Professional Left Podcast Episode 1017: Judgment Day

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor"  -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu

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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

Looky Who's Getting A Glow Up From Our "Allies"

Once they were let into our Big Tent, unrepentant and ambitious to "reform" our party to their liking...

And once their friends in the media helped them colonize what little was left of the "Liberal" media and banish actual Liberals who had been right all along to the realm of the Neverborn...

...it was as inevitable as night following day that they would use their growing influence to reconstitute some version of the comfortingly familiar media ecosystem they once knew.  One that includes the likes of Chris Cillizza, but where you will find nary a one OG Liberal writer or podcaster.  

Burn The Lifeboats

A Unified Theory of Never Trumpism

As MSNOW, and the former staff of The Weekly Standard (The Bulwark) and Barack Obama's former joke writers (the Pod Save lads) continue to amalgamate into a single, Centrist/Center-Right media keiretsu, their third-rate/too-late epiphanies keep coming fast and furious.

This one in particular kept me chuckling all the way through the three-and-a-half hours Blue Gal and I spent at a local cinema watching half an hour of coming attractions (90% horror flicks) and three hours of Christopher Nolan's substantially revised version of The Odyssey.  I had no fear that my soft chuckles might disturb our fellow cinema patrons  because HOLY FUCK IT WAS LOUD.  And not ordinary, Nolan-loud.  I have no objection to ordinary, Nolan-loud.  This was loud -- like a jet engine and a fire alarm simultaneously going off six inches from your ear loud. "Trying to drive Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican Embassy in Panama City and force him to surrender." loud.  "My God, why didn't I bring a pot of wax to seal my ears?" loud.   

Repeatedly.  For minutes on end.

Anyhoo, I kept right on chortling because this time their third-rate/too-late epiphany came in the form of a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, the problem with the Republican Party stems from the fact that it's full of Republicans and a brief lament that no one else has thought to entertain this possibility.

Sad!

Jon Lovett (Pod Save lads): There's the quote going around uh it's something to the effect of more Americans are fascist than we realize.  And one day we're going to find out. And so I I want to I want to this is actually where I wanted to go next because um I think this is an old Hemingway.... But the gist of it I think does apply. A point you've made repeatedly which I think there's very little equity to in politics is... uh... you can blame Trump, you can blame misinformation, you can blame  Republicans, but and this is a a paraphrase of something you've written.  77 million Americans who voted for Trump are some combination of unserious, decadent, or weak. Now it it's a lot cheaper in politics to blame the powers that be. That's true on the left, that's true on the right. There's not a lot of discussion about the culpability of the actual voters and their agency in this. So, can you just as somebody that has been an observer uh of conservatism from the inside for a long time, uh what have you learned about um the voters themselves through this period?

Jonathan V. Last (Bulwark):  Well, so I mean I can tell you my impressions. I can't tell you that they are like facts that I've learned. Um, what I have seen suggests to me though that you to avoid ... to avoid...uh, coming to the conclusion that voters wanted what they chose, you got to start creating a whole bunch of  Rube Goldberg contraptions. And the minute you push on any of these constructs even a little bit, they start wobbling and so you have to build another one, right? 

And h/t to Alert Listener Walt for pointing this out.

My Unified Theory of Never Trumpism?  

That they will always be on the verge of catching up with where Liberals were 20 years ago.  

They always present their epiphanies as if they just discovered an elusive, and previously unknown element lurking between Fluorine and Nitrogen on the periodic table.

Their new element?

It's called 'oxygen' fellas." 

Congratulations.  You 'discovered' oxygen.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Rules, Schmules

You may have noticed that over the past 10 years or so, actual Liberals (who had the poor taste to have been loudly right about the Right all along) were elbowed aside while recently former Republicans (who hadn't just been wrong about the Right all along, but had been the eager handmaidens of the forces that created Trump) were anointed by their pals in the media as the Voice of the Resistance.

And from their newly bestowed commanding heights within the media, these Never Trumpers handed down a new set of Democracy Alliance Commandments to us little people.  

Those commandments included...

The pasts of these arrivistes -- even their immediate horrendous pasts - are irrelevant!  

Daring to interrogate that past in any way is destructive to The Cause.   

Mouthy Liberals asking them to apologize for building careers slandering them in the most despicable ways imaginable is rude and petty and destructive to The Cause.

All that matters is the Present! All that matters is that they're with us now!

So I am moved to wonder why those very clear and strictly enforced Never Trump Commandments...

...don't apply to this guy?

I'm pretty sure I know why, and I find my answer depressingly predictable.

I Am The Liberal Media

Stupid Is The Fire In Which We Burn

Lest you think Trump's manifold acts of corruption, extortion, treason and unhinged racist lunacy are penetrating the MAGA groundwater, let me disabuse you of that notion right now.  

And to do that, I need us to take a little walk down memory lane.  Specifically, to 14 years ago, before Trump slouched out of the Republican id to swallow the GOP whole.  It was a time during which all your favorite future Never Trumpers were swearing up and down that everything was fine, that the Party of Lincoln had never shone so brightly,  and anyone who suggested otherwise was openly mocked as a crackpot.

While they were busy ignoring what was going on with the base of their own party, this is what your 'umble crackpot scrivener was writing about the state of the Right:

The entire Conservative enterprise is built on delusion and old dynamite, which is why every clock much forever remain stopped at one minute after Reagan's inauguration, every fact must be smothered under the stasis field of Rush Limbaugh roaring, rage-drunk bluster.  It is the sarcophagus of a dead ideology where the walls are now so densely postered and palimpsested with the detritus of Conservatism's lurid, lying history that its denizens cannot find the exit anymore, and its floors are so sticky and pitted with the grue of its savage, tribal, beat-in rituals that no one bothers to even look for the door.

