Goin’ to a Party Where No One’s Still Alive

As longtime readers of this blog know, my opinion of former RNC chair Michael Steele is that he's rather a grifting hustlebuck who will take pretty much any side of any issue depending on which way the wind is blowing and who is covering his tab.  

Let's face it, no one would know who Michael Steele is if Barack Obama hadn't been elected president in 2008.  He'd have gone down in the history books as another minor politician who's political career stalled out on the middle rungs   of state government, and who went on to do occasional Fox News hits, sit on corporate boards and maybe teach poly sci at a state university.  

Not a bad life.   

But instead, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in November of 2008, and was inaugurated on January 20, 2009.  Ten days later, on January 30, 2009, the manifestly racist Republic National Committee elected Steele as its party chairman because they desperately needed to pretend that they weren't a manifestly racist organization.  

To be blunt, GOP bigots needed a black face fronting for their party, and Steele was only too happy to take the job.  

If you follow Illinois politics you may have noticed the striking similarities between the national GOP's panicked election of Steele just days after Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the Illinois GOP's  panicked nomination of an out-of-state lunatic named Alan Keyes to run against Obama the Illinois 2004 Senate election.  

In March 2004, Illinois Republican primary voters nominated Jack Ryan (not that one) as their choice to run against Obama in the Fall, but a late-breaking sex scandal caused him to step down.

Illinois election law allows party leaders (not voters) to fill the vacancy, and as Obama was already building momentum, several prominent GOP leaders declined the party's invitation to get their asses kicked in November.  So they imported Keyes from Maryland, who proceeded to lose in an absolute blowout, pulling just 27% of the vote compared to to Obama's 70%.  

And the rest, as they say, is history.

So when the national GOP also brought in a black bit player from Maryland to be the face of the party...well, let's just say no one here was terribly surprised.  

Now, as a time-saver and to spare my sore arm, I'm going to grab this short explainer from my blog from a few years ago.  2021 to be exact:

But above all, Michael Steele is a black man who has spent his entire adult life flacking for an explicitly racist American Fascist Party.  And in the long shadow of Donald John Trump, this is what him especially interesting to me.  Because his flailing, back-peddling, excuse-making mush-mouth double-talk about why he remained loyal to the GOP -- how he could be the chair of the party, and why he still retains his party membership as it was turning itself into a racist monster machine capable of producing a Trump -- is a distilled version of all the excuse-laden "We never knew!" gibberish that is now the mother tongue of the Never Trumpers.  

It was not so very long ago that Steele, while acknowledging that the GOP may have had a long and problematic history on the subject of race, still insisted that, as party chairman, he drove the bigots out of the GOP like St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.  And it was only after he was cruelly betrayed and deposed that all of them in their millions came running back to the Party of Limbaugh.

All of that is, of course, bullshit and everyone knows it, which is why things get especially surreal when Steele shows up in a different venue, such as a Lincoln Project podcast with Stuart Stevens entitled "The Republican Party's Original Sin".  After a long and accurate disquisition from Stevens about race being the GOP's original sin...Steele not only agrees, but goes into greater historical detail.

Suddenly, instead of the hero who drove the bigots out of the GOP and swept the party back to power in 2010, Steele reimagines himself as a noble, doomed Cassandra who warned party leaders that putting a black guy at the head of the party "wouldn't do jack".  That without fundamental reform at the precinct level the party would never change, but the party has refused the advice and recommendations of noble, doomed Cassandras like Steele who have tried to point this out the them.

Then he launches into a long recitation of the history of the GOP which is just surreal.

We hear about "Barry Goldwater and his embrace of segregation".

And Richard Nixon and "his embrace of a Southern Strategy."

And "My political hero, even, Ronald Reagan, starting his presidential campaign in the worst, god-forsaken, racist hole in Mississippi."  Did the GOP think that "black folks were gonna sit there and not pay any attention to that?"

I dunno, Mr. Steele.  You sure as shit didn't pay any attention to it.  In fact, you made such a successful cottage industry out of not paying attention to it that eventually that racist dung-heap of a party hired you to front for them.  

Steele is a hall-of-famer for filling up the space between commercials with circular, card-palming  gibberish, but having said all of that (and so much more over the years) I do appreciate that, during his latest guest appearance on The Bulwark, Steele took pains to specify that it wasn't just "the voters" who are to blame for Trump, but explicitly the 78 million who voted for him for the third time in 2024:

There was this:

Steele: At the end of the day, I put it on us because they are reflection of who we are, the American people. 70... at least 78 million of us decided let's do this shit again.  After everything we knew, after everything we saw, they got hung up on the cost of, you know, a piece of bread, or tank of gas or whatever ... whatever they wanted to make up about Joe Biden that they didn't like. 

And this:

Steele: It's sad but it's still bad, because remember 78 million people put him back in power.

That being said, when he and Tim Miller meandered over to the subject of Byron Donalds, I about fell out of my chair.

Steele:  [Trump] doesn't want to be reminded of his failures of leadership and his capacity to be anything other than a racist. He doesn't want to be reminded of that. And he likes the coloring that guys like Hegseth give him to sort of put a veneer on it to whitewash it. That's why they're taking, you know, black history and stripping it down. We don't want to talk about slavery. 

So, let me find a negro that's going to go out and... and parrot that.  Byron Donalds, right? And... and... and make and make me feel good about my racism.  He makes a whole lot of white folks feel good about themselves. As I just said,

he does not hold the mirror up. He does not reflect back to them the the culture from which he comes uh to say, "This is part of your his history as much as anything else. Why are you trying to wipe it out?

Honestly, as many times as I've seen it, when I run across this species of Republican switcheroo in the wild, it still leaves me a little dizzy.  Seeing sorta-former Republicans who used to make a living doing something despicable (and which they refuse to acknowledged ever happened)... now making a living trying to shame a current Republican for making a living doing exactly the same fucking thing.  

Like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, you can almost hear the muffled screams of whatever little self-awareness Steele keeps locked up in some underground vault as it slowly suffocates in the cold, dark ground.  

Oh, and one thing more.

