They Knew.

They knew, or they were completely delusional.  

And in just this past week, we find four prime examples from prominent recently-former Republicans looking back past the "Danger!  Do Not Enter!" Forbidden Zone barrier of 2016 and noting just how long ago it should have been clear to anyone that they were building a Doomsday machine with no off switch.

Tim Miller knew.  And, looking back, it's clear now that Scarborough either knew it and won't admit it, or didn't know it because he's a fucking lump.  

And credit to Miller for cutting Squint off at the "McCain wuz a maverick" pass.  Yeah, sure, but he tapped Sarah Palin as his VP, because Palin was the one that got the base to stand up and salute.  

From NJ.com, October 4, 2008:

Palin: The Lowest Common Denominator

... Here's what Rich Lowry had to say: "Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, 'Hey, I think she just winked at me.' And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it." 

Post-debate, Hannity gushed about how attractive Palin was. At Palin rallies, you can buy buttons about how "hot" their VP is, etc. And yet they called Biden sexist for saying Palin was more attractive than he was? They called Campbell Brown sexist for wanting an example of Sarah Palin's foreign policy experience. 

Palin employed sex appeal in the debate in a display unbecoming of a 44-year-old mother of 5 and a candidate for one of the highest offices in the land. As a woman, I was embarrassed and sickened. And that is why republicans think she "won" the debate--because she employed cutesiness, recited all her rehearsed lines, and didn't answer any questions she did not want to ask. Often, she just out-and-out lied... 

And let's be clear: McCain knew exactly what he was doing when he took on Palin.  It was political Viagra for a limp campaign, and came from the same, clear-eyed, ruthless understanding of exactly who the GOP base really was, that his visit to Liberty University to kiss Jerry Falwell's poxy ass came from.   The same Jerry Falwell that McCain had publicly slammed as an "agent of intolerance" who represented the "outer reaches of American politics" just eight years earlier.  

You will also remember that reliable Conservative stalactite Kathleen Parker, had her bump-it blown back by the response from her loyal readers to her column suggest that Palin wasn't up to snuff.  From the long-gone 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.

You will also remember The Most Ubiquitous Conservative Writer in the Solar System, wiping his brow in relief, because now that Palin was fading like a bad dream, everything was looking great for the future of David Brooks' Republican party.  This was mere months before Donald Trump oozed down the escalator.  And you all know what happened next.  

Next up we have Stuart Steven saying straight out that he was wrong, wrong, wrong about the Republican party.  That all the terrible things that "people" [he means "Liberals" but still can't say it] said about the GOP turned out to be true.  

Then we have Stevens' fellow Lincoln Square colleague, Rick Wilson, (get better colleagues, Stuart) who was flown to England and feted by the UK's Quiet Riot podcast so that he could drink their mead, eat their bully beef and lie about his origin story.  From the podcast:

I've done this longer than any other Republican leader.  I did this starting in 2015. I was the founder of the never Trump movement. Yeah. I've run the Lincoln Project now. Over 10 years now. 

Like hell  he was.  The "Never Trump" name and concept were just a hashtag on Twitter in early 2016 that cropped up during the Republican presidential primaries.  Then, thanks to glowing, round-the-clock coverage by MSNBC, goofs like Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol became the public face of a tiny number of Republicans who were freaked out that Wingnut Judgement Day might finally be just around the corner.

And what Wilson is trying to pass off as founding "Never Trump" in 2015 was just him doing normal, well-paid, campaign dirty work for a candidate.  He worked for the Rubio campaign until Rubio flamed out, then hired himself out to the Cruz campaign.  Which is no more the "founding" of anything than working for Santorum in 2012 was founding a "Never Romney" movement.  

Also, fun fact, the Lincoln Project was actually founded in December of 2019 when Conservative grifters figured out that credulous Liberals would throw huge bags of money at any former Republican who would produce slick "Trump is an asshole" ads that never budged a single vote but was political PornHub to those credulous Liberals.  Founded by George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, Rick Wilson, Jennifer Horn, Ron Steslow, Reed Galen, and Mike Madrid, and two years later had all but collapsed due to sexual and financial scandal.  

Inside the Lincoln Project’s ‘toxic’ workplace

Interviews with nearly two dozen people with knowledge of the group’s workings reveal a culture of infighting, sexist language and disparate treatment.

But inside Wilson's shameful flim-flamming of our British friends, we find a grain of truth.  

After a lengthy disquisition in which Wilson shows that he knew perfectly well that going into the 2016 election, a huge percentage of the Republican base was motivated by an unhinged, racist hatred of Barack Obama, one of the Brits say, well yeah, but hadn't this sort of thing been going on for decades?

What about Nixon's Southern Strategy?  And that 30% who hate Obama isn't enough, is it? They have to be amped up.  That hatred has to be used by someone.  

Great point.   Wilson replies...

Wilson: Listen, the old theory of the Republican party was we knew that 25% of the base, if I may put it as bluntly as it used to be said in the room, were cousin fucking weirdos.  

Big laugh

Wilson: And you brought them out of the closet every four years. You hosed them off and you sent them off to vote.

We did not want to talk about those people. We did not particularly like those people. I come from... you can call it the RINOS or the country club Republicans or whatever you want to call it, but we were the guys who could win races and the weirdos could not win races, but that coalition, they were a part of it. Now they're in the government. 

You may have noticed two different flavors of lies here.

First, it was never 25%.  As Stuart Stevens now effectively admits, it was much higher than that.  Probably closer to 70% or 80%.

Second, "everyone in the room" means that everyone in Republican leadership knew damn well what kind of dangerous nutcases these people were.

And third, as to this "we were the guys who could win races" claptrap?  A lie by omission. The only way your country club Republicans clients could win anything was by flattering and pandering to "cousin fuckers".  By ratcheting up their hatred every election cycle, and using Fox News and Hate Radio to keep them at a full boil in between.  Without the "cousin fuckers" you'd never have won fucking thing and eventually they figured it out.

And do you know who was jumping up and down, shouting warnings about Frankenstein, and the Golem and the Sorcerer's apprentice while Rick Wilson was getting rich whipping the cousin fuckers into a frenzy?  From me in 2005 in a "Both Sides Do It" column by (who else?) David Brooks -- 

 ...I’ll name 15 leaders of your party who are intolerant, hate-mongering theocrats. Superstition-touting extremists. Your opinion leaders. The ones who get out the vote for your candidates and without which you cocksucking Cocktail Party Republicans would never win anything.

-- which is a sentiment I've repeated in dozens-- probably hundreds -- of posts ever since.

And just for sport, there is also this from me in 2011:

The sad truth is that Hate is the Right's Ring of Power. They're never going to give it up, because they know the minute they do -- the minute they're no longer allowed to pretend that Liberals are evil, freedom-hating fifth-columnist monsters who are dragging America into a Marxist abyss on the secret orders of our Kenyan Usurper Overlord -- their whole ideology would implode...

...they would never win another election...

...and tens of thousands of powerful, well-remunerated insiders from Rush Limbaugh to David Gregory who depend on that hate for their daily bread would suddenly have to go out and find honest work.

To be clear, it wasn't just me.  I was one voice in a great chorus of Liberal writers and bloggers who were all sounding the alarm.  That to stay in power, the leaders of the GOP were now explicitly bending the knee to Hate Radio and Fox News because their dependence on Conservative media to get out the vote and drum up contributions was now complete.  

To anyone paying attention with honest eyes, this was all clear as day when, in 2009, the head of the RNC had to go groveling to Rush Limbaugh to beg forgiveness for saying [checks notes] true things about that despicable scumbag.

Steele to Rush: I'm sorry

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

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

But the louder we Liberals sounded the alarm, the louder we were denounced as alarmist crackpots.  And this went on and on right up until Trump showed up and it had become all far too late to stop what was about to happen.   