Which is why  no deviation can be permitted, no error can be admitted and no apologies can be allowed.

As I wrote last year, this catastrophe all began as a headlong dive into the best fucking high the Right would ever have ...

Now the bender is over.

Outside, Reality's beating sun is stationed in the treetops, so bright and close to the Earth that it vaporizes shadows inside of pockets and purses, and through the sodden walls of their fragile fastness Conservatives they can feel its slippery photons circling their ideological clubhouse, sniffing the hinges and lintels like wolves, looking for a way in.

This time, there is no trick-or-treat scamper to safety for them in the kindly, Tea Party gloaming: no way to scuttle off to the next wingnut spider hole in a tri-corner hat and tights pretending they'd never even heard of George W. Bush. No, the rotting hulk of the Party of Lincoln has become their crypt, and inside of it there is nothing left for them but to sink forever deeper into the shadows until they become one with the darkness.

And from deep inside their narrow house, you can hear the terrified squeals of Conservatism's pasty, self-righteous, rigidly ignorant, sexually-terrified wingnut child-men trying frantically to spackle up the little holes through which modernity, complexity and reality continue to leak...

The point of pulling this out of the archives is threefold.

First, labor-saving.  Since I've been on this beat for a good long while and since Republican bigotry and depravity are an endless cycle of repetition and escalation, why not borrow from my younger and less emotionally exhausted self?

Second, to show why, for all their professed interest in talking with people whose viewpoints are different than their own, no way no how does any Never Trumper want to talk about which crew was actually right about the Right all along, and which team of esteemed paid professionals absolutely blew it.  

Third, and of more importance, is to put the cast-iron obstinance and denialism of the GOP base in its proper context.  They didn't suddenly get this way yesterday.  They've been this way for decades and, year after year, they've only gotten louder, stupider and more intransigent. They can no longer metabolize reality.  It's poison to them, so, marching under Trump's banner, they make war on it, and only get more berserk with fury the more Reality leaks into their lives.  

So, while irrefutable evidence of Trump's madness and venom rage all around us like a hurricane, and we're shouting at these idiots as loud as we can, "Can you see it now?   Can you see how bad it is now!" -- inside the shuddering hovel of their media bubble, they're busy grabbing anything they can to nail up over the windows to keep the storm at bay.

Two local examples.

First, there is the case of the Illinois Democratic legislator who, this last January, proposed giving local municipalities the authority to charge people a $5 permitting fee in unincorporated areas if they want to have an "open burn", and the flexibility of levy stiff fines if anyone conducts an "open burn" without a permit.  Important fact: this legislation -- which, I'll remind you, was proposed by one lone state congressperson in January and has gone nowhere since -- would in no way affect barbequing in your back yard, or having a cozy little marshmallow-toasting fire in a firepit in your back yard.  

State Rep. Briel: New bill is not targeting your campfire

The local MAGA meatheads went absolutely ballistic.  Jackbooted this and overreach that and the gummit telling you it's gonna slap you with a $100,000 fine if you have a weenie roast with the kids in the yard.  And of course the fact that this legislation would do none of those things was irrelevant to the ginned up firestorm (pun intended) that was whipped up on the Right.  Because all they fucking care about is having something scary and Liberal to shriek about to drown out all the actual catastrophes their Dear Leader is inflicting on this country in their name.

How bad is it?

It's worse than ballroom!

This is the pattern: a minor, local policy proposal becomes, through media amplification, a nationwide moral panic completely detached from reality.  

And remember kids, by the commutative law of MAGA meathead media, what one Democrat does, all Democrats are responsible for.  And if all Democrats everywhere don't stop what they're doing and unanimously denounce whatever ginned up claptrap Fox News is troweling out today, then all Democrats everywhere are guilty!guilty!guilty!

And when you tar the entire party with the slander-brush, don't forget to cram as many magic conjure words into the headline as possible.  For example, this from Murdoch's New York Post checks just about every box.  

Behind today’s radical, Jew-hating Democratic Party is a monster created by Barack Obama

Yes, they forgot to squeeze in Hillary's emails and Benghaaaazi, but I'm pretty sure that's a headline page-limit thing and not some swine of an editor having a mild attack of conscience and thinking, "Nah.  We dare not go that far."

Speaking of playing the hits is a desperate attempt to distract from how comprehensively Trump is fucking them over and what utter, drooling idiots this makes all of them look like, MAGA mouthbreakers are even dragging the already-infinitely-debunked "Clinton Kill List" out of cold storage.  

Because while their soft lizard brains are incapable of processing facts they don't like, they all have fond memories of the lies that made them feel smart.  Of the glory days of beating up on Hillary Clinton.     

Which is why we must...

Burn The Lifeboats

And Now They Have To Live The Rest of Their Lives Like a Schnook

I did this graphic twenty years ago.  Back in September of 2006.  And boy howdy, if you wanted to enjoy the good opinion of the legacy media back in 2006, you did not want to be a Liberal blogger, no sirree.  You wanna talk about cancel culture?  If you were a Liberal blogger in the early 2000s, you automatically became a media and cultural pariah,  permanently caricatured as soft-headed, terrorist-loving, Murrica-hating lunatics.

In the good, gray pages of America's Newspaper of Record, we were compared to Tom Fucking DeLay, as the nation's premier depraved and unhinged danger to democracy.

But the experience of [the malignant Tom] DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.

Andrew Sullivan warned that we may become "a fifth column".  On the now-defunct Chris Matthews Show, a near-hysterical David Brooks cast us as even crazier than the crazies on the Right.  Charles Krauthammer invented the term "Bush Derangement Syndrome" just for us.     