A regular feature on Never Trump podcasts is the Victory Lap Segment.  A few self-congratulatory minutes devoted to reminding everyone who is listening that they and only they were right all along.  That they and only they warned about Trump early on, but did anyone listen?  Nooooo.  And look what happened.  

Miller:  So, I just I just want to start with like you and me have to kind of reflect this morning, right? I mean, you know, we're out. Okay. We were never Trump from the jump, you know.  And we were... we... we warned people. We said that we don't think this is going to go well. You can't trust this guy...

Steele:  Yeah, you know, I... I thought about that too, Tim, and I thought about it a lot and I came to the uh conclusion that I'm the only one who's got his shit tight  right.  The rest of these motherfuckers they don't know. I have no idea what the fucker they think they doing, but they have ruined a once great party. They have they are in the throes of taking down um uh a great nation. 

Then, later...

Steele: And yet now folks are sitting around going, "Well, I just didn't know. I I didn't... I didn't realize."  Bitch, please!  We told your ass back in 2013, 14, and 15. 

Miller: We told you. Yeah.   

Steele:  We watched Marco Rubio get his ass handed to him on a stage uh in 2016 by a guy who was at 2% in the polls at the time.

Miller:  Yeah.

Steele:  So, yeah, Tim, here we are. Um I'm still in it. You... you got out. I'm still in it.  That's because I'm high on something. I... I should sell whatever it is because..

Miller:  Yeah, that's cathartic to review. I guess I would just say we warned them all, but I don't know about you. Um I... I... I want to come on and just kind of do a victory lamp and be like, "Hell yeah, I was really right." And I was right. We can just we just kind of say that I was right. And I do like to text my MAGA friends sometimes and remind them that I'm right when I wake up in the morning and I'm feeling a little feisty. But, um, it is it's kind of even worse than I thought...

And it occurs to me that this sure is an awful lot of big talk from people who despise and actively hide from Lefties who actually were right about the Right all along.   

I Am The Liberal Media

Centrism's back baby! And Michael Steele's Got It!

Now that the MSNBC/Bulwark axis has completed the rehabilitation of Michael Steele and, after MSNBC race purge, given him one-third of his own weekday show, Steele is now firmly a member in good standing of that inner circle of recently-former Republicans who will control the direction of the last little corner of the "liberal" media on cable teevee.

And in his ad on The Bulwark for his own podcast, Steele gives us a hint about who he thinks the "liberal" media should be leaning towards:

Politics.  Culture.  You name it, we're talkin' about it.  And we're keeping 100% real right here on the Michael Steele podcast.  I'm Michael Steele.  I'm the host of the podcast. Each week I'm having conversations with political analysists, writers and activists who aren't afraid to shake things up.  A little bit like yours truly.  It doesn't matter if you're on the Left, the Right or somewhere in that strong Middle, this is the space you wanna be in...  

If I had to guess, as a complete outsider with no network contacts at all, but with a pretty good track record of making these sorts of predictions, I would guess this gives us a preview of where MSNBC is headed in the near future.  

Fact is, MSNBC is dying.  We'll, truth be told, cable news as a whole is dying, but MSNBC is leading the race to the cemetery.

From The Independent, December 18, 2024:

More bad news for MSNBC as they hemorrhage viewers and are now losing to NewsNation in weekend ratings battle

Amid plummeting ratings since Donald Trump’s election last month, several of the liberal cable news network’s programs on Saturday finished behind the centrist cable news upstart in the key 25-54 demographic.

From (so sorry) The New York Post, February 26, 2025:

‘Fox & Friends’ extends ratings lead as MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ loses nearly half its audience since election.

Thanks to a long series of stupid mistakes made by the network's stupid shot-callers, MSNBC has put itself in an impossible position.  

They don't want to lose whatever is left of their Liberal audience...

But they also refuse to sack Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough and his side piece and his menagerie of hacks, which is one of the major reasons liberals are staying away in droves...

Which means they very much need to attract replacement viewers so their ad rates don't drop to the point where only dick pill and prepper survival pack purveyors are willing to spend coin on advertising on MSNBC, because then it's back to six hours of LOCKDOWN! in the evenings...

But the chances of attracting any MAGA Republican viewers are slim to none, unless they pull a Newsome and start stunt-casting MAGA mopes like Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens.  Which will definitely drive away even more of their liberal viewers, because if I want to watch that trainwreck, I'll just wait until someone posts it on YouTube...

So, sooner or later,  the cable new shot-callers will once again begin listening to the siren's song of the same old snake oil salesmen peddling the same old nonsense about there being a vast and underserved audience of politically active and aware Centrists out there just over the horizon.  

And if the shot-callers just had the courage to lard their lineups with Third Way/No Labels/Country Over Party/Purple Project/Forward Party talking-heads, by jiminy, they could not only put on the best show this hick town has ever seen, but save the family farm to boot!

And that is where I believe MSNBC is headed.  

And it is for circumstances just such as this that, in the early 1600s the writer M. Day coined the expression "a fool's errand".

I Am The Liberal Media

Job, Jobs, Jobs

These days one hears stories from all over about devastating cuts to government programs, and about the capricious and destructive mass firings of government employees.  

Having been on the receiving end of no less that three savage and incompletely conceived and executed firings from which I never recovered, my initial impulse was to sympathize with the newly unemployed.  And having spent nearly two decades in workforce development in one role or another, I am also keenly aware of the terrible ripple effect that mass layoffs can have on a family, a community and a country.   

But when a higher authority tells me I'm stupid and wrong about all of this, well, I guess I need to be humble enough to have a seat and learn a lesson.  Because all these layoffs were of government employees, and no less of an authority than the now-former head of the Republican party (pre-Trump) is on record as saying that government jobs aren't real jobs.  

Shocking, I know, but I'm just a nobody blogger typing away from wat out in the middle of Middle America, and this received wisdom came directly from the man running one America's two major political parties.  And he didn't mutter it into the dirty microphone of some podcaster no one had ever heard of: he said it on one of the Sunday Showz, back when people actually watched the Sunday Showz.

