I have a "Rock with Barack" stub for the "Young Voter's Reception" thing I also dropped a little coin to attend.

The world as it was then, courtesy of the Chicago Reader, March 7, 2000:

...

Obama's detractors rap him because he didn't grow up on the south side. He points out that he's spent most of his adult life there, his wife is from South Shore, and he's raising his daughter as a south-sider. His enemies also say he's too white and too bright. Part of it--although they won't say it publicly--is that he grew up with a white mother. Part of it is his demeanor. His lanky, Lincoln-esque body is usually stiff and upright, and he speaks in a stentorian baritone that sounds like a TV newscaster's (Lester Holt's, to be specific). But the main reason is that he's associated himself with Harvard and the University of Chicago, two strongholds of white power.

"Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community," says Donne Trotter, who detests Obama. "You just have to look at his supporters. Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It's these individuals in Hyde Park, who don't always have the best interests of the community in mind."

Lu Palmer, a radio talk show host and chairman of the Black Independent Political Organization, dismisses Obama as arrogant and compares him to Mel Reynolds, who went from a Rhodes Scholarship to Congress to prison.

"When Obama first hit town, my recollection is that he came here running some voter registration drive," Palmer said. "He came to our office and tried to get us involved, and we were turned off then. We sent him running. We didn't like his arrogance, his air."Palmer had another run-in with Obama in 1996, when he tried to dissuade the young politician from running to replace state senator Alice Palmer (not a relation). Palmer was resigning to seek Reynolds's old congressional seat, which was won by Jesse Jackson Jr."I said, 'Man, you sound like Mel Reynolds,'" Palmer said. "There are similarities. If you get hung into these elite institutions, and if you so impress white folks at these elite institutions, and if they name you head of these elite institutions, the Harvard Law Review, that makes one suspect."

Obama says that when "Congressman Rush and his allies" rip him for going to Harvard and teaching at the U. of C., they're sending a signal to black kids that "if you're well educated, somehow you're not keeping it real." He refuses to be ashamed of his education. In January he held a fund-raiser for black educators at Honeysuckle's, a nightclub on 87th Street. It attracted people who don't believe the Ivy League is poison. "I'm glad he went to Harvard," said Lula Ford, who used to be principal of Beethoven Elementary School in the Robert Taylor Homes. "I want all children to go to Harvard, especially from the south side of Chicago."

...

A lot has changed since then.

For one thing, I no long have the scratch to write checks to candidates like this -- ironic that I was never without more work that I could handle during the Bush Administration, but that since being laid off ten days after Barack Obama was sworn in I have not had steady employment, or any gig that paid more than 1/10th of what I was making back during the Dark Days of Dubya.

For another, this...

Professional Left Podcast #114

2012-02-10T13:17:00.001-06:00

“All your vaginae are belong to us."

-- Pope Santorum I

Links:

The Final Edition (Satire): "Roger Ailes: 'Fuck It, I'll Just Be President Myself'"

Obama-Bush and the Auto Industry Bailout of 2008

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Da' money goes here:

There Once was a Man Named Bush

2012-02-10T08:48:00.003-06:00

No, for real.

There really was.

Of course, if you stick to the major wingnut/CPAC media outlets, you know that details of his life and times are mostly lost to history but he appears to have been a "Republican" who -- despite of what this obviously Librul Media-doctored footage from the 2008 CPAC Conventions purports to show --

held some sort of public office in spite of the the remarkable fact that not a single one of his fellow Republicans ever voted for him or supported him in any way.

Weird, huh?

Well this Bush guy

has climbed back out of the wingnut memory hole just long enough to violate the Three Cardinal Rules of being a good, Limbaugh Conservative.

Violation #1: Failure to vehemently deny the existence of George W. Bush.

From the Detroit News:

Las Vegas — Former President George W. Bush defended...

Noooooo!

Violation #2: Failure to vehemently deny that it was George W. Bush who initiated the bailout of the American automobile industry.

Bush on auto bailouts: 'I'd do it again'

BY DAVID SHEPARDSON DETROIT NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAULas Vegas—

Former President George W. Bush defended his decision to bail out General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC at the end of his administration.

"I'd do it again," Bush told thousands of the nation's auto dealers, explaining approving a $700 billion bailout fund used to rescue banks, insurers and automakers. "I didn't want there to be 21 percent unemployment."

Bush said he believes in the free market and under normal conditions, automakers and other businesses should have been allowed to fail.

"If you make a bad decision, you ought to pay," Bush said. "Sometimes, circumstances get in the way of philosophy."

In late December 2008, after Congress refused to act, Bush agreed to a $17.4 billion bailout for GM and Chrysler using his broad authority under the $700 billion fund established to help the failing banks, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
...

And Violation #3?

Failure to jam a reference to Saul Aulinsky

into every fucking sentence.

Douglass on Lincoln -- UPDATE*

2012-02-09T18:09:00.002-06:00

From Frederick Douglass' "Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln" delivered on the occasion of the unveiling of The Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1876.

...
I have said that President Lincoln was a white man, and shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

Though Mr. Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery. The man who could say, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war shall soon pass away, yet if God wills it continue till all the wealth piled by two hundred years of bondage shall have been wasted, and each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been paid for by one drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether," gives all needed proof of his feeling on the subject of slavery. He was willing, while the South was loyal, that it should have its pound of flesh, because he thought that it was so nominated in the bond; but farther than this no earthly power could make him go.

Fellow-citizens, whatever else in this world may be partial, unjust, and uncertain, time, time! is impartial, just, and certain in its action. In the realm of mind, as well as in the realm of matter, it is a great worker, and often works wonders. The honest and comprehensive statesman, clearly discerning the needs of his country, and earnestly endeavoring to do his whole duty, though covered and blistered with reproaches, may safely leave his course to the silent judgment of time. Few great public men have ever been the victims of fiercer denunciation than Abraham Lincoln was during his administration. He was often wounded in the house of his friends. Reproaches came thick and fast upon him from within and from without, and from opposite quarters. He was assailed by Abolitionists; he was assailed by slave-holders; he was assailed by the men who were for peace at any price; he was assailed by those who were for a more vigorous prosecution of the war; he was assailed for not making the war an abolition war; and he was bitterly assailed for making the war an abolition war.

But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is, that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.
...

Today, I believe the technical term for Mr. Douglass would be "another goddamn, sell-out faux abolitionist L-bot" .

UPDATE -- I was mistake: today, the modern technical term would be "repulsive abolitionist hypocrite". Management regrets this error.

Bluepillnation, Jasper and Several Others

2012-02-08T16:01:00.003-06:00

Are having a rich and fecund discussion about the duties, obligations, agonies and upper limits of principled Liberal activism in the comment section below decks on this thread.

Well worth bringing a chunk of it up to the front page where everyone can see it.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

bluepillnation said...

@Jasper As someone who also knows the "you don't belong here" look (though due to social class and means or lack thereof rather than melanin levels) I understand where you're coming from. But change in this media-centric day and age is going to be more gradual than it has been in the past. Every generation of western kids seems to understand more implicitly that racism is wrong - so we just have to keep the trend going.

I still think you're being a little over-sensitive regarding some blogs and commenters however. I'm not seeing accusations of immaturity or "whining" in response to criticism of President Obama per se, but I do see it aimed instead at a specific kind of criticism - namely the kind that demands actions that would be political suicide in the current climate and signs off with "...so I'm sitting out the next election/voting third party". *That's* immature, and not unlike a kid who won't eat their dinner or tidy their room unless they get what they want right now, even in the face of an honest promise that they'll get a treat later.

It seems a significant number of otherwise intelligent and empathetic people have yet to understand the concept of deferred gratification. In this case you have a political climate that has been dragged further to the right, inch-by-inch, for the last 32 years at least. Even Bubba Clinton only managed to slow the process down to some extent, and for that he was pilloried by the Right, who spent billions digging up dirt on him until they had something with which they could attempt to impeach him. The only reason their shellacking of Obama (who, as you say, is even less able to halt the slide) is so impotent is because they didn't think he'd beat Hillary to the nomination - what do you think they'd do to a President who gave you everything you wanted?

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Jasper said...

I view change (policy, social, etc.) in our media-centric era as something that comes more quickly than it once did. See: the Komen Foundation firestorm.

I'm not sure about your perception of race and western society, but it's still a contentious issue down this way. And the internet seems to be yet another flashpoint.

I'll accept that I am over-sensitive, in that I want someone to care about my political opinion and not dismiss it cavalierly. My specific demands of our President were promises he made during his campaign and certainly would not have amounted to political suicide of any kind; especially not when he and the Democratic party held the reins of power for two full years.

I know his critics play on this but what defense is there when he had 2 years of a Dem Congress, a populous tired of GOP malfeasance and his tactical decision was to try to reach some sense of accord with the lunatics on the right and take legislative baby steps? Some defenders put this down to a mysterious long form strategy but I cannot see it.

I agree with your charge our generation's want for immediate gratification, but it cannot be dismissed that Obama played to that desire with his "Hope" campaign and with his heady campaign promises—he didn't just lightly tease that bundle of neurons, he gripped it with both hands and yanked it like a friar tolling a church bell until it pealed far and wide. And then he rode that endorphin rush all the way to the White House. For him to do this and then a couple of years later say, "Whoa, whoa…slow your roll, everybody" and *not* expect cries of foul play from those fervently caught up in his rhetoric just seems unfair.

Again, civil liberties and social justice were the hill I chose to die on and as such it will be a bitter pill to swallow to vote for him again. But I probably will. I just wish the dialogue with those left disillusioned and (seemingly) disenfranchised were less of a dismissive, accusatory nature. There are legitimate complaints to be heard.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

bluepillnation said...

Of course there are legitimate complaints to be heard - however at the same time achievement is constrained by possibility, and it is a sad truism that the higher up the pyramid you get, the less room for manoeuvre you have.

Today Clinton is vilified almost as much by progressives for not doing enough during his two terms as he was by conservatives during his time in office - and yet those same conservatives howled from the rooftops that he was some kind of un-american socialist for the changes he did make. I suspect that a lot of the things progressives now vilify him for (passing NAFTA for example) were essentially a quid pro quo to get some leeway for small progressive reforms with a pathologically antagonistic Republican Congress - but his greatest legacy in office was turning a sizeable deficit into a respectable surplus, which I'm sure he intended to pass on to Al Gore to keep things moving in the right direction.

Instead, you had the Bush Administration piss the whole thing away on military and security boondoggles (most of which were resurrected Cold War projects - completely useless against terrorist cells), which has left Obama even more limited than Clinton was in terms of room for manoeuvre in terms of financial standing alone - and like Clinton, even the little he has managed to do has come at the expense of being called an un-american socialist by the Right, which has consolidated it's hold on media even more aggressively than it was in Clinton's day.

If President Obama were to do all the things being asked of him by progressives, I could guarantee you a one-term presidency followed by a lurch even further to the right. Both Clinton and Obama know this - they (and the Democratic Party as a whole) saw what happened to Jimmy Carter and changed tack accordingly - just as the Republicans did following Nixon's defeat in 1960 and resignation following Watergate.

The issue is that the very nature of progressives, being humanist in nature if not in name, is that they tend to take "First Do No Harm" as a baseline. Even self-proclaimed "fighting liberals" like the beloved and much-missed Gilly took the fight only to those who were causing harm and deserved to be rhetorically threshed and politically sidelined. Regressive conservatives don't care who they steamroller as long as the result suits them. This is why Democratic politicians try to find consensus even as the Republicans wilfully double down on the crazy - because the former care what's at stake and the latter clearly do not. Combine this fundamental drive with the woeful financial situation and the aggressive antagonism of the right-wing media and you have your answer.

Yes it's frustrating, but it may bring some comfort to remember Aesop's tortoise and hare. Push too far too soon and you'll get cocky and lose (which is particularly true of the previous administration). Slow and sure is the way...

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Jasper said...Fair points all around.

I have the Gilliard Doctrine tattooed on my heart and it's probably among the chief reasons reason I haven't checked out of the game.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

bluepillnation said...

Thank you sir.

Steve Gilliard was an exceptionally talented and visceral writer, and he was also a very concise and precise wordsmith. In the paean to being a "fighting liberal" that we all know and love he used the phrase:

"I want to stop them".

He didn't want to kill, annihilate, crush, dismember, maim or hurt them in a physical sense - even as he pointed out how destructive and morally bankrupt they and their creed were, and I like to think that was because he knew in his heart that to cross that line would be to become like them, and make any eventual victory over them an empty, pyrrhic one.

The Poor Feel Like a Bag of Sand

2012-02-08T12:19:00.000-06:00

Watching David Brook trying to explain "work" or "poverty" in the pages of the "New York Times" really is semantically indistinguishable from Steve Carell attempting to explain sex in "The 40-Year Old Virgin": every time he opens his mouth to show off his bed cred

what comes out are a string of embarrassing noises assembled out of the fragments of what he has heard other people saying :

The essential truth about poverty is that we will never fully understand what causes it.

There are a million factors that contribute to poverty, and they interact in a zillion ways.

and

The list of factors that contribute to poverty could go on and on, and the interactions between them are infinite. Therefore, there is no single magic lever to pull to significantly reduce poverty. The only thing to do is change the whole ecosystem.

If poverty is a complex system of negative feedback loops, then you have to create an equally complex and diverse set of positive feedback loops. You have to flood the zone with as many good programs as you can find and fund and hope that somehow they will interact and reinforce each other community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood.

The key to this flood-the-zone approach is that you have to allow for maximum possible diversity.

...

Of course one really good, battle-tested anti-poverty program on which most of the golden age of Murrican Values was built is known as a "good-paying job" with "security" and "strong labor protection" that provides "Americans" with a "future" towards which they can "plan" and in which they can have "faith". But for America's Leading Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual it is neither fun nor safe to talk about that stuff (mostly because just beneath the surface of that conversation lurks the ever-present danger of accidentally mentioning the 30 years of Conservative economic policies which destroyed the golden age of Murrican Values.) Much easier for Mr. Brooks to lay down 800 words of faux badass rat-a-tat pop sociology jive about the po' that he picked up on the street.

Unfortunately the "street" on which Mr. Brooks picked up his urban blight slingo winds past the dull, dark, and melancholy House of Murray before cutting directly through beautiful, downtown Davos, and when he tries to sound like he knows what he is talking about all that shines through -- as bright and shiny as a new, fiat currency penny -- is his complete lack of any frame of personal reference:

Let’s say there is a 14-year-old girl who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the love and sense of purpose that go with motherhood, rather than stay in school in the hopes of someday earning a middle-class wage.

You have no idea what factors have caused her to make this decision, and you have no way of knowing what will dissuade her. But you want her, from morning until night, to be enveloped by a thick ecosystem of positive influences.

You see, as America's Leading Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual, Mr. Brooks desperately wants to write big, heroic paragraphs about Centrism (which is all he ever writes about anymore) and the plight of the wee, downtrodden people of Supply Side Brigadoon, but since Centrism is a fraud and since Mr. Brooks hasn't the slightest fucking clue about poverty, what comes out of his keyboard sounds as idiotic as Willard Romney talking about being unemployed, or Newt Gingrich talking about morality. And since Our Mr. Brooks definitely does not want to talk about the complete devastation 30 years of Conservatism has wreaked on the middle class, the working poor and America's manufacturing base, he instead opts to lazily extrude 800 words of gabble-gabble nonsense out of the giant hole where his human experience ought to be.

Of course, over in the Better Universe, a fraud like Mr. Brooks would be collecting a paycheck by thanking me for shopping at Costco after swiping my receipt for tube socks, a pallet truck of mac and cheese and a ten gallon drum of maple syrup with a Magic Marker.

But in this Universe -- for reasons that passeth all understanding -- Mr. Brooks has been handed a "Guns of Navarone"-sized megaphone planted permanently atop a giant pile of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.'s money.

Which is a tragedy, because the essential truth about Conservatism is that we will never fully understand what causes it.

There are a million factors that contribute to Conservatism , and they interact in a zillion ways, but at the root of this tragedy is our nation's broken wingnut welfare system.

Let's say there is a young Conservative male person who, for perfectly understandable reasons, wants to experience the enormous wealth and influence that go with rolling out of bed twice a week and jerking 800-words of oligarch bait into the pages of the New York Times, rather that developing any real skills or doing anything resembling real work.

You have no idea what factors caused this young man to choose a life of telling lies about hippies and poor people to banksters and the Wall Street money changers, but you're pretty sure that trying to appeal to his conscience is never going to work, because this soul-dead plutocrat knob gobbler has discovered that there is big money in ignoring the grotty details of the real world in favor of abstract Conservative principles which he can mindless apply in all cases, consistently and uniformly.

Also don't bother throwing technocrats at him because it is a fact universally acknowledged as being true by America's Leading Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual technocrats are always wrong about everything:

Technocrats are in the business of promulgating rules. They seek abstract principles that they can apply in all cases. From their perspective, a rule is fair when it can be imposed uniformly across the nation.

Technocratic organizations take diverse institutions and make them more alike by imposing the same rules. Technocracies do not defer to local knowledge. They dislike individual discretion. They like consistency, codification and uniformity.

But the tragedy of Mr. Brooks' choice to spend his life suckling the Wingnut Welfare teat are not confined to his life alone: by the nature of what he does and who he serves means that Mr. Brooks exerts a terrible and destructive influence over the rest of us.

So what to do?

Sadly, the list of factors that contribute to Conservatism could go on and on, and the interactions between them are infinite. Therefore, there is no single magic lever to pull to significantly reduce Conservatism . The only thing to do is change the whole ecosystem.

If Conservatism is a complex system of negative feedback loops, then you have to create an equally complex and diverse set of positive feedback loops. You have to flood the zone with as many good writers as you can find and fund and hope that somehow they will interact and reinforce each other community-by-community, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, blog-by-blog.

The key to this flood-the-zone approach is that you have to allow for maximum possible diversity.

Which unfortunately these days appears to consist of Paul Krugman, Charlie Pierce and me :-)

Mr. Brooks is the Antagonist

2012-02-07T17:54:00.000-06:00

of the Philip K. Dick novel in which we are all imprisoned.

Here is a link to what Mr. Charlie Pierce has written about Mr. Brooks' latest column.

For anyone who is interested, here is Mr. Brooks from a January 20, 2012 panel of "[f]ive of the country's most influential political minds" -- MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, senior Obama adviser David Axelrod, New York Times columnist David Brooks and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel -- moderated by “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos at the University of Chicago International House’s Assembly Hall:

The panelists concluded the discussion with a reflection on the current political climate, and the future of both major political parties. Brooks said that today’s polarized political culture is connected to the disappearance of humility and self-effacement.

“If you have a sense of modesty about yourself, you realize that you need the people who disagree with you because of your own flawed understanding of the world,” he said. “If you think you have the truth by the short-hairs, they’re just in the way.”

There's No Blood Going To It

2012-02-07T11:23:00.000-06:00

President Santorum has Big Plans for Your Vaginae

2012-02-06T13:26:00.001-06:00

So does the Republican Supreme Court.

So does the Republican Congress.

So does your local, Conservative school board.

Here is a snip of Blue Gal's post today on why the culture war has stopped being something you can opt out of anymore:

...
None of us can be neutral in the culture war over Planned Parenthood.

What we are confronting here is that defending Planned Parenthood on the "nice pink" issue of breast cancer screening DOES MEAN defending Planned Parenthood on the not-so-pink issues of contraception and yes, abortion. There is a direct link between the Catholic Bishop freak out on health insurance to cover contraception and the Komen brouhaha. It's women. And it's women in a very "Wake Up White Women!" way.

We priveleged white women with educations and laptops and smart phones and wide access to the twitter streams of our congressmen, can't be neutral or even silent.

We can't say "I would never have an abortion but don't want to restrict access for anyone else" and stand aside while state legislatures around the country restrict access for everyone else.
...

I cannot adequately describe how sanity-preserving it is be married to such a smart and savvy woman, especially in these parlous times :-)

Go read the rest here.

Moyers FAIL

2012-02-06T00:00:00.000-06:00

Normally I like Bill Moyers and will follow him almost anyplace he wants to go.

But watching him grin and nod Charlie Rose-style as the 1,000th insipid Centrist burned valuable public television bandwidth driveling on about how both sides are exactly, equally wrong and morally blind was simply too much.

Sample:

JONATHAN HAIDT: But cooperation and competition are opposite sides of the same coin. And we've gotten this far because we cooperate to compete. So you can say that liberals are more accurate or in touch with how the system works. But I would say they're more in touch with some aspects of how systems go awry and oppress some people, ignore other people. Liberals see some aspects of where the social system breaks down. And conservatives see others. You have to have consequences following bad behavior. That is as basic an aspect of system design as any. And that's one where conservatives see it much more clearly than liberals.

I think I'm a centrist, in terms of liberal conservative. And I feel like I'm sort of, I sort of, like, stepped out of the game. And now that the game has gotten so deadly, I'm hoping that, in the coming year, I can be the guy saying, ‘Come on, people, just, here, understand the other side so you stop demonizing, and now you can argue more productively.

Just what our public discourse needs: one more vapid, Tom Friedman replicant selling the same fucking snake oil, this time with a patina of liberal respectability courtesy of Mr. Moyers.