Charles Krauthammer: Bush Derangement Syndrome is spreading.  
Published: Dec 7, 2003

For the unpardonable sin of writing truthfully and accurately about the state of the Republican party and the catastrophic trajectory it was on, by the legacy media and conservative media, we were nearly universally loathed and dismissed.  And the more it became clear that we had been right about the Right all along, the more establishment institutions wanted us to shut the fuck up and go away, because we were not telling the story they wanted told.

Thirteen years later,  in 2019, I wrote this:

And on that day I will butter my humble bread with schadenfreude as I watch the stunned indignation of my Liberal allies who were damn-fool enough to lend their credibility to their Never Trumper pals in exchange for nothing -- watch as they wake to find that their pals have not only turned on them, but have used the credibility my Liberal allies gave them as patents of nobility to stake a permanent claim in the mainstream media as the new Reasonable Center of American politics.

I shall uncork a fine, vintage "I fucking told you so" when Brian Williams and Joe Scarborough and Don Lemon and on and on and on welcome Rick Wilson and Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes and on and on and on as heroes.  Brave truth-tellers who stood out as one of the few, clear, sane voices on either the Left or the Right during these past few crazy years.

Never Trumpers in conversation with each other.  From The Bulwark, two days ago:

Sarah Longwell:  And I... I think that... I don't know if you're familiar with the phrase people uh will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right. 

Oh my yes, Sarah.  We Liberal bloggers are very familiar with that phrase.  People who have been writing about the catastrophic trajectory of the Republican party since the days when the ink on your Kenyon College diploma was still wet?  Since before you joined the Log Cabin Republicans?  People who were slandered, mocked, and ignored by the same people who now staff The Bulwark and take victory laps for "being right"?   

Yes, we are very, very, very familiar with that phrase.

But please continue.

Longwell:  Um, and I also think as Trump demonstrates what a threat he is to liberal democracy in this moment that a lot of the people who said "Kamala? Trump? They'll probably be about the same." are mad at us at how right we were about the threat he presented. 

This has become a consistent, predictable feature of every Bulwark podcast..  Or, rather, a key marketing and branding slogan of every Bulwark podcast as they ask for new subscribers.  Reminding everyone not only how right they were and how the Right despises them for it -- but let's let David Frum explain...

Frum:  Well, The Bulwark is indispensable and brave and your present amazing success should not cause people to forget the incredible chanciness and riskiness of the enterprise at the beginning.   And so you all deserve tremendous honor.  You made sacrifices. So did your colleagues, by the way, or your  counterparts at The Dispatch. Many of them made tremendous individual sacrifices and again it's worked out but no one knew that at the beginning...

From Capital Research,  May 14, 2025

The Bulwark: From Nonprofit to Profits

...According to the DDT Institute’s 2021 report to the IRS, the nonprofit sold The Bulwark to Center Enterprises in August 2021 for $100,000. The report also notes the firm is “more than 35%” owned by Sarah Longwell. (The DDT Institute also reported more than $1 million in expenses for The Bulwark for the months preceding the sale.)

The Bulwark website now states that it is owned by “Center Enterprises, Inc.”

The funding model is now advertising and reader support, via the Substack subscription platform, and a lot of content is behind paywalls. The basic membership is $100 annually, with a “Founding” level that provides access to additional content for $300 per year.

As of March 2025, The Bulwark reported nearly 90,000 paid Substack subscribers, which at a minimum of $100 each equates to $9 million annually (Substack takes roughly 10 percent of that.) An additional source of revenue is a YouTube page, “bringing in between $150,000 to $300,000 a month,” according to New York magazine. So that’s an additional $1.8 million or more per year.

“After several years of breaking even,” noted the New York report, “The Bulwark had its first profitable year in 2024.”

It's funny to hear people who were given millions in startup capital by angel investors, limitless promotional hits on cable news amounting to tens of millions in free advertising, op-ed gigs, book deals, speaking engagements and uplift by other A-list podcasters -- all of which is a million times more support than any Liberal bloggers and podcasters were ever offered by the same wealthy individuals and institutions -- talking about what a tremendous sacrifice it was quitting Team Evil 20 years too late.  

Every time I hear this kinda talk -- which is a near-constant refrain from every Never Trumper -- I get notes of Henry Hill bitching at the end of Goodfellas --

-- about how far his station in life was reduced once he was forced to get out of the mob and turn on all his old cronies.

Funny old world.  

I Am The Liberal Media

The State of the Never Trumper Persuasion Theory as of Today

Sigh.

Burn The Lifeboats

Things That Make You Doubt Whether You Exist At All

This exchange between former Trump spokesmodel turned Bulwark employee, Sarah Matthews, and Tim  Miller made me check my blogroll and archives to make sure the entire history of the Liberal blogosphere/ podcast universe really existed.  Or had I hit my head on a low-slung door casing in 1998 and just dreamed it all up.

Matthews:  Don't get me wrong like of course there's a little part of me that thinks internally of course it feels good to be right but like I didn't want to be right about all of this. 

Tim Miller: I did and that's one way that we're different. And I don't want to be immodest or anything, but it does feel like as I survey the news that we're going to go to this morning, like that the most extreme cringe version of Never Trumpism uh seems like it was it was correct. Like, whatever person you have in your mind, you're like, "This person like hates Trump so much that some of their takes are even a little bit like, you know, make you wince a little bit because they've gone so far around the bend." Like that person, whoever that person is in your mind, was like way more right than any anybody who tried to say like,  "Let's call it balls and strikes." Like, let's see, you know, he's he had some good points on this or that. 

Matthews:  And now obviously like you know five years of being the on the anti-Trump side and yeah feels feels good to know that we were right.

Sure she did all the things and enjoyed all the perks and told all the lies and backed all the madness, but she reassures Tim, in her hip-hop heart (tm New York Times Pitchbot) she was never really down to clown.  She was never really bought in to all the MAGA stuff.  Deep down she knew things weren't right.