Only private sector jobs are real jobs, ergo, ipso facto, QED something something government jobs aren't real jobs and therefor don't count.  

Period. 

I wrote a whole long thing about it back when this was the official policy of the Republican party (pre-Trump), which I will link below, but you know me.   Maybe I was drunk.  Maybe I made the whole thing up on a lark.  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of Liberal bloggers?  So let's turn to PolitiFact to see if I'm lying.

Michael Steele stated on January 31, 2009 in a speech to House Republicans:  "You and I know that in the history of mankind and womankind, government — federal, state, local, or otherwise — has never created one job."

Steele says government has never created a job.

Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, recently won a contest to lead the Republican National Committee. He also made history as the first African-American to lead the party. 

One of Steele's first appearances was before a retreat for House Republicans on Jan. 31, 2009.  Steele praised the House Republicans for voting as a block against the stimulus package promoted by Democrats and President Barack Obama. Then he said that the stimulus was pointless, because government can't create jobs.

A week after talking to the House Republicans, Steele appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos showed Steele video of Republican Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida praising the stimulus bill. Steele didn't seem to back off the spirit of his previous comment.

Steele: "Well, no — you know, with all due respect to the governor, I understand where he's coming from. Having been a state official, I know what it means to get those dollars when you're in tight times. But you've got to look at the entire package. You've got to look at what's going to create sustainable jobs. What this administration is talking about is making work. It is creating work."

Stephanopoulos: "But that's a job."

Steele: "No, it's not a job. A job is something that a business owner creates. It's going to be long term." 

Stephanopoulos: "So a job doesn't count if it's a government job?"

Steele: "Hold on. No, let me finish. That is a contract. It ends at a certain point, George. You know that. These road projects that we're talking about have an end point. As a small-business owner, I'm looking to grow my business, expand my business. I want to reach further. I want to be international. I want to be national. It's a whole different perspective on how you create a job versus how you create work."

I thought all video of this event had been lost or scrubbed, but digging around in my archives I found that, in addition to my long, angry post about it, I had actually made my very own video record of it, with a little twist at the end.  

I guess I figured I  might have another use for it someday.

(Not Work Safe)

Turns out, Steele is a very handy fella to have around, because he will say anything his employer pays him to say, no matter how obviously ludicrous it is.  

When Democrats elected the first black man as president, the deeply racist Republican party had a sudden, urgent need to have a black face out front swearing that they weren't racist at all.  And Michael Steele answer the call!

When Republicans needed a black man to explain that, sure, the GOP used to be racist, but all the bigots scampered back to the Democratic party in 1992, Steel was only too happy to do that job too.

...Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, 'Bubba' went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton."

After he was deposed as party chair, Steele would go on to explain how, despite driving all the racists out of the party during his tenure as party chair, the racists had all, somehow, mysteriously reappeared after he had been voted out.  So mysterious!

Sometime during Trump's first term, Steele began gradually making appearances on MSNBC, decrying what had happened to his party...over the previous three or four or five years.  You will have no doubt noticed long ago that has always been the time horizon for almost all Never Trumpers:  the party was doing great until they ran me out.  Then, suddenly, with no warning...

And over time, Steele successfully completed the MSNBC Republican Reputation Rehabilitation program -- 

Former RNC Chair Michael Steele Erupts On-Air: To Hell With Republicans!

-- to the point where he began showing up as a substitute host here and there,  began the rounds of the A-list political podcasts, and was given 1/3 of his own show on Saturday morning.

Then, last week, after MSNBC completed it racist purge of on-air talent, like the RNC back in 2009, MSNBC needed a familiar black face out front, reassuring the public that everything was okily dokily.

And so...

Joy Reid’s MSNBC Show Canceled in Major Shake-Up

Ms. Reid’s 7 p.m. program will be replaced by a panel show co-hosted by Symone Sanders Townsend, Alicia Menendez and Michael Steele.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode #761: No Fair Remembering That Time Michael Steele Pretended He Was a Democrat

“You say I acted atrociously. Yes. I did. I do it for a living.” -- Mike, House of Games

 

Links:  

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The Disordered Thinking of Fascism's Deadbeat Dads

In my capacity of "He Who Listens To Cable Teevee Never Trumpers When They Talk Among Themselves" I hear things.  Like the unnamed narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart", above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. 

How, then, am I mad? 

Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you about Michael Steele's visit to Joe Walsh's podcast.  

It breaks down as follows.

First, the top line of Steele's resume remains his button-busting pride at the "winning coalition" he says he put together in 2010 which stopped Obama in his tracks.  Which is typical, Republican revisionist bullshit.  What actually happened was Steele's political fortunes were raised because Steele -- the Party of Old White Men's buffoonish "See? We're not bigots!" former codpiece -- was willing shut his mouth and ride the rising tide of overt, berserk Tea Bagger racism in the Republican Party.  

These days he and Joe Walsh can be heard on Walsh's podcast braiding each other's hair while Walsh fawns over Steele political savvy in welcoming lunatics like him into the mighty Republican coalition that put an end to the Kenyan Usurper's sinister plans to turn Murrica into a socialist hellhole.

Actually, neither man mentions Obama at all.  Obama's existence and the eight year racist Republican primal scream that followed his election have simply vanished from the tale.  Instead, they both sigh and remember that period as the Good Old Days.

But of course those of us who (ahem) have archives and  memories remember those days a little differently.

From me back in 2010:

Hoping the rest of the world wouldn't notice, today RNC Chair Mikey Steele hooked up with Rightwad Crazies in the political Men’s Room for a brief, degrading “Tory Hole” assignation.

Oops.

Tea partiers get audience with RNC chairman but not a shared public stage

By Dana Milbank
Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele treated tea party leaders like an ugly date Tuesday afternoon: They were good enough to take upstairs, but not good enough to be seen with in public.