Still, every now and then -- and regardless of how much Centrist sludge they try to bury the reality under -- a prominent wingnut gets bit by their own rabid dog hard enough to momentarily give the game away. Of course, everyone who makes living selling the Centrist lie quickly closes ranks to pretend it never happens, but some of us watch and some of us remember.

Here is what I wrote back in 2008 when the Pig People momentarily turned on Kathleen Parker.

+ + + + + + + + + + +

Kathleen Parker Finally Gets
a good, long look at who's been signing her check all these years.

This is such one of my favorite parables I’m surprised I haven’t inflicted on you for three years:

… this insect specialist is walking around on the Near North Side during rush hour one summer day, talking with a friend. The ambient environment – near an “el” stop and hard by one of the ubiquitous construction sites – was warm-weather busy. As if someone had accidentally knocked over a bee hive full of workers dressed in bike pants, short skirts or business-casual suits and loosened ties.

It was loud.

And that’s when the entomologist stops his friend and tells him the he hears the distinctive chirping of a particularly uncommon species of cricket (BTW, feel free to re-tell this story using the ‘White House’ and Jiminy Cricket if you’d like. With a dollop of AstroGlide it fits like a pair of bunny slippers.)

His friend is dubious, to say the least.

“Quit screwing with me, Dwight (we’ll call him ‘Dwight’),” Larry said (we’ll call the other guy ‘Larry’.) “you know you can’t hear a damned thing in this din.”

Ok, “din” is my word. Larry wouldn’t really say that.

Dwight shrugged, and took out a small handful of coins – nickels and pennies and a dime or two, (Possibly exactly the same combination of coins O. Henry used in “The Gift Of The Magi”) – and tossed them up and out onto a temporarily vacant spot on the sidewalk. The instant they hit and started pinging and jangling around, everyone in earshot ceased what they were doing, stopped talking, and turned to look at the source of the sound.

“It’s not how loud it is,” Dwight said. “It’s what you listen for.”

…

Keep that in mind while you read this from Firedoglake:

Kathleen Parker Shocked To Find Her Party’s Full Of “Vicious”, “Threatening”, Delusional Wingnuts

By: Blue Texan Wednesday October 1, 2008

Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.

...
"After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

And she knows vicious. Here's Parker in 2003, on the Democratic presidential candidates:

Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot."

Suck it up, Kathleen. You've been tossing red meat to a caged rabid animal for two decades. No sympathy when it finally bites you.
Now, she whines:

...when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.

I'm truly speechless.

UPDATE

John Hawkins, responding at Right Wing News, writes:

As a general rule, conservatives aren't as nasty and vicious as liberals...

To which I say, Amen Brother!

However I couldn’t quite place which pillar of sweet, kindly Conservative temperance Mr. Hawkins might be citing, so maybe someone can help me out here.

Was it Karl Rove?

Or Tom DeLay?

Or Newt Gingrich?

Was it Roger Ailes?

Glenn Beck?

Tucker Carlson?

Neil Cavuto?

Ann Coulter?

Pat Robertson?

Maybe Chris Wallace?

Lou Dobbs?

Dick Armey?

Robert Novak?

Steve Doocy?

Jesse Helms?

Bob Dornin?

Jerry Falwell?

John Gibson?

Sean Hannity?

Dick Cheney?

Brit Hume?

Rush Limbaugh?

Mary Matalin?

Tony Perkins?

Dick Morris?

Bill O'Reilly?

Phil Gramm?

Michael Savage?

John Hagee?

Monica Crowley?

William Donohue?

Frank Luntz?

Michael Medved?

G. Gordon Liddy?

Or maybe Laura Ingraham?

Once upon a time, in another country, all it took was a scrape of yellow cloth

to instantly dehumanize someone.

Like a switch being thrown, a favorite teacher, neighbor or friend could become

a hated pariah.

An honored member of the community could be morphed into an enemy of the state

in the twinkling of an eye.

And it was possible ONLY because a sophisticated infrastructure of habitual, mindless, daily-repeated bigotry and rage that had been built up decade after decade was annexed by a power-mad clique of fanatics, weaponized, tanked up with rocket fuel, and then let off the leash.

Does this sound at all familiar, Ms. Parker?

Of course as long as the monster worked on your behalf -- as long as it was only gypsies, malcontents, misfits, queers, Jews and commies against whom the propaganda machine ranted by day and and for whom the jackboots came by night -- as long as the bell never tolled for thee -- everything was just fucking peaches and cream!

As long as it's just those people, Good Germans like Ms. Parker will always be more than happy to make a little bank firing up the mob. Only too willing to smirk and sneer and turn a little profit raging up the pig people in the service of demonizing anyone who doubts the infinite wisdom of the Dear Leader or the infinite goodness of the Christopath cabal that runs the GOP, ‘cause it all sounds just like sweet, sweet music…just as long as its being directed at the dirty ~~Jews~~ Liberals.

But now the monster has turned on its creator, and Good German Kathleen has finally heard an inkling – or an oinkling – of the baying, shrieking hordes whose bloody-mindedness we on the Left have been trying to curb for the last generation.

So, as a newly Displaced Pundit stranded in Liberal Casablanca, let me save you some time and trouble and tell you what won't work.

For about the last 30 years, we tried on the Left the sweet-reason thingie.

Didn’t work at all.

We tried the “compromise” thingie.

Got called weak and cowardly for our trouble.

We tried the “Hey, lets elect the most Centrist President we can find. A Republican-lite Southerner, that’ll give the Right almost everything they ever wanted. Welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, GATT, a balanced budget, surpluses, and a military victory.” thingie.

For our sins we got eight years of partisan hearings, government shutdown, slander, and impeachment, because while Conservatism might have been a movement once upon a time, too many of us failed to realize until it was too late that today's Conservatism is a moral dumpster fire of bigots, fundies, homophobes and imbeciles.

It is a disease that took over the country by screaming that everyone who disagreed with it was a god-hating traitor, and if you expect one iota of pity from anyone on this side of the moral Universe for finally getting bitten by the mad dog you’ve been feeding all these years, you can go fuck yourself with a steam hammer.

Once that disease is eradicated, we'll get right back to playing nice.

But until then, Anna Karenina, your locomotive is waiting.

Dear David Frum

2012-02-04T12:00:00.000-06:00

Just to prevent any misunderstanding on the part of anyone on Team Romney who have mistaken your occasional expressions of faux horror at the shambling, Gorgon killbot your Party has become for an unwillingness to go immediately and enthusiastically back to work for the shambling, Gorgon killbot Party, have you considered just going all the way and renaming your Daily Beast column, "Please for the love of God and the Angel Moroni why won't Mitt Romney hire me already?!?"

I mean, since it's loyalty first and everything else second with you guys anyway it won't cost you anything: you'll still be able to use your position to smuggle wingnut goofs like Ramesh Ponnuru and Ann Coulter back into mainstream acceptability (for which they will, in turn, owe you big once they get their own shows on CNN) and Andrew Sullivan has made it clear that he'll continue to drive ten thousand people to your site every day, rain or shine, no matter how big a fool you make of yourself, so what's to lose?

Yours in Christ,

driftglass

Professional Left Podcast #113

2012-02-03T13:46:00.001-06:00

“Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.

-- Adlai E. Stevenson

Links:

Link to New Yorker page where homeschooling Mom votes for Newt while unaware of his marital history here.

Da' money goes here:

And Now, Bob Cesca:

2012-02-02T15:22:00.001-06:00

“The Lesser of Two Evils” -- Why Progressives Lose Posted on 02/02/2012 at 7:02 am by Bob Cesca
[My latest for The Huffington Post]

There comes a time during just about every general election cycle when a faction of progressive Democratic voters begin to harrumph and gripe about the two party system. Specifically, the following remark jumps back into popular discourse: “we’re choosing between the lesser of two evils.”

The off-handed rejection of the Democrats as “less evil” rapidly descends into hectoring and in-fighting on the left about either supporting a third party or drafting a primary challenger to oppose the Democratic nominee, presidential or otherwise. In fact, this time around, some progressives are even considering a vote for Ron Paul, the most conservative member of Congress in the last 75 years, even though his positions on a variety of issues, namely civil rights and reproductive rights, are indefensible.

Naturally, much of this point of view can be attributed to generalized frustration with the two party system and the ugliness of electoral politics. But there’s a trend among influential progressives that’s almost as frustrating as the system itself. Whenever the Republicans are in charge, progressives unite to defeat and replace the Republican leadership with Democrats. But when the Democrats are in charge, progressives have a tendency to hypnotically lapse into contrarian, too-hip-for-the-room ambivalence, apathy and an “everyone is evil” defeatism. Thus, support for Democratic Leader X is weakened — often with disastrous consequences, the least tragic of which being a reemergence of the previously ousted Republican leadership.

In 2000, this attitude won enough progressive votes for Ralph Nader to literally change the course of history. Widespread voter fraud aside, Nader achieved 97,488 votes in Florida. If just 538 of those votes for Nader had been for Al Gore instead, the history of the last 10 years might have been significantly different. But Nader’s involvement, along with high profile endorsements from progressive heroes like Michael Moore, delivered an election-altering percentage of votes to Nader.

The word on the street was the familiar and laughable notion that Gore and Bush were basically the same person. Both candidates and both parties were painted as equally crooked and corrupt, and the system was irrevocably stacked against the people. So otherwise smart progressives backed Nader as an antidote to the crippled system — a truly “progressive” antidote, unlike Gore.

Knowing what we know now, how seriously naive was that?

Even though he ran a flawed campaign, Gore would have been a vastly different president than George W. Bush in almost every respect. Of course he might have been impeached by the Republicans after 9/11, but I don’t want to skew too deeply into an alternate timeline. The point is that Nader has since disintegrated into a careerist troll and Al Gore has become a progressive lion.
...

The rest is here.

Now That Star Wars: Episode I, The Incoherent Mess

2012-02-02T08:37:00.001-06:00

is being re-released in 3D (so the boring awfulness will now shamble right off the screen and into you lap) I figured it was time to re-release the one good thing inspired by the "Phantom Menace": the best online movie review in the history of online movie reviews.

Part 2:

Part 3 here.

Part 4 here.

Part 5 here.

Part 6 here.

Part 7 here.

David Brooks Speaks

2012-02-01T20:39:00.000-06:00

In his weekly, cringe-inducing "Conversation" with Gail Collins, David Brooks states the following as fact:

Finally let me vent some frustration about the Democrats. I open up Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook this morning and I see the big headline, “Administration To Make Digital Textbook Push.”

That’s what the Obama revolution has come to. The country is facing decline and trillion-dollar deficits and the administration has decided to focus its energies on digital textbooks. What about the nation’s pressing eraser shortage? Or the way parking spaces at the mall seem to get narrower year by year? Surely there are dozens of completely trivial issues they can latch on to in order to mask their absence of larger plans.

The Obama Administration has already proposed some very large and ambitious undertakings. Some you may agree with. Some you may not. Some you may thing don't go nearly far enough (I, for example, understand just how ambitious, deeply-focused and multidimensional the White House's manufacturing initiative could be if the are really going to get behind it and push.)

But it doesn't matter because nothing Obama Administration proposes (with the following, "everybody diving for cover" exception) is ever going to make it through the legislative abbatoire that is the Republican congress.

I could pound this simple fact home with example after example for hours, but really, why bother?

Mr. Brooks already knows all this, just as Mr. Brooks also knows that these facts doesn't matter because Mr. Brooks is not in the "truth" businesses.

He is in the "telling politically comforting Conservative lies" business.

And business is good.

Business is always good.

And if you have noticed that this post is nearly identical to the previous post regarding the lies of David Frum, you are correct.

Mr. Frum and Mr. Brooks both consistently lie about the same things in the same way and are both richly rewarded for doing so, so why not?

David Frum Speaks

2012-02-01T16:55:00.003-06:00

In "Who Wrecked Obama's Post-Partisanship?", former Bush-speechwriter David Frum states the following as fact:

The troubles faced by President Obama are not very different from the troubles faced by the presidents before him. Yet with each successive presidency these similar problems become more extreme in nature. Focusing on the particular personality of a particular president will miss the point—as we'll see again in obverse at whatever time the next president takes office.

Except there is no Liberal Hate Radio.

There is no Liberal Fox News.

There is no Liberal Regnery Press.

There is no Liberal wingnut welfare system that makes sure that its writers get paid.

There is no Liberal Grover Norquist.

There were no years and years of sham hearings and kneecapping special prosecutors used to grind the Bush Administration to a halt.

And despite richly deserving it, George W. Bush was never impeached.

I could go on for hours, but really, why bother?

Mr. Frum already knows all this, just as Mr. Frum also knows that is doesn't matter because Mr. Frum is not in the "truth" businesses. He is in the "telling politically comforting Conservative lies" business.

And business is good.

Business is always good.

"Rebirth of a Nation"

2012-02-01T14:36:00.003-06:00

...is what the title of an awesome vivisection of David Brooks' latest op-ed piece should be.

Just in case there is anyone left who has not already reacted to Mr. Brooks' column on how America's "upper tribe" has selfishly horded all of he country's virtues and values.

Or, to quote Monty Python, "Even the police began to sit up and take notice."

Mr. Pierce Writes About -- UPDATE

2012-02-01T10:00:00.000-06:00

Mr. Brooks here.

Balloon Juice links to Mr. Pierce here.

Real Clear Politics links to Mr. Brooks' column here.

Digg fires Mr. Brooks' column across the planet here.

New York magazine writes about Mr. Brooks here.

Mahablog regarding Mr. Brooks here.

Duncan Black's comments about Mr. Brooks now have elicited 145 comments and read as follows:

No Stomach For It Today
And a bit busy with some stuff. So outsourcing to Pierce...

Marginal Revolution regarding Mr. Brooks here.

Alicublog's brief commentary on Mr. Brooks now has 144 comments.

Since Jonathan Chait and Tyler Cowen have written about Mr. Brooks, I assume Mr. Sullivan will be summarizing what other people have to say about Mr. Brooks for the Daily Beast and/or Newsweek magazine presently.

And so forth.

++++++

UPDATE:

Business Insider weighs in.

Forbes is heard from.

The Big Think.

And so forth

How to Win an Argument With a Liberal

2012-01-31T23:15:00.002-06:00

Step One: Take one, cogent, well-written Digby post which -- in passing -- cuts a deep, bloody gouge out of Andrew Sullivan's massive and painfully well-documented professional and ideological hypocrisy.*

Step Two: Lop off a big chunk of the piece's inconvenient "context" which gives it its moral and political momentum.

Step Three: Repackage Digby's now-truncated argument into the argument you wish she would have made so that you can rebut it with the kind of willfully obtuse narcissism that only America's premiere Gay Catholic Tory can muster.

Step Four: Ignore the hilarious irony that the willfully obtuse narcissism with which your rebuttal is written was exactly what Digby was taking you to task for in her post.

Step Five: Make sure your blog does not accept comments.

* link fixed. my apologies.

The Moon

2012-01-30T18:43:00.000-06:00

Some choose to go to the Moon. Some choose to believe that the purpose of government in a representative democracy is to take up the greatest educational, environmental and economic burdens and challenges that we face as a nation, and that rational people contending in the public arena is the best way to thrash out our differing priorities.

And some choose to believe the Earth is 9,000 years old. That any collective action taken on behalf "We The People..." is evil. That any government beyond sending them Social Security checks and cutting their taxes is evil. That rationality is elitist. That facts are irrelevant. That any opposition to their disastrous superstitions and paranoia is evil. That compromise is evil.

For the former, there is now no greater cultural imperative than insuring the electoral extinction of the latter.

The safe and orderly demolition of the Right is our generation's Moon shot.

Looks Like Someone

2012-01-29T01:12:00.000-06:00

Got

the

title

wrong.

The Modern Conservative Movement

2012-01-28T11:32:00.002-06:00

80% paranoid imbeciles squatting in the rubble of the Space Age raging about Negroes and socialism.

20% hucksters turning a buck by pandering to the rage and paranoia of rubble-squatting morons.

From the Washington Post:

Paul pursued strategy of publishing controversial newsletters, associates say

By Jerry Markon and Alice Crites, Published: January 27

Ron Paul, well known as a physician, congressman and libertarian , has also been a businessman who pursued a marketing strategy that included publishing provocative, racially charged newsletters to make money and spread his ideas, said three people with direct knowledge of Paul’s businesses.

The Republican presidential candidate has denied writing inflammatory passages in the pamphlets from the 1990s and said recently that he did not read them at the time or for years afterward. Numerous colleagues said he does not hold racist views.

But people close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.

“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman’s.

The newsletters point to a rarely seen and somewhat opaque side of Paul, who has surprised the political community by becoming an important factor in the Republican race. The candidate, who has presented himself as a kindly doctor and political truth teller, declined in a recent debate to release his tax returns, joking that he would be “embarrassed” about his income compared with that of his richer GOP rivals.

Yet a review of his enterprises reveals a sharp-eyed businessman who for nearly two decades oversaw the company and a nonprofit foundation, intertwining them with his political career. The newsletters, which were launched in the mid-1980s and bore such names as the Ron Paul Survival Report, were produced by a company Paul dissolved in 2001.

The company shared offices with his campaigns and foundation at various points, said those familiar with the operation. Public records show Paul’s wife and daughter were officers of the newsletter company and foundation; his daughter also served as his campaign treasurer.

Jesse Benton, a presidential campaign spokesman, said that the accounts of Paul’s involvement were untrue and that Paul was practicing medicine full time when “the offensive material appeared under his name.” Paul “abhors it, rejects it and has taken responsibility for it as he should have better policed the work being done under his masthead,” Benton said. He did not comment on Paul’s business strategy.

‘I’ve never read that stuff’

Mark Elam, a longtime Paul associate whose company printed the newsletters, said Paul “was a busy man” at the time. “He was in demand as a speaker; he was traveling around the country,’’ Elam said in an interview coordinated by Paul’s campaign. “I just do not believe he was either writing or regularly editing this stuff.’’In the past, Paul has taken responsibility for the passages because they were published under his name. But last month, he told CNN that he was unaware at the time of the controversial passages. “I’ve never read that stuff. I’ve never read — I came — was probably aware of it 10 years after it was written,’’ Paul said.

A person involved in Paul’s businesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid criticizing a former employer, said Paul and his associates decided in the late 1980s to try to increase sales by making the newsletters more provocative. They discussed adding controversial material, including racial statements, to help the business, the person said.

“It was playing on a growing racial tension, economic tension, fear of government,’’ said the person, who supports Paul’s economic policies but is not backing him for president. “I’m not saying Ron believed this stuff. It was good copy. Ron Paul is a shrewd businessman.’’

The articles included racial, anti-Semitic and anti-gay content. They claimed, for example, that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “seduced underage girls and boys’’; they ridiculed black activists by suggesting that New York be named “Zooville” or “Lazyopolis”; and they said the 1992 Los Angeles riots ended “when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.’’ The June 1990 edition of the Ron Paul Political Report included the statement: “Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.”

It is unclear precisely how much money Paul made from his newsletters, but during the years he was publishing them, he reduced his debts and substantially increased his net worth, according to his congressional and presidential disclosure reports.

In 1984, he reported debt of up to $765,000, most of which was gone by 1995, when he reported a net worth of up to $3.3 million. Last year, he reported a net worth of up to $5.2 million.

...

The idea that Ron Paul would neither know nor care nor ever hear even a single word of feedback about what was was going on with his cash cow was always ludicrous.

And anyway, I don't know what the big surprise is: the is exactly the same strategy Fox News, Hate Radio, Regnery Press, etc. uses to reliably rake in billions of dollars and millions of votes year after years after year.

Von Clueless Award Nominee

2012-01-27T17:12:00.000-06:00

"Today's "conservatives" would use the impeachment provision to oppose an elected president's fiscal policies. If you want to to grasp just how much contempt they really have for the Constitution and the institutions of government - something actual conservatives care about - absorb that fact." - Andrew Sullivan

"Today's "conservatives"?

"Today's"?

105th CONGRESS

2d Session

House Resolution 611

Resolved, That William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, and that the following articles of impeachment be exhibited...

Introduced December 15, 1998

Let's see now...January 2012...minus December 1998...carry the Y2K problem...equals...a long ass time ago, Mr. Sullivan.

More than enough years of Conservative treachery and treason clearly visible as far as the eye can see for anyone with a functional cerebral cortex and a conscience to figure that the GOP is an irredeemable shitpile of bigots, Christopaths and plutocrats, who will never stop hag-riding this country from one disaster to another until they are driven to political extinction.

Professional Left Podcast #112

2012-01-27T13:56:00.002-06:00

“Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away."

-- Anonymous

Links:

Facts about Food Stamps.
All purpose Link #2 :-)

Da' money goes here:

The Lament of the CEO

2012-01-27T11:51:00.000-06:00

I didn't write this: I lifted it from "DUGLARRI" in the comment section of this New Yorker article, added one additional line at the end and posted it here because I felt it needed some additional air time.

The Lament of the CEO

I didn't complain when we sent the assembly jobs overseas because I'm not an assembly worker.

I wasn't concerned when we sent the tech support to India because I'm not in tech support.

I didn't sweat when we sent the R&D overseas because I'm not a scientist.

I wasn't worried when we sent finance, legal, and marketing overseas because I'm not a marketer, or a lawyer, or a finance person.

Now one of my former suppliers is selling a new product just like mine, but for half what I can sell it for.

I won't complain now, either, because I'm too busy looking for a new job.