(So lemme understand.  Back then, when she worked for Donald Trump, on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis she was just lying about what she truly believed.  And doing it so expertly that no one could tell that she never believed the things that were coming out of her mouth.  

But now she's telling the unvarnished truth?  And you can trust that because...?  C'mon people.  It's like no one has ever seen Double Indemnity. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. The File on Thelma Jordon. Or  No Man of Her Own, )

Well none of those questions were on the table.  Instead Tim did the podcast equivalent of chucking her under the chin and telling her, it's OK kiddo.  As the official brand-ambassador for the "pro-democracy coalition", I can assure you, all is forgiven. You're on The Bulwark payroll now, and we absolve everybody.   

Everybody?

Well --- not everybody.  There are two groups whose transgressions are so grievous that they can never be excused.

The first group is one guy.  Tucker Carlson.  Who has always been lying, skeevy con man who'll say anything to advance his personal and political fortunes.  All his "apology" amounts to is another MAGA rat scurrying down the-rat line of a sinking ship.  Never trust this guy.  

The second group are... Liberals.  Especially Liberal bloggers and podcasters who had the poor taste to have been. inconveniently, 100% right about the Right since long before there was ever such a thing as  The Bulwark or a Never Trumper.  Since long before Trump was even a thing.  

If the Bulwark crew had it within their power to wish all of us with long memories and detailed files ... 

... all into the cornfield, they'd do it before close of business.

But since that is beyond their abilities, they settle for pretending we never existed, except as straw men whose imaginary follies prompt endless eye-rolling from the savvy set.

I Am The Liberal Media

Schrödinger’s Alliance

Now that Never Trumpers have been handed control over gatekeeping and party-discipline duties for the Democratic Party,  I try very hard to be a good Liberal and never question any of the decisions our Never Trump supervisors hand down.

I got mah mind right, boss!

For example, I understand that we're no longer the "Democratic Party".  Now our brand is the "pro-democracy coalition" which is supposed to make it easier for people who despise us and everything we hold dear to join our "coalition" without having to worry that they might get some of that icky "woke" stuff on them.

So every day I get up and turn portraits of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and JFK to the wall to remind myself that "Democratic Party" is oldspeak now.  Maybe even crimethink!  

And having been sternly lectured on the Never Trump Iron Clad Rule of Alliances no less than 10,000 times over the past ten years (including from people whose MAGA derangement has since metastasized and swallowed them whole) I try to toe the line and do as I'm told.  

But, to quote Captain Terrell from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan:

Sir, that is difficult. I... try to obey, but...

For example, without guidance from my Never Trump handlers I'm all at sea about what I should do with this new information about Tucker Carlson.

From The Hill:

Tucker Carlson ‘sorry for misleading people’ with Trump support

Pundit Tucker Carlson is expressing regret for voicing support for President Trump.

Carlson, who has been a sharp critic of Trump’s war in Iran, said during a recent episode of his podcast and online show that prominent people on the right who backed Trump ahead of the 2024 election are “implicated” in what’s going on in the Middle East.

“So I do think it’s like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be,” he said. “And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people and it was not intentional. That’s all I’ll say.”

You can see why my simple, Liberal brain is all fuzzy and confused. Because a plain-text reading of the fine print of the Never Trump Iron Clad Rule of Alliances makes it very clear that Carlson cannot be welcomed into the "pro-democracy coalition" as a mere Adam Kinzinger-grade ally. No, no. According to established precedent, given that he is a high-status Person of Influence among the MAGA meatbags, he is to be automatically field-promoted to Liz Cheney Super-Ally status! 

 A class of ally whose most transparently ridiculous and self-serving excuses -- "I wuz fooled!" -- are to be treated like the Letters of Transit in Casablanca. They cannot be rescinded. Not even questioned.

So where does that leave me?  I mean, I certainly don't want to run afoul of the new protocols, so are my old Carlson graphics now potential thoughtcrimes?  

Is it enough if I just burn them in my back yard, or will special depots for their disposal be set up and supervised by Never Trumpers?  

Also, does this automatically move Carlson to the front of the pack in the 2028 Democratic pro-democracy coalition presidential race, or does he need to appear on both Rogan and The Bulwark before that decision is made?  Is there a fund I should be contributing to?  And until then does Carlson's status exist in some indeterminate quantum state?  A Schrödinger's alliance? 

Again, please extend a thousand pardons to my Never Trump supervisors for all of this.  Clearly my opinion is worth something or I never would have merited 10,000 lectures on what a danger to democracy I was for not trusting the honorable intentions of Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Michael Cohen and so forth.  And since no less than the fate of democracy hangs in the balance, I want to make sure that I'm on firm, Never Trump-approved footing, and at the moment I have no idea where firm footing lies.  

In fact, when it comes to reconciling our Never Trumpers' wise Rule of Alliances with what I know of Tucker Carlson, my confusion is such that you could say I'm having a Star Trek "Norman" moment.

Yes, you could definitely say that.  

No Half Measures

The Strait of Arrakis

"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." -- Paul Muad'Dib, Dune, 1965

You Dune fans out there have probably noticed that the "power to destroy a thing" threat which Iran -- a nation governed by religious fanatics -- has now credibly leveled against the United States and Israel over the Strait of Hormuz is exactly the same threat that Paul Muad'Dib leveled at the rest of the Empire in Dune.  If you fuck with us, we will destroy this thing.   We will strangle it and then your empire will fall because your whole empire -- all trade, all medicine, all mobility -- depends on the product of this ancient place that you've been exploiting and abusing and messing with for generations.  

So welcome to the early premiere of Dune, III, but not in theaters in December.  This version of Dune is coming to our homes, our highway, our grocery stores, our schools, and our medical facilities right now courtesy of  Donald Trump, who, on a whim, decided to fuck with one of the places on this Earth that he should have left the fuck alone.