Steele invited leaders of the conservative movement over to the GOP's Capitol Hill headquarters (to the adjacent National Republican Club, technically) for a private meeting on the third floor. But Republican leaders, probably wary of TV footage showing a tea party takeover of RNC headquarters, denied the activists' request to use the facility for the news conference they had planned for afterward.
…

The Money Quote:

The moment encapsulated well the Republican Party's dilemma as it tries to harness the considerable energy of the tea party movement. Steele's task is essentially to co-opt its leaders, keeping them from electoral challenges that could hurt the GOP's chances. Yet at the same time, he can't appear to the rest of the country to be embracing a movement known for extremist words and deeds.…

Even as he roasts in the depths of Hell, at this moment Lee Atwater is laughing hard enough to lactate bile.

This was also the period during which Rush Limbaugh responded to Steele making some mildly critical remarks about Limbaugh by dropping a house on his head to remind him who, in this relationship, wears the boots and who shines the boots.  

Steele reacted by crawling back to Limbaugh and begging forgiveness:

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.”

So that's the first segment.  

The second segment featured Steele and Walsh being sad and bumfuzzled over what the heck happened to their party?  How could it have come to this?  

I dunno, Mike.  Maybe that winning coalition of the you're so proud of -- that indestructible doomsday machine of bigots and imbeciles --  had something to do with it.  Maybe groveling before Limbaugh's throne instead of working to drive him and the rest of this filth out of the party had something to do with it.  But in Steele's hands, the past is always malleable, like clay, ready to be shaped and reshaped into whatever form he needs at the moment to sell himself to whoever will hire him today.  

If you're interested, I wrote a longer thing about it back in 2016 when Ana Marie Cox wanted me to believe she had not "let him off the hook" when he was on her podcast as part of his perpetual Reputation Rehab tour.  Spoiler:  She let him off the hook.

Here's a little taste from that 2016 podcast:

Steele:  You say voter suppression on the Republican side.  I say voter control on the Democratic side.  It works on Both Sides. I'm beyond excuse-making.  I want to get to why things don't work the way we want it to work.

And, just for fun, here's another little taste:

Steele: The president [Trump] is much more of a Democrat than he is a Republican

For his sins, these days Steele can be found in constant rotation on MSNBC, either guesting or substitute hosting -- his hugely problematic past now as dead disco, and as safely entombed as Chernobyl by his friends in the media.

The third segment was about why Steele could never register as a Democrat, because there's no room for a "pro-life" person like him in the party.  Maybe, someday, if the Democrats every really became a "big tent party" he would consider it, but he shall remain a member of the white supremacism, Hang Mike Pence, lying, treasonous insurrection party for the foreseeable future because he is [checks notes] a Man of Principle.

The fourth segment was about how Democrats should count their blessings that the GOP is as crazy as it is, because if not the Republican party would be running everything, because Democrats suck and are terrible at "messaging" and are elitist snobs who are out of touch with Real Murrica and how Dems are just a few years away from being just as batshit as Republicans because something something AOC.  

And OMG, why aren't Democrats talking about infrastructure more!?

This public act of shouting into the abyss has been brought to today you by me, because...

I Am The Liberal Media

Listen My Children and You Shall Hear...

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to listen to a just couple of minutes of conversation between two paid MSNBC contributors who are all over that cable news outlet every single day like a rash.

And while you're listening, keep in mind these facts about these two men.

First, both of these men have been lifelong Republicans who held positions of genuine prominence and influence in their party and spent their entire adult lives cold-bloodedly advancing the agenda of that party.

Second, both of these men, in their own way, are materially responsible for the devolution of the GOP into the fascist shithole it is today.

Third, both of these  men aggressively ignored the every warning, every flashing light and every .alarm bell that something was drastically wrong with their party and was getting worse.

Fourth, both of these men mocked and dismissed as alarmist Liberal crackpots anyone flashing those warning lights and sounding those alarms that something was drastically wrong with their party and was getting worse.

Fifth, once the devolution of their party into a fascist shithole became too much for them to ignore, deflect (Both Sides!) or paper over, both men expressed complete shock at what was happening to their Republican party and continue to insist that it all happened spontaneously and with no warning due to some mysterious Trumpian hoodoo, and that no one coulda seen it coming.  

Sixth, each of of these men were (depending on who you ask) were either tossed out or driven out of the party whose monstrous agenda they had spent their entire adult lives relentlessly advancing.

And seventh, each of these men were immediately snapped up by "Liberal" MSNBC where their pasts were whitewashed away and where they now both make a very fine living warning that something is very wrong with the Republican party.

But when the MSNBC cameras are not around, and their just kicking in the safe-space of Charlie Sykes' reconstituted-Weekly-Standard-but-now-it's-called-The-Bulwark tree fort, here is what Sykes and Michael Steele have to say about people like us.  

People like us...who didn't work hard all of our live to turn our party turn into a fascist shithole and then lied about it.  People like us...who didn't lose our party to a lunatic like Donald Trump.  People like us...who have actually done extremely well in almost every election since 2018 despite the incessant carping and bitching of men like Sykes and Steele who are very put out that Democrats stubbornly refuse to become Republicanish enough to suit their taste.  People like us...who have held this tattered nation together despite the fact that we lack the kind of million decibel megaphone which the Right spend decades building and which men like Sykes and Steele were only too happy to use to tear this nation apart.

Or, if you're rather not listen to these two goofs who let their whole political party go to shit right before their eyes complain about how bad Democrats are at politics, here's a rush transcript, with a few of my own remarks salted in there.

Steele: Because Democrats don't know how to get out of their own way.  They're the most politically inept people I've...I don't even know how they survived this long in politics.  

driftglass: Says the black guy who hired himself out to front for the Party of Bigots and Imbeciles until that party decided it didn't need him anymore and tossed him aside like a used condom.  

Sykes:  Hehehe.

Steele:  I just don't.  I mean you know when your political opponent is digging a hole you don't get in it with him.  Let him keep digging by himself.  When your political opponent is going out saying all all kinds of badshit crazy stuff you don't get in the way of that.  You don't set up an administration that comes in the door with the winds of democracy in its sails and spend the first 18 months talking about filibuster rules...

Sykes:  Oh my God no you go back to that first two years and the amount of time they spend fighting one another...