What happened next? 

First, media corporations -- which were overstuffed with savvy pundits who had assured the public that the GOP was fine and healthy and this sort of thing could never happen -- began scrambling for talking heads who could explain the inexplicable.  

And, second, they wanted nothing to do with all those Liberal alarmist crackpots who, as it turned out, had been right all along.  Because those Liberal alarmist crackpots tended to arrive with receipts.  And those receipts made their vastly overpaid savvy pundits look like idiots.  Because we can't have that.

The much better alternative was to platform the shit out of a handful of now-unemployed Republican comms people who you all already knew, and who were only too happy to spin the story of the Rise of Trump in a much more savvy pundit-friendly way.  That this was some kinda Black Swan event.  A fever that was sure to break sooner or later.  A glitch in the Matrix that no one could have seen coming and for which certainly none of them were responsible.

But you know, come to think of it, you know who might be kinda responsible for a big chunk of the horrors that were now raining down on their heads?   Those damn Liberals.  Because, just maybe, it was them saying the Republican party was a racist party... made so many Republican voters mad that, well, they went ahead and started doing racism just to say "Fuck you!" to the Liberals.

Which was a theory floated by Charlie Sykes and a number of his guests when he was the public voice of The Bulwark... as the Bulwark was being relentlessly promoted by CNN and MSNBC the New York Times and the Washington Post.  Because for hardwired right-wing goons like Sykes, regardless of the circumstances, somehow, some way, the Left will always turn out to have been the villains.  

They either knew they were playing with something dangerous and radioactive, or they were willfully blind to it.  And as the toxicity of the GOP base spiked higher and higher year after year, the more they were either willing to go along with it for the money and the influence, or the tighter they had to squeeze their eyes shut to what was happening all around them.  

And once it all fell apart, then came the mad scramble for...believe it or not...credit.   Listen to any Never Trump podcast and within minutes you'll hear them boasting about how they were warning Republicans about Trump in 2016 or 2017 or 2018 and woe betide the fools who did not listen.  You will hear them rolling their eyes at how all those morons called them [checks notes] alarmist crackpots back in 2018 or 2019 or 2020.  And now look at 'em!  

Their whole marketing campaign is based on the single premise that they saw this coming when no one else did, which is why you should send them money and heed their warning that the Democratic party needs to become more Centrist.  And buy their book!

Now that they have successfully colonized what little was left of the "Liberal media" it's safe for them to mention, often in passing, that, sure, they knew the base was nuts.  That when your job is to get Republican elected, and bigots, imbeciles and Fundies are all what you have to work with, then that's what you work with.   

Too bad.  So sad.  Also buy my book. 

No wonder they hate Liberal bloggers and podcasters.  No wonder they continue to pretend we never existed.  We fuck up their entire business model.  

So, while we know we'll never be invited to cross the pond and feted by the Brits, as we eat their prime joints of venison and partridge and drink their Taylor Fladgate port and tell the true tale of what really happened, today I felt compelled to set the "Who, What, When" record straight once again.

Burn The Lifeboats

Correction

By no stretch of the imagination has the Lincoln Project ever been the "foremost pro-democracy organization in the United States".  And if Rick Wilson was ever a "principled Republican" for three days straight I'll eat my hat.  

The foremost pro-democracy organization in the United States belongs to the Democratic Party, of which I have been a member my entire adult life. 

The Lincoln Project is an advertising company staffed by mountebanks which cranked out slick, Trump-bashing ads that tickled the pleasure centers of way too many credulous Liberals and made the lads and lasses at MSNBC swoon back in the day.  

However, as I wrote all the way back in November of 2021in "The Fail-Safe Election"  -- 

...there should be one fact that stands out bold and clear to anyone who has eyes to see: that the staggering amount of free publicity and hard cash lavished on the Lincoln Project on the theory that their unique insights into the Republican mind would pay big dividends for the Democrats was a complete bust.  That, outside of the tiny circle of Never Trump Republicans who seem to exist almost entirely on teevee and Twitter -- surprise! -- neither the tens of millions of dollars that credulous Liberals poured into the Lincoln Project...

...nor the Liberal Political PornHub videos they cranked out budged even a fraction of the Republican base one inch...

And yet you will remember that so many of our fair-weather Liberals allies insisted that the Lincoln Lads basically won the 2020 election for Joe Biden despite incontestable evidence to the contrary.  

If you needed a bylined writer to tell you bitter truths, you could've heeded the wise words Charlie Pierce:

The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election

Never Trump conservatives are about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party.

Or you could've read The Hill, although it's kind of a trash publication so I can understand why you might blow them off -- 

Lack of influence means it's time to dismiss the Lincoln Project

-- but the basic electoral math that they buried halfway down the column is not in dispute.

During their time in the sun they even scammed their way into a glow-up from 60 Minutes, back when that meant something.  Later, when the various scandals the Lincoln Lads were drowning in broke into the open, 60 Minutes had to, uh, revise their assessment.

But these veteran grifters hung on like herpes because, as America's most famous capitalist philosopher, Phineas Taylor Barnum, allegedly observed, there's a sucker born every minute.

And two to take 'em.  

No Half Measures

Irony: Now It Belongs To The Ages

 

Today Rick Wilson strokes his beard ponderously and ponders what in the world happened to his Republican party?

Spoiler:  Cynical, "Toss the bigots and imbeciles red meat until the burst and then stampede 'em to the polls" Republican operatives like Rick Wilson are what happened to the Republican party.

Burn The Lifeboats

This Is Me, Laughing and Laughing and Laughing...

Excellent piece , best I read on No Labels yet. As you probably know @ProjectLincoln has been exposing the dark money group for awhile #NoLabelNoGood

— Karen.Moyle 🌊 🌻🟧 (@9Moyle) August 1, 2023

...and laughing.

 

Burn The Lifeboats!

In Which the Word “Uncovering” Works So Hard It Snapped Its Spine

As you contemplate the following screen-shots, bear in mind that Nixon's Southern Strategy, Reagan's "Welfare Queen" ideology, Limbaugh's "Feminazis, Libtards and Barack the Magic Negro" vocabulary and Gingrich's slash-burn-and-relentlessly-demonize politics are the filthy, racist waters that spawned Mr. Rick Wilson.

And that, until five minutes ago, profiting handsomely by further toxifying those filthy, racist waters has been his life's work.

But now...

Since almost no one be me cares about any of this, I have learned to content myself by being grimly entertained by listening to Wilson continuing to use his real superpower -- reptilian amoral flexibility -- to seamlessly transition from being a paid, Right-wing political hitman who gleefully took the filthy lucre of crackpot Conservative billionaires and used the unlimited crackpot-billionaire funded resources available on the Right to help build a Republican doomsday...

...to landing squarely on my "No Fair Remembering Stuff" podcast corner (but isn't everybody?) dressed up as Mr. "Holy shit!  You mean the Republican Party has been full of Republicans all along!!" guy.

And the funniest part of all of this?  Wilson (and pretty much every other Never Trumper) blocked me years ago specifically for promiscuously and publicly remembering the very same monstrous past of the Republican party that he is now "uncovering".

  

Burn The Lifeboats

The Lads Can't Help It

However far they try to distance themselves from the unholy monster they created, most Never Trumpers simply cannot endure more than a few minutes of critiquing the insanity of their recently former party without taking an awkward, swerving detour down "But the Democrats..." boulevard.  

For, y'know, "balance". 

Even if they have to make shit up, this ritual mating-call-and-response of Beltway respectability is wired so deeply into their psyches that, like Roger Rabbit and "Shave and a Hair-Cut", they are powerless to resist the minty-fresh dopamine hit of a well-placed "Both Sides Do It".