Curse those damn hippies for doing this to me!

From High Atop Mt. Resume

2012-01-26T13:31:00.001-06:00

I look across at the apex of American Journalism.

Someone on a previous comment thread wanted to know what I did for a living since I "can't get a job in journalism" and since Willard Romney is a fine, hardworking Murrican and not a mooching, useless Liberal eater like me.

Or something.

So, here you go, expanded a little from what I left in my own comment section, with name and dates fuzzed out to protect the ~~insolent~~ ~~indolent~~ innocent.

My job?

I am currently unemployed and looking for full time work.

Over the last 3 years -- since being laid off from a very demanding, multi-disciplinary position (everything from performance management to writing white papers to managing remote facilities) at which I worked for 10 years, and routinely put in 80-100 hrs/week (no overtime when you are in management) -- I have been underemployed, and have worked several part-time or temporary contract gigs for organizations which desperately wanted to bring me on full time but had their budgets slashed as a direct or indirect result of the Great Recession.

I have also just about exhausted everything I carefully put aside for a rainy day during those years because I never imagined it would rain so long and so hard.

In the past I have been (since leaving puberty behind and in no particular order) a computer programmer and systems analyst, a college professor, corporate trainer, an IT manager, research manager, editor, grant writer, regular writer, senior executive in charge of damn-near-everything from speechwriting to strategic planning to making the PowerPoints look purdy, a policy wonk, performance management guy, project manager, department reorganizer, consultant several times over, a direct social service provider and much more.

I have briefed congressional staff on more than one occasion, prepared bosses for public hearings, and addressed foreign delegations.

I have been on the radio several times, done public speaking, and sold a few stories here and there.

I have made many inquiries about work in the journalism/pundit trade -- in print or in front of a mic and/or camera -- and have never heard back from anyone. I have sent out lots of resumes and inquiries for many other things and, for the most part, have never heard back from anyone. I don't take any of that personally because shouting into an abyss is just how it is in the working world today.

On my last gig, I was heavily recruited for a full-time job by both my boss and his boss. I went through an intense, week-long series of interviews and psych, IQ and "cultural fit" exams. After they were done, I was told I had a virtual lock on the job. That I was perfect for it. My boss was excited. His boss was excited. HR was excited because the number of hoops they had to leap through to hire anyone at this place exhausted them and they were always glad when it looked like the end was in sight. Then, two days before my temporary contract ended, the president of the organization abruptly decided that she wanted to move in a "different direction". My contract was not extended and I was let go. My boss was in tears. His boss apologized. HR was stunned. I have not been able to find anything since.

I have also written and Photoshopped this blog almost every day for going on seven years -- rain or shine, 80-hour-work-week or unemployed-and-getting-discouraged -- and podcast every week with Blue Gal (the 112th straight episode will drop tomorrow) which, all combined and despite the incredible kindness and generosity of my readers and our listeners, brings in considerably less than what a single, minimum wage/no benefit job would pay.

I am, of course, also an amateur historian, amateur paleontologist, definer of civilization and leader of the civilizing forces...but it turns out those gigs only pay a living wage when you can get casino moguls to write you multi-million-dollar checks :-)

The NYT's Auxiliary, Backup Conservative

2012-01-25T16:39:00.001-06:00

Would like to share his thoughts with you.

The address made plain what has been increasingly obvious for some time. After flirting with the role of the reasonable centrist after his party’s defeat in 2010, President Obama has decided to run for re-election as a full-throated liberal populist.

Like the many of his compatriots within the ivied cloister of our Establishment Punditocracy -- from David Brooks and his ludicrous asymmetriphobic obsession with Centrism to Tom Friedman and his embarrassing public extrusions of rambly, malformed English in defense of Third Party fairy tales (from the Columbia Journalism Review) --

Over the weekend, The New York Times op-ed page published one of Tom Friedman’s periodic columns about the need for a uprising of the “radical center.” It was, unsurprisingly, terrible. Though the details of these columns change with each iteration—this one relied heavily on a new initiative called Americans Elect, which brings together two of Friedman’s favorite things, wealthy people and the Internet—the basic wrongheadedness does not.

Friedman’s idea seems to be that if only we can find some reform that will allow us to “break the oligopoly of the two-party system,” it might, someday, be possible for someone who holds 90 percent of Barack Obama’s stated policy positions—plus support for a carbon tax—to assume a position of power. Then, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear—maybe because some fantasy vice president (Michael Bloomberg?) applies some of his “pragmatic independent” pixie dust?—political dysfunction disappears, and a magical new era of “superconsensus” to solve our “superhard” problems is ushered in. Startlingly, this consensus seems to closely reflect many of Friedman’s personal policy preferences.

Friedman has been engaged in third-party wishcasting for at least five years now; Brendan Nyhan’s excellent, running blog post on third-party media hype records that back in the 2006 election cycle, Friedman longed for a “Geo-Green Party.” His “radical center” phase, though, seems to be inspired by the Tea Party era. Friedman has devoted columns to this mythical middle at least three times since spring 2010. They’re as predictable as the tides, or a hackneyed lede about a conversation with a taxi driver or tech entrepreneur.

--  I long ago lost interest in the meat and taters of what Mr. Douthat had to say about pretty much everything.

Instead, like Brooks and Friedman, it is the mere fact of  Mr. Douthat's existence that I find fascinating. As if the Opportunity rover had suddenly spotted a Fiddler Crab wandering the surface of Mars while singing honky-tonk in Portuguese, or an archivist had unearthing a manuscript proving that Leonardo da Vinci was 77 meters tall and that he invented bar codes and Velcro, it would not be the physical size of such discoveries -- their weight or height -- that would make them profound, but the implications of those discoveries which would reorder our thinking about the Universe.

Thus it is with Ross Douthat -- a silly little man scuttling across the surface of a world where every notion of common sense and meritocracy says he should not be. And scuttling right along beside him?  Mr. Brooks and Mr Friedman, each also blithe defying the laws of logic and competence and prospering in an environment where they really, really have no business existing at all. All protected within an expensive and well-maintained media bunker which prevents any of the consequences of their follies and idiocies from blowing back on them in the slightest degree.

It is a puzzle, and as someone who is both very interested in how all kinds of organizations perform -- in how and why they succeed or fail or bamboozle themselves into committing suicide -- and who also loves fiddling with minimum information puzzles, I find it almost irresistible to try and deduce what possible concatenation of dysfunctions, delusions and very poor management decisions must have taken place at the New York Times to result in them simultaneously ensconcing Messrs. Douthat, Friedman and Brooks together on the editorial page of America's Newspaper of Record.

Such is my curse.

Today in Centerville -- SOTU UPDATE

2012-01-24T17:17:00.000-06:00

UPDATE: When I wrote this long piece today, I swear I had no idea how perfectly it would tongue-in-groove fit together with the manufacturing and job training sections of Barack Obama's State of the Union speech. I had just effing had it with David Brooks (once again) getting away with dropping another steaming load of pernicious Centrist claptrap into the pages of the NYT.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

If I had never written a blog post in my life, I believe the sheer brass of Mr. Brooks' calculated malfeasance today would inspire me to learn Blogger or WordPad just so I could publicly detail the cardinal and venial sin he commits against honest journalism this time around.

You see, in a Basic David Brooks Column/Variation #3 (a heartwarming tale of human spirit overcomingness cribbed from somewhere bolted to yet another completely dishonest indictment of "Both Sides") you might have to run a couple of hydrostatic tests on the thing to find the bad weld or the false bottom -- not that hard, but it does require some experience.

But today? Today was easy because Mr. Brooks pooped a solid ingot of stupid onto the New York Times editorial page with barely a lick of paint to cover the crime --

Free-Market Socialism
...
The idiocy of our current political debate is that neither side seems capable of talking about the interplay of economic and social forces. Most of the Republican candidates talk as if all that is needed is more capitalism. But lighter regulation and lower taxes won’t, on their own, help the Maddie Parliers of the world get the skills they need to compete.

Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.

This materialistic ethos emphasizes reducing inequality instead of expanding opportunity. Its policy prescriptions begin (and sometimes end) with raising taxes on the rich. This makes you feel better if you detest all the greed-heads who went into finance. It does nothing to address those social factors, like family breakdown, that help explain why American skills have not kept up with technological change.

-- and he did it on a topic I just happen to know oodles about: labor markets, education and training systems, the huge and ever-growing training gap, manufacturing, etc.

...
If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support.

As a survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School grads by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin makes clear, to get companies to locate their plants in the U.S., Obama is going to have to simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible and balance the budget over the long term.

To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.
...

Yes, I am forced to confess that in addition to have versed myself thoroughly in things like science fiction (both canonical and arcane), I also own and have actually read such action-packed bodice-rippers as:

"Skill Wars: Winning the Battle for Productivity and Profit"

"The 2010 Meltdown: Solving the Impending Jobs Crisis"

"Trying Hard Is Not Good Enough" (on how to correctly measure and make sense of system changes)

"Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education"

"Creating Public Value -- Strategic Management in Government"

And so forth.

("...and I think I've understood them.
They're about girls, right?
Just kidding.
But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash's autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.")*

I have a bookshelf full of the stuff which I am in the process of putting up for adoption because,

I honestly don't know if I will ever again have chance to use in a professional capacity, and
These aren't the sorts of tomes that any sane person would haul around for recreational reading.

I'm also the sort of wonk who has a dozen board-feet of policy documents quietly oxidizing somewhere in cold storage, along with the regs for various government training projects and initiatives, reviews of high school and community college curriculum and just an ass-load of material on what are known as "sector-based" programs because they figure out what sectors are most active and long-term viable in the local economy and then concentrate on getting all the players -- labor and management, business and gummint -- to work together to strengthen that sector for everyone's mutual advantage.

And working together on a local level is key, which is why flogging the President of the United State for not being able to force the owners of some metal stamping plant in Peoria to play nice with the members of the local school board is just one of the many, many layers of infantile incomprehension at how the real world really works with which Mr. Brooks' horseshit hoagie is piled high.

For example, does Mr. Brooks have any any idea how many hundreds of thousands of dollars -- sometimes million of dollars -- it costs to set up and maintain a decent manufacturing training program at a community college? Does the factory Mr. Brooks mentions -- "Standard Motor Products, which makes fuel injectors" -- exist within a cluster of similar plants where the pool of potential trainees who might all need similar training on similar machines makes such a large capital investment makes sense...or would such a facility stand idle most of the time?

Given the high demand for these skills, and the high wages that go along with them, how exactly does Mr. Brooks plan to lure competent machinists off the factory floor and into the classroom to teach his programs? Will Mr. Brooks' program(s) offer academic credit, industry certification or will he force the local community college board and business leaders to build a curriculum that will do both? Will the credit be transferable to the nearest four-year institution, or will a student who want to move onward and upward discover find that his hundreds of hours have been consigned to some non-degree-seeking Adult Ed limbo and have to start over?

Will there be night classes for the locals who already have a job but need to upgrade their skills?

Are you going to drug-screen people?

Oh, and who exactly is paying for all of this? Because regardless of what Mr. Brooks seems to believe, the President of the United States does not personally stand outside every unemployment office and community college in America asking people what they want to do with the rest of their lives, testing them for aptitude and then handing out vouchers for whatever their school will cost. That money may come from a lot of different sources , but if you want your local employment and training system to foot any of the bill, then you'd better make damn sure the whole thing is certified by the local workforce board.

Any such system will, of course, have any number of strong advocates for spending all of these scarce resources on entirely different things like training nurses or long-distance truck driver, so I assume Mr. Brooks has figured out a way to set up the hundreds of local governing bodies that will make all these very local decisions in a way that will keep everybody happy, or at least willing to forgo sabotaging the entire enterprise. Or is assuming that the President will attend to each of these concerns personally?

By the way, the local factors and considerations I have ticked off so far? These are just the ones I came up off the top of my head after an exhausting trek across the state last night and they barely scratch the surface. We could, for example, kill a mighty good bottle of scotch and not cover the half of variables involved in hashing out the pros and cons of "distance-learning" (Will it be permitted? Encouraged? Prohibited?) or putting newbies and experience workers in the same classroom?

And after that, if you then wanted to talk about the horrors of trying to get a community college to risk its financial security to re-calibrate its 20-years-out-of-date degree program (and its 20-years-out-of-date instructors and equipment) in order to graduate students with industry certifications you would also have to agree to make time to solve the problem of getting some pterodactyl in a company's HR department to risk their job security by re-calibrating their 20-years-out-of-date job descriptions, rustic workplace culture and often just-plain-ridiculous expectations, because it ain't just public institutions who have failed us.

We would also need to talk about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka "da stimulus") which Mr. Brooks failed to mention spent hundreds of millions of dollars (while working inside an absurdly constricted 18 month spending window) advancing every one of the issues he is bitching about.

We would also need to talk succession planning, employee buyouts, and a culture that says encouraging a student to take up a trade instead of focusing on college is an insult and possibly racist, because they are all interrelated and all in urgent!urgent!urgent! need of attention.

As I said, if this were my first blog post, I would take my freshly-minted, community college trained, industry-certified blogging skills and write a long, shapely jeremiad encompassing all of this. I'd spill 10,000 words wondering how Mr. Brooks can keep getting away with dropping such grotesque distortions into the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

Wondering who -- by name -- permits this disgrace to go on and on and interminably on?

Wondering who keeps allowing Mr. Brooks to just wish away ugly reality of the fanatical and united opposition that this President faces on Every. Single. Fucking. Issue. so that he can spew his malevolent Centrist lies again and again and again.

But this is not my first blog post. This is, in fact, getting up toward my 3,700th, and I know for sure that I will never get an answer to any of questions no matter how many times I ask them, no matter how often they are email to the people involved, and no matter what font I use.

And yet, if only for the sake of ordering my own thoughts -- and for the sake of a notation made in some future record of this time and place that back in the Bad Old Days when clowns like Mr. Brooks were paid vast sums of money and given virtually unlimited access to the American media, there were at least a few voices pointing out that our media Emperors had been bare-assed nekkid all along -- I feel compelled to carry on.

But rather than wrenching my back carrying more adjectives down from the attic, allow me to restate Mr. Brooks' key paragraph --

To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.

-- and use Teh Internet to make my case.

Here is a video of Candidate Obama pointing to an innovative Chicago high school -- Austin Polytechnical Academy -- by name as an example of what his administration wanted to do. This school was created in one of Chicago's toughest neighborhoods -- a neighborhood which had been destroyed by decades of deindustrialized, disinvestment and vulture capitalism.

A year later, here is Senator Dick Durbin visiting the same school and listening to the kids tell him him about coffee manufacturing

Here is the same school featured on the News Hour.

Here is a link to President Barack Obama promoting manufacturing in Iowa.

Here is a link to President Barack Obama promoting manufacturing in Michigan.

Here is a link to President Barack Obama announcing his Advanced Manufacturing Partnership.

Here is a link to President Barack Obama calling for big investments in high-tech manufacturing in Pittsburgh.

Here is a link to President Barack Obama calling for big investments in advance manufacturing in the energy sector.

Here is President Barack Obama addressing a joint session of Congress last year and asking for their support for his job's plan:

"Already, we've mobilized business leaders to train 10,000 American engineers a year, by providing company internships and training. Other businesses are covering tuition for workers who learn new skills at community colleges. And we're going to make sure the next generation of manufacturing takes root not in China or Europe, but right here, in the United States of America"

Here is President Barack Obama begging Congress to help him provide the unmployed with temporary assistance and a path to finding permanent employment:

Here is President Barack Obama asking Congress to help him make "America more competitive for the long haul" by doing what is necessary to "out-build and out-educate and out-innovate every other country on Earth"

"As I've argued since I ran for this office, we have to look beyond the immediate crisis and start building an economy that lasts into the future -- an economy that creates good, middle-class jobs that pay well and offer security. We now live in a world where technology has made it possible for companies to take their business anywhere. If we want them to start here and stay here and hire here, we have to be able to out-build and out-educate and out-innovate every other country on Earth."

Here is a link to the Department of Labor's Annual reports page, which is packed with information from all 50 states and every major metroplitan area on the progress that has been made in trying to fix the decade's old problem of getting people into good jobs with a decent future

Here is a link a PDF on the Department of Labor's Annual reports page which shows what the State of Illinois has been up to in running sector-based training and employment programs.

And here is a link to Barack Obama talking to the workers at a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio about the success of his bailout of the America automobile industry, because it turns out that in order to build a bridge between the people who are looking for a decent job and an industry that needs well-trained people, you first have to save that industry from complete annihilation.

I could go on like this for another 100 pages, but I hope I have made my point.

I should also mention that to find these "Obama + manufacturing" videos online, one has to be willing to wade through an ocean of Republican bile, lies and unified, fanatical opposition to Every. Single. Fucking thing President Obama has proposed: a unified, fanatical opposition which Mr. Brooks simply refuses to acknowledge because doing so would screw up the incredibly lucrative Centrist scam off of which he and so many others like him parasitically feed.

But whatever the craven Mr. Brooks chooses to pretend, over in the wingnut universe where most of his Republican jackal pals reside, the auto industry -- that pillar of the manufacturing industry in America and creator of the very jobs Mr. Brooks is talking about -- was not and is not discussed as just another market sector need of "lighter regulation and lower taxes" but as a massive front group for Evil Union Thugs which should have been allowed to crash and burn (taking all of its second- and third- tier suppliers with it)in a glorious bonfire of pure freedom-luvin' laissez-faire capitalism.

And this truly deranged idea -- that what the American Economy most needed in the depths of the Great Recession was massive, collapse which would have put additional millions out of work -- was not a belief the fringe nutjobs whispered about in quiet rooms: it was a broad, wingnut consensus which virtually the entire Conservative brain caste including GOP candidate and future-David-Brooks-meal-ticket, Willard Romney

was only too happy to shout from the rooftops.

Weird how Mr. Brooks seems to have overlooked or forgotten all of that, isn't it?

Mr. Brooks also seems to have overlooked or forgotten the fact that even modest, non-partisan legislative efforts like the Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organize Regional Success Act -- which was designed to target funding directly at the issue he identifies --

Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organize Regional Success Act of 2011 or SECTORS Act of 2011 - Amends the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 to require the Secretary of Labor to award renewable three-year competitive industry or sector partnership grants to eligible entities to develop strategies that: (1) encourage growth and competitiveness through work with employers within a targeted industry cluster; (2) help workers move toward economic self-sufficiency and ensure that they have access to supportive services; (3) address the needs of firms with limited human resources or in-house training capacity, including small- and medium-sized firms; and (4) coordinate with entities that carry out state and local workforce investment, economic development, and education activities.or workers including, steadier employment with increased earnings and better access to benefits.

-- are doomed to die quiet, cloakroom deaths so long as they face the united and fanatical opposition by the leaders of Mr. Brooks' Republican Party. And everyone knows it.

Just like he somehow manages to overlook or forget the fact that, in the wingnut universe,the mere suggestion that the United States should maybe have an "industrial policy" so that we can start to catch up with with the rest of the advanced manufacturing countries is spoken of as if Barack Obama was trying to hand the nation's nuclear lauch codes over to Cesar Chavez.

Just like he somehow manages to overlook or forget that over in the wingnut universe the appointment of Ron Bloom to coordinate Administration manufacturing policy was treated as definitive proof of a massive, secret, Maoist plot to destroy America being led by the malicious Communist-in-Chief.

Ah, but Teh Internet remember!

A random sample finds...

...a clip of wingnut Congressman Allen West calmly explaining that Barack Obama is a Marxist.

...a clip of GOP Party boss and the most popular Conservative radio host in history -- Rush Limbaugh -- explaining that Barack Obama is a Marxist for the 851st time

...a clip of slighty-less popular Conservative radio host Mark Levin explaining that Barack Obama is a Marxist.

...a clip of noted Swiftboat Liar, Birther pimp, Conservative hero and New York Times best-selling author Jerome Corsi explaining that Barack Obama is a Marxist who will probably cancel the 2012 elections.

...and a montage of the most influential Conservative liars in American history explaining that Barack Obama is, as the young people say, everything but a child of God.

If the last seven years and +3,600 posts have taught me one thing about blogging, it is that we pottymouthed Liberals will never be a serious impediment to Mr. Brooks in any way. We will never be able to prevent him from using his national platform to repeat his pernicious lies over and over again. We will never be able to undo all damage he does, or deprogram all the credulous readers who believe every word he says.

Mr. Brooks makes a handsome living tells plutocrat-pleasing lies, and there is nothing we can do about that.

What we can do, as citizens, is tell the truth as we know it, as best we can, in any venue which is available to us and hope it does some good.

And the truth is, while I strongly disagree with many of the specific policy prescription the Obama Administration has offered up to pull us out of the terrible and widening hole our manufacturing economy is in, President Obama inherited a manufacturing education and training system that was not a system at all. It was disaster; a series of make-do patches that had been slapped onto an economic sector which has been in full retreat for 30 years.

Basic childhood education was and is a tragedy.

High schools were and are a catastrophe.

Programs for vocational education which provided exactly the kind of training and direction Mr. Brooks is whining abouthave been underfunded and understaffed to the point of collapse for decades while their advocates were marginalized and ignored. This happened because up until very recently we were content as country to let our manufacturing base slide into the ocean -- because everyone knew were were all gonna get rich going into computer programming!