Steele:  Yes!

Sykes: ...the amount of energy that was spent by Democrats attacking other Democrats while all of this was going along it was almost like, OK, Trump is gone... uh the... the coup failed let's go on and and we're going to scratch other issues here.  And... and they really squandered two years.  

We interrupt this piss-and-moan session about how awful Democrats and how this administration, with the "winds of democracy in its sails" to drop in this from a much longer article in Vox:

Joe Biden has been a pretty good president

...The most basic reason for a president to decline reelection is if they’re doing a bad job and are calamitously unpopular — if they’re overseeing a brutal war like Johnson and Truman were, or surging inflation or joblessness, or some other kind of disaster.

Biden is not in the strongest position you can imagine for a president seeking reelection; he’s less popular than the last three presidents to win reelection were at this point. But he’s more popular than Ronald Reagan was at this point, which — given that Reagan went on to win 49 states in 1984 on his way to reelection — tells you a bit about how poor an indicator approval ratings are this far from Election Day.

But Biden is not at all in the position that Johnson or Truman were in. He is not prosecuting a war with US troops; in fact, he ended the war in Afghanistan after 20 crushing years (a move that, somewhat ironically, marked the beginning of a prolonged dip in his approval ratings). And while the way that withdrawal happened left a lot to be desired, nothing like the sight of US troops being slaughtered during the Tet Offensive (as preceded Johnson’s decision not to seek election) is happening now.

Nor, contrary to much speculation, is the US economy in recession. The economy grew at a steady if unspectacular 2.7 percent last quarter; unemployment is the lowest it’s been since 1969 (LBJ’s war was bad for humans but great for jobs in defense industries); inflation is elevated but falling, or at least relatively stable. Wages are rising quickly, especially for less-educated workers in service and manual labor jobs. You have to go back to the dot-com boom of the late ’90s to get a better economic picture than the one Americans are enjoying right now, and this one is arguably more equitable.

Biden deserves a lot of credit for that state of affairs — more than the credit or blame that presidents usually deserve for the state of the economy.

Learning from the overly tepid fiscal stimulus enacted by the Obama administration in response to the 2007-2009 recession, at the start of his term Biden ushered through a massive $1.9 trillion package, the American Rescue Plan, that kept progress on jobs and wages from stalling out as Trump-era measures faded.

The package overshot significantly; he made the opposite mistake that Obama made in 2009. But his was the better direction in which to err: the inflation that resulted, while painful, was less painful than the many years of excess unemployment and depressed demand that resulted after 2009. In the meantime, the measure plunged child poverty to a record low by expanding the child tax credit.

Much has been made of the ways in which moderate Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Krysten Sinema (I-AZ) frustrated Biden’s grander ambitions. It’s certainly true that Sinema blocked his plans to tax high earners more heavily, and Manchin kept the child tax credit improvements from being made permanent.

But looking at what actually did pass during Biden’s first two years, one gets a different picture. Biden signed the largest investment in R&D and deployment of clean energy in US history into law; the head of the International Energy Agency termed it the world’s most important climate action since the Paris accords.

Separately, Biden signed into law hundreds of billions in new science funding, passed on a bipartisan basis as part of an effort to strengthen semiconductor manufacturing. After the Trump administration’s famous failure to pass an infrastructure bill, Biden did it.

Looking abroad, the administration’s handling of the Ukraine war has been outstanding. Choosing to release intelligence showing Russia’s invasion plans in the weeks leading up to the attack was a masterstroke, denying Russian President Vladimir Putin any ability to claim that Ukraine provoked him. Biden has kept his G7 counterparts aligned in imposing sanctions on Russia, denying it oil revenue, and supplying weapons to Ukraine.

The result is a war that is already vastly more costly than Putin bargained for, without US or NATO troops being dragged into the conflict, and backdoor progress on something US presidents had been fruitlessly pursuing for years: increased European military spending.

Biden does have some notable failures, most importantly the continuing massive death toll of Covid-19. In his first year, he mobilized the largest vaccination campaign in our history to face it, with shots going from coveted and hard-to-access to ubiquitous and available at any pharmacy in a matter of months.

But the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to allow a vaccine mandate for most employers slowed adoption, as did partisan resistance to the shots among conservatives. The emergence of the more transmissible delta and omicron variants meant the disease surged even as vaccines were readily available

While it is unclear how much the administration could have done to encourage more mitigation steps, like funding for better ventilation systems, Biden once said in a debate with Trump that anyone responsible for 220,000 dead Americans “should not remain as president of the United States of America.” Given that the US Covid death toll currently stands at 1.1 million, it’s fair to say he hasn’t fared much better.

Taking the good with the bad, Biden looks like a fairly successful president, overseeing an unusually good economy without US troops in danger. That’s not normally someone you want stepping aside.

 We now rejoin Sykes and Steele pissing and moaning about how yadda yadda yadda...

Sykes:  I mean maybe they'll get it back at some point you know but counting on the Republicans to do it for them...

We interrupt Sykes commentary about how Democrats are lazy dumbasses who are "counting on the Republicans" for whatever with this clip from the 2023 SOTU of Diamond Joe Biden head-faking the entire Republican party into publicly supporting his position on Medicare and Social Security in front of an audience of millions:  

 

We now rejoin Sykes whinging about how progressives live in a bubble too!

 

Sykes: ...uh... I know it's tempting, and I know that they, uh, live in their own...  And, see this is the thing about it.  I mean you and I both know that the Fox folks live in a bubble.

Steele:  Yes!

Sykes: I'm not sure that progressives fully understand and how they live in a bubble as well.

Steele: Yeah they don't they don't.

Sykes: They don't. And there's not much we can do to tell them about it except, hey, we have these podcasts this is what we do.

driftglass: The only "bubble" progressives have is a tiny corner of one cable news channel which, over the past seven years, has been completely colonized by an army of recently-former Republicans like Sykes, and still-Republicans-because-God-knows-why like Steele.

Steele:  That's why we're here baby! 

Sykes: Michael Steele it is always great to have you. Michael Steele is host of the Michael Steele podcast also a political analyst for MSNBC... 