Observe as we join a conversation already in progress among the Lincoln Lads -- Reed Galen and Lincoln Project Senior Advisors Trygve Olson and Jeff Timmer -- as they are sharing their thoughts on the recent tragic Nashville school shooting

Olsen:  And here's the thing about it at the end of the day.  Most of those deaths are caused by the exact same weapon.  It's not like they're using a pump action 12 gauge and going into schools and doing this.  It's the same gun.  And at some point it has to stop.  And honestly that Boebert woman just drives me nuts, right?  Like, she has all these pictures of herself and their kids, all armed up. 

We're it within my power I would bar every pundit on Earth from ever using phrases like "at some point it has to stop" since they're lazy and meaningless.  At some point every person dies.  At some point the sun will burn out.  So what?  But other than that, I have no objections.  To this point the conversation  had been clear, fact-based and cited specific statistics and policies. 

Galen:  As did the member of congress who represents Nashville.

Olsen:  Right.  And it's like, I just wonder what their parents were like that they were teaching them that about guns.  I mean, clearly they weren't going to hunter safety in western Wisconsin.  Like, it's just asinine.  And the other thing is, though, about 400 people [in Las Vegas] might be a statistic, Jeff, but every single one of those people is the most important person in the world to someone who's left in this world dealing with it.  And in the case of those three kids [in Nashville] they were the most important person in the world for at least two people; their parents.

Once again, no objections.  But then...

Olsen:  But, y'know, the Left doesn't do itself any favors in this either, Reed.

Strap in because now we're taking that hard, non sequitur pivot away from verifiable statistics and identifiable policies and people, and into the "Both Sides Do It" land of straw men and sweeping, bullshit generalizations about "the Left".  

Olsen:  Because most of them don't understand, y'know, when they get talking about guns and whatever, they don't want to have a reasonable conversation about it either.   

Suddenly, Olsen is somehow a fucking expert on what "most" of us on the Left do and do not understand about "guns and whatever". 

Suddenly, Olsen can infallibly intuit that we "don't want to have a reasonable conversation" about guns.

Olsen:  Y'know, a lot of them -- this is where the cultural differences matter, right?  They're not, like, differentiating between somebody's 12 gauge they use to go out and hunt ducks or even a 9 millimeter that they're keeping in their house that they like to go and do some sport shooting with and have for security that they keep in a locked box, and AR's with, y'know, hollow point bullets.  And so you don't get a reasonable conversation about it.  

"a lot of them"...

"they're not, like, differentiating"... 

And that's why "you don't get a reasonable conversation about it."

Fuck you, Olsen.

Olsen:  I think, y'know, there are things that could be done, but I think at the end of the day some of this starts, quite frankly -- and this is what's so irresponsible about people like Boebert -- responsible gun owners making sure their kids -- and most of them do... 99.9999999 percent of them -- that they're responsible and that they're not promoting this weaponized culture.

Here's a static for you, Olsen.  Clowns like you have waving the myth of  "responsible gun owners" in the faces of unreasonable Liberals like me for at least a generation.  We're supposed to sit down and shut up because "at some point" these "responsible gun owners" were surely going to put an end to the massacres is some inexplicable but definitely responsible manner.   Which means that in the time we stoopid, irresponsible Liberals (who can't differentiate between a AR-15 and a slingshot) have been waiting for your imaginary "responsible gun owners" to step up and and at least begin doing something, there are American children have survived gun massacres, grown up and had kids of their own.  

And yet, after all this time. these "responsible gun owners" are still nowhere to be found.  Hey, here's an idea!  Perhaps you could prevail on your hunting friends to gather the greatest wilderness trackers in American to track them down and bring out of hiding to get this working on this extremely serious problem.  

Or perhaps instead it is time for clowns like you to stop telling everyone else to keep waiting for the Responsible Gun Owner Fairy to come in the night while we sleep and put Responsible Gun Control Policies under our pillows.  

Perhaps instead the time has come for you to sit down and shut up and let the rest of us have a crack at the problem.

At this point, Galen grabs the wheel and awkwardly tries to steer the Lincoln Lads out of the swerve.  Not by pushing back or pointing out how asinine his colleagues remarks had been, but instead... 

Galen:  But this is part of what I would call the authoritarian movement that Trump leads...

FYI, the beginning of every Lincoln Lad podcast begins the same way.

Hey everybody it's Reed.  Before we get started, I just want to remind everyone that the fight that we're facing is not about Right versus Left.  And it's not about Republicans versus Democrats.

The hell it's not. 

Burn The Lifeboats

Why We Will Never Have a Liberal Media

Because who needs an actual Liberal media when you have Tom Nichols and Charlie Sykes?

Because while Democrats were just standing around not winning and never winning and just generally sucking at winning, and the Lincoln Project and The Bulwark were out there -- repeatedly and single-handedly -- saving democracy!

Because the Lincoln Lads and The Bulwark really know how to get in Republican's heads, man!  I mean, why can't the DNC hook up with them and let Rick Wilson orchestrate everything?  

I mean, after all, is was the Lincoln Lads and The Bulwark "that got Biden elected".

For the record, these are not my sentiments.  My analysis and critiques of the Lincoln Lads and The Bulwark are marbled throughout the last seven years of this blog -- from the invention of the Lincoln Lads and The Bulwark by MSNBC, to the ongoing and lavish sponsorship of the Lincoln Lads and The Bulwark by MSNBC to, finally, the colonization of MSNBC by employees of the Lincoln Lads and The Bulwark.

No, these are the sentiments of the actress Jane Lynch.  

The spectacular Jane Lynch (Glee, Party Down) joins Tim and Sarah this week, and turns out she’s a huge fan of Never Trumpers! 

Which, I suspect,also  reflects the beliefs of a large number of Coastal Liberal elites.  Which is why we can stop looking to them for any support in creating an actual Liberal media in this country.  

Jane Lynch is a fine actress whose work I enjoy a great deal.  She has also ingested wholesale all the self-aggrandizing bullshit the Lincoln Lads and The Bulwark are constantly pumping out.  Self-aggrandizing bullshit which, thanks to their MSNBC benefactors, now reaches millions of liberals every week, including our Coastal Liberal elites.

So why bother to build an actual Liberal media when its so much easier to just job it out the Lincoln Lads and The Bulwark and cut them large checks whenever they need it?

After all, the Lincoln Lads proved that a small group of very determined people could change the tide of history. 

And the reason I know that is true is because...uh...well...because veteran Republican charlatan and Lincoln Lad co-founder Rick Wilson says so:

"One thing we proved at the Lincoln Project was a small group of very determined people could change the tide of history." --  Rick Wilson 

I Am The Liberal Media

Political Grifter Voltron Assemble!

Or do you prefer "Grifter Agglutination".

There are so many things I learned from listening to just a leeetle bit of Rick Wilson's podcast.

First, despite the fact that Democrats retaking the House in 2018 happened before the Lincoln Project existed, and despite the fact that there is no evidence that Lincoln Lads moved a single vote in 2020, and despite the fact that they have been mired in scandal and controversy ever since, and despite the fact that their 2020 "Tiki Torch" stunt backfired horribly and may have tipped the Virginia gubernatorial election to Glenn Younkin --

Lincoln Project co-founder: Stunt at Youngkin event ‘recklessly stupid’

Steve Schmidt, the co-founder of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, slammed the recent tiki torch stunt pulled by the organization ahead of the Virginia gubernatorial election, calling it “recklessly stupid.”

“I thought the action was recklessly stupid. It was dishonest and cheap. It is exactly the wrong way to approach the fight against a real fascist movement, against extremist elements. It showed appalling judgment by the day-to-day management and leadership of The Lincoln Project,” Schmidt said on Wednesday during an interview on “America at a Crossroads.”...