As thousands of small, neighborhood companies vanished -- many for no reason other than a lack of successionplanning by their owners -- America shrugged because who cared about a lot of old factories in bad neighborhoods anyway when everyone knew were were all gonna get rich in the stock market!

As Reaganomics came into full, horrifying flower -- as we sleepwalked into became an importer/debtor nation instead of an exporter/creditor nation -- the informal but absolutely critical pipeline of skilled workers was permitted to dry up and blow away because everyone knew were were all gonna get rich off of real estate!

And then it all fell apart almost overnight...and suddenly everybody wanted to know why the schools weren't working, why their mortgages were underwater and where all those good factory jobs had gone.

But answering those questions honestly and in full measure -- telling the simple truth about where we are, how we got here, who is working to solve our problems and who is working to oppose every solution -- would not only fail to stroke a single plutocrat's egos, but would also freak the shit out the Great Wad who still believe in Centrist fairy tales.

Which is is why you will never read about it under Mr. Brooks' byline in the New York Times.

"Blacklist"

2012-01-23T12:20:00.000-06:00

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

In the middle of lambasting the Right for being what they were long before he suddenly noticed, Mr. Sullivan has been trying to pick a fight with Fox News for a couple of weeks now, going so far as to repeatedly state that he had been blacklisted (one example here):

Listen to Limbaugh, the GOP's chief spokesman. How does a Romney channel that level of viciousness and rage? Listen to Hannity. How does a smooth manager reach a base that wants the same Manichean approach to foreign policy, in which there is only ally (Israel) and enemies everywhere else (Europe, China, the Arab world, Russia)? Read Mark Levin. There are only two options now on the table, as he sees it: freedom or slavery. And a vote for Obama is a vote for slavery.

This is the current GOP. It purges dissidents, it vaunts total loyalty, it polices discourse for any deviation. If you really have a cogent argument, you find yourself fired - like Bruce Bartlett [or?] David Frum - or subject to blacklists, like me [on?] Fox.

I understand how he feels, but Jeez, why single out Fox?

I mean, I always thought being completely ignored by the media no matter how cogent your argument, no matter how pungently or silkily you make it and no matter how many times and in how many venues you repeat it was pretty much the working definition of "blogger".

But I was wrong and I admit it -- being completely ignored by the media is, of course, the working definition of "Liberal blogger".

After all, regardless of the raving idiocy of their individual positions and pronouncements, from Pammy Atlas to Michele Malkin to Erick son of Erick

to Dana Loesch to Ramesh Ponnuru to Box Turtle Ben Domenech, to Andrew Brietbart to Chicago's own mini-Brietbart, Warner Todd Huston...Conservative bloggers have come to expect a level of community support, respect, remuneration, media acknowledgement and even deference that Liberal bloggers long ago gave up even dreaming about.

We on the Left stand on our orange crates and shout into the Conservative and Centrist wasteland that our public dialogue has become. We on the Left hear nothing but the wind answer us back because the goons and con men who own that wasteland -- who made that wasteland -- do not dare acknowledge that we are here and that we have been right all along.

Being a Liberal blogger, I never expect Mr. Sullivan to reply to or even acknowledge the dozens and dozens of very well-reason critiques I have laid at his door over the years, any more than I expect, say, David Brooks to take any note whatsoever of the Liberal blogosphere's fusillade of well-reasoned rebuttals and refutations that strafe his bi-weekly Reasonable Conservative midden pile to bits every single week of the year. Any acknowledgement of the legitimacy of Liberal critiques and the overwhelming superiority of the Liberal batting average compared to the Conservative and Centrist batting averages on issue after issue would immediately reveal both the core tenet of the Right ("The Left is wrong all the time on every single issue") and the core tenet of the Center ("The Left is exactly half-wrong all the time on every single issue") to be as ridiculous as Flat Eartherism, and publicly turn their well-remunerated spokesmodels into unemployable laughingstocks.

So that's never gonna happen.

But my fellow Weblog Award winner Andrew Sullivan is not a Liberal blogger. He is a Conservative blogger and he feels his is owed an answer -- owed the courtesy of a reply from people who have so far only paused between their many, other lies long enough to take a dump on his work before returning to their regularly scheduled propaganda.

So, let's go over that definition of "blacklist", shall we?

black·list [blak-list] -- noun:

1. a list of persons under suspicion, disfavor, censure, etc.: His record as an anarchist put him on the government's blacklist.

2. a list privately exchanged among employers, containing the names of persons to be barred from employment because of untrustworthiness or for holding opinions considered undesirable.

Mr. Sullivan is the leading traffic-driver for the one of the largest news sites in the world.

He gets his books published at-will.

He can appear on teevee programs ranging from "C-Span" to "Real Time" to "Hardball" to "Anderson Cooper 360" very much as it suits him.

He can get his often ridiculous opinions printed in prominent, global-reach newspapers and periodicals ranging from "The Atlantic" to "The New Republic" to "The New York Times" whenever he pleases.

And two weeks ago, his boss handed him the front page of "Newsweek" magazine.

See, this is not the media biography of someone who has been "blacklisted": this is the media biography of a fully-initiated member of the Club.

However if you would like the know what the media biography of someone who has been blacklisted looks like, it's pretty easy.

All you have to do is ask any Liberal blogger.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

2012-01-23T11:20:00.000-06:00

The Ownership Society.

One Sunday, the Mouse Circus confirmed for the thousandth times that, for the most part, media has largely given up on asking any really important, substantive questions about anything. And yet, despite their best efforts, the highly paid spokesmodels for the leadership caste of the our political infotainment industry found themselves stuck trying to publicly cope with a genuinely substantive question: Who owns the Conservatism in America?

The answer varies wildly on who you ask.

For example, to keep their personal Conservative brand-identification from completely collapsing every time they publicly screw the pooch, pretty much every one on the Right who rides the mainstream media gravy train -- from Joe Scarborough to Andrew Sullivan -- insists that they are the only, true Conservative left on Earth by simply defining Conservatism as whatever the Hell they say it is this week. Whatever catches their fancy is "real" Conservatism; whoever happens to be pissing them off at the moment is not a "true" Conservative.

On the other hand, for those on the Right who draw their paychecks from Fox News, Hate Radio, or the political system, Conservatism is defined as hating imaginary Hippies as hard as humanly possible. Crazy, treasury-bankrupting tax schemes? No problem. Promises to invade imaginary enemies with non-existent armies? No problem. Putting a police cordon around every vagina? No problem. An endless cataract of ludicrous lies and Bircher conspiracy mongering, all spoken and believed without batting an eye as long as it comes beribboned with "...because Barack Obama is a Kenyan Commie who hates America."

All frauds in their own way, all trading on their allegedly special, privileged access to the True Conservative Cross, and it works most of the time because on the Right there are almost always enough rubes to go around. But come election time the question of who are heroes and who are heretics sharpens itself to a stabby point because the answer to the question of who "owns" the Movement and what "ownership" means has real, national consequences.

The two loudest claimants this Excalibur of Conservative Authenticity have, of course, been on display all along, but they have almost never been so clearly limned as the were in South Carolina Saturday...and in the mass pants-crapping GOP parade at the Mouse Circus Sunday morning.

And I must say, I found it morbidly hilarious to watch the Party of God and Capitalism locked in a death struggle over the answer to the oldest Marxist question of all:

Who shall control the means of production?

Will it be the money men who are bankrolling the slow-motion plutocratic takeover of America, or the rank-and-filers who knock on the doors, stuff the envelopes and, rain or shine, march to the polls every other November to hand the plutocrats what they paid for -- an electoral mandate for their horrible, horrible policies?

It has -- no kidding -- come to this: to a struggle between the Wingnut Factory owners and the Wingnut Factory workers, and each side has found its perfect champion.

In one corner we have Willard Romney, the pure distillate of Vulture Capitalism. Robotic, soulless, and hideously uncomfortable around the non-millionaire peons he needs to get himself elected. In his every word and gesture you can imagine him calmly killing David Bowman -- telling him that, no, he will not open the Pod Bay doors.

In the other corner, we have Newton Leroy Gingrich, the bloated, red-faced articulator of the very real rage and paranoia of the Pig People.

The voice of the America Hunter Thompson wrote about as "...a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." The man who wrote much of the "call your opponents 'traitors'" operating system that now drives the entire Republican machine and who has now hacked his way back into that machine using the back-door he left open for himself.

The cold, efficient power of infinite money versus the white-hot, broken-bottle vocabulary of bottomless hatred.

Fun to watch!

Also fun to watch in this struggle over the ownership of the Party of God and Money are Prominent media-creature Republicans like Joe Scarborough banking on the fact that the Party will soon turn on Gingrich because they will remember what a lunatic he was in 1995...while somehow conspicuously ignoring the fact that his Party doesn't give a shit about anything that happened in 1995.

That their Party has, in fact, spent a fair-sized fortune training the Base not to give a shit about -- or even remember -- anything that happened in 1995.

Or 1996.

Or 1998.

Or 2002.

Or 2005.

Or 2007.

That their Party has, in fact, only remained in power by investing millions of dollars in the Strategic Forgettery necessary to convince the Base to belligerently ignore everything that happened before the Kenyan Usurper somehow tricked his way into the White House on January 20, 2009.

So congratulations Joe; just as Lenin warned, the GOP money-class has indeed sold their Base the rope with which they are now being hung.

Of course, in the end only a damn fool bets against money, so I have no idea how this bare-knuckle pig fight will all end, but I can make some fairly astute predictions.

1. David Gregory will continue to pay the vig on whatever unholy debt he has incurred with Newt Gingrich by letting Newt tread the "Meet the Press" boards whenever he chooses and spout whatever happy-horseshit he wishes under Gregory's iron-clad guarantee that Newt will NEVER be asked any tricky or embarrassing follow-up questions.

2. Billionaire Tom Friedman will continue to produce embarrassing heaps of wretched prose like this, whining that everybody should be nicer to everybody and strongly hinting that a billionaire-funded Third Party which reflects billionaire Tom Friedman's Reasonable Centrist values would make such a world possible, and for which the New York Times will continue to pay him handsomely.

3. At some point in the next seven days, David Brooks will explain the Gingrich win by writing another 800 words of maudlin godawful about Dirty Hippies ruining American values, and for which the New York Times will continue to pay him handsomely.

It's The Great Klansman, Charlie Brown!

2012-01-21T19:17:00.000-06:00

Once again, the ghost of Lee Atwater has risen over another Republican election like the Great Klansman, flying though the night to dance on the bones of Abraham Lincoln and promise to restore the rage-drunk, inbred remnants of the Confederate South to their former glory, but only if they are sufficiently sincere in their hatred of the usual suspects -- gays, Negroes, uppity women and, of course, the Liberal media which spreads their terrible lies.

And thus does a corrupt, thrice-married adulterer, race-baiter, serial liar and amateur paleontologist

win the most important GOP primary to-date.

From the New York Times:

Gingrich Wins South Carolina Primary, Upending G.O.P. Race

By JIM RUTENBERGPublished: January 21, 2012

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Surprising his rivals and upending the highly unpredictable Republican race for the presidency, Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary on Saturday, just 10 days after a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire left the impression his candidacy was all but dead.

Mr. Gingrich rode to victory by winning a plurality of voters among a wide swath of important Republican voting blocs, outperforming the rest of the four-person field among evangelical Christians and Tea Party supporters, men and even women, who had been expected to vote by comfortable margins in favor of Mitt Romney, the man who was presumed to be the front-runner as of just a few days ago.
...

So congratulations, Pig People!

You and Baron Grifthausen -- the man who wrote the operating system for your Pretty Hate Machine --

absolutely deserve each other.

Heavy Rain in South Carolina

2012-01-21T15:02:00.000-06:00

Is expected to depress turnout of the key Romney robot/Cylon demographic.

Analysts believe this development plus an 11th hour surge in racist trolls breaking for Gingrich will cost Romney the election, regardless of how many carbon-based meat-bags

he awkwardly feigns empathy for.

Your 2012 GOP South Carolina Knife-Fight

2012-01-20T22:33:00.000-06:00

In easy-to-digest Twitter-form:

For the benefit of future historians and current award committees, my Tweets from last night:

Newt believes asking amateur paleontologists about their history of lying, adultery and rank hypocrisy will weaken America. Fundamentally!

Willard thinks state should be able to decide whether or not they want to screw veterans.

Willard thinks it's a national military when it comes to buying tanks, but handling vet problems s/b done state-by-state.

For God's sake, what does Willard have to do to show how much compassion he has for you grubby, carbon-based meat-bags!

TelePrompter! Drink!

Ron Paul mentions the 60s. Hippies?!? Somewhere David Brooks just popped a boner.

"Frothy" points out that Newt in insane.

Newt: I helped Marconi develop elbow pasta radio in 1622. I helped Tesla invent electrons.

Newt: I built Calvin Coolidge out of a kit that I received through the mail just after I invented the mail.

Willard: I have been down the mean streets of America. Well, my driver has...

Willard has a S0C-7 Abend.

Fundamental + Reagan! Drink until you can't feel your Laffer Curve!

Ron Paul waves his Republican cloth coat.

Willard will let you grubby carbon-based meat-bags look at his mountain of looted gold when Hell freezes over.

Willard: My Dad was born a poor black child. Later I was born. My Dad gave me nothing but my hair. I love God. Next question!

Willard: I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992.

Frothy:The internet is a mean place where property rights are abused and people get horrible nicknames just 4 loving Jebus!

Tonight's real winners? Future historians looking to pinpoint the moment when the GOP completely, publicly shit the bed.

Newt:If I could do 1 thing over, I'd travel back in time & stop myself from inventing mint jelly. It was a fundamentally bad idea

Newt: Deporting grandfathers will never work. Especially horny, serial adulterer grandfathers.

Frothy: The 1st thing you do is obey the law, but the 1st thing you know, old Jed's a millionaire. And by "Jed" I mean "Willard"

Did Mr. Libertarian just advocate eliminating the Posse Comitatus Act?

Willard: I respect the fact that you grubby, carbon-based life forms take your reproductive rituals seriously.

Willard: Clones? No! Replicants? Oh Hell yes!

Shorter Newt: Fundamentally, N*gger! N*gger! N*gger! Basically

Shorter Mittens: S0C6 Tax Explanation Abend -- Invalid parameters were passed through the linkage section.

1) Jefferson Davis would have been right at home on stage. 2) GOP voters wouldn't understand why that would be a bad thing.

Willard promises tax massage, but without full release.

To which what can one add, but

Professional Left Podcast #111

2012-01-20T15:59:00.002-06:00

“Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased — thus do we refute entropy."

-- Spider Robinson

Links:

Religious Right is About Patriarchy, Not Family Values
Andrew Sullivan claims he's been blacklisted by Fox News

Da' money goes here:

Should This be Entitled "Blithering Heights"?

2012-01-20T10:27:00.000-06:00

Or, "A Thatcher in the Rye"?

Either way, the central lesson of today's sermon from Our Mr. Brooks is that, as a life-long, establishmentarian testicle cozy, he loves and trusts wealthy people very, very much. So very much, in fact, that sometimes it hurts.

And sometimes he takes his hurt out on his readers.

Like today, in his New York Times column entitled ~~"Leave Willard Alone, You Envious, Ass-Faced Peons!~~ "The Wealth Issue", which is possibly the largest, single free-standing straw man ever constructed in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area.

Built largely out of scraps scavenged from the Cliff's Notes on the "Mormonism in America", Mr. Brooks sings paeans to his giant stick figure, dances immodestly around it for awhile, then set it on fire and calls it a good day's work. It is his own, personal Burning Man, and it begins as follows:

Mitt Romney is a rich man, but is Mitt Romney’s character formed by his wealth? Is Romney a spoiled, cosseted character? Has he been corrupted by ease and luxury?

The notion is preposterous. All his life, Romney has been a worker and a grinder.

After which we are treated to a ten paragraph pamphlet on "The Noble Legacy of the Latter Day Saints from the Early 19th Century Through Last Thursday".

After which, this:

Mitt Romney can’t talk about his family history on the campaign trail. Mormonism is an uncomfortable subject. But he must have been affected by it.

It is a story of relentless effort, of recovery and of being despised (in their eyes) because of their own success. Romney himself experienced none of this hardship, of course, but Jews who didn’t live through the Exodus are still shaped by it.

...

And thus Mr. Brooks finishes off his 800-word New York Times contractual obligation on the virtues of being "... worker and a grinder" the way Mr. Brooks completes all such assignments: as lazily as possible.

It is also, needless to say, complete nonsense. A textbooks example of the Conservative Straw Man genre with David Brooks doing what David Brooks does best; fitting a monster mask of non-existent arguments over the head of some unnamed, imaginary Liberal opponent cobbled together out of throw pillows from his den and then going righteously to town on the Terrifying Pillow Ogre he just invented.

However, in addition to letting him once again play rhetorical handball against a shower curtain, today's 800-word embarrassment serves another, equally important Brooksian imperative -- it allows Mr. Brooks to hedge his bets and protect his position as America's Number One Callow Political Insider by publicly and shamelessly sucking up to Willard Romney hard enough to, as the kids say, strip the chrome clean off a trailer hitch. Because taken as some kind of "rebuttal" against some unspecified imputation of corrupt foppery on the part of some critic somewhere, what Mr. Brooks has written is so transparently ridiculous -- so easily collapsible with the barest flick of fact -- that there is no other way to read it other than as just one more of Mr. Brooks' signature, gooey editorial mash notes to yet another potential-future-meal-ticket.

Because nothing I have read by anyone, anywhere, has ever inferred that Willard Romney is in any way lazy at all.

Quite the opposite: the brief against Romney is that like Gordon Gekko

Larry the Liquidator

"Boiler Room"'s Jim Young, or Hannibal Lechter, Willard Romney has the empty soul, fierce drive and infinitely reprogrammable ethical software of a really industrious sociopath.

When we look at Romney, it is not that we see indolence.

Instead, when we look at Romney we catch a deeply disturbing glimpse of what William Gibson once described in "Neuromancer":

“...for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

Just as when we look at Mr. Brooks, we do not see mere hackery, but catch a deeply disturbing glimpse of a creature who craves nothing more than to grow rich in groveling service to our inhuman, plutocrat overlords.

Willard Romney, R-Villa Straylight

2012-01-19T19:37:00.000-06:00

On now on CNN, the Romney killbot versus the evil trolls.

Everyone's a winner!

No, You Festering Peasant Drool Buckets

2012-01-19T12:08:00.001-06:00

You may not see my stock portfolio.

Whether concocting another 100% fact-free fable about Dirty Fucking Hippies destroying America values;
br />

...

MR. BROOKS: I don't think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don't have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it's wrong, but they've been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK." And so that waters everything down. The second thing is a lot of the judgment is based on the supposition that if we were there, we would have intervened.

MR. DIONNE: Right.

MR. BROOKS: And that's just not true.

MR. GREGORY: But I have to challenge you on that point.

MR. DIONNE: Yeah.

MR. GREGORY: Is it really that we don't know right from wrong? Is there anybody who doesn't know that sodomizing a 10-year-old boy in a shower by another man is wrong?

MR. BROOKS: But if you...

MR. DIONNE: Exactly.

MR. BROOKS: If you're alert to the sense of what evil is, what the evil is within yourself and what evil is in society, you have a script to follow. It's not a vague sense. You have a script to follow. And this is necessary because people do not intervene....

or using his New York Times column to shamelessly pimp for the oil and gas industry in an out-of-nowhere advertisement on the Joys of Fracking and how it suffers at the hands of Dirty Fucking Hippies:
br />

David: But the bigger problem is that Democrats may lose the spirit of enterprise. University town voters tend to be put off by the policies favored by the aspiring entrepreneurial classes. They side with the environmentalists over the people who like pipelines and shale gas, for example.
...

...the American Plutocracy has no more dog-loyal lick-spittle than Our Mr. Brooks.

Sure, when it comes to reporting the simple, unhappy facts about class or race or politics or culture in America, Mr. Brooks may be congenital liar, but the lies he tells are so diligently focused on pleasing the powerful -- so congenial to ears of the immensely wealthy -- that whether or not they intersect with reality at any point is entirely beside the point. Because Mr. Brooks is not a journalist in any sense of the word; he is a storyteller, employed by America's Newspaper of Record to tell America's power-elite the fairy tales that make them happy.

Over and over again.

Column after column, year after year, Mr. Brooks piles up his personal fortune and reinforces his thick network of clout-heavy patrons by singing them the same little tune.

He wrote one such yesterday, but to get yourself in the proper frame of mind to appreciate Mr. Brooks' words, consider the distance between the imaginary lives of imaginary, simple, working folk found in the lyrics of the lagniappe lullaby

with which Mr. Brooks sings for his supper...

..and the working world as really is for millions of real, working people in America.

Consider that...

...if you want to get a low-wage job a banging out dents and welding cracks on public transit buses, you will first have to pee in a cup.

...if you want to get a low-wage job dodging punches at a social service agency working with, say, ex cons you will first have to agree to let the HR department and three different levels of law enforcement go over your life with a microscope and a pair of rubber gloves.

...if you want to get a low-wage job moving pallettes of potato chips around in some freezing. pre-dawn warehouse, God help you if you ever did time in what Willard Romney refers to as "the Big House".

...if you dream of being, say, a postal inspector, understand that the FBI will visit you, everyone in your immediate family, all of your friends and all of your former employers.