And just for fun and at no additional charge, here's little background on Sykes from a 2017 Urban Milwaukee article on "The Many Faces of Charlie Sykes":

...I can only imagine how hard it must have been for someone like Charlie, always deeply cynical and Mencken-like about the intelligence level of the great unwashed masses, spending day after day — for 24 years — stoking the anger and wing-nut conspiracy theories of his listeners.
But the paychecks were great. Between his radio gig and right wing dollars for his books from conservative groups, Sykes did very well. And he had the power to help elect and defeat candidates, and make friendships with heavyweights like Gov. Scott Walker, House Speaker Paul Ryan and the conservative Bradley Foundation’s president Mike Grebe.

By 2016, however, Sykes must have gotten sick of it all. Sources tell me he applied for the position of president of the Bradley Foundation after Grebe announced his resignation, and Sykes was never seriously considered for the job. After all he had done for the right-wing cause. That had to be infuriating. (And yes, there has always been some anger fueling Charlie’s views.)

So Sykes fell back on his well-practiced turn as the enlightened political turncoat who has suddenly — and ruefully, wittily, quotably — seen the error of his former ways. Rather than become king of the nation’s biggest conservative foundation, Sykes maneuvered to become the titan of talk radio traitors, getting coverage in the Politico and National Public Radio, and winning a position as contributor to MSNBC... 

 

...As former Wisconsin Democratic Chairman Mike Tate put it to Barabak, Sykes is like “a guy who slowly fed poison to his dog for 10 years then, when the dog dies of poisoning, throws up his hands and says, ‘My God, how did that happen?’”

 

Burn The Lifeboats

Fun With Language With Michael Steele.

To hear former RNC chair and bondage-themed nightclub habitue, Michael Steele, tell it, the Republican Party is shit.  That's not a word Steele ever uses on teevee, but that's what he means.

Shit.  

And even though he inexplicably remains a registered Republican, he's right. 

After all, the Republican Party nominated Donald Trump. Republicans elected Donald Trump.  The Republican Party pledged fealty to Donald Trump.  The Republican Party renominated Donald Trump.  And Republicans came out in ever greater numbers in 2020 to voted for Donald Trump than they did in 2016.

A real shit party.

So by the converse law you would think it be safe to say that, in the same way Republicans are responsible for Donald Trump, that Democrats are responsible for Joe Biden.  After all, Democrats nominated Biden, right?  

And Democrats elected Biden.  

And somewhere north of 80% of Democrats approve of the job he is doing.

So, fair to say that Joe Biden is a Democrat who was elected by Democrats, in the same way Donald Trump is a Republican who was elected by Republicans, right? 

 I mean, there's a Wikipedia pic and everything.

Sorry for being so elementary and redundant, but to tell the balance of this story, we need to get these very obvious facts straight, because according to Michael Steele everything you and I just agreed on is wrong.  

So, so very wrong.

According to Michael Steele, Democrats did not elect Joe Biden.  Instead, a large, amorphous group called "the American people" elected Joe Biden.  Which, corollarily, also must mean that the people who did not vote for Joe Biden, but instead voted for Donald Trump, are either not Americans, or not "people", or both.  

And that doesn't seem right. 

Isn't language fun!

So having removed lifelong Democrat Joe Biden from the Democratic Party and assigned his victory to "the American people", Michael Steele now grants himself the liberty to use his credential as an American Person (and therefore a member in good standing of "the American people") to sternly lecture Democrats on the subject of what "the American people" did and did not elect Joe Biden to do.

By the way, in case you were wondering, I am not just pulling this out of thin air or some nether region I would never mention on this family-friendly blog.  These are the thoughts of paid MSNBC contributor and bondage-themed nightclub habitue, Michael Steele, as he spoke them on this Lincoln Project podcast, which does not come with a transcript, so you'll have to trust me that I wrote it all down to the best of my abilities.

Steele:  The second thing that worries me is that Democrats don't have a damn clue how to do politics.  They just don't know how to do the politics. 

Reminder that this is the same Michael Steele who hired himself out to front for a patently racist party, then got run out of that party by the racists he swore weren't there, and who has been consistently wrong about his Republican Party since it ran him out.  But please continue. 

Steele:  And they spent the first 18 months of this term bickering over filibusters and chompin' at Joe Manchin and the like instead of clarifying again for the American people why they elected Joe Biden.

Once again, and louder, for the slow individuals in the back, A) other than geographically, there is no such group as "the American people" and, B) this non-existent group certainly did not elect Joe Biden.   But please continue. 

Steele:  Joe Biden was not elected to bring Liberal policies your front door.  

And...

Steele:  Joe Biden was not elected to do the Green New Deal.

And...

Steele:  Joe Biden was not elected to forgive student debt.  That's not why Joe Biden was elected. 

And this is how you know that, from the top of his bald head to the tips of his tasseled loafers,  Michael Steele is a Republican for life.  Because the single greatest article of faith among Republicans and the mainstream media during Steele's lifetime has been thatm, when Democrats win elected office it is somehow illegitimate for them to try to govern as Democrats.  Period. Full stop.

And make no mistake, that is exactly what Steele is saying, plain and clear.  That Joe Biden -- who ran and won as a Democrat -- has no business even trying to run his administration as a Democrat.  Has no business doing policy.  Has no business proposing legislation or executive actions, even the legislation or executive actions which he ran on. 

Has no business, y'know, governing.  

Joe Biden's only role, according to Steele, is ceremonial.  To be a smiling figurehead on the prow of the ship of state at whom "the American people" can point and say, "Hey, that's not Donald Trump.  Well whatdya know about that!"

Steele:  Joe Biden was elected to help us restore our faith in democracy and to protect us against the threat that stood in front of us...  And then they start coming, talking about "The next LBJ", I'm, like, shut that down.  That's not what this is about.  That's not what the American people want.  

And so forth.  

So what are some true things we can say about Michael Steele?

First, that he is the former chair of the Republican Party who swears he never knew his Republican Party was full of Republicans.   