-- despite all of that, the Lincoln Project's extremely revised version of history gets more grandiose by the hour.  From the trailer for Rick Wilson's The Enemies List

"One thing we proved at the Lincoln Project was a small group of very determined people could change the tide of history."

 So, by the driftglass calendar -- hey look! -- they're right on schedule:

And for those credulous Liberals out there who swore they were bedding down with Kevin Costner only to wake up to find it'd been Slippin' Jimmy McGill all along --

-- I did try to warn you. 

Over and over and over and over again.

But as the Lincoln Lad's began to fade into the swarm-o-gnats background noise of American politics, I began to lose interest.  I was starting to wear holes in the soles of my "I Told You So" shoes from all the "I Fucking Well Warned Them" dancing I've been doing these past several years, so I sent them off to the cobbler and forgot about them.

Until this caught my eye:  

Not Left Or Right But Forward

Rick Wilson's The Enemies List

Oh my.

So slipped on a pair of  "I Told You So" socks (they'll do in a pinch), warmed up the Philco and gave ol' Rick a listen. 

And oh my.

Miles Taylor, co-founder of Forward:  Really what we want to do is go run genuinely independent candidates, especially in places that are not competitive.   So think deep red districts where MAGA has a chokehold over an area of the country, and where Democrats have no hope of beating an extremist.

driftglass: Hold up for a moment.  The co-founder of Forward is telling me, explicitly, that Forward is going after Republican seats in places Democrats can't win.

Taylor: We wanna go run a common sense, principled leader to try to shake those districts up around the country.  So really, were excited about that...

Taylor:  The last data point I'll provide you is, people are pretty blown away to find out that about 70% of the races in this country are uncontested...  That's pretty stupid.  That's just pretty fucking stupid.

driftglass:  70%!  Holy Hannah, that's a lot!  So before we slide past that Forward Party talking point, let's look at the invisible bridge Mr. Taylor has to scamper across unnoticed to get from "deep red districts where MAGA has a chokehold over an area of the country, and where Democrats have no hope of beating an extremist" to "70% of the races in this country are uncontested".

The deep, red chokehold district thingie seems to be clearly implying congressional districts, which if 70% of those are unopposed, well , as the kids say, Big if True!

So there are 435 voting members in the House of Representatives.  An 70% of that that would be ... let's see ... round up to the nearest whole number ... and we get ... 305.  Wow!   Do 305 House seats really go uncontested in every election?

Uh, no. 

From the 270-to-Win site:

[In 2022] There are 16 incumbents - 13 Republicans and three Democrats - that have the ballot all to themselves. Their only opposition would be via write-in, where allowed.

In 2020, this number was 11, split more evenly with six Republicans and five Democrats.

driftglass: So not 305.  Barely a fraction of a fraction of 305.  Because when the Forward party mouthpieces trot out this number, they always fail to emphasize that it refers to about all elections for all offices in the United States.  That includes races for things like school boards, alderpersons and city councilors, water reclamation commissioners, county judges and mosquito abatement district directors.  

Well, if the Forward Party's big plan to shake loose the MAGA chokehold on American politics is to run candidates for mine inspector or Clerk of the Peace, more power to them, I suppose.  But that sure doesn't sound like the plan.

Mr. Taylor continues.

Taylor: But at the same time, that means teaming up with the Good Guys against the Bad Guys.

driftglass: Wait a minute.  

Wait one, whole, leisurely Springfield, Illinois minute.  

In virtually every piece of Forward propaganda I've ever read, whether from the party's social media accounts or from individual hype-men like Andrew Yang, the "good guys" are always the Forward Party, and the Bad Guys are always the Republican and Democratic parties.   

Always Both Sides.  Always the K'rupt Duopoly.

So...who are the other good guys with whom Mr. Taylor proposed that the Forwardists team up with?

Taylor: So...and, right now, the... the Democratic Party is the one that's the bulwark protecting democracy.

driftglass:  Wow.  I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Forward Party "Overthrow the K'rupt Duopoly!" Tweets are about to vanish like farts in a firestorm.

But maybe I misunderstood.  Because I'm stupid like that.  Please continue gentlemen.

Rick Wilson:  Well that's... that is, y'know, one of the big... the big challenges of a third party is making sure you're targeting it in a way that doesn't advantage the side that wants to break democracy.  That doesn't give, y'know... that doesn't split off uh... and... and give moderate Republicans a place to run to if they should be voting for uh, y'know, uh a Democratic in a competitive seat like that.  ...  How do you make sure that... that if one side of the political equation right now in the Republican party wants to basically break democracy, how do you not do more damage in that thing.  Sounds like you guys are trying to calibrate that in a way that meets that challenge.

driftglass:  Not according to virtually every piece of Forward Party Both Siderist "Overthrow the K'rupt Duopoly!" agitprop I've seen to-date.

Taylor: Well, yeah, it's, y'know, it's the traditional spoiler argument.  But you go back to that [misleading, bullshit] stat that I just said.  70% of races are uncontested.  The "system" is pretty fucking spoiled as it is.  So, y'know, when it comes to the MAGA movement, ideally we would attract a lot of middle-of-the-road Conservatives over to our cause and deprive the GOP of the votes they need to have a MAGA supermajority.    

Did you see the bait?  "70% of races are uncontested."

Did you see the switch? "So... when it comes to the MAGA movement."

Come on man, if you're a Conservative party, why not just say you're a Conservative party?  Why not articulate the Conservative policies that you think would attract imaginary middle-of-the-road Conservatives?

Taylor:  And we've been seeing that.  We've been seeing disaffected Republicans come our direction in droves.  

driftglass:  Define "droves".

driftglass:  See also "The Bush-Belly Sneetches".  Now observe closely as Mr. Taylor blows up his own talking point.

Taylor:  But we're also seeing that with disaffected Democrats.  I mean look, there are super, super blue districts that even the Democratic party says, "Oh man, we've gotta get rid of some of these people and put some normal folks in."

driftglass:  You know, I'm on the Sekrit Democratic Party Burn Book Mailing List and so far I've not heard any of this, but seeing as Miles Taylor's last job was [checks notes] "Chief Of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump" maybe the Democratic Party leadership trusts him enough to have passed along to him some super secret bitching that they've not shared with the rest of us.  

The rest of the conversation takes the same, schizophrenic downhill tumble that all conversations between recently-former Republicans seem to take, because that's the way they're wired.  They quickly forget that the MAGA GOP are now the "bad guys" and regress back into 2015 Beltway media talking points about the Extremes on Both Sides.

Wilson:  When folks come to you and say "We don't like what the Republicans here are doing" and "We don't like what the Democrats here are doing" and they ask you the hard question ... "What do you believe in?" ... You can get people to describe their ideological takes in a few sentences for most Republicans and for most Democrats.

driftglass: Taylor goes on the reassure Wilson that his Forward Party definitely has an answer to that question.  And the answer is so easy and obvious!  The Forward Party believes... what the "silent majority" of Americans believe!  All of that common sense centrist stuff that "independents" believe!

For example, on climate change Taylor explains that the Extreme Left which believes in stopping every engine on Earth right now or whatever, and the Extreme Right who think its all a hoax.  And the Forward Party is straight up the Sensible Center!  

Or take abortion, which the Extreme Left yadda yadda and the Extreme Right yadda yadda. And the Forward Party is once again on the side of the silent majority!

Except, or course, Taylor is full shit.  

Those "Extreme Right" positions he describes are ones the actual Republican Party actually supports and, as with gutting Roe v. Wade, has used its political power to enact.  Whereas the "Extreme Left" positions he describes have zero support within the Democratic Party, and the Sensible Centrist policies he lays out are basically the Democratic Party platform.