So, how did we get here?

Well, there are really two and only two theories of the case about the rise of Donald Trump.

First is that Trump swept in overnight as if by magic.  He just showed up, did some hoodoo and bamboozled 70 million United States citizens into voting for him.  Boom! Just like *that* he hoodwinked everybody.  First, handily sweeping aside all 723 of his Republican opponents in 2016  primaries, locking up the nomination early, and then proceeding on to win the general election due to the electoral college being massively tilted in favor of small states full of enough bigots and imbeciles to do the job.  

That's theory #1.

Theory #2 goes like this.

The rise of a monster like Trump was a long time coming down a long, and terrible road along which the Republican party has been marching for a generation.  Maybe two generations.  Either way, a very long time.   And eventually all the kindling, and all the oily rags, and all the barrels of toxic hate and bigotry and arrogant ignorance --  all the highly volatile poisons the GOP had been tinkering and toying with for decades -- finally came back to bite 'em.  

They had been using that poisonous alloy of focused hatred and stupidity and derangement to smite Democrats and win elections, and using the same logic that tobacco companies had used for decades: of course, we know the product we're selling is dangerous, highly addictive, and often lethal, but it's also incredibly profitable.   So we're going to go right on selling it because there is no way in this Land of the Free, that we're ever going to have to pay a price for how we make our money.      

And right down the line, the craftiest minds at every high-brow Conservative media platform and the savviest political operatives in the GOP -- even with examples like Golem, and Frankenstein, and The Sorcerers Apprentice, and all of human history right at their fingertips -- showed themselves to be utterly incapable of imagining that the doomsday machine they had built out of rage, racism and belligerent ignorance might one day be turned against them.  

For the record, this is what I wrote 36 hours after Donald Trump oozed down the Golden Escalator back in June of 2015:

In case you missed it, Squint and the Meat Puppet handed the MSNBC camera over to Donald Trump this morning for a relaxing, 30-minute handjob. While Trump rambled lazily from one pinnacle of bullshit and narcissism to the next, Morning Joe crack-house regulars Mark Halperin (Glenn Beck's favorite mainstream media enabler) and the pickled remains of Mike Barnacle looked on, smirking and giggling. All that it lacked to complete the creepy, peep-show effect were trench-coats and bad lighting.

But of course, the story of the Trump candidacy has very little to do with Donald Trump. 

As I wrote a few years ago, the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.  

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

They are the GOP's premium leads, but however abundant and renewable a resource the Conservative meatheads may be, come Presidential election time, there is never enough room at the trough for every rapacious Republican hog.  This is why every few years we have these Little Red State Fundy moments; that delicate time when the knives come out and the various species of Conservative con men start cutting each other's balls over who gets to pluck the wingnut pigeons...

...while trying desperately not to call attention to the fact that their entire political system depends on pandering to the army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps which the GOP has worked so long and hard to cultivate.

Fortunately for the Right, now that the "respectable" media has as much to lose by cracking out of turn as Hate Radio and Fox News, we can all look forward to another campaign season of the American mainstream media looking stoically the other way.

Seems like theory #2 actually fits the facts like a bespoke Savile Row suit, while theory #1 looks more and more like a tiny, tattered fig leaf trying to cover a mountain of shame, complicity and bad faith.  

So a sensible person might well ask themselves, "Why the hell do the Never Trumpers and the legacy media still cling to theory #1 like a drunk clinging to an empty jug?"

And I might well answer that person, "You know, that's a helluva good question.  The next time you're within shouting distance, why don't you ask them, because they ain't taking my calls."

I Am The Liberal Media.

The Zombie Dance of JD Vance.

 "The world we knew is gone, but keeping our humanity? That's a choice."  -- Dale Horvath, The Walking Dead

I know some of you are not podcast listeners and prefer your words on a page arranged in neat little rows.  So, for you, and for anyone looking for a much tidied-up version of our last podcast, herewith you will find some of what my wife and I discussed.

We start with that quote from the character of Dale Horvath, because that question is the central question of our time, and it comes down to how we understand two separate ideas.  

But first, we need to take a very brief tour of the end of the world as it’s portrayed in science fiction, beginning with the 1983 made-for-TV movie that gave people of a certain age nightmares and apparently freaked Ronald Reagan out so badly that he started talking seriously about nuclear disarmament with the Soviet Union.  That would be “The Day After”, which more than 100 million people watched when it first aired on ABC on November 20, 1983. and in a 2009 Nielsen TV Ratings list was one of the highest-rated television films in US history.

[Fun Fact:  The film was broadcast on Soviet state television in 1987 during the negotiations on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.   And the producers demanded that the Russian translation conform to the original script and that the broadcast not be interrupted by commentary.]

The film was about nuclear war and its aftermath, which focused much less on the explosions themselves and more on what happens in the days and weeks that follow.  Communities across Kansas and Missouri are left devastated. Infrastructure collapses: power grids fail, hospitals are overwhelmed, communication breaks down, and government authority slowly erodes. The film portrays how ordinary people like farmers, students, doctors, and families struggle to understand what’s happened while radiation sickness, shortages of food and medicine, and social disorganization steadily worsen.

This is what made “The Day After” especially unsettling – its depiction of slow societal breakdown rather than immediate annihilation. Survivors initially try to maintain normal routines and institutions, but each passing day systems and institutions that we largely take for granted -- the medical profession, the food supply, law and order – starts to fall apart. By focusing on this gradual unraveling of society, the film emphasizes that the real horror of nuclear war is not just the blasts but the prolonged collapse of social order and the suffering that follows.