...if you hope to keep a roof over your family's head by landing that sales gig, you'd better dye the gray our of your hair and pare down your formidable resume to make sure it looks like you're under 40.

...having landed that low-wage job moving numbers around spreadsheets and constantly retweaking your psychotic boss' PowerPoint presentations to include whateever the fuck he happened to read on "In Flight" magazine this week, if you want to keep your job you'd damn well better never turn off your iPhone or Crackberry, just in case your psychotic boss has a brainstorm at 2:00 that you absolutely need to get going on Right Now!

In the the workaday, working class world about which Mr. Brooks obviously knows nothing whatsoever, it is now absolutely commonplace to be expected to turn out the pockets of your life and hand your hair, urine, blood over to strangers to get a job.

Even a crappy job.

In the the workaday, working class world about which Mr. Brooks obviously knows nothing whatsoever, it is now absolutely commonplace to be expected to give up on having anything your parents would recognize as a "private life" as a condition of keeping your job.

Even a crappy job.

And if you don't like it? Fuck you! Quit and starve because now that the plutocracy which Mr. Brooks has spent his life celebrating and defending has annihilated the middle class and gelded our labor unions, there will be forever be six unemployed Americans ready and eager to take your place on whatever terms the company dictates.

And if, in turn, those Americans start getting uppity and asking for crazy shit like "raises" or "health insurance" or "time off"?

Well, behind each of them stand 100 Chinese slaves who will do the work for pennies a day.

Got that?

Now keep these incredibly invasive disclosure rules -- from psych exams to surrendering your flesh and fluids to internet background searches to find out if you or any of your 2,611 Facebook friends have ever said "fuck" online -- which have now become the banal norm for the American working class in mind as you read today's little gem by David Brooks, in which he explains why people running for the most powerful job on Earth -- a job where you can let and energy company poison the groundwater for thousands of Americans, influence the spending of trillions of tax dollars on weapons systems or give the Go/No-Go to allow the reimportation of cheaper, generic drugs -- should not have to disclose whether or not they are heavily invested in Exxon Mobile or Halliburton or Eli Lilly.

From Gawker (with a h/t to "Gene"):

In some little cutesy online back-and-forth piece today, Brooks and Gail Collins purport to debate the issue of presidential candidates releasing their tax returns. Here is where David Brooks comes down:
...
My own view is that the desire for full disclosure stems from a few things. First, pure prurience. Second, members of what used to be called the New Class perpetually labor under the delusion that other people dislike the rich as much as they do and if they can only disclose that someone is rich that will end their political chances. Third, there is a misbegotten ideology haunting the land, the ideology of sunshinism. This is the belief that everything should be made public...

Sunshinism is a destructive ideology. Forcing people to financially undress in public is just one of those incursions that repels decent people from running for office... It also destroys people's faith in government. Have you noticed that as democracy has become more open, cynicism has skyrocketed and the effectiveness of government has gone down the toilet?

So just to clarify, and I don't know why I'm shocked by this, really: New York Times employee and wealthy white male David Brooks strongly believes that the idea that our most powerful and barely-accountable leaders should have to tell we, the people, a bare minimum of facts about themselves and their lifestyle, is a "destructive ideology."
David Brooks, a columnist whose work is based largely on news reported by journalists dedicated to exposing facts that powerful officials would prefer to keep private, favors allowing powerful officials to keep everything private. David Brooks, who purports to know something about politics, genuinely believes that the fear of too much honesty with the public is the reason that "decent people" don't run for elected office...

I would write a little more, but at the moment I am nursing that tiny, starburst headache behind my right eye I always get just after I make another round of job inquiries and just before I re-certify for unemployment, so I will conclude with this quote by James Russell Lowell:

He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft.

This Was The Week

2012-01-18T23:49:00.000-06:00

When Conservative Exile and Tina* Brown employee, Andrew Sullivan, was given the cover of Newsweek Magazine...

...and Conservative Exile, Andrew Sullivan running buddy and newly-minted Tina Brown employee, David Frum, was invited onto the Colbert report.

Something about a Club.

Something about its very limited membership.

* Typed "Tiny" instead of "Tina".Apologies for the typo

Bain Capital, Hard at Work

2012-01-18T10:34:00.002-06:00

Healthy Company: I don't want to go on the cart.

Willard Romney: Oh, don't be such a baby.

With All The Penetrating Insight (UPDATE)

2012-01-17T16:00:00.000-06:00

that we have come to expect from "Newsweek, Tina Brown turns her magazine's front cover over to the "conservative-leaning Independent" Andrew Sullivan who explains how Both Sides Do It!

"The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong."

Wowsers!

Sounds like a nightmare; a Universe where every position is carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue.

This place where no one but America's leading gay Catholic Tory -- frolicking across the few lonely yards of heroic middle ground on his Isle of Reasonableness -- is capable of seeing this bright, burning truth.

"While the left is less unhinged in its critique, it is just as likely to miss the screen for the pixels.

Wowsers again! And Zounds, also too!

Actually...before we go any further...I have a little confession to make.

I cheated just a little bit here.

Rather that waiting for the Muse of Blogging to convert the existence of Mr. Sullivan's "Newsweek" column into the spark of inspiration, the preceding paragraphs were created by me dipping into my own archives. Instead of taking a long walk in the still woods or staring into a contemplative fire while sipping poteen from a Mason jar like real writers are supposed to do, I fell back on a couple of recall exercises from my writing group days and dredged up a few sentences that still hang on to the inside of my skull by their nails, mashing together two older posts -- this one about David Brooks and this one about Thomas Friedman -- both of which were written 2005.

The truth is, I could have easily gleaned a hundred such sentences from any of the the hundred of thousands of words I have strung together on the same subjects over seven years since I began blogging, because all Mr. Sullivan is doing is reconfiguring the same, tired Centrist retread which I am heartily sick and tired of seeing in print anywhere.

The bitter truth of our current situation is actually very simple:

The Right is an unholy, unsalvageable mess. It is too far gone, too beholden to its fascist elements and too fucking dangerous to be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.

For years, Liberals have been just about the only people who have had the balls to say that the Right is an unholy, unsalvageable mess out loud and in all kinds of weather. For example, in the darkest days of the Bush Administration we continued to say it out loud even as Conservatives like Andrew Sullivan were turning a buck calling us unAmerican, freedom-hating Fifth columnists.

No matter how many times Liberals turn out to be right in fact, our media/industrial complex will never permit it to be acknowledged in public. Too much money is riding on the Big Scam that the Left and the Right are both equally wrong, so Never. Ever. Ever.

The core of virtually every Liberal critique of Obama Administration comes straight from this reality.

So does the stridency of some of our voices.

Because we are getting very tired of always being right and never being heeded. Tired of being lied about. Tired of being slandered. But mostly of all we are completely done with lazy, Centrist panderers (a disturbing number of whom are still fresh from being kicked out of the Conservative clown car) getting away with poxing the houses of both those who lie loudly...and those who loudly call out the liars as liars.

The fact is that the modern "Left" forms a rich, complex and interesting caravan of allied interests which, on any given day, can run from Noam Chomsky to John Cole, cut across a bean field to pick up Digby, swing onto a frontage road to let Susie Bright hop aboard and make a quick stop at a steel mill to hook up with Leo Gerard before barreling down Route 66 where Al Franken and Dan Savage are both thumbing their way across America. But since Centrism is where the money is, Mr. Sullivan can only claim the title of King of that particular dung-heap by compressing the totality of the rich, complex and interesting Liberal critique into a single, convenient monovocal monolithic fiction -- the "truly deluded" Left -- which he can then pair off against the very ugly, very real bugfuck crazy Right.

This is why, for all his bellyaching, Mr. Sullivan never actually identifies a single, "deluded" Liberal by name. Because in this fairly tale, Liberals don't need actual names. Instead, various disembodied Liberal abstractions collectively called "They" float around doing unreasonable things:

"They rail against..."

"They decry..."

"They despair..."

They "...projected onto Obama absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country..."

On the other hand, to build this particular iteration of the Centrist thesis, Mr. Sullivan has no trouble finding plenty of names to name among the the first tier leaders of the Right. Mr. Sullivan indicts the participants in the "Republican debates" as being among the ringleaders of the wingnut mob. Willard Romney is singled out by name several times --

"[The Affordable Care Act] is not, as Romney insists, a one-model, top-down prescription...".

..."On foreign policy, the right-wing critiques have been the most unhinged. Romney accuses the president of apologizing for America, and others all but accuse him of treason and appeasement. "

"That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe..."

..."Mitt Romney accuses the president of making the recession worse, of wanting to turn America into a European welfare state, of not believing in opportunity or free enterprise, of having no understanding of the real economy, and of apologizing for America and appeasing our enemies. According to Romney, Obama is a mortal threat to “the soul” of America and an empty suit who couldn’t run a business, let alone a country."

-- as are Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh, in this paragraph --

"And it is this Republican intransigence—from the 2009 declaration by Rush Limbaugh that he wants Obama “to fail” to the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s admission that his primary objective is denying Obama a second term—that has been truly responsible for the deadlock. "

-- which distinguishes itself by being followed by what may be the single, funniest sentence in the whole article:

"And the only way out of that deadlock is an electoral rout of the GOP, since the language of victory and defeat seems to be the only thing it understands."

Funny, because Mr. Sullivan seems to have somehow forget that the GOP has already been handed not one but two such "electoral routs", in 2006 and 2008.

And the results of those historic, back-to-back electoral beatdowns? The Right did not to sober up, did not get together and kick the bigots and the lunatics to the curb, because the bigots and the lunatics are the Right. Instead they did the exact opposite, ratcheting up the ragetalk, doubling-down on the crazy and running their bugfuck conspiracy factories around the clock.

And you know what? It worked!

Whee!

It worked because the Right greeted the dawn of the Age of Obama with a collective scream of primal rage and terror which has not merely not diminished one decibel since the day he took the oath of office, but has actually doubled and re-doubled with his every action and every word.

It worked because while Liberals were begging the Obama Administration to take the implacable hostility and hostage-taking contempt of the Right as a serious threat to the country, the Administration chose instead to follow through on their brilliant Reasonable Centrist Plan to win the Right over by treating them like long-lost lodge brothers from whom they had become estranged over some silly, Thanksgiving dinner misunderstanding that happenedso long ago that no one could remember the details.

Chose, in other words, to ignore all those shrill Liberals who were warning them that they were walking nekkid into a Category Five wingnut wilding and heed exactly the same kind of happy Centrist horseshit advice that goofs like David Brooks, Mark Halperin and Andrew Sullivan all wallow in.

The Right, of course, could not fucking believe their luck. Crippled and bleeding from a thousand self-inflicted wounds, they were allowed to reconstituted their Party using its ugliest, most deranged, most racist elements.

Allowed to strap tri-corner hats into the pointy heads of their howling mob, stuff them into Koch Brother-funded buses which drove them off to Fox News-sponsored events and into political re-branding history.

Allowed to traffic in the worst kind of white supremacist sludge.

Allowed to lie and lie and lie and lie.

And allowed to do it all virtually unmolested by the White House and the mainstream media because nobody wanted to hurt their fee-fees by pointing out that they were completely out of their fucking minds.

Actually, there was one group -- the Liberals -- who understood very clearly what horrors were squirming around inside the GOP's fake Tea Party chrysalis. Liberals, who had just worked themselves to a frazzle getting Barack Obama elected, and had great hopes for the transformational mandate their newly-elected President had won.

Liberals, who began warning their newly-minted President early on that by not taking these fuckers seriously,

his Administration was making the biggest mistake

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

of its young political life, and putting at risk every one of the critical reforms it said it believed in.

Liberals, who for their troubles were given the red-headed stepchild treatment; walked firmly over to the political children's table and told to sit quietly while the grownups hashed everything out.

Liberals who Mr. Sullivan now dings in his "Newsweek" cover story as "truly deluded" for

"...projecting unrealistic fantasies onto a candidate who never pledged a liberal revolution."

Because, yeah, where in the world would we have ever gotten a crazy ideas like that?

As one of the millions of non-deluded Liberals who Andrew Sullivan simply refuses to believe actually exists, I am not pissed off because this Administration failed to live up to any "...absurd notions of what a president can actually do in a polarized country..." as I am well out of puberty and know better than to look for heroes and saviors in politics.

I am, on the other hand, very pissed off that this Administration has failed on its own terms. This Administration brushed past Liberal complaints by countering that the gravity of the times and circumstance require them to be hard-headed, real-world pragmatists, and yet during their first 2.5 years in office they have consistently and disastrously failed in the first duty of hard-headed, real-world pragmatism -- to accept and act on the irrefutable evidence which is pounding you over the head every fucking day.

The Obama Administration's signal failure was not how it handled single payer or Guantanamo Bay: its signal failure was its blithe obliviousness to just how bottomless the fanatical hatred of Right really was.

They failed because when faced with the reality of an intractable opposition of bleating, bloody-minded, knives-out lunatics, this Administration simply refused to believe that it could not charm or compromise or Centrism their way to victory. Instead of facing reality, they chose the siren's song of the Reasonable Centrist who told them that the one, sure-fire formula for success was to meet every obstacle by shoving the nearest Liberal principle out the airlock in the name of bipartisanship, taking whatever crumbs the Right might offer in return and declaring victory.

Except compromise didn't work. In fact, it emboldened their enemies. Hey, that's not good! What should we do about that?

Well, according to every clever, highly-paid Reasonable Centrist, when compromise with people who are now saying openly that they hate you and want to destroy you fails, the only solution is....more compromise!

After which follows another month or two under a fire-hose of relentless lies and slander.
Another weekend of wall-to-all news coverage of Pig People jammed into some Ramada Inn ballroom waving birth certificates and ranting about Obama's secret Communist plot to sell American out to the Taliban.

And more calls for even greater and more spectacular compromise by those clever, highly-paid Reasonable Centrists who those "deluded" Liberals are by now pleading with you to notice haven't been right even once so far.

But you soldier on, rinsing and repeating and cheered along by those Reasonable Centrists again and again, right down that gently downward-sloping Reasonable Centrist Road that finally led to Democrats running away from their own President's most significant accomplishment -- the Affordable Care Act -- and directly into the chain saw that was the 2010 election.

A loss which the Reasonable Centrists all agreed should be met by the Obama Administration with an immediate and aggressive campaign of compromise and appeasement.

But having their asses handed to them in 2010 seems to have had a...bracing...effect on the Obama White House, and for the last several month they appear to have finally decided to do what those "deluded" Liberals have been begging them to do all along: take on the Right directly.

This has had a number of side effects, including the vastly entertaining spectacle of David Brooks -- the Alpha Male of the cult of Reasonable Centrism -- completely losing his shit and melting down in a weepy, screamy, public breakup hissy fit --

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

...
So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach.

It has gone back, as an appreciative Ezra Klein of The Washington Post conceded, to politics as usual. The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful!
...

The president’s goal in 2012, I suggested, would be to try to paint himself as the moderate bipartisan grownup, and dismiss the Republicans as extreme, intransigent, and hyper-ideological.

Based on the actual details of the deficit plan that the administration just released, though, I would like to retract that analysis. Between the size, scope and design of the tax increases and the skimpiness of the entitlement reforms (nothing on Social Security, minimal tinkering on Medicare), it seems that the president will be running for re-election as Nancy Pelosi instead.
...

-- which, in the history of weepy, screamy, public breakup hissy fits, may be second only to Rob Gordon's legendary act of rain-whipped relationship seppuku in "High Fidelity".

And so we end where we began.

With a punditocracy still competing to see who can be this week's King of the Centrist dung-heap, in a country which cannot continue to survive half Fox and half free.

UPDATE: I was on a live chat forum with Mr. Sullivan this afternoon. I pointed out that to make his case for equivalence between the Right and Left, he cites several specific examples by name (Romney, McConnell and Limbaugh) of reckless, deluded behavior by several prominent/powerful Republicans/Conservatives but no such examples by Liberals, who are simply noted as "They" doing this and that.

I asked him to support his thesis by naming specific examples of comparably reckless, deluded behavior by Liberals as prominent/powerful as Romney, McConnell and Limbaugh.

I waited and waited but received no answer, although I did learn that:

"...Palin's tweet made me come in my pants. I write what I think is true. I don't give a damn about "reputation." If I'm wrong I correct or re-think. Once a writer worries about these things, he's like an actor watching the audience. In my opinion, far too many journalists worry about their reputation."

and

"...I adore Ron Paul - for his courage, his candor, his extraordinary success in shifting our debate on critical questions of foreign policy and debt and freedom..."

and

[Regarding how often Mr. Sullivan has talked to Barack Obama] "Three times over four years. Only once one-on-one on the phone. The last time I saw him was before the Inauguration. I like to keep my distance. I didn't interview him for this piece."

So there's that.

The Highlight of My Day Yesterday?

2012-01-17T10:33:00.002-06:00

The 2nd grader spontaneously deciding that she wanted to do a project on Martin Luther King, Jr. and read it to the rest of us.

John Nash Explains

2012-01-14T01:07:00.000-06:00

Both how the Not-Romneys will hand the nomination over to Willard Romney, and how Conservatism is destroying America.

Because they cannot wrap their heads around the "...and the group" part of the equation.

I personally find it hilarious that the only way for the 75% of the GOP who fucking hate Willard Romney to deny him the nomination would be to act like a pack of evil S!O!C!I!A!L!I!S!T!S and put the interest of the group ahead of the interest of any one individual.

And doubly so when you consider that it was exactly this kind of "I've got mine so fuck you" mentality that made the GOP's direct lineal descendant -- the government of the Confederate States of America -- such a complete basket case.

At GOP Central Command

2012-01-14T00:22:00.001-06:00

The Republican Brain Caste prepares to take the Party's useful idiots in-hand...

...while, deep inside a Not-Romney campaign bunker

other plans are set in motion.

There is nothing new under the Sun.

Professional Left Podcast #110

2012-01-13T13:25:00.001-06:00

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

-- John F. Kennedy

Da' money goes here:

Then War Broke Out in Republican Heaven

2012-01-12T11:53:00.001-06:00

Willard and his plunderfuck money fought against the Newt, and the Newt and his casino-money fought back.

-- Revelation 12:7 (St. Ronald Reagan edition)

This is Newt Gingrich's half-hour beatdown documenting Willard Romney's years of soulless rapacity sowing his wild LBOs and playing Dread Pirate Roberts at Bain Capital.

I have had two whole careers shot out from under me by plunderfucks like Romney (and one career incinerate by the Romney mentality running through the existing management like a staph infection.)

The only advice I can humbly offer when dealing with them is, whenever possible, follow the first and most ancient rule of fighting vampires: never, ever invite one in the door.

Launch of a New Magazine: Take One

2012-01-11T20:31:00.000-06:00

A Professional Left Joint.

The Little Boy

2012-01-11T17:48:00.000-06:00

Who never grew up.

I feel for the young boy Mr. Sullivan used to be (as described in this video.)

I too was a gifted kid who got stomped by the system (in my case I ran head first into a teacher who was a sadist and a school system which all but encouraged bullying because they were embedded in a community full of hyper-aggressiveness, hyper-competitive young executives, all on the fast track up, or on the fast track down. The indifferent administrators and laughably inadequate "gifted" programs would come later...)

But to harbor that resentment all these years? To haul it all the way across the Atlantic ocean and project it onto another country and culture -- a country and culture which you clearly did not and not understand? And to get that transposition so dangerously, backwardly wrong?

This is what I cannot get past.

America was never England, Mr. Sullivan, and our Liberals and Democrats were not the Labor Party when it came to education or anything else.

In this country, it was not the Left who closed schools down to keep gifted outsiders from succeeding: it was a group of powerful Southern Democrats who, once upon a time and in pursuit of the very Conservative idea of maintaining the social order and stability of their racist society, wrapped bigotry up in a Bible to keep African Americans subjugated.

This they did in the name of Almighty God.

To keep their way of life alive and African Americans subjugated, these same people used the same bigotry, wrapped in the same Bible and cited the authority of the same Almighty God to justify forging themselves into an aggregate paleo-fascist entity called the Confederacy, which seceding from the country and made bloody civil war on its neighbors.

Did your gifted school mention any of this when they were teaching you world history?

Did they bother to teach you that, having lost that bloody civil war, these same, damned people merely shifted from outright slavery to a system of brutal apartheid enforced by state-sanctioned terrorism to keep their way of life alive and African Americans subjugated? That they justified it all once again using the same bigotry, wrapped in the same Bible and citing the authority of the same Almighty God?

Did they teach you that this depravity never went away?

That in America it has been passed from generation to generation like hemophilia?

That one of the "To Do" items on the very top of their list was to deny anything remotely resembling a decent public education to non-Whites, gifted or not?

That these are the people who redubbed themselves "Dixiecrats". Who opened hundreds of "segregation academies" to keep their children hating the way they were supposed to. Who rigged up property laws, election laws, marriage laws and state constitutions to deny, cripple and oppress non-Whites. Who took the old Confederate battle flag out of the museum and incorporated into their state flags just to scream "Fuck You!" at the forces of justice and modernity a little bit louder.

I guess your school skipped all that. Otherwise you certainly would have learned that the direct, lineal descendants of the proud practitioners of this Bible-wrapped bigotry migrated en masse into the Conservative movement and the Republican Party.

Migrated en masse because they were invited by the leaders of the Conservative movement and the Republican Party to do so.