It's exactly the same game of ideological Three Card Monte that every third party scam tries to run, that Very Serious Conservative frauds like David Brooks have been playing for decades, and which Jonathan Chait brutally deconstructed back in 2016:

David Brooks and the Intellectual Collapse of the Center:

...

But even if you accept this very strange notion of the political alignment in Trump’s Washington, it raises a question Brooks is not prepared to answer. If his objection on the left lies with the “Sanders socialism,” then isn’t there an appealing centrist lying to the right of that? A moderate who favors market-oriented solutions that bring together business and labor, who welcomes empiricism, and is willing to compromise? A politician who has led the Democratic party for the last eight years and, in fact, is still the sitting president of the United States right now?

One might think so. But Brooks spent the last eight years defining the center as something Obama was not. It didn’t matter that Obama supported a health-care plan first devised by Mitt Romney, or a cap-and-trade plan endorsed by John McCain. Brooks nestled himself into the territory between Obama and the angry, no-compromise Republicans who were shutting down government and boycotting all negotiations with the president. If Obama endorsed the policies Brooks preferred, he would simply pretend that Obama had not proposed them. Indeed, one of the most common genres of David Brooks column was a sad lament that neither party would endorse policies that in fact Obama had explicitly and publicly called for... 

But the Sensible Centrist lie will never die so long as there are enough pundits, enough Republicans on the run from their past and enough cowardly fence-straddlers to prop it up.

Wilson:  I think the type of voters you're talking about are the types we've targeted at Lincoln for the past three years.  ... But there is a frustration growing -- and this is a frustration that both parties, y'know, have a responsibility for -- that both parties have become this sort of like code-worded only, Burger King versus McDonald's fight.  It's Cokes versus Pepsi...  And while there's an entertainment complex built up pushing both those narratives, it's unsatisfactory with a lot of people.  

Wilson [after talking about how ludicrous and destructive the re-invented GOP is with hobgoblins like Boebert and Greene leading the way]:  The loudest voice in the room  They're going to scream louder.  They're going to cause more trouble.  They're going to engage in the "owning of the Libs".  The ritual bullshit and all that.  And... and, look, The Squad on the other side is... is... plays a similar...

driftglass:  Then Wilson catches himself, as if suddenly remembering that he's on a live mic, that Both Siderism has become naughtybad, and that that asshole driftglass is probably listening and may blog about it.

Wilson: And I'm not a Both Sidesism guy!  I'm really not!  But I know as a former Republican strategist, that every day that the Squad is talking it's a gift for the Republican party to the normies still in the GOP.

driftglass: The problem that Wilson in describing -- and that he is definitely Both Sidesing -- has nothing to do with anything that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ayanna Pressley or any other Democratic back-bencher might say on any given day. 

The problem Wilson is describing is the ability of an integrated Conservative Media Hate machine to take any goofy thing that any Democrat might say on any given day of out of context and amplify it a zillion times over social media, over 10,000 radio stations and 100 top-rated podcasts and three cable teevee networks and who-knows-how-many Evangelical church pulpits.  Scream that message day and night until they bludgeon the mainstream press into covering it as "news".   

Wilson knows all of this perfectly well since for decades he made a handsome living feeding that Hate Machine.

Wilson:  You're told, if you wanna be in this party you've gotta all this crazy shit.  Right now, if you want to be a Republican you have to say January 6th was a tourist visit and Donald Trump is the legitimate president and Joe Biden cheated to win.  You have to say that essentially.  

driftglass: But Wilson just can't help himself.

Wilson:  And I think that those shit-tests that go on inside both parties now...

driftglass: Now I'm bored.  But I would also like to thank everyone who helped us turn "Both Siderism" into such filthy expletive a dirty that even committed Both Siderists now feel the need to stop in the middle of some patently ridiculous false equivalence to explain that they not really, really a Both Siderist.

OK.  One more

Taylor:  I would stake out a different position than you a little bit on the Both Sidesism.  I am a Both Sideser.  Not that both sides are equally as bad at the moment.  Certainly my [very recently] former party, the Republican Party, represents the greatest threat to democracy...  But very close friends at the highest levels of the Biden White House have said they have a deep-seated fear...

And I'm done.  

Well, almost done.  Because as long as I'm here at Rick Wilson's dump, poshotting specific rodents on a specific pile of debris, seems a shame not to widen the aperture and get a look at the lay of the land.

So, in addition to coddling recently-former Republican Both Siderists and whitewashing the Lincoln Projects' brief, scandal-plagued history into a heroic saga of the Lincoln Lads single-handedly "chang[ing] the tide of history" what else does this Rick Wilson fella get up to on his podcast?

Rick pledes to his listeners that he will fearlessly interview [checks notes] most of the same Never Trumpers who have gobbled up the media spotlight for the past six years. Like Lincoln Project co-founder Reed Galen!  And Lincoln Project guy Stuart Stevens! And Lincoln Project adjacent guy George Conway!  Former Lincoln Project guy (who bailed once the waves of scandal repeatedly capsized the Lincoln Project) who is now also Lincoln Project adjacent guy  -- and who also has his own podcast! -- Michael Steele.  And friend of the Lincoln Project, Molly Jong Fast! 

But when he's not interviewin', Rick promises listeners he will speak his mind!  

Or issue various "stern warnings"! 

Or sometimes he just "goes off"!

Here are a sampling of blurbs for various episodes.  See if you can spot the pattern (emhasis added where I would read this in my scariest "In a world..." voice.)

"Listen to find out who Rick is blasting this episode"!!!  

And 

"Rick puts someone on The Enemies List and calls it a permanent entry. Listen to find out who"!!!  

And:

"Listen to find out who Rick is targeting for the list"!!!

And:

 "Rick adds another group to The Enemies List. Listen to find out who."!!!

And:

"Rick has a double entry on this episode's Enemies List. Listen to find out who is the lucky pair."!!!

And:

 "Listen to find out who Rick is targeting for the list."!!!

And:

 "And, of course, you won't want to miss who gets put on The Enemies List."!!!

And 

"Rick adds another name to The Enemies List. Listen to find out who makes the unfortunate cut this episode." !!!

Rick Wilson: Internet tough guy.

There are also various typos which I consider to be hilarious in their own right because I am low and perverse.

Burn The Lifeboats

Every Little Breeze Seems to Whisper, "I Fucking Told You So"

 

"Every conceivable standard of conduct, propriety, ethics and governance was shattered by the Lincoln Project board." -- Steve Schmidt, Lincoln Project co-founder.

Part of me thinks that, like Michelangelo contemplating a fresh slab of marble, I should just circle the following Tweets for a year or two, looking at every angle, contemplating them in all their perfection, and letting the underlying truths emerge before picking up my hammer and chisel..

8/ the @ProjectLincoln. Before the organization started @TheRickWilson set up a GO Fund me to make a movie 🎥 about Trump. He raised tens of thousands of dollars 💵 and never made the movie. I asked him about it 500 times. No movie. I was not comfortable with this. It is a big

— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) October 12, 2022

Or perhaps, before putting pixel to paper, it would be best retire to a mountain retreat to meditate on Situationism and postmodernism and the free play of signs and signifiers refracting through these Tweets?

The reason @ProjectLincoln was able to extract millions from gullible liberals -- to say nothing of the petty fraud and theft of Rick Wilson for this film -- is @GoFundMe, @JoyAnnReid, @JoeNBC kept endorsing and glorifying them, so liberals assumed they should keep giving cash.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 12, 2022

But I don't have a mountain demesne to which I can retreat because I'm not a grifting douchebag who suckers credulous dopes out of their cash.  