 You’ll find this same plot structure in almost every story, movie or TV series in the science fiction sub-genre of post-apocalypse/dystopian fiction.  The Stand.  World War Z.  Station Eleven.  The Last of Us. It's a very long list and every fan of the genre has their favorite.  I, for, one an a big fan of A Canticle for Liebowitz, in which the inciting incident happened so long ago that no one really remembers what caused it.  

Great book.  Highly recommended.

There is always an inciting incident – could be a lab leak, a nuclear exchange, tainted food, or a virus that comes out of nowhere – followed by disbelief, followed by panic, followed by attempts at containment that grow progressively more desperate and violent while at the same time there are increasingly desperate attempts at finding a way to mitigate the growing damage or cure the spreading disease.

So, getting back to the quote from The Walking Dead – "The world we knew is gone, but keeping our humanity? That's a choice." – in every story about post-apocalyptic confusion and panic, some people begin to figure out that, whatever comes next, the old world is gone for good.

 And that is the first question for all of us in the here and now: Do you accept that the world as we knew it – the political and cultural America we once knew – is gone?  Because if you do, then you’ll arrive at one set of answers to that question.  

But some people just don’t, and those people will arrive at a radically different set of answers, because they liked the old ways.  They prospered and were respected under the old rules. They can’t adjust to the new realities, so they metaphorically offer empty prayers in an empty church, as if, by sheer force of will, they can beg, and bargain and bully  the new reality back into the old ways.

Of course, there has been no nuclear war, and at the moment there is no virus sweeping across the globe, or meteor impact large enough to topple governments.  But when you think about it, our lived experience as Liberals is remarkably similar to characters living through a zombie apocalypse.   

So, as a thought experiment, let's see how this metaphor stacks up.  

First, the inciting incident.  For those of you who are playing along at home, you might say The Powell Memo, or Nixon’s Southern Strategy, or Strom Thurmond switching parties, or the media becoming a Both Sides Do It cult, or Republicans inviting Conservative evangelicals into the party, and those are all good answers.  But for the moment, let’s call those examples (and dozens more) the foreshocks of what was to come.

These are moments of escalation that, in a sense, were like retroviruses that weakened our democracy’s immune system and set the stage for the real Bad Thing.  And in this scenario, the inciting incident was the election of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2000, and even more importantly, the re-election of Bush and Cheney in 2004.  

That was the year that launched 1,000 liberal bloggers.  

In their first term, Bush and Cheney showed that they were more than willing to lie and cheat to win, and crucially, that the base was cool with it.  They proved that Republican concerns about deficits were a lie.  That character didn’t count after all.  That they could lie this country into a catastrophic foreign war…and the Republican base and the legacy media would go along with it.

And the re-election of Bush and Cheney?  Let's turn to the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson for post-2004 debate coverage, because what Hunter Thompson saw is what we all saw.

Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrolled Bush and left him for roadkill.

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. . . . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.

Karl Rove, the president's political wizard, felt even worse. There is angst in the heart of Texas today, and panic in the bowels of the White House. Rove has a nasty little problem, and its name is George Bush. The president failed miserably from the instant he got onstage with John Kerry. He looked weak and dumb. Kerry beat him like a gong in Coral Gables, then again in St. Louis and Tempe -- and that is Rove's problem: His candidate is a weak-minded frat boy who cracks under pressure in front of 60 million voters. 

And you know what?  It didn’t matter in the slightest.  If you were there at the time, you saw what years of the Conservative media calling anti-war Democrats “traitors and lunatics" with "Bush Derangement Syndrome”  had done.  What Andrew Sullivan, calling us “fifth columnists” had done.  And don’t forget this, coming from the highest office in the land. 

From The New York Times, September 8, 2004: 

Cheney Warns of Terror Risk if Kerry Wins

Stepping up the battle over national security, Vice President Dick Cheney warned on Tuesday that the country would be at risk of a terror attack if it made "the wrong choice" in November, and President Bush accused Senator John Kerry of adopting the antiwar language of his Democratic primary rival Howard Dean...

Oh, and we mustn't forget the gay bashing, or who Bush’s point man was on slandering gays and lesbians.  From Salon, April 5, 2007:

With Bush as president, [Matthew] Dowd was put on the Republican National Committee payroll and became an intimate participant in White House strategy sessions. Bush and the Republicans now exploited divisive wedge issues and tactics with a vengeance. After Sept. 11, 2001, fear was bundled with loathing, the terrorist threat from abroad conflated with the gay menace within. By 2004, relying on Dowd’s numbers, Republicans made gay marriage the most salient social issue, exceeding abortion and gun control in its inflammatory potential to mobilize conservatives. Dowd prescribed the strategy for targeting Republican base voters’ “anger points,” as GOP consultants called them, for maximum turnout. 

And then came the Swiftboating!  

The base of the Republican party sopped all of this poison up with a biscuit and begged for seconds.  Which Fox News and Hate Radio provided non-stop 24 hours a day, while the legacy media rolled right over for it.

And the incompetent dry-drunk halfwit draft dodger and his blood-drunk regent were reelected, defeating a decent, honorable man and war hero.  All of which and so much more during a time which your Never Trump allies desperately want you to remember as the good old days, when everyone played it according to Hoyle.  

This is what jump-started the Liberal blogosphere.  And this was the true beginning of the current Republican zombie apocalypse.  It was when Republicans learned they could violate what they’d always claimed were their core principles, and the base would cheer them on.  That they could attack Democrats every day using the most disgusting lies and most violent, unhinged rhetoric, and there’d be no consequences.  The laws of political gravity no longer applied to them.  

And most importantly, it’s when the base discovered they could unleash their worst impulses and be rewarded for it.  That Conservative media and Republican elected officials would actually egg them on, while the legacy media busied itself pretended it wasn’t happening.  