This is all happened, by the way, at around the same time you were getting out of diapers.

So how the hell did you miss it?

How in the hell did virtually all of Conservatism's leading public intellectuals fail to notice that these very people still grimly carry on their centuries-old struggle to use the terrible power of government to oppress, thwart and cripple the groups they hate. That they are defined by their hatred? What whole religions, media empires depend on that hatred?

That your entire movement, Mr. Sullivan, long ago came to depend on that hatred? A movement you crossed an ocean to join, and to which you have have devoted most of your adult life?

Honest to Christ, Mr. Sullivan, some day I really would like at least one of you Conservative exiles and expats to spend 1/100th of the effort you devote to parsing Ron Paul's latest verbal tic and give an honest answer this simple question: How did some of Conservatism's leading public intellectuals get something this fundamental so massively wrong? Is it a cognitive disorder? Were you just that blind? Or was it for the money?

Because it wasn't the those terrible Liberals who pulled their children out of American public schools rather than let the Socialist Kenyan Usurper "indoctrinate " their minds with his sinister "Orwellian" message of "Stay in school and do your homework".

No, as usual it was the brain caste of American Conservatism who dreamed up that bit of racist bilge, just as it was, once again, the rank-and-file of that movement who obediently lined up to hate whoever their leaders told them to hate.

It was, in other words, exactly the same sort of people who have been the heart of the Right since long before you joined their team.

How did you miss that?

The Mote in Bobo's Eye

2012-01-10T23:20:00.000-06:00

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

-- Matthew 7:5

Begin first with this understanding; Mr. Brooks is a Professional Conservative.

Without that one pony to ride, Mr. Brooks has nothing.

Nothing at all.

Which is why, Mr. Brooks, Professional Conservative, has written another 800-word column for the New York Times about Liberals.

In this column, Mr. Brooks:

Wonders aloud why nobody like Liberals.
Puts the entire burden for fixing everything that is broken in America on the back of Liberals.
Suggests that the very first thing Liberals need to do to fix what is wrong with America is to stop everything and purify Liberalism.

Even though he has demonstrate over and over again in great detail how embarrassingly little he knows about Real Liberals and (conversely) how much of his writing is driven by an obsession with the same Imaginary Liberals which live under Rush Limbaugh's bed, Mr. Brooks nonetheless continues to write frequently -- compulsively -- about us.

Continues to make a princely living telling tale tales about Liberals and hippies and 1960s.

Like his writings on economics and history, most of what Mr. Brooks writes about Liberals is not simply wrong, but always wrong in exactly the same way. All sifted through a corrupt ideological filter which prevents Mr. Brooks from coming to terms with the fact that every problem he identifies has either been created by or made vastly worse by the diligent application of his own ideology.

Or, more simply, Mr. Brooks cannot write honestly about what is wrong with America because Mr. Brooks is what's wrong with America.

That being said, let us poke a stick into today's fresh helping of mire and see what oozes out.

First, Mr. Brooks assertion that nobody like Liberals.

Why aren’t there more liberals in America?

It’s not because liberalism lacks cultural power. Many polls suggest that a majority of college professors and national journalists vote Democratic. The movie, TV, music and publishing industries are dominated by liberals.

...

Given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism. Yet the percentage of Americans who call themselves liberals is either flat or in decline. There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal...

Mr. Brooks never bothers to cite any sources for his assertions about how or why American's identify themselves with this or that label, and this graph from Pew explains why.

Because if you simply substitute the word "Progressive" for the nearly-identical word "Liberal" (which the Right has spent billions demonizing) Mr. Brooks' entire argument collapses.

Mr. Brooks' third observation -- that the "solution" to a the nonexistent problem is the mortification of the Liberal flesh, the purification of the Liberal ideal --

..Sailors scrub their ships. Farmers clear weeds. Democrats have not spent a lot of time scraping carbuncles off the state.

Worse, in an attempt to match Republican rhetoric, Democratic politicians are perpetually soiling the name of government for the sake of short-term gain. How many times have you heard Democrats from Carter to Obama running against Washington, accusing it of being insular, shortsighted, corrupt and petty? If the surgeon himself thinks his tools are rancid, why shouldn’t you?

In the past few weeks, the Obama administration has begun his presidential campaign by picking a series of small fights with the Republican-led House over things like recess appointments. These vicious squabbles may help Obama in the short term by making him look better than Republicans in Congress. But they will only further discredit Washington over the long run.

Life is unfair. Republican venality unintentionally reinforces the conservative argument that government is corrupt. Democratic venality undermines the Democratic argument that Washington can be trusted to do good.

Liberalism has not expanded because it has not had a Martin Luther, a leader committed to stripping away the corruptions, complexities and indulgences that have grown up over the years.

If you’ll forgive some outside advice, President Obama might consider running for re-election as Luther. It’s not enough to pick a series of small squabbles and then win as the least ugly man in the room. He might run as someone who believes in government but sees how much it needs to be cleansed and purified.

-- is equally absurd not because the Liberal stables don't need cleaning, but because of the idea that we should turn our attention to cleaning out those stables in the middle of a pitched battle as the wingnut hordes are swarming us with bayonettes fixed is suicidal.

No, amid our many problems, Conservatism stands out as American democracy's Number One massive, sucking chest wound. The top of the triage list. And the first civic duty of every public-spirited Liberal must be to hasten the extinction of the Modern Conservative Movement, which is a project that must begin in the Center.

The reason Modern Conservatism was not laughed off the stage decades ago is that it is willing to drop a 16 ton weight on anyone in the media who refused to treat it with respectful seriousness. The Right -- with its legions of bigots, buffoons, Bible thumpers and billionaires -- gets its every Bronze Age theory and popskull proclamation treated with the utmost seriousness because the mainstream media is terrified to do otherwise.

Because news is a commodity, and the Right has convinced the Mainstream Media that it can cut them off at the wallet if they speak out of turn.

And so, behind the shriveled figleaf of objectivity, the Right is permitted to do and say anything no matter how traitorous, destructive or loony while from the Center we get nothing but the mantra of "Both Sides Do It" repeated forever and ever and ever.

Which is not only morally offensive, but also the proximate cause of exactly the kind of public mistrust of government which Mr. Brooks pretends to care about:

...Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don’t trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don’t trust the federal government.

A few decades ago they did, but now they don’t. Roughly 10 percent of Americans trust government to do the right thing most of the time, according to an October New York Times, CBS News poll.

Why don’t Americans trust their government? It’s not because they dislike individual programs like Medicare. It’s more likely because they think the whole system is rigged.

The public distrusts government because they have been told by the very same fuckers who clubbed the media to its knees that the government was their Enemy. Not the imperfect manifestation of the will of a conflicted people, but a force for Evil constructed by Liberals to destroy them, And every time those fuckers got hold of the keys to the government they chopped it for parts, sugared the gas tank, slashed the tires, set what was left on fire and then rolled the burning hulk off the nearest cliff to demonstrate that -- See! See! -- that thing was not safe at all!

So, strike two for Mr. Brooks.

On the other hand, I do happen to agree with Mr. Brooks that Liberals have not been taking sufficient, intelligent action on our own behalf.

Of course, the irony of Mr. Brooks calling for a sense of bravery and purpose which he himself complete lacks is not lost on me -- that when it came to bearing any of the cost or responsibility for his war of choice, the economic disasters his ideology has wrought, or the toxic disaster his party has made of Washington D.C., Mr. Brooks has made a career of excusing himself to the Reasonable Centrist bathroom and then crawling out window whenever another Republican butcher's bill comes due.

However the fact that Mr. Brooks is a coward and a fraud does not mean that Liberals are not occasionally, ridiculously self-defeating.

Yes, we fight for Big Principles, but too often we also let the "narcissism of small differences" turn relatively minor differences into full-on range wars. I have walked away from Liberal organizations more than once because they failed completely in their primary duty: getting out of their own way long enough to do the good they all said they believed in doing.

We can also be very bad at communicating. Yes, we are quite good at semaphoring to each other in the language of graphs, policy prescriptions and eyerolls at the latest Republican perfidy, but often we just suck at street fighting. Quit waving charts at the muggles and expecting them to change their minds! You have to be able to connect with people emotionally. You have to explain to people why they should care in the language the respect and understand. And frankly you have to be able to reach into a Conservative's chest cavity and rip out his heart: our current situation requires it and we are all too often insufficiently competent at delivering it.

We are also cheap fuckers (a theme I heard over and over again at Netroots Nation.) I'm not talking about the rank and file -- not the people who are barely scraping by, who write to Blue Gal and me every day, who drop us a fiver they can't afford "thank you" notes that blows us away. No, I'm talking about Liberals with very, very deep pockets. The ones on Obama's platinum donor list. The ones who kick it at Davos. Who spend summer on the French Riviera and winters in St. Moritz and who are cheap fuckers when it comes to building the institutions on which a movement depends.

The Right beat us into a corner because they were willing to spend without limit, decade after decade after decade. Willing to spend whatever it took to build political think tanks and interlocking media empires which all geared to pour continuous hellfire onto the word "Liberal".

And it worked.

We, on the other hand, couldn't manage to keep the Koufax Awards going.

Jon Huntsman's Rambling, OediPAC-Funded Mess of a Speech

2012-01-10T20:44:00.001-06:00

In 90 seconds.

GOP Temporarily Tires of Masturbating

2012-01-10T19:15:00.000-06:00

With its non-dominant hand.

From NBC:

NBC projects Romney wins N.H. primary

Updated at 8:00 p.m. ETMANCHESTER, N.H. – Mitt Romney is projected to win the New Hampshire primary, scoring a decisive victory for the former Massachusetts governor in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Also the Amazing Invisible Libertarian tricks the media into once again paying fleeting, grudging attention to him by placing second (projected).

Gone Today, Here Tomorrow

2012-01-10T16:58:00.001-06:00

Scientists fiddle around with cool shit.

From "National Geographic":

"Time Cloak" Created; Can Make Events Disappear
Experiment is first to make a hole in time, expert says.

Brian Handwerkfor National Geographic NewsPublished January 4, 2012

Einstein's theories of relativity suggest that gravity can cause time to slow down. Now scientists have demonstrated a way to stop time altogether—or at least, to give the appearance of time stopping by bending light to create a hole in time.

The new research builds on recent demonstrations of "invisibility cloaks" that can make objects seem to disappear by bending waves of visible light.

The idea is that, if light moves around an object instead of striking it, that light doesn't get scattered and reflected back to an observer, making the object essentially invisible.

Now Cornell University scientists have used a similar concept to create a hole in time, albeit a very short one: The effect lasts around 40 trillionths of a second....

Making Time Stand Still

To conduct their time-stopping experiment, described this week in the journal Nature, [study co-author and Cornell physicist Alex] Gaeta and colleagues aimed a laser beam at a probe and passed the beam through a device called a time lens.

While a conventional optical lens bends a beam of light in space, the time lens modifies the light's temporal—not spatial—distribution.

"It's a way of being able to really control the properties of a light beam in the time domain, and shape and distort and do funny things like this to light in the time domain," Gaeta said.

Study co-author Moti Fridman, also of Cornell University's School of Applied and Engineering Physics, devised a method in which he crossed the laser beam aimed at the probe with a strong "pulse" laser inside specialized fiber optic glass.

"This changed the frequency and wavelength of the beam so it moved at a different velocity, and this is why a [time] gap was created," he explained.

A second pulse laser on the other side of the time hole reversed the changes, restoring the beam to its original properties.

In the experiment, an event that happened inside the time hole wasn't detected by the probe.
...

As insanely cool as this all is (and it is) the scientists conducting the research seem strangely unaware that others have been working along parallel lines for years.

In fact just recently a well-funded outfit called "The GOP" made a unit of time known in temporal legerdemain circles term as "Every fucking thing before January 20, 2009" completely disappear without a single "time lens", "flux capacitor" or any other of your fancy-schmancy "science".

Instead they used money. Lots and lots and lots of money. Enough money to bend spacetime, the memories of millions of Americans and will of thousands of media executives.

Of course, there were a few, terrifying side-effects...

No Wonder You're Feeling Tired

2012-01-09T11:34:00.000-06:00

On the one hand, yes, there are substantial omissions.

On the other hand, rare is the post -- no matter how exhaustive -- that doesn't have at least one "But you forgot..." somewhere in the first three comments.

The Award for "Best NH Debate Post Title"

2012-01-09T08:15:00.000-06:00

Must go to Jurrasicpork at Brilliant at Breakfast for "Last Night's NH Debate: Live Free or Die of Embarrassment".

The writing is also up to the job:

...
Willard, leader of the rat hordes, is da Man. Meet your new 2012 Republican Car to Nowhere.

There was no Night of Long Knives or even a Dusk of Apple Paring Knives. Newt and the others, save possibly for Jon Huntsman in this, his Brian's Song of a national appearance, went after Willard with about as much real zeal as so many crocodiles recently bloated with baby hippos would look at a full-grown hippo. Huntsman did channel Herbert Hoover by muttering something to Willard in Mandarin Chinese, which came off sounding like a chess nerd explaining the Sicilian trap to a bunch of football jocks just before they folded him six ways into a locker.
...

Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed

2012-01-08T15:00:00.000-06:00

Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. *

In case you were wondering, every time I hear or see or read the same, lavishly remunerated sock puppets jackhammering home the same, patently false Centrist narrative for the umpteen millionth time from impregnable media fortress that reach several million more people a week than I ever have or ever will, this is what it sounds like to me:

From "Brave New World":

"What's the lesson this afternoon?" he asked.

"We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes," she answered. "But now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness."

The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively.

"Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let's have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet."

At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.

"… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."

There was a pause; then the voice began again.

"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"

The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.

"They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson."

Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafœtida–wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia.

"The greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time."

The students took it down in their little books. Straight from the horse's mouth.

Once more the Director touched the switch.

"… so frightfully clever," the soft, insinuating, indefatigable voice was saying, "I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because …"

Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.

"Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too–all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides–made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!" The Director almost shouted in his triumph. "Suggestions from the State." He banged the nearest table. "It therefore follows …"

As corrupt and crippled as our politics has become, our system still demands that, every few years, the people who make our laws undergo a certain amount of scrutiny and an up-or-down hiring decision by the people they propose to represent.

But as you may have noticed, that scrutiny is now routinely bent out of shape -- so wildly distorted that on any give day all we seem to have is a choice of poisons; a fire-hose of relentless Conservative lies, irrelevant trivia, breathless horse-race gibberish, poll number recitations and 30 second ads.

And that is because the deciders who dictate the parameters of that political discussion -- the Villagers who conspire to whisper "I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki." into our nation's ears a hundred times a day from a dozen angles -- are themselves almost never scrutinized and held to account at all.

If they were, I would happily walk away from blogging tomorrow because if they were people David Brooks would never be able to keep his day job after going on Hate Radio to put Barack Obama on the couch

barely four-months after an ambarassing, tearful, emo public breakup

with That Man from Chicago...

...and barely a week after finding public solace in the arms of a 15th century calificador working for the American branch of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.

* (from "1984")

Happy Birthday Mr. Bowie

2012-01-08T07:42:00.000-06:00

And many more.

Bouphonia Reminds All Randites

2012-01-08T00:01:00.000-06:00

to "Protect the Queen!".

Of course the author does not get around to property rebuking us Manichean zealots until Update II:

This robotic devotion of literally brainless shills to falsehood and viciousness not merely as political tactics, but as supreme ends in themselves, is the litmus test that distinguishes the Obama era's ever-dwindling authentic humanity from hyperpartisan personality cultists.

Or cleverly unearthing our real motivations until Update IV:

...manifestly the mere delusions of situational ethicists who literally wallow in the entrails of the foreign babies they murdered by proxy for the greater glory of the assassins who slaughtered these innocents in their name? All one can hope is that if these cultist shills can't bring themselves to agree with me when circumstances ineluctably demand it, they can at least be honest about their motivations.

Still, as I sit here full of remorseful shameliness at my wallowy Manicheanism, my suddenly resurgent conscience ineluctably demands that I salute the effort :-)

Conservativism is Pro Same-Sex Marriage

2012-01-07T15:00:00.000-06:00

Because Andrew Sullivan says it is:

Dear David

My friend David Brooks writes the following:
I’m to Rick Santorum’s left on most social issues, like same-sex marriage and abortion.
No, no, no. David is to Santorum's right on both issues, if left and right retain any meaning. Same-sex marriage is arguably the most successful socially conservative reform ever, as Conor Friedersdorf notes...

Mr. Sullivan is a gay Catholic Tory who has built an entire career carrying water for the Conservative Movement.

The Conservative Movement is fueled by people who really hate people like Mr. Sullivan.

Because the Conservative Movement is fueled by people who really hate him, Mr. Sullivan has invented a wholly fake history of the Conservative Movement to explain away his delusional, self-contradicting bullshit.

One of Mr. Sullivan's pet projects has been spending much of the last three years castigating a woman named Sarah Palin for making up wholly fake history of Conservative Movement to explain away her delusional, self-contradicting bullshit.

One of the side effects of Mr. Sullivan's delusional, self-contradicting bullshit is that he has been rendered incapable of understanding why this is hilarious.

Sad, really, but not in any way career-limiting because Andrew Sullivan has internalized the only important lesson in pundit social climbing: always, always, always kiss up --

I found the rest of the [David Brooks] column, by the way, surpassingly sane.

and punch down.

Grandpa Walnuts Phones It In

2012-01-07T00:40:00.000-06:00

From ABC News:

John McCain Continues to Do Mitt Romney’s Dirty Work, Hits Rick Santorum on Earmark Spending

On his second day as a member of Team Romney, Sen. John McCain continued to assail former Sen. Rick Santorum for supporting so-called “pork barrel spending.”

“Believe me, earmark spending is the gateway to corruption, and that was practiced when Republicans were in the majority,” said McCain, R-Ariz. “Sen. Santorum and I have a strong disagreement, a strong disagreement that he believes that earmark and pork barrel projects were good for America.

“I think it’s wrong for America and so does Sen. [Jim] DeMint and so does Sen. Lindsey Graham who have been staunch fighters against earmark and pork barrel spending,” said McCain, evoking the names of two of South Carolina’s senators. “And I know you’re proud of that.”

Because when will I ever get another chance to recycle this graphic that is even half this good?

Professional Left Podcast #109

2012-01-06T23:59:00.000-06:00

“Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos."

-- Homer J. Simpson

Da' money goes here:

Good to see Alan Grayson

2012-01-06T15:50:00.001-06:00

Join the Driftglass Book Club.

From one of the fundraising emails Representative Grayson sends me five times a week:

...

I looked at those Iowa polling numbers again and again, and I asked myself what possible rational explanation there could be for them. And then I realized that there is no possible rational explanation. Only an irrational one.

And it’s not the candidates. It’s their voters.

Let’s see. Severe highs and lows. Violent mood swings. One day, a person thinks that someone is the messiah, and a week later, the devil. And did you see the audience during the Iowa Republican debates? Violent temper tantrums. Inexplicable angry outbursts.

Hmmmmm. What does that sound like?

It sounds like manic depression to me.

All of those manic depressives, about a third of the vote, were forced to choose among Romney, Santorum, Paul, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Cain and Huntsman.
...
So now I understand it. Romney won the paranoid vote, everyone who thinks that the brown people are trying to steal all their stuff. Why? Because no one is more white than Mitt Romney. As I said earlier today, it’s as though Romney is on a strict diet of sour cream and cottage cheese, small curds only.

Perry and Bachmann split the schizophrenic vote, all the people who hear a voice in their head, and think that it’s God. Because Perry and Bachmann can listen to the radio whenever they want to, even when it’s turned off.

Ron Paul got the obsessive-compulsive vote, the folks who think that America is like some kind of mechanical wind-up toy, and the Articles of the Constitution are the gears.

And Santorum ended up with the manic-depressive vote. Maybe because they like the way that Santorum cries in public. Boehner was their second choice.

By the way, I’m not the first person to notice this about the other side. Noted Nixon-hater Philip K. Dick actually wrote a novel about this in 1964, called “Clans of the Alphane Moon.” Except that Dick placed that story in outer space, not Iowa. Minor difference.

Nicely done, Representative Grayson.

Next week: "The Day the Icicle Works Closed" versus the "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" -- when is a dystopia not a dystopia?

And I'll drop you some lagniappe as soon the uptick in the American employment statistics upticks to include me :-)

Guys Like Us, We Had It Made

2012-01-06T10:00:00.000-06:00

Those were the days.

As any Monty Python fan can tell you, nobody ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.

And as every professional pundit knew before Iowa, not even a grange-hall full of ethanol-lobotomized cow tippers could ever get themselves sufficiently shellacked to vote for the America's roving ambassador from the Vatican Office of Special Inquiry in an meaningful numbers.

And yet Iowa Republican caucus-goers did exactly that, and having been blindsided by Rick Fucking Santorum's rounding-error-tie for first place with the Romney Simulacra in Iowa, suddenly cobbling together a column's-worth of Yodi-like pronouncements on what the candidacy of Rick Fucking Santorum's means for the future of Western Civilization has suddenly become the new, must-have accessory for the top-tier pundit on-the-go.

One time-tested method of formulating an assessment favored by honest journalists is known as "journalism", which in this case would it the tedious, time-consuming task of "researching" Candidate Santorum's wholly awful, medieval opinions and then holding them up to the light in a way that is both informative and entertaining.