So, fair to say that Mr. Steele doesn't know shit about Republicans.

Second, its painfully clear that, like most Never Trumpers, Mr. Steele's understanding of the Democratic Party consists of a skull full of Fox News/Hate Radio caricatures left over from the days when Mr. Steele had to go groveling to Rush Limbaugh for Limbaugh's forgiveness and approval.

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.”...

Third, while Mr. Steele disowns the party he once chaired (and which turned out in their tens of millions to voted for Donald Trump in 2020) and disdains Democrats as irrelevant, loudmouth spoilers who want to ruin Mr. Steele's vision of Joe Biden as a marble statue placeholder...at the same time,  and also like most Never Trumpers, Mr. Steel claims to speak with deep expertise and sweeping authority about a non-existent set of humans called "the American people" who Mr. Steele asserts are actually responsible for nominating and electing the Democratic president.   

So is Michael Steele a liar, or just deeply delusional?

I'm not sure.

The only thing I am sure of is that Michael Steele is a paid MSNBC contributor who...well, let's let him tell it:

Steele:  Check me out on MSNBC.  I'm there a lot, so chances are you won't miss me.

And that's true.  Like all the other Never Trumpers who have colonized the media and now dominate the public political narrative, Michael Steele is there.  

 A lot.  

But I do miss him every time he's on because I know how to use the teevee remote.

I Am The Liberal Media

Why Is Michael Steele?

You might remember Michael Steele as the guy who folded like a two-dollar lawn chair when Boss Limbaugh expressed his displeasure at remarks Steele made about him when he was chairman of the GOP.

Or you might remember him as the RNC chair who went on the Sunday Shows during the Obama economic recovery to explain that government-funded jobs aren't real jobs because (not kidding) government-funded jobs come to an end and real jobs never do.  I documented it at the time because A) I was still writing up the Sunday Shows on a regular basis and, B) it was such a singularly stupid argument to make and Steele made it in such a ham-handed, double-talky way that I couldn't imagine that his party would let him go on humiliating himself in their name on national teevee much longer.  

From me in 2009:

On “This Week” George Stephanopoulos asks Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele about Dubya.

Shorter Michael Steele: Bush was awesome. His economic politics were fooking brill. He inherited a recession from the Evil Bill Clinton.

And then came the Stupid Of The Month.

Steele: Government doesn’t create jobs. Only the private sector creates jobs.

Stephanopoulos: What?

Steele: Government jobs don’t count as jobs,

Stephanopoulos: What…squared?

Steele: They don’t count as jobs, because they have an end point.

Stephanopoulos: So people who will rebuild our shitty schools don’t really count as people who have jobs?

Steele: No. Because those jobs will eventually end. They’re just make-work. And private sector jobs never, ever end.

Stephanopoulos: But…but…3.9 million people lost their jobs year? All of those “private sector jobs” ended.

Steele: Sure, but private sector jobs always come back, George. The Majyk Jobs Unicorn brings them.

Stephanopoulos: OMFG. You’re a complete douche, aren’t you?

Steele: I’m a Republican, George; we’re all douches.

Wow. So this is now the official policy of the Party of God.

That cops don’t have “jobs”.

Neither do teachers.

Or firemen. Or sewer workers. Road construction crews. Bridge builders. Snow plow drivers. Bus drivers. Train conductors. Coast guard.

The United States Army.

has no "jobs".



Neither does

the United States Navy

The Peace Corps?


Nuh-uh.

Neither does the Marine Corps.

No "jobs" for state-funded nursing care. Doctors. Foster care workers.

Consultants and contract employees working the private sector aren’t really really working at “jobs” either, since their contracts eventually end.

The lady who delivers your mail doesn’t have a “job”.

The lifeguard who saved your uncle from drowning at a public beach didn't have a “job”.

The public defender that got your kid a little justice doesn’t have a “job”.

The judge who put the drug dealer who was terrorizing your neighborhood away doesn’t have a “job”.

The auditor who makes hedge fund managers pay their fucking taxes doesn’t have a “job”.

The tech guy who makes sure the computer lab at your daughter’s school can take a beating and still run the next day doesn’t have a “job”.

The hematologist at the county blood bank doesn’t have a “job”.

The gearheads and welders who make sure the buses and garbage trucks run, rain or shine don’t have “jobs”.

The people doing the 2010 census don’t have “jobs”.

The job counselors and case managers at your local employment One Stop also don’t have jobs, even though they are the ones who are going to work like hell to help that laid-off lathe operator find another way to support his family now that the GM supplier he worked for for 22 years has closed its doors.

The air traffic controller who made sure your mom’s plane didn’t slam into a mountain doesn’t have a “job”.

Customs agent isn’t a real job.

Even though millions of these people may have worked honorably on a public payroll providing vital services for decades – may have put their kids through college, bought a house and retired on that salary – the Chair of the Republican National Committee does not consider what they do to be “real” jobs.

So my mother, who taught her whole life, never had a “real” job.

My dad, who was a principle, was also somehow actually unemployed.

All of the dams my grandpa built wasn’t real labor. And the defense plants he worked at didn’t really exist.

The truly dreadful thing about this is not merely that in Mikey Steele’s world, all of these jobs and thousands more are all just sorta welfarey make-work, but that I’m absolutely sure Mikey Steele believes every single word of the bilge he hawks up.

Because if you want to rise through the ranks of the GOP, you are required to believe this tripe.

It is doctrine. Dogma. The station of the Conservative Cross and the Passion of the Gipper all rolled into one, big, toxic, Randite fattie...

Yep.  That was Michael Steele at the pinnacle of his power as RNC chair. 

Or, if you give him any thought at all, perhaps your Michael Steele mnemonic trigger might be "Bondage Themed Night Club".

But above all, Michael Steele is a black man who has spent his entire adult life flacking for an explicitly racist American Fascist Party.  And in the long shadow of Donald John Trump, this is what him especially interesting to me.  Because his flailing, back-peddling, excuse-making mush-mouth double-talk about why he remained loyal to the GOP -- how he could be the chair of the party, and why he still retains his party membership as it was turning itself into a racist monster machine capable of producing a Trump -- is a distilled version of all the excuse-laden "We never knew!" gibberish that is now the mother tongue of the Never Trumpers.  