And it was all going great until it all fell apart!  When the price in blood and treasure and reputation of the Bush administration’s incompetence, deceit and corruption grew so great that even Fox News screaming at 120 decibels couldn’t drown it out.  

This was the moment to stop the Republican zombie plague in its tracks.  To cauterize the infection by holding everyone responsible accountable, right down to the Republican base who had endorsed all of it with their vote, and a legacy media which had let war criminals lie to their face and laugh about it.  

But one of the themes you will find running through almost every zombie apocalypse story is sadness.  The loss of the familiar world and the people who gave it meaning. Unlike many other horror genres, the enemy is frequently someone who used to be human—a friend, a neighbor, a family member—now reduced to an unrecognizable shell.

Alongside that sadness runs a strong current of nostalgia, often expressed through small, almost mundane details. Characters cling to remnants of the old world—photographs, music, empty streets, half-functioning routines—as a way of preserving identity that reality is taking away. This nostalgia is both comforting and bittersweet; it reminds the characters that the apocalypse is erasing our shared cultural memory and what we believed were our shared values.  

  And here in the real world, this is when the “Let’s get back to normal” caucus leaps into action and insists that the best way to move forward is to put the past behind us.   Because “Let’s get back to normal” is code for letting the millions of malefactors who created the disaster off the hook.  

A prime example of this is New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who is apparently running in the 2007 Meet the Press Green Room presidential primary.  This was him on Morning Joe just last week:

Booker: "There are really good people in the Senate on both sides of the aisle, and I have these private conversations with my colleagues about what's wrong. But they're afraid or unwilling to say these things publicly. And that is the crisis that we're in. It's a crisis of conviction."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 24, 2026 at 1:02 PM

And the reason many of us OG bloggers roll our eyes at people like Senator Booker is that we’ve already been to this rodeo.  We’ve already witnessed Republicans fuck things up almost beyond repair, then Democrats get voted in to clean up their mess, and the immediate reaction of the “Let’s get back to normal” crowd was to put the past behind us.   

This is what was on offer in 2008 when Barack Obama ran for president.   In the face of the huge disasters which Republicans had left in their wake, Obama offered decency, competence and a forgive-and-forget forbearance, inviting Republicans to roll up their sleeves and help him fix what was broken.   

Except Republicans are not wired that way.  They do not learn the lessons that every child is supposed to know.  Lessons about admitting you were wrong when you were wrong.  Lessons about apologizing when you were wrong to the people you have wronged.  Lessons about cleaning up the mess you made.  

Instead, the Republican ethos is the opposite of all of that in every way.    

First, never admit you were wrong.

From Time Magazine, June 25, 2014

Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday stood by the Bush Administration’s decision to wage war in Iraq, saying he has never second-guessed the decision even with Iraq once again descending into chaos.

“I was a strong advocate of going into Iraq,” Cheney told PBS in an interview, a week after launching a new political group designed to boost his foreign policy and national-security policies. “I think that was the right decision then, and I still believe that today.” 

 Second, obviously never apologize…because you’re never wrong.

And third, there is no mess to be cleaned up because either they just refuse to acknowledge it, or they try to blame it on some Democrat.   

And now here we are again.  2006 all over again, but vastly worse with exponentially higher stakes.  If this were an actual zombie apocalypse, the title would be “26 Years Later. “

The inciting incident that changed the world has already happened and now we are living in  a post-apocalypse Republican zombie future.

So what can we say about this ugly new world?

We can say that the nostalgia-drunk forgive-and-forget caucus is once again ascendant – led by recently-former Republicans like the Bulwark Crew – because they tell the story that the hapless Sensible Centrists want to believe and the “Let’s get back to normal” legacy media desperately wants its dwindling readership and viewership to believe.  

That the people who clawed their way to power casually slandering us in the most despicable language imaginable – the “Fuck Your Feelings” meatheads – must now be treated by us like delicate Faberge eggs that might break and flee back into the waiting arms of the American Fascist Party at any hint of criticism or judgment.  

We can say that many of us are infuriated by what-might-have-been.  How could those responsible have allowed this to happen?  How could they not have seen the danger in what they were doing.  We can also say that many of us are depressed because we’re pretty damn sure we know why those responsible allowed this to happen, and it was for the pettiest and stupidest of reasons.  

We can say that perhaps the majority of Republican politicians – the ones Senator Booker insisted were good people – have metaphorically adopted the Walking Dead method of safely moving through a herd of walkers without being torn to pieces.  And that is to smear rotting zombie remains all over themselves, affect a slow, undead shamble and join the party.  Sure, you'll probably puke and, sure, a random cloudburst can ruin your disguise and turn you into lunch for MAGA purists.  But MAGA zombies are stupid, so with a little luck you’ll look and smell enough like one of the undead to be able to make your way to the head of the herd safely.

Let’s call this the "Zombie Dance of JD Vance Zombie".     

Then, of course, there are the billionaires and party leaders who believe they can harness the zombies or keep them as pets.  Put them as a defensive perimeter around their schemes, or launch them as offensive weapons against the opposition.  Yes, a herd of mindless biting monsters can come in very handy, especially during “Republican Primary Elections”.  Except every now and then the camouflage wears off and a Republican who built their career appeasing zombies forgets that they’re dealing zombies and tries to appeal to them as thinking, adult human beings who care about democracy.  --- That’s when they get eaten.  

Let’s call this “Liz Cheney’s August 16, 2022, Republican primary ass whoopin’” - where she lost to outright lunatic and pro-Trump zombie named Harriet Hageman, with 28.9% of the vote to Hageman's 66.3%. Her margin of defeat was the second-worst for a House incumbent in the last 60 years.

So let’s get back to the second half of Dale Horvath’s question, because that's the big one.  If you accept that the world we knew is, in a very real sense, gone, what does our common humanity require of us?  