Rachel Maddow shows how that is done here:

At the absolute opposite end of that continuum is a lazy, sloppy and fundamentally dishonest method known as "Being David Brooks".

Being David Brooks means barely glancing at the actual, carcinomic horror show that your crazy-as-a-Betsy-bug Party long ago devolved into before deciding to fuck all that unhappiness.

Being David Brooks means your work week consists of sticking a period at the end of the first 800 words of vapid homilies, Hippie punching and assorted claptrap about American Moral Decay you pull out of your ass.

Being David Brooks means dutifully sucking the dick of whoever you perceive as being "in" at the moment, daintily dabbing the corners of you mouth after you are done, and humbly thanking whatever God you worship that Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. still believes in Wingnut Welfare.

Being David Brooks means that after your brief, ritual disclaimer that the nude, full-contact political lap dance you are about to witness is not nearly as much fun for the dancer as you might think --

A New Social Agenda

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: January 5, 2012

I’m to Rick Santorum’s left on most social issues, like same-sex marriage and abortion. I’m also put off by his Manichaean political rhetoric. ...

you then get your fanny right in there and go to town like an industrial stump grinder set to puree:

But having said all that, I’m delighted that Santorum is making a splash in this presidential campaign. He is far closer to developing a new 21st-century philosophy of government than most leaders out there.

One of Santorum’s strengths is that he understands that a nation isn’t just an agglomeration of individuals; it’s a fabric of social relationships....

Communities breed character. Santorum argues that government cannot be agnostic about the character of its citizens...

His political philosophy is built around the Catholic concept of subsidiarity — that everything should be done at the lowest possible level. That produces a limited role for Washington, but still an important one.

Over the years, Santorum has sought to use the federal government to nurture healthy communities....

..teach manners to children.

...he seems to understand that simply cutting is not enough to build a healthy society. To avert decline, America has to restore its values.

Santorum understands that we have to fuse economics talk and values talk....

If you believe in the dignity of labor...

If you believe in personal responsibility...

If you believe in the centrality of family...

If you believe social trust is the precondition for a healthy society...

And so forth.

Mr. Brooks has made a very good living championing economic, political and ideological causes which have all pretty much fallen apart right before his eyes -- and right in front of the rest of the world.

In almost any other profession, shitting oneself as badly, repeatedly and publicly as Mr. Brooks has done would be permanently disqualifying. No tenure at barber college for you, Sweeney Todd! But in Mr. Brooks' profession it only means that he has to change his product line around slightly; shifting slowly away from economics, foreign policy, history and all of those other irritatingly quantifiable subjects and onto much safer hobby horses like morality, values and nostalgia.

And thus does the real, despicable Rick Santorum disappear completely from Our Mr. Brooks' column and becomes just another empty vehicle for Our Mr. Brooks' to trick out with maudlin drivel; just another Christmas tree to decorate with his lazy, mendacious prose.

And why not? As patriotism has always been the last refuge of scoundrels, so has saccharine bathos always been the the last refuge of the failed Conservative pundit and politician. I mean, why go through all the trouble of dusting the American crime scene for the fingerprints of 40 years of Conservative avarice and bigotry when you can just prop your feet up on top of the body you yourself helped to decapitate and whine about the good old days before America's moral compass was stolen by Dirty Hippies and made into a bong.

There will never be an end to the lying because there will never be any accountability for it: like Ricky Perry's Spandex jogging suit, the "America-hating Liberals ruined America" lie is so pliable that it can stretched to cover every imaginable calamity, tragedy or misshapen freak of Conservative nature.

A lie so pliable that every other line in every Republican stump speech can assert unchallenged that America wouldn't be in the mess we are in if only Liberals hadn't messed everything up.

A lie so pliable that Newt Gingrich can blame Liberals for things like Susan Smith drowning her children and Columbine and not be run out of town on a fucking rail.

A lie so pliable that David Brooks can state as fact that that there never would have been a child rape cult at the top of the Penn State football program if it hadn't been for those damn Liberals and not be fired instantly.

And slowly, by such constant, ritual repetition, the lie takes on a life and a momentum of its own, becoming a kind of cultural irredentism which asserts that all of the loss of our Former Glory was caused by degenerates who annexed and debased our Noble Values, and that to restore our Former Glory all we have to do is take our Noble Values back from the bastards and traitors who stole them.

Didn't need no welfare state.

Everybody pulled his weight.

Gee, our old LaSalle ran great.

Those were the days.

Mussolini came to power in Italy on less.

As We Say in Chicago

2012-01-06T09:00:00.000-06:00

"Privilege has its memberships"

From Andrew Sullivan:

Frum Joins The Beast!

An awesome addition to the masthead.

From David Frum:

FrumForum launched itself almost exactly three years ago, on Inauguration Day 2009. Over the subsequent interval, our hundreds of contributors have reached more than 5 million individual readers. I like to think that together we have helped to move the national debate. When we launched, Sarah Palin was a leading candidate for president and Glenn Beck was broadcasting conspiracy theories on cable TV. Three years later–not so much. OK, maybe we can’t claim all the credit. But we won’t refuse some fair share.

Now like all good things, this adventure is coming to an end. I’ve been invited to move my blog and print journalism to the Daily Beast/Newsweek, a larger and more technologically advanced platform. Tina Brown is one of the great media visionaries of our time. The opportunity to work with her–and learn from her–is deeply exciting.

Starting Monday, my work will shift to the Daily Beast/Newsweek site. The FrumForum URL will forward readers to the David Frum page at Daily Beast/Newsweek. FrumForum itself will continue to exist as an archive site, preserving three years of debate–the brilliant insights of our writers–and the passionate comments of our readers. Noah Kristula-Green will join me on the Daily Beast/Newsweek team.

...

For a minute there I was worried that an entire day might pass without having my worst opinions about American media underscored a dozen times with a red Sharpie pen and nailed to my forehead with a railroad spike.

But come what may, this circle really does remain unbroken.

Today in False Equivalence

2012-01-05T23:00:00.000-06:00

Somewhere in American media, people with high profiles push the False Equivalence lie every day.

Every. Single. Day.

Which is kind of amazing, when you think about it. Impressive, in its own, Soviet kind of way.

Today I guess it was David Frum's turn to pull the plow:

President Obama has engaged in a dubious maneuver to force a recess appointment through a Senate that denies it has recessed.

...

The president’s action has ignited a fireworks show of Republican outrage. And yes, Obama has here pushed presidential power beyond past limits.But it’s not only presidents who can bend the rules. The Senate has also pushed its powers here beyond the usual limits...

...

Over the past three decades, we have lived through a prolonged cycle of partisan revenge. Each party pushes the law to score partisan points in ways that would have been deemed unacceptable only just a little while ago. Then at the next turn of the cycle, the other party pushes the law further and wider and even more destructively.

Of course this is not true.

Not true at all, and everyone knows it.

There are any number of graphs and charts which I could insert here comparing Republican on the subjects of filibusters, recess appointments and general assholery (some of which, such as a link to this perennial favorite:

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

Saturday 3 September 2011

...
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill.

are to be found right in Mr. Frum's comment section) but why bother?

From professional fabulists like Frum and Brooks on the discredited Right, to lavishly remunerated clowns like Gregory and Halperin in the Fake Center, to the priests of the Church of Our Lady of Professional Indignation on the Left, there is far too much cash flow tied up in pretending that there is not a dime's worth of difference between the Left and the Right to let a little thing like objective reality get in the way.

And no amount of howling into that fiscal headwind is going to change this dynamic any time soon.

Still...

Still, try imagining you have a job.

Lucky you! :-)

Now imagine you have to share a cubicle with a lunatic.

The lunatic has a hammer, and every time you try to do anything -- anything at all, no matter how innocuous -- answer the phone, use your computer, mail a letter -- the lunatic smashes it with his hammer.

Every time you try to bypass or roll over the lunatic, your boss orders you to leave him alone. Informs you that you are required to work together as a team.

After all, who doesn't love teamwork!

Your boss then pats the lunatic on the head, and docks your pay.

Every time you try to work with the lunatic, he cracks your skull with his hammer, sets fire to your desk and scampers away, giggling.

After which your boss stops by to pat the lunatic on the head again, and cut your pay again.

When asked, the lunatic proudly justifies his behavior be explaining that you are really an arachnid from Tau Ceti masquerading as a human and sent here to murder us all in our sleep in advance of a mass invasion by your fellow arachnids from Tau Ceti. Therefor any hostile action on his part -- no matter how bugfuck or destructive -- is justified.

This country is not broken because you and the lunatic you share your cubicle with are both equally crazy and wrong.

It is broken because too many people have a huge professional, political and financial stake in pretending that you and the lunatic you share your cubicle with are both equally crazy and wrong.

Once You Eliminate the Impossible...

2012-01-05T11:11:00.000-06:00

...whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be Rick Santorum.

-- Sherlock Holmes

John Kenyan of Mars

2012-01-04T22:27:00.001-06:00

From Wired Magazine via Balloon Juice:

White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author January 3, 2012 | 3:00 pm
Forget Kenya. Never mind the secret madrassas. The sinister, shocking truth about Barack Obama’s past lies not in east Africa, but in outer space. As a young man in the early 1980s, Obama was part of a secret CIA project to explore Mars. The future president teleported there, along with the future head of Darpa.

That’s the assertion, at least, of a pair of self-proclaimed time-traveling, universe-exploring government agents. Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings insist that they once served as “chrononauts” at Darpa’s behest, traversing the boundaries of time and space. They swear: A youthful Barack Obama was one of them.

Perhaps this all sounds fantastical, absurd, and more than a little nuts. We couldn’t agree more. That’s one of the reasons we love conspiracy theories — the more awesomely insane, the better. Each week during 2012, when the Mayans tell us to expect the apocalypse, Danger Room will peel back a new layer of crazy to expose those oh-so-cleverly hidden machinations powering this doomed plane of existence. Welcome — back — to Tinfoil Tuesday.

According to Basiago and Stillings, Obama isn’t just lying about his identity. He’s lying about his military service record, too. While his political opponents in 2008 attacked him for never serving, in truth, he was concealing his participation in a hidden CIA intergalactic program hosted at a California community college in 1980.

Officially, the White House says Obama never went to Mars.

...

Sure.

"Officially".

That's just what "they" would say isn't it?

50 Years Ago

2012-01-04T11:54:00.001-06:00

A famous American Libertarian wrote about gadflies, power politics, religion, government secrecy and human nature.

Of course he slipped it between the covers of his most famous science fiction novel, so if you never read "Stranger in a Strange Land" you might have missed it.

We join irascible libertarian, lawyer, medical doctor and pulp fiction writer Jubal Harshaw talking to his friend, muckraking journalist Ben Caxton:

"Says who?"

"Says the infallible Jubal Harshaw, speaking ex cathedra from his belly button. See here,son, if a deputy sheriff beats a prisoner to death, it's sweepstakes odds that the countycommissioners didn't order it, didn't know it, and wouldn't have permitted it had theyknown. At worst they shut their eyes to it-afterwards-rather than upset their ownapplecarts. But assassination has never been an accepted policy in this country."
"I'd like to show you the backgrounds of quite a number of deaths I've looked into."
Jubal waved it aside. "I said it wasn't a policy. We've always had politicalassassination-from prominent ones like Huey Long to men beaten to death on their ownfront steps with hardly a page-eight story in passing. But it's never been a policy here andthe reason you are sitting in the sunshine right now is that it is not Joe Douglas' policy.Consider. They snatched you clean, no fuss, no inquiries. They squeezed you dry-thenthey had no more use for you . . . and they could have disposed of you as quietly asflushing a dead mouse down a toilet. But they didn't. Why not? Because they knew theirboss didn't really like for them to play that rough and if he became convinced that they had(whether in court or out), it would cost their jobs if not their necks."

Jubal paused for a swig.

"But consider. Those S.S. thugs are just a tool; they aren't yet aPraetorian Guard that picks the new Caesar. Such being, whom do you really want forCaesar? Courthouse Joe whose basic indoctrination goes back to the days when thiscountry was a nation and not just a satrapy in a polyglot empire of many traditions . . .Douglas, who really can't stomach assassination? Or do you want to toss him out of office? We can, you know, tomorrow-just by double-crossing him on the deal I've led him toexpect -- toss him out and thereby put in a Secretary General from a land where life hasalways been cheap and political assassination a venerable tradition? If you do this,Ben, tell me what happens to the next snoopy newsman who is careless enough to walkdown a dark alley?"

Caxton didn't answer.

"As I said, the S.S. is just a tool. Men are always for hire who like dirty work. How dirty willthat work become if you nudge Douglas out of his majority?"

"Jubal, are you telling me that I ought not to criticize the administration? When they'rewrong? When I know they're wrong?"

"Nope. Gadflies such as yourself are utterly necessary. Nor am I opposed to 'turning therascals out' -- it's usually the soundest rule of politics. But it's well to take a look at what newrascals you are going to get before you jump at any chance to turn your present rascalsout. Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestlybe said in its favor is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the humanrace has ever tried. Democracy's worst fault is that its leaders are likely to reflect thefaults and virtues of their constituents -- a depressingly low level, but what else can you expect? So take a look at Douglas and ponder that, in his ignorance, stupidity, andself-seeking, he much resembles his fellow Americans, including you and me . . . and thatin fact he is a notch or two above the average. Then take a look at the man who willreplace him if his government topples."

"There's precious little choice."

"There's always a choice! This one is a choice between 'bad' and 'worse' -- which is adifference much more poignant than that between 'good' and 'better.'"

The Iron Loony Bows Out

2012-01-04T10:08:00.000-06:00

Invokes William Penn, pilgrims, Jesus and has an unplanned poig-nancy live on teevee in the most interminably long case of crazymouth in the history of quitting.

Farewell to the finest collection of crackpot ideas, bald faced lies and Ninja Romulan ensembles in American presidential politics.

Iowa Has Never Been Kind

2012-01-03T23:01:00.001-06:00

To amateur paleontologists.

From CBS News:

Iowa caucus results: Santorum and Romney in dead heat

UPDATED 11:33 p.m. ET

Doors have closed at caucus precincts across Iowa, and early results show Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum in a dead heat with Ron Paul close behind. CBS News entrance polling reveals Romney's voters are looking for someone who can beat President Obama, while Santorum's voters looking for a true conservative. Paul's voters are male, younger, and many are first-time caucus goers.

With 1,658 of 1,774 precincts reporting, Romney and Santorum were tied for the lead at 25 percent while Paul followed with 21 percent.

Rep. Michele Bachmann was in sixth place, with just 5 percent. Jon Huntsman decided not to compete in Iowa.

The Monster In Me

2012-01-03T21:00:00.000-06:00

One of the first times I learned I was a fraud and a monster as a blogger was back 1,500 years ago when I opted to support the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama over the candidacy of Senator Hillary Clinton.

At the time I said that I would, of course, support Senator Clinton in the general election if she emerged as the candidate, but not in the primary. I did a lot of posts, graphics, and so forth.

Probably even said "fuck" once or twice.

Which of course meant that I was a clearly a misogynist, the dupe of the something-or-other Chicago something and several other horribles. (Sorry that don't remember every detail, but it sure was a lot of fun! Also I'm still waiting for that damning "Whitey tape". Did I miss it? I know I missed "The Love Guru", so it's guess it's possible.)

At the time I said -- repeatedly and to no effect -- that I would support Senator Clinton in the general elections because presidential elections always comes down to a choice between two deeply flawed major candidates. Each deeply flawed candidate will garner tens of millions of votes in 50 states, while a scattering of minor candidates will pull in a fraction of a fraction here and there. But because we have a winner-take-all system -- which no amount of wishful thinking will make otherwise -- sometimes those few million or few thousand or few hundred votes are just enough to permit the candidate the protesters hate and fear the most to win.

Ironic, no?

Easier by far to insist that there is no difference in any way whatsoever on any issue of importance between the two major Parties or their candidates and then blast away in every direction. Anyone who has been around the block more than once knows this is a cheap, lazy fraud, but it is also an easy fraud to perpetrate because both of the deeply flawed candidates major party candidate will almost inevitably be products of the American political system -- both recipients of bushels of tainted corporate dough, both dogged by positions and compromises their supporters will gag on.

Just as it is would be easy and accurate to say that there isn't a dime's worth of difference or distance between the Earth and Mars...so long as you compare them using your naked eye from the vantage point of Alpha Centauri.

Or if you are a noble-public-advocate-turned-egomaniac-spoiler-for-hire named Ralph Nader.

Or if you are a Republican-who-tried-to-overthrow-the-Clinton-Administration-by-criminalizing-blowjobs-turned-Libertarian named Bob Bar.

Or if you are an oozing-racist-slug-turned-Paleolibertarian named George Wallace.

Me, I'm just a regular, grubby carbon-based life form. I go around the Sun once a year and the difference between a "habitable" and an "uninhabitable" planet is extremely important to me.

For example, I'd like to keep Social Security and Medicare intact forever because more and more of us will get old while fewer and fewer of us will get rich. I'd like to keep programs for the poor -- from Head Start to WIC to Medicaid -- intact forever because the poor will be with us always. I'd like developers and drillers to keep their fracking hands off of my national parks and forests. I'd like well-educated professionals to be paid excellent, tax-payer funded salaries by the government to make sure no quick gigabuck artists can get away with poisoning my water, air, food, medicine and planet. I'd like women to go right on owning their own bodies.

It's a long list of things I would like to continue to have, and which one Party has pledged itself -- openly and publicly -- to taking away from me by election, litigation or fraud. One Party, which loathes me so profoundly for merely existing and believing what I believe that it built an entire, vertically-integrated industry around hating me and telling me exactly how hostile their coming fascist state will be to me, 24/7/365 from coast-to-coast, at the tops of their lungs for the last 30 years. One Party which has done more premeditated violence to our capacity for self-government in a shorter period than I would have ever believed possible back in the good old days when I blew my vote out the airlock by giving it to John Anderson.

And once they finish doing have said they will do to my country, I don't really give a fuck whether what's left is called a College of Corporations, a theocracy or a Libertarian Thunderdome where what they do to women or minorities or gays in Alabama or South Carolina or Arizona is supposed to be none of my fucking business because I have a 217 area code.

Because it won't be my country anymore.

Of course it's hardly my country now, but unless you are a member of the Professional Indignation Caucus, there is still a big of difference between "dead" and "mostly dead".

Then again, I am a hardened, serial offending recidivist who has already been convicted by the Supreme Bloviet of counterrevolutionary obstreperism and deviationist stoogery so many times it barely registers anymore.

Hell, Dick Cheney is probably standing over my shoulder right now, dictating this to me, spelling errors and all.

So what do I know.

A Gay Catholic Tory, An Expatriate Libertarian and the Ghost of Ronald Reagan Walk Into a Bar...

2012-01-02T21:00:00.000-06:00

No kidding.

And in that bar they take turns holding forth on what "the left" really believes and why Ron Paul's existence is a damning indictment of the Progressive Movement and the Democratic Party.

Because who would know better what sinister motives lurk in the dark hearts of Liberals than...Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan?

From Andrew Sullivan:

The Ron Paul candidacy has proven a very fertile event on both right and left. It has shown that there is some real disquiet among conservatives about retaining the 20th Century vision of American military global hegemony. And it has shown that the left is ultimately more concerned with the hunt for damning ideological associations, than with the ideas that Paul has promoted - even when those ideas are closer to some of candidate Obama's than president Obama's.In a deliberately provocative must-read, Glenn Greenwald spells out the left's priorities in demonizing Ron Paul
...

Mr. Sullivan then links to a long article in which Mr. Greenwald does what is now Mr. Greenwald's stock-in-trade: radically decontextualizing complex decisions made by the grotty, impure slobs on the Left down to simple binary bouillon cubes --

The very same people who in 2004 wildly cheered John Kerry — husband of the billionaire heiress-widow Teresa Heinz Kerry — spent all of 2008 mocking John McCain’s wealthy life courtesy of his millionaire heiress wife and will spend 2012 depicting Mitt Romney’s wealth as proof of his insularity.

-- with which he can then vehemently disagree.

Mr. Sullivan then returns to lambaste "the left" for our various sins and failings, going reflexively to the All-Purpose Conservative Hail Mary of doubling down on defending the fragrant top-notes and moist, cake-like consistency of the poo into which one has just stepped:

And so [the Left spends] enormous energy persuading themselves that Paul is actually a paranoid, anti-Semitic, racist bigot, and so need not be engaged seriously.

...

Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Sullivan both exist quite comfortably in a parallel dimension made up of dorm rooms debates bolted together with abstractions, and where the ugly specter of imperfect political reality does not intrude. It is a fine place, safely above it all, where you can fire in all directions with impunity, and impugn the motives of anyone who disagrees with you with all the righteous fury of the perfectly pure.

From a short, incisive essay on Mr. Greenwald by A. Jay Adler introducing a longer, livelier essay on Mr. Greenwald:

...If you read Greenwald much, you know there is no life in anything he writes about. His words are acerbic, glum, and dispiriting. His common goal is to paint incendiary and dehumanizing portrayals of anyone who has ever sought to serve in government. He never has his own expertise or solutions to bring to his narratives. The goal is to always tear down someone else, and drive his readers into pitchforked frenzies of ideological zeal. He does it so well that his screeds will suck all the oxygen from the national conversation whenever he drops a new one at Salon.com, the Guardian.co.uk, or whichever venue is giving him space that day.