Nor do have I a year or two to fiddlefuck around while I live off the interest of the large pile of cash which the aforementioned credulous dopes have handed me.  There is no endowment or dark money war chest or internet zillionaire benefactor.  There are no cable news corporations who incorporated me into their business plan and now invest millions in free publicity every month to promote this little blog of mine.  

That tip jar you see at the bottom of these posts?  That's it.

But with that tip jar (and the permanently low profile this blog is going to have until the day they drag me outta here) comes a certain freedom.  Here, I am at liberty to say pretty much whatever I want to say (within the editorial limits I set for myself) knowing that, from time to time, I am going to piss off a nontrivial percentage of my readers and my political "allies".  

Which is a fair bargain.  And why, when I saw that not only was grifting sleazebag (and former Liberal media darling) Steve Schmidt using all of this words to vivisect the grifting sleazebags (and former and current Liberal media darlings) of the Lincoln Project including grifting sleazebag (and Liberal media darling)  Rick Wilson...

...but that grifting Bolshi Freedom Troll (and former Liberal media darling) Glenn Greenwald was using grifting sleazebag Steve Schmidt's words to bludgeon the Lincoln Lads and the MSNBC whelping box that spawned them...

...well let's just say that I smiled.  

Bitterly, but I smiled.

A lot.  

I had all the feels, as the kids say, because this was the crossover "Why Do Otherwise Intelligent People Keep Falling For This Shit" episode I never expected.

And the fact that I had to go to a bottom-of-the-wingnut-barrel schlock shop like Twitchy to retrieve this stuff (no link because fuck 'em) -- 

‘WORST con artists’: Glenn Greenwald takes a cue from Steve Schmidt OUTING The Lincoln Project and DECIMATES Rick Wilson

-- because everyone involved in the story blocked me years ago for the high crime of remembering their inconvenient pasts?    

My smile just kept getting bigger.

You longtime readers can probably fill in the rest of the story, but for the newer arrivals, our tale begins way back during the Obama administration, when Bolshi Freedom Troll Glenn Greenwald was beloved by many on the Left and in the media because Snowden and documents and Russia and "Obama is worse than Bush!" and it was in all the papers, so you can read all about it somewhere else.

Or just rent the shitty movie.

Anyway, almost immediately after Greenwald became the World's Greatest Journalist and before his internet sugar daddy cut him a check for a quarter of a billion dollars, something about the many, bilious diatribes Greenwald was cranking out on a daily basis began to stink.

Greenwald had a whole shelf of ideological axes to grind and petty vengeances to enact, and now he had the clout to do it.  And he did.  Insufferably.  Incessantly.  He bent the truth with abandon and then broke it. Went to the Dudgeon Outlet Mall  and bought the highest dudgeon he could find and used it at an indignation decibel level that could knock satellites from their orbits to rail against anyone who did not meet his standards of ideological and journalistic purity -- standards which he himself freely and frequent broke.

And woe betide the poor fool who noticed and wrote about Spleenwald's lies and hypocrisy.

Well dear readers, I was one of those benighted, woe betided fools, who saw what was going on in plain sight, wrote about it, and got absolutely slagged for it by my "allies".  

Overnight I was no longer a Liberal in good standing.  I was a drooling, jackbooted fascist.  A corporatist shill.  An "Obot".  The blowback was swift, severe and material...but I kept writing while a whole lot of much more connected Liberal writers with steady gigs in the legacy media kept their heads down and said little or nothing because it wasn't worth getting the Greenwald horde on their asses.

Such are the perils and privileges of being an indy writer, beholden to no one.  

Then Glenn started heading off the deep, deep end in exactly the ways I had predicted, and in a manner that his fan boys could no longer ignore.  Showing up on Fox News.  Whoring for Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour.  Yucking it up with Laura Ingraham.  And so forth.  And gradually his mob of avenging Purity Angels stopped showing up at my place and calling me a Nazi.  

Search the blog for "Greenwald" and you'll find all of it.

Not terribly much later, Donald Trump began his steady rise to power in the Republican Party.  And while drooling, jackbooted, fascist "Obot"s  crackpot Liberal alarmists like me were warning that Trump was grotesque end product of decades of Republican Southern Strategy politics come to claim his throne -- that he was the GOP base made manifest -- all the savvy Conservative political havers-of-opinions like David "It's Gonna Be Rubio!" Brooks and streetwise GOP political arsonists-for-hire like Rick Wilson reassured the public that the nomination and election of Donald Trump was utterly impossible. 

Rick Wilson in Politico,  July 22, 2015

Greetings, Donald Trump super fans. I am a member of the GOP establishment. I’m writing to tell you that, no matter how much you wish it otherwise, the Donald Trump candidacy is almost over.

Don’t be fooled by Trump’s double-digit lead in a new poll: He is not going to win. He’s not going to win the primary. He’s not going to win the general. He’s not going to win a third-party bid. Sure, he can damage the GOP ticket badly enough to guarantee Hillary’s election, but he can’t win. He’s too flawed, too liberal, too undisciplined and too afflicted with verbal dysentery when even slightly provoked. He lacks the fundamental presence and gravitas of a commander-in-chief.

Donald Trump is not running a real campaign. He is working the phones, stirring the pot and using the media ecosystem to its fullest. Soon, the bolder members of the field will follow Rick Perry, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush in making harder and more decisive strokes against him. Unlike Trump, they’ll use real oppo, tested and targeted messages—ads built not just to cut, but to kill. They’ll break his operational tempo, get inside his OODA loop and turn his circus into a crispy ruin. It’s what real campaigns do....

Even if it means (and it well may) that Hillary Clinton sits in the White House, names 3 or 4 Supreme Court justices and lets Bill run around the East Wing molesting the help, you’re going to teach the hated Establishment a lesson by becoming Trump Super Fans, even if he runs as a third party candidate and guarantees Her victory...

And just as they had been for decades about every other Republican atrocity, all the Very Serious Conservative havers-of-opinions and all the GOP political arsonists-turned-Never-Trumper and all the savvy mainstream media political pundits were wrong, wrong, fuckity wrong about Trump.  They watched -- stunned and unbelieving -- as the racist base of the Republican party that GOP leadership and media had so carefully cultivated did exactly what we crackpot alarmist Liberals had been warning for decades that they would eventually do: hoist a monster of their own making up on their shoulders and carry him to the White House.

At this point in our story it is terribly important to step back and contemplate how thoroughgoing the failure of institutional media and Conservatives leadership had been up to the day Trump was elected.  How gleefully they had all jumped on the "But Her Emails" bash Hillary bandwagon because they believed it was impossible for her to lose.  

Wrote a whole long thing about it here ("The Candidate Who Has Fallen Under the Weight of Her Stone") if you're interested.  

The point being that this was not the first catastrophic institutional failure of the national media and Conservative elites.  Far from it.  In fact, the savvy havers-of-opinions who were caught flat-footed by the rise of Trump were pretty much the same savvy havers-of-opinions who were caught flat-footed by the collapse of the Bush administration, and flat-footed by the Fake Tea Party once they dropped their masks.  Over and over again they showed themselves to be so pot-committed to their reassuring fairy tales of who they wished Republicans to be that they actively refused to see who Republicans actually were until something big and scary kicked in their doors and grabbed them by the throat.  

And even then, it was unimaginable that they would turn for advice and council to the one group of people who have actually been right about the Right all along.  The dirty hippies.  Once again, the savvy havers-of-opinions were so pot-committed to their campfire tall tales of Liberals as feckless dopes and crackpot alarmists that it was institutionally inconceivable to them that we dirty hippies might be able to explain how Trump came to be.  

It would also be institutionally dangerous to give the dirty hippies a national platform because of our terrible habit of Remembering Inconvenient Stuff.   