Well that’s a damn good question.  

And for the answer we have to travel all the way back to the Year of Our Lord 2016.  The closing months of that campaign.  Very painful, we know.  

According to our thought experiment, in 2016 we were well over a decade into a full-blown Republican zombie post-apocalypse world, divided among Donald Trump who was the now the undisputed leader of the rabid, bitey-bitey Republican zombie horde, Hillary Clinton who was trying everything she could think of to peel away some fraction of the zombie horde, and the legacy media, which had chucked all sense of proportion and fairness and were beating Hillary like a rented mule every day because they believed she could not possibly lose, so what’s the harm of pretending that Both Sides are blah blah blah.  

And then the “deplorables” thing happened.  And from the safe distance of five years later, the Washington Post had this retrospective.  From The Washington Post, August 31, 2021:

Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ speech shocked voters five years ago — but some feel it was prescient

Hillary Clinton said those three words in the final months of her 2016 presidential campaign, making rhetorical and political history. There were two kinds of Donald Trump supporters, she explained: Voters who feel abandoned and desperate, who she placed in one metaphorical basket, and those she called “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic” — her “basket of deplorables.”

“I am all that stands between you and the apocalypse,” Clinton told the cheering crowd. She launched into all the things she found “deplorable” about Trump: He threatened marriage equality, cozied up to white supremacists, made racist and sexist remarks — all things she found “so personally offensive.”

She warned there were two months left in the race and no one should assume he wouldn’t be elected anyway. 

The people in this basket, emboldened by Trump’s tweets, were “irredeemable,” she said. But there was another basket: Trump supporters who just felt the government had let them down and wanted change — and Democrats had to empathize to win these voters. 

Clinton’s remarks spread like a prairie fire mainly because it threw pundits and Centrists and elite Conservatives a life preserver. Yay! Instead of reporting on the dire threat the Republican party had become, they could keep the Both Sides Do It lie stoked for another few weeks!  

It was all over Politico.  It was in Time magazine.  

It was in Bustle, PolitiFact Vox, segment after segment on CNN.

The NPR Tone Police made a five-course meal out of it. 

David Brooks wallowed in it, both on PBS and in The New York Times.

This is what Jonathan Allen said about it in his 2017 book “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign”.

It’s very hard to say you have a message of civility and then turn around and talk about how essentially a quarter of the country is, in your view, a basket of deplorables.  That is a screeching conflict of her overall message, which is we have a civilized country and we need to be stronger together — that this should be a kinder, gentler, unified country.

You can practically hear this asshole chortling over the chance to use the word "screeching" in a book about Hillary Clinton.  

But we Democrats tried all this, didn’t we?  Barack Obama’s administration was an eight-year lab experiment in continuous and nearly superhuman efforts to reach out to Republicans. Find common ground with Republicans.  Compromise with Republicans.  And Republicans fucking hated him for it.  Back then, all of your favorite Never Trumpers were making their living relentlessly slagging Obama and counseling lockstep obstruction and sabotage. To this day, you will hear Republicans like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley blaming Obama for the divisions in the country.

So, five years later, please note what the very same Jonathan Allen said about the very same subject in that Washington Post retrospective:

When asked about “deplorables,” Nick Merrill, Clinton’s spokesman, said she was never afraid to denounce racism — just two weeks earlier, she gave a significant speech deconstructing the alt-right and the “quest to preserve white maleness” in America. “The deplorable comment may have been politically less than ideal, but it has been proven right again and again over the last five years.”...

Now, many of her fans believe she was prescient about “half” of Trump’s base.

“After four years of President Trump,” Jonathan Allen said. “I think that there are a lot of Democrats and some Republicans who would say that was an undercount.” 

 So back to the question, if we really care about a viable future for our country, what does our humanity demand of us?

We tried running competent public servants and Republicans hated us for it.  And what happened? 

They only got worse.

We tried open-handedness, decency and olive branches, and Republicans didn’t just reject that out of hand. Because Republicans are wired differently than normal people, they coded all of that as weakness and naivete and used it as a signal to go on an eight-year berserker attack on the Obama administration.

And they only got worse.

Then they nominated and elected the King of the Birthers.  Who fucked up everything he touched.

And Republicans only got worse.  Dug in even deeper just like they did during the Bush administration as the wheels were coming off.

Then they renominated Trump.  He lost.  Then they tried to overthrow the government. 

And they only got worse.

Then they renominated Trump again.  He promised he’d pardon the J6 traitors.  

He won.  Again.  And here we are.

 And check the clock, because this insistence that the Liberals need to shut up and sit down and deplorables need to be ouchlessly absolved has been the Never Trumper’s First Commandment of the Resistance for a decade now.  And as you may have noticed, the Republicans have only gotten worse.

Yes, some of them are hurting now.  Feeling some pain at the pump, some pain as Trumpflation eats away at their paycheck, some pain at all the things they voted for come back to bite ‘em.   Then there is Iran.  And, of course, the Epstein files.  Sure they voted for it all, over and over and over again.  And, sure, they cheered when their Dear Leader made Liberals cry.  But, see, somehow they believe it really wasn’t their fault.  They were just, y’know, going along with the crowd.  

So have they seen the light?  Learned their lesson? 

Of course not.  History has shown again and again that they aren’t built that way.  They just want someone to step in and ease their self-inflicted suffering until they’re back on their feet enough to go back to hating Liberals and voting for monsters.  

Our humanity and concern for our country demands that we do everything that is in our power to break the “We can get away with anything” mindset of Republican voters -- whose rage and racism and stupidity brought these calamities down on us.  That these lifetime members of the Party of Personal Responsibility be held civically and socially responsible for what they have done to us.  

Burn The Lifeboats