It was not so very long ago that Steele, while acknowledging that the GOP may have had a long and problematic history on the subject of race, still insisted that, as party chairman, he drove the bigots out of the GOP like St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.  And it was only after he was cruelly betrayed and deposed that all of them in their millions came running back to the Party of Limbaugh.

All of that is, of course, bullshit and everyone knows it, which is why things get especially surreal when Steele shows up in a different venue, such as a Lincoln Project podcast with Stuart Stevens entitled "The Republican Party's Original Sin".  After a long and accurate disquisition from Stevens about race being the GOP's original sin...Steele not only agrees, but goes into greater historical detail.

Suddenly, instead of the hero who drove the bigots out of the GOP and swept the party back to power in 2010, Steele reimagines himself as a noble, doomed Cassandra who warned party leaders that putting a black guy at the head of the party "wouldn't do jack".  That without fundamental reform at the precinct level the party would never change, but the party has refused the advice and recommendations of noble, doomed Cassandras like Steele who have tried to point this out the them.

Then he launches into a long recitation of the history of the GOP which is just surreal.

We hear about "Barry Goldwater and his embrace of segregation".

And Richard Nixon and "his embrace of a Southern Strategy."

And "My political hero, even, Ronald Reagan, starting his presidential campaign in the worst, god-forsaken, racist hole in Mississippi."  Did the GOP think that "black folks were gonna sit there and not pay any attention to that?"

I dunno, Mr. Steele.  You sure as shit didn't pay any attention to it.  In fact, you made such a successful cottage industry out of not paying attention to it that eventually that racist dung-heap of a party hired you to front for them.  

Steele wonders aloud that maybe, just maybe, the racist GOP isn't really interested in not doing racism anymore.  Maybe this is just who they are and they like it that way.  Then he ticks off...

...Trayvon Martin.

...police violence.

...red-lining.

And now that the GOP has embraced saying the quiet part out loud?  Now that no one is playing it off as an accident anymore or bother to speak wingnut codetalk and instead are being openly racist and passing racist enabling acts to keep themselves in power?

Steele:  Our party gave birth to that... From Goldwater on.  Understand the reason the reason why daddy King -- Martin Luther King, Sr. -- broke with the party.

Wanna hear more?

Steele:  When Johnson made his break with the segregationist past of the Democratic Party and embraced Kennedy's civil right agenda, that freed up all these white southern men to take their votes someplace else...

All of this spoken as if it had all happened on another timeline, in another universe, where it was all tragic and horrible but somehow had nothing to do with Michael Steele.

These days you can find Steele everywhere.  A paid contributor on MSNBC, on the radio, on his own podcast, guesting on others and at the 92nd Street Y where we learn from the blurb that Michael Steele revitalized the Republican Party!

America Moving Forward

The Lincoln Project’s Michael Steele and Reed Galen in Conversation with Mike Barnicle 

Join two members of the Lincoln Project — former Republican and MSNBC political analysis Michael Steele, the former Lt. Governor of Maryland and former chairman of the Republican National Committee charged with revitalizing the republican party (which he did), and political strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project Reed Galen for a look at where are we now.

These days you can find find Michael Steele everywhere...except in any venue where anyone might ask him the obvious question:  Since you clearly understand the racist history of the GOP, why the fuck did you join them, and why the fuck did you stay?

Because the answer to that question would destroy him.

No Half Measures

One Economic Bright Spot: The Never Trump Lifeboat Industry is Booming

You may remember Michael Steele as the decorative ornament who was hired to front for the Party of Bigots and Imbeciles during the Age of Obama to prove they weren't, y'know, a party of bigots and imbeciles.

Or you may remember Michael Steele as the Limbaugh Groveler.

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.”...

Or you remember Michael Steele as the guy who told so many humiliatingly stupid lies on behalf of the Republican Party that he stopped going on The Daily Show for fear of the merciless mocking that  awaited him there.  TDS eventually just replaced him with a puppet, which was so appropriate on so many levels.

So where does a Republican like Michael Steele -- who trashed any shred of credibility he might have once had by publicly humiliated himself over and over again in defense of a party which A) loathed him and, B) turned out to be exactly as horrendous as the Left said it was all along -- go to hustle a buck these days?

MSNBC, of course, where all employees are warned to oblige the network's burgeoning stable of Republican Never Trumpers by never, ever mentioning their hand in creating the Republican monster machine which spawned Donald Trump and his army of congressional killbots.   

And thus freed of his despicable past courtesy of the Bottomless Beltway Media Memory Hole,  MSNBC contributor Michael Steele has now turned his mighty analytical powers to warning that those scurrilous Republicans will try to escape accountability for their depravity via the magic of...

... revisionist history.

This is reason #27 why they don't put me on panels with Michael Steele :-)

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Michael Steele Bumping Fists with Every "Serious" Republican's Dearest Friend In The Whole, Wide World

Join me now as we watch former RNC chair, Michael Steele, completely obliterate the last half century of extraordinarily inconvenient Republican history.

Which is what virtually every other "Serious Republican" has been busy doing over the past couple of years:  building themselves a fucking armada of lifeboats and sailing faaaar away from any acknowledgement that anything was ever wrong with their GOP before Donald J. Trump oozed down the Escalator of Doom and into the hearts of his party.

The alert viewer will note how Nicolle Wallace's hospitality towards her old friend Michael extends all the way to making sure that there is no one sitting on her panel who will call him out on his self-serving hogwash/whitewash

For the record, this is the same Michael Steele featured in this Politico story from nine years ago:

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.”...

The Republican National Committee Chairman who went groveling to Rush Limbaugh for absolution back in 2009 would like you to believe that, in 2018, he has no fucking idea how his party turned into a shitpile of racists, cowards and imbeciles.

This is reason #23 why they don't put me on panels with Michael Steele :-)

Behold, a Tip Jar!