It just wouldn't do to have some dirty hippie on a Sunday morning Power Panel explaining that Trump was not a black swan event, but the end-product of 50 years of cynical Republican political and media strategies and a willingness on the part of a complicit national media -- including every sniveling fucker on this Power Panel -- to look the other way or "Both Sides" every Republican act of depravity.  

Nope, that wouldn't do.  Wouldn't do at all.  And since they control the cameras, media corporations just cooked up a narrative that suited their corporate interests.  They bankrolled Trump voter whisperers like Salina Zito to speak to them of "economic anxiety".  They invented the entirely new genre of journalistic fiction that one wag refers to as Magic Ruralism and dispatched their Zeitgeist Action News vans to the interior of the American continent to interview Real Murricans in diner after diner after diner after diner.  

They also repurposed their existing assets.  

Almost overnight Joe Scarborough went from being Trump Fluffer #1 to Mr. Trump Truth Teller Guy #1 Who Had Never, Ever Been a Trump Supporter.  We dirty hippies bellowed our outrage as loudly as our tiny platforms would allow, but when you're a celebrity (and you control the cameras) they let you do stuff like that.  

Almost overnight Bill Kristol went from being a smirking Conservative ghoul and unreconstructed Iraq War pimp famous for being catastrophically wrong about everything (Maddow on MSNBC in 2014), to rambling Uncle Billy, a valued MSNBC contributor  who said mean things about Trump, oh and by the way we're starting a new media company called The Bulwark you should check it out!  

Almost overnight Charlie Sykes went from being Wisconsin's Rush Limbaugh to trusted MSNBC contributor and Man Who Is Perpetually Shocked At How The GOP Completely Lost Its Mind Overnight, oh and by the way I'm part of a new media company called The Bulwark you should check it out! 

Almost overnight MSNBC became the preeminent Reputation Laundromat for outcast Republicans and unemployed Conservative pundits, as long as they stuck more-or-less to the same script.  That the GOP had suddenly and spontaneously lost its mind in 2016.  That no one could have seen it coming.  And that none of the Conservatives who were now employees of MSNBC were in any meaningful way responsible for what their party had become.  

If you were a Bush regime dead ender like Nicolle Wallace or Steve Schmidt, or a friend of theirs like Matthew Dowd, or a fellow traveler like Michael Steele, a place would be found for you in the budget and at the table.  And in this new order it wouldn't do to have some mouthy dirty hippie confusing things by showing up with receipts.

Wouldn't do at all. 

And once the dramatis personae had been cast and seats at the table filled, the ritual among these very recently-former Republicans became a contest to see who could outdo whom in calling Trump a shithead and calling his "followers" racist morons without letting on that these were the same racist morons that these recently-former Republicans had spent their careers cultivating and exploiting.  

A couple of people who excelled at calling Trump a shithead and calling his "followers" racist morons were Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, who were packaged and sold to cable news audiences as canny, street fighting campaign veterans who knew how to win!win!win! despite the fact that their candidates kept losing.  Their candidates for president lost in 2008 and 2012, and in the 2016 GOP primaries all of their show ponies got wiped out and glue factoried.  

But none of that mattered.  Because despite the fact that Democrats came roaring back in 2018, taking the House and the Senate thanks almost entirely to Democratic women and minorities working their asses off and organizing, the new mainstream media political fairy tale was that since Democrats are irredeemably and holistically bad at politics, and since Trump must be defeated, the republic was dooooomed unless Democrats wisely stepped aside and let all of these newly ascendant recently-former Republicans tell them how to run things.

These are the same recently-former Republicans who had by now -- surprise! -- colonized cable news and national newspapers, and built their own media corporations like The Bulwark thanks to large infusions of cash from wealthy benefactors and glowing saturation coverage by MSNBC. All of which served only to amplify the message of "Democrats have a sacred responsibility to the future of the nation to immediately stop being Democrats and start aggressively courting phantom independents and reasonable Republicans" until it just about drowned everything else out. 

And so, having carefully prepared a rich, fertile loam of peril and the incessant negging of Democrats as hapless fiddlefucks who don't know anything about the Real Murrica beyond Berkley and Swope Park, a for-profit advertising agency consisting of recently unemployed Republican shit-slingers, con men and perverts was seeded, watered and fertilized by a cable teevee network which was now dominated by the voices of recently-former Republicans.  

And thus The Lincoln Project was born.

The Lincoln Lads specialized in shunting the vast sums of money they were raking in to marketing and production companies owned by Lincoln Lad board members.  Out the other end of that pipeline came slick 30- and 60-second commercials which called Donald Trump a lying scumbag and the "credulous boomer rubes" who supported him stupid.

At this point I am obliged by Clio, the Muse of History to mention that at no point in the entire lifespan of the Lincoln Project have any one any of the Lincoln Lads generated a original single idea or observation that Liberals hadn't already had and made over and over and over again for decades.  However, what we Liberal never had during all of that time (and never will have) were cable news outlets and major American newspapers willing to carry our often salty critiques of the Republican party, every day, for years, for free.

We thundered and sermonized and parodied and discoursed as loudly as out tiny platforms permitted.  We said "fuck" a lot and spilled billions of pixels over the course of decades but to no avail.  We were (and are) pariahs.  Nobody wanted to hear it.  Everyone wanted us alarmist crackpots to STFU and go away.  

Back-to-back, the Lincoln Project scores a glowing front-page article in The New Yorker AND a their own segment on 60 minutes.

Just for fun, let's take a look back at how Liberal bloggers were treated in 2006 for doing saying/exactly the same things.https://t.co/6VIdjny6d2

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) October 12, 2020

Then came Trump, and almost overnight MSNBC became the Recently Unemployed Bush Regime Dead-Ender/Hate Radio talker/Weekly Standard Editor Full Employment Project, which, in turn, gave birth to the Lincoln Project, which MSNBC sold the shit out of as if they were dick pills or reverse mortgages.  

There were endless glowing interviews.  Book promotions.  Practically handing the mic over to them week after week.  Running their ads over and over again as "news".

For decades, the mainstream media Tone Police stomped the hell out of any Liberal who tried to play hardball.  Now, as we all watched in real time, that same mainstream media fell all over itself  giving the Lincoln Lads tens of millions of dollars worth of free, flattering promotion.

Now put on your Imagination Hats and try to imagine a universe in which actual Liberals who had been right about the Right all along -- right about the Right during all the years when the Lincoln Lads were being paid princely sums to angry up the crazies in order to get Republican monsters elected -- got that kind of sweetheart coverage from cable news and American newspapers.  

Imagine if...

...there were bidding wars over who would get to publish Digby's book, and endless coverage of it in the media.  

...instead of dying poor and in obscurity,  the late Steve Gilliard, who had Michael Steele's number from jump, had been given the teevee pundit seat reserved for odious Mr. Steele.  

...it was Eric Boehlert who had been chosen to host Meet the Press and it was Chuck Todd who was hit by a train.  

...it had been the Sexy Liberal crew interviewed by 60 Minutes about their strategy for taking down Trump.

But none of that happened, and nothing like that will ever happen.  

By contrast, the launch of the Lincoln Project was treated by the media as a cause for rejoicing on the scale somewhere between the development of the polio vaccine and the arrival of the Mercury astronauts in New York City:

Finally, there is light at the end of this tunnel!  Finally the heroes we prayed for have come!

And the money poured into the Lincoln Lads' coffers.  And out came more ads calling Trump an asshole.  And calling Susan Collins a ditzy fuckface.  And calling Lindsay Graham a gimp.  

And in poured even more money.  

And a few of us in what remains of the Liberal blogosphere digital world -- a very few of us -- started looking around and asking, "What the actual fuck is going on?"  Do you people know who these goof are?  What dregs of the racist Right they were palling around in just five minutes ago?  These guys built entire careers calling you commie scum and electing ghouls to destroy everything you hold dear.  And these ads?  They're not going to budge any Republican votes.  They're not going to "mess with Trump's head".    All they're doing is repeating back to you your own fantasies of rage and revenge and getting right up in some fascist's grill and shouting "Fuck You!".  

Jesus, Seka and Johnny "Wad" Holmes  people, these ads are just political PornHub clips for Liberals.  How can you not see that?

But the people liked their political porn.  They thirsted for it.  And so the cycle of porn, followed by free publicity for that porn on cable news, followed by money continued.  I wrote about it, over and over again, in great detail, and the general reaction from my allies (such as it was) was that I needed to shaddap and get with the program.

Being a good soldier I reassured my scolders and upbraiders that they had nothing to worry about.  That I had written on a wide variety of subjects over the past 17 years, and however right I turned out to be in the end, none of if had ever made the slightest difference and none of it had ever earned me one iota of credibility for the next time I started making unpopular predictions.  So they needn't be concerned that some nobody blogger out here in the middle of Middle America pointing out that, say, the Lincoln Project has a Rick Wilson problem will ruin everything and get Trump re-elected 

Don't worry Susie, I have a long history of nobody listening to me, not even my "allies" :-)

Until 4-5 years later.

And then it's all "Holy shit, why didn't anyone warn us!"

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) June 18, 2020

But the doomsayers kept at it, warning me that jostling the Lincoln Lads' elbows even slightly could mean the ruin of us all, and whether or not I was actually right about the sleazoid character and histories of the Lincoln Lads was beside the fucking point because didn't I realize that American democracy was on the line!  So if I wanted to remain a Liberal in good standing I had damn well shut up and start clapping or Tinkerbell would be dead, dead, dead and it would all be my fault!

Well, (he said, rounding the clubhouse turn) since I had already been through this sort of thing with the Cult of Greenwald, this time around this "friendly fire" didn't really bug me.  I kept right on writing and watched as all my initial predictions about how these recently former Republican would leverage the existence of Trump and the legitimate threat he posed into lucrative new media perches for themselves --

Trump was sent by Satan to normalize Bill Kristol

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) August 16, 2017

-- from which they could virtually embargo any discussion of their own complicity in building the GOP monster machine that made Trump possible in the first place.

The Lincoln Lads moved fast, grabbing book deals extolling their electoral genius (and calling Trump a shit head), setting themselves up as the sole arbiters of Who Shall Be Forgiven of Their Political Sins and Who Shall Be Damned Forever ("Boom Times Are Coming to the Indulgence Factory") and going international:

The Trump-taunting Lincoln Project Is Coming to Israel. But Not as Liberal Saviors

Fresh from what fans consider their Never Trump triumph, the Lincoln Project founders have a new mission: To help ditch Netanyahu. But you might not like what happens next.

The media did its part as well.  Before the smoke had cleared from the 2020 election, Brian Williams (Brian who?) was on the air throwing "Michael Steele and the Lincoln Project" a victory parade.

Brian Williams is now telling America that Michael Steele and the Lincoln Project should take a "well-deserved victory lap" for this election.

JFC

The Fail-Safe Election https://t.co/srfywM8Hp8

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) November 5, 2020

Except, no.

Because for all their faunching and preening and all the unlimited and glowing free media they were handed by virtually every media outlet, the Lincoln Project amounted to nothing.  Sure, they had built a very profitable Liberal political porn site, but by every electoral metric it was a failure.  Trump's 2020 vote total was +10M higher than 2016, not lower.   Their main senatorial targets like Graham and Collins -- who the Lincoln Lads promised they would knock off without breaking a sweat -- both won handily and by much bigger margins than they had had in their last elections.  

If you needed a byline to tell you bitter truths, you could turn to the wise words of Brother Charlie Pierce:

The Lincoln Project Didn't Move 10 Votes in This Election 

 

Never Trump conservatives are about as relevant to the actual election results this year as are the Whigs or the Free Soil Party.

But credulous Liberals continued to defend these goofs because they had gotten in too deep, which is what every con man bets on.  Because they gave their hearts and dollars away to grifters that their trusted Liberal teevee network re-branded into heroes by putting them on the air practically every day while banning any discussion of their sleazy pasts.  

And what would it say about them -- about their faith in their own their judgement -- if they were now forced to admit they were not only wrong, but that they had been so easily scammed into carrying water for and lining the pockets of a bunch of Republicans?  

What would it say about them  that the mouthy grouches who warned them not to do it were right all along?

And yet, because reality doesn't care about our feelings, and because beneath its glowing mainstream media façade, the Lincoln Project has always been a rat's nest of cynical, profit-driven and just plain skeevy Republican operatives, it came as no surprise to this tired, old blogger that when it fell apart, it fell apart really fast.

First came the revelations of scandal.  Then the attempts to cover up the scandals and smear anyone who spoke out of school.  Then the mass resignations.  And, of course, there was all of that grifting.  All of which I documented here as it was happening.

And now, as foretold by your host (albeit through a glass and darkly) two years ago -- 

I look forward to Matt Damon playing Rick Wilson and Ben Affleck playing Steve Schmidt in an 8-part, Lincoln Project funded Showtime series called "Saviors of the Republic".

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) October 27, 2020

-- ShowTime has indeed completed and is releasing a five-part documentary about the collapse of the Lincoln Project.  

Which, in turn, has prompted Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt to leap into his own hīnayāna and (as I said miles and miles ago at the beginning of this very long post) use all of this words to paddle the hell away from the Lincoln Lads as fast as he can.  

Which, along with the documentary itself, is now getting all kinds of play in all kinds of places:

From NBC:

Showtime’s ‘Lincoln Project’ doc, like the super PAC, is noisy but not all that effective

It felt like watching a reality TV show about a group of attention-seeking political consultants.

From The Washington Post:

Seven bleak takeaways from Showtime’s ‘The Lincoln Project’ miniseries

From The Daily Beast:

How the Lincoln Project Hoodwinked Anti-Trump Liberals

From Vanity Fair:

“You Can Feel When the Stakes Are Real”: The Lincoln Project Is Still Alive and Kicking After a Near-Fatal Tumble

And, of course, Fox News hobgoblins Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald are immensely grateful to all the credulous Liberals who bankrolled the Lincoln Project sword with which Fox can now stab us:

Lincoln Project's Steve Schmidt blasts co-founders as unethical, suggests disgraced group should disband

Schmidt says Showtime documentary on Lincoln Project shows 'some of the most despicable and unethical behavior'

So how in the world did this dirty commie nobody Liberal blogger from the middle of nowhere with no friends inside the media draw such an accurate bead on the true nature of the Lincoln Lads from the start...

...while every voice in the mainstream media was singing paeans to them and virtually all of my "allies" were telling me to shut up and sit down?

Well, let's answer that question by rephrasing it like this:  How in the world could I have predicted that building a Super PAC out of the timbers of old GOP pirate ships, selling it to a credulous public with tens of millions of dollars worth of free publicity and enlisting "liberal" MSNBC to endorse it,  and then crewing it with Republican brigands, mercenaries. marauders and cut-throats would lead to conflict, scheming, plunder and betrayal?

Golly, I dunno.  I guess I'm just a fooking genius.  Fooking psychic!

Either that, or maybe I just understood what was likely to happen when a bunch of Republican mercenaries and con men were handed the keys to the media, while at the same time credulous Liberal were told over and over again by that same media that unless these grifters were given their unswerving support democracy was doomed.  

Understood it in the same way one can understand a simple, well-known chemical reaction. The same way any high school chemistry teacher can tell you what will happen if you drop metallic sodium into water.

It will go boom.

I Am The Liberal Media