And to underscore the point, more of Mr. Greenwald speaking for himself:

...

Even worse are the lying partisan enforcers who, like the Inquisitor Generals searching for any inkling of heresy, purposely distort any discrete praise for the Enemy as a general endorsement.

So potent is this poison that no inoculation against it exists. No matter how expressly you repudiate the distortions in advance, they will freely flow. Hence: I’m about to discuss the candidacies of Barack Obama and Ron Paul, and no matter how many times I say that I am not “endorsing” or expressing support for anyone’s candidacy, the simple-minded Manicheans and the lying partisan enforcers will claim the opposite. But since it’s always inadvisable to refrain from expressing ideas in deference to the confusion and deceit of the lowest elements, I’m going to proceed to make a couple of important points about both candidacies even knowing in advance how wildly they will be distorted.

I promise Mr. Greenwald that despite years of being a paid-up, card-carrying member of the "lowest elements" I will try as hard as my simple-minded Manichean brain will permit to make no such badthinkful distortions of his jaundiced, preemptive contempt for anyone who does not happen to line up with him straight down the line.

Instead I will simply note that this is the sensibility of a child.

A very bright child to be sure, but also a very angry child. And it stands, in many ways, as the perfect obverse side to the David Brooks scam: where Mr. Brooks pretends to hold himself fanatically between all sides of every issue (except that dirty immoral Hippies obviously destroyed all that is good in America), Mr. Greenwald holds himself stridently above all issues (except that dirty deviationist Hippies are obviously Obamabot hypocrites and possibly worse than six Hitlers.)

And that is a very cozy hammock to lie in.

Hell, after wasting my vote on John Anderson in 1980 because I thought Jimmie Carter was icky and Ronald Reagan was nuts

I could have easily tantrumed myself through the next 30 years, hopping from one, doomed purist cause and candidate to another while sneering at the grubby compromisers and half-a-loafers who foolishly believed that "good enough" could ever be good enough.

And please understand (although I am sure my Manichean swine enemies will twist my words to make it sound otherwise!) I would never rebuke my younger self for that decision any more than I would mock anyone who gave their heart to Candidate Obama only to wake up one day brokenhearted to discover he was just a politician: I find no fault in these things because I don't think idealism is foolish and I don't think "politician" is a dirty word.

But if you linger long enough after graduation in the high school parking lot of American politics refusing to move on or grow up, don't be surprised if people start treating you like that creepy guy who hangs out in the high school parking lot refusing to move on or grow up.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

2012-01-02T10:37:00.002-06:00

"Fair and Balanced" edition.

At the Mouse Circus Sunday, the media got caught in the alley with its skirt hiked up over its head handing out free Conservative hump-hump.

Think I'm kidding?

Count 'em as we go.

On “This Week...”:

Republican Ron Paul
Republican Michele Bachmann
Republican political analyst Matthew Dowd
Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress
Conservative Fox News stooge, Byron YorkFormer
Iowa Republican Party political director, Craig Robinson

On “Fox News Sunday”, no big surprise that was:

Republican Rick Perry
Republican Ron Paul
Republican Michele Bachmann

On "Face the Nation":

Republican senator Rand Paul
Former Republican senator and current Romney mouthpiece, Jim Talent.
Former Republican representative and current Gingrich mouthpiece, J.C. Watts,
Mike Allen, of ~~Republico~~ Politico
John Dickerson, reporter
Norah O'Donnell, reporter-seeming confection
David Yepsen, Director, former reporter

On “Meet the Press”:

Republican Rick SantorumIowa
Republican party chair, Matt Strawn.
Kathie Obradovich, reporter
Republican strategist Mike Murphy
Conservative hack David Brooks,
And Mark Halperin, who is an all-around robot super-hack of such heroic proportions that Salon magazine named him their #1 Hack of the 2011 (he was #2 last year):

...
What more is there to say about Mark Halperin?

He certainly hasn’t gotten any better since last year, when a panel of experts (me) named him the world’s second biggest hack. He’s still wrong about everything. He’s still shallow and predictable. He’s still both fixated solely on the horse race and also uniquely bad at analyzing the horse race.

Halperin spent 2011 gearing up for the presidential elections by parroting transparently lame spin from Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, insisting that Palin was really going to run for president and taking Trump’s farcical vanity “campaign” seriously as anything other than a time-wasting stunt. He still takes Mark Penn seriously as a wise campaign sage and not an amoral grifter. And he got in trouble for calling President Obama a “dick” on “Morning Joe,” because the president criticized the GOP at a press conference. (This after Halperin spends years writing columns calling him a weak-willed wimp, because he is a Democrat.) The worst thing was not that he called the president a dick, it was that the president hadn’t even been dickish.

As far as substance goes, well, if you wanted substance you'd have gotten up two hours before our weekly national political media fiasco and watched "Up with Chris Hayes", a sample of which I include
here:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(video preceded by advertising)

Still, it was...bracing...to watch David Gregory's ball bearings begin to grind and sizzle as Rick Santorum lied to his face over and over again. Santorum -- who invokes the name of Almighty God no fewer that 117 times in every speech -- looked straight into Gregory's eyes and flatly asserted that every single problem in the world -- debt, deficit, unemployment, Iran, partisan vitriol, government gridlock -- were created with calculated intention by the Kenyan Usurper because he wants to destroy America. And the last, few shovels-full of flaming bullshit apparently exceeded even Gregory's legendary capacity to ignore Republican perfidy and he went a little off (h/t Heather at Crooks and Liars):

What do you know? We actually got some pushback for once from David Gregory on this week's Meet the Press when a Republican came on the air and just outright lied.GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum was giving the usual spiel about how President Obama is some great divider and doesn't want to work with Republicans -- which frankly, takes a lot of gall after the unprecedented level of vitriol, name calling and obstruction we've seen from the GOP, but then projection does seem to be the one thing they're good at -- and then claimed that Obama had hasn't met with Republicans in six months.As Gregory reminded Santorum, the debt ceiling talks "over the summer were a constant set of meetings, so that can't be accurate." To which Santorum immediately backtracked and said that it was a few months since he's met with them instead.

Santorum may have lost the capacity to distinguish the truth from the frothy anal mix that is constantly bubbling out of his pie hole, but he knows his Base very well and he knows what they need to hear from a candidate to get them to the polls on election day.

Over on Fox, Ron Paul talked AIDS, promiscuity and socialism (from what I could gather, a free society depends on the "right" to catch a disease, be denied insurance and die in agony because the best palliative for plague is laissez-faire capitalism)...

...while over on "This Week..." Ron Paul swore that he had no idea who wrote the "Ron Paul Newsletter", or what was in it, and vigorously disavowed the few "bad sentences" that elves or aliens or the CIA had managed to slip into them.

(You know, having edited newletters for active and interested groups, it is hilarious to me that anyone could believe me that after the first batch of Klanspeech bullshit went out under Ron Paul's name, he didn't hear a single fucking word back -- either in horror or support -- from his large, boistrous and opinionated readership. But then again, to be a Paulite you have to be able to believe three impossible things before breakfast every day, so I wouldn't look for their ardor to dim any time soon. )

Back on "Meet the Press", David Gregory averred that "This is a campaign about Big things!" while David Brooks thinks this it is "a values-thing" and Mark Halperin sees "buckets of scenarios".

Well, so do I.

Looks Like I Have to Learn to Spell

2012-01-01T13:16:00.000-06:00

"Gorgeous George Stephanopoulos" again.

ABC re-paints it's Sunday morning privy one more time (via Reality Chex):

"This Week with Whoever" Is on again at ABC News.

Keach Hagey of Politico: "Christiane Amanpour is leaving 'This Week' and returning to her roots at CNN and in foreign reporting in a new arrangement that allows her to appear on both ABC News and CNN International.... George Stephanopoulos will replace her on 'This Week,' while continuing his duties on 'Good Morning America.' Jake Tapper will also have a 'large role' in the Sunday show, as will other correspondents...."

However often ABC -- or any network -- rebrands its Mouse Circus dog food and reshuffles its usual suspects, until someone on commercial teevee has the balls to assemble something as unabashedly smart and raucous as "Up with Chris Hayes" (and arrange to air it later in the day than the farm reports) nothing about our national political dialogue will change very much.

Maybe a little new embroidery around the edges -- an occasional thrill as some housebroken Liberal is allowed to tread the boards for a minute or two -- but nothing of existential importance will be allowed to break the media mesmerism. Nothing as far as the eye can see but the kind of lazy, narcissistic and aggressively stupid Brooks/Halperin/Gregory/Friedman drool that Hunter at dKos expertly exfoliates here (h/t Invisible Backhand):

...
It strikes me that the fault for all our current problems in Washington lies equally with both parties. That probably is not technically true, but examining it at any deeper level would require actual work, on my part, and if I chose to single out one party or the other as being more to blame then people from that party would probably get very angry with me, the next time I saw them at a holiday party, and that would darken the whole mood considerably. So both parties are to blame.
...

If one party wants to chop up kittens to feed them to the elderly, and the other wants seniors to get gift certificates to Applebee's, then the obvious answer is to give them gift certificates for purchasing dead kittens. If one party wants to nuke the entire planet just for sport, and the other party, say, wants to nuke nothing, then only a snob or a flaming liberal would object to nuking half the planet as reasonable compromise.

This, then, is the fundamental truth of phoning something in: When in doubt, presume both sides are wrong and that the answer is, regardless of actual facts, statistics, logic, morality, history, or ideology, smack dab in the middle of what all the other people are saying. The magic of this stance is that it literally requires absolutely no research whatsoever: It also shields the writer from being seen as taking sides, or even of having an actual opinion.

I can be confident of my lazy-assed pronouncement that both sides of any discussion are equally wrong, or muleheaded, or corrupt for one simple reason: by phoning that in, too.
...

And speaking of "Up with Chris Hayes"... just how much better is it than everything else?

So much better that I'm little worried MSNBC may hire Mark Green to come in and "improve" it into extinction.

And speaking of the Mouse Circus ... more on today's burnt Republican offerings later.

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T23:30:00.000-06:00

Be careful out there.

But don't forget to make a few mistakes along the way.

via Neil Gaiman:

"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

"Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. ... Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life."

All Lies and Jest

2011-12-31T23:00:00.000-06:00

Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

The Most Ridiculous Sentence of the Weekbelongs to Andrew Sullivan:

The attempt by the left and the neocon right to make [Ron] Paul out to be the real bigot in this race is gob-smacking.

First, for sheer entertainment value, nothing beats occasionally tuning into the long-running Telenovela of Mr. Sullivan's serial, whirlwind affairs with onevery bad idea after another. In this soap-opera, Mr. Sullivan chases virtually any idiotic notion that suits his fancy waaay down virtually any rabbit hole own this it tumbles, alibiing himself all along the way that what he is really doing is exploring some as-yet-unheard-of crenelation in "real" conservatism: a form of conservatism which, as one wag once put it, seems to flicker in and out of existence like someform of exotic subatomic particle:

Like so many others of his kind, Sullivan maintains his career (and quite possibly his sanity) by hiding out in a meticulously-constructed fantasy-land. Bolted together out of leftovers from the Book of Genesis, it posits a righteous, sinless, pre-Fall "Real Conservatism" that apparently flickered in and out of existence like some exotic subatomic particle (two parts lepton to one part moron) sometime between 7:00 and 7:03 A.M. GMT on March 9, 1981.

And so long as whatever-it-is-this-time bears the whiff of this imaginary "real" conservatism, Mr. Sullivan will wallow in it, lingering

In the rank sweat of [its] enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty

until, of course, it inevitably blows up in his face.

At which point he hustles the hell away ~~Frum~~ from the scene of the crime, whistling loudly and talking about bigger pictures and broader perspectives.

This predictable, recurring FAIL seems to come directly from Mr. Sullivan's fundamental inability to understand the United States as it really exists. As if he had come to our fair shores believing that the Civil War was some merry historical mixup from a bygone age, "General Lee" was just the name of the car on "The Dukes of Hazzard" and that everything of any importance in American history happened after the Ascension of St. Ronald Reagan.

So first, let me say that mere words cannot 'compass round my joy at having America's premier gay Tory Catholic Beltway blogger presume to tell me what "the left" thinks.

About anything.

And second, WTF are you talking about, "the real bigot"?

"The"? Are you fucking kidding me?

It is true that after Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people in the name of striking a blow against the tyranny of Big Gummint

that particular strain of batshit Right-wing crazy slipped hastily into more pastel-colored Libertarian camouflage and became less conspicuous than Santorum's banal Dominionist leftovers. But a quick costume-change doesn't mean that species of militant anti-government loco disappeared after Oklahoma City any more than slapping tri-corner hats onto the pointy heads of dog-loyal Republican Base after the debacle of the Bush Administration magically transformed them into a "Tea Party" which had apparently never even heard of George W. Bush.

The bigger picture here, Mr. Sullivan, in case you haden't yet pieced it together is that bigotry is the foundation on which your entire movement rests.

Bigotry is the indestructible Adamantine skeleton on which the flesh of 10,000 political campaigns, religious crusades, anti-science think tanks and "traditional morality" ballot measures have been hung. And as everyone on the Left understands but apparently you do not, the reason Ron Paul is momentarily getting more attention for his brand of loco than Rick Santorum is for his is that Santorum's kind ofhatred never went underground.

The bigger picture here, Mr. Sullivan, is that Racism is America's Original Sin.

And whether it comes swaddled in Scripture alongside misogyny and homophobia, or slithers in the back door with a little Small Gummint perfume dabbed behind its horns and tail, it will continue to be our democracy's terrible, wasting disease -- passed down from generation to generation -- until we are rid of it.

Until its adherents and exploiters are shamed or enlightened or marginalized into extinction.

And that will never happen as long as America's Original Sin continues to be wielded by the Right from the podium, from the pulpit, from behind the radio mic and in from of the teevee camera as it's political weapon of choice. Which, as Mr. Charlie Pierce points out, they have been doing since around the same time Mr. Sullivan was taking his first steps and learning his first words:

You know who also thought that "appearing to be racist was a good political strategy in the 1990's"? The same people who thought it was a good political strategy in the 1960's, '70's, and '80's. The same people who hired Lee Atwater. The same people who looked at the white-supremacist backlash against the triumphs of the civil-rights movement and saw, not a outbreak of lawless racism, but a golden political opportunity, and who built a political movement out of the remnants of American apartheid, and who allowed that movement to take over an entire political party until all that's left is what you see now, parading through the streets of Iowa, or working in the state houses to deprive minority voters of the rights for which they paid so dear a price.

It was more than Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul, boys. It was the entire Republican party, and the conservative "movement" that energized it. It's why Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign talking about "states rights" in Mississippi, not half-a-mile from the spot where murdered civil rights workers were buried in a dam. It was welfare mothers driving Cadillacs and young bucks buying steaks. It was the slandering of Lani Guinier as a "quota queen." It's all those ID laws in all those states, and the phony ACORN scandal, and virtually everything said by every GOP presidential candidate on the subject of immigration and, in case you haven't noticed, it's an awful lot of the problems your people have with Barack Obama. It's what the pathetic Willard Romney is talking about when he talks about "the entitlement society." It's too late to get out from under it now. Without "appearing to be racist" as a good political strategy, there would be no modern Republican party. Modern conservatism would have ceased to exist after the debacle of 1964. Don't be fobbing it all off on poor Ron Paul

But as one wag once noted:

Acknowledgment of Paternity which establishes Ronald Reagan as the political father of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin would completely fuck up Mr. Sullivan's lucrative scam.

So, shhhhhh!

Professional Left Podcast #108

2011-12-30T12:18:00.000-06:00

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”

-- J. G. Ballard

Links:

The 2011 Jon Swift Memorial Roundup.
America's own Gay Catholic Beltway Tory wondering why "the left" ignores the "real" bigot in the GOP race.

Da' money goes here:

Resistance is Fictile*

2011-12-29T19:15:00.005-06:00

A Brief History of the Modern GOP.

The Right built a Party to bring this guy's people

into the showroom.

They created a whole teevee network to do it.

And an entire publishing industry.

And a coast-to-coast radio empire.

And a refurbished hillbilly religion.

They welcomed every stray bigot, spit-flecked snake-handler, bug-eyed Bircher, dreg and douchebag into the Party of Lincoln with candy and flowers and promises of make their wildest, paranoid fantasies come true.

And they succeeded, and in this Year of Our Lord 2011 every facet of the Crazy Diamond they designed and created has been on glittering display for everyone to see.

They got what they paid for -- a headless, shrieking, rage-drunk electoral mob that is impervious to reason -- and it scares the shit out of them because the kind of people that headless, shrieking, rage-drunk electoral mobs rally around are not exactly the kind of people that genteel dumbass Centrists are going to warm to.

And so the sheep are slowly being herded into supporting a cyborg whose moving, calculating, flip-flopping components are so clearly visible whirring away behind a Lucite bubble that every single Christopath and wannabe Klansman can see -- clear as day --exactly how little their Party gives a shit about their interests and desires.

It is, in its own way, as raw a power move as Dubya ever pulled off: fucking the Base...with their pants and tri-corner hats on...on Main Street...at high noon...and getting away with it.

Getting away with it because Republican leaders know that, after years of conditioning and reinforcement, the motives of the Base are pure, reflex/Pavlov and Hate is the bell that makes them drool.

And however much the Party of God may hate Willard Romney, they hate him incrementally less than they hate the sight of that Socialist Kenyan and his family in their god damn White House.

* fic·tile (f k t l, -t l ). adj.

Capable of being molded; plastic.
Formed of a moldable substance, such as clay or earth.

Today, All Respect to Batocchio

2011-12-27T22:54:00.003-06:00

Who once again did the yeoman's work of herding us notoriously flinchy bloggers together long enough to create this year's "Jon Swift Memorial Roundup".

Which, as Batocchio (of Vagabond Scholar) reminds us, is a:

...tradition started by the much missed Jon Swift/Al Weisel. He left behind some excellent satire, but was also a nice guy and a strong supporter of small blogs. As Lance Mannion puts it:
Our late and much missed comrade in blogging, journalist and writer Al Weisel, revered and admired across the bandwidth as the “reasonable conservative” blogger Modest Jon Swift, was a champion of the lesser known and little known bloggers working tirelessly in the shadows...

One of his projects was a year-end Blogger Round Up. Al/Jon asked bloggers far and wide, famous and in- and not at all, to submit a link to their favorite post of the past twelve months and then he sorted, compiled, blurbed, hyperlinked and posted them on his popular blog. His round-ups presented readers with a huge banquet table of links to work many of has had missed the first time around and brought those bloggers traffic and, more important, new readers they wouldn’t have otherwise enjoyed.

It may not have been the most heroic endeavor, but it was kind and generous and a lot of us owe our continued presence in the blogging biz to Al.

Excluding blogging, catching up with my long-overdue pile of correspondence and "Thank You" notes is my required writing through the end of the year.

And reading every single one of the posts Batocchio has compiled and offered up for our pleasure is my required reading.

Dive in and begin enjoying this embarrassment of riches here.

And don't forget to mind your manners and say "Thanks".

Advanced US Spy Technology Lost to Crazy Despot

2011-12-27T14:41:00.003-06:00

Appeaser-in-Chief once again cowers before foreign tyrants; apologizes for America.

More Traditional Christmas Fare, Ctd. -- UPDATE

2011-12-25T18:00:00.000-06:00

Wouldn't be Christmas without Tom Waits.

UPDATE -- I have no idea what happened to this video.
This is one of two recent posts that had video content which was there 8 hours ago and has since vanished.So we'll see.

More Traditional Christmas Fare, Ctd. -- UPDATE

2011-12-24T12:01:00.000-06:00

(Video preceded by advertising)

UPDATE -- I have no idea what happened to this video.
This is one of two recent posts that had video content which was there 8 hours ago and has since vanished.So we'll see.

By Request: The Professional Left's 10 Big Lies of 2011

2011-12-24T10:41:00.003-06:00

From Episode #107:

It matters if you’re wrong. Club members never have to worry about being wrong.
It matters if you’re right. Non-Club member are virtually never be credited for being right. The closest we come is that sometimes -- 5 or 10 or 20 years after the fact -- convention Beltway Wisdom will slowly submit to the relentless badgering of Reality, reverse itself (while taking infinite care not to hold any of the advocates of the Old Lie account) and recongeal around the what has been the Dirty Hippie position all along. At no point will Beltway brain wizards ever admit they had been wrong all along (see lie #1.)
Big Media is a disinterested observer and reporter in the political process.
There is no governing elite.
The Republican Party’s priority is family values. It's all IOKIYAR all the time when it comes to sex, power and hypocrisy.
Centrism!
Most Americans are independents. Bullshit. Most Americans are not interested in politics at all, or are afraid to discuss it, or list themselves as "Independent" for a variety of mutually contradictory reasons ("The 'Independent' Granfalloon").
There is a free market. Ha! Any pretense of a free market has been abandoned by big business who use their almost unlimited economic power to stack the government in their favor (for example, BOA President saying “we have a right to make a profit.”)
Voting is a privilege not a right.
Voting doesn't matter. Ha! If voting didn't matter, the GOP would not be spending billions of dollars to stop you from doing it.

More Traditional Christmas Fare, Ctd,

2011-12-24T08:00:00.000-